Creative Class

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, this chart has to be valued more than 10 times that.  Detroit is literally off the chart. The big losers, other than the Motor City, are sprawling Sun Belt metros: the Miami, Tampa, Orlando, So-Flo Triangle; So-Cal’s once-vaunted Inland Empire, L.A. and San Diego; Las Vegas; Portland; and Rustbelt cities Buffalo, Rochester, and St. Louis.

The big winners: D.C. and Baltimore. NY and Boston also do well, along with Silicon Valley and San Francisco, Austin, Seattle, and Denver. Salt Lake City and Oklahoma City are also in very good shape, as well as, surprisingly, certain Rustbelt Cleveland and Milwaukee.

Chart from Paul Kedrosky, original data from Indeed.

The Obama administration announced its upcoming summit on jobs yesterday.  The economic crisis has eliminated seven million jobs in the U.S. and 400,000 in Canada. ”This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all job growth from the previous business cycle,” writes Mort Zuckerman, editor-in-chief of U.S. News and World Report, in an op-ed ominously titled: “The Free Market Is Not Up to the Job of Creating Work.”

An enormous potential source of jobs is right in front of our noses – the service sector. Service jobs employ 56 million people, 45 percent of workforce in the United States and seven million workers, 46 percent of  Canada’s workforce. Millions more will be added as we move from crisis to recovery.

However, low-paying service class jobs seem to be a poor substitute for the long-run, stable, high-wage jobs that are being lost in manufacturing. But service jobs offer lots of potential for innovation, entrepreneurship, and the upgrading of employment opportunities.  The Strength in Services Summit will explore what is and can be done to transform service jobs into more innovative, higher-paying, and better work.  Click here for more. And contribute to the ongoing dialogue on this critical issue.

Digital technology from myspace.com to a recording studio on your laptop means that music can literally be made and distributed anytime, anyplace, and anywhere.  But it is also clear that a great deal of music continues to come out of particular cities and their music scenes.

The graph below, from a new study from my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute ranks the major music locations in the U.S. and Canada. Even before I moved to Toronto I was aware of the musical talent that comes out of Canada: from classic rockers like Joni Mitchell and Neil Young to Rush’s brand of rock and pop stars like Nelly Furtado or indie darlings New Pornographers, Arcade Fire, and Feist. So our team at the Institute decided to see what the numbers might tell us about differences between the Canada and U.S. music industries.

The rankings are based on location quotients which gauge the relative concentration of music industry establishments, including record labels, distributors, recording studios, and music publishers.

Interestingly enough, half the top 15 cities are  Canadian. Still, the  United States is home to the two top-ranked cities – Nashville which is literally off-the-chart on this measure and Los Angeles, the center for global entertainment.  Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal all out-rank New York on this score. Atlanta makes the top 15 as do college towns like Austin and Madison, Wisconsin. U.S. establishments are  considerably bigger than their Canadian counterparts, with average receipts of $4.1 million per establishment, nearly eight times the Canadian average of $540,000. But, Canada in fact has about five times the level of music establishments after controlling for population, 5.9 music establishments per $100,000 compared to 1.2 for the U.S.

The full report is here.

There’s no shortage of lists of the world’s happiest nations or of the happiest of the 50 U.S. states. The folks at the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index have also compiled detailed happiness scores for America’s 435 Congressional Districts (see the map below).

The table below shows the 10 highest-scoring and the 10 lowest-scoring congressional districts on the Well-Being Index. The table speaks for itself. The happiest districts are among the most affluent in the nation. Six of the top 10 are affluent and physically magnificent California communities. The least happy districts are mainly places of extreme disadvantage, inner-city neighborhoods in Detroit, Cleveland, South Philly, the Bronx, or Appalachia. There are a couple of slight anomalies – wealthy Grosse Point, Michigan, is lumped together with poor inner-city Detroit neighborhoods (wonder why that would be?), and given the devastation of greater Detroit it’s not surprising that even the rich would be less happy then elsewhere. And hipster Williamsburg is lumped together with Bed-Stuy: But, then again, whoever said hipsters were happy…

Many of us had the advantage of committing most of our really stupid behavior before the days when everyone at, say, a keg party had the ability to record and publish said misdeeds. There are lots of stories of people losing opportunities for jobs because of inappropriate material posted on social networking sites. In a well-publicized case, someone lost an opportunity after tweeting “Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work.” Someone noticed it and responded “Who is the hiring manager. I’m sure they would love to know that you will hate the work. We here at Cisco are versed in the web.”

