Creative Class

One of the keys to building a sustainable, creative economy is leveraging a city or region’s assets and engaging the citizens with those assets. A great piece in today’s WSJ highlights how Pittsburgh, PA and Carnegie Mellon University (where Richard taught/lived for years) has supported its citizens’ efforts to learn about and build robots - including edible robots! Here is the website for Robot 250 (the year-long robot festival).

From the article by Clare Ansberry:

Mickey McManus took five seedless cucumbers, carved them so they looked like fingers and anchored them to a hunk of Edam cheese. To this “hand,” he attached a small electronic device, programmed to respond to sound; when someone laughed or clapped, the fingers flexed. He brought his cucumber robot to a wine-and-cheese party as an appetizer, along with a robotic Rice Krispies Treats man that pivoted whenever the lights dimmed…

The yearlong program, called Robot 250, coincides with the city’s 250th birthday. Teachers fanned out to 13 neighborhoods, providing materials, instruction and troubleshooting. “We wanted to put technology into the hands of as many people as possible,” says Illah Nourbakhsh, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, who came up with the idea…

People in Pittsburgh have been building robots for decades. Seventy years ago, an engineer at Westinghouse Electric created Elektro the Moto-Man, who could walk and smoke cigarettes and had a 77-word vocabulary. His sidekick, Sparko the Moto-Dog, wagged his tail, sat and barked on command.

Today, there are more than 30 robotic companies in Pittsburgh. They make drowsy-driver warning systems, and robots that help with surgery, unload crates and search for life on distant planets. Alcoa Inc. has a 6-foot-tall robot spokesperson, Al, who hosted a recent Robot Block Party at the Carnegie Science Center.

Part of the Robot 250 event, the block party was billed as the city’s largest and most diverse public gathering of robots. A solar-powered robot mingled with hazmat robots that search for explosives. Robots built by teenagers were on display. Red Rover, a four-wheeled robot that has become a local celebrity in robot circles, made an appearance. Red Rover and his creators are vying for the Google Lunar X Prize, a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon and transmit video, images and data back to Earth.

Pittsburgh has had many struggles over the years, but is continually trying to use its historical strengths to claw its way back to the leading edge of the economy. Many cities and regions could take a cue from Pittsburgh’s efforts to engage its people and their creativity. What is your city doing? Is it working?

That’s the title of an intriguing new study by my former Carnegie Mellon colleague, Lowell Taylor along with Dan Black and Natalia Kolesnikova (h/t: Allison Kemper). (Black and Taylor collaborated with Gary Gates on the “gay index” studies.) They find “an extremely large variation in female labor supply across metropolitan areas in the United States.” Looking at employment trends of married, white, non-Hispanic women ages 25-55 with a high school level education, they show that more than three-quarters (79 percent) of such women are employed in Minneapolis versus less than half (49 percent) in New York.  And they find a major reason to be the cost of commuting.

Tyler Cowen counters that amenities and density would seem to matter:

“With all due respect to The Walker Art
Center, if I wanted to be a kept woman I would not start my quest in
Minneapolis.  High density, as you find in Manhattan, means lots of fun things
to do in your copious free time as a kept woman and also a higher degree of
income inequality and thus the hope of snaring a rich man.  There’s a reason why
they didn’t set Sex in the City in Paramus and most of the women there
will be working even when the traffic gets worse.”

The authors clearly know a lot about amenities and density. Amenities were at the center of their story about why gay men live in San Francisco. It was a over discussion of amenities and cities afterall that Gates and I met and decided to collaborate. And Kolesnikova took my PhD seminar on said while a doctoral student at CMU.

Seems to me that Columbia University’s Lena Edlund’s work may also bear here. Edlund, puzzling over the consistent pattern where single women outnumber single me in large cities world-wide, suggests a main reason may be that men essentially have to “pay” women more for marriage in these locations - the costs of having and raising kids.  The study does look at the effects of highly educated power couples and concludes that such arguments don’t really help explain labor force participation of married women varies so widely by location.

The extent of the divergence is indeed very interesting, and also consistent with the general sorting of the population on economic and demographic as well as psychological dimensions.

Your thoughts?