Creative Class

How do economic crises affect inequality? In the past, inequality increased prior to economic crises, only to moderate during and after crisis periods. In the present crisis, many expected inequality to decline. Others, however, note that with job loss in the millions and unemployment above 10 percent, while investment bankers continue to rake in big bonuses inequality is on the rise.

A new study by researchers at the Minneapolis Fed and New York University tracks inequality in the U.S. since 1970 (via Mark Thoma). I find that while income inequality has increased during the crisis, consumption inequality has declined.

Recent evidence shows how the distribution of resources changes in recessions in complex ways.

• The bottom of the earnings distribution falls off substantially relative to the median, causing earnings inequality to increase in recessions.
• This increase is substantially mitigated by government and private transfers. This mitigating effect, together with the fact that households can use borrowing and lending to smooth income declines, causes the consumption distribution to typically move very little during recessions.
• The current recession appears somewhat unusual. So far, consumption inequality has declined sharply, perhaps because the consumption-rich have been disproportionately hurt by declining asset prices.

I was talking to a 60-year-old, retired entrepreneur at a party the other night. Successful guy, very sharp. I asked him what he thinks is next for Florida and he said he did not have much hope for Florida, mostly due to lack of visionary leadership. Then he said something that really struck me. He suggested that Florida is on a course to reset to its old state of being “cheap, sunny, and dumb.”

That really struck me because while we are all talking about the great reset that is going on, I had not thought to ask the question, “What does Florida reset to?” And he may very well be right. At the state level, we are relaxing the rules for developers  to encourage even more sprawl to try to kick-start our construction industry again. We are actually lowering impact fees in places. We are lowering protections on the environment. This seems like a reset towards “cheap, sunny, and dumb.” There are powerful forces and attitudes that could very well push Florida back into this reset mode. And that is pretty scary.

While we all generally agree that this reset is needed and welcomed in some cases, we should be careful that we don’t reset back to a point so far back that we actually lose too much of our hard won progress. We all have to ask ourselves and our leadership what the plan and vision is for this reset. Each community is facing this and we act as if the reset is just something that will happen. That is not the case, yet I hear far too little  debate as to how we actively shape the reset.

American attitudes toward immigration are hardening, according to a new Gallup poll. Half of all Americans say immigration should be “decreased” – up 11 points from 39 percent last year.

Anti-immigration sentiment is growing across all major political groupings. Some 61 percent of Republicans say they would like to see immigration decreased, up from 46 percent in 2008, compared to 46 percent of Democrats, up from 39 percent; and 44 percent of Independents, up from 37 percent.

Southerners show the greatest anti-immigration sentiment with 54 percent saying they would like to see immigration decreased, followed by easterners (51 percent), midwesterners (48 percent), and westerners (44 percent).

The poll also saw a shift in American attitudes toward whether “immigration is a good or a bad thing for the country” with more than a third (36 percent) saying it is a bad thing.

Gallup notes that this marks “a return to the attitudes that prevailed in the first few years after 9/11.”

Immigration in America has gone in great cycles over the past century or two. While immigration has typically fallen during economic crises, the U.S. has prospered from its relative openness to global talent. America saw an influx of leading scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and musicians during the Great Depression which helped bolster its position at the frontiers of science, technology, entrepreneurship, and the arts during the long post-war boom.

Economic crises are transformative periods when talent flows can be reset and countries and regions rise and decline. The future belongs to those countries and regions that can attract the best and brightest across the entire world.

Growing anti-immigrant sentiment, should it continue, is bad news for American technology, entrepreneurship, and the economy in general. Let’s hope it turns around.

The impacts of the economic crisis continue to be felt unevenly across the country. I’ve previously looked at the factors associated with higher rates of regional unemployment. But which places have seen the biggest jumps in unemployment since the crisis hit?

To get at this, my colleague Charlotta Mellander conducted a straightforward statistical exercise called a “residual analysis.” It’s a simple way to track how a location performs relative to the performance of all other locations. Basically, the analysis examines to what extent the initial unemployment rate in May 2008 seems to have had an impact on the change in unemployment over the last year. Technically speaking,  Mellander ran a regression analysis predicting change in unemployment over this last year (May 2008 to May 2009) as a function of the initial level of unemployment at the beginning of the period (May 2008). She then compared the predicted values to the actual values.

The first graph shows the pattern for U.S. states.

