Creative Class

That’s the message of Gina Kolata’s story in the 8/22/06 Science Times (sub required). The Nobel-prize winning economist, Robert Fogel, predicts that by 2030, about a quarter of economic ouput will be spent on health care, making it “the driving force in the economy,” like railraods in the early 20th century. Fogel is the author of the fantastic book, The Fourth Great Awakening.

The article caused me to recall something the visionary venture capitalist, David Morgenthaler said to me several years ago. When he was a young man, Morganthaler said, he invested heavily in technology: figuring it took a large share of income to buy more computing power.

Now he invests in health care and entertainment, which he saw as driving sectors in our economic future. Largely, he said, because the technology revolution has brought very cheap computing power. Now when he spends his money he wants to buy additional years of life, or more quality years of life, or enhanced experiences. This is where demand is. The economy is no longer powered by the key engines of the industrial era, as our current growth in the face of soaring commodity prices can attest to.

Yes, certainly, one of the new economic drivers is health care, but so is entertainment and the production and puchase of experiences. And on that score, another leading sector is destined to be education — I mean education not as elementary, high school and college — but education broadly defined as life-long development across all spheres, including work, life and leisure. And technology, especially in the form of software, will remain important as an undergirding infrastructure in this emerging economic system. Health care, education, entertainment, and technology — the core fields of the creative economy!

(posted by Richard)

Via Keirnan Healy’s great blog (June 23rd entry) a link to very important new research on increasing social isolation in America. The paper is a bit technical, but written in clear English. The conclusions, which begin on p. 371, are incredibly interesting and the discussion of geography’s role in social isolation and the rise of the “post-familial” family on p. 372 and p.373 extremely so.

(posted by Richard)

An interesting piece in the New Scientist discussing happiness worldwide and a new study by Adrian White at the University of Leicester. White used various measures to make his index and created the world happiness map. The article states, “Money may be able to buy happiness after all – especially when it is poured into healthcare and education. That is the idea suggested by a new ranking of countries in terms of the happiness of their people.” This, of course, contrasts with a Daniel Kanheman study discussed on this blog the other day. (click on the image for a bigger view of the Global Happiness Map)

(posted by Richard)

Check out the new Men’s Health rankings of America’s angriest cities. Yes, Mickey is scowling behind that painted on smile as Orlando (FL) comes in as the angriest city in America.

According to the Men’s Health article, “Our search for evidence of urban anger began with the percentage of men with high blood pressure, from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (as calculated by Sperling’s BestPlaces). We then factored in FBI rates of aggravated assaults and Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers on workplace deaths from assaults and other violence. And because rage and the road often go hand in hand, we also included traffic-congestion data from the Texas Transportation Institute, as well as speeding citations per state from the Governors Highway Safety Association.”

Here are your top 10: Orlando (FL), St. Petersburg (FL), Detroit (MI), Baltimore (MD), Nashville (TN), Wilmington (DE), Miami (FL), Memphis (TN), Jacksonville (FL), and St. Louis (MO). Sunshine state huh?

(posted by Richard)

That’s the question being asked by Sunday’s NY Times Business section (sub required). Seems like a variety of large developers (including three publicly traded REITS) are jumping into the college housing business. But the bigger question is how can college and universities become more seamlessly interconnected with their communities?

Big strides in this direction have been made at the University of Pennsylvania which, under former President Judy Rodin’s leadership, developed an ambitious plan to connect the school to its surrounding neighborhood. In Providence, Rhode Island, the Rhode Island School of Design has redeveloped old commerical and office buildings into design studios. Arizona State University is developing an urban campus, integrated into the existing community fabric, in downtown Phoenix.

By integrating colleges and universities in community redevelopement, communities gain the bustling street-life and neighborhood energy associated with 24-7 college schedules. Moreover, universities can and do play an important role in the economy.

Here is a recent report titled The University and the Creative Economy that I produced with my colleagues Gary Gates, Brian Knudsen, and Kevin Stolarick. It examines the role of the university through the lens of the ‘3-Ts’ of economic analysis and finds that, “the university comprises a potential — and, in some places, actual — creative hub that sits at the center of regional development. It is a catalyst for stimulating the spillover of technology, talent, and tolerance into the community.” No wonder real estate investors are showing up on the quad.

There is no doubt that online video has become a killer application. The combination of powerful, yet cheap cameras and broadband connections have unleashed a wave of creativity that applies to entertainment, commerce, education, and just about any other endeavor that humans show interest in.

From YouTube and DailyMotion to Revver and EEFoof.com, new video services with new business models are popping up daily. Of course Google Video and Yahoo Video are forces to be reckoned with. No matter which model wins out, creativity will benefit.

Are you or your organization using online video to get things done? Is it effective?

