This is a longer, more detailed, and more statistics-laden version of an op ed piece that ran in the Financial Times on Friday. As mysterious as the downward trend in crime may be (and as vexing a challenge as it’s posed to professional explainers), it’s obviously a welcome development—and is very possibly a bellwether of even more positive changes in our society.

Almost three years into the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, with massive unemployment and pessimism rife, America’s crime rates are falling and no one—not our pundits, policemen, or politicians, our professors or city planners—can tell us why. As I wrote about here, there were 5.5 percent fewer murders, forcible rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults reported in 2010 than in 2009, according to the most recent edition of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report; property crimes fell by 2.8 percent over the same period and reported arsons dropped by 8.3 percent. And the drop was steepest in America’s biggest cities—which are still popularly believed to be cauldrons of criminality. “While cities and suburbs alike are much safer today than in 1990,” notes a recent report by the Brookings Institution, “central cities—the big cities that make up the hubs of the 100 largest metro areas—benefitted the most from declining crime rates. Among suburban communities, older higher-density suburbs saw crime drop at a faster pace than newer, lower-density emerging and exurban communities on the metropolitan fringe.”

An essay in The Economist featured a graphic which charts the arc of American crime rates since the 1960s. Its caption poses the question that is on everyone’s lips:

Some explanations evoke Sherlock Holmes’ “dog that didn’t bark.” When crime rates first began to fall in the 1990s, Steven Levitt and John Donohue III argued that legalized abortion was responsible, since unwanted children would have been more likely to grow up to be criminals – a finding that was not only wildly controversial but has been met with substantial challenge. Research by economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes find attributes a significant proportion of the decline in violent crime to children’s reduced exposure to lead.

Others suggest that America’s astronomical incarceration rate—the highest in the world—is responsible, though that begs the question why countries that don’t incarcerate their citizens at anything like the same rate suffer from less crime than the US does. It’s disquieting to think that what would seem to be an unalloyed social good—less crime—might have been brought about in part by what many believe to be a social disaster: America’s draconian, unequally enforced drug laws. Still, law enforcement must be given its due; many big city police departments have developed statistically-driven methodologies for targeting crime hot-spots, with conspicuously successful results. And we as individuals have changed our behavior as well—from taking elementary precautions like locking our doors, to investing in crime-stopping technology like burglar alarms for our homes and LoJack for our cars.

Still, it is confounding that crime would decline as economic conditions worsen. My own analysis, conducted with my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander, turns up no statistical associations between crime and either the level or the change in the level of unemployment across metros, or between crime and the level of income inequality. There does seem to be a modest relationship between the absolute poverty rate and crime. Our analysis turned up an association of .19 between crime and the percent of population below the poverty line. But it has weakened substantially over the past two or three decades, according to the Brookings study.

So too has the relationship between crime and race. From evening news headlines to crime shows on TV, popular culture underlines the propinquity between crime and race Our analysis turned up modest correlation (.37) between crime and the share of population that is black. But again, Brookings Institute report assembles powerful evidence to show that the relationship has been weakening. “The association between crime and community characteristics—like the proportion of the population that is black, Hispanic, poor, or foreign-born—diminished considerably over time,” notes the study. “The strength of the relationship between the share of black residents and property crime decreased by half between 1990 and 2008, while the association between the share of Hispanic residents and violent crime all but disappeared.”

In the popular imagination, crime is frequently associated with big, densely populated cities. Here again, we can separate fact from myth.  Primary cities and older high-density suburbs exhibited the largest decreases in crime between 1990 and 2008, according to the Brookings study. And the gap between city and suburban violent crime narrowed in two-thirds of the nation’s 100 largest metro areas. Our own analysis turns up no association whatsoever between metro size or metro density and the overall level of crime, though we do find a modest correlation (.25) between density and violent crime.

In a thoughtful essay in the Wall Street Journal, the distinguished political scientist and urban crime expert James Q. Wilson hit hard at strictly economistic explanations, suggesting that deeper changes in American culture can better account for the mystery. “The cultural argument” he writes, can help explain not only the current drop in crime, but also “the Great Depression’s fall in crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression—at society’s cost—became more prevalent.” My former Carnegie Mellon University colleague, the distinguished criminologist Alfred Blumstein, proposes an “Obama effect,” in which young black males’ increased optimism about their futures makes them more likely to refrain from violence.

But the key factor, as it turns out, lies in the growing racial, ethnic, and demographic diversity of our cities and metro areas. Our analysis found that the Hispanic share of the population is negatively associated with urban crime. Crime also fell as the percentage of the population that is non-white and the percentage that is gay increased. And of all the variables in our analysis, the one that is most consistently negatively associated with crime is a place’s percentage of foreign-born residents. . Not only did we find a negative correlation (-.36) between foreign-born share and crime in general, the pattern held across all of the many, various types of crime – from murder and arson to burglary and car theft. The Brookings study also finds evidence of a substantial shift in the connection between foreign-born residents and crime. While foreign-born share was positively associated with crime in 1990 and 2000, that relationship had disappeared by 2008. The foreign-born share of population now shows no relationship to property crime, and a negative relationship to violent crime. The pattern is most pronounced for primary cities and inner-ring suburbs, the Brookings study found, but not for lower-density suburbs and ex-urbs.

