Globalization of Creativity

Airoots writes:

Meanwhile, two types of cities are emerging as new centers of art and cultural creation: First, the new urban giants of the developing world such as Bangkok, Shanghai and Mumbai, but also Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Rio, and Buenos Aires, Johannesburg and Dakar. As they grow and mutate, these cities are open and messy enough to provide artists with interstitial spaces they can takeover and make their own. Then, smaller cities such as Philadelphia, Zurich, Barcelona or Goa are also becoming increasingly attractive to artists. They often offer lower rents, wider space and a better quality of life. Thanks to the relative democratization of communication and transportation, creative people can now really be in touch with the rest of the world while living in places better suited to their budget and aspirations.

According to Adam Stokes, an American DJ living in Shanghai who’s emailed us through the blog: “Shanghai is exciting and slutty again, just like the old days. Even as an outsider, you can observe a lot of the interesting things happening in the city. Foreigners have a lot of freedom to make it up as we go along, and while we’ll never win in the end, we can misbehave or take opportunities to try all sorts of things we’d need to haplessly intern for back home. It’s cheap enough to make bad choices too, so if you wind up broke, you won’t starve.”

However all of these cities are also on a global track of urban transformation and integration into the established art scene. The creative industry is well on its way to connecting these new spaces and transforming them into expensive and exclusive zones of networking.

Milken's Best Performing Cities (2007)

The Milken Institute does it again.  It's 2007 edition of "Best Performing Cities" was just released.  Kudos & props to Ocala Florida and Wilmingon NC (#1 and #2 respectively).

From the report:

The top 10 performers of the 200 largest metros:

1. Ocala, Florida
2. Wilmington, North Carolina
3. Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, California
4. Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, Arizona
5. Orlando-Kissimmee, Florida
6. Naples-Marco Island, Florida
7. McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas
8. Provo-Orem, Utah
9. Las Vegas-Paradise, Nevada
10. Raleigh-Cary, North Carolina

The Best Performing Cities Index is outcomes-based. Its components measure job, wage and salary, and technology growth. The Index ranks U.S. metros based on their ability to create and sustain jobs. It includes both long-term (five years) and short-term (one year) measurements of employment and salary growth. There are also four measurements of technology output growth, which are included because of technology’s crucial role in regional economic growth.

Yet another way to measure prosperity?  It's still focused on "trailing" indicators.  We like our overall measures which include talent (Creative Class) and tolerance (inclusiveness) and help serve more as a "leading" indicator. You can get the full report here (free sub required).

posted by Kevin Stolarick

BEA Releases New Numbers on Metropolitan Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

From the BEA's press release:

According to these prototype estimates, in 2005, real GDP by metropolitan area grew in 327 of the 363 metropolitan areas. Growth in real GDP by metropolitan area in 2005 was strong along the western and southern coasts (Chart 1). Growth was particularly robust and widespread in the metropolitan areas located in Florida. In contrast, the metropolitan areas near the Great Lakes did not perform as well.

Perspective on GDP by Metropolitan Area for 2005

• Current-dollar GDP for the Nation was $12.4 trillion; it was $1.6 trillion for California, the largest state
• In comparison, in the New York metropolitan area it was $1.1 trillion
• Metropolitan areas produced 90 percent of U.S. current-dollar GDP; the five largest metropolitan areas accounted for 23 percent of the U.S. total
• The smallest 75 metropolitan areas accounted for less than two percent of U.S. GDP
• When ranked by current-dollar GDP, the New York metropolitan area would rank second among states and 10th among countries in 2005.

There are many ways to measure "prosperity" and GDP is certainly among the most common.  We've been waiting for these numbers to become available.  But, now the question is not which regions are growing the fastest (GDP is obviously increasing with population and firm growth), but which regions are the most productive (GDP per person) and what is happening to productivity growth?  What other questions should we start looking at now that this data is available??

posted by Kevin Stolarick

What a Mind Blower

I guess I thought Rise had reach, but this one really surprised me. GOP Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee recommends it to students at Ouachita Baptist University. The story in the Bapist Press.