BTWs, here’s a video of me (RF) from Google Video that I found while surfing the other day. It is my visit to the Charlie Rose Show with an old friend, Tom Stewart, the editor of the Harvard Business Review. On the clip we discuss globalization and the creative economy.

(posted by Richard)

More on the question of mobility, this time from the WSJ… which offered a story about the City of Buffalo’s attempt to “reclaim” its natives sons and daughters by throwing a homecoming event. The event/marketing campaign, culminates with Buffalo Old Home Week 2006, and has made great use of online tools and email lists such as a 68,000 strong “Buffalo Bills Backers” list.

Trust me, lot’s of places are trying this, including the city of Omaha, NE and the state of Iowa which the article mentions. It’s an uphill battle. It will be very, very hard slogging against the forces that are spurring the flow of talent and the means migration.

The 285,000 new college grauates that moved to New York City between 2000-2005 that I blogged about the other day, is about the same as the population of the ENTIRE City of Buffalo (which had a peak population of 590,000 in 1950).

Quote of the article come’s from Tammy Bialek-Lehre, a Buffalo native who left to be a Las Vegas-style showgirl overseas and is now a chriopractor in Evanston, Il. Tammy plans to move back to Buffalo because, “I feel a void no other city can fill.” Will Buffalo organizers will find others with similiar sentiments? Check out the online Buffalo expat discussion that is taking place — click on ‘read repat stories’ link.

(posted by Richard)

Austan Goolsbee, writing yesterday’s Economic Scene column in the NY Times (sub required), hits a grand slam (he started with the baseball analogies).

Goolsbee , a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, takes on the question of whether or not state and local spending on university based research and technology can spur regional development — recasting the ‘contemporary age-old question’: how to create another Silicon Valley?

His answer is: not so easy and not so fast. According to Goolsbee,

“with so many trying to spin universities away from their traditional academic focus into engines of economic development, it is worth considering whether investing in local universities can achieve that goal. This strategy is based on the view that research done by professors can form the basis for local start-up companies and that the graduates of the university can supply the entrepreneurs and employees.”

Goolsbee reminds economic development professionals, “advocates should remember an old maxim of economic development: Beware of investing in things that can move. As it turns out, graduates and research ideas both tend to move around a lot. Subsidizing teaching is problematic as a development strategy because graduates frequently move out of state.” AMEN!

Citing work by Lynne Zucker and Michael Darby of UCLA, Goolsbee focuses on scientific talent. He finds that only by having ’superstar scientists’ will university research lead to economic development. The star scientists provide a reputation needed to lure others.

However, according to Zucker and Darby (check out their paper here), there are only about 1,800 ’superstar scientists’ nationwide – about the same number of people who played Major League baseball between 1981 and 1994 (the same period the study covered).

And here is the rub: Lot’s of intelligent baseball owners and general managers have tried to best the NY Yankees — with only limited success. “If dozens of sports mad billionaire team owners can’t do that, how easy would it be for the economic development office” at a local university to match Silicon Valley?… DOUBLE AMEN!

Goolsbee acknowledges that universities are important to local development, but “counting on them to make you the next Silicon Valley is, alas, more like betting on my beloved Cubs to win it all.”

(posted by Richard)

Will Singapore be able to capitalize on stem cell fumbles here at home? According to yesterday’s NY Times (sub required) Singapore is trying to lure US and other leading global stem cell researchers by offering funding and flexibility.

The Times reports that two more of America’s top cancer researchers, Neal Copeland and Nancy Jenkins, will relocate to the new Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology from their previuous posts at the National Institutes of Health outside DC. They are not the first researchers to head to Singapore and will not be the last.

Singapore, which has been investing heavily to grow an artistic and culturally creative environment, still faces a big challenge with openness to outsiders. But it looks like they are making real strides on the first two Ts. (And yes, there is a chewing gum reference in the article)

(posted by Richard)

High real estate costs in NY? No matter, college graduates are flocking to NY and paying to be part of a rich cultural and economic system. According to an incredible NY Times (sub required) article on 08/16/06,

“Almost 5 million people over the age of 25 in the New York metropolitan area — more than a third of the region’s population — had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2005, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau. In Manhattan, nearly three out of five residents were college graduates and one out of four had advanced degrees, forming one of the highest concentrations of highly educated people in any American city.

Between 2000 and 2005, the number of people in the metropolitan area over 25 who had not finished high school declined by 520,000, a drop of almost 20 percent. During the same period, the number of college graduates in the region rose by almost 700,000.

From 2000 to 2005, the number of New York City residents with at least a bachelor’s degree increased by about 285,000, a gain equal to the total number of college-educated people in San Francisco. “

(posted by Richard)