It might be hard to wrap your mind around this—especially with all the demagoguery about immigration. But the numbers tell a different story than our alarmist pundits and politicians do. “Since 1990, all types of communities within the country’s largest metro areas have become more diverse,” Elizabeth Kneebone, one of the authors of the Brookings report, wrote in The New Republic. “Crime fell fastest in big cities and high-density suburbs that were poorer, more minority, and had higher crime rates to begin with. At the same time, all kinds of suburbs saw their share of poor, minority, and foreign-born residents increase. As suburbia diversified, crime rates fell.” Along with their entrepreneurial energy and their zeal to succeed, immigrants are good neighbors—cultural and economic factors that militate against criminal behavior, and not just in their own enclaves but in surrounding communities as well.

One additional factor bears on this. Our analysis also turns up a consistent negative correlation between crime and the overall level of city happiness. It makes intuitive sense that a low-crime city would be a happy city; still, it’s worth pointing out that the happiness measure (which comes from Gallup surveys) is associated not just with overall crime but with almost every type of crime across the board. This is somewhat striking in an analysis where associations between crime and key social and economic variables are hard to find. More to the point, the Gallup research identifies openness to diversity as being one of the two most important factors that shape city happiness and community satisfaction across the board.

America’s declining crime rates are cause for celebration, even if we can’t completely explain the phenomenon. The fact that diversity appears to play such a signal role in the trend—something that most Americans regard as a moral and economic good in its own right— makes it all-the-more satisfying.

The Creative Class Group will embark on a variety of initiatives influenced by the creative group they have identified. They will perform research to help Le Méridien identify new development opportunities by applying their exclusive ‘creativity index’, using the Creative Class Group’s one-of-a-kind framework; technology + talent + tolerance and territorial assets. CCG will help to connect Le Méridien hotels to key contacts in each city from the fields of tourism, culture, art, design and cuisine. They will work to acquire influential speakers to participate in “New Perspective Events” at Le Méridien hotels across the globe. CCG  will also curate content for the ‘Hub’ libraries selected based on their research on the core attributes, values and preferences of the Creative Class. The books selected will comprise of a mix of contemporary and foundational books about creative culture in the arts, design, economy and society, as well as localized books reflecting each cities history and characteristics.

Read the full release here.

Photo © Ralph Gibson

This year’s NBA finals pitting the Dallas Mavericks against the Miami Heat is a rematch of 2006 championship, still it’s just the second time that each team has appeared in the finals. Miami came away victorious in that first matchup; Dallas has yet to claim a title. Will the “Heatles” – Lebron, Wade, Bosh – win the championship they banded together for? Will Mark Cuban, the Mavericks billionaire owner and former Dancing with the Stars contestant, finally get a crown after years of falling short? Which city will get its parade?

But might this budding rivalry signal something bigger at play?  Are we witnessing a shift in the geography of the NBA’s dominant teams?

Others have already speculated on this (here and here).  With the help of my Martin Prosperity Institute colleagues Patrick Adler, Charlotta Mellander and Zara Matheson, I decided to look at the geography of NBA champions over the past six decades spanning 1947 to 2010.

The first map (above) shows the teams that have won the most championships.  With 17 crowns, the Celtics—the team that dominated the 1960s, with an astounding nine titles—are still the winningest franchise by far, followed by the Lakers with 11 (16, if you count the five won by the Minneapolis Lakers). The only other team that approaches them is the Chicago Bulls, with six championships, four of them in the glory days of Michael Jordan. San Antonio (also eliminated this year) has four.  Over the decade just past, a very small number of teams have been dominant.  Since 1999, nine crowns went to either the Lakers or the Spurs, while the Pistons, Heat and Celtics have won one each. And get this: Between them, the Lakers and the Celtics have featured in two-thirds (40 out of 63) of the NBA finals completed to this point. The two have met each other head-to-head for the championship 11 times.

This year, of course, things are different. Dallas swept the Lakers, the defending champs, while Miami vanquished the perennial eastern conference winners the Boston Celtics in the second round, before taking out Chicago in the conference finals.

But championships are biased towards bigger cities, which can afford the best players (though clearly size isn’t everything or New York City would be more dominant than it is). So we controlled for championships per capita, dividing the number of championships won by the population of the metro where the team is located (see second map, below):

Boston is still on top. But San Antonio, with four titles between 1999 and 2007, now takes second place. Interestingly, two smaller market teams from the 1950s tie for third – the Syracuse Nationals, who became the Philadelphia 76ers in 1963, and the Minneapolis Lakers, who moved to Los Angeles in 1960.  LA is sixth, Detroit eighth, and Chicago ninth. For all its money and media-might, New York is at the very bottom, its last titles dating back to the Willis Reed-Walt Frazier-Dave DeBusschere era of the early ‘70s. But San Antonio and the smaller market Syracuse and Minneapolis half a century ago notwithstanding, smaller-market teams and locations do not fare substantially better even on this metric. Which brings me back to my main point.

