Creative Class

For a long time we’ve know that money is NOT the key to happiness. Yesterday’s WSJ reports (sub required) on recent research into happiness including a new publication by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and others. Among the findings: more money does not necessarily translate into more happiness.

The story notes that two things that can improve happiness are keeping your commute time short and making good use of leisure time. From the article,

“Keep your commute short. Tempted to use your latest pay raise to buy a big house in a distant suburb? Don’t do it. While we often adjust amazingly well to life’s hardships, commuting is an exception. ‘You can’t adapt to commuting, because it’s entirely unpredictable,’ says Daniel Gilbert, author of ‘Stumbling on Happiness’ and a psychology professor at Harvard University. ‘Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.’

“Use your leisure time wisely. Surveys show that leisure is better for your happiness than work. But much also depends on how you spend your leisure time. Passive activities like watching television usually don’t make folks as happy as eating. A good meal, in turn, doesn’t rank quite as highly as active leisure activities, such as socializing with friends.”

I’ve worked with Kahneman on happiness research (we are both Gallup Senior Scientists) on Gallup’s Soul of the City survey. My new book will include several chapters on place and happiness and results show that the place you live has a BIG effect on happiness. I’ll be talking about that at Gallup’s Positive Psychology Summit this fall.

(posted by Richard)

Pro sport scouts have been lurking around high schools for years, trying to find the next Michael Jordan, Peyton Manning, or David Ortiz. It seems that corporations are now doing the same thing. This intense race to secure talent earlier and earlier is something I learned about while attending a financial services industry event over the summer.

From the 08/15/06 Wall Street Journal (sub required):

“Employers like PwC are targeting students early with internships, scholarships, employment opportunities and college grants, aiming to build long-term relationships that could give them an edge in recruiting full-time employees. PwC, New York, starts contact with students as early as high school.

Such early nurturing fosters loyalty to sponsor companies, as well as getting students involved in the work force. Ms. Van Kirk says interns who are hired full time have the advantage of previous training and a deeper knowledge of PwC. The company, which began the program a decade ago, says these people have a higher probability of being strong performers and of staying with PwC longer”

(posted by Richard)

New immigration data has been released from the census bureau’s most recent American Community Survey. While the number of immigrants living in the US has risen 16% since 2000, certain places, which have not traditionally drawn immigrants, are now starting to do so.

From the 08/15/06 NY Times (sub required)

“the Pew Hispanic Center showed that while 58 percent of the immigrants who arrived in the United States since 2000 settled in 5 of the traditional gateway states, 24 percent settled in 9 second-tier states (including Georgia, Massachusetts and Washington) and 11 percent found homes in 11 third-tier states, many of which have seen little immigration before (stretching from Connecticut to Minnesota to Nevada).”

For a more local view, reporter’s Layton and Keating at the Washington Post (sub required) wrote an excellent piece exploring the Washington DC region’s unique immigrant population. Befitting a leading creative economy, the region has more educated immigrants than most other places, greater diversity among immigrants (country of origin), and also a greater percentage of english speaking immigrants.

(posted by Richard)

Economic competition, though often framed as between nations, is truly between communities, whether they are across a river, the country, or the Pacific Ocean.

BusinessWeek has a great new piece exploring this idea and highlighting the concept by comparing Boston and Cambridge, MA and other areas such as Portland, OR and Montreal.

“‘The paradox of globalization is that location still matters,’ says Harvard Business School competitiveness guru Michael E. Porter. ‘The more barriers disappear, the more that capital and talent become mobile, the more decisive become geographic advantages.’ Areas most punished by globalization, he notes, are those whose geographic advantages have ebbed, such as Detroit’s proximity to the Great Lakes.”

(posted by David)

There is no doubt that Chicago is now one of America’s talent attracting magnets — a success story of revitalization. From day one, Mayor Daley focused on things like parks and flower baskets and public art throughout the city’ diverse neighborhoods, not just downtown.

Now, as an 8/10/06 Washington Post (sub required) article highlights, Daley is greening Chicago’s great buildings. This builds quality of place and it simultaneously gains attention for the city. It sure caught my eye…

From the piece,

“Daley is an especially big fan of green roofs. The City Hall roof, planted with more than 150 varieties of plants, is often 50 degrees cooler in summer than nearby asphalt roofs, whose temperatures can reach 170 degrees. It also houses beehives.

