Creative Class

Last week, we looked at the relationship between class and happy states. This week we look at the effects of class on the 2008 Obama-McCain presidential election. Since states are key units in the U.S. electoral college system, we took states as the units of analysis as opposed to individuals. So under the watchful analytical eye of Charlotta Mellander, we looked at how the class composition of states (as opposed to say the class membership of individuals) effected votes for Obama versus McCain. To make this a little bit more interesting and more fun, we also looked at the effects of factors like income, housing prices, and human capital, as well as the gay index and personality on state voting patterns. Basically, we wanted to identify the kinds of states that voted for Obama or McCain.

CLASS AND THE ELECTION: First things first. There was undeniable class pattern to state voting in the 2008 election. States with large concentrations of two classes – the creative class and the service class were strongly associated with Obama, while states with large working class concentrations went for McCain.

The Creative Class: The correlation between creative class states and Obama was positive and significant (.425), while it was negative and significant for McCain (-.442).

The Service Class: The same basic pattern was true of the service class, the largest class and also the class with the lowest average level of wages and salaries.  Service class states were positively associated with Obama (.390) and negative for McCain (-.415).

The Working Class: Now check out the pattern with the working class. Hasn’t the conventional wisdom long been that working class voters tilt heavily toward the Democrats? When it comes to the concentration of working class jobs in a state, not so much. Working class states were even more strongly associated with McCain (.658) than creative class states for Obama; and working class states were quite negatively correlated (-.623) with Obama. This state level pattern contrasts with individual voting. While Obama won lots of working class voters, working class states went strongly for McCain.

Income and Economic Output: We also looked at the association between state voting and income and economic output (measured as GDP per person). Obama states were those with higher levels of GDP per capita (.375 Obama vs. -.388  McCain) and higher incomes (.516 Obama vs. -527 McCain). These are in line with earlier findings of Columbia University political scientist and Rich State, Poor State author, Andrew Gelman.

Housing Prices: States with high housing prices also were in the Obama camp.  Housing prices were strong correlated with Obama states (.672) and negatively associated with McCain states (-.725).

Human Capital: Human capital – that is the percentage of adults with a college degree – was strongly positively associated with Obama states (.458) and negatively associated with McCain states (-.492). These patterns contrast somewhat with more nuanced data for individual voters. Gelman pointed out in an e-mail that: “At the individual level, Obama did best among people without h.s. degrees and people with postgraduate degrees. McCain did best among people with some college and people with college degrees (but no postgrad degrees).”

The Gay Index: Obama states were also those with greater concentrations of gays and lesbians.  The Gay Index was positively associated with Obama states (.532) and negatively associated with McCain states (-.544).

Personality Factors: Psychologists have long been interested in the connection between personality and individual voting and ideology. So, once again using data originally collected by Cambridge University psychologist Jason Rentfrow and his collaborators, we compared state voting patterns to the concentration of the five major personality types – extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness-to-experience, and neuroticism. While three of the types had little relation to state voting patterns, two were significantly associated with Obama vs. McCain votes.

Open-to-Experience: Obama states were associated with high concentrations of open-to-experience (.409) – that is highly creative and innovative people; openness was negatively associated with McCain states (-.371).

Conscientiousness: McCain states were associated with high concentrations of conscientious (or dutiful) personalities (.311).

In an e-mail, Rentfrow says these findings are in line with his own: “The links with class, openness and voting is consistent with what we found in the 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential elections. Although we didn’t look at the class groupings you looked at, each is related to openness, and we found that openness was strongly related to voting patterns after controlling for income, education, race, and sex. I ran the same analyses for the 2008 election and the results are very similar…”

I know most of you voted for Obama. In the process, you were hoping and praying for change. Unlike many of you, I had far less faith, but much hope. On January 18, I posted this about Obama. I would like to revisit this earlier post, as my fears are being confirmed. In it the deepest insight was that Obama was ratifying Bush’s failed policies and taking ownership of them. By choosing not be truthful with the American people, Obama is now rapidly on the way to failure. This is despite the fact that Michael Wells and others have argued that he has just been in office for four weeks, give him a chance.

