June 2009 Archives
"The bicycle is the means of transport used most often in Amsterdam," reports Bike Europe. "Between 2005 and 2007 people in the city used their bikes on average 0.87 times a day, compared to 0.84 for their cars. This is the first time that bicycle use exceeds car use."When I started cycling in the Boston area a decade or so, I recall there was a competition between bike, car, and train commuters on designated routes. The bike commuters cleaned up.
It's getting better in cities from New York to Portland, but American and Canadian cities have a long way to go to catch up - in car too many, commuting by bike remains fraught with risk.
Check out this video of Amsterdam bike commuters:
Dutch start-up SellaBand has built a platform that allows artists to crowd-source funding from music-lovers around the world. Established in 2006 by two Sony-BMG music executives, it provides a Bowie-bond like process for up-and-coming bands to raise $50,000 to record their album by selling ten-dollar "parts" to online "believers."Economist Ajay Agrawal has been studying SellaBand's business model as part of a new MPI program on Innovation and Creativity. He recently hosted an evening featuring a performance from the first Canadian to record with SellaBand, Angie Arsenault.
Ed Glaeser has some very sensible things to say about the shrinking cities brouhaha. Despite the growing hype, there's not a shred of evidence that the Obama administration is considering bull-dozering anything. Glaeser says it makes a heck of a lot more sense to favor people over places. Invest in human capital and encourage people to be mobile, Glaeser contends, promise much better long-term economic payoffs than undertaking expensive and dubious strategies to try to revive dying places.
It's useful to put the current debate in historical context. "Planned shrinkage" was originally proposed in the 1970s by then NY housing commissioner Roger Starr. Even earlier, the late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan advocated for the related idea of "benign neglect" as a pillar of urban policy. Both resulted in a slew of unintended and nasty outcomes - like increased arson and violent crime. And as the market for some central locations, like NYC, began to improve, a whole bunch of neighborhoods that were candidates for government-assisted "shrinkage" (read: slow demolition) once again became valuable - parts of Brooklyn, Queens, Hoboken, even Jersey City. Economics is a big part of their comeback. But this would not have happened if the building stock of those places had been allowed to completely decay or was demolished.
It's abundantly clear that the contemporary shrinking cities movement in the U.S. and Europe is much more sensitive to urban conditions. These contemporary approaches recognize that globalization and market forces work against some older locations. They sensibly suggest that such places would be better served by proactively managing the process of economic transformation and adjustment. Flint and Youngstown provide useful models of how older communities can strategically adjust to the strong forces of economic concentration and spiky globalization. Pittsburgh's economic transformation - feted by Newsweek's Howard Fineman among others as a model for Detroit and other places - is a case study of how to shrink smart and strategically.
The most successful shrinking strategies, like Pittsburgh's, are not top-down affairs driven by all-knowing governments, but organic, bottom-up, community-based efforts. While Pittsburgh government and business leadership pressed for large-scale urban renewal - stadium-building, convention centers, and more far-fetched schemes for local mag-lev trains - its real turnaround was driven by organic, bottom-up initiatives. Community groups, local foundations, and non-profits - not city hall or business-led economic development groups - were the driving forces behind neighborhood stabilization and redevelopment, university-based economic development, water-front revitalization, park improvements, and green building among others. This kind of bottom-up process takes considerable time and perseverance. In Pittsburgh's case, it took the better part of a generation to achieve stability and the potential for longer-term revival.
All of which brings us back to a big question: What about people versus place strategies? I agree with Glaeser: people must be the priority. Especially in tough economic times, public investment should flow toward people. Early childhood investments, as James Heckman has shown, are the most important, longest-running and highest-paying investments we make.
But places also matter. Sure, there are plenty of things that urban policy has done wrong - like large-scale, top-down urban renewal - things that we need to stay wary of and not repeat. That does not mean public policy should ignore places.
The quality of the place we live is a key component of our happiness and subjective well-being. We now have solid empirical evidence about what people want and need from places: safety and security, good schools, economic opportunity, the ability to connect to other people, ethical and forward-looking leadership, opportunities for civic engagement, a place that gives everyone a go with abundant green space, a clean environment, and a strong sense of its own history, among other things.
