Creative Class

Hiring people with international living experience may become a priority in future creative workplaces. According to recent psychology research reported in The Economist, people who have lived abroad are better problem-solvers than those who have never lived anywhere but in the USA.

[Researchers] presented 155 American business students and 55 foreign ones studying in America with a test used by psychologists as a measure of creativity. Given a candle, some matches and a box of drawing pins, the students were asked to attach the candle to a cardboard wall so that no wax would drip on the floor when the candle was lit. (The solution is to use the box as a candleholder and fix it to the wall with the pins.) They found 60% of students who were either living abroad or had spent some time doing so, solved the problem, whereas only 42% of those who had not lived abroad did so.

A follow-up study with 72 Americans and 36 foreigners explored their creative negotiating skills…. where both negotiators had lived abroad 70% struck a deal …. When neither of the negotiators had lived abroad, none was able to reach a deal.

Just having traveled abroad was apparently not enough to improve a person’s likelihood of solving the problems. Also, the researchers claim they found a way to filter out factors like the possibility that better problem-solvers are the ones more willing to live abroad.

As creative talent remains in short supply, improving the problem-solving skills of employees will be a priority at many companies. If further research in this area continues to support the findings, we may see employers who need a creative workforce – with top problem-solving skills – seeking to hire people with experience living abroad (which, of course, includes immigrants who by definition have done so). A global firm may even offer to give people that experience early in their careers, stationing people outside their home countries.

Or, as another recent Economist article reports, right now some companies are offering jobs to people – next year. What if they helped them to live and volunteer abroad in the meantime? Perhaps paying a small stipend. They’d score the double bonus of securing talent for when the economy rebounds and improving the problem solving skills of that talent.

Have you lived abroad? Do you think it improved your problem-solving skills?

Brian Frank writes:

Well, almost. Norman Mailer’s infamous “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster” was originally published in 1957 in Dissent.

Nearly a decade earlier, in 1948, Anatole Broyard published “A Portrait of the Hipster” in Partisan Review. I can’t find an online version, but here’s how one writer describes it:

Broyard attempted an analysis and a definition of a new type then appearing around Greenwich Village who had, in his view, been welcomed by intellectuals who “ransacking everything for meaning, admiring insurgence… attributed every heroism to the hipster.,,.”

But Broyard was less enthusiastic about these supposed new rebels … In Broyard’s words: “The hipster promptly became in his own eyes, a poet, a seer, a hero.” And he added that the hipster life-style “grew more rigid than the Institutions it had set out to defy. It became a boring routine. The hipster – once an unregenerate Individualist, an underground poet, a guerrilla – had become a pretentious poet laureate.”

Of course, what Broyard was doing, as well as attacking the hipsters, was criticising his fellow-intellectuals for failing to accept that the hipster rebellion was a sham.

Hmmmmmm…

More than 2,000 car dealerships across the country will be closing their doors in coming months. Planetizen – my favorite urbanist site – recently asked its readers what should be done with all that space. Here are the top five vote-getters as of May 21:

• Ask the local residents about what the community needs (222 votes)
• Urban gardens (200 votes)
• Create walkable, vibrant places and improve current communities (138 votes)
• Farmers’ markets and local events (126 votes)
• Solar and wind energy park/vehicle charging stations (102 votes)

MapScroll links to a series of “new and improved” maps of Big Five personality types from the expanded (Canadian) edition of my book Who’s Your City?. Based on data collected by Cambridge University psychologist Jason Rentfrow and his collaborators, these new maps ignore state and national boundaries and include the U.S. and Canada.

The first map is agreeable types.

The second is conscientious personalities.

The third is for extroverts who are more likely to move according to Rentfrow and company’s research.

The fourth is for open-to-experience personality types, also more likely to move.

The fifth is for neurotics.

A new British study finds that the most pirated pop songs on the internet are those that already top the charts. Instead of giving rise to a “long tail” where small indie acts broaden their appeal online, the study found that digital technology – and music pirating – simply work to reinforce the fat head of mass appeal. From the BBC’s summary:

There was little evidence that file-sharing sites helped unsigned and new bands find an audience … It suggests file-sharing sites are becoming an alternative broadcast network comparable to radio stations as a way of hearing music.

Music critic, Carl Wilson, provides perspective:

This shouldn’t be a surprise ever since the 2006 Columbia University study that showed pretty convincingly that popularity tends to breed popularity whether on the Internet or not: When facing a big list of music, even if you have sampled each song, most people are apt to decide that the best ones are the ones other people also like …

It’s also notable that the Big Champagne study found that most people followed this pattern because otherwise they were overwhelmed by choice (you’ve probably run across Barry Schwartz on that paradox).