The trouble is that the market and foreign policy are not giving him time and he is continuing nearly all of the failed policies of the past using advisors that are the architects of this failure.

On the economy, there is no reason to list the architects of failure he has appointed, but it is important to note that it is not only the top appointments, but also the lower-level appointments including an ex-lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, a new head of the SEC who formerly was the head of the securities industry self-regulatory (an oxymoron) organization, which did an excellent (snark) job with Messrs. Madoff and Stanford.) An aside, in my experience when one finds one large mother cockroach  [i.e., an enormous Ponzi scheme] under the refrigerator, much less two, be prepared for many baby cockroaches, small Ponzi schemes and frauds, and, God forbid, even larger ones to be exposed soon. The big ones are the signs of the infestation. In a similar vein, appointing a hedge fund manager to help with the automobile industry bailout, where the hedge funds have been involved in bankrupting not only the manufacturers, but also the parts suppliers, seems particularly tone deaf. Instead of change, Obama has taken ownership of the failed policies of the past and seems bound and determined to continue them.

In terms of the military adventures, he is going down a parallel path. He has not unilaterally declared that we will be completely out of Iraq in 16 months. In Afghanistan, he is taking the Lyndon Johnson path of only approving half of what the generals want. He has continued Bush’s policies on rendition, put the CIA dungeons in Afghanistan off limits to human rights rules, and not yet closed Guantanamo. Folks, let us be serious. These wars are not going to be won. Dungeons are not moral and cannot be defended. But, more important, we and Obama need to face the fact we CANNOT afford these wars and dungeons.

What is the biggest “tell” that Obama may not be serious about change? He is discouraging Congressional investigations of the Bush Administration and serious investigations as to the causes of and responsibilities for the financial meltdown. He is not demanding that the SEC prosecute CEOs lying about the financial condition of their firms, has not told his press secretary to stop attacking reporters who say things that he doesn’t like, or demanded that his cabinet officers including Geithner stop lying about the fact that our banks are insolvent.

If he represents change, then he needs to stop the lies, sleights to hand, and doubletalk. He needs to stop the surreptitious transfer of public funds to private firms. The bloggers, the stock market, and the economy will expose the corruption regardless. And, unfortunately for all of us, Obama will be discredited. Trust is so valuable for someone trying to change the system, once lies are exposed it is over. It is not too late, but it is very late. Yes, only four weeks into a new presidency and it is late. To begin with so much promise and so quickly plant the seeds of a collapsed Presidency is a tragedy for all of  us.

Those who voted for Obama need to contact him and your Congresspersons every day saying you want something different. We did not vote for four more years of a more personable George Bush. Obama must be something different. He does not need to take ownership of the Bush Catastrophe.

Tyler Cowen says not so good:

The simple truth is that so far economic policy has fallen short of being good. Some (not all) left-wing bloggers may be reluctant to say this so early in the tenure of such a long-awaited administration, but perhaps a few of them are thinking it. There is the stimulus, the Geithner banking plan, and the housing plan. Of course there are differences of opinion but perhaps it is fair to say he is straining to be one out of three?

President Obama stopped by the city yesterday, inciting havoc in terms of all timing, routing, and availability of transportation. Some walkers were forced to wait two hours to cross the street along the motorcade route, while some buses that barely interacted with his route were over an hour behind schedule. This man knows how to shut down a city!

I’d like to retrench upon, and synthesize some ideas from, a couple of past blogs – namely the last one which examined space and entrepreneurial innovation, and one where we looked at the future of Obama’s urban policy -  in examining how good he might be in building cities back up.

A new bill was introduced to the House of Representatives last Tuesday – the Community Regeneration, Sustainability, and Innovation Act of 2009:

The purposes of this Act are:

(1) to provide Federal assistance, through grants and the provision of technical assistance, to establish land banks in communities and metropolitan areas that have experienced significant population loss due to large-scale employment losses which have resulted in widespread
abandonment of real property;

(2) to encourage innovation, experimentation, and environmentally sustainable practices through collaborative efforts to reuse and rehabilitate land bank property in ways that will provide long-term benefits to the public;

(3) to encourage the creation of green infrastructure;

(4) to encourage the creation of new employment opportunities, especially in areas related to environmental sustainability and green infrastructure directly related to the implementation of regeneration plans assisted under this Act; and

(5) to encourage the strategic use of other Federal, State, local, private, and nonprofit resources not provided under this Act to stabilize and improve neighborhoods not presently experiencing widespread vacancy and abandonment, but whose stability is or may be threatened if current
demographic or employment trends continue.