There are plenty of small-scale, locally rooted investments that can and do make a difference - the kinds of things Jane Jacobs and others have long advocated - that don't cost an arm and a leg and which provide broad public goods kinds of benefits: improving run-down buildings and community sore spots, encouraging community engagement in schools, upgrading parks and open space, planting trees and urban gardens, adding bike lanes, widening sidewalks to encourage both pedestrian use and outside activity, updating zoning and building codes to enable upgrading of commercial strips, live-work conversion and mixed-used development.
As with so many things in life, it's the small stuff that can really make a difference - in this case not just to cities, shrinking and otherwise - but to the quality of life and happiness of the people who live in them.
International economist Richard Baldwin takes a close look at the actual figures and finds a very different trend. Examining IMF data on the dollar volume of trade in services originally compiled by economists, Mary Amiti and Shang-Jin Wei, Baldwin plots the dollar volume of out-sourced U.S. service work against the dollar-volume of service work that has been attracted to or in-sourced by the United States.
As the chart shows, the U.S. is a net in-sourcer of service jobs, with the U.S. in-sourcing gap actually increasing over time. Based on this, Baldwin concludes that:The US, as it turns out, is a net "insourcer". That is, the world sends more service sector jobs to the US than the US sends to the world, where the jobs under discussion involve trade in services of computing (which includes computer software designs) and other business services (which include accounting and other back-office operations. ... Blinder is right in that the US importing an ever-growing range of commercial services - or as he would say, the third industrial revolution has resulted in the offshoring of ever more service sector jobs. However, the US is also "insourcing" an ever-growing number of service sector jobs via its growing service exports. The startling fact is that not only is the trade not a one-way ticket to job destruction, the US is actually running a surplus.
The data only cover the period 1980 to 2003, so it is certainly possible that the trend-line has changed since then, but Baldwin argues that the logic of trade in services suggests this basic trend will continue.
Since services are highly differentiated products, and indivisibilities limit head-to-head competition, my guess is that we shall see a continuation of the trends in the chart. Lots more service jobs "offshored" and lots more "onshored". What governments should be doing is helping their service exporters to compete, not wringing their hands about one-way competition from low-wage nations.
Crosscut argues that it's time for Seattle and other cities to learn from NYC's example and start turning old elevated structures into parks and other good uses (pointer via Planetizen).[T]hink a bit about the advantages of elevated linear parks. They can provide remarkable views, often through the slots of the cityscape. They open up access to back-door and upper-level spaces. They make connections with gritty urban history. The design experience is not the usual bland blend but instead has the visual excitement and tension of green spaces set amid rusting iron forms. The Seattle aesthetic has been to make open space as green and pastoral as possible, as if blotting out the city. Time for a richer palate, a more dissonant and beautiful chord.
(Image from thehighline.org)
Speaking entirely for myself, I like to look at the rate of change of total hours worked in the economy. Total hours worked is equal to the total number of workers employed multiplied by the average length of the workweek for the average worker. The length of the workweek tends to respond at turning points faster than does the number of jobs.Frankel provides the graph below which tracks the trend in hours worked over the past decade.
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In this context, a recent survey of Harvard's graduating class by the Harvard Crimson offers an interesting peek into how the crisis may be changing the career and locational calculations of talented young people. Better yet, the Crimson has surveyed the graduating class for three consecutive years. I'm the first to admit it's a highly biased sample. But, it's also a very interesting one - tracking graduates from arguably the world's leading university. As such, it provides particularly useful signals about the kinds of jobs and the kinds of places such highly motivated, highly mobile young people are choosing.
The results of earlier surveys were fairly predictable. Harvard grads traditionally headed to consulting and investment banking jobs in NYC. But this year's findings - coming as they are in the midst of the economic and financial crisis - shed light on a variety of interesting and much speculated upon trends.
Still Getting Jobs: While stories about the worsening job prospects for college grads are legion, the economic and financial crises do not seem to have not significantly altered prospects for Harvard grads. This year, 59 percent of students lined up jobs prior to graduation - down not-too-terribly-much from 66 percent last year. This is understandable since Harvard grads are headed into professional, knowledge, and creative occupations which have the lowest rates of unemployment and since they signal top talent.
That said, career choices are certainly shifting along some predictable and some not-so-predictable lines.
Finance and Consulting Fade: As expected, far fewer grads are headed to finance and consulting. But, this figure has been consistently trending down over the past three years - falling from 47 percent in 2007 to 39 percent in 2008 to 20 percent this year. The numbers of grads headed into finance fell from 23 percent last year to 11.5 percent this year, while consulting dropped from 16 percent to 8.5 percent.
