There are Red States and Blue States, rich states and poor states, and Bible and Rust-belt states. But now we must add Globe-trotting and Stay-at-home states to that list too – that is, according to new data on the percentage of Americans who have a passport. The map below – which has been getting a lot of attention on-line (via Grey’s Blog) – charts the trend for the fifty states.

New Jersey boasts the highest percentage of passport holders (68%); Delaware (67%), Alaska (65%), Massachusetts (63%), New York (62%), and California (60%) are close behind.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, less than one in five residents of Mississippi are passport holders, and just one in four residents of West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama and Arkansas.

It’s a fun map. With the exception of Sarah Palin’s home state, it reinforces the  “differences” we expect to find between the states where more worldly, well-travelled  people live versus those where the folks Palin likes to call “real Americans” preponderate. Mostly to entertain myself, I decided to look at how this passport metric correlates with a variety of other political, cultural, economic, and demographic measures.  What surprised me is how closely it lines up with the other great cleavages in America today.  The statistical correlations  generated by my colleague Charlotta Mellander are genuinely striking, among the strongest I have seen for virtually any measure.  While my usual caveats stand—our analysis deals with associations only, correlation and causation are not the same thing—the results are intriguing and perhaps provide another window into America’s divide.

Let’s begin with income. If one assumes that people with more money are more likely to travel overseas, one would be absolutely correct.

There is a considerable correlation between passports and both median income (.81) and per capita economic output (.70). No matter how you slice it, wealthier states have more passport holders.

It’s also reasonable to assume that more highly educated people would be more likely to hold a passport. And that too is what we find across the states. There is a considerable correlation (.80) between passports and human capital levels (measured as the percentage of a population with a bachelor’s degree or higher).  What’s really striking is that this correlation holds even when we control for income, using a statistical procedure called partial correlation analysis.

Passport holding also reflects the structure of state economies. There is a substantial correlation (.70) between the percentage of passport holders and the percentage of the workforce in knowledge-based and creative jobs.  Conversely, there is significant negative correlation between passport holders and the share of the workforce in blue-collar working class jobs (-.82). Working class states have considerably less passport holders than creative class states. Again, the correlations hold when we control for income.

States with higher percentages of passport holders are also more diverse. There is a considerable correlation between passports and the share of immigrants or foreign-born population (.63) and also gays and lesbians (.54). The more passport holders a state has, the more diverse its population tends to be.  And yes, these correlations hold when we control for income.

What about politics? How does passport holding line up against America’s Red state-Blue state divide?  Pretty darn well, actually.  There is a considerable positive correlation between passports and Obama voters (.59) and a significant negative one (-.61) for McCain voters.  It appears that more liberally-oriented states are more globally oriented as well, or at least their citizens like to travel abroad. Again, the correlations hold when we control for income, though they are a bit weaker than the others.

Passport holding also reflects something about the underlying personality of places.  American states are not only sorting by income, education and political orientation, but by personality type, according to research by the Cambridge University psychologist Jason Rentfrow and his colleagues.  Passport holding is in fact related to three of the five major personality types.  There are positive correlations between passports and Openness-to-Experience personalities, and negative ones to both Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.  “The results suggest to me that this is also linked to Openness,” Rentfrow noted after looking over these findings. “Openness is about curiosity and adventure, so it would make sense that Open places have high numbers of passports.”

And finally, states with more passport holders are also happier. There is a significant correlation (.55) between happiness (measured via Gallup surveys) and a state’s percentage of passport holders.  Yet again, that correlation holds when we control for income.

There are stark cultural differences between places where international travel is common and those where it’s not, and we can see them playing out in the cultural and political strife that has been riving the country over the past decades. Think of John Kerry, who was accused of looking and sounding “French” and George W. Bush, who’d hardly been overseas before he became president, or for that matter Barack Obama, with his multi-cultural global upbringing, and Sarah Palin, who had to obtain a passport when she traveled to Kuwait in 2007. The trends in passport use reflect America’s starkly bifurcated system of infrastructure. One set of places has great universities and easy access to international airports; another an infrastructure that is much further off the beaten track of the global circulation of capital, talent, and ideas.