With LA and Boston both showing signs of age, some believe the league’s two most storied franchises are headed for longer-run decline. I suspect it’s way too early to write their eulogies. While new teams have certainly emerged, those older powerhouses still have much to build on. But what’s even more interesting is how the dynamics of place and talent are shaping not just the make-up of the NBA’s dominant teams, but the strategies that the smaller teams are adopting to combat them.

Location plays a huge and sometimes underestimated role in sports, even more so than in many other more traditional industries. The biggest cities have the biggest markets and the biggest attendance, true—but only up to a point.  Arena size is more or less fixed. Dallas, a big but far from the biggest city, leads the league in attendance and Portland, a medium-sized city, is second. It’s not so much “big” that matters for attendance as “big enough.” Plus, there is a close relationship between attendance and wins in most cases, as my previous post on the playoffs showed.

Where location really matters is in determining where the most talented players end up. In the modern NBA, the location decisions of a few highly talented superstars can have a radical impact on which teams excel and which teams fail. Just look at the turnarounds of the Miami Heat and the New York Knicks this year, and the decline of the Phoenix Suns and Cleveland Cavaliers—two teams that had been perennial playoff participants. Place acts as a key axis of talent attraction—few if any other types of talent are as closely linked to a city and its identity as its sports stars. Look at the fallout over LeBron James’s move from Cleveland to Miami, or perhaps more to the point, Amar’e Stoudemire’s rocket-like ascent to mega-star status when he moved from Phoenix to NYC.

Beyond attendance, larger cities bring something else that is critical to talent’s locational calculus: Franchises in the largest cities not only have the money but the essential media clout required to lure top talent and put together super-teams.  A larger more central media market means a bigger platform, more coverage, and of course the potential for more endorsement deals that make for a more lucrative career.

And the key here is not only the size of the city in which a franchise is located, but the broader metropolitan (or “metro”) region of which it is a part, and increasingly the broader mega-region – complexes of cities and suburbs – in which it is located. Mega-regions are the great economic forces of our time – many rival nations in size and scale. Home to just 18 percent of the world’s population, the globe’s 40 largest mega-regions produce two-thirds of its economic output, and nine in ten of its innovations.  The map (below) charts the location of the leagues 30 franchises by mega-region.  The great Bos-Wash region is home to five teams; Chi-Pitts boast six.  Six other mega-regions are home to two clubs each.  More to the point perhaps, just three NBA franchises – the Oklahoma City Thunder, Memphis Grizzlies, and Utah Jazz – are located outside one of North America’s mega-regions.

Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston, the sport’s historically dominant franchises, are each located in the country’s biggest regional centers. With 3.7 million people, Los Angeles is the country’s second largest city and the heart of its second largest metro (12.8 million). It is also the hub of the vast So-Cal mega region, which is home to 21.4 million people and generates $730 billion in economic output.  With 2.6 million people, Chicago is the nation’s third largest city; its metropolitan area (9.4 million) is the third largest in the nation; and, it is a hub of the Chi-Pitts mega-region, with 46 million people and $1.6 trillion in economic output. Though Boston is a smaller city today – with a population of just 600,000 – it was a much bigger place relatively speaking in the Celtics heyday back in the fifties and sixties. It is still the hub of a large metro of 4.5 million people, the nation’s tenth largest, and a node in the gigantic Bos-Wash mega-region, which with 54 million people and $2.2 trillion in economic output is the biggest mega-region in the US and the second largest in the world.

All that said, the two current championship contenders, Miami and Dallas are no slouches either, locationally speaking.  Both are major regional centers in the rapidly growing Sunbelt. With a population that’s swelled to 1.9 million people, Dallas has become the country’s 9th largest city and 4th largest metro (6.3 million). It is a hub of the Dal-Austin mega, with 10.4 million people and $370 billion in economic output. As the hub for Southwest and American Airlines, it is a major transportation center and a gateway to the U.S. and Latin America; it is also a magnet for talent (along with Austin, it has become a major tech center) and corporations, having attracted the likes of Comerica, and JC Penney in recent years.

Miami is only the nation’s 44th largest city but it is at the heart of the country’s 8th largest  metro; it is also the hub of the vast and fast growing So-Flo mega, which includes Tampa and Orlando and is home to 15.1 million people and produces $430 billion in economic output. It is a major center for Latin American finance and commerce and a major draw for global talent.

Sure, neither Miami or Dallas are as big as LA or Chicago or New York, but they’re bigger than Boston and they have the locational size, market and media clout to attract top talent. The Big Three chose Miami, as I wrote about here, because it was just the right size – big enough to afford them, but diverse enough, open-minded enough, free-wheeling and hungry enough that they could make their own rules.