"The one cultural norm that transcends all of the generations, all languages is the transmission of our culture through our art forms. It is the one way in which one generation speaks to the next," Huckabee said.

"It makes perfect sense when you think that even in the way that God designed us, we were designed to be creative. After all, if He is the Creator and He has made a creation and we have been created in His image, it would be the logical conclusion that in His image, since He's a creative God, that part of what He has created in us is a creativity that ought to be stimulated and enhanced and somehow not put aside," he added.

A former Ouachita trustee, Huckabee recommended that students read a book by Richard Florida, "The Rise of the Creative Class," in which the author predicts that the future economy will be driven not by those who are strong in technology, agriculture or manufacturing but those who are creative.

"The accommodation of the creative class really is the foundation for the future of our nation's economic strength," Huckabee said.

The Great Divergence

This picture really is worth a thousand words. But do look at Tyler Cowen's comments on Paul Krugman's original post.

My own two cents is that this shift, like the one before it (the long gilded age) is a consequence of a major economic shift, in this case the shift from the industrial to the knowledge-based or creative economy.  I date the emergence of the modern creative economy at roughly 1980. Since that time the US has created roughly 20 million jobs in the creative sector of the economy - everything from science and technology to arts and enterainment and the professions.  Such major shifts, as Marx and Schumpeter long ago argued, open up whole new industries and whole new sources of wealth. Left to their own devices, economic divergence is a natural consequence.

New institutional arrangements are required to bridge these gaps. In the post-World War II world it was mainly about unions and social democracy.  Like them or not, such institutional arrangements worked because they allowed the top to expand while the bottom gained some share of economic prosperity.  And like them or not, there is no going backward here: The old post-war institutional landscape simply will not work in the creative age. But one thing is obvious: "Lopping off the top" would be an unmitigated disaster, stopping economic growth in its tracks.

The great unanswered question of our age is what will do the trick - what kinds of institutions can square the proverbial circle in the creative age, enabling the peaks of the creative economy to expand while pulling up its valleys. The alternative is not pretty.

Abolish Iowa?

Well, not really. I was there for a great visit to Iowa State last week. And  I met two of our favorite CCG alums, Amanda Styron and Jesse Elliott. Richard Doak came to my talk and makes some great points in this piece from Des Moines Register.

Let's just give up trying to promote Iowa.  Then let's abolish the state Department of Economic Development.  Finally, let's erase the state's borders. Let the state fade into a general region known as the Midwest rather than remaining a rather small, arbitrarily created governmental entity known as Iowa.

That's silly, of course. Iowa can't disappear from the map. But it might be useful to conceptualize that happening. Iowans need to start thinking more regionally - not just regionally within the state but regionally across state lines. We should begin to see ourselves as a part of something bigger - the Midwest.

That thought occurred last week while listening to a guest lecture delivered by economic growth expert Richard Florida at Iowa State University. ...
Florida's great discovery was that economic growth occurs in regions that are most inviting to creative people. That's what revolutionized thinking about economic development.

The smart thing to do would be to take all the money wasted on business incentives and plow it into education and quality-of-life improvements. ... The hitch is that Iowa might be too small to pull it off alone.

The regional nature of growth suggests that Iowa will fare best as part of a larger region, not as a small state trying to go it alone. Besides, Iowa has never had much success trying to sell itself as an entity. The state has tried for decades to improve its national image, only to get poll results that show Iowa has no image. The state barely registers in the national consciousness. Trying to pitch Iowa as a sanctuary for creative types might be a tough sell.

Why even bother? Why not stop trying to sell Iowa and start selling the Midwest? Imagine all the states of the Upper Midwest getting together. They could swear a non-aggression pact on business incentives and merge their state universities into one mega system, combining them to make a gigantic dynamo of economic growth. Then they could join in a massive campaign to market the Midwestern lifestyle to the rest of the nation.They could sell this as the best region in America, because it would be.

