Creative Class

Warning: If you’re over 30, please proceed with caution. I mean it. This may upset you.  I just caught wind of a 28-year-old musician who goes by the name of ‘Girl Talk’ who is ‘sampling’ The Band, The ‘Stones, R.E.M, AC/DC, and Aretha Franklin, and mixing their iconic sounds with the likes of 50 Cent, T-Payne, Gwen Stefani, and Bubba Sparxx (who!?)

Listen here.

Because he (Girl Talk is a he) started his own ‘independent label’ he thinks he can basically do whatever he wants! No royalties, no fees. And his album is basically free! His website says, “Pay whatever you want.� And he encourages YOU, the listener, to use and sample his music. This internet-driven model threatens to bury the whole record industry!

Here’s another way to look at Girl Talk: as an artist and as an MC, but not in the traditional sense of the word. He has no records, no turn-tables, and no CDs. He has a laptop. That’s it. Girl Talk is commonly described as a mash-up artist: someone who takes the vocals from one song and the instrumentals from another and mixes them together into a new, unique sound. Think The Beatles’ The White Album meets Jay Z’s The Black Album to create Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album. But Girl Talk takes the style to a whole new level. 50+ samples in one four-minute song are not uncommon, and he mixes his massive database of music at live shows in real time on a plastic wrapped computer. Because his samples are so short, nothing he does is illegal according to “fair useâ€� copyright law in the U.S.

I believe Girl Talk’s music is a metaphor for my generation. His songs, which sample from Roy Orbison, Queen, Nirvana, and T.I., to name a few, require a very broad musical knowledge to be fully appreciated. N-Geners today listen to a lot of music and can give a wink and a nod to the clever way older songs are used. Even if they don’t know those songs, odds are many kids will go online and discover them afterward.  OK, kids listening to and/or learning the greatest rock/pop songs of all time. That’s a good thing.

On the other hand, his music can be construed as the ultimate symbol of our short attention spans and our obsession with short, easy-to-digest sights and sounds (think Sneezing Panda on YouTube). One could argue that digital technology has left us incapable of focusing on a good song for more than a few minutes (so let’s jam 50 samples into one track instead!), and Girl Talk is my generation’s answer. OK, that’s a Bad thing.

Girl Talk understands his target audience. He knows his music will be widely disseminated online, for free, before he has the opportunity to release a CD. So he embraces an open, online platform for his music where payment is optional:

“I think what we went for seems like an obvious game plan now, just because as soon as it hits the internet, anyone…can get it for free if they want to. So why not tap in and let them actually take a step back and think about it, and maybe offer some money?�

Get the whole interview with Pitchfork Media Here.

In this open and collaborative model, more money goes directly to the artist (and not a major label), he fosters good will with his fan base, more people get to hear his sound, and as a result he attracts a wider audience to live shows. I think this is a good thing.

This last question depends on your perspective. Some of his mash-ups take important songs out of context and use them only as a means to an end. How would you feel if he mixed Sam Cooke’s powerful and spiritual ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ with the vacuous and asinine ‘My Humps’ by the Black Eyed Peas just to get a ‘cool’ sound? In this regard, his music can be construed as not respecting the wholeness and message of his songs. I’m not a music critic, so I’ll stop there before I start sounding foolish, but I encourage you to share your thoughts.

The cities want in, as David Miller noted here earlier. Their lining up for stimulus funds and the tab is getting pretty hefty, according to this Forbes report (h/t: Dean Alexander).

On Dec. 8, just two days after Obama’s pledge for massive infrastructure spending, the U.S. Conference of Mayors released an 803-page report–a wishlist of some 11,391 infrastructure projects they would love to press ahead with.Those cities that responded would like $17 billion for streets, $15 billion for water and sewage, $13 billion in community development grants, $7 billion for transit systems, $6 billion for energy projects, $4 billion for schools, $4 billion for public safety, $4 billion for airports, $2 billion for public housing and $1 billion for Amtrak infrastructure.

Here’s a partial list: Miami: $3.4 billion; Sacramento: $2.8 billion; Philadelphia: $2.6 billion; Los Angeles: $2.4 billion; Albuquerque: $2.3 billion. There’s plenty more.

To find our where the best ratios are in SoCal, click here (h/t: Paulo Raposo). Lots of blue for boys, but Beverly Hills, Hermosa Beach, and Manhattan Beach read pink - that is with greater percentages of single women to men. And, no, the data compiled by the LA Times from the 2000 U.S. Census do not take gays and lesbians into account.

Richard Saul Wurman’s recent offering, 19.20.21, is an interesting step toward a more comprehensive understanding of our future “spiky” world. The site is well worth a visit, and (if you have not read it yet) Richard’s article on the subject (PDF) is also worth reading.

This map compares the south’s 2008 presidential vote (in conventional red and blue) with an 1860 map of cotton production (dots).