This is the latest in a suite of innovation bills (one focusing on small business, and another on achievement through technology) that are being worked through the House right now and, to me, it’s the one that will have the most visceral impact on youth, because it deals with the space they occupy. While one way to look at this is as a way to prop up private sector developers who are involved in Hope VI redevelopments (many of which are struggling, as I learned recently at a CHRA conference), there are a lot of great things going on with this bill that will set up more interesting spaces for youth to engage and launch innovative practices.

What’s most promising is the way in which experimentation and competition for new ideas, as well as inter-sectoral, multi-stakeholder collaboration, and “green” concepts are encouraged in the bill. The federal government (through the HUD) would finally be doing for the spaces in the core what it did for the peripheries when it created the Housing Act of 1949 and again later with the development of the New Town Corporation in the early 70s. It would be stimulating a brave new conversation about space, but with a different, more sustainable focus. The bill seeks to be inclusive to all ages, abilities, and modes of transportation as well as seeking better modes of regulation to implement the plans more effectively – probably a response to the problem that has plagued the Hope VI effort.

What isn’t seen as clearly is an attempt to account for culture. There word only comes up in the bill twice, yet cultural mapping and planning is one of the most important tools for creating prosperity out of space. Particularly with youth enterprise, what I’ve observed is that most often enterprise occurs at the intersection of location and culture. In my most recent blog, the youth enterprises that I mentioned are all based, for the most part, on culture and emerged out of cultural scenes – urban culture in particular (a culture completely predicated by the last spatial system change ironically enough). They were able to get established and survive, however, because of the relatively low barrier of entry into the local real estate markets and their ability to acquire space in which to operate. Once youth enterprise takes root in these kinds of areas, often the regeneration process is already well underway.

And how about including some youth-based metrics for gauging success? If we learned anything from past experimentation with space it’s that while grown-ups might occupy the role of pioneer in these experiments with space, youth are always the natives – we experience it in fundamentally different ways. While we react to complications of the past through bills like this, we sometimes squelch the gift of the present for youth, who will be the builders of the future. The irony being that it’s the reaction to how spatial conditions affect youth that has historically incited the support for spatial system change initiatives like this.

So: How can the experience of space as a young person help to inform the Federal framework being established for the modification of space? How does the youth experience of space differ from that of the adult, and is there room for prosperity and community within that margin?

Wow, this one turned into a long-ers. For making it through, you all definitely deserve some music.

The stimulus process brings to mind the old adage that while you might like sausage or legislation, you don’t want to watch either one being made. But I think the final bill came off better than most expected. For the first time in over a decade I have some hope for the U.S. government working in our country’s best interests. Whether or not you agree with the Obama team’s strategy of letting Congress do the drafting until the final negotiations, the investments in high-speed rail, research, and the internet will pay off in creative class productivity (and these are investments – if the government were a business they’d go straight to the balance sheet, not operations spending.)

• A post here worried about cuts to transit to fund tax cuts. The final bill increased high speed rail to $8 billion (up from $300 million in the first House bill), $8.4 billion for mass transit, $1.3 billion for Amtrak (only 60 percent for NE corridor, so maybe some will reach Oregon). Yes, still too much for highways and leaving decisions to the states could be bad, but I think there’s language about focusing on maintenance before new construction.
• There’s $10 billion for the electric grid to support the $20 billion for alternative energy.
• In research, NIH gets $10 billion (thanks to Arlen Specter), $1 Billion for NSF, $1.6 for NASA, and more.
• The funding for $7 billion for rural high speed internet and $17 billion online medical records are steps toward catching up with the rest of the industrialized world.
• Increases in Pell grants and tax credits for college will hopefully help more people go to college.