Amen, Richard!  And Iowa is already connected to the world's third largest mega-region, the great Chi-Pitts mega running from Pittsburgh through Cleveland over to Detroit, across to Chicago and Minneapolis and into Iowa.

Place to Retire

Kevin Stolarick of the Creative Class Group and Lisa Taber of FortiusOne have paired up to develop a series of 'heat maps' that show the hottest places in the country based on your lifestage and some preselected criteria.  The maps allow you to zoom in on specific parts of the country or see how your current city compares to others.

Place to Retire Map 

Come back Monday to see next week's map: Want It All

World's Greenest Cities

Here's a link to the Reader's Digset study of the world's greenest locations courtesy of Matthew Kahn one of the study's principal authors.  Below is their ranking of the World's Greenest, Most Livable Cities. Many interesting findings here, particularly New York ranking as America's leading green, liveable city. Would be cool to compare these to our creativity rankings: I'm always being asked how my rankings stack up to environmental sustainability.

5 Best

1. Stockholm

2. Oslo

3. Munich

4. Paris

5. Frankfurt

U.S. Cities

15. New York

22. Washington, D.C.

23. Chicago

26. San Francisco

36. Atlanta

43. Denver

46. Houston

55. San Diego

57. Los Angeles

60. Phoenix

Creative Goteborg

Stephen Metcalf has a fascinating article on Sweden's "second city" in the NYTimes special magazine, The City. This bit made my day.

On my second day in the city, at an annual art exhibition-rock concert-barbecue called Warm Up!, a young Swedish gangsta in a hoodie, stinky sneakers and aviator specs asked me if I had heard of Richard Florida. Florida is an American economist and urban theorist who believes that the presence of a “high bohemian” class, of artists, musicians, high-tech workers and gay men and women, drives economic growth more than sports stadiums or iconic architecture. When I called Florida, he was elated to discover that Swedish club kids cite his work and quick to return the compliment. “Look, England ruled the world, and it was a tiny island,” he said. “It's possible the world is going in the opposite direction of the big state.” Florida believes a small, well-educated, super-value-added country like Sweden could thrive and influence the world, or some portion of it, by being a knowledge-workers' paradise.

Can Architecture Save a City?

Denny Lee ruminates on how a great piece of architecture - Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilboa - effects the soul of a city.

On paper at least, Bilbao seems to have it all: world-class museum, fine Basque cuisine, a rollicking night life and lots of shopping. But like the new bike paths that were rarely used during my visit, the city lacks the critical mass of attractions to take it from a provincial post-industrial town, to a global cosmopolitan city. And in the meantime, it is losing the shabby edge that gave the city its earlier appeal.

The concentration of first-rate architecture is astounding, even without Gehry's titanium masterpiece. But architecture alone does not a city make. Bilbao is all dressed-up, but hasn't figured where to go.  “Our local culture still hasn't integrated with the Guggenheim,” said Alfonso Martínez Cearra, the general manager of Bilbao Metropoli-30, a public-private partnership that is guiding the city's revitalization. “This is still an industrial city.”

The disconnect between Bilbao the brand, and Bilbao the city was on display one Saturday night, when the narrow streets of Casco Viejo were once again packed with young bar-hoppers. The smell of marijuana wafted from a crowd outside a bar on Calle de Somera. In the group was Ikel, a 22-year-old studying to be an engineer, like his father. “I've never been to the Guggenheim,” Ikel said between puffs, as mechanical street cleaners starting scrubbing beer and urine from the cobblestones. “It's for tourists.”

Do you agree?

Making Room for Bikes

I'm always amazed at the number of bikes on the road in Toronto where cycling plays a major role in communting and getting around. Now rhe Big Apple wants to get into the game.

