Creative Class

Writing in today’s Guardian, Jeremy Seabrook provides a penetrating analysis of today’s youth and youth culture.

Parenting has come to mean, increasingly, supplying the money to
provide children with all the good things for which global markets
kindle an implacable desire. What is sometimes described, rather
benignly, as “pester-power” is recognition of this.

A generation has grown, formed within, by and for the market rather
than by and for society. Many unpleasant developments over which the
government seeks to reassert its declining control – binge-drinking,
the “normalisation” of drugs, the cult of celebrity, the supremacy of
what money can buy, incivility, absence of respect, obesity, the
epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases – are by-products of
childhoods upon which a major determinant has been a market whose
values have been championed above dull politics, and which have,
accordingly, captivated the heart and imagination. (The obsession with
“hearts and minds” abroad ought, perhaps, to be directed to the
multiple alienations of home.)

My thoughts and the rest of the article after the jump.

I have been thinking a lot about the creation of new life stages -
teenager, young adult, empty-nester – in the context of my new book. It
seems to me Seabrook is onto something here.  The idea of a long youth
unconnected to purpose has created a sort of drift for many. For a
time, some young people channeled this into politics or into
creativity, as many still do. But today market and consumer values have
become a main – if not the main – source of identity.  The crisis of
institutions – schools, politics and corporations, even the family-
deepens this drift. I’m not nearly as gloomy as Seabrook however. Even
if his pattern is the dominant one, many, many young people are
developing far more productive life strategies. Young people I come
into contact with and work with today are much more enterprising and
entrepreneurial than their baby-boomer counterparts. They are able to
take initiative and establish things for themselves.  Out of the
current period of restructuring and adaptation, I have no doubt new and
more progressive lifestyles and coping strategies will emerge – and the
creators of those strategies will be the young – precisely because they
are on the very front lines of change.

It is astonishing how the most obvious social wrongs and abuses can
remain “unknown” until acknowledged by power and authority. Despite
continuous news coverage, the unblinking vigilance of the camera, the
no-stone-unturned persistence of investigative journalism, the
unnoticed gains recognition only when it forces itself upon society,
which it sometimes does with great violence.

So it has been with contemporary discussions on youth, its disaffection, misbehaviour
and alienation from a world that appears to offer it everything. Since
the socialising of children has become primarily another aspect of
marketing, the consequences of these developments ought to have been
subject to more searching scrutiny than they have received. When the
market rules, why should the young be castigated for living by the
rules of the market?

While we have been busy bringing democracy to Iraq and other dark
corners of the world, there is growing disarticulation from the
democratic process in the lives of young people. The inner decay of
democracy has been replaced by the daily plebiscite of the market, in
which people vote with their feet; a version of popular participation
which contrasts with the apparently sterile immobile state of politics.

A new generation has been shaped by experience, which has
transformed its sensibility and estranged it from a world in which the
power of the freely elected is supposed to hold sway.

Education is obsessed with similar problems – how to keep pupils
involved and committed, how not to lose them to the lure of commerce
and its entertainments, which offer richer forms of instruction than
those offered by the state. Parents, too, perceive their waning social
power over children. They have been bypassed by markets, which appeal
over their heads, directly to the young.

Parenting has come to mean, increasingly, supplying the money to
provide children with all the good things for which global markets
kindle an implacable desire. What is sometimes described, rather
benignly, as “pester-power” is recognition of this.

A generation has grown, formed within, by and for the market rather
than by and for society. Many unpleasant developments over which the
government seeks to reassert its declining control – binge-drinking,
the “normalisation” of drugs, the cult of celebrity, the supremacy of
what money can buy, incivility, absence of respect, obesity, the
epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases – are by-products of
childhoods upon which a major determinant has been a market whose
values have been championed above dull politics, and which have,
accordingly, captivated the heart and imagination. (The obsession with
“hearts and minds” abroad ought, perhaps, to be directed to the
multiple alienations of home.)

A peer-driven market culture is the primary source of identity, not
being rooted in place, function or purpose, factors which shaped an
earlier generation.

In this new social order, there is only one thing worse than
domination by the market, and that is exclusion from it, since there is
now no other source of knowing who we are.

The market, whatever its emancipatory potential, also brings in its
train some strange pathologies, not least of which is the angry
resourceless state of those. The means to participate are, arbitrarily,
it seems to them, withheld.