This doesn’t mean that smaller-market teams have to give up. The San Antonio Spurs won four titles from 1999 through 2007 with team play and great coaching.  For all his personal flash and bravado, Mark Cuban has more or less followed this model of his mega-region neighbors with the Mavericks, building his team around one great and extremely disciplined talent (Dirk Nowitzki) and a supporting cast of solid role players. Smaller cities like Memphis and Oklahoma City have been following this model with substantial success, and now even the big-market Bulls have taken it up. With its Big Three, Miami (ironically, a much smaller city than Dallas – but perhaps one with more glitz and media throw-weight) has gone in precisely the opposite direction.

The finals are not just a clash of two cities but of two different models for leveraging talent and building successful teams. Which type of team – and which type of city - will win it all?  Pass the popcorn.

Which cities are America’s best read?  There’s no need for guess work any longer, now that Amazon.com has compiled all of its book, magazine and newspaper sales (in both print and Kindle format) since January first of this year for U.S. cities with populations of more than 100,000, and ranked them according to their per capita sales. Some of the results (via Mashable) are ho-hum, others more surprising.

1. Cambridge, MA
2. Alexandria, VA
3. Berkeley, CA
4. Ann Arbor, MI
5. Boulder, CO
6. Miami, FL
7. Salt Lake City, UT
8. Gainesville, FL
9. Seattle, WA
10. Arlington VA
11. Knoxville, TN
12. Orlando FL
13. Pittsburgh, PA
14. Washington DC
15. Bellevue Wa
16. Columbia SC
17. St. Louis MO
18. Cincinnati, OH
19. Portland OR
20. Atlanta, GA

Number 1 is a no brainer: Cambridge, Massachusetts is home to Harvard and MIT.  Next in line is quaint Alexandria, Virginia, which far outpaces nearby Washington DC which – for all its highly educated think-tankers, journalists, public servants, and lawyers – ranks just fourteenth.  No surprise either that college towns Berkeley, Boulder, and Ann Arbor round out the top five.

Then come the shockers. Miami – known more for its sun and nightlife – ranks sixth. The region, it should be pointed out, is home to Books and Books, one of the nation’s foremost independent book stores.  Two other Florida cities—college town Gainesville in eighth and Orlando at twelfth, make it the only state with three cities in the top twenty. Virginia has two, tenth place Arlington as well as Alexandria. The state of Washington also has two – Seattle, which ranks ninth, and Bellevue fifteenth.  Older Rustbelt cities also make the cut: My old hometown of Pittsburgh is thirteenth, St. Louis seventeenth and Cincinnati eighteenth.

But what’s truly stunning about this list is the cities that didn’t make the cut.  Human capital hubs like Austin and San Francisco fail to register.  And what about New York City, home of the corporate book publishing industry?  One might argue (the folks at Barnes & Noble or its many independent book stores certainly would) that the universe of Amazon customers doesn’t exhaust the world of book buyers. But still …

This year’s NBA’s playoffs have had more than their share of drama.  Kobe Bryant’s and Phil Jackson’s Lakers melted down at the end of their four game sweep by the Dallas Mavericks. Lebron James finally triumphed against the vaunted Boston Celtics. Now the conference finals feature four stellar teams in matchups that are as notable for their tactical and strategic contrasts – the star-studded Heat versus the defense-minded team concept of Tom Thibodeaux’s Chicago Bulls – as for their outstanding players. And the archetypal confrontation between the Thunder’s 22-year-old Kevin Durant and the Maverick’s grizzled veteran, the seemingly unstoppable Dirk Nowitzki, promises still more scenery-chewing.

But beyond their individual stars and lineups, there’s that intangible force of the proverbial sixth man—the ineffable but undeniable jolt that players get from a noisy fan presence in the stands. Playing on your home court in front of devoted fans who whoop it up and cheer you on while booing your opponent, creates an extra level of energy that is almost impossible to measure.

But instead of waving our hands at it, let’s try to quantify it. As part of our ongoing study of the geography of sport, that’s just what my MPI colleagues Patrick Adler, Charlotta Mellander and I have been doing. Poring over statistics on wins, losses, and attendance, we’ve looked at series of conventional measures and tried our hand at developing some new ones that might offer a better gauge of fan devotion —and that will allow us to zero in on which teams have the most devoted fan bases and which either reward or punish their fans’ loyalty.  The maps below prepared under the steady hand of the MPI’s Zara Matheson plot these metrics for the NBA’s 30 franchise cities.