Education and Health Care Gain: More grads are headed to education and health care. Education is up from 10 to 15 percent of grads. Health care increased from 6 to 12 percent.
Government Down, Slightly: Despite the conventional view that government work is becoming more attractive - both because it is growing and it is stable - the share of grads taking jobs in government fell slightly from 4.5 percent last year to 3 percent this year. The Crimson notes this could be considered a "paradoxical trend given the Democratic victories in the 2008 elections and the fact that 74 percent of Harvard seniors describe themselves as more liberal or considerably more liberal than the average American."
I think it's more in sync with past trends actually. Having taught public policy students for the better part of three decades, I've noticed a long-running trend away from traditional government work which is perceived as overly hierarchical and bureaucratic. Public service and cause-oriented students I've come across prefer work in smaller scale, more flexible non-profits where they believe they can have more immediate impact. The Crimson reports that "programs like Teach for America... received applications from a record-setting 14 percent of Harvard seniors, according to data released by the organization."
What They Really Want to Do: The survey asked: grads what what career they would choose "if finances were not a concern." To my mind, this is the most interesting question of all. The Number One field: the arts, with 16 percent choosing it as their "dream field," followed by public service (12.5 percent) and education (12 percent). Finance and consulting captured the "dreams" of just five percent each.
Top Cities: Check out the great map below. The greater Boston area is the top destination - reinforcing the point that having an elite university (or more) in your local backyard can be a considerable talent advantage. And since after-college moves are the pinnacle of mobility it can be a lasting one. Cities might do better by focusing a little bit less on luring "ex-pats" back home, and a little more on retaining the college grads that have already chosen them.
New York has fallen from its previous top spot. D.C. is down just a tad - even with the new heavily Harvard Obama administration and the southern shift in the nation's financial and economic nerve center. Small percentages are headed to the South or the Midwest, with Chicago drawing just 1.3 percent of grads.
Seventeen percent of grads are going abroad. Some might look at this as a tale of shrinking U.S. opportunities versus improving foreign ones,but I look at it as a very positive sign for the future.
Startups may represent a new economic phase, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. I'm not sure of this, but there seems a decent chance it's true. People are dramatically more productive as founders or early employees of startups--imagine how much less Larry and Sergey would have achieved if they'd gone to work for a big company--and that scale of improvement can change social customs.He notes that startups are highly clustered in certain cities:
Startups are a type of business that flourishes in certain places that specialize in it--that Silicon Valley specializes in startups in the same way Los Angeles specializes in movies, or New York in finance.And he's concerned about what this means for society:
If so, this revolution is going to be particularly revolutionary. All previous revolutions have spread. Agriculture, cities, and industrialization all spread widely. If startups end up being like the movie business, with just a handful of centers and one dominant one, that's going to have novel consequences.The spiky nature of our era - evident in everything from startup clustering to rising economic and geographic inequality - is among the most critical issues of our time. The crisis creates the opportunity to address it. But for some reason, U.S. and global policy-makers are unable or unwilling to take it on. The consequences will surely come back to haunt them sooner or later.
Another issue that is starting to arise outside of your writing is the future of food production. I would like you to consider how your view of future urban areas would interact with increasing commodity prices for basic food stuffs. Northern to central Virgina is an interesting case in point. There is a vibrant rural community, filled with local food-growing ex-urban dwellers. In the late 90's up to this crash, they were competing with Mc-mansions for land. Can these extended regional urban/suburban/rural areas continue? Or will the increases in prices on food commodities further separate urban and rural as the need to increase productive yield becomes the only value of rural farm land?I asked Betsy Donald, a geographer at Queens University who has done extensive research on the creative food economy, about this.
The creative food economy has profound implications for sustainable economic development because place and providence become central to quality food making, marketing and lifestyle. Food, unlike any other commodity on the planet, is intimate: we eat it and therefore how we eat it has implications for a host of policy related issues around job creation, health, hunger, ecosystem protection, carbon footprint, labor practices, cultural awareness and diversity.She's on to something. The demand for higher-quality food - both from individual consumers and from restaurants - is already leading to a tighter, more organic, higher-quality food supply chain. Adding creativity, so to speak, to food production will increase its value; we'll pay more for it, and that will make this kind of food production economically more viable. Who knows? Perhaps the economics will someday enable the remaking and reuse of declining ex-urbs as centers of more vital, higher-end, creative farming communities.