This should really come as no great surprise. After all, in the
first industrial era, the capitalist labour market created a different
kind of humanity out of the wasting peasantry of an impoverished
countryside, as people streamed towards the new industrial towns of the
early 19th century. A different kind of human being, never before seen
in history, was born – the industrial worker, created by the
necessities of a national division of labour, which sent its children
into mills, mines, forges and manufactories, to learn there a cruel
pedagogy of survival.

The 19th century was characterised by the works of intrepid social
explorers who ventured into darkest England to discover what kind of
alien, and possibly savage, beings inhabited the manufacturing
districts. Engels, Mayhew, Booth, Jack London and, in the 20th century,
George Orwell, tried to make sense of the strange and perverse
character of people whose lives had long ago forsaken the cycle of
seed-time and harvest, and had been remade by the harsh rhythms of
industrial discipline.

In our time, the temper of industrial humanity has been dismantled,
no less thoroughly than that of an archaic peasantry in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries.

The epic disturbance in our age has dissolved a national division of
labour, sent industrial work to distant countries, and left at a loss
people who had never doubted their function and reason for existence.
Unlike in the early industrial era, people have become richer at the
same time; and this has masked some of the more malign consequences.

The political vacuum has been filled by identities provided by
consumer markets, in which people have searched for meaning, now that
the factories have been ploughed into the earth, the great workshop of
the world has fallen silent, its rusting machinery exported to distant
third world factories, its products outsourced to young factory women
in Mexico, Bangladesh or Indonesia.

EP Thompson called his great book The Making of the English Working Class.
We have seen its undoing, and the reincarnation of the popular
sensibility in a form for which no collective name exists. Whatever it
is called, it represents a distinctive psychic structure from anything
that preceded it. This remaking is now a fait accompli.

It remains the endeavour of conservatives of all stripes to restore
the status quo ante, to place the new kind of human being into a
familiar, recognisable and controllable context. This is impossible.

The “post-industrial” reality of contemporary Britain is not
emancipated from industry, indeed, is even more deeply embedded within
it globally, for even basic necessities in daily use are brought in
from all over the world; but we look in vain if we seek continuities in
the politics that grew out of derelict pit-villages, wasted city
suburbs and provincial towns left high and dry by the extinction of the
labour they performed.

Of the early industrial era, JL and Barbara Hammond
said “the labourer is not a citizen of this or that town but a hand of
this or that manufactory”. Today’s definition would be different – the
people are not citizens of this or that place, but are the dependents
of a global market. This change has the same irreversibility, a psyche
refashioned for other, perhaps equally alien, purposes as those which
drove people into the choice-less occupations of the industrial towns.

It is a rare hypocrisy that promotes an unchanged politics, when
politicians themselves have sought so hard to supersede their own role
by preaching the supreme virtue of market values, and then repudiating
the consequences of the way these developments work themselves out in
the world.

Check out this Wall Street Journal story on Pennsylvania’s efforts to stem its brain drain:

The common refrain in Pennsylvania is that the state is
a "net importer" of college students, but a "net exporter" of college
graduates. … But many students take their diplomas and run, leaving
Pennsylvania with the third-oldest population in the nation as measured
by the number of people 65 and older. The result: The state is
struggling to attract the type of cutting-edge companies that would
make it a major participant in the "knowledge-based" economy — one
driven by highly skilled workers and industries like technology,
science and health care. The state is on a mission to change that.

Now read this from the Post-Gazette:

A local startup that last year got off the ground with help from a
venture capital firm that received money from the state is moving to
Boston.Logical Therapeutics Inc. officials said they are making the move to
tap into a deeper pool of talent that they hope will help their firm
get their promising painkiller out of the lab and into the commercial
marketplace….Logical’s co-founders and sole employees, former University of
Pittsburgh official Carolyn E. Green and Dr. Mitchell Fink, Pitt’s
chief of critical care medicine, in recent months visited roughly 30
investment firms around the country that, "almost without exception,
asked if we’d be willing to relocate,” said Ms. Green, the company’s
chief operating officer.

The Wall Street Journal article goes on and on about how the key is to create tech jobs. But then the jobs also move away. So much for those chickens and eggs. Hmmmmm….
Your thoughts?

Writing in today’s NYT Magazine, Erica Goode summarizes Robert Putnam’s recent research on diversity and social capital:

What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or
town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form
fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home
watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood
barbecue or joining a community project?

This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide
telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam
and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group
division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes in the June
issue of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. “In colloquial
language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to
‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

The full story after the jump.

