Creative Class

Yesterday, we looked at the relationship between drug use and economic patterns. We saw that drug use was associated with both higher levels of state economic output as well as higher levels of unemployment.

Today, I turn to the relationships between drug use and economic class. My colleague Charlotta Mellander charted the relationships between drug use and the percentage of a state’s economy that is made up of two classes: the creative class – that is, people who work in knowledge-based, artistic, and professional occupations; and the working class – those who work in production, transportation, and construction jobs.

While the associations between drug use overall are weak, the patterns for marijuana and cocaine are significant. Take the creative class: Both marijuana and cocaine use are positively and significantly related to states with higher concentrations of the creative class.

Correlation coefficient: 39**

Correlation coefficient: 36**

Now look at the results for the working class, where the pattern is reversed. Both marijuana and cocaine are negatively and significantly related to the concentration of working class jobs in state.

Correlation coefficient: -.35**

Correlation coefficient: -.36**

Note: * indicates statistical significance at the .05 level; ** indicates significance at the .01 level.

Yesterday, I looked at the relationship between drug use and politics. We saw that states that voted for Obama had higher levels of marijuana and cocaine use than those that voted for McCain. But perhaps economic factors lie behind those political trends. We know that Obama drew from less affluent minority voters and also from more well-educated, creative class voters. Perhaps the associations between drug use and voting patterns reflect deeper economic patterns.

The conventional wisdom is that economic hardship is a key factor in drug use. Anyone who watches crime shows like The Wire gets this picture really fast.

To get a first approximation of this, we examined the relationship between drug use and unemployment. Not surprisingly, the use of illegal drugs is correlated with state unemployment (.31). And the correlations are even a bit higher when we look at marijuana (.36) and cocaine use (.36).

Correlation coefficient: 0.31*

But things get more interesting when we look at the relationship between drug use and economic development. While there is no relationship between economic output and illegal drug use overall, there is a significant relationship between state economic output and marijuana, and an even stronger correlation between economic output and cocaine use, as the charts below show.

Correlation coefficient: 0.31*

Correlation coefficient:  0.61**

But there’s more to the story. Tomorrow, I turn to the relationship between drug use and the class structure of state economies.

Note: * indicates statistical significance at the .05 level; ** indicates significance at the .01 level.

Ryan Grim’s new book, This is Your Country on Drugs, has revived interest in drug use and drug policy. Around the time it hit the streets, this map of drug use by state (via Map Scroll) started circulating around the Internet.

As it turns out, the map is based on detailed data from the National Survey of Drug Use and Health on the use of various types of “illegal drugs” by state.

So, with this treasure trove of data in hand, and with the help of two colleagues, the Swedish regional economist, Charlotta Mellander, and Cambridge University personality psychologist, Jason Rentfrow, we decided to take a look at the relationship between drug use and various political, economic, and psychological characteristics of states.

There’s lots and lots of research that examines the effects of factors like income, poverty, and race on the propensity to use drugs. But our team has been focusing on the role of psycho-social as well as economic factors on state and regional outcomes. A pioneering study by Rentfrow, Sam Gosling, and Jeff Porter identified the effects of personality factors on state-level economic and social outcomes. So we wanted to extend this line of research to see if and how these various economic, demographic, and personality factors might be related to drug use. We are knee-deep in a more extensive research project, but our preliminary results looked so interesting we thought we would report them and encourage feedback.

Some of the results reinforce the conventional wisdom, but others are surprising – at least for us.

Let’s start with an indicator of politics that’s sure to spark some interest – whether a state voted for Obama or McCain in 2008.

When it comes to the use of illegal drugs overall, there’s no real correlation. But that changes when we look at marijuana and cocaine. Both are significantly and positively related to with Obama states. The converse is true of McCain states, where the correlations are negative. Let me reiterate that these are provisional results which point to general relationships – or should I say associations – which could have many causes.

Conservative commentators might take this as evidence of the anything-goes, libertine lifestyles of “latte liberals” and of the need to return to more traditional, “all-American,” working class values. But that misses the bigger point. There are real differences in the economic and social environments of Obama and McCain states, as John Judis and Ruy Ruy Teixeira’s Emerging Democratic Majority, and Andrew Gelman and his collaborator’s Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, along with other studies have shown – particularly in their levels of development, economic and occupational structure, and, I would add, in their psycho-social environments as well.

Tomorrow, we’ll start to dig a little deeper into economic correlates of drug use. And, later this week, I’ll look at the relationships between drug use and certain kinds of occupations, and also to the personality types of states.

Correlation coefficient: .42**

Correlation coefficient: -.44**

Correlation coefficient: .37**

Correlation coefficient: -.36**

Note:  * indicates statistical significance at the .05 level; ** indicates significance at the .01 level.

It’s more than a jobless recovery, we’ve been looking at a jobless decade or more, at least in terms of private sector jobs, according to Business Week’s chief economist, Michael Mandel.