Beyond these productivity building investments, other parts of the package are necessary or at least not as bad as they could have been:

• The tax cuts, while not as productive as investment, are targeted at the middle class and toward being spent in the real economy, rather than rewarding people buying a third “home.”
• Some of the holes in the safety net are being patched with more money for Medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment.

By the way, probably the best political job in America today is John Baldacci’s, the Democratic Governor of Maine. As far as I can tell, his state’s two Republican senators didn’t ask for anything in negotiating the Stimulus. But don’t be surprised to see some extra job training centers and wind energy farms Down East.

OK, what do you think?

On Tuesday, I DJ’d a party for the Governor General of Canada celebrating Barack Obama’s Inauguration. It was a cool little affair that brought a diversity of youth together to discuss what this event means to us as young Canadians. Peace to Emcee E and Nomadic Massive who also performed. At the end of the blog I’ll post my playlist, since people often wonder what one might play at an event like that.

In as much as we are different, Canada and the U.S. in fundamental ways – landmass, population, density, demographics, political structure, etc. – we are the same in that we are neighbors and share the same land and, in broad strokes, share ideals about how life should be lived. This event and the reactions in the room showed how more than ever the American dream is really a North American dream that we all take part in.

Young people are definitely empowered by President Obama as a living example of change. It’s interesting, however, to see how hungry young Canadians are to play a role in and identify with this change. As neighbors to ground zero of the global Obama-wave, and a nation that is deeply interlinked with the U.S., it is natural and fair that we pose the question “where is our Canadian change?”, and not unreasonable that we would yearn somewhat for an Obama figure of our own – to give young people a sense that their voices participate as equals in their democracy. In this new vision of the North American dream, what will Canada’s role be and where will its youth place?

While Canada’s version of the dream is younger, less dense, a bit smaller, and more cautious, it is sturdy, perhaps a bit more agile, and has the advantage of being able to consider the trials and missteps of its older, bolder neighbor in order to innovate on that experience and those ideas – probably in a faster and more dexterous way as a result of being over 60 percent slimmer in terms of population and density. While we might not do the scaling up, we are in a great position to build the models. The climate will most certainly be ripe for the ideas. More than anything, I think that’s where young people, particularly in Canada, will be participating heavily. Whereas Barack finally opened the door for youth in the U.S. to participate in driving the U.S. with their vote, he might have also opened the window for young Canadians to make significant contributions to the welfare of this continent with their ideas – particularly with the U.S. school system in the state that it’s in. With any luck, the positive feedback loop between the two countries will help us retrofit the way that leaders lead in Canada, because one thing that was voiced repeatedly at the forum is that we need that kind of reform.

While the U.S. is being clear that it wants to set the pace, how can young people in Canada help to finish the race, considering our position as neighbors and co-participants in the dream? What is the most constructive way to set up this partnership?  How can we see the innovations in the democratic process invoked over the border be brought into play over here?

And now, the inaugural playlist:

1. We Almost Lost Detroit – Gil Scott Heron
2. My People…Hold On – Eddie Kendricks
3. Long Time Coming – Aloe Blacc
4. Stakes Is High – De La Soul
5. Resurrection – Common Sense
6. The Souljazz Orchestra – Mista President*
7. Black President (Feat Johnny Polygon)  – Nas
8. Voices At The Crossroads – Knaan f. Tracy Chapman*
9. What’s Going On – Marvin Gaye
10. Change – Donald Byrd
11. Get Involved – Soule, George
12. Positivity (Mark Ronson ‘68 Remix) – Stevie Wonder
13. Brand New Day – Staple Singers

A new global poll finds that:

All 22 countries covered in the poll would prefer to see Senator Obama elected US president ahead of Republican John McCain. In 17 of the 22 nations, people expect relations between the US and the rest of the world to improve if Senator Obama wins.

“Large numbers of people around the world clearly like what Barack Obama represents,” GlobeScan chairman Doug Miller said. “Given how negative America’s international image is at present, it is quite striking that only one in five think a McCain presidency would improve on the Bush administration’s relations with the world.”

More here. Is anyone really surprised?