Creative Class

The creative, knowledge economy is based – at least in part – upon the abilities of individuals and teams to leverage their collective information and ideas into new innovations.

But, how do ideas and information get shared? Does information flow along traditional corporate hierarchical and team division lines? Apparently not, according to research reviewed and summarized by Harvey Schachter in the Globe and Mail last week:

From his summary:

Organizational network analysis charts resemble a spider’s web, with endless crisscrossing strands that show who collaborates with whom….Often, the most important individuals are lower down in the organization, known to colleagues for their knowledge or the speed with which they respond to queries, while formal bosses prove to be bottlenecks, unreachable or not considered of much use in everyday work…

The most valuable knowledge workers, therefore, need to know who has information that they need – and, they themselves need to be a source of key information for others (which could simply be, who knows what).

The most successful senior managers would also know how to leverage this internal network of problem-solving and innovation-creating ability. This might mean knowing how to divide staff into teams such that there is not too much duplication of internal knowledge networks among team members.

Many workplace design firms now also try to design space to encourage organizational networking and internal idea sharing. This is one reason private, assigned offices are becoming less common in some industries as four walls and a door can discourage interaction.

How does information and knowledge flow where you work?

While the business press points to May’s slowdown in the pace of layoffs as an early sign of recovery, Harvard economist Jeffrey Frankel says not so fast. Frankel, who’s also a member of the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, prefers an alternative indicator of employment – total hours worked – which he says provides a better gauge of economic cycles (pointer from Economix).

Speaking entirely for myself, I like to look at the rate of change of total hours worked in the economy. Total hours worked is equal to the total number of workers employed multiplied by the average length of the workweek for the average worker. The length of the workweek tends to respond at turning points faster than does the number of jobs.

Frankel provides the graph below which tracks the trend in hours worked over the past decade.

The location decisions of graduating college students has interested me for years. The reason is simple: College grads are making a joint decision about what job to take, what labor market to enter, and what city to live in, so they provide an interesting lens into how these choices get made. And, because they are both highly skilled and highly mobile – three to five times lore likely to move than, say, a 45-year-old – the locations they pick are likely to leave a lasting imprint on our economic geography.

For the past several years, the Harvard Crimson has surveyed the graduating class. I’m the first to admit it’s a highly biased sample, but it’s also a very interesting one – tracking graduates from arguably the world’s leading university. As such, it provides useful signals about the kinds of jobs and the kinds of places highly motivated, highly mobile young talent is picking.

The results of earlier surveys were predictable. Harvard grads traditionally headed to consulting and investment banking jobs in NYC. But this year’s findings – coming as they are in the midst of the economic and financial crisis – evidence some different and interesting trends.

Still Getting Jobs: While stories about the worsening job prospects for college grads are legion, the economic and financial crises have not significantly altered prospects for Harvard grads. The survey found that 59 percent of students had jobs lined up prior to graduation down slightly from 66 percent last year. This is understandable since Harvard grads are headed into professional, knowledge, and creative occupations which have the lowest rates of unemployment and since they signal top talent.

That said, career choices are certainly shifting along some predictable and some not-so-predictable lines.

Finance and Consulting Fade: Far fewer grads are headed to finance and consulting. The figure has been consistently down over the past three years, actually – falling from 47 percent in 2007 to 39 percent in 2008 to 20 percent this year. The numbers of grads headed into finance fell from  23 percent last year to 11.5 percent this year, while consulting dropped from 16 percent to 8.5 percent.

Education and Health Care Gain: More grads are headed to education and health care. Education is up from 10 to 15 percent of grads. Health care increased from six to 12 percent.

Government Down, Slightly: Despite the conventional view that government work might become more attractive, the share of grads taking jobs in government fell slightly this year 4.5 to three percent. The Crimson suggests this is “a paradoxical trend given the Democratic victories in the 2008 elections and the fact that 74 percent of Harvard seniors describe themselves as more liberal or considerably more liberal than the average American.”

I think it’s more predictable. Having taught public policy students for the better part of three decades, I’ve seen a long-running trend away from traditional government work which is perceived as overly hierarchical and bureaucratic. Public service and cause-oriented students I’ve come across prefer work in smaller scale, more flexible non-profits where they believe they can have more immediate impact. The Crimson reports that “programs like Teach for America… received applications from a record-setting 14 percent of Harvard seniors, according to data released by the organization.”

What They Really Want to Do: I found this question to be the most interesting in the survey. When grads were asked “what career they would choose if finances were not a concern,” the number one field was the arts, with 16 percent choosing it as their “dream field,” followed by public service (12.5 percent) and education (12 percent). Finance and consulting dropped to five percent each.