There is a huge movement toward preserving prime farmland on the urban fringes through efforts to resolarize the farm, but also a budding trend toward urban gardening. Recall during World War II that 40 percent of produce consumed in America came from private "Victory Gardens." Now these urban gardens are making a comeback - with more attention paid to organic and diverse food production (think Michelle Obama's White House Garden) and San Francisco's recent veggie planting on the grounds of City Hall. In Seattle, a local program offering public gardening plots has 6,000 plots assigned and a waiting list of 700 people - an aspect of the food economy that integrates local, organic and ethnic food production.
Some of this creative food production draws on more traditional farming practices, but much of it also challenges it by calling for more sustainable forms of food production that reduces the need for both fertilizers and pesticides and cleverly used polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight (as is going on in Argentina and Brazil). It calls for a more holistic vision of the food economy that views food as a prism through which we can explore the scope and complexity of many of our most pressing economic, social and ecological issues.
Map courtesy of the Martin Prosperity Institute
Corporate headquarters are both heavily concentrated in and very specialized by region, according to a new analysis by Scott Pennington of the Martin Prosperity Institute.
Eighty-five percent of the headquarters of the largest companies in the U.S. and Canada are concentrated in a dozen or so mega-regions.
Two mega-regions - Chi-Pitts and Char-Lanta - account for almost half of all manufacturing headquarters. Chicago appears to have increased its hold on manufacturing headquarters, in effect pulling them in from other major cities in the mega-region.Not surprisingly, Hou-Orleans dominates in energy; and Nor-Cal is the center for high-tech headquarters.
Finance and insurance are more dispersed. While Bos-Wash accounts for 17 percent of finance and insurance headquarters, Char-Lanta and Tor-Buff-Chester also have significant clusters. These regions are also more diverse in their economic makeup - with significant concentrations of media and entertainment in Bos-Wash and Tor-Buff-Chester and of manufacturing in Char-lanta - perhaps leaving them more resilient in coping with the fallout from the financial crisis.
An estimated 32% of American children are overweight, and physical inactivity contributes to this high prevalence of overweight.This policy statement highlights how the built environment of a community affects children's opportunities for physical activity. Neighborhoods and communities can provide opportunities for recreational physical activity with parks and open spaces, and policies must support this capacity. Children can engage in physical activity as a part of their daily lives, such as on their travel to school.
Factors such as school location have played a significant role in the decreased rates of walking to school, and changes in policy may help to increase the number of children who are able to walk to school. Environment modification that addresses risks associated with automobile traffic is likely to be conducive to more walking and biking among children. Actions that reduce parental perception and fear of crime may promote outdoor physical activity. Policies that promote more active lifestyles among children and adolescents will enable them to achieve the recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity. By working with community partners, pediatricians can participate in establishing communities designed for activity and health.
Green chutes optimism is misplaced. The economic crisis continues to deepen at a pace that is on par with or worse than that of the Great Depression, according to an updated analysis by economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke. They conclude that even though "trade and stock markets have shown some improvement without
reversing the overall conclusion - today's crisis is at least as bad
as the Great Depression" (pointer via Mark Thoma).
Their first graph (below) tracks world industrial output leading them to conclude that: "World industrial production continues to track closely the 1930s fall, with no clear signs of 'green shoots."' They add that: "North Americans (U.S. & Canada) continue to see their industrial output fall approximately in line with what happened in the 1929 crisis, with no clear signs of a turn around."
Jane Jacobs long ago argued that cities are the cradles of civilization and of economic development and that density and human interaction hold the key to economic progress. The findings of a major new study published in Science finds that density is a key factor in the emergence of modern human behavior.
Increasing population density, rather than boosts in human brain power, appears to have catalysed the emergence of modern human behaviour, according to a new study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal Science. High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behaviour appearing at different times in different parts of the world.