The first map (above) charts the total number of fans that each NBA team has drawn over the past three years. The Chicago Bulls lead with 2.64 million. Among other 2011 playoff contenders, Dallas is fourth with 2.46 million. Miami is fifth (2.4 million) and Oklahoma City is 13^th, with 2.23 million. Among all teams, Portland is second, with 2.53 million, followed closely by Cleveland with 2.51 million (likely a legacy of the Lebron years), and the until-recently woeful New York Knicks (a subject I’ll return to) with 2.41 million. Some fabled and very good teams place further down the list: the reigning champion LA Lakers are in eighth place with 2.3 million, four-times champs San Antonio Spurs are in eleventh with 2.25 million, and the 17-times champions Celts are in 12^th place (2.25 million). At the very bottom are the New Jersey Nets, a franchise that is relocating to Brooklyn, the Sacramento Kings (a team that has threatened to move), and the Indiana Pacers. Each of these teams has drawn an average of less than 1.8 million fans over the past three seasons—just 65 percent of the league leaders’.

But total attendance doesn’t show how much of an arena is filled at each game. To get at this, we use a second metric of “attendance capacity,” also relatively standard, which compares the average attendance numbers for each NBA team to the average capacity of their stadiums.  Doing so enables us to compare teams from smaller markets (many with smaller arenas) to teams in much bigger cities. We also averaged this measure over the past three years. The second map (below) charts how the NBA’s 30 franchises stack up.

Two of the current crop of playoff contenders – Dallas and Chicago – do extremely well. Dallas is first with a capacity of 104 percent and the Bulls are third with 102 percent (little wonder their hyper-dedicated fan base traveled en masse to Indianapolis during the first playoff round). The Portland Trailblazers are second (102.7%). Oklahoma City ranks seventh at 97 percent attendance capacity. Interestingly, the Miami Heat ranks just 13^th on this measure at 94.8 percent. But recall, this is a three-year average. This year, with the Big Three, the Heat moved up to fifth position (100.9 % this past season). Among other teams, the Orlando Magic are fourth (100.1%), the Lakers are fifth (99.7%), and the Celtics are sixth (99.2%). The New York Knicks are a respectable eighth (98.7%), despite their abysmal record over two of the past three years. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Philadelphia 76ers post the worst attendance capacity (74.1%) followed closely by the New Jersey (soon to be the Brooklyn) Nets, and the Memphis Grizzlies, despite their solid season and playoff performance. Attendance capacity, not surprisingly, tracks closely with winning: There’s a strong correlation (.67) between the two (see the scatter graph below).

This raises still another, perhaps more interesting question about the fan factor: Which NBA teams reward their fans with the highest wins to attendance ratio, generating the highest level of “fan ecstasy,” and conversely, which  have the highest level of “fan misery” (the highest losses to attendance ratio)?

The third map (above) shows how NBA franchises and cities stack up on our “Fan Ecstasy Index.” The Dallas Mavericks come in first; the Bulls are sixth, the Heat ninth, the Oklahoma City Thunder 11^th. Among other teams, the Orlando Magic, a perennial playoff also-ran, are second, followed by the Lakers, Trail Blazers, Celtics, Bulls, and Spurs. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the New Jersey Nets, Sacramento Kings, Minneapolis Timberwolves, Philadelphia 76ers, and Washington Wizards have the lowest Fan Ecstasy scores.

But when all is said and done, truly fanatical fans show up to watch whether their teams are winning or losing.  The fourth map (below) charts NBA teams and cities on our “Fan Misery Index,” which compares losses to attendance capacity. It builds on previous attempts to create misery indices—see here and here—but our measure connects losses to fan commitment.

Two of the current playoff teams – the Chicago Bulls and the Oklahoma City Thunder – have relatively high Misery Index scores, fourth and third respectively over the past three years. Their tried-and true fans stuck by them during down times, only to be rewarded this past season, as their Misery Index Scores have shifted along with their records.

Far and away, the team that generates the most pain for its fans is the New York Knicks, who personally cause me no end of pain. A New Jersey native, I grew up watching and loving the great Knicks teams of Walt Frazier, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, and Bill Bradley. Over the past three seasons, the Knicks have won just 41 percent of their games. At the same time, they’ve averaged 98 percent attendance capacity. Knicks fans are true “masochists” according to this measure, suffering stoically through the Dolan era, Stefan Marbury, Isaiah Thomas’s harassment lawsuit, botched trades, over-paid players, and no playoff wins still, since the Ewing era. Maybe things will improve as Stoudemire and ‘Melo begin to gel, or with the addition of another superstar in the off-season. A true Knicks’ fan is nothing if not hopeful, unless they just like to be hurt. But back to the main point.

As we head down the road in the conference finals, it will be interesting to see how the fan factor plays out. Chicago and Dallas are attendance leaders with big capacity. Miami has turned it around with its winning team. Oklahoma City fans, like Chicago’s, are extremely loyal, steadfastly standing by their teams even in down years. Miami’s arsenal of talent and Dallas’s overall experience may carry either of them to victory, but Chicago and Oklahoma City are solid teams that, though each has one great player, have shaped their game around team play. And both of them have another edge—the sixth man of their perennially devoted fan base.

