In the Americas broadly (the U.S., Canada and Mexico) 52 percent of the workforce is employed full time by a single employer, 10 percent are unemployed, and 24 percent are underemployed. In Europe, 56 percent are employed full time, nine percent are unemployed, and 20 percent are underemployed. Workers have the most precarious situation in Africa, where only 19 percent are employed full time for an employer. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the countries that comprised the former Soviet Union have the highest percentage of their workers working full time for an employer.

Gallup’s analysis finds a close association between economic development (measured as GDP per capita) and full time work, a negative relationship between economic development and underemployment, but no relationship between economic development and the rate of unemployment.

Unemployment remains a persistent problem in the U.S. and other advanced nations, but perhaps a closer consideration of full time work and underemployment will yield another, even more useful set of insights.

Do gas taxes, tolls, and auto registration fees ensure that America’s highways “pay for themselves?” Not at all.

A new report by U.S. PIRG, the federation of state Public Interest Research Groups, shows the cumulative net subsidy that U.S. taxpayers have paid for the interstate highway system since its inception —a sum that is fast-approaching $700 billion.

The report cites research by the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Subsidyscope Project, which found that “user fees paid for only 51 percent of highway costs, down 10 percent over the course of a single decade.” Even if state, local, and federal governments spent every penny of these fees and taxes on highways, they would still only pay for less than two-thirds of their cost. But they don’t: A significant portion of these revenues aren’t even spent on highways but used for other purposes.

The upshot is a federal policy that not only subsidizes roads and drivers, but distorts the transportation system and the broader pattern of urban development that flows from it. Add in government incentives for home-ownership and what you have is a massive subsidy for suburban sprawl, which imposes costs of its own.

That may have made some economic sense for the old Fordist model of economic growth, where suburbanization fueled demand for the products coming off Rustbelt assembly lines. But it makes much less sense now, when so many of these products come from China, and when economic growth in the U.S. and other advanced nations comes from knowledge and innovation.

It’s time to put in place a new and more rational transportation policy which is in sync with new economic realities and budget priorities. Tantamount to this is making drivers and those who use our roads pay their full costs.

“Beautiful Places: The Role of Perceived Aesthetic Beauty in Community Satisfaction” is a new paper on regional studies that I wrote with my MPI colleagues Charlotta Mellander and Kevin Stolarick.

Here’s the abstract:

This research uses a large survey sample of individuals across United States locations to examine the effects of beauty and aesthetics on community satisfaction. The paper conducts these estimations by ordinary least-squares, ordered logit, and multinomial logit. The findings confirm that beauty is significantly associated with community satisfaction. Other significant factors include economic security, schools, and social interaction. Further, community-level factors are significantly more important than individual demographic characteristics in explaining community satisfaction.

Read the full paper here.

The great economic reset we are in the midst of extends even to Americans’ choices of places to live. The popularity of sprawling auto-dependent suburbs is waning. A majority of Americans – six in 10 – say they would prefer to live in walkable neighborhoods, in both cities and suburbs, if they could. Writing in The Wall Street Journal a few months ago, I noted how changes in our economy and demography are altering “the texture of suburban life in favor of denser, more walkable, mixed-use communities.” Christopher Leinberger has shown the positive effects of walkability in cities, towns, and suburbs; the architects Ellen Dunham Jones and June Williamson have detailed ways that older car-oriented suburbs can be retrofitted into more people-friendly, mixed-use, walkable communities. And walkability pays. According to research by Joe Cortright, housing prices have held up better in more walkable communities.Walkscore.com, the online group that rates walkable neighborhoods, provides detailed data on walkability for 2,500 cities and 6,000 neighborhoods across the United States. Nate Berg of planetizen used their data to come up with a new way to rate and rank America’s most walkable cities and metros. The chart below shows his results. The first column shows how metros stack up on walkscore.com’s overall walkability index. The second lists Berg’s calculation based on the number of neighborhoods in these metros that have above-average walk scores. (Details on Berg’s methodology are here.)

Most Walkable Metros

Source: Nate Berg of planetizen, based on walkscore.com data.

Either way you slice it, San Francisco tops the list, followed by the East Coast communities of the Bos-Wash corridor: NYC, Boston, Philly, and D.C. Seattle and Portland do well, as does Chicago. Somewhat surprisingly, L.A. scores reasonably highly on both metrics.

With the steady statistical hand of my colleague Charlotta Mellander, we examined the correlations between this new walkability data and key economics and demographics of metro areas.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Census, American Community Survey, and Nate Berg of planetizen, based on walkscore.com data.

As before, we found significant associations. Walkable metros had higher levels of highly educated people (.44) and of the creative class (.46). Perhaps more significantly, they also had higher incomes (.64) and higher housing values (.55), more high-tech companies (.58), and greater levels of innovation (.4).

Walkability is more than an attractive amenity — it’s a magnet for attracting and retaining the highly innovative businesses and highly skilled people that drive economic growth, raising housing values and generating higher incomes.

Just as people with higher levels of education have fared better during the Great Recession, cities and regions with higher levels of human capital have experienced lower rates of unemployment and higher wages. But human capital, which takes into account only the level of a worker’s education, is a crude measure – some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, are college dropouts.

A while back, I wrote about research done by my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), that took data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ O*NET Project on actual skills (physical skills of the sort used in manufacturing, analytical or cognitive skills, and social intelligence skills like the ability to direct teams, form entrepreneurial new businesses and organizations, and mobilize people and resources behind common causes and objectives) and charted their relations to the economic performance of cities and regions.

