Creative Class

It’s increasingly recognized that immigrants power Silicon Valley innovation and entrepreneurship and top the ranks of US science, but according to this report in the New York Times foreign-born athletes are a critical component of America’s Olympic edge as well.

Marching into Beijing Stadium under the American flag this August
will be a kayaker from Poland, table tennis players from China, a
triathlete from New Zealand, a world-champion distance runner from
Kenya and a gold-medal-winning equestrian from Australia.

All newly minted United States citizens. Foreign-born and trained stars have been contributing to the United
States’s Olympic medal count since 2000 in a modest but growing trend
that blurs the national boundaries of the competition …

The United States is a magnet for attracting accomplished veteran
athletes to switch citizenship, according to analysis by The New York
Times. Since 1992, about 50 athletes who had competed in international
events for their home countries — including 10 for China — became
United States citizens and Olympians, winning eight medals, records
show. This practice has implications for American athletes who are shut
out of precious Olympic berths and has also been cause for conflict
among competing nations.

Nine new citizens are on track to secure spots on the 600-athlete
United States team for Beijing, including the distance runner Bernard
Lagat, who won two medals for Kenya in the 2004 Athens Games …

Seven Olympic medals since 2000 have been won by five new citizens
who had been elite performers for their home countries: the gymnast
Annia Hatch from Cuba and the synchronized swimmer Anna A. Kozlova from
Russia each won two in 2004; the sailor Magnus Liljedahl from Sweden
and the tennis player Monica Seles
from Yugoslavia in 2000 in Sydney, Australia; and the ice dancer Tanith
Belbin from Canada in the 2006 Winter Games in Turin, Italy.

Graphic from the NY Times.

Tyler Brule’s Monocle has a new listing of global cities based on a unique rating of quality of life. He discusses the rankings in the Financial Times.

1. Copenhagen: out in front by virtue
of its scale, a good airport, all those bike paths and handsome locals.
2.
Munich: almost a winner, but it should have committed to building the Transrapid
airport rail link.
3. Tokyo: the world’s best big city by far. Unfortunately,
last week’s stabbing spree hasn’t done much for its public safety record.
4.
Zurich: more relaxed neighbours would put it in first place.
5. Helsinki: a
European capital with a foot firmly in Asia.
6. Vienna: one of Europe’s greenest
cities.
7. Stockholm: the city wants to go vertical — a tricky mission.
8.
Vancouver: the best of North America in a beautiful frame.
9. Melbourne: the
best neighbourhoods in the southern hemisphere.
10. Paris: its visionary mayor has made the old dame internationally relevant
again.

(more…)

Peter Culshaw reports on the first creative class election in The Telegraph:

According to American sociologist Richard Florida, it was the “creative class”
that swung victory for Barack Obama in the recent US Democratic nominations.  In Florida’s definition, the “creative class” includes people
working in the media, advertising, online, music and film industries, as well as
designers, artists. and other, often freelance, creative workers who
overwhelmingly supported Obama … We are witnessing the first creative-class election in American
history,” he says. “The creative class is an online class; it’s YouTube, its
MySpace, it’s music. And no one has caught fire with this class like Obama.”

While pundits have looked endlessly at how the Democratic race
was split along race, gender or education lines, Florida, a professor at the
University of Toronto who has written a bestselling book The Rise Of the
Creative Class, was more interested in “looking into how creative-class people
were voting in this primary season. On issue after issue, they preferred Barack Obama to Hillary
Clinton or John McCain by wide margins”.

The benefit for Obama of having this creative class onside is
almost inestimable. For a start, there were high profile music videos like
Will.i.am’s star-studded Yes We Can
- a YouTube sensation, watched online by more than eight million viewers –
and I got a crush on Obama by a singer calling herself Obama
Girl, both of which generated reams of free coverage for Obama.
Hundreds of less well-known videos also worked in his favour,
reaching out to a wide variety of voters, from the hip-hop Representin
Obama and the self-explanatory salsa song Latinos for
Barack Obama, to scores of indie, country, and folk tunes. The small number
of Clinton and McCain videos were outnumbered and looked clunky, embarrassing
and patronising in comparison. An even more important key to Obama’s victory was his success in
using the web to fundraise, attracting more than a million small donors. While
the policy differences between Clinton and Obama were not that huge, the idea of
a candidate not in the pocket of corporate lobbyists added to Obama’s appeal
among the online community, creating a virtuous circle of support.