Cyclists and pedestrians never quite imagined it this way, but maybe there is a use for all those cars after all. The city is planning to remake seven blocks of Ninth Avenue in Chelsea into what officials are billing enthusiastically, perhaps a bit hyperbolically, as the street of the future. The most unusual aspect of the design, which will run from 16th Street to 23rd Street, is that it uses a lane of parked cars to protect cyclists from other traffic. It does this by placing the bike lane directly next to the sidewalk on the western edge of Ninth Avenue, which is the left side of the street for those facing north, in the direction of traffic. The plan also takes a lane from cars, creating more room for pedestrians and for the bicycle lane. ...Next to the bike lane, which will be 10 feet wide, will be an eight-foot section of pavement that will act as a buffer, with plastic posts and large planters to keep cars from entering. The parking lane will be to the right of the buffer zone, and beyond that will be three lanes for traffic.The result will be a barrier of parked cars between cyclists and moving vehicles.

More here.

Creativity Gap?

Business Wire reports on a new survey of the creativity gap in US workplaces.

At a time when many economists and futurists are pointing to creativity and innovation as one of the cornerstones of U.S. competitiveness in the years ahead, a new survey finds that, while an overwhelming majority of American workers believe they are instinctively creative, fewer than two in three think they are tapping their creative capacities on the job.

The survey, commissioned by the Fairfax County (Virginia) Economic Development Authority (FCEDA), host of the 2007 National Conference on the Creative Economy in October (www.creativeeconomies.org), and conducted by Ipsos Public Affairs, found that 88 percent of U.S. workers consider themselves creative. But when it comes to creativity in the workplace, just 63 percent said their positions were creative, and a comparable 61 percent thought similarly about the companies for which they work.

This “creativity gap” – the disparity between the creative resources available and those being employed – can be an important indicator, experts say, in determining how well American companies are preparing for a future U.S. economy that will rely on creativity and innovation more than ever. ...

The survey found that most workers put a high premium on creativity at work. Seventy-five percent of respondents thought their employers valued their creativity, and even more telling, one in five (21%) said they would change jobs in order to be more creative at work even if it meant earning less money. Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed indicated they would move if it meant being part of a more creative community. This was especially true of younger workers ages 18-34 (37%).

Global Quality of Life

Yahoo News and AFP report the findings from a new study of quality of life around the world (hat tip Dean Alexander):

Nordic countries take the greatest care of their environment and their people, according to a ranking published on Thursday by the publication Reader's Digest. Finland comes top of the 141-nation list, followed by Iceland, Norway and Sweden, and then Austria, Switzerland, Ireland and Australia. ...The United States comes in 23rd, China 84th and India 104th.

The ranking combines environmental factors, such as air and water quality, respect for biodiversity and greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as social factors, such as gross domestic product, access to education, unemployment rate and life expectancy. The statistical basis is the UN's Human Development Index and the Environmental Sustainability Index drawn up by Yale and Columbia universities and the World Economic Forum.

European countries -- again, led by Scandinavia -- also top the Reader's Digest assessment of 72 cities for their quality of life. The criteria for this include public transport, parks, air quality, rubbish recycling and the price of electricity.

The winner is Stockholm, followed by Oslo, Munich and Paris. Asia's mega-cities fare the worst. At the bottom is Beijing, preceded by Shanghai, Mumbai, Guangzhou and Bangkok.

These rankings seem to jibe with the ones our team did for Flight of the Creative Class. I can't seem to find a link to the original study. Please let us know if  locate  a link.

Dumpster Chic

This is just one of the many reasons I love Toronto.

For the next 11 days, Swintak (above) will be holed up in an abandoned building at a municipal waste disposal site in the Toronto portlands infusing a forlorn dumpster with a veneer of luxe. "A little bit of beige, some white," says Swintak, running a hand along the glassy shellacked inner walls of her eventually posh receptacle. When it's done, a suite of rosewood furniture, multiple-hundred thread count sheets and a two-item room-service menu will give the outsize garbage can a sheen of the luxurious. The notion? A boutique hotel for one night only in an alley behind a Burger King at College St. and Spadina Ave. The installation is part of Nuit Blanche, Toronto's freshly adopted, all-night chaotic art spectacle on Sept. 29 from 7:03 p.m. to sunrise.

Read the whole story here.

The Velvet Hammer

That's the "tool" Jack and Suzy Welch advocate for managing creative people in their recent Business Week column. 

