Creative Class

Last week, we looked at what makes for happy states. One thing that stood out was that states with larger concentrations of the working class had lower levels of well-being.

So, we decided to take a closer look at the relationship between the working class and several key indicators of state wealth and well-being.

What we found is striking  – and frankly troubling. States with large concentrations of working class jobs had lower levels of income, GDP per capita, and well-being – pretty much everything across the board.

There were significant negative correlations between states with a large share of working class jobs and three of the five component indices in the Gallup well-being index: healthy behavior ( -.65), physical health (-.42), and life evaluation (-.31), as well as for the well-being index overall (-.51).

The pattern was similar, even worse, when we looked at the relationships between the working class and GDP per capita (-.51), income (-.69), human capital levels (-.71), and housing prices (-.62).

So maybe it’s time to think twice when we hear how important it is to save “good” working class jobs.  Individually, that may well be the case. Some of these jobs pay very well, and lots of people who lose them may find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to find similar work at their pay levels

But from the point of view of society and economic development broadly, it’s important to recognize that states with large concentrations of working class jobs do very poorly in terms of wealth and well-being.

These findings distress me personally. Looking them over and over, I found myself thinking back to advice  my father – who spent more then 50 years as a worker in a Newark eyeglass factory – gave my brother and I long ago. “Boys,” he said, ”I do this so you won’t have to. That’s why you have to stay in school, study hard, and go to college.” I understand much better now what he was driving at.

So the past couple of days at the MPI – under the ever-watchful analytical eye of Charlotta Mellander – we took the Gallup happy states data and compared it to various measures of state economies. This is a first cut analysis and it’s dealing only with correlation or association and not causation, but the relationships are nonetheless interesting. Here’s a quick rundown.

Our analysis is in sync with what Will Wikinson already has pointed to: State happiness is associated with income (a correlation of .33 with our measure of average income), as well as housing prices (.49). Makes sense: People are willing to pay to live in happy places, and people with more income have more choices. And it’s even more closely associated with levels of human capital (that is, share of adults with a bachelor’s degree or above – it’s . 77)

And what about the creative class? Happy states appear to be creative states – at least as measured by the share of people employed in creative class jobs (with a correlation of .48). The correlations are even higher for the the super-creative core and the the overall creativity index (.53).

Makes you wonder: Are creatives more likely to live in happy places or are they more likely to be happy people? Well… psychologists have identified a powerful relationship between creativity and happiness. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi finds that engaging in creative activities like writing, playing music, computer programming, mountain climbing, or chess is a major source of happiness. But in her workplace studies, Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School says it works the other way around: She finds that it’s happiness – or should I say happy workplaces – that generate creative thinking and workplace innovation as opposed to vice versa. Psychologist Barbara Fredricksons suggests that “positive” people are more open-minded, less racially biased, more likely to see the bigger picture, and ultimately more creative. So maybe this kind of thing scales up from who we are and what we do to where we live.

On that score, yes, happy states are also apparently those greater concentrations bohemians (.43), immigrants (.36 ), and gays (.32), as well as states with higher levels of high-tech industry (.22) or those with more innovative potential.

One worrying finding: States with a large concentration of the working class are far less happy – with a negative correlation of (-.51). That’s downright unhappy. Perhaps Marx was right after all about the alienation that comes from industrial work – or in this case the unhappiness found in working class locations. We’ll be doing more on the connection between economic structure and state happiness in the future.

Is there any connection between between happy states and the personality types that live there? Using data provided by Cambridge University psychologist Jason Rentfrow we were able to compare happy states to the concentrations of the five major personality types – extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness-to-experience, and neuroticism. While it may not come as a big surprise, neurotic states were far less happy states – the correlation between the two being (-.62). The correlations for all four other personality types were all insignificant.

Take a look at the graphs here and let us know what you see – and think.

Will Wilkinson picks up on the relationship between happiness and income.

(Gallup Organization via NYT Economix). Click here for map fun.

Joel Kotkin writing in Forbes has apparently just discovered that cities like New York and San Francisco are unequal and (get this) that such rising inequality threatens social cohesion and long-run economic prosperity.

Higher costs–manifested in everyday expenses like sales taxes and energy bills–now contribute in a large way to growing inequality even in the richest, most elite cities. When housing and other costs are factored in, notes researcher Deborah Reed of the left-leaning Public Policy Institute of California, deep-blue mainstays Los Angeles and San Francisco rank among the top 10 counties in America with respect to the percentage of people in poverty. Only New York and Washington, D.C., do worse.

Here’s a list of the most unequal large metro regions -those with over 1 million people – from way back in 2003.

Could this be related to the world being… ahem… spiky?

Las Vegas takes top spot, followed by Detroit. Atlanta, Greensboro, and Dayton round out the top five. Phoenix comes in sixth. No surprises there. But, I was surprised frankly to see Chicago make the list. Here’s the full list, from Forbes.com, based on fourth-quarter rental and homeowner vacancy rates for the 75 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country. Curiously, there is considerable overlap with this Forbes list of the places where home sales are rising fastest.

A-list, B-list, C-list. Now the M-list – M is for Meltdown. The Guardian put together this list of the 25 people “at the heart of the meltdown.” Do you agree? And do you think history will be harsh on all of them?

1. Minneapolis and Seattle (tie)

3. Washington, D.C.

4. St. Paul

5. San Francisco

6. Atlanta

7. Denver

8. Boston

9. St. Louis

10. Cincinnati and Portland, Ore. (tie)

The ranking is based on six key indicators: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources for cities with populations of 250,000 or greater. (via USA Today). My eyeball analysis suggests this ranking is reasonably though not entirely correlated with levels of human capital and the creative class.

No, not the baseball teams! Which is the better city?

In a light-hearted nine-inning match-up, I compare the two cities head-to-head in the categories we normally use to rank places for quality of life. The categories include such areas as climate, crime, economy, and housing.

Which wins?  Gritty Philadelphia or sun-splashed Tampa Bay?

After nine hard-fought innings, the winner is crowned in the World Series of Cities.

The Freakonomics guys (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner) have invited me to answer reader questions on their blog in the New York Times.

My work is all about finding “Best Places,” and studying differences between the cities, metros, and communities of the U.S. and Canada. So it dovetails nicely with Richard’s work in Who’s Your City?

I hope you’ll check it out and ask some questions of your own. We’ll take questions for about three days, and then answer them in another post.

“Best” always,

Bert