Passport holding provides a window into America’s big sort—in fact it serves as a robust indicator for all the other things that so divide us.

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.

Before the crisis, Frey notes, young college grads had been strongly attracted to Sunbelt bubble metros like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and California’s Inland Empire, where housing was cheap, credit readily available, and local economies were booming around real estate and services. But that has changed. In the wake of the crisis, young adults are flowing towards larger cities, college towns, knowledge-based and creative economy metros, and even some older Rustbelt metros are beginning to increase their ability to retain and attract them.

Austin topped the list in attracting college grads in the 2007-2009 period — it was the only U.S. metro to register more than a two percent gain in college grads. Two other Texas metros – Dallas and Houston – also did well, making the top five in terms of total migration, along with Denver and Seattle.  Raleigh, North Carolina with its concentration of universities and tech and Portland with its quality of life registered large percentage gains.  Migration of young adults to places like Phoenix, California’s Inland Empire, Atlanta, and Charlotte, which topped the list in 2005-2007, the immediate pre-crisis period, slowed.

The chart above, from Frey’s analysis, shows American metros that have either reduced their migration losses of young adults with college degrees or turned previous losses into gains. It’s perhaps not surprising in light of the crisis and reset that big cities and metros like New York, Boston, D.C., Chicago, and LA, as well as tech centers like San Francisco and San Diego, reduced their losses or turned them into gains. These locations offer thicker labor markets, more abundant economic and networking opportunities, as well as slightly more affordable housing.

But perhaps the best news is that a significant number of older Rustbelt metros – like Buffalo, Cleveland, St. Louis, Hartford, and Milwaukee – that had been losing young college grads have stemmed those previous losses, while others – including Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Baltimore, as well as New Orleans – have begun to turn them into gains.

While clearly the economic crisis has caused more young people to stay put in these locations,  two other factors have influenced this shift.  On the one hand, many of these regions have made long-term efforts to transform from industrial to knowledge-driven economies which we know from the experience of greater Boston and other places take the better part of a generation to take hold. On the other, some of them have been at the forefront of efforts to develop strategies to make themselves more open and attractive to young college graduates, and these strategies may be starting to pay dividends.

It’s abundantly clear that the economic crisis and Great Reset have caused mobility – long a hallmark of the American economy – to stall, making it harder for both individual workers and local economies to adjust to new economic conditions.  According to Frey’s research, it has slowed the long-running flow of younger people and college grads to the Sunbelt, tilting the landscape of talent retention and attraction toward larger cities and metros, while reinforcing the position of tech centers and quality-of-place destinations like Austin, Raleigh-Durham, Seattle, the Bay Area, Denver and Portland.  At the same time, it appears to have put older Rustbelt metros back on the talent map, with some like Pittsburgh actually registering real gains in the migration of young college grads.

Certainly the housing crisis and the ongoing economic transformation has played a role, but it also suggests that the longer-run efforts that these communities have been making to transform their economies, as well their more recent strategies to upgrade their quality-of-place and in general improve their ability to compete for young talent may well be paying off. And that is very good news.

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.

The chart above, from Renn’s analysis, shows the metros which registered the biggest change in human capital (measured as the share of adults with a bachelor’s degree or higher) over the decade spanning 2000 and 2009.  New York County, which is Manhattan, registered far and away the largest increase. Renn notes that at first glance this might not seem so surprising, since New York is a big place. But a closer look at the numbers reveals that it is a very big deal indeed: “Frankly, it’s staggering. Manhattan increased its density of people with college degrees by 7,500 people per square mile,” which is more than the total population density of most of the cities in the United States. Kings County (Brooklyn), Queens, and the Bronx have also showed a marked increase in human capital density, clear evidence of greater New York’s resurgence as a talent hub.  Talent is increasingly drawn to big, dense cities; Renn’s top ten counties are all in the greater New York, San Francisco, Boston or D.C. areas.