The hardest hit states are ones that were doing badly even before the crisis hit. The fitted line is steep; the correlation between the two is 0.59 and significant; and the R2, 0.345. States below the line experienced a smaller than predicted increase in unemployment levels, while those above the line saw a larger than predicted increase.

Michigan has the highest unemployment rate, but Oregon (+3.0) has taken the biggest relative hit. Alabama (+1.8), Indiana (+1.6), South Carolina (+1.6), and Wisconsin (+1.4) have also taken bigger than expected hits. North Dakota has the lowest rate of unemployment but Alaska (-2.8), Mississippi (-2.1), Arkansas (-1.2), Connecticut (-1.2), Iowa (-1.1), and Nebraska (-1.2) have done better than expected.

The second graph repeats the analysis for U.S. metropolitan regions. It excludes two extreme outliers in California – Yuma and El Centro – which started the period with 20 percent plus rates of unemployment.

The hardest hit metros are also those that were doing badly before the crisis. The fitted line is again steep; the correlation coefficient is high, 0.59; and the R2, 0.351.

The crisis has hit hardest at smaller Rustbelt metros, especially those in Indiana: Elkhart-Goshen, IN; (+7.3); Kokomo, IN (+7.2); Decatur, GA (+3.2); Sheboygan, WI (+2.7); Fort Wayne, IN  (+2.3); and Youngstown, OH (+2.2).

While Detroit has faced staggering unemployment, the difference between its actual and predicted unemployment is +1.6. Among large metros, Portland (+3.1), Charlotte (+2.2), and, San Jose (+1.9) experienced even bigger than expected increases in unemployment. Las Vegas (1.5), Boise (1.29), and Orlando (+1.29) have also been hard hit. San Francisco (+.93), Miami (+.49), L.A., Chicago (+.31), Atlanta, and San Diego (+.21) also performed worse than their May 2008 unemployment levels predicted.

Several Oregon metros took worse than expected hits: Bend-(+4.6), Eugene-Springfield (+3.8), Portland (+3.0), Salem (+2.5), Medford (+2.4), Corvallis(+1.9). Metros that border Oregon like Spokane, Washington (+0.8) and Boise, Idaho (+1.3) also have high differentials.

Three Texas cities – Dallas (-1.0), Houston (-0.9), and Austin (-1.0) – performed considerably better than expected. Minneapolis-St. Paul (-0.4) did too. Cities along the Bos-Wash mega-region – Boston (-0.4), D.C. (-0.3), New York (-0.1), and even Philadelphia (-0.3) – also did better than predicted. Surprisingly, Phoenix also outperformed expectations (-.2), albeit modestly.

College towns number among the best performers, doing much better than predicted: Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, home to University of Illinois (-2.2); Iowa City, University of Iowa (-1.81); Manhattan Kansas, Kansas State University (-1.82); College Station, Texas, Texas A&M (-1.74); New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University (-1.54); State College, Pennsylvania, Penn State University (-1.47); Boulder, Colorado, University of Colorado (-.93); Austin, Texas, University of Texas (-1.0); Ann Arbor, Michigan, University of Michigan (-.94); and Ithaca, New York, Cornell University (-.97), among others.

In a widely read cover story published earlier this month, Business Week’s chief economist Michael Mandel asks, “To what degree has American innovation been ‘interrupted’?” Mandel argues that the economic crisis is partly the result of America’s failure to generate high-impact commercial innovations.

What if, outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted?

The crux of his argument is that many, if not most, of the big breakthrough innovations that were supposed to occur over the past decade or so have failed to materialize. His article provides a raft of compelling examples of once-heralded innovations – in areas from biotech to micro-machines – that have simply not panned out. This failure to commercialize and diffuse these new breakthrough innovations – America’s inability to set in motion the great gales of “creative destruction” identified long ago by Joseph Schumpeter as key to capitalist growth – he argues, is a key contributor to both the financial bubble and the economic crisis.

But since there is compelling evidence that the figures are overstated by the credit bubble and statistical problems, we can construct a plausible narrative for the financial bust that gives a starring role to innovation-or rather, to the lack of it. It goes something like this: In the late 1990s most economists and CEOs agreed that the U.S. was embarking on a once-in-a-century innovation wave-not just in info tech but also in biotech and many other technologies. Forecasters upped their long-run growth estimates for the U.S. economy. Consumers borrowed against their home equity, assuming their future incomes would rise. And foreign investors lent America money by buying up U.S. securities, assuming the country would come up with enough new products to pay off the accumulated trade deficit.