On the other hand, having an impressive social media presence can be a huge asset for a job seeker. For example, being LinkedIn to important people in the field or people with buying authority builds one’s gravitas, regularly retweeting interesting articles makes one a useful resource, even clever Facebook updates give an insight into one’s creativity and personality. A good social media presence also improves traditional resume fodder,  a hyperlink to “please visit my blog” is better than “excellent written communication,” and “I am proud of the recommendations on my LinkedIn profile” is so much better than “references available on request.”

Have you experienced any social media snafus?

Here’s the abstract for a new paper on said with Charlotta Mellander and Kevin Stolarick.

Economists have argued that individuals choose locations that maximize their economic position and broad utility. Sociologists have found that social networks and social interactions shape our satisfaction with our communities. Research, across various social science fields, finds that beauty has a significant effect on various economic and social outcomes. Our research uses a large survey sample of individuals across US locations to examine the effects of beauty and aesthetics on community satisfaction. We test for these effects in light of other community-level factors such as economic security and employment opportunities; the supply of public goods; the ability for social exchange, that is to meet people and make friends; artistic and cultural opportunities, and outdoor recreation; as well as individual demographic characteristics such as gender, age, presence of children, length of residence, income and education levels, and housing values. The findings confirm that perceived beauty or aesthetic character of a location has a positive and significant effect on perceived community satisfaction. It is one of the most significant factors alongside economic security, good schools, and the perceived capacity for social interaction. We also find community-level factors to be significantly more important than individual demographic characteristics in explaining community satisfaction.

The full paper is over at the MPI site, here.

Paul Kennedy famously argued that imperial overstretch — that is devoting too much money and resources to military uses — plays a central role in the decline of great powers, including the United States. But it looks like America’s growing obesity epidemic is reducing the pool of capable recruits, according to this story in The Washington Post (via Dana Goldstein).

About 75 percent of the country’s 17- to 24-year-olds are ineligible for military service, largely because they are poorly educated, overweight and have physical ailments that make them unfit for the armed forces, according to a report to be issued Thursday.

Other factors, such as drug use, criminal records and mental problems, contribute to what military leaders say is a major problem that threatens the country’s ability to defend itself at a time when the all-volunteer force is already strained fighting two wars.

Money quote:

When you get kids who can’t do push-ups, pull-ups or run, this is a fundamental problem not just for the military but for the country,” said Curtis Gilroy, the Pentagon’s director of accessions policy. Many kids are not “taking physical education in school; they’re more interested in sedentary activities such as the computer or television. And we have a fast-food mentality in this country.”

Childhood obesity varies considerably across the fifty states and reflects some straightforward economic and demographic patterns, according to a basic correlation analysis by my colleague Charlotta Mellander. Childhood obesity, not surprisingly, reflects adult obesity (with a correlation of .54). It is also more prevalent in states with large working class populations (.4). It is less likely in states with higher income levels (-.32), greater concentrations of the creative class (-.37), and especially those with higher levels of adults with college degrees (-.64).

Photo Credit: Flickr User Seattle Municipal Archives

I’m sure that some people are just now recovering from the collaboration celebration par excellance that was the Creative Places + Spaces conference.  For those keeping track, this was my first “work-conference” (ooooooh!). For whatever reason it actually does make a difference somewhat.

Anyways, it was a pretty dizzying few days with incredible addresses from minds ranging from Toronto’s Poet Laureate Pier Giorgio Di Cicco challenging us to make the fabric of the city more like that of the family, to Cirque du Soleil’s Excutive Producer Lyn Heward taking us on a magic carpet ride to the seven doors of collaborative process.  There were more focused nuts and bolts type sessions on the second day, but in general it was like getting bowled over with good-idea-about-working-with-others after good-idea-about-working-with-others for three days, with peaks here or there depending on what you’re into, and more nudity than can be casually explained, even with Spencer Tunick in the house. Summaries are abound.