I’m a huge proponent of research on North American metros (that is U.S. and Canadian metros).  I think there’s a lot to learn from such analyses, especially for U.S. urbanists and urban areas which tend to look mainly at trends in U.S. cities.  The group of economics researchers at Stats Canada have been among those doing the best research in this area, Check out this paper by Des Beckstead, Mark Brown and Guy Gellatly in the International Regional Science Review. Here’s the abstract:

Using pooled Census of Population data for 242
metropolitan areas, this paper evaluates the link between long-run
employment growth and the supply of different types of skilled labor.
It also examines factors related to the growth of a
particular type of skilled labor—workers in science and
engineering occupations. The first part of the article investigates
the contribution of broad and specialized forms of human
capital to long-run changes in urban employment from 1980 to 2000.
It places particular emphasis on workers in science and
engineering and culture occupations. The second part of the article
focuses on factors that influence the growth of science and
engineering employment across metropolitan areas. It examines whether
the scientific capabilities of cities are influenced by
amenities such as the size of the local cultural sector.

The NY Times reports on a major new study by the National Endowment for the Arts on the state of professional artists in the 21st century.

In 2005 nearly two million Americans said their primary employment was in
jobs that the census defines as artists’ occupations — including architects,
interior designers and window dressers. Their combined income was about $70
billion, a median of $34,800 each. Another 300,000 said artist was their second
job …

San Francisco leads metropolitan areas in the proportion of artists in the
work force, followed by Santa Fe (which ranks first in writers and fine
artists), Los Angeles, New York and Stamford-Norwalk in suburban Connecticut.
The Top 10 also include Boulder, Colo.; Danbury, Conn.; and Seattle. Orlando, Fla., leads in entertainers and performers.

The “Artists in the Workforce” report, prepared by Sunil Iyengar, the
endowment’s director of research and analysis, identified 185,000 writers,
170,000 musicians and singers, nearly 150,000 photographers, nearly 40,000
actors and 25,000 dancers …

Over all, artists make more than the national median income ($30,100). They
are more highly educated but earn less than other professionals with the same
level of schooling. They are likelier to be self-employed (about one in three
and growing) and less likely to work full-time, year-round. (Dancers have the
lowest median annual income of all artists, architects the highest — $20,000 and
$58,000, respectively.)

The full report is here. Graphic from the New York Times.

Dale Anne Reiss, director of global real estate for Ernst & Young:

One of the fascinating things that I’m seeing is that with the price of the
dollar, the U.S. may become one of the outsourcing locations. I have heard
people in London say, anecdotally, that New York is a great place to put
financial positions because compared to London you can get great people at low
costs compared to the pound, low housing compared to the pound and low office
costs compared to the pound. And with all the firings on Wall Street, there’s an
availability of people.

The whole interview in the Wall Street Journal is here.

This is a map  (via the Wall Street Journal, h/t Ronnie Sanders) of the world based on cell phone data The Journal reports that the research team used:

six months of cellphone-company data to track the
seemingly random movements of 100,000 anonymous European mobile-phone users. By
analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position, the
researchers distilled these diverse travel routines into a mathematical pattern,
like those previously observed among some predators.

The paper published in Nature is here.

A major Brookings Institution report finds that:

Large U.S. cities are economically strong – generating 75 percent of the
country’s gross domestic product – but only one-fifth enjoy a mix of healthy
productivity, narrow wage inequality and environmental sustainability … Across the map, one type of prosperity blooms while another shrivels, the
think tank said, pointing to San Jose, California, as an example. The
metropolitan area just south of San Francisco has the second-highest annual
productivity growth rate, at 5 percent, but also contends with some of the worst
wage inequality. The top 10 percent of workers earn 7.6 times as much as the
bottom 10 percent.

Via Reuters. The report with detailed tables is here.

Physicist Steve Hsu on recent theories of the enormous, embedded capacities of the human mind.

Eric Baum’s
What is Thought? (Google books version) … notes that evolution has compressed a huge amount of information in the
structure of our brains (and genes) … This perspective seems quite obvious now that I have kids – their rate of
learning about the world is obviously enhanced by pre-evolved capabilities.
They’re not generalized learning engines — they’re optimized to do
things like recognize patterns (e.g., faces), use specific concepts (e.g.,
integers), communicate using language, etc.

More here (pointer via Mark Thoma).

Every human being has creativity hardwired into their very being. If the scientific challenge of our time is to understand this incredible thinking machine, the corresponding social challenge is to evolve social and economic organizing systems which can harness its tremendous potential.

“[I]n the long run, we are all the Grateful
Dead.” – Paul Krugman.

I wish. More and more of us are like the t-shirts vendors at a Dead concert, actually. A lucky few are the backup band, and fewer and fewer are sound men or roadies. One thing that seems self-evident – artists, musicians, writers, scientists, and creative people generally continue to produce terrific creative material.  It’s the transmitters and publishers of that content that are the bottleneck and the problem. What will become of the book publishers, record companies and scientific journals in this new age of digitization. Seems to me like they are the dinosaurs of the digital age on their way for extinction. More of Krugman’s ruminations on digitization of everything, authors, musicians, and IP, here.