As far as that sixth man is concerned, winning isn’t everything or the only thing. It’s all about love. Just ask Spike Lee or Woody Allen, if you see them at a Knicks game.

To seize your opportunities and navigate a career in this new borderless world, you have to be prepared to pick up stakes. Depending upon where Mom and Dad live, you might need to move to get that critical first job.

Put some serious thought into where you go when you do go. The place you choose to start your career is key to your economic future. Jobs no longer last forever. In fact, the average twenty-something switches jobs every year. Places can provide the vibrant, thick labor market that can get you that next job and the one after that and be your hedge against layoffs during this economic downturn.

Early career moves are the most important of all, according to my Atlantic colleague Don Peck.Writing in the National Journal, he cited a prominent study that finds that “about two-thirds of all lifetime income growth occurs in the first 10 years of a career, when people can switch jobs easily, bidding up their earnings.” Sure you can move from place to place every time you switch employers (and in fact people in their twenties are three- to four-times more likely to move than people in their fifties) but it’s a lot easier to manage a forward-looking career if you choose the best place right out of the gate.

So where to go?

To help you choose, my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander and I ranked 223 U.S. metropolitan areas according to factors that indicated how active and high-quality their job markets are. We added variables for the share of young adults and college graduates, to capture places that are open to smart twenty-somethings, where you can not only build friendships and look for mates but create the personal professional networks which are so crucial to both careers and happiness. We included a variable for rental housing, since you’ll need to be flexible at first and mortgages are hard to get. After much back and forth, we decided not to include an affordability variable, because we thought the key was to get that critical first job and launch your career—even if you have to double or triple up with roommates. The seven variables we based our rankings on are:

1.      Unemployment rate

2.      Share of the workforce in professional, technical, management or creative positions

3.      Earnings potential (median earnings of BA holders)

4.      The share of young people (ages 25-34) in the population

5.      Share of the population with a BA or above

6.      Mating opportunities (share of population that has never been married)

7.      Rental housing

In years past, ours and other rankings have taken amenities like nightlife and parks into account. Given the truly frightening state of the economy, we decided to focus this year’s rankings mainly on the job market and economic conditions.. We pulled the data from the latest edition of the American Community Survey.

Greater Washington DC comes in first this time around, with a job market that includes everything from government and Fortune 500 companies, to think tanks, start-ups, and NGOs.  It’s a great place for smart, civically minded new grads who might want to test out a wide variety of career options. Greater New York only comes in fifth, which might sound surprising since it’s such a mecca for grads in a wide variety of careers from banking and management to media and entertainment and creative fields from digital media to indie music. But most of them end up living in Manhattan, Brooklyn, or near-by Hoboken and our stats cover the whole metro. Seventh-ranking San Jose is in the heart of Silicon Valley—the place for techies (though Austin, San Francisco, Boston, and Durham-Raleigh’s Research triangle have lots of tech jobs too). Smaller college towns like Madison, Boulder, Iowa City to name a few – also do well. College towns like these have highly-skilled, resilient economies that have been among the best at weathering the economic crisis. They are great hold-over place for grads thinking about their next move, whether it’s the job market or onto grad school.  Our slide show features twenty five metros in all—and there are a lot more college towns and tech capitals in the mix.

Happy hunting—and have some fun while you’re doing it. Finding a job with a future is a real challenge in this economy, but any adventure worth going on has its hardships, and few quests are as exciting (or rewarding) as the pursuit of the right job—and the best place to live. Good luck.

The map above, from Ford via greenautoblog.com, shows the 25 American cities that are the most ready for electric vehicles (EVs).

Cities were evaluated across the following criteria:

• Utility rates that encourage “off-peak” charging;
• Streamlined permitting and inspection processes, to speed up the development of necessary infrastructure;
• Advisory committees that help communities deal with electric vehicle issues;
• Urban planning to optimize locations for chargers;
• Incentives to offset customers’ costs for installing required hardware;
• Other city- or region wide programs that encourage EV use.

As gas prices continue to spike, car manufacturers are finally offering alternatives. The Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf have been winning Car of the Year awards at all of the major auto shows this year, and more electric cars are coming, like the more moderately priced S Sedan from Tesla. It will be interesting to see how many car buyers—and in what cities—choose to drive them.

Great graphic from the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London.

The Center monitored Twitter in selected global cities to identify patterns of use and networks in these places (via planetizen).

Economic inequality has been mounting in the United States, hitting levels not seen since the Gilded Age.  There are numerous explanations for this phenomenon, ranging from the decline of unions and high-paid manufacturing jobs to the rise of globalization, of new technology, and knowledge-based work (what economists call “skill-based technical change”) and the bifurcation of the labor market into high-skill and low-skill jobs.

But do our cities and changing economic landscape play a role as well?  There are good reasons to suspect that they do.  For one, the past decade or so has seen a sorting of population by skill, occupation and human capital, (see my 2006 article “Where the Brains Are”).  For another, it is well known that both highly skilled and talented people and productive firms and high-tech industries tend to cluster and agglomerate together to create powerful economic advantages.