Putnam’s new work is more complex than previously, showing evidence of clear benefits from diversity. And there is overlap between his notion of bridging social capital and my team’s work on diversity, which he clearly notes: “Diversity has clear benefits, Putnam says, among them economic growth and enhanced creativity — more top-flight scientists, more entrepreneurs, more artists. But difference is also disconcerting, he maintains, “and people like me, who are in favor of diversity, don’t do ourselves any favors by denying that it takes time to become comfortable,” Putnam says.

There are lots of reasons which could account for this association between places with high levels of diversity and high levels of social isolation. One that reflects recent work of my team is that places with high levels of diversity also have high levels of migration. High levels of migration make it harder to forge trust.  Moreover, our hunch is that migrants reflect particular kinds of personality types which are more likely to seek out new experiences and less likely to be rooted in personal relationships.

What do you think?

For decades, students of American society have offered dueling
theories about how encountering racial and ethnic diversity affects the
way we live. One says that simple contact — being tossed into a stew of
different cultures, values, languages and styles of dress — is likely
to nourish tolerance and trust. Familiarity, in this view, trumps
insularity. Others argue that just throwing people together is rarely
enough to breed solidarity: when diversity increases, they assert,
people tend to stick to their own groups and distrust those who are
different from them.

But what if diversity had an even more complex and pervasive effect?
What if, at least in the short term, living in a highly diverse city or
town led residents to distrust pretty much everybody, even people who
looked like them? What if it made people withdraw into themselves, form
fewer close friendships, feel unhappy and powerless and stay home
watching television in the evening instead of attending a neighborhood
barbecue or joining a community project?

This is the unsettling picture that emerges from a huge nationwide
telephone survey by the famed Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam
and his colleagues. “Diversity seems to trigger not in-group/out-group
division, but anomie or social isolation,” Putnam writes in the June
issue of the journal Scandinavian Political Studies. “In colloquial
language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to
‘hunker down’ — that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

In highly diverse cities and towns like Los Angeles, Houston and
Yakima, Wash., the survey found, the residents were about half as
likely to trust people of other races as in homogenous places like
Fremont, Mich., or rural South Dakota, where, Putnam noted, “diversity
means inviting a few Norwegians to the annual Swedish picnic.”

More significant, they were also half as likely to trust people of
their own race. They claimed fewer close friends. They were more apt to
agree that “television is my most important form of entertainment.”
They had less confidence in local government and less confidence in
their own ability to exert political influence. They were more likely
to join protest marches but less likely to register to vote. They rated
their happiness as generally lower. And this diversity effect continued
to show up even when a community’s population density, average income,
crime levels, rates of home ownership and a host of other factors were
taken into account.

It was not a result that Putnam, the author of the much-discussed
2000 book “Bowling Alone,” was looking for when he sat down six years
ago to examine the mass of data he had collected. He was hoping to
build on his earlier work, which described a precipitous decline in the
nation’s “social capital,” the formal and informal networks — bowling
leagues, parent-teacher associations, fraternal organizations, pick-up
basketball games, youth service groups — that tie people together,
shore up civic engagement and forge bonds of trust and reciprocity. Now
he wanted to find out more about how social capital varied regionally
and over time.

But the diversity finding was so surprising that Putnam said his
first thought was that maybe something was wrong with the data. He and
his research team spent five years testing other explanations. Maybe
people in more diverse areas had less political clout and thus fewer
amenities, like playgrounds and pothole-free streets, putting them in a
misanthropic mood; or maybe diversity caused “hunkering down” only in
people who were older or richer or white or female. But the effect did
not go away. When colleagues who heard about the results protested, “I
bet you haven’t thought about X” — a frequent occurrence, Putnam said —
the researchers went back and looked at X.

The idea that it is diversity (the researchers used the census’s
standard racial categories to define diversity) that drives social
capital down has its critics. Among them is Steven Durlauf, an
economist at the University of Wisconsin
and a critic of Putnam’s past work, who said he thinks some other
characteristic, as yet unidentified, explains the lowered trust and
social withdrawal of people living in diverse areas. But without clear
evidence to the contrary, Putnam says, he has to believe the conclusion
is solid.

Few would question that it is provocative. The public discourse on
diversity runs at a high temperature. Told by one side, the narrative
of how different ethnic and racial groups come together in schools,
workplaces, churches and shopping centers can sound as if it was lifted
from “Sesame Street.” Told by the other, it often carries the shrill
tones of a recent caller to a radio talk show on immigration reform:
“The school my kid goes to is 45 percent Mexican,” he said, “and I
don’t see this as being a good thing for this country. Do we want to
turn into a Latin American country?”

