Creative Class

My old friend, Don Holbrook, outlines the challenges globalization brings for US cities and economic development, here

(hat tip: Kevin Stolarick).

How do you define your road in life?

Today Richard Florida met with the team from PBS’s Roadtrip Nation. 

Read more about their cool project on their website.

The always interesting Jim Kuntsler sees suburbia on its last legs:

I get lots of letters from people in various corners of the nation
who are hysterically disturbed by the continuing spectacle of suburban
development. But instead of joining in their hand-wringing, I reply by
stating my serene conviction that we are at the end of the cycle — and
by that I mean the grand meta-cycle of the suburban project as a whole.
It’s over. Whatever you see out there now is pretty much what we’re
going to be stuck with. The remaining things under construction are the
last twitchings of a dying organism. The rest is here.

Ross Douthat, invoking Joel Kotkin, sees suburbia as the future:

The suburbs are a triumph,
not a torture chamber: They’re the place where “we’ve created the first
mass middle class in the history of the world where people own their
own land and their own homes,” which is an achievement to be celebrated
and sustained, rather than denigrated and abandoned. People love living
in them: Suburbanites are happier and enjoy a more vibrant civic life
than other Americans, and it’s not just bigoted whites hiding out in
gated communities; immigrants, in particular, are voting for the
suburbs with their feet, to the point where the best ethnic cuisine in
the country is increasingly served way out in the exurbs. I’ll end this post with his most provocative suggestion, which came
on the heels of a discussion of telecommuting and the ways in which
work will increasingly revolve around the home, rather than a distant
office. “Post-industrial society,” he remarked, “will look more like
pre-industrial society than anyone ever expected.” More here.

Somehow, they end up in the same place.

Matt Yglesias weighs in.

Me, I don’t think post-industrial society and geography will look anything like our pre-industrial one.  The economic gains to clustering, the rise of the mega-region, the onset of a spiky world convince me that our new world will be denser and spatially concentrated than the old one.  The resurgence of American-style suburbia is a pipe-dream. Indeed, one of the biggest drags on U.S. competitiveness will be its stretched out spatial structure which not only consumes gasoline and other natural resources, it consumes time.

Your thoughts?

Lots of interesting stuff in print and on the web.

Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the Post-American Landscape” in Harper’s Magazine (sub req).

Duncan Merrell on New Orleans, abandoned also in Harper’s Magazine.

Seed Magazine on the Santa Fe Institutes’s research on urban metabolism (discussed here previously).

Brain Drain leaving America? 

Learn more by tuning in to
The Colbert Report on Monday, July 16 to Comedy Central at 11:30
EST.  Richard Florida speaks to Stephen Colbert
about the ‘Flight of the Creative Class.’

Learn more about The Colbert Report and the upcoming episode here.

Click here for an interactive map of the top 20 counties with the highest average expenditures per household.  Marin County, California is first, followed by Fairfield, Connecticut and Fairfax, Virginia.  The New York metro is home to 7 of the top 20. Greater DC has 4.  California has 3.

In an increasingly spiky world, The Economist argues they do.

These days mayors seldom tackle an issue of national significance
without pointing out how incompetent the federal response has been.
Climate change is an especially fashionable stick with which to beat
Washington. Two years ago, as the Kyoto protocol went into effect
without America, Seattle’s mayor called on other cities to reduce
greenhouse-gas emissions by 7%—the same cut that would have been
required of the nation. More than 500 have since signed the “cool
mayors” agreement. Mr Bloomberg, for his part, has signed up more than
200 mayors for his gun-control alliance.

Ironically, mayors’ reputations have also been helped by the dearth
of federal cash that they complain about. Before revenue-sharing ceased
in the 1980s they had a richly deserved reputation as beggars. Since
then the shrewder mayors have turned themselves into salesmen. They
lobby for corporate headquarters and sports teams and try to lure
visitors to spruced-up city centres. John Hickenlooper’s background as
owner of a pub in downtown Denver prepared him well for such a role as
mayor there.