But is this seeming explosion of human capital just an artifact of population growth? In the chart above, Renn plotted each county’s increase in human capital (again adults with a bachelor’s degree and above) as a percentage of its total increase in population. The list of counties is more or less the same, with Manhattan in first place, followed by D.C. The rest of the top ten counties were all in the greater New York, D.C., Boston, or San Francisco areas. All of them added human capital at a rate of 100 to 200 percent of their overall population gain.

America’s economic landscape is increasingly spiky. Talented, highly-skilled and highly educated people are clustering in and around America’s major cities to an extent few would have thought possible a couple decades ago, when suburbs and sprawl were the locations of choice and cities were for the musicians, artistic creatives, and the poor. This kind of clustering, the advantages of which Jane Jacobs described decades ago, is fuelling the revival of the core cities of the Bos-Wash mega-region and San Francisco, and spurring the revival of older urban districts like Brooklyn, which according to an analysis earlier this year by pollster Nate Silver, includes New York City’s most desirable neighborhood, Park Slope.

Despite its many upsides, this urban revival both reflects and reinforces the great economic and social divide which is splitting America by geography as well as by class. Beside the small number of resurgent central cities stand many other once-great cities, including the Rustbelt cities that literally drove American economic might during the early to mid 20th century, that continue to languish and even decline, while the Sunbelt cities of sand have been hit heavily by the housing crash.

Left to its own devices, America’s economic landscape will only get spikier and more uneven, and its political landscape, already being reshaped by the rise of rightwing populism and of the Tea Party movement, ever more polarized. Restoring sustainable economic growth and a more socially and politically cohesive society will require nothing less than new policies and institutions which can channel growth in ways that enable the many benefits of economic clustering while ensuring improving wages and living standards for the broader populace.

The most powerful factor in economic growth is human capital – the level and concentration of skilled, energetic, and productive people. Charting the human capital levels of nations and regions is all the rage today, but Adam Smith long ago argued that human capital constitutes a critical fourth factor of production alongside land, labor, and capital.  Human capital is the key factor in both national and regional growth, according to careful empirical studies.

Most regional economic analyses measure human capital across metropolitan regions. But metro regions – which are made up of central cities and their surrounding suburbs – come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Some have densely concentrated central cities, like Manhattan in the greater New York region; others are more continuously sprawling like Los Angeles. A while back, a reporter called to ask me about the role of human capital in Milwaukee. He wanted to know whether it made any difference that human capital levels were low in the central city compared to the region as a whole. I responded that I thought it did. Following Jane Jacobs, my hunch was that regions with more concentrated human capital would have some advantage over others where the distribution was flatter or more similar across the metro. When his article came out, a number of prominent economists more or less said the same thing. But we all added that we couldn’t be sure; most studies focus on human capital at the metro level and few, if any, have looked at the distribution of human capital within metros – that is, between the urban center and its suburbs.

So what about the distribution of human capital within metropolitan regions: Does it matter? With the help of my statistically savvy colleague Charlotta Mellander and our team at the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), I decided to take a look. We developed a simple way to begin to get at this question of the distribution of human capital within metropolitan areas. Basically, we compared data on the level of human capital (the percentage of adults with a bachelor’s degree and above) in the metro as a whole to the human-capital level in its primary urban center or central city. Fortunately, a nice data series on both metro and city-level human capital is readily available from the Brookings Institution’s State of Metropolitan America Indicators series. We used these data to generate a series of maps, build a simple measure of the ratio of central-city to metro-human capital, and ultimately to generate a scattergraph which enables us to see the pattern of central-city and metro human capital across the country.

The first map (above), prepared by the MPI’s Zara Matheson, shows human capital by city. Washington, D.C. is first with a whopping 58 percent of adults holding a bachelor’s degree or above. Five additional cities have human capital levels that exceed 50 percent – Raleigh-Cary (52.4 percent), Seattle (52.1 percent), San Francisco (51.3 percent), Madison (51 percent), and Boston (50.5 percent). Rounding out the top 10 are Atlanta (46.1 percent), Charleston (45.3 percent), Minneapolis-St. Paul (43.7 percent), and Austin (43.6 percent).