Do the creatives in an organization need special handling? In a word, yes. Leading people who often don't think of themselves as employees of anyone or anything, let alone followers embedded in an organization consisting of levels, layers, and moving parts, is about as far from Management 101 as you can get. In fact, it's an art, drawing on all sorts of soft skills, like empathy, an ability to nurture, and ad hoc psychological counseling. But what a mistake if you lead creative people from your heart and stop there. Managing creative people also requires—it even demands—a measure of authority. Nothing heavy-handed, of course. You don't want your resident out-of-the-box thinkers running for the exits. With their fresh ideas and unique perspectives, they can be, and often are, the reason for breakthrough products and new ways of working, and even the impetus for whole new businesses. Still, creative people must know that boundaries and values exist, and they have to respect them. Because if they don't, creative people have a way of going off the rails—and taking the workaday core of the company with them.

Read the whole thing here. Do you agree or disagree?

Creative Berlin

Berlin now boasts eye-catching modern architecture, a thriving contemporary art scene, a boom in design and concept stores, and serious global gastronomy. It's also a bargain: Luxury hotels are among the cheapest in Europe, and an ice cream cone that costs $5 in London is $1 here. As Mayor Klaus Wowereit says: "Berlin is poor, but it's sexy."

Quite a quite from a mayor. Check out the story in Business Week.
 

Is a Global Housing Crunch in the Cards?

The US housing crunch has gotten a lot of ink. But according to this report in the Economist, housing prices may be even more out of whack in other countries around the globe.

The S&P/Case-Shiller national index, the best gauge of American house prices, peaked last year after rising by 134% in the previous decade. France, Sweden and Denmark have all had booms of similar size. In Britain, Australia, Spain and Ireland, the ten-year increase in house prices has been even larger. If America is staring at a nasty housing crash, what does this say about the fate of frothy markets elsewhere?

Creative Food

Betsy Donald came to visit us at the Prosperity Institute. She's doing incredible work on creativity in the food industry. Not just celebrity chefs but across the food supply chain.  So today on the plane from Toronto to Iowa I was more than pleasantly surprised to find this New York Times article on the great Alice Waters, who is worried because:

true, radical change — a country full of people who eat food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it and good for the earth — is simply not coming fast enough. ... A revolution in how we eat means respecting food and the people who produce it, she said. In her world, every aspect of this revolution, be it related to agricultural policy, the environment or obesity, must begin with a plate of lovely, locally produced food and work backward from there.

To Work or Not To Work?

According to a Census survey from 2004, with a population of 227 million over the age of 15 in the U.S., almost 79 million of those people (35%) did not work for the prior 4-months.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census just released it's report Reasons People Do Not Work: 2004.

From the report:

At even the busiest times, a large number of working-age people in the United States do not have or want jobs. Whatever the state of the economy, many people, even those who want to work, have been outside the workforce for long periods of time. Whether their joblessness is brief or extended, nonworkers constitute a large and important pool of human resources. Much research has been devoted to studying the characteristics and behavior of workers. Less is known about nonworkers. This is the second report that uses data from the nationwide Survey of Income and Program Participation SIPP) to fill some of the gaps in this knowledge. It examines several key characteristics of nonworkers, the main reasons they do not work, and some of the connections between their characteristics and their reasons for not working.

Retirement (38 percent) and school attendance (19 percent) were the most commonly reported reasons. Chronic illness or disability was the main reason for almost 1 in 7 nonworkers (15 percent). Taking care of children or others accounted for 13 percent. Around 6 percent cited an economic reason for not working––about 2 percent were on layoff, and 4 percent were unable to find work. Approximately 2 percent reported a temporary injury or illness as the main cause for being out of  work. The remaining 7 percent either were not interested in working or reported an “other” reason.

It's clear that the number of people actively looking for work is related to current economic conditions.  When times are difficult, many people give up and just stop looking for work and are then no longer counted as "unemployed".  Understanding everyone who is not currently in the workforce is a more meaningful undertaking.