Top Cities: Check out the great map below. The greater Boston area is the top destination – reinforcing the point that having an elite university (or more) in your local backyard can be a considerable talent advantage. And since after-college moves are the pinnacle of mobility it can be a lasting one. Cities might do better by focusing a little bit less on luring “ex-pats” back home, and a little more on retaining the college grads that have already chosen them.  New York has fallen from its previous top spot. D.C. is down just a tad – even with the new heavily Harvard Obama administration and the southern shift in the nation’s financial and economic nerve center. Small percentages are headed to the South or the Midwest, with Chicago drawing just 1.3 percent of grads. Seventeen percent of grads are going abroad – which may be taken as a signal of a shrinking U.S. and improving foreign opportunities but which I view as a very positive sign for the future.

We always think of urban planning as the preparation for population and job growth. But, should some cities  plan for population and job decline?

Today, I was on NPR’s To the Point to discuss shrinking cities and the idea of planning for communities that are experiencing significant population decline. For today’s conversation, Flint, MI served as an intriguing case study. Some communities like Flint, MI are actively practicing land banking.

Take a listen.

NPR’s To the Point: Honey I Shrunk the City: Bold Ideas for Declining Urban Centers

“For years, urban planning has been all about growth. But in recent years, with the decline of American manufacturing, a whole new school of thought has emerged. It’s all about shrinking, not growing. As more and more metropolitan areas lose populations and healthy tax bases, guest host Sarah Terry looks at how are cities coming up with new solutions to control the change, instead of simply trying to cope with it.”

Listen here.

Profile here.

Should cities and communities plan for shrinking populations? Can this be part of a comprehensive economic development plan for declining communities?

Paul Graham speculates that startups may herald a new era of political economy:

Startups may represent a new economic phase, on the scale of the Industrial Revolution. I’m not sure of this, but there seems a decent chance it’s true. People are dramatically more productive as founders or early employees of startups–imagine how much less Larry and Sergey would have achieved if they’d gone to work for a big company–and that scale of improvement can change social customs.

He notes that startups are highly clustered in certain cities:

Startups are a type of business that flourishes in certain places that specialize in it–that Silicon Valley specializes in startups in the same way Los Angeles specializes in movies, or New York in finance.

And he’s concerned about what this means for society:

If so, this revolution is going to be particularly revolutionary. All previous revolutions have spread. Agriculture, cities, and industrialization all spread widely. If startups end up being like the movie business, with just a handful of centers and one dominant one, that’s going to have novel consequences.

The spiky nature of our era – evident in everything from startup clustering to rising economic and geographic inequality – is among the most critical issues of our time. The crisis creates the opportunity to address it. But for some reason, U.S. and global policy-makers are unable or unwilling to take it on. The consequences will surely come back to haunt them sooner or later.

On the What’s Happening section of the blog on RyanSeacrest.com, Richard Florida’s singles map from Who’s Your City? is front and center. Ryan Tweeted about it as well.

What do you consider the best city for singles?

The Iranian Presidential Election will be held this Friday. Against seemingly insurmountable odds, Hossein Mousavi, a moderate and progressive candidate (by Iranian standards) has emerged as a serious contender to the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

While his “Green Revolution,” at first seemed nothing more than a Sisyphean struggle by a group of young moderate Iranians against a totalitarian and despotic government – destined for failure despite their greatest efforts – the winds of change have dramatically and suddenly tipped in Mousavi’s favor and, at this point, it’s anyone’s race.

Iran’s state-controlled media has given Mr. Mousavi no air-time, the government has banned his party from hosting peaceful rallies in sports stadiums and other public venues, and those rallies which have occurred spontaneously in the street have been met with hostilities from government officials. Still, his candidacy built momentum.

So how did Mr. Mousavi, whose supporters promise “a new greeting to the world,” emerge as a serious contender to Mr Ahmadinejad despite a state-wide government campaign to quell his movement? The answer: FACEBOOK. Mousavi’s supporters – mostly young people and educated urban dwellers – have taken to the Web, garnering support and enthusiasm on Facebook and on blogs, posting videos of their candidate on YouTube, and organizing impromptu street rallies by mass-texting fellow supporters literally on the fly. The result: a highly organized, energetic, and sophisticated force for change.

Mousavi supporter Emad Mortazavi, a 24-year-old sociology student, said, “Last week, there was suddenly this feeling that it was possible, that Mousavi could get enough votes. Social-networking sites and text-messaging have played a big role in spreading the message.”

In typical form, Ahmadinejad blocked Facebook in May in an attempt to silence his opposition, but to no avail (it was opened back up three days later). In the end, Iran’s youth proved more tech-savvy than anyone in Ahmadinejad’s government.

In an uncanny mirror image of the U.S. election last year, it appears the Net-Generation – people born between 1980 and 1996 – may once again anchor the winning candidate by embracing progressive attitudes and exploiting the power of the internet to collaborate and organize for their candidate. Evidence of a seismic demographic shift, the precipitous rise of Mousavi proves that young Iranians are a force to be reckoned with.

The AFP reports:

“With more than 60 percent of Iranians born after their nation’s Islamic revolution in 1979, the under-30 vote will be crucial in next week’s election in which hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is being challenged by three fiercely critical rivals.