Mandel lists four areas in which America’s recent performance has been lackluster: stock market performance in the pharmaceutical, biotech, and life-science sectors; declining real wages for highly educated workers; a mounting trade deficit in high-tech sectors (which grew from $30 billion U.S. surplus in 1998, turning into a $53 billion deficit by 2008); and little improvement in the death rate (which he sees as a measure of the failure of breakthrough medical technologies to materialize) as evidence for the failure of American innovation.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Mandel and I find his general thesis about lagging U.S. productivity and job growth over the past decade or so to be both intriguing and plausible. And since so much of my own work focused on the relationship between innovation and American competitiveness was flagging, I find myself particularly drawn to his most recent “innovation-interrupted” thesis.

My first book, The Breakthrough Illusion, written with Martin Kenney in 1990, argued that the U.S. system of venture capital-backed breakthrough innovation was skewed to encourage short-term super-returns from new breakthrough innovations, and was structurally ill-suited to capturing the longer-term wealth derived from developing these innovations into successful products and industries. That work drew upon the intriguing thesis of innovation theorist Henry Ergas, who argued that the U.S. had developed a shifting system of innovation geared to near-constant development of new products through new firms, as opposed to a deepening system (think of German cars) which continuously adds technology to upgrade existing industries. According to Ergas, the key to long-run prosperity lies in synthesizing both strategies – cultivating an economy which could deploy new technologies in new sectors while at the same time deploying them to upgrade and revolutionize old ones.

I opened my 2002 book, Rise of the Creative Class, with a time-traveler experiment. Someone traveling from 1900 to 1950 would be blown away by the varied technical marvels that surrounded them from televisions to airplanes. But while someone who time-traveled from 1950 to the 2000 would see a few new technologies, like the personal computer and the cell phone, he or she would likely be much more amazed by sweeping social changes. And in my 2004 book, Flight of the Creative Class, I argued that America’s innovative edge in the late 20^th century was inextricably tied to its ability to attract foreign scientists, technologists, and engineers. The combination of mounting U.S. immigration restrictions and growing efforts by foreign countries to retain their own best and brightest (and attract others from around the world), I suggested, was an under-appreciated threat to U.S. competitiveness and prosperity.

In fact, I found Mandel’s essay so compelling that I decided to take a look at the actual data. Mandel rightly says that we currently lack a comprehensive “innovation index” that tracks commercial innovation: “There’s no government-constructed “innovation index” that would allow us to conclude unambiguously that we’ve been experiencing an innovation shortfall. Still, plenty of clues point in that direction.”

True enough. But research into the economics of innovation has discovered at least one reasonable measure of innovation – patents. There are problems and biases with using patents as a measure of innovation, as economists who specialize in the subject have pointed out. Patents measure certain areas of technology more than others. In some areas of commercially important R&D, patents are rarely used. Other areas, including less commercially relevant ones, are awash in patents for minutiae. And patents are not synonymous with commercially relevant innovations. That said, patents do provide a consistent, broad-gauge indicator of the level and rate of innovation – one that can be tracked over long periods of time and be broken out by nation, city, and region, and by U.S. resident versus non-resident or foreign inventors.

With my Prosperity Institute team – Charlotte Mellander, Scott Pennington, Dieter Kogler, and Patrick Adler – I’ve taken a look at the trends in U.S.-patented innovations. In a series of posts this week, I will report our findings. Tomorrow we’ll look at the trends in U.S. patents over time. Wednesday we’ll explore patenting by U.S. resident versus non-resident (foreign) inventors. Thursday we’ll examine the geographic distribution of innovation – tracking the rise of some innovative regions and the fall of others. And Friday we’ll discuss the longer-run historical relationship between innovation and economic crises.

…Cassandra is universally disliked (h/t to Bob Eberhart).

What are we to make of this poll that shows Obama rapidly losing altitude with voters, particularly the Independent voters? Just as Obama was being inaugurated, and immediately afterward, I wrote a number of posts on this blog warning about his mistakes in taking ownership of the Bush mistakes. After taking heat from my friends and the incredible (the root word here is credit, which means trustworthiness etc.) rise of the stock market, I decided to keep my mouth shut.

