So, what are America’s busiest airports? Depends on what you measure, it turns out. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics compiles detailed statistics on America’s airports (via the NYT’s Catherine Rampell).
For domestic flights, Atlanta is the busiest airport, followed by Chicago O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, Denver, and LAX. (more…)
After a long drive up to the shores of Lake Michigan, I opened my laptop to check up on a day or so of lost e-mail, and in my in-box were a slew of messages reporting on the passing of Chris Freeman. It’s apt that I sit here writing this feeling the cool breezes off the gorgeous clear blue lake on this magnificent August day thinking back on his work and life.
Chris Freeman was one of the greatest thinkers and scholars of innovation and the dynamics of the capitalist economy. Born in 1921, the same year as my own father, Freeman not only studied capitalist innovation and dynamics, he lived them. As a young boy, he watched the world lapse into depression, he watched England be eclipsed as an economic power, and he watched the tremendous power of innovation propel post-war growth and prosperity. He saw the rise of the corporate R&D lab and the bureaucratization of innovation that Schumpeter had written about, and then he saw the surge in entrepreneurial venture capital financed innovation in the late 20th century. He witnessed firsthand the bursting forward of innovation in great bunches and bundles, pushing capitalism forward and changing its stripes as it did so. But he was never, ever a technological determinist. Throughout his work, he called attention to the complex and nuanced interplay between technology and organization in shaping both economy and society.
That’s the overwhelming conclusion of a new Gallup-Healthways survey based on telephone interviews with 173,581 employed Americans over the past year.
The first chart shows the toll that commuting takes on physical health. Americans with longer commutes suffer higher levels of back pain, higher cholesterol, and higher levels of obesity. (more…)
This chart from Gallup shows the dramatic growth in the percentage of Americans who want to see smoking banned in public venues.
Over at The Transport Politic, Yonah Freemark accuses me of making too much of a case for high-speed rail:
Setting aside the positives and negatives of fast trains for now, my biggest qualm with Florida’s argument is his sense that the megaregion will produce the “Concentration and clustering [that] are the underlying motor forces of real economic development.” He cites the Boston-Washington and Char-lanta regions as examples of these megaregions, which he says “Will do more than anything to wean us from our dependency on cars…”
Though there was been an increase in the number of residents living in the dense cities along the corridor (those that Florida implies need to be reinforced to meet the demands of the next century), that expansion is minor compared to the increase in the number of residents living in not-so-dense areas. It is true that the interconnections between cities in the Northeast have led to strong intercity rail ridership compared to the rest of the country, but the true success, especially of the New York metropolitan area, has been in maintaining urban and commuter rail ridership, which represents a far larger quantity of users and which has nothing at all to do with the presence of the greater Boston-Washington megaregion. The megaregion in itself, in other words, cannot be directly correlated with the notions of higher density…
Jennifer Edwards is one of many, many Americans selling their homes and trading them in for a new, more flexible, experiential life as renters.
Today, at 2 PM, I will sell my 2-bedroom Condo in Park Slope Brooklyn. This is not a new experience. I bought and sold real estate in New York City throughout the mid 1990s and 2000s, in order to put myself through graduate school, pay for my son’s private school education, and monetarily supplement my artist / college professor earnings …
I’m primed to channel my creative skills elsewhere as it seems I am perhaps [again] ahead of the trend. Two recent studies indicate that we find happiness not by owning [things] but by doing [things] …
Apply this to the ideas of ownership vs. experience and you have either a recipe for disaster or the tools to take back control of your life where you can. Changing your boss may be hard. Choosing not to take on car payments, credit card debt and mortgages, or at least minimize them, is easier.
Today, I survey my home, a rented apartment in the East Village, and thank my landlord. As I remember 14 years of ownership experiences: properties sprouting leaks, broken sewage pipes, unruly coop boards, building-wide lawsuits, and assessments. All I have to do now is pay my rent and my landlord takes on all of the headaches, the mortgage, and the maintenance of my living space. By this evening, there will be money in the bank and I will be free. I feel better already.
Check out my new piece in The New Republic:
Speaking at a health care reform rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, in July 2009, President Obama declared that the worst of the recession was over. “We have stopped the free-fall. The market is up and the financial system is no longer on the verge of collapse,” he said proudly.
A year or so later, with midterm elections looming and an electorate that is as fearful and angry as any in memory, the stock market has risen, but even a breath of bad news can send it tumbling. As dismal as housing prices continue to be, they have yet to hit bottom in some places. Unemployment remains frozen at an overall level of nine-plus percent, and job creation has been anemic. If the crisis belonged to George W. Bush, the recovery has been Obama’s—and it has been a fragile and tentative one at best. Along with billions of dollars in stimulus payments, the president has spent down most of his political capital. So what is his next step?
Read the full article here.
Last week, I posted on a Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report on the metro regions with the highest-paying jobs in nine major occupations. But this report only listed the top two regions in each category. So I decided to take a closer look at the underlying BLS data to compile a more comprehensive mapping of regional pay. With the help of my colleague, Charlotta Mellander, we looked at the pay levels for three types of jobs – high-skill, high-pay, creative class jobs; traditional, blue-collar, working class jobs; and lower-skill, lower-pay service jobs.