According to the Wall Street Journal, salaries for top talent in Bangalore, India are starting to converge with those in Silicon Valley.

Several years on, the forces of globalization are
starting to even things out
between the U.S. and India, in
sophisticated technology work. As more U.S. tech companies poured in,
they soaked up the pool of high-end engineers qualified to work at
global companies, belying the notion of an unlimited supply of top
Indian engineering talent. In a 2005 study, McKinsey & Co.
estimated that just a quarter of India’s computer engineers had the
language proficiency, cultural fit and practical skills to work at
multinational companies.

The result is increasing competition for the most
skilled Indian computer engineers and a narrowing U.S.-India gap in
their compensation. India’s software-and-service association puts wage
inflation in its industry at 10% to 15% a year. Some tech executives
say it’s closer to 50%. In the U.S., wage inflation in the software
sector is under 3%, according to Moody’s Economy.com.

Rafiq Dossani, a scholar at Stanford University’s
Asia-Pacific Research Center who recently studied the Indian market,
found that while most Indian technology workers’ wages remain low — an
average $5,000 a year for a new engineer with little experience — the
experienced engineers Silicon Valley companies covet can now cost
$60,000 to $100,000 a year. “For the top-level talent, there’s an
equalization,” he says.

That means that for a large swath of Silicon Valley –
start-ups and midsize companies that do sophisticated tech work –
India is no longer the premier outsourcing destination. While such
companies make up just a fraction of India’s outsourcing work, they had
been an early catalyst for the growth of India’s information-technology
business and helped the country attract other outsourcing clients.

Read the whole story here (sub req). Such is the frightening reality of a spiky world where salaries and wealth rise in the spikes, while outside them millions, and in this case billions, live in abject poverty.

Jonah Goldberg of the LA Times writes that the key to wealth is “between our ears.”

[O]ur wealth is really all in our heads. Literally. In
the case of the United States, for example, less than a fifth of our
wealth exists as material stuff like minerals, crops and factories. In
Switzerland, cuckoo clocks, ski chalets, cheese, Rolex watches, timber
and every other tangible asset amount to a mere 16% of that country’s
wealth. The rest is captured by the expertise, culture, laws and
traditions of the Swiss themselves.

These numbers come from
Kirk Hamilton, a World Bank environmental economist and lead author of
a new study, “Where is the Wealth of Nations?” (available at worldbank.org).
In a fascinating interview in Reason magazine, Hamilton explains how,
when measured properly, “natural capital” (croplands, oil, etc.) and
“produced capital” (factories, iPods, roads, etc.) are the smallest
slices of the economic pie. What Hamilton calls “intangible capital,”
which includes the rule of law, education and the like, is by far the
biggest slice. The entire planet’s “natural capital accounts for 5% of
total wealth, produced capital for 18% and intangible capital 77%.”

This makes some intuitive sense. We’d all rather be the man who knows how to
fish than the man given a fish. Or think of it this way: The Malthusian
thinks only about hardware, when the money is in software and design.
China makes America’s iPods; America collects the profits. … The greatest symbols of our civilization — from skyscrapers to libraries — not only count for a mere fraction of our
wealth, they would turn to dust and rubble if we disappeared. The
hardware is nothing; the software, everything. All that civilization is
and can become exists within us. If we forget that, we forget literally
everything.

The story is here.

In our research on creative class consumers, we find that many creative class members have high expectations that their vendors adhere to their creative class ethos. From Spingwise, a short piece on Dole’s attempt to provide more to their organic customers.

"Dole Organic lets consumers
“travel to the origin of each organic product”. By typing in a fruit
sticker’s three-digit Farm Code on Dole Organic’s website, customers
can find the story behind their banana. Each farm’s section on the
website includes background info, shows photos of the crops and workers
and tells consumers more about the origin of Dole’s organic products."

Here is a link to the farm (#776) that produced the banana in the picture. And just for fun, here is Kirk Cameron and a friend on YouTube using a banana to prove creation (though they forget that a banana fits in a chimp’s hand as well as it fits into a human hand).

posted by David