Now we are nearly six months into the new presidency and what do we have? Obama has invoked Bush era Imperial Presidency secrecy rules, signing statements, and even willingness to torture. The CIA has admitted lying to Congress, the direct representatives of the people, and there are no prosecutions. Unemployment that is reaching ever new highs, and the green shoots the Administration promised shriveling and dying. Wars in Afghanistan and now Pakistan are spiraling downward. For those who admonished opponents of these wars that there was no choice, I can guarantee you that the war will be lost and we will be worse off for having gotten involved. It is existential bad faith and terrible politics to say there are no choices. The Iraq War continues on. Our treasure is being squandered even as we are going bankrupt as a nation.

The real catastrophe that threatens to swamp Obama are the bailouts without end to Wall Street and, even more important, the increasing perception among Americans that Wall Street has become a rigged casino where citizens, pension funds, and 401Ks go to be sheared. Whereas Obama should have begun prosecuting executives who lied materially about the status of their companies, e.g., Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and AIG, they have so far been given a free pass. There are stock market rumors about front running in on a massive scale, tip-offs from the Federal Reserve to selected banks about forthcoming actions that allow the equivalent of insider trading, etc. This is serious stuff.

It was these abuses that were the core of the Roosevelt clean-up of Wall Street. There have been massive bailouts, but no programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps etc. to put people back to work.

Consider the observed pecking order of bailouts: Wall Street gets trillions; GM and Chrysler 100s of millions; state and local governments tens of millions; ordinary citizens very little. If Obama is to save his presidency, then he needs to fight as hard for the Main Street as he has for Wall Street. Let’s hope the newest polls give him the message.

How are you folks feeling? Has the Obama Administration been doing the right things? Is this the way forward for the country?

The economic crisis appears to be causing a slight but noticeable shift from the suburbs to the cities, according to an analysis of recent Census data by Brookings demographer William Frey, reported in the Wall Street Journal.

“The central-city population in U.S. metropolitan areas with more than one million people (excluding New Orleans …) grew at an annual rate of 0.97% between July 2007 and July 2008 …That compared with a growth rate of 0.90% in 2006-2007, and growth rates around 0.5% in the years between 2002 and 2005, when the robust real-estate market led to new jobs and new housing developments outside the cities, where open land is more plentiful … Population growth in the cities has translated to slower growth in the suburbs. U.S. suburbs in metro areas greater than 1 million people grew at a 1.11% annual rate in 2007-2008, the same as a year earlier and down from growth rates between 1.29% and 1.48% between 2002 and 2005.”

The combined effects of the recession, job loss, and the housing crisis have made it more difficult for many to sell their houses, in effect locking them in place and slowing rates of residential and geographic mobility. Frey points out that:

“This shows cities were reviving at the end of this decade, and they are also surviving a recession that has been a lot harsher for other parts of our landscape …Cities are big enough and diverse enough that they are able to survive these ups and downs in the economy a lot better.”

And this is especially true of the biggest and most diverse cities, like New York and Chicago, which are hubs of large mega-regions, as well as magnets like greater D.C. and Silicon Valley which continue to draw in highly skilled and ambitious people from the U.S. and the world. Large Rustbelt cities, like Detroit, continue to lose people, and rates of growth in housing-driven Sunbelt cities have slowed considerably.

Writing in The Atlantic, I argued that the economic crisis was reshaping America’s economic geography, with big city centers and mega-region hubs like New York City, talent-rich regions like greater D.C., and college towns weathering the storm relatively well, while Rustbelt cities and shallow-rooted Sunbelt economies being much harder hit.

Take a look at the graph below from the newly released SP/Case-Shiller Home Price Index for April.

Phoenix and Las Vegas have taken the biggest hits: Housing prices there have declined more than 50 percent in the past year. Miami is next, then Detroit where housing prices have sunk to mid-90s levels. San Francisco is the only significant talent region to be pummeled. Part of this is to be expected given the tremendous run-up in housing prices there, but still prices remain higher than 2000 levels. San Diego, L.A., and Tampa have all seen declines in excess of 40 percent.

Housing prices have declined less significantly in greater D.C., Chicago (hub of the great Chi-Pitts mega-region and a magnet for regional talent), Seattle (a high-tech, high human capital center), Atlanta (a talent hub for the southeast), New York, Portland, Boston, Denver – (talent hub for the Rockies), Dallas (a mega-region hub), and Charlotte (which along with Atlanta hubs the great Char-lanta mega-region). Cleveland breaks the pattern, but like Detroit its absolute housing values have fallen. Prices in greater D.C., along with Denver, Dallas, and Cleveland, were actually up in April.