Beneath this trend lies a broad and fundamental restructuring of the U.S., and virtually every other advanced economy – the decline of manufacturing and the rise of professional, knowledge-based, and creative work on the one hand, and lower-end service work on the other. This chart (via the New York Time’s Floyd Norris) depicts the shift.

So the news last week was that the housing market was seemingly getting back on track. Take a gander at this, via Calculated Risk. Based on data put together by Matt Padilla, it tracks foreclosures in Orange County. Now Orange County has certainly been one of the harder hit markets, but still there is no turn around in the trend. The trajectory is straight up. And until foreclosures start to slow down, the housing market can’t really bounce back, now can it?

James Kwak weighs in here.

“When you bring artists into a town, it changes the character, attracts economic development, makes it more attractive to live in and renews the economics of that town. “There are ways to draw artists into the center of things that will attract other people.”

National Endowment for the Arts, Chair, Rocco Landesman in the New York Times.

The new chairman said he already has a new slogan for his agency: “Art Works.” It’s “something muscular that says, ‘We matter.’ ” The words are meant to highlight both art’s role as an economic driver and the fact that people who work in the arts are themselves a critical part of the economy.

“Someone who works in the arts is every bit as gainfully employed as someone who works in an auto plant or a steel mill,” Mr. Landesman said. “We’re going to make the point till people are tired of hearing it.”

American attitudes toward immigration are hardening, according to a new Gallup poll. Half of all Americans say immigration should be “decreased” – up 11 points from 39 percent last year.

Anti-immigration sentiment is growing across all major political groupings. Some 61 percent of Republicans say they would like to see immigration decreased, up from 46 percent in 2008, compared to 46 percent of Democrats, up from 39 percent; and 44 percent of Independents, up from 37 percent.

Southerners show the greatest anti-immigration sentiment with 54 percent saying they would like to see immigration decreased, followed by easterners (51 percent), midwesterners (48 percent), and westerners (44 percent).

The poll also saw a shift in American attitudes toward whether “immigration is a good or a bad thing for the country” with more than a third (36 percent) saying it is a bad thing.

Gallup notes that this marks “a return to the attitudes that prevailed in the first few years after 9/11.”

Immigration in America has gone in great cycles over the past century or two. While immigration has typically fallen during economic crises, the U.S. has prospered from its relative openness to global talent. America saw an influx of leading scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and musicians during the Great Depression which helped bolster its position at the frontiers of science, technology, entrepreneurship, and the arts during the long post-war boom.

Economic crises are transformative periods when talent flows can be reset and countries and regions rise and decline. The future belongs to those countries and regions that can attract the best and brightest across the entire world.

Growing anti-immigrant sentiment, should it continue, is bad news for American technology, entrepreneurship, and the economy in general. Let’s hope it turns around.

I continue to be astounded by the unrelenting interest in “singles maps” and singles ratios. A bluntly titled blog devoted to San Francisco’s lop-sided gender ratio cites this 2007 study (and an earlier 1991 one) which identified a singles’ tipping point of sorts. The study found that:

[A]s the sex ratio augmented in favor of women, at first, as you would expect, the women simply turned fussy and went for richer and more powerful men. But at a certain point a curious thing happened: the amount of socioeconomic status a guy needed to get girl increased way more than the math would predict. Specifically when the ratio was tilted in favor of women by 10%, low status men became not 10% less likely to get a girl but 200-300% less likely and high status men 30% less likely.

In other words, increase the number of males in a system too much and the number of females interested in pairing up GOES DOWN, due to some mysterious psychological trigger. Women won’t pick and choose, they won’t choose at all. They abandon the enterprise. Romance dies. Society crumbles. Imagine a bar with 100 girls and 100 guys. The bouncer admits 10 more guys and competitively speaking it’s as if, for the low status guys, 130 guys walked into the room (and for the high status guys, 30 guys). The bar might as well close for the night.

Deans, probably wonder why the “In Search of Excellence” method of wandering the halls looking for spontaneous chats with faculty doesn’t work so well with us. Answer: the faculty whom they most want to keep, because their work is the best, are working from home – so that they can get something done without a Dean bothering them.

From one of Dan Drezner’s commenters on Paul Graham’s essential essay on makers versus managers.

Yesterday, two of the most interesting economic bloggers, Naked Capitalism and Michael Shedlock, covered the same topic on the web: the hypertrophy of U.S. military manufacturing production and the concomitant stagnation and decline on non-military manufacturing. Each of these bloggers reflects upon what this says about our economy and our future.

I connected this with a program on the history of Sparta that I have been watching on Public Television. Sparta, as we all know, was artistically, and, in other ways, quite uncreative, particularly when compared to chaotic Athens. Is the U.S. increasingly becoming the Praetorian State? How will this affect creativity and innovation?