Putnam’s argument is more nuanced. Diversity has clear benefits, he
says, among them economic growth and enhanced creativity — more
top-flight scientists, more entrepreneurs, more artists. But difference
is also disconcerting, he maintains, “and people like me, who are in
favor of diversity, don’t do ourselves any favors by denying that it
takes time to become comfortable,” Putnam says.

Why that discomfort seems to translate into social isolation and a
weakening of civic bonds remains anyone’s guess. Studies by Wendy Berry
Mendes, a social psychologist at Harvard, and her colleagues find that
when research subjects play a cooperative game with someone of another
race, they can show physiological signs of distress — reduced cardiac
efficiency and arterial constriction, for example. On a daily basis,
this alarmed reaction might make people pull inward. Putnam himself
speculates that, with kaleidoscopic changes going on around them,
people in diverse communities might experience a kind of system
overload, shutting down “in the presence of confusing or multiple
messages from the environment.”

Still, in Putnam’s view, the findings are neither cause for despair
nor a brief against diversity. If this country’s history is any guide,
what people perceive as unfamiliar and disturbing — what they see as
“other” — can and does change over time. Seemingly intractable group
divisions can give way to a larger, overarching identity. When he was
in high school in the 1950s, Putnam notes, he knew the religion of
almost every one of the 150 students in his class. At the time,
religious intermarriage was uncommon, and knowing whether a potential
mate was a Methodist, a Catholic or a Jew was crucial information. Half
a century later, for most Americans, the importance of religion as a
mating test has dwindled to near irrelevance, “hardly more important
than left- or right-handedness to romance.”

The rising marriage rates across racial and ethnic lines in a
younger generation, raised in a more diverse world, suggest the current
markers of difference can also fade in salience. In some places, they
already have: soldiers have more interracial friendships than
civilians, Putnam’s research finds, and evangelical churches in the
South show high rates of racial integration. “If you’re asking me if,
in the long run, I’m optimistic,” Putnam says, “the answer is yes.”

It’s not just scientists and entrepreneurs we’re locking out, it’s Chinese cooks. Writing in today’s NYT, the Zagats point out that immigration restrictions are hurting Chinese food in America.

[T]he
principal obstacle to improving Chinese fare here is the difficulty of
getting visas for skilled workers since 9/11. Michael Tong, head of the
Shun Lee restaurant group in New York, has said that opening a major
Chinese restaurant in America is next to impossible because it can take
years to get a team of chefs from China. Chinese restaurateur Alan Yau
planned to open his first New York City restaurant last year but was
derailed because he was unable to get visas for his chefs. If Henry Kissinger could practice “Ping-Pong diplomacy,” perhaps
Condoleezza Rice could try her hand at “dumpling diplomacy”?

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In today’s NYT, my colleague Tyler Cowen writes:

Michael S. Dell (of Dell Inc.) sold stamps to collectors when he was 12 and Bill Gates founded Microsoft when he was 19. Facebook, the social networking site, was the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard University sophomore at the time. A study
by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor showed that the United States
was unusual among developed countries in having a higher business
start-up rate among its 18- to 24-year-olds than its 35- to
44-year-olds.

But why has America produced so many successful young entrepreneurs?
Ben Casnocha, 19, author of the new book “My Start-Up Life: What a
(Very) Young C.E.O. Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley,”
offers clues.

Tyler’s right. And do read Ben’s terrific book.

The Wall Street Journal (sub req) quotes a Big Three executive:

"We need to eliminate most, if not all…like 80%" of
the gap, says a senior automotive executive involved in labor planning.
"It has to be gone by the end of the contract, or doing business in the
United States is unsustainable." All three domestic auto makers "will move investment
in plants and people outside the country" if they don’t bring U.S.
labor costs in line with those of Toyota and the other foreign auto
makers, the executive said.