What’s more the ensuing exchange of information and opinion is the primary way that these choices become meaningful. A s one of the researchers, Andrew Bud, told The Register: “… it’s through people chatting to each other and seeing the music talked about in the media. That’s what culture is.”

I’ve been having a blast guest-blogging over at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish. If you haven’t seen it already, check out my fellow guest blogger Richard Posner’s latest post reacting to an e-mail from Alan Greenspan.

Felix Salmon points to Julia Ioffe’s TNR story on Nouriel Roubini, zeroing in on the long journey back to recovery.

Given the right changes, perhaps the United States can develop with the productive long view in mind, and maybe its human talent can be spread more equitably. “When you have more financial engineers than computer engineers, you know that the brightest minds have gone into something where, probably, the margin was excessive,” he had told me earlier. “Maybe some of these bright people are going to do something entrepreneurial, more creative, or go into government. I think that’s actually a good change. The transition is painful, but the result may be good.”

Salmon’s comment is spot on.

[O]ver the long term, I’m optimistic that the redeployment of US human resources away from finance and into the real economy is bound to be a good thing. But in the medium term, the process of “scaling back and turning inwards” around the globe is going to be extremely painful – and is far from over. Or, to put it a more familiar way, things are going to get worse before they get worse. Only very slowly and very painfully might they start to get better — and it’s not going to happen any time soon.

The thing that strikes me most is how very long it takes for economies to reset themselves during crises. Recovery from both the Long Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s took the better part of two or three decades. Both required not just a new wave of technological innovation, the creative destruction of various industries, and new modes of government economic intervention, but were premised upon a whole new “spatial fix” – the rise of the “modern” industrial city after the Long Depression and suburbia’s rise after the Great Depression – to set in motion broad new patterns of consumer spending and demand which could power longer-run growth. My own father was just eight in 1929, my mother three, when the stock market crashed. They left Newark for a close-in working class New Jersey suburb in 1960 – three full decades after the onset of the crash.

Governments and central banks certainly have better monetary and fiscal policy tools at their disposal now and are more adept at managing economic downturns. Still, I fear it will be a much longer road to full recovery and a new normal than most people expect.

The American Lung Association’s State of the Air report on America’s most polluted cities is out. Here’s one summary (pointer via Planetizen).

Six out of ten Americans live in urban areas where air pollution can cause major health problems … Despite America’s growing “green” movement, the air in many cities became dirtier during the past 12 months. The research names Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Bakersfield as the most polluted US cities. The report finds that air pollution hovers at unhealthy levels in almost every major city, threatening people’s ability to breathe and placing lives at risk …

Many cities, like Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Washington, DC and Baltimore have made considerable improvements in their air quality over the past decade. People living in some of these cities however, are breathing even dirtier air than what was reported in the Lung Association’s previous report. Only one city, Fargo, North Dakota, ranked among the cleanest in all three air pollution categories covered by the research.

Maps of the most polluted cities are here; the cleanest cities here.

Google has developed a nifty new algorithm to identify employees who are most likely to leave the company. Discoblog explains:

Performance reviews, pay raises, promotion histories, and other data on its 20,000 employees were crunched into yet another mathematical formula, which reportedly spat out the names of who was most likely to quit.

No surprise, Google insiders are keeping quiet about the details of the algorithm, though they will say that it has already “identified employees who felt underused,” a key precursor to telling your boss to shove it. Meanwhile Laszlo Bock, the company’s head of HR, told the Wall Street Journal that the algorithm helps the company “get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave.”

Perhaps it’s fashionable to bash uber-successful companies. I visited Google twice for book talks  – once at their Silicon Valley headquarters, and also at their NYC office. I’ve been to a lot of high-tech companies, leading-edge manufacturing plants, and the trendiest of creative enclaves, but Google still blew me away. The digs were great, and employees (at least the ones I met) appeared smart, challenged by their work, and genuinely engaged in what they were doing. Not to mention, the algorithm seems pretty useful and reasonable to me.

Here’s the map from the Social Science Research Council’s American Human Development Project.

The pattern is more or less what you would think. Catherine Rampell from Economix notes that:

Connecticut, which has the highest development of all American states, is roughly comparable with Ireland (the fifth most-developed country worldwide). But Mississippi has an H.D.I. level roughly on par with that of Turkey (#76 in the international development rankings).

MapScroll and Economix clear up any remaining confusion about an earlier, problematic map. Check out the project’s website and terrific interactive maps.