Several analysts predict a high urban youth turnout in favour of former premier Mir Hossein Mousavi…Tehran has been gripped by a new fashion frenzy ahead of the June 12 vote, with scores of teenagers and 20-somethings sporting green wristbands, scarves and T-shirts.”

Iranian youth ultimately face many of the same problems as young people in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. In a time of economic turmoil they want a candidate who can answer their questions and who can appeal to their better instincts; not some religious zealot who spends most of his time demonizing the Western World and threatening the extinction of its neighbors. The DailyKos writes,

“The economy is a key issue, and many young people with college degrees cannot find jobs or acceptable living arrangements in Tehran and other major cities…the ruling elites cannot ignore the desires of such an enormous percentage of the nation for long. Iran is in for some major shifts due to demographics alone.”

Tomorrow, the Iranian people will take to the polls. The sun may rise Saturday morning on a very different looking Middle East.

A reader writes:

Another issue that is starting to arise outside of your writing is the future of food production. I would like you to consider how your view of future urban areas would interact with increasing commodity prices for basic food stuffs. Northern to central Virgina is an interesting case in point. There is a vibrant rural community, filled with local food-growing ex-urban dwellers. In the late 90’s up to this crash, they were competing with Mc-mansions for land. Can these extended regional urban/suburban/rural areas continue? Or will the increases in prices on food commodities further separate urban and rural as the need to increase productive yield becomes the only value of rural farm land?

I asked Betsy Donald, a geographer at Queens University who has done extensive research on the creative food economy, about this.

The creative food economy has profound implications for sustainable economic development because place and providence become central to quality food making, marketing and lifestyle. Food, unlike any other commodity on the planet, is intimate: we eat it and therefore how we eat it has implications for a host of policy related issues around job creation, health, hunger, ecosystem protection, carbon footprint, labor practices, cultural awareness and diversity.

There is a huge movement toward preserving prime farmland on the urban fringes through efforts to resolarize the farm, but also a budding trend toward urban gardening. Recall during World War II that 40 percent of produce consumed in America came from private “Victory Gardens.” Now these urban gardens are making a comeback – with more attention paid to organic and diverse food production (think Michelle Obama’s White House Garden) and San Francisco’s recent veggie planting on the grounds of City Hall. In Seattle, a local program offering public gardening plots has 6,000 plots assigned and a waiting list of 700 people - an aspect of the food economy that integrates local, organic and ethnic food production.

Some of this creative food production draws on more traditional farming practices, but much of it also challenges it by calling for more sustainable forms of food production that reduces the need for both fertilizers and pesticides and cleverly used polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight (as is going on in Argentina and Brazil). It calls for a more holistic vision of the food economy that views food as a prism through which we can explore the scope and complexity of many of our most pressing economic, social and ecological issues.

She’s on to something. The demand for higher-quality food – both from individual consumers and from restaurants – is already leading to a tighter, more organic, higher-quality food supply chain. Adding creativity, so to speak, to food production will increase its value; we’ll pay more for it, and that will make this kind of food production economically more viable. Who knows? Perhaps the economics will someday enable the remaking and reuse of declining ex-urbs as centers of more vital, higher-end, creative farming communities.

Hypebot ran this three-part post recently.

Part I: Music & The Creative Class: A Fruit Fly Industry

Business Week examines how Gen Y is coping with the crisis. Boulder, San Francisco, and D.C. top the list. College towns and big cities dominate the list prepared by Kevin Stolarick and our MPI team.

So we dug into some Gallup data on what Gen Y wants in cities and here’s what we found:

Jobs are clearly important. Gen Y members ranked the availability of jobs second when asked what would keep them in their current location and fourth in terms of their overall satisfaction with their community ….

[T]he highest-ranked factor was the ability to meet people and make friends. Makes perfect sense, since Gen Y intuitively understands what economic sociologists have documented: Vibrant social networks are key to landing jobs, moving forward in your career, and one’s broader personal happiness. They not only desire a thick labor market but what I have come to call a thick mating market, where they can meet new people, go out on dates, and eventually find a life partner. They recognize what psychologists of happiness have shown. It’s not money per se that makes you happy; it’s doing exciting work and having uplifting personal relationships …

Where older Americans see high-quality schools and safe streets as key, Gen Y understandably ranks the availability of outstanding colleges and universities higher. Many are likely to go back to graduate school, and having great programs nearby is a big plus. When it comes to their overall community satisfaction, access to open space, being in an aesthetically beautiful city, and having access to vibrant nightlife are also quite important; Affordable housing, air and water quality, and availability of religious institutions matter too but slightly less so.

When we look at the factors that affect the likelihood Gen Ys will stay in their current community, the beauty of the place again mattered, along with its climate, the ability to get around easily with little traffic, and affordable housing.

This is important, because Gen Y members are considerably less attached to where they live than other Americans. About a quarter (26.5%) of them said they were extremely satisfied with the place they currently live, compared with nearly half (47.4%) of all Americans. Twentysomethings are on average three or four times more likely to move than forty- or fiftysomethings.