How do they get away with this BS. This guy shouldn’t be managing a 7-11. The Big Three are not failing because of labor costs. They are failing because their product is crap. The problem is the worst management since the US steel industry – whiners, cry-babies and incompetents.  They keep churning out stuff no one wants. The SUVs which were carrying them have now collapsed and they are being crushed with the move to more fuel efficient cars and hybrids. This is one of the greatest stories in gross mismanagement in world industrial history. It is hard to imagine how anyone could squander the kind of lead and assets they had, but they did. It boggles the mind, actually. When Martin Kenney and I studied Japanese investment in the auto industry during the 1980s and 1990s we were shocked and appalled by what we saw. Factories in total disrepair.  Crap everywhere. Workers treated like sub-humans. Read Rivethead sometime if you have a chance. So were the Japanese. They never even imagined the US auto and related industries could be in the shape they were in.  When in doubt remember this:  Those Camrys and Accords that are tearing up the US market? No, they’re not made in Japan or some low labor cost country. They’re made right smack here in the US, using American workers. And Japanese and German workers are not exactly cheap labor. It’s not American workers that are the problem- it’s management.

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For this week’s "By the Numbers," we take a spin off of a U.S. Census press release from yesterday that highlights how Americans commute to work.    The Census found:


“Driving to work was the favored means of commute of nearly nine out of 10 workers (87.7 percent), with most people (77 percent) driving alone.  In contrast, 4.7 percent of commuters used public transportation to travel to work in 2005, an increase of about 0.1 percent over 2000 levels.”

In the press release, the Census also presents interesting data about which U.S. cities had the highest percentage workers taking public transportation, biking and walking to work and telecommuters.   The Census used the principle city as the unit of measurement.   

You can see the full Census press release and download principle city results here.

To compliment the work of the Census, we decided to look at which METRO REGIONS had the highest percentage of workers taking public transportation, biking, and walking to work and telecommuters.   

Here are the top three metro regions for each:

Public Transportation: Top 3 Metros

1. New York, NY – 29.7% (of workers)
2. San Francisco, CA – 13.7%
3. Washington, DC – 13.2%

Biking to Work: Top 3 Metros

1. Eugene, OR – 4.7%
2. Iowa City, IA – 2.9%
3. Santa Barbara, CA – 2.5%

Walking to Work: Top 3 Metros

1. Iowa City, IA – 5.9%
2. New York, NY – 5.7%
3. Madison, WI – 4.5%

Telecommuting: Top 3 Metros

1. Santa Cruz, CA – 8.4%
2. Hilo, HI – 8.3%
3. Santa Fe, NM – 6.5%

You can download the top 10 metros for each here. Download CCG_MetroCommuting.pdf

posted by: Steven

In "The Geographical Processes behind Innovation: A Europe-United States Comparative Analysis " Riccardo Crescenzi, Andres Rodriguez-Pose, and Michael Storper look at the question of whether or not the spatial distribution of innovative factors can explain the "innovation gap" between the U.S. and Europe.

Among their findings:

The higher mobility of capital, population, and knowledge in the US not only promotes the agglomeration of research activity in specific areas of the country but also enables a variety of territorial mechanisms to fully exploit local innovative activities and (informational) synergies. In the European Union, in contrast, imperfect market integration, and institutional and cultural barriers across the continent prevent innovative agents from maximising the benefits from external economies and localised interactions, but compensatory forms of geographical process may be emerging in concert with further European integration.

(Full version of their academic working paper is available here.)

So, all these highly mobile Creative workers aren’t just moving to find a better music scene and the ultimate tekka maki.  It turns out all that mobility helps to cross-pollenate the innovation process — all the more reason that regional openness, tolerance, and low barriers to entry are important drivers to regional growth and prosperity.  (See Florida & Gates, "Technology and Tolerance:  The Importance of Diversity to High-Technology Growth" from 2001.)

posted by Kevin Stolarick

New numbers on getting to work from the Census Bureau.

(Full press release with data links here).

Some interesting items to note, among the 50 largest cities, Portland Oregon deserves some special attention.  3.5% of the workforce bikes to work (#1); 5.3% work from home (#2); 4.3% walk to work (#12); 13.3% take public transporation (#10).

The top ranked cites by percentage of the workforce:

• Biking – Portland OR – 3.5%
• Working from Home – San Francisco – 6.3%
• Walking – Boston – 12.5%
• Taking Public Transportation – New York – 54.6%

At least 22 of the top 25 cities in each of the four non-driving categories are in the top 100 (out of 368) Creative Class cities.

posted by Kevin Stolarick

Lisa Falkenberg writes:

Quality of life would improve later, after Houston grows up to
become a center for commerce and trade. (I thought we already were.) … Yeah, but if the place is dirty, boring and smothered in concrete, who the heck would want to live here?

Her story is here (and after the jump). The full report is here.

I’ll bite my tongue for the time-being, but would love to know what you think – not just on the report but on what might underlie the Partnership’s apparent change of course.

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