This map below from the Gallup organization shows the results from its newly released Global Employment Index. The Index is based on Gallup data on workers that are employed full time for an employer, underemployed, and unemployed; it charts these employment trends by global region. An interactive map can be found here.
Cities and regions across America and the world have made significant efforts to attract and retain young college graduates over the past decade or so. This has been driven by growing awareness that the ability to attract human capital, as well the ability to attract companies plays a key role in economic competitiveness. And since young adults are the most mobile members of the population – people in their mid-20s are three to five times more likely to move than middle aged folks – the ability to attract them early in life can pay big, lasting dividends.
A new study by Brookings demographer William Frey examines trends in the migration decisions of young adults and college grads (as separate groups) over the years 2007 – 2009. His findings are especially interesting and relevant, since they cover the period since the onset of the economic crisis and reset.
The economic crisis has caused a significant decline in migration, with the mobility of Americans hitting record lows. Young adults and college graduates have not been excepted, Frey finds, with a growing number of them staying put or moving back with their parents. That said, the mobility of both college grads and young adults remains considerably higher than for Americans as a whole, according to Frey’s analysis.
But where have young adults and college grads been heading since the economic crisis?
To answer this, Frey charts the migration trends of both young adults and college grads across America’s 52 largest MSA’s, those that are home to more than one million people, using newly released Census data for the 2007-2009 period.
Smart people of the highly educated sort that economists refer to as “human capital” are key engines of economic growth and development. More and more, they have been clustering in a relative handful of big cities. A recent post by Aaron M. Renn, who blogs as The Urbanophile, charts the changing density of college educated people across U.S. metro areas. His analysis builds on an earlier analysis by Rob Pitingolo (I blogged about it here) which introduced a measure of human capital density.
Fiat is looking to follow Mini’s lead when it comes to customization for consumers. “The personalization is something that customers want.” The design centers inside the dealership will be a lot like the ones you’d find in a new subdivision, with lots of choices. “Those are all of the different 14 interiors, exteriors,” Soave said, “but you can mix and match, and that’s part of the deal.” … these design centers are not strictly up-sell areas. Depending on the shopper, though, they can be.
The full story is here.
Social media is redefining the landscape of everything we do, from the way we connect to family and friends, how brands and celebrities capture attention, to the way business and journalism function. Hundreds of millions of people across the world use social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If any technology promised to shatter the constraint of geography, overcome distance, and flatten the world, social media would be it.
But a quick look at the map below, from the NetProspex 2010 Social Business Report, shows this is not the case at all, certainly not for the United States.
My new paper with Charlotta Mellander and Jason Rentfrow examines the role of the creative class and other markers of post-industrial societies and happiness. Here’s the abstract:
Our research examines the role of post-industrial structures and values on happiness across the nations of the world. We argue that these structures and values shape happiness in ways that go beyond the previously examined effects of income. Drawing from previous theory and research, we measured post-industrial structures in terms of higher level education and the share of the workforce engaged in knowledge-based/ creative work. Post-industrial values were measured in terms of acceptance of racial and ethnic minorities and of gays and lesbians. Our measure of happiness is derived from a large-scale global survey of life satisfaction conducted by the Gallup Organization. We controlled for income in our analyses and divided our sample into high- and low-income countries to explore whether income has different effects on countries at different stages of economic development. Our results indicate that post-industrial structures and values have a stronger effect on happiness in higher-income countries, where the standard of living has surpassed a certain level. Income, on the other hand, has a stronger impact on happiness in low-income countries. Thus, we propose that when income rises beyond a certain level, a new system of post-industrial values centered on education, creativity, and openness become better predictors of happiness than income.
The full paper is here.
Research universities increasingly function as a key hub institution of the knowledge economy – from Stanford University’s role in Silicon Valley to MIT’s role in greater Boston’s Route 128 high-technology complex, from the University of Texas in Austin to the rise of the North Carolina Research Triangle, not to mention Carnegie Mellon’s role in Pittsburgh’s regeneration. But what are the world’s leading centers for university research?
To get at this, my MPI team and I used the recently released Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) to chart the locations of the world’s leading 500 research universities by the city and metro region where they are located. The map below, by the MPI’s Zara Matheson, shows the geography of academic research centers across the world.
Is a new world financial order emerging from the economic crisis? Will Asia’s rising financial centers displace the long-held dominance of New York and London?
The newly released edition of the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), an annual competitiveness ranking of the world’s leading financial centers, provides useful data with which to assess the evolving landscape of global finance.
The map above, prepared by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), shows the world’s leading financial centers based on the GFCI ranking.
Women make up the majority of the U.S. workforce and an even larger majority of knowledge, professional, and creative workers. In a provocative and controversial essay in The Atlantic, Hannah Rosin argues that the post-industrial economy is better suited to the types of skills and capabilities women possess. The current economic crisis has been dubbed a “mancession” by some - as men in blue-collar jobs have borne the brunt of layoffs and unemployment.
But economic opportunity for women varies widely across the globe, according to an important new measure, the Women’s Economic Opportunity Index, released recently by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). The Index provides an empirical gauge of the status and opportunity afforded women across 113 nations. Spanning 26 separate variables on women in the labor market, educational outcomes and opportunity, women’s legal and social status, access to finance, and the general business environment, it is drawn from data from the World Bank, the UN, the International Labour Organization, the World Economic Forum, and the OECD, along with a series of new indicators.
That’s the title of this Wall Street Journal story on a new Rockefeller Foundation Initiative to support the creative class.
To assure the city remains the cultural and creative leader of the world, the Rockefeller Foundation is giving more than $3 million to support local artists and arts organizations.
More than 400 applicants vied for a chance to receive two-year grants, ranging from $50,000 to $250,000. Eighteen winners were chosen, including Bowery Arts & Science, to project the works of poets onto walls and buildings in city neighborhoods and the City University of New York Institute for Sustainable Cities in partnership with Artist as Citizen, to create an online atlas that traces the city’s environmental transformation and maps out the future of the city’s environment …
“It’s a new business model that builds the financial resilience of the arts sector while maintaining the artistic capacity,” says Judith Rodin, president of the Rockefeller Foundation.