An important study entitled “Inequality and City Size” by Ronni Pavan of the University of Rochester and Nathaniel Baum-Snow of Brown University and the National Bureau of Economic Research takes a close look at this issue.  Using data from the American Community Surveys of the U.S. Census, Pavan and Baum-Snow tracked the gap between the lowest and highest reported incomes across U.S. between 1979 and 2004, from the smallest rural areas to the biggest urban centers. They examine the effects of city size on wages while controlling for factors like human capital and work effort  - key factors in determining wages outlined in the seminal work of labor economist Jacob Mincer – and the composition of local industry.

The chart below, adapted from their study, shows their key findings. The X axis is based on city or metro size – ranging from rural areas indicated by a 0 to the largest metropolitan regions. The Y axis shows the level of inequality.  The green line is for 1979, orange for 1989, magenta for 1999, and blue for 2004-07.

In 1979, the line was relatively flat, rising only slightly for the largest metros: Inequality was relatively the same regardless of whether you lived in a rural community, small city, or large metro. But with each passing decade the slope grows steeper, the gap between haves and have-nots growing progressively larger by city size. The study finds that city-size alone accounts for roughly 25 to 35 percent of the total increase economic inequality over this period over and above the role of effects of skills, human capital, industry composition and other factors.  This effect is more pronounced among lower wage earners. City size explains 50 percent more of the increase in inequality for the lower half of the wage distribution than for the upper half, the study finds.

“Something fundamental has changed in our economy, and it’s happening at the metropolitan level,” explains Baum-Snow. “If we want to understand what’s causing the wage gap, we now know we need to look at the unique economies of our larger cities,” adds Pavan.

Both the U.S. and the world have grown increasingly spiky, with our socio-economic divide increasingly overlaid with a growing economic geography of class.  Big cities like New York and LA have attracted wealthy people not just from America but from around the world.  This trend reflects the growing advantages of geographic clustering or agglomeration.  The larger and more populous a city or region, the more likely it is to have the human capital and economic ecosystems required to support the most advanced—and hence the highest-paying— technologies and industries.  Bigger cities attract more innovators, more entrepreneurs, and more highly skilled and ambitious people in general, and provide a fluid environment where these individuals can combine and recombine their skills. Big cities also generate powerful economies of scale and scope, resulting in higher rates of innovation, new firm formation, and productivity.  They attract better-educated, better-trained, more-experienced workers, driving up wages.

At other side of the spectrum, manufacturing, which once clustered in and around large cities and metros, has shifted to less expensive suburban, exurban, and off-shore locations. And large cities have become home to a large and growing contingent of lower-skill, lower pay service jobs – from childcare and food preparation to retail sales and personal services.  Taken together these factors have in effect divided or bifurcated the labor market in big cities into highly paid “creators” and much lower-paid “servers.”

Despite this divide, big cities may still offer a better environment for less-advantaged, lower-skilled workers. As urban thinkers from Jane Jacobs to Edward Glaeser have argued, big cities improve economic conditions for everyone, including the least well-off, compared to what they could expect in smaller cities or in the countryside. Big cities typically offer better paychecks even for low-skill jobs.  And even though housing and other costs are higher, bigger cities provide more opportunities and a thicker labor market for just about anyone to move up the socio-economic ladder and find new opportunities when needed.

With the help of my colleague, Charlotta Mellander, I took a quick look at the association between cities and wages. Using micro data on millions of individuals across U.S. metros, Mellander calculated the residual values for the average wage across these metros.  This amounts to a location premium which shows how much, on average, the metros pay in wages after controlling for skills, education and hours worked.

Workers on average gain the most from living and working in San Jose, California, where the location premium is $13,479. The location premium is above $10,000 in the metros – Charlotte, Orange County, and Nassau.  New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, the District of Columbia, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Houston number among the top 20 metros on this measure (see the map above).

Mellander then ran a basic correlation analysis comparing this location premium to city size. Not surprisingly, the correlation is positive and significant (with a coefficient of. 24). While not overwhelming, it suggests a modest association between average wages and city size (see the scatter-graph below). Bigger cities or metros on average pay higher wages overall, even when skills, education and work effort are taken into account.

All of this leads to an intriguing conclusion about the connection between cities and wages.  On the one hand, city-size has become a factor in increasing inequality, magnifying the underlying bifurcation of the labor market. On the other hand, bigger cities appear to pay better average wages.  Cities make us richer, more productive and increase our wages, even as they reflect and compound the growing social and economic divides of today’s increasingly spiky world.

The big winners in Sunday night’s Grammy Awards took many by surprise. Arcade Fire took home the record of the year for “The Suburbs” and the country group Lady Antebellum’s song “Need You Now” won awards for best record and best song of the year. The former is from Montreal, the latter hail from Nashville.  The internet and social media exploded with a raft of incredulous messages – - a Tumblr called “Who is Arcade Fire?” compiled dozens of them.  The Today show’s Matt Lauer blurted: “I’ve never heard of the Arcade Fire. I’m going to have to download them.”