On the other hand, the city with the lowest level of human capital is Detroit, where fewer than 12 percent of adults hold a college degree, almost five times less than Washington, D.C., the country’s leading city. Most of the cities with low levels of human capital are de-industrialized cities of the Frostbelt that have faced high levels of out-migration: Youngstown (12.4 percent), Cleveland (14.3 percent), Allentown (15.3 percent), Dayton (16.8 percent), and Toledo (17.4 percent), along with two California cities – Stockton (15.8 percent) and Modesto (17.6 percent) – and two New England communities – Hartford, Connecticut (16.7 percent) and Springfield, Massachusetts (17.5 percent).

The second map (above) shows the human capital levels by metro. Again, Greater Washington, D.C. tops the list (48.6 percent), followed by Bridgeport-Stamford (47 percent), San Francisco (45.8 percent), San Jose (Silicon Valley, 41.4 percent), Boston (50.5 percent), Raleigh (52.4 percent), Madison (51 percent), Minneapolis-St. Paul (39.7 percent), Austin (39.3 percent), and Denver (38.9 percent). Seven cities rank in the top 10 on both the central city and metropolitan lists: Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Boston, Raleigh, Madison, Minneapolis, and Austin all appear twice.

When we look at metros as opposed to cities, Frostbelt communities drop out, save for Youngstown (22.1 percent), and the lowest-ranked spots are metros in California – Bakersfield (14.6 percent), Stockton (15.8 percent), Modesto (15.6 percent), Riverside (19.2 percent), and Fresno (19.5 percent); Texas – McAllen (16.3 percent) and El Paso (21.3 percent); Lakeland-Winter Haven, Florida (19.2 percent); and Las Vegas (22.4 percent).

But how do central-city and metro human-capital levels compare? To get at this, we developed a simple ratio of central-city to metro-level human capital. The results of this analysis are frankly a bit perplexing (see the chart above). The metro with the highest ratio is McAllen, Texas (1.84) – a region which ranks near the bottom of the list on metro human capital. High ratios are also found in several other communities – like, for example, Lakeland-Winter Haven, Florida (1.41) and Bakersfield, California (1.39) – that also rank low in terms of metro human capital. Other regions with high ratios include Charleston (1.52), Seattle (1.37), and Atlanta (1.27), as well as Little Rock (1.47), Boise (1.32), Salt Lake City (1.33), and Baton Rouge (1.23).

On the other side of the ledger, Detroit has the lowest ratio (.41), and it is again joined by several other Rustbelt cities in the bottom 10 – Cleveland (.48), Allentown (.53), Youngstown (.56), and Dayton (.62), along with Hartford, Connecticut (.44) and Springfield, Massachusetts (.56). Philadelphia (.66) and Ogden, Utah (.62) also have low ratios, along with Bridgeport-Stamford (.65), which has the second-highest level of metro human capital (47 percent) in the country.

The reason for these mixed results is an artifact of the data. Metros with high levels of metro human capital but moderate levels of central-city human capital will have higher ratios when compared with regions with relatively low levels of metro human capital and low-core human capital.

To get a better handle on the relationship between metro human and central-city human capital, we simply plot the two against each other in the scattergraph (above). There is a positive and reasonably close association (with a correlation between of .67). What’s more interesting though is the outliers on both sides of the fitted line.

The upper right-hand quadrant shows places which have a high level of metro human capital and a high level of central-city human capital. Washington, D.C. is the top performer here, occupying the furthest upper right-hand corner. Raleigh, Seattle, Atlanta, Madison, Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis-St.Paul, Austin, San Jose, San Diego, and, perhaps surprisingly, Albany all occupy this “win-win” quadrant.

Greater New York is just slightly above the line with a slightly greater level of central-city to metro human capital. Denver and Bridgeport-Stamford are slightly below it.

In the bottom left quadrant of the graph are places where both metro and central-city levels of human capital are low. This space includes Detroit, Youngstown, Cleveland, Allentown, Dayton, Stockton, and Ogden, Utah, among others.

