Source: New York Times
Countries where people eat faster have higher rates of economic growth. Floyd Norris discusses the findings of recent OECD research:
The fastest eaters were in North America; the United States, Canada and Mexico were the only three nations to report fewer than 75 minutes a day devoted to eating and drinking.
As the accompanying chart shows, the 10 countries where people spend less than 100 minutes eating and drinking each day have, as a group, consistently shown higher economic growth than those that took more than 100 minutes to savor their daily repasts ...
The relationship persists within regions. All four of the Western European countries whose people eat relatively rapidly -- Britain, Finland, Norway and Sweden -- showed average economic growth of 2 percent or better over the eight years. Of the five Western European nations whose people ate more slowly, only Spain grew that rapidly. The others -- Germany, France, Italy and Belgium -- showed compound growth rates of 1.5 percent or less. Similarly, New Zealand, with slow eaters, grew at an average rate of 2.8 percent a year, while the faster eaters in Australia produced a 3.1 percent growth rate. South Korea, with faster eaters, grew at an average rate of 3.8 percent. Japan, which favors a more leisurely approach to dining, grew just 0.8 percent a year.
Makes sense, actually. A pioneering study by researchers affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute research team documents the role of "urban metabolism" in shaping city innovation and growth. As I wrote in The Atlantic:
The rate at which living things convert food into energy-their metabolic rate-tends to slow as organisms increase in size. But when the Santa Fe team examined trends in innovation, patent activity, wages, and GDP they found that successful cities, unlike biological organisms, actually get faster as they grow. In order to grow bigger and overcome diseconomies of scale like congestion and rising housing and business costs, cities must become more efficient, innovative, and productive. The researchers dubbed the extraordinarily rapid metabolic rate that successful cities are able to achieve "super-linear" scaling. "By almost any measure," they wrote, "the larger a city's population, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person."
Richard Florida
Makes sense. In countries where workers have fewer rights, growth is higher, too.
Mr Florida, I am really surprised how superficially you can skim information when it serves your thesis to do so. Eating quickly is not related to your (otherwise very provocative) idea about "urban metabolism" on any but the most simplistic level. Eating quickly is a symptom of a drive-through, take out, eat-in-front culture that I would argue is the antithesis of the intellectual energy that underlies your urban metabolism. Further, I would argue it is a result of GDP growth, not a cause. You left out (and Mr. Norris conveniently buried) the other finding of that study that shows faster eating correlates to higher obesity rates too.
Why do you subvert your excellent scholarly work with these cheap and obvious plugs for your books?
Rockfish -
The similarity is in the speed and velocity of urban life. I would suggest that walking and talking fast reflect the same kind of process. One of my very senior colleagues in urban economics actually made this connection when I was discussing the work of the Santa Fe Institute team. He said he long been looking for data on the speed of walking and talking by location to see if and how it might be associated with say higher rates of innovation in certain places. I find myself quite fascinated by the process by which cities and urban centers (and perhaps some countries as well) seem to speed up the pace of many aspects of life. Just to be clear, I was promoting the Santa Fe Institute work not my own.
Richard-
Thank you for taking the time to reply. If I thought you actually read any of the comments here I would have been more diplomatic!
I guess what bothers me is that the concept of "intellectual metabolism" which is implied in the urban metabolism you describe is a powerful and elegant metaphor, and it seems to be diminished by linking it so literally to walking, talking and eating.
The places that foster innovation and creativity are certainly characterized by a "velocity of ideas" that allows information to be ingested, processed, and used as energy or raw materials for new ideas. Speeding up the iterative process of intellectual production and consumption promotes greater innovation. Geographic proximity, transportation and communication technology all enable this process.
I'd be very curious to see if the data on obesity, for example, is different when you look at cities or regions, rather than a country as a whole. If Americans all eat fast and are obese (a gross generalization of the study), but you found New Yorkers eat FASTER (creative centers, like NYC, should operate faster than, say, Iowa) and are LESS obese (my own personal observation), that would be very interesting indeed!
Rockfish - Of course I read comments. Only wish I had a little more time (writing new book etc...) to comment on them. Catherine Rampell has a nice post on just that over at Economix.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/obesity-and-the-fastness-of-food/
RF
Mr. Florida: the article displays one of my pet peeves: non-adjustment for population growth. I think in such cases tracking the growth of GDP per capita makes more sense than GDP alone (probably wouldn't make much difference in this case, but still, not controlling for the boost to GDP expansion conferred by population growth makes for less meaningful data). And yes, I realize this is the fault of the Times and not you.