Could these wins reflect something of a broader trend?  Is the landscape of popular music changing? Could it be that new upstart music scenes in Nashville, Montreal, and elsewhere are gaining ground on New York and LA, the long-established hegemonic centers of commercial and recorded music?

My team and I have been involved in an ongoing project to track the changing dynamics and geography of the popular music industry. The chart below shows some of the preliminary data we have collected.  Compiled by my colleague Ian Swain, who is now our tour with his own band, Bonjay, it uses a statistical measure called a location quotient to chart the concentration of music business establishments—including record labels, distributors, recording studios, and music publishers—in metro areas in the U.S. and Canada with populations over 500,000. Interestingly, Canada U.S. figure of 1.2.

The top ranked city is Nashville, which is literally off the chart.  LA is second, Montreal third, Toronto (where Grammy nominated artists Justin Bieber and Drake hail from) fourth, and Vancouver (home to Michael Buble winner of the award for traditional pop vocal album), followed by New York in sixth.

Nashville has become a major force in the music business. Miranda Lambert was nominated for three Grammys this year and took one home for best female performance for her record “The House that Built Me.”  Alison Krause, who won the 2009 Grammy for her record Raising Sand with Robert Plant, has won 26 Grammys, the third most in history after George Solti and Quincy Jones. Taylor Swift, last year’s Grammy Queen, has a home in Nashville.

Over the past several decades, Nashville transformed itself from a rather narrow country music outpost in the 1960s and 1970s into a major center for commercial music. By the mid-2000s, only New York and Los Angeles housed more musicians. Nashville’s rise is even more impressive when you look at its ratio of musicians to total population. In 1970, Nashville wasn’t even one of the top five regions by this measure. By 2004, it was the national leader, with nearly four times the U.S. average. Today, it  is home to over 180 recording studios, 130 music publishers, 100 live music clubs, and 80 record labels.

While Nashville lacks the diversity of genres found in LA and NY, according to an analysis of MySpace data conducted by my colleague Dan Silver, it has large concentrations of commercial genres beyond country, spanning Christian, pop, rock and punk—so much so, that over the past decade or so Nashville has begun to suck in talent from the rest of the country and the world.  Australian Keith Urban first moved there in 1992; he moved back with Nicole Kidman in 2005. They were shortly joined by the legendary rocker Jack White, who relocated to Nashville from Detroit and established his new multipurpose headquarters, Third Man Productions, where he produced country veteran Loretta Lynn`s Van Lear Rose, Wanda Jackson`s  The Party Ain’t Over ; emerging acts like the Smoke Fairies and the Black Belles; and  his own records with the  Dead Weather and Raconteurs, as well as remastering and re-releasing his albums with the White Stripes.  The ongoing evolution of Nashville has made it into something of a Silicon Valley of the music business, combining the best institutions, the best infrastructure, and the best talent, as I noted in a post here in May, 2009 (“The Nashville Effect”).

Though Montreal may not have the commercial punch of Nashville, its musical assets extend far beyond Arcade Fire. In a study of Montreal’s creative economy I conducted with Stolarick and consultant Lou Musante in the early-2000s, we found musicians from around North America relocating there to take advantage of the city’s historic and cultural heritage, openness, and affordable real estate.  Montreal is also home to Cirque de Soleil, a cultural force in its own right.

Upon accepting the award for best record, Win Butler, the leader of Arcade Fire—who hails originally from Texas—noted the bond between music and his adopted city.  “I just want to say thank you, merci, to Montreal, Quebec, for taking us and giving us a home and a place to be in a band.” Talking with reporters after the show he added: “There’s such a beautiful arts scene and music and dance (and) a lot of creative forces there.” This is clearly a guy who thinks a lot about place: his band’s award winning album is titled “The Suburbs.”

True, the rise of Nashville and the smaller but influential scenes in Montreal and elsewhere will not threaten the position of LA, NY and London atop the pop commercial music hierarchy.  But intriguing  and influential indie rock scenes have grown up in far flung places, from Austin and Seattle to Portland (home to The Decembrists) and Omaha (home to Conor Oberst), not to mention the rise of Atlanta as an R&B and hip-hop mecca – where the much-talked about meeting between Bieber and Usher took place.

The effects of this extend far beyond music per se. The San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Austin are as well-known for their clusters of entrepreneurial high-tech industry as their music.  Places with flourishing music scenes have underlying economic and cultural systems that are open to new ideas and that enable technology entrepreneurs as well as musicians and artists to mobilize the resources they need to realize their dreams and visions. Understanding the factors that led Win Butler to choose Montreal and caused acts as diverse as Lady Antebellum, Taylor Swift, Alison Krause and Jack White to end up in Nashville provide a powerful lens not only into our popular culture but the very inner workings of our increasingly idea and talent-driven economy.