The distribution of human capital across metros areas and central cities is quite uneven. Economists Christopher Berry and Ed Glaeser have documented the growing divergence of human capital across U.S. metro regions – a subject I have written about previously for The Atlantic. But this divergence is, if anything, even greater across cities and urban centers. And since human capital is the key driver of economic prosperity, this means the economic fortunes of American metros and cities are diverging and quite likely to diverge even more in the future. Economic and social inequality is increasingly overlaid with a deepening economic geography of skill and of class. That’s a very serious problem – and one that’s getting worse.

Across the world, two in 10 households have access to the Internet at home, according to a just released Gallup survey. Internet access at home was far greater in more economically advanced countries: Nearly eight in 10 people (78 percent) in countries where gross domestic product (GDP) is more than $25,000 have Internet access at home. Home Internet access drops off steeply in less affluent, less developed nations, according to the Gallup survey, especially in countries with less than $10,000 in per capita GDP. The survey is based on telephone and face-to-face interviews with approximately 1,000 adults, aged 15 and older in 116 countries, and was conducted in 2009.

The map above, by Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute, shows the percentage of households with Internet connectivity, highlighting the top 10.

The study notes the connection between home Internet connectivity and both urbanization and economic development. “Populations in the most connected countries also tend to be highly urbanized, reducing the cost of extending Internet delivery modes – whether phone and cable lines or wireless towers – to a high proportion of residents. Two of the most connected populations in the world – residents of Singapore and Hong Kong – are entirely urban,” the study reports, adding that: “Internet access is clearly a function of economic development; as recent trends in China demonstrate, demand for electronics and online services grows as living standards rise along with disposable income levels.”

Home Internet connectivity is indeed a function of economic development, as my analysis with Charlotta Mellander finds, but it is also related to the transition from industrial to post-industrial societies.

Source: World Development Indicators for 2006.

Home Internet connectivity is closely associated with economic output measured as gross regional product per capita according to our analysis, with a correlation of .89. It is also closely correlated with total factor productivity (.87), the UN Human Development Index (.84), and the Global Competitiveness Index (.84) – various measures of the level and extent of economic development.

Source: World Development Indicators for 2006, calculations by Charlotta Mellander.

But other factors also appear to be at play. It is not just the level of economic development that matters, but its nature and type, notably the transition from older, industrial-style economies and societies to newer, post-industrial ones, as I noted in a previous post. Post-industrial economies are distinguished by more highly educated populations or higher human capital levels; higher levels of knowledge-based, professional, and creative class jobs; higher levels of innovation and R&D; higher levels of entrepreneurship and business formation; and a shift toward more open-minded and tolerant values – what Ronald Inglehart has dubbed “post-materialist values.” My recent research with Charlotta Mellander and Jason Rentfrow finds evidence that post-industrial socioeconomic structures and post-materialist values matter to the happiness of nations, especially of the most advanced nations, in addition to the effects of income and the level of economic development.

Source: Based on average level of education by Barro and Lee, 2001.

Home Internet connectivity is closely associated with the level of human capital (.73 ) and with the percentage of the workforce that are members of the creative class (.71).

Source: International Labour Organization 2000-2006 (an average).

Home Internet access is also closely associated with the level of innovation measured as patents (.86), research and development efforts (.89), and entrepreneurship (.69).

Source: USPTO, 2000-2006.

Home Internet connectivity is also closely correlated with happiness (.67) and slightly less so with more open and tolerant attitudes toward gays and lesbians (.48) and racial and ethnic minorities (.3).

Source: Gallup World Poll, 2008.

This is just a preliminary first-cut analysis. I point out that correlation does not imply causation and other intervening factors likely come into play. We hope to look at all of this in further analysis with more advanced statistical techniques. But, for now, we can say that while income and the level of economic development play an important role in home Internet connectivity, it is also related to the type and nature of economic development and the values it engenders. There is something in the nature of post-industrial economies that appears to work in addition to the effects of income. Perhaps it is that people with higher levels of education encourage people to be more connected. Or perhaps people in knowledge-based jobs feel they have to be more connected or their jobs require them to be connected at home as well as at work. Whatever it is, it is clear that not just the level of economic development, but the nature and type of development and the attitudes it brings into play matter to many facets of life today, from overall happiness and well-being to being connected online at home.