I personally had a few highlights:

• As much hyperbole as you might feel there was about Sir Ken Robinson, the man delivers when on stage. This is one wickedly funny, wickedly smart man.
• Favorite/Best Collaboration (in my books) goes to St. Michaels Hospital, the NFB and film maker Katerina Cizek for their exhaustively deep Filmmaker-in-Residence. How do you remake the form and process of documentary to be an agent of social change instead simply being of a window into the lives of others? Watch this movie/click this link to find out. I could gush on and on about how moved I was by this, but you really have to see what they’ve done. It’s an INCREDIBLE collaboration between media and medicine. Katerina and the NFB also announced that they’re taking that same process to the domestic urban landscape with their latest collaboration called Highrise about the apartment towers of the world. So good!
• The Most Unexpected Event (other than all of the nakedness) saw me on the final panel with Charles Landry, Tonya Surman, Allyson Hewitt, and Tim Jones. Is this what happens when you get a job? People invite you on panels?? Cool!

Charles Landry’s presentation about creative bureaucracy really made me sit up straight in my chair. I still have my bureaucrat-baby-fat and, thanks to my coworkers, my spirit has yet to be crushed by this job, so the challenge of his address resonated quite strongly with me: how do we make bureaucracy more creative?? Especially when considering the necessary dependable things they do that they can’t be creative about like payroll, or other such niceties.

It came up again on the the final panel,  and we talked a bit about how municipalities can help spur ad hoc or grassroots groupings of agents in their communities towards organization so that they can collaborate with the municipality in more meaningful ways – creative partnerships. While it wasn’t said explicitly, what’s also being inferred is that bureaucracies, in-large, don’t interface well with individuals. In the way that they operate it seems that government bureaucracies, at least, are geared towards dealing with groups – unions, church groups, neighborhoods, BIA’s.  These factors are still very relevant, but it’s interesting to note that people have access to a greater diversity of cultural inputs and that identities are increasingly individual, while also considering that bureaucracy is all about the experience of standardization. How will the creative bureaucracy keep up with increasingly individualized individuals? Hey upper management – collaborate about that on your next coffee break.

Music!

New research by the Gallup Organization finds that 700 million people – 16 percent of the world’s total population – would like to move to a different country than the one they currently call home.

The first map below shows the percentages of people in various regions of the world that desire to permanently move to another country.

The second map shows the places these movers would most like to relocate to.

Gallup also compiled a very interesting index of potential net migration which compares “the estimated number of adults who would like to move out of a country permanently subtracted from the estimated number who would like to move to it,” as a proportion of the total population. Here are the top five and bottom five countries. Interestingly, the United States did not make the top five.

Geoff Flood, CEO of T4G Ltd., has 230 employees who develop enterprise software solutions for large organizations. Gordon Pitts of the Globe and Mail recently interviewed him.

Asked about why he has chosen to have development centers in Toronto, Vancouver, and Halifax, he answers:

We have a strategy of locating where smart people want to live. All of these cities, Toronto included, fit that bill. There is a limit to the technology resource in the country, and we need to go where bright people want to live and can thrive.

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For example, our largest customer is in Atlanta and the work is being done in Halifax. It is a good export business; it’s good for the talent in Halifax.

Isn’t that the opposite of the old Canadian model whereby people move to where the work is – whether Fort McMurray or any mining town?

We’re in a business where we can live anywhere and work anywhere, and we don’t really care where it happens. It’s 24/7, it’s fast-paced but if you can do it in your kitchen, we don’t have a problem. We provide communities that have a great living environment with the chance to add new workers.

In Vancouver’s case, haven’t you got some contracts, as well?

We don’t typically look for the customers in the local city. We think it is better to be in the export business and compete on a larger scale, but it’s really nice if you can work at home.

Shouldn’t you be in India, where you can slash costs?

Most people would think there is some sense to doing that. But at this point the pendulum is swinging back. I don’t think the cost advantage is there in the way it might have been 10 years ago. Even for low-cost commodity kinds of work, we’re on about par. And we want to do the hard stuff, the creative stuff, and you tend to find more of the resources to accomplish that in North America.

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We have to be better and so do they. The global competition is wonderful, and it’s something we need to be able to work with. But in the area where we work, we have a competitive advantage.

Flood also mentions being interested in harnessing the talent of Saskatoon and Lethbridge. Seems that rather than going abroad, he’s finding pockets of talent in smaller centers.

Could this be a model for future economic and business development?