‘The quality of the building outside affects how you live inside, what you’re breathing,’ Daley said. ‘Anytime you fly into an airport, you see flat roofs. Imagine if every one of those flat roofs had a green roof. What a difference that would make!’”

(posted by Richard)

Mpreis, an Austrian grocery chain, uses architecture and design to impress its customers as they look for their veggies and such.

According to website The Cool Hunter, “For the last 15 years Mpreis has commissioned talented up and coming architects to design their stores based on their individual locations. So instead of uninspired cookie cutter buildings dotted across the Austrian Alps the chain boasts unique and individually designed stores that are in harmony with their local environment.”

Is this type of focus on local communities and environments beyond the reach of mega-retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco?

(posted by David)

One of the reasons I moved to Washington DC was to be near many leading social scientists and policy makers. In fact, I recently saw some working research being produced by Steve Pedigo at the Greater Washington Initiative and I was blown away by DC’s location quotients in occupations such as economists (almost 16), sociologists (9), and political scientists (36).

This June I plugged into the deep, thick social science network of Washington DC through participation in a CATO Unbound monthly discussion — an online ‘intellectual marketplace,’ run by the DC based CATO Institute. I wrote the lead essay for a discussion about the Future of Work. Edward Leamer, Robin Hanson, and Frank Levy all provided response essays.

Here is my essay and here are the responses by Leamer, Hanson, and Levy.

The conversation that followed the essays can be found here.

Check out this insightful presentation that Robert Kelly, a partner at Liguid Hub, presented during a workshop at the Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit held in June in Philly. He starts from the hypothesis that “creativity is not a commodity,” and does a great job framing many of the issues — from outsourcing and nationalism to the thickness and wide scope of the opportunities — facing IT professionals and software developers in today’s changing markets.

BTW, there are lots of other presentations on the Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit website worth taking a look at.

Some food for thought and examples of what communities around the country are doing on the tolerance front. Some are putting out the welcome mat, while others are following a different route.

A recent USA Today series highlighted a new movement in which cities are posting signs declaring their inclusiveness. According to the article,

“Sixty-eight cities in 28 states have decided that a plain old welcome sign is no longer enough in a nation growing increasingly diverse. In a symbolic plea for greater tolerance, communities from West Virginia to California are posting signs that say: ‘Welcome. We are building an inclusive community.’”

The USA Today series (hat tip: SohoDojo) also offered an article on a small Indiana town working on its tolerance and an article on the growing diversity in suburbs throughout the US.

Alternatively, a recent article in the Washington Post provides anecdotal evidence from Virginia that points to potential ‘gay’ flight as the state’s gay marriage debate heats up. From the article,

“Virginia state legislators passed a law two years ago that prohibits “civil unions, partnership contracts or other arrangements between persons of the same sex purporting to bestow the privileges or obligations of marriage.” A proposed constitutional amendment, which will go to voters in November, excludes any “unmarried individuals” from “union, partnership or other legal status similar to marriage.”

Many gay people in Virginia and some family-law attorneys say they worry that the state law and proposed amendment are more far-reaching than simple bans on gay marriage — that the measures could threaten the legal viability of the contracts used by gay couples to share ownership of property and businesses.

Many have moved to the District, but no estimates are available. “Virginia is becoming not gay-friendly,” said District-based real estate agent Jeff Lockard, who said he has many gay clients. “What we are seeing is that same-sex couples — if they can afford it — their preference is to be in the city. It’s something I’ve seen more and more in the past year and a half.”

Had a great conversation with my old friend Paul Glastris the other day. Paul is the incredible editor of the Washington Monthly. We discussed my writing a piece on how cities and mayors are the new laboratories of democracy. For a while now, I’ve been saying that in the 1980s and 1990s, the states and the governors were the source of new policy ideas and innovations.

Now it seems like a remarkable class of young mayors — Martin O’Malley in Baltimore, Denver’s John Hickenlooper, San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom, Seattle’s Greg Nickels, and of course Richard M. Daley in Chicago, Michael Bloomberg in New York and now Newark’s Cory Booker — are developing new ideas, innovations and strategies for revitalizaing, developing and governing our cities. Will be thinking about this piece for the next couple of months. Would appreciate any ideas or stories or examples you might have…