Now new MPI research charts the effects of these skills on regional wages. Each region is ranked three times: by its share of occupations requiring analytical skills, social intelligence skills, and physical skills. As the above chart shows, the two types of skills most closely associated with knowledge and creative work – social and analytical skills – add substantially to regional wages. Physical skills of the sort associated with blue-collar work do the opposite. The MPI study concludes that:

Some cities, like Huntsville or Houston, rely predominately on analytical skills. Most cities that draw highly on analytical skills also rely on social intelligence skills, like San Jose, Boston, Washington, Durham and Boulder. The cities that rely the most on physical skills are places like Dalton, GA, known for its carpet manufacturing, Toledo, OH, a center of glass manufacturing, and agricultural and food processing centers like Bakersfield, CA.

Employment in city regions is shifting away from physical skills and towards analytical and social intelligence skills. Regions that successfully increase their share of jobs relying on analytical and social intelligence skills are more likely to prosper than regions that rely on the physical skillset associated with manufacturing.

There is much more to be gained, both in terms of creating better jobs and making cities and regions more prosperous, from strategies that shift the skill mix of people and places toward social and analytical skills than those that seek to add more manufacturing jobs. Efforts to increase the social and analytical skills used in service jobs not only bolster productivity and spur innovation, but can improve wages and contribute to overall regional prosperity.

This map, courtesy of my MPI colleague Zara Matheson, shows how all U.S. metros stack up on my Trick-or-Treater Index. It expands the top 20 list I posted earlier this week at The Daily Beast and covers all metro regions across the United States.

From The Daily Beast:

With Halloween just around the corner, you probably don’t have time to move to a different city to improve your (or your kids’) candy haul. But you may be lucky to already live in one of the best cities for trick-or-treating all ready. We crunched the numbers to come up with a list of the best cities to be when the costumes come out.

Our Trick-or-Treater Index is based on five criteria. A good place for trick-or-treating needs lots of kids, so we used the percentage of children aged 5 to 14. The haul is likely to be better where people have more money, so we included the median household income. It’s easier to canvass neighborhoods that are walkable so we measured as the share of people who walk to work—and also those that have a greater density of population. And then there’s that hard-to-miss Halloween spirit. The most over-the-top costumes and celebrations often occur in artistic neighborhoods, so we included the fraction of artists, designers, and other cultural creatives. The Trick-or-Treater Index covers all 300 plus U.S. metros and includes both their core cities and suburbs.

Read the full article 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.

The U.S. is home to four of the top five centers: Boston-Cambridge in first place, followed by Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco. Other leading U.S. research centers among the top 25 include: Chicago (6th), Durham-Chapel Hill (11th), Pittsburgh (13th), Trenton-Central New Jersey (14th), New Haven (17th), Ithaca (18th), San Diego (19th), Philadelphia (20th), Seattle (21st), Madison (22nd), and Baltimore (23rd).

But a number of foreign centers rank quite high. London (5th), Paris (7th), and Zurich (8th) all rank ahead of San Jose/Silicon Valley (9th). Cambridge, England is 10th, Munich 12th, Stockholm 15th, Oxford 16th, and Tokyo 24th. Toronto, where I teach, ranks 28th.

For the time being, the U.S. remains in the lead, but foreign centers appear to be gaining ground. And this trend may be accelerated by the mounting budget problems facing many states and research universities as well as cutbacks in research funding and growing anti-immigrant sentiment in some quarters of the United States. Great Resets like the current one have given rise to significant shifts in the locus of scientific research talent in the past. And this was a large part of the reason the United States eclipsed Europe on this front during the last Great Reset.

But what’s even more striking about the map is the degree of geographic concentration on the East and West Coasts of North America, Western Europe, and just a few spots in Asia and Australia/New Zealand. The concentration of the knowledge and scientific assets in just three major mega-clusters – the East Coast/Great Lakes, West Coast of North America, and in Europe – is astounding. And it is likely to reflect significant geographic advantages in research and knowledge-generation for them.

It’s a given that scientific talent is highly mobile. But distance still plays a role. All other things equal, it is both easier for and more likely that leading scientists and researchers will move within these clusters - say between Boston and New York, or even Chicago and Toronto; much the same is true among, say, L.A., San Francisco, and Seattle. And collaboration within them is surely easier as well. This kind of proximity creates considerable short- and long-run advantages both for the universities and research centers within the cluster and the cluster as a whole.

This would seem to imply that ongoing efforts to upgrade research universities, attract top scientific talent, and build world-class research environments in China, India, the Middle East, and other parts of the world are likely to face significant uphill battles. And that established mega-clusters are likely to enjoy significant advantages into the foreseeable future.

This video by CNN’s Richard Quest looks at the ongoing transformation and remaking of L.A. as a post-sprawl mega-city (via Planetizen). He profiles the revitalization of downtown and efforts to increase density and create a more livable metropolis.

Check out this video (via Urbanophile) on New York City’s wide-ranging efforts to improve quality of place. It’s shifting from a car city to a “city for people” – expanding bike lanes into a networked cycling infrastructure and upgrading its bus system. The environment benefits, it’s easier to get around, streets are safer, and neighborhoods are quieter - all of which make the city a more desirable place to live, work, and play.