The Index also tracks prices in terms of their 2000 baseline. Nationally, it’s at 140, meaning housing prices remain 40 percent higher than in 2000, more or less in line with 2003 prices. Looked at it this way, the geographic pattern could not be more striking.

Rustbelt cities have seen, by far, the biggest declines relative to 2000 prices. Detroit and Cleveland are the only two cities where housing values have slipped below 2000 values – Detroit at 69 percent and Cleveland at 98 percent.

Prices have just about fallen back to 2000 levels in Sunbelt cities like Phoenix (105), Atlanta (105), Las Vegas (112), Dallas (115) and Charlotte (118). Miami (145) and Tampa (140) break the pattern; their prices remain significantly above 2000 levels. My guess is that prices will continue to fall and sharply in these two markets in the coming months.

But prices in prices in Boston (146), L.A. (149), greater D.C. (167), and New York (170) remain significantly above – 50 to 70 percent above – 2000 levels. While these prices may dip some, my hunch is these markets will not be devastated and will remain substantially above 2000 levels.

The SP/Case-Shiller Index suggests that housing prices are still falling and have another 30 or more to go before they hit bottom. One thing you can be sure of, it will continue to be felt unequally across regions.

Green chutes optimism is misplaced. The economic crisis continues to deepen at a pace that is on par with or worse than that of the Great Depression, according to an updated analysis by economists Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O’Rourke. They conclude that even though “trade and stock markets have shown some improvement without reversing the overall conclusion – today’s crisis is at least as bad as the Great Depression” (pointer via Mark Thoma).

Their first graph (below) tracks world industrial output leading them to conclude that: “World industrial production continues to track closely the 1930s fall, with no clear signs of ‘green shoots.”‘ They add that: “North Americans (U.S. & Canada) continue to see their industrial output fall approximately in line with what happened in the 1929 crisis, with no clear signs of a turn around.”

The economic crisis continues to reshape our economic geography.

Despite short-term hits, the world’s leading financial centers, New York and London, are likely to remain on top through the crisis and beyond, according to Peking University professor Michael Pettis, writing in Newsweek:

Financial crises tend to trigger overwrought predictions of major economic shifts–and then debunk them. Today’s global economic meltdown is no different. In recent months, it has become popular to predict that New York and London (or NyLon, as they’re together known) will soon lose market share as cities in the emerging world use the crisis to wrest away dominance. But history suggests that the opposite is more likely: that New York and London will actually increase in importance over the decade to come …

Big centers have two huge advantages over smaller rivals: greater liquidity and larger networks. Big investors tend to flock to big financial capitals because they offer higher volume and lower trading costs, and issuers of stocks, bonds and other financial products follow the flock of investors. …When a liquidity boom ends, however, it tends to accentuate the advantages of big markets while diminishing those of smaller ones.

China Digital Times picks up China Law Blog’s similar reading about:

why New York will remain as the world’s financial capital and why, despite the projected growth of Asia’s economies, we should not expect Shanghai, Hong Kong, or anywhere else to usurp it. At least not for an exceedingly long time.

Older Rustbelt centers continue to get clobbered by the structural decline of manufacturing. Job losses at bankrupt automakers GM and Chrysler have been highly concentrated in older Rustbelt centers as this NYT map shows.

And, the sun continues to set on shallow-rooted Sunbelt cities, according to this Associated Press analysis.

Some cities — Las Vegas, Phoenix, Fort Myers are good examples — hitched their floats to housing bubbles and got caught up in development that depended largely on, well, development itself, rather than sustainable, scalable, productive industry, economic analysts say. …

AP Stress Index figures, which calculate the economic impact of the recession on a scale of 1 to 100, illustrate how the downturn has played out in some of these communities:

In Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, the Stress Index more than doubled from 5.12 at the beginning of the recession in December 2007 to 12.67 in March 2009, worsened by a foreclosure rate that nearly tripled.

Mounting foreclosures in Las Vegas’ Clark County drove up its Stress Index score from 10.5 at the start of the recession to 19.3 in March 2009.

In Lee County, home to Fort Myers, unemployment has doubled and foreclosures have soared 75 percent since the recession began, lifting its Stress Index from 10.5 to 19.98 …

Now Phoenix’s hotel industry is tanking, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“Phoenix suffers from the dual challenges of overbuilding and shrinking demand due to the national drop-off in corporate conferences,” said David Loeb, a hotel-industry analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. “All of this means that Phoenix’s hotel market has experienced one of the steepest downturns among the big markets.”