Clusters of smart people of the highly educated sort that economists refer to as “human capital” are the key engine of economic growth and development. The standard way economists measure this is to take the percentage of people in a country, state, or metropolitan area with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Jane Jacobs argued that the clustering of talented and energetic in cities is the fundamental driving force of economic development. In a classic essay, “On the Mechanics of Economic Development,” the Nobel prize-winning, University of Chicago economist Robert Lucas formalized Jacobs’ insights and argued that human capital, or what can be called Jane Jacobs externalities, are indeed the key factor in economic growth and development. Still most scholars measure human capital in terms of population, not in terms of its geographic concentration.

So I was intrigued by this fascinating analysis by Rob Pitingolo (h/t: Don Peck) which takes this question head on. To get at the issue of human capital clustering, Pitingolo compiled a neat measure of what he calls “educational attainment density.” Instead of measuring human capital or college degree holders as a function of population, he measures it as a function of land area – that is, as college degree holders per square mile.  As he explains:

I compiled the data at two geographic levels: first at the city level and second at the “urban county” level. I realize that comparing these geographies is not always entirely fair. That’s why I’m giving away the spreadsheet with all of my work to anyone who wants to build upon this analysis (download it here). I picked these cities by looking at the 50 largest metro areas by population and pulling what I deemed to be the “primary city” from each. In two metro areas, the Twin Cities and Bay Area, I pulled two “primary cities.”

He goes through a variety of analyses in his post, which I highly recommend. But let me just show the results of  his analysis of college degree density for the 50 largest cities.

San Francisco and New York are far and away the leaders in human capital density with 7,031 and 6,357 college degree holders per square mile, respectively. Boston (3,871), Washington, D.C. (3,395) , Seattle (2,853), and Chicago (2.543) all have human capital densities in the range of 2,500 to 3,500 degree holders per quarter mile. Silicon Valley has a human capital density of 1,259 degree holders per square mile. Also in this range and above the 1,000 threshold are Minneapolis (1,997), Providence (1,711), Philadelphia (1,664), Miami (1,633), L.A. (1,596), Oakland (1,596), Baltimore (1,336), St. Paul (1,293), Pittsburgh (1,289), San Jose (1,259) Portland (1,194), San Diego (1,071), Atlanta, (1,035) and Denver (1,023). Interestingly, noted, smart, high-tech clusters Austin and Raleigh are slightly below this level with 857 and 799 college degree holders per square mile, respectively. The lowest human capital densities are in Oklahoma City (159) and Jacksonville (167). Human capital densities of less than 500 degree holders per square mile are found in Birmingham (210), Louisville (250), Nashville (268), New Orleans (285), Kansas City (288), Memphis (313), Virginia Beach (370), Indianapolis (408), Detroit (425), Salt Lake City (445), Cleveland (453), San Antonio (469), and Phoenix (470). The median density in his data set is 792.

Pitingolo goes on to provide interesting analyses of human capital density at the county level, and also to conduct a residual analysis which enables him to identify places that are better or worse than expected on “predicted degree density.  He raises an important question about the distribution of human capital within a metro region, calling attention to the issue of ”human capital sprawl.” As he defines, this occurs when human capital density is lower in the central city than its surrounding county. He finds preliminary evidence of this type of  human capital sprawl in five places - Louisville, Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, Nashville, and Indianapolis – and notes that: “This preliminary result is particularly worrisome if you believe that metro areas need strong central cities and strong central cities need a lot of smart people.”

Though U.S. unemployment is in the 10 percent range and we continue to hear people are “just happy to be employed,” a new survey from The Conference Board finds that only 45 percent of Americans are satisfied with their jobs. Even greater numbers of those under 25 are unhappy with their employment.