(Via  Strange Maps, h/t Charlotta Mellander)

More discussion here.

The “Real Time Economics” blog in the Wall Street Journal has an interesting post matching state voting preferences (determined by current polls) to changes in home prices, changes in personal income, and the unemployment rate.

You can do a quick sort online, and a few points jump out right away…

• The six states with the lowest unemployment rate are all strongly Republican. Four of the six with the highest rate are voting Democratic.
• 10 of the 12 with the greatest gain in income are going Republican, while 10 of the 12 with the lowest income gain are voting Democratic.
• The home appreciation category is really interesting. 18 of the 20 states with the greatest losses in home prices are going Democratic. 16 of the 20 states that best maintained their home’s values are leaning Republican.

It’s tempting to look at that last category and translate the pain felt by homeowners into a desire for a new political ideology. Not so fast. The vast majority of the states (in those batches of 20) are voting the same as they did in 2004, so really it was a case of the blue states getting hit the worst by the recent housing downturn.

Using their data, I converted the polling data to a linear scale, and did some simple correlation analysis. The coefficient of correlation was roughly 25 percent for both the categories of unemployment rate and change in personal income. It rose to 45 percent for the home price change category.

I thought it might be interesting to look at the difference between states’ voting from 2004 to 2008 and created a category for the ‘delta.’ I was hoping for some big insight, but the results were disappointing. The correlation coefficients were actually less, so the big takeaway might be that there is a lot of inertia. Changes in economic conditions may take longer to make a large impact.

My spreadsheet is here for your own analysis.

Of course, the United States’ political landscape is narrowly divided into Red and Blue states, so even a small shift in voter sentiment is translated into a sea change.

Best, Bert

Although employer interest in making workplaces fun, healthy, and productive places has grown over the past decade, some workplaces still cause problems.

Forbes and The Financial Post asked this week, “Is your office making you sick?” Here are some things to watch for:

1. Workplaces and “cold” symptoms:

Everything from mold spores to office furniture that lets off formaldehyde gases to changes in humidity can affect a worker’s upper respiratory system. If you suffer from the sniffles, “the best thing to do is to get an industrial hygienist,” says Berman. Multiple employee complaints may indicate “sick building syndrome,” and an industrial hygienist will be able to test the air for toxins and irritants and advise a company on how to improve the air quality.

2. Workplaces and stress (part I)

Despite many valid concerns, Dr. Berman says he also hears from workers who experience “phantom air quality issues” where testing has shown no traceable toxins.

“It’s amazing the kinds of things that can create an air quality issue where there isn’t one,” says Dr. Berman. Stress, conflict, and low morale can all contribute to perceived air quality issues.

3. Workplaces and stress (part II)

According to findings compiled last year by researchers at the Healthy Lifestyle Program at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, one-fourth of employees view their jobs as the No. 1 stressor in their lives.

4. Muscle aches

According to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, almost 2 million workers suffer from such musculoskeletal disorders, including elbow tendinitis, wrist pain, and lower back problems.

“We tell people to try to find their comfort zone and follow some guidelines,” she says. Jacobs recommends that workers shift positions frequently, stretch regularly, and equip their desks with the basics, including an adjustable chair, keyboard tray, foot rest, and proper lighting.

The article suggests that office workers need to take charge of their overall health by leading a healthy lifestyle as well as acting to reduce stress and workplace irritants.

It’s hard to be creative if you can’t breath properly, your back hurts, and your job is generating unnecessary stress.

Does your workplace negatively affect your health?

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.

Matt Roush summarizes my talk at Detroit’s Creative Cities Summit 2.0 earlier this week:

Florida said the market and economic turmoil today is a “fundamental business shift, two or three or four 80-year waves packed into one. This is a massive realignment of how our society is organized.”

Saying today’s market chaos is reminiscent of the chaos of the 1870s that gave rise to Karl Marx, Florida said that “the economics of financial capital at its end. The era of making billions by trading alone is over. When credit’s hard to get, when people can’t move billions around easily, there’s only one source of capital left, the kind that comes in human beings, in real people, in our communities.”

The core of this transformation, Florida said, is that “for the first time in human history, no longer does the ability to capture natural resources or raw materials, and combine them with physical labor and giant masses of capital, those things are no longer the cornerstone of economic growth. All those things can now be moved around. In the advanced world, the only source of economic growth is human creativity.”

And Florida said he believes bankers and government officials simply haven’t grasped the changes yet. “With all due respect to (U.S. Treasury) Secretary Paulson and the G7, their models are bankrupt. The new models are not in the White House or the parliaments of Europe, they are strategies being conducted on the ground in real communities.”

The rest is here.

I’m working on an essay on the Geographic Implications of the Financial Crisis for a major monthly magazine. I’d appreciate your thoughts, fact, and insights?