In the study, the UCL team found that complex skills learnt across generations can only be maintained when there is a critical level of interaction between people. Using computer simulations of social learning, they showed that high and low-skilled groups could coexist over long periods of time and that the degree of skill they maintained depended on local population density or the degree of migration between them. Using genetic estimates of population size in the past, the team went on to show that density was similar in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Middle-East when modern behaviour first appeared in each of these regions. The paper also points to evidence that population density would have dropped for climatic reasons at the time when modern human behaviour temporarily disappeared in sub-Saharan Africa.
That's the overall rate of unemployment, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' newly released U-6 measure
which includes "marginally attached workers" as well as those who work
part-time for economic reasons. That's quite a bit higher than the widely
reported 9.4 percent figure also released today.
And, unemployment continues to fall unevenly by gender, race, class, and occupation.
Race: The unemployment rate for whites was 8.6 percent compared to 12.7 percent for Hispanics, 14.9 percent for blacks, and 16.8 percent for black men.
Gender: Men continue to experience higher rates
of unemployment than women, with the gap widening to three full
percentage points - 10.5 percent vs. 7.5 percent (for those over 16
years of age) - due to
the concentration of men in manufacturing jobs.
Human Capital/Education: Unemployment is even more uneven by education or human capital level. The unemployment rate for college graduates is 4.8 percent, half that for high school (only) graduates (10 percent), and one-third of the 15.5 percent rate facing those without a high school diploma.
Class: And there remain huge differences in unemployment by occupation. The
highest rates of unemployment remain concentrated in working
class occupations. For production, transportation, and moving occupations
overall, the rate is 13.7 percent, up from 6.3 percent last year. For production workers it's 15.6 percent; movers and
transportation workers, 11.8 percent;
and construction and extraction jobs, 19.7 percent. For service
occupations, the unemployment rate is nearly 10 (9.4) percent.
Unemployment is significantly lower for the creative class. For
management and business occupations - including hard-fit financial jobs
- overall the unemployment rate is 4.6 percent,
up from 2.7 percent last year; and for professional and technical
occupations it is 4.2 percent, up from 2.5 percent a year ago.
The unemployment rate surged to 9.4 percent today. But unemployment continues to fall heavily on certain demographic and class groups and in certain cities and regions of the country, according to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Greater Detroit still posts the highest rate for large regions
(those with a million or more people), 13.6 percent, down from 14
percent in March. Los Angeles, Tampa Bay, Las Vegas, and San Jose also have rates above 10 percent. Greater Portland,
Oregon saw the largest jump in its unemployment rate (+6.9 percentage
points), followed by Detroit (+6.6 points) and greater Charlotte (+6.4
points). Iowa City (3.2 percent), Des Moines (4.6
percent), and Salt Lake City (five percent) post the lowest unemployment rates.
Ryan Avent notes
the resilience of Washington, D.C. and of the Bos-Wash mega-region
across the board as well as college towns. He also points to the
surprising strength of the "eastern Rust Belt" especially Buffalo,
Scranton, Syracuse, and Pittsburgh. These places all experienced the kind of hit
Detroit is taking today roughly a generation ago. They have had time to stabilize the economic trauma and to begin to rebuild around universities, heath care, technology, and creative
industries.
Large increases in regional unemployment remain heavily concentrated in regions with large fractions of blue-collar working class jobs. The change in unemployment from April '08 to April '09 is closely correlated (0.39) with the regional concentration of working class jobs - that is, jobs in industrial production, transportation, and construction, according to an analysis by my colleague Charlotta Mellander.
Regions with higher levels of the creative class and higher levels of human capital have fared much better. (Year-over-year, change in unemployment is negatively correlated with both the creative class, -0.29, and human capital levels, -0.35, the percentage of adults with at least a bachelor's degree).
Unemployment does not appear to be related to regional income levels (the correlation between the two is insignificant). And it tends to fall more heavily on regions with higher housing prices (with a significant positive correlation between the two of 0.18) - perhaps an artifact of the bubble.
Interestingly, regions with large concentrations of lower-end service jobs (like food prep, building maintenance, and personal care services, which are typically seen as the worst and least secure kinds of jobs) are holding up much better than those with large working class concentrations. (Change in unemployment is negatively correlated, -0.29, with large concentrations of these standardized service jobs).
