Here’s a letter signed by many leading Canadian researchers (including me) urging the Canadian government to restore the recently canceled Census long-form. This is a key source of data and serious trends-analysis of the Canadian economy, its cities and regions. It needs to be restored.
A key aspect of resetting the U.S. economy is a shift from homeownership to rental. The U.S. homeownership rate is already coming down on its own, and metro regions with about 40-45 percent renters and 55-60 percent owners appear to have greater flexibility in dealing with economic transitions and higher levels of human capital and higher incomes as well. But rentals can also play a role in urban revitalization. It used to be that rental units were converted into condos. But now, in downtown Miami, high-end condos are being converted into rentals. And it’s bringing lots of young people, empty-nesters, and even some families back downtown, according to this Bloomberg report: (more…)
In the Denver airport Thursday night, traffic literally stopped as hurried passengers froze in front of TV screens to watch LeBron James’ press conference. Who would have thought that so much would turn on, as Andy Borowitz put it, “the spectacle of an incredibly wealthy man getting a new job”?
This wasn’t Apple or Google picking a new city for their headquarters. This wasn’t the Yankees or the Celtics or the Cowboys seeking out a new place to build a stadium. It was just one person – admittedly a very talented one, but still just a single individual. “Here is James,” writes the venerable New York Times sports columnist William Rhoden, “a 25-year-old African-American man with a high school diploma, commanding a global stage.”
During the run-up to the big decision, the Wall Street Journal compiled a patently hilarious “Lifestyle Location Index,” comparing New York, Miami, Chicago, L.A., and Cleveland, the finalists in the LeBron locational derby, on taxes, luxury hotels, fancy restaurants, exclusive golf courses, high-end car dealerships, and nightlife (one can only hope they were doing this tongue in cheek). The Journal quoted Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’s Robin Leach, too: “New York gives him the high-powered world of Wall Street and super-sized apartments and Miami gives him the beach and his pals. Cleveland, that’s another story.”
My latest columns:
A growing chorus of commentators believes America faces an increasingly jobless future. They argue that the US economy can no longer create meaningful numbers of high-paying jobs, especially for less skilled workers who lack college or more advanced degrees.
There is no question that millions of high-paying jobs have been eliminated and private sector job creation has been anaemic. The US unemployment level did fall to 9.5 per cent in the latest figures released on Friday, but this decrease was mostly because more than half a million people gave up looking for work at all.
Periods of crisis and creative destruction such as the current one are when new categories of jobs are created as old categories of jobs are destroyed. The key to a sustained recovery is to turn as many of these – as well as existing lower-paying jobs – into better, family-supporting jobs.
GOOD links this map from a new report on state obesity from the Trust for America’s Health.
A quarter or more of all adults are classified as obese in more than two-thirds of states. The fattest states are all in the South. Colorado, California, Montana, and Mid-Atlantic and New England states have the lowest rates of obesity.
More and more economic experts are saying the U.S. economy is headed for a “double-dip” recession. But actually it’s much more – and much more serious than that. Earlier this week, Paul Krugman speculated that the U.S. is headed for a Third Great Depression, noting that while recessions are relatively common and depressions quite rare, he fears our current economic circumstance is coming to look more like the Great Depression of the 1930s or the Long Depression of the late 19th century.
The first chart below from David Leonhardt of The New York Times shows the recent downturn in private-sector unemployment.
Commuting is among life’s least enjoyable activities, according to research by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and others. The graph below shows the cities with the worst commutes in the world, according to IBM’s Commuter Pain Index (via Wired).