This Monday, the world’s governments took a final plunge on fixing this crisis by basically assuming the debts of the world’s important banks. In the U.S., the politics of who receives the bailout and who doesn’t will be interesting. In my mind this gamble poses two questions:

1)  Will it be enough to prevent a collapse of the financial system?

This is a difficult question to answer.  I have my doubts.

If this extreme program operates as many think it might, it would guarantee that a certain set of banks would not collapse. The reasoning seems to be that these guarantees will unfreeze credit markets. For this the governments of the world will take hundreds of billions of bad bank loans, default swaps, structured investment vehicles, and all manner of so-called assets (probably worth zero or close to zero) onto their books. The sheer scale of what is being proposed can be seen by the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. We now know it had worthless loans and assets of, at least, $100 billion. Some Europeans are saying that Lehman’s collapse cost them about $300 billion. We also know that almost always in such bankruptcies the true cost is greater than what is initially reported. Let us extrapolate from this and assume (because to take on all of them would be unimaginable) that when the Treasury/Fed say they will bail out banks, they only mean a few key banks and leave the rest to their own devices (there is evidence for this suspicion as the large regional banks such as Sun Trust and Zion did not participate in the huge rally on Monday). So, which banks will be bailed out? My guess is Goldman Sachs (Paulson and Robert Rubin’s ex-employer), Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and a few others (did Wells Fargo buy Wachovia so that it could enter this charmed circle?).  P.S. - We now have confirmation of which firms are being bailed out: JPMorgan, Goldman, Citi, BoA, Wells Fargo, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, State Street Bank [thank you Barney Frank], Bank of NY Mellon [thank you Hillary and Schumer].

Will this unfreeze credit markets? I think it is unlikely for two reasons: One, if you are an unprotected bank, then why would you lend at all? If you are one of the protected, then banks why on earth would you lend to any organization outside the circle of protected banks? The assumption appears to be that the actors in the system will now assume everything is fine and begin lending. If as everyone expects a recession is coming and most firms are highly leveraged, lending would be very risky. What type of collateral for a loan could you receive that would be worth as much in a bankruptcy tomorrow. Of course, one could have loans or investments a la Warren Buffett in Goldman Sachs or GE, which charge nearly usurious penalty interest rates of 10 percent and radically dilute the common stock holder, i.e., our pension funds and 401Ks.

The world’s governments have taken what appears to be a final step by assuming on the debt of their largest and privileged banks, they are committing future taxpayers to valorize today’s debt. They are not yet willing to admit openly that the taxpayers are buying garbage and moving it from the banks to themselves. Governments appear to hope that by moving some portion of the garbage to the taxpayer the problems will go away. This is similar to the belief among Bear Stearns, Lehman, and AIG executives that hiding garbage debt inside their firms and then lying about it to the public would make the garbage disappear.

So will this newest plan unfreeze credit markets and encourage banks to loan again? Unlikely, but no one has a crystal ball.

2) The second question is this: Is the financial system telling us something far more profound about the underlying economic situation?

Why is this the most important question? If this is a profound crisis in the core of the economic system, then these approaches are merely treating symptoms and are destined to fail (sort of like treating metastasized cancer by surgically removing parts of the body). Remember, Ben Bernanke has been called the “foremost expert on the Great Depression” by his fellow mainstream economists. Bernanke essentially lays the problems of the Great Depression on bad financial policy by the Federal Reserve and other fiscal and monetary mistakes. This belief says that government fiscal and monetary policies, if well administered, can circumvent capitalist economic crises. Marxists and Schumpeterians are not so sanguine. Particularly Marxists argue that the Great Depression was the expression of fundamental discontinuities in the underlying economy and, if this is the case, then attempts to patch the current system up are bound to fail - and probably in the process waste resources and time.

Let me play out the reasons that we may be in a more profound crisis and, if this the case, why the current ever more panicked efforts by governments to swallow private sector debts cannot provide a basis for a sustainable recovery.

a) The forces of globalization are still underway and, as many of have been saying, they are putting downward pressure on incomes in the developed nations, which, of course, are the consumers of the products of the developing nations. A small telltale of this, IBM announced dramatically increased profits on only slightly higher sales. My guess is that these profits were made by substituting low-cost developing world service providers for their high-cost developing nation employees. This dynamic will continue putting pressure on wages in the developed nations and contributing to a deflationary dynamic.

b) Real wages have stagnated in the U.S. since 2000 for all but the wealthy.

c) Income inequality has increased globally and, as a result, the vast majority find themselves less and less capable to consume.

d) The technological revolution of digitization has changed the central source of value creation from the assembly line to the designer/engineer.

e) The entire credit complex that was built up after World War II that Vance Packard decried and the cult classic The Hidden Persuaders may be at its endpoint. This would mean a deleveraging on a scale never before seen in human history. Is it possible that we can no longer borrow from the future because the future is now?

If our situation is, as I suspect, more profound, then the newest bailout will fail, and this will be clear soon.