Seems to me, we'd be much better off developing new strategies to improve wages and working conditions in this sector - by say speeding the dissemination of better management models and improving innovation and productivity - instead of bemoaning the loss of blue-collar jobs or, worse yet, bailing out failed manufacturing firms.Despite short-term hits, the world's leading financial centers, New York and London, are likely to remain on top through the crisis and beyond, according to Peking University professor Michael Pettis, writing in Newsweek:
Financial crises tend to trigger overwrought predictions of major economic shifts--and then debunk them. Today's global economic meltdown is no different. In recent months, it has become popular to predict that New York and London (or NyLon, as they're together known) will soon lose market share as cities in the emerging world use the crisis to wrest away dominance. But history suggests that the opposite is more likely: that New York and London will actually increase in importance over the decade to come ...
Big centers have two huge advantages over smaller rivals: greater liquidity and larger networks. Big investors tend to flock to big financial capitals because they offer higher volume and lower trading costs, and issuers of stocks, bonds and other financial products follow the flock of investors. ...When a liquidity boom ends, however, it tends to accentuate the advantages of big markets while diminishing those of smaller ones.
China Digital Times picks up China Law Blog's
similar reading about:
Older Rustbelt centers continue to get clobbered by the structural decline of manufacturing. Job losses at bankrupt automakers GM and Chrysler have been highly concentrated in older Rustbelt centers as this NYT map shows.why New York will remain as the world's financial capital and why, despite the projected growth of Asia's economies, we should not expect Shanghai, Hong Kong, or anywhere else to usurp it. At least not for an exceedingly long time.
And, the sun continues to set on shallow-rooted Sunbelt cities, according
to this Associated Press analysis.
Some cities -- Las Vegas, Phoenix, Fort Myers are good examples -- hitched their floats to housing bubbles and got caught up in development that depended largely on, well, development itself, rather than sustainable, scalable, productive industry, economic analysts say. ...
AP Stress Index figures, which calculate the economic impact of the recession on a scale of 1 to 100, illustrate how the downturn has played out in some of these communities:
In Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, the Stress Index more than doubled from 5.12 at the beginning of the recession in December 2007 to 12.67 in March 2009, worsened by a foreclosure rate that nearly tripled.
Mounting foreclosures in Las Vegas' Clark County drove up its Stress Index score from 10.5 at the start of the recession to 19.3 in March 2009.
In Lee County, home to Fort Myers, unemployment has doubled and foreclosures have soared 75 percent since the recession began, lifting its Stress Index from 10.5 to 19.98 ...Now Phoenix's hotel industry is tanking, according to the Wall Street Journal.
"Phoenix suffers from the dual challenges of overbuilding and shrinking demand due to the national drop-off in corporate conferences," said David Loeb, a hotel-industry analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. "All of this means that Phoenix's hotel market has experienced one of the steepest downturns among the big markets."
| Score | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | San Jose - Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA | 100.0 |
| 2 | 3 | Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA | 46.4 |
| 3 | 2 | Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, MA | 45.2 |
| 4 | 5 | Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV | 41.8 |
| 5 | 4 | Los Angeles - Long Beach - Glendale, CA | 40.2 |
| 6 | 6 | Dallas - Plano - Irving, TX | 21.8 |
| 7 | 7 | San Diego - Carlsbad - San Marcos, CA | 19.3 |
| 8 | 11 | Santa Ana - Anaheim-Irvine, CA | 17.7 |
| 9 | 9 | New York - White Plains - Wayne, NY-NJ | 16.8 |
| 10 | 8 | San Francisco - San Mateo-Redwood City, CA | 16.1 |
Outside the U.S., the report finds that:
My colleague Charlotta Mellander compared these Milken high-tech rankings with our own regional demographic measures for the top 50 U.S. and Canadian metros and found significant correlations to:
- Toronto, ON jumped 10 places from 2003, showing impressive gains in building and attracting high-tech businesses in manufacturing and reproducing of optical media, biopharmaceuticals, and medical and diagnostic laboratories.
- Baja California has become a key manufacturing center for high-tech giants such as Casio, Honeywell, Sanyo, and Sony. The state finished in second place in 2003, just after San Jose, in the ranking for manufacturing of semiconductors and other electronic components. It also leads North America in medical equipment and supplies manufacturing.
- Vancouver, BC showed the greatest rise among the top-10 metros for software publishing, climbing from 14th place in 2003 to ninth place in 2007.
- Economic Output: Measured as gross metropolitan product per person (0.475).
- Talent: The Creative Class (0.46),Super-creatives (0.34), and Human Capital - percent of population with a BA and above (0.3).