Here is an excerpt from the On Deadline column/blog at USA Today.

Only 45% of American are satisfied with their work, the lowest level ever recorded in 22 years of surveys, the Associated Press reports.

The figure is down from 49% in 2008, says the Conference Board research group, which conducts the survey.

Workers under 25 expressed the most dissatisfaction — about 64% of them saying they are unhappy in their jobs.

That is a pretty large number of young American workers starting their careers in a negative way. One of the key findings was that most workers don’t find their job interesting.

Doing something interesting — creating something new, solving a problem that is important to a group of people, and working in an industry one is passionate about — is a key driver for talented people.

For some of the talented, this wave of unhappiness in the U.S. workplace will lead them to form new firms or become self-employed. This should lead to greater innovation and societal wealth.

Moreover, smart existing organizations will continue to improve what they offer to talent. Even in the depths of a recession, talent must be satisfied with fair compensation, a stimulating environment and challenging work. This dissatisfaction trend, The Conference Board points out, has been growing for decades.

Living through the current economic downturn, none of us take economic prosperity for granted anymore. We’re aware now, more than ever, of how important it is to cultivate the things that contribute to long-run economic growth and sustained prosperity as well as to regulate and cope with those which can come to jeopardize that prosperity.

Economists mainly agree that there are two things that power long-run economic growth. Thanks to the Nobel-prize winning work of Robert Solow, we know that technology is one. Human capital is another. Detailed empirical studies by Harvard’s Robert Barro and others show the connection between human capital and economic growth.

But what about class – does it matter? Using data from the International Labour Organization, Charlotta Mellander developed class profiles for nations of the world. The graphs below show the relationship between two main classes – the creative class and the working class – and two common measures of economic growth - gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and total factor productivity (TFP).

The results could not be more striking.

The creative class is strongly related to both GDP per capita and total factor productivity. In preliminary statistical analysis conducted by Mellander, the creative class effect was even stronger than that from the well-established human capital measure.

Now look at the graphs for the working class. Societies with large concentrations of the working class have lower levels of GDP per capita and total factor productivity.

Source of all graphics: Martin Prosperity Institute

There’s a great post by Edward Glaeser (in the Economix blog of the New York Times), titled “New York, New York: America’s Resilient City.”

In it, he describes how New York has managed to avoid the decay that has afflicted many large older cities, and, after a brief downturn in the 1970’s, came roaring back as arguably the most influential single city in the world.

His explanation? In a word – “smart people.”

“New York still has an amazing concentration of talent. That talent is more effective because all those smart people are connected because of the city’s extreme population density levels. Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city. “

Glaeser continues, describing why dense cities succeed…

“They thrive by enabling us to connect with each other, which then promotes learning and innovation. The current downturn will only increase the returns to being smart, and you get smart by hanging around smart people. As long as New York continues to attract and connect those people, the city will continue to thrive.”

Now here’s what every city planner wants to know. Is this replicable? Can this success be engineered or encouraged, and are the effects measurable in 10 years, 20 years, a lifetime?

Does anyone have successful examples of campaigns and projects to replicate this resilient infrastructure? Or perhaps, examples of some cautionary unsuccessful attempts?

Best wishes to everyone for a creative and fruitful New Year!

Most economists believe that human capital – that is, education level – is a key factor in regional development. But it’s now dawning on more and more researchers that the kinds of work people do may be more important than just the overall level of education. This focus on what people do, as opposed to what we learn in school – the conventional economist’s measure of human capital – is what originally set me on to write about the creative class in the first place.

This recent report by Todd Gabe of the University of Maine and Jaison Abel of the New York Fed takes a detailed look at the role of occupations and skill in regional growth. The study finds that “knowledge associated with the provision of producer services and information technology are particularly important determinants of economic vitality in U.S. metropolitan areas.” It also reinforces the findings of my own research with Charlotta Mellander and Kevin Stolarick that specific occupations and job categories are especially important to economic development – management, business and finance, science and technology, and also arts, culture, and entertainment.