Creative Class

Just found out there’ll be a good-size segment about Who’s Your City? and … well … me on tonight. Enjoy.

John Cassidy, writing in the NY Review of Books, provides a fascinating look at the thinkers and thinking that are shaping the economic outlook and policies of Barack Obama (pointer via Mark Thoma).

Here’s one new list (pointer via Planetizen):

1.  Honolulu, Hawaii

2.  Virginia Beach, Virginia

3.  Billings, Montana

4.  Columbus, Georgia

5   San Diego, California

6.  Des Moines, Iowa

7.  Minneapolis, Minnesota

8.  Madison, Wisconsin

9.  Colorado Springs, Colorado

10. Santa Rosa, California

My list from Who’s Your City? is here.

Compare, contrast, comment?

Alain Bertaud has some interesting work on density and urban structure (pointer via Mark Thoma).

The always extremely interesting Kevin Phillips in the Washington Post:

Here, then, is the unnerving possibility: that another, imminent global
crisis could make the half-century between the 1970s and the 2020s the
equivalent for the United States of what the half-century before 1950
was for Britain. This may well be the Big One: the multi-decade endgame
of U.S. ascendancy. The chronology makes historical sense — four
decades of premature jitters segueing into unhappy reality.

Matt Yglesias comments:

The United States is currently the richest country in the world by a pretty
wide margin. Since China and India are both growing from a much smaller
base, it should be possible for them to maintain higher average growth
rates over an extended period of time eventually overtake us in terms
of overall GDP.

The U.S. does not have to be overtaken by another country for its competitiveness to falter and its quality of life deteriorate. The biggest threat to US competitiveness, from my perspective, stems from the increasing global competition for talent. While the US once held a powerful upper hand in attracting global talent which fueled its technological and entrepreneurial edge,  the edge has diminished for three interrelated reasons. One, US policies have made it harder for  talented outsiders to get in. Two, small states  like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and some northern European countries have increased their ability to attract global talent. And three, both China and India (who have supplied a great deal of US technical talent in recent decades) are working to retain more of their young talent and attract back those that left.

I don’t think we will see the ascendancy of another great power for some time, but the US may well lose ground – the cumulative result of small but significant improvements in competitive position from many quarters. And while I would never count the US out – its transformative and regenerative capabilities are unparalleled – the economic challenges America faces today do seem significantly  greater than at any time in recent memory.

Yesterday I posted my two part interview with CIUT’s David Peterson.  Here’s a link to a fascinating discussion with David, Andy Frank, Kate Adach, and Lynn Harrison. Best of all it includes a wonderful new song by Lynn, “Just the Kind of City I Am,” inspired by these themes. Enjoy!

Here’s Part 1 and Part II of my Take 5, CIUT 89.5FM Toronto interview, hosted by David Peterson. That’s David and me in the studio on the University of Toronto campus.

Channeling his inner-Jim Kuntsler, Paul Krugman says rising oil prices spell big trouble for suburbia:

To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a
pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or
five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and
plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of
neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan
areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater
Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta
is a city of cars, cars and cars.

And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s
starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.

Changing the geography of American metropolitan areas will be hard. For one thing,
houses last a lot longer than cars … Infrastructure
is another problem. Public transit, in particular, faces a
chicken-and-egg problem: it’s hard to justify transit systems unless
there’s sufficient population density, yet it’s hard to persuade people
to live in denser neighborhoods unless they come with the advantage of
transit access …

Still, if we’re heading for a prolonged era of scarce, expensive oil,
Americans will face increasingly strong incentives to start living like
Europeans — maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for
the rest of our lives.

Europeans still drive a lot even with way expensive fuel -  the highways are perpetually clogged, worse at times the in the US, around Europe’s major cities.  Sure, the transit is better, people take the train and lots more ride bicycles than in the US.  The same can be said of Toronto.  But it’s not fuel costs that are driving this, it’s the time and networking costs.  Who’s moving back to US super-star cities? Not the middle classes, rather it’s the relatively affluent, who are choosing to trade-off space for time. That said, America’s stretched out spatial structure is a dead-weight cost against future competitiveness especially compared with the relatively compact city-regions in other parts of the globe.  In the creative economy, it is density, velocity, and idea-generation – in tandem with fuel economy or even energy efficiency, which which will be the core of competitive advantage.

The question remains: How to avoid a super-segmented and sorted city, and how to provide affordable housing in light of these growing forces?

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Malone argues that we are rapidly becoming one:

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new
college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than
a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the
U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business
owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to
Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at
a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today’s high
schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup
poll.

An upcoming wave of new workers in our society will
never work for an established company if they can help it. To them,
having a traditional job is one of the biggest career failures they can
imagine.

Hmmmm… to a certain extent or for a certain segment of society.  However, Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, Toyota, Wal-mart, the health sector, the defense-industrial complex, the public school system and the government still really do exist. In fact, education and health are the largest single employers in many large cities.  Honestly, while people change jobs frequently, I wonder to what degree the profile of the entrepreneurial and self-employed has changed over the past 2 or 3 decades. There are many people who prefer the security of a “job” to the risk of an entrepreneurial venture.  Our own personality studies, as well as those of others, substantiate that.  I could go on, but what do you think?

The Globe and Mail has a nice interview with CCG friend, editor, and author, Megan Hustad:

Why do people have such a strong desire to reprogram themselves for the
workplace? What happens in a corporate setting is not something that
comes naturally. There’s an art to doing well in these contrived
situations, and it’s difficult to do well without preparation and
training …

Being snarky and cynical have become totally mainstream and it works
well with Internet culture because it’s fast, snappy and dismissive. [A
lot of young people] are surrounded by people who are so quick to take
any sincere effort down. My set associated careerism with being an
unimaginative Republican. I thought that if you’re really clever and
smart, things will take care of themselves and it will be enough. It’s
not ….

Wanting to be of service to other people is a deep human need. Some
people underestimate how much they’ll enjoy their job once they stop
thinking it’s all about them and what they need to do to accomplish
their own ends. That’s not to say you need to be a brainless team
player. … It’s a paradox: If you want a more self-determined future
and career, you start getting there by extending yourself toward other
people more than you think you ever have to.