- Openness and Tolerance: The Mosaic Index - a measure of openness to foreign-born people (0.45); and also to the Gay Index (0.315) when San Jose - the extreme outlier - is excluded from the analysis.
Manpower CEO, Jeff Joerres talks to the Financial Times about the crisis and the possibility of a new brain drain in the U.S. and Europe.
Mr Joerres says opportunities in the developing world could prompt a "brain-drain" from America and Europe that could exacerbate the talent shortage.
"It's not just Irish going back to Ireland or Indians going back to India," he says. "It's Americans saying: 'Mumbai is not so bad and when I go there I get a standard of living that's acceptable to me'. You'll see more of that."
In a reluctant foray into politics, Mr Joerres says the US is shooting itself in the foot by having too low a limit on the number of non-immigrant visas it issues, meaning that the work permits tend to run out by May every year. "That's just wrong," he says. "The growth of this country came from people who were not American but were classically American - who came here from another country with an idea, developed it and created employment. Two-thirds of Silicon Valley companies were started by people not born in the US.
"We were so arrogant about being able to capture the smartest people in the world because we were the best alternative. But there are a lot of other neat alternatives right now. Go to Shanghai, Dubai, Qatar, Abu Dhabi - that's who the US is competing against. We're competing against the nightlife and the energy in Mumbai and Bangalore.
"This is a global labour market," Mr Joerres adds. "If you see migration back to Mexico, India, China, some of the western countries could be really adversely impacted by a brain-drain that they didn't quite anticipate."
We know that economic crises are periods of accelerated innovation and creative destruction, but they can also radically reshape the global flow of talent. Europe's economic difficulties and relative closure during the previous two major economic crashes - the Long Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s - helped pave the way for the U.S. to achieve its global talent advantage. We may be seeing the beginnings of another shift today - less toward nations and more toward thriving mega-regions. One thing is for sure: The global competition for talent promises to get more heated as we move from crisis to recovery. The places that can attract the most capable and broadest array of talent will gain considerable long-run competitive advantage as that happens.
But Obama may be on his way to fashioning a broad cross-class coalition, according to this Gallup survey which tracks the president's approval rating by occupation (pointer from Charlotta Mellander).
The president enjoys a nearly two-thirds (65 percent) approval rating overall. He enjoys relatively high approval ratings across major occupational or class groups, and his approval rating is rising across key groups.
Blue Collar Workers: Production and manufactuirng workers provided a 68 percent approval rating, up from 62 percent in March.
Service Workers: Service workers gave the president his highest approval rating in May, 71 percent.
Professional, Knowledge, Creative Workers: The president registered a 65 percent approval rating from professionals (up three points from March) and 60 percent from managers and government workers.
Entrepreneurs and Self-employed Workers: The president's biggest gains came from business owners and self-employed workers, where his approval rating increased 11 points from 44 percent ion March to 55 percent in May.
It's an open question whether Obama can maintain these numbers (Andrew Gelman suggests there are ways the GOP could "win it all back"), but right now they look impressive, especially given the very uneven ways the crisis is affecting these groups.
I suspect a lot of bloggers may be introverts, because blogging is great if you like to sit in front of the internet all day. If not for my aversion to specializing in one subject, I probably would have been an academic historian, because I think it would have suited me to work in libraries back before there was an internet.So I asked Cambridge personality psychologist Jason Rentfrow about it:
I would be inclined to think that Openness would be a big predictor of blogging because it's related to curiosity and reflection... But just as my work on music and entertainment preferences indicates that personality is related to preferences for particular content, I would imagine personality is related to the content of people's blogs.Rentfrow sent along a link to this study on bloggers and personality:
We examined whether the Big Five personality traits predicted blogging. The results of two studies indicate that people who are high in openness to new experience and high in neuroticism are likely to be bloggers. Additionally, neuroticism was moderated by gender indicating that women who are high in neuroticism are more likely to be bloggers... The results indicate that personality factors impact the likelihood of being a blogger and have implications for understanding those who blog.As for Rauch, his being wary of over-specialization leads the armchair psychologist in me to believe he is likely to be high in openness-to-experience as well as being an introvert. Highly creative people frequently share these sorts of personality traits. Like The Economist, I'd place him way up on the spectrum of creative people, which the leading psychologist of creativity describes this way.
Richard Florida