The importance of understanding that every single person has creative potential and that ways to tap all that potential will be the true source of competitive advantage is reinforced by this study.  As my colleague in Sweden, Charlotta Mellander, points out, the real challenge is making jobs and occupations rewarding enough (and not just with money) so that people choose working over not working.

posted by Kevin Stolarick

Go Louisville

According to a report in today's Wall Street Journal:

Louisville's past was built on race horses, bourbon and baseball bats, but the city is staking its future on Somali Bantu and other immigrants flocking here from across the globe. As neighbors like Nashville join a national wave of cities drafting ordinances designed to repel many foreigners, Louisville's business and political leadership is working aggressively to absorb immigrants. In speeches, Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson champions the city's immigrants, whom he calls "internationals." In each of the past four years, he has handed out "international awards" to individuals, companies and organizations working to integrate and improve the lot of newcomers. "Communities that embrace diversity are going to be the most successful," says the mayor, who has been at the city's helm for most of the past two decades and avoids distinguishing between legal and illegal immigrants.

Loyal Employees Stay Home

Andrea Coombes of the WSJ (sub req'd) wrote a piece last week highlighting a recent survey that found, "workers who telecommute from home or elsewhere, while still a very small portion of the work force, report the highest levels of satisfaction with their jobs and loyalty to their employers." The article has some great insights and mini-cases. Longer snippet below.

posted by David

Think Big!

Fabulous article in the WSJ today about consumer spending.  Why do some companies get it and others stand idly by?  Propel, Starbucks, the Luna Bar, Zara, Starwood all had my vote years ago. 

Check out the story here

Posted by Rana

Talent, Talent, Talent

Doug Ready and Jay Conger on "How to Fill the Talent Gap" in the Wall Street Journal.

It's no secret that global companies are finding it harder to fill critical jobs these days. They're struggling to land top recruits in emerging markets, for instance, and haven't prepared people in their own ranks to step seamlessly into management slots. Companies are racing to find solutions, but most of them are making a crucial error: They're treating these problems as separate issues. At most multinationals, a host of problems in recruiting and developing talent are converging to create a perfect storm -- a crisis that could derail the company's growth strategies. To meet the challenge, companies must rethink how they hire, train and reward their employees, placing those tasks at the heart of their business plans. In doing so, they have an opportunity to address all these separate problems with a unified plan, rather than waste time and resources attacking each of the issues individually.

We arrived at this conclusion after researching more than 40 companies to gain a better understanding of their concerns in recruiting and developing. We wanted to identify what steps companies were taking to excel in these areas -- to see what it would take for a company to become a world-class talent factory. As a part of our research, we identified five common problems in recruiting and development.

Immigration Absurdity

Read this incredible interview with British economist Philippe Legrain, author of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them. Legrain points out the economic value of immigration and of diversity and of the absurdity of current US policy.

I certainly agree that the US immigration system is absurdly restrictive in granting visas to highly skilled foreigners, and that US companies suffer, or shift operations overseas, as a result. If you think that Google, Yahoo!, eBay were all co-founded by immigrants, and that nearly half of America's venture-capital-funded start-ups were founded by immigrants, keeping out foreign brainpower is a remarkably stupid policy.

But I disagree with the notion that the US only needs highly skilled immigrants, still less that they can be selected through a points system, as proposed in the immigration reform bill earlier this year. Bureaucrats cannot possibly second-guess the requirements of millions of US businesses, let alone how the fast-changing economy's employment needs will evolve over time. In effect, the points system amounts to government officials picking winners--a notion that is rightly criticized in industrial policy and elsewhere. And it allows nothing for serendipity: that people end up contributing to society in unexpected ways. Who would have guessed, when they arrived in the US as children, that Jerry Yang would one day co-found Yahoo! and Sergey Brin Google?

In any case, the US does not just need highly skilled workers, it still relies on low-skilled ones too. In fact, they account for over a quarter of US jobs. Every hotel requires not just managers and marketing people, but also receptionists, chambermaids and waiters. Every hospital requires not just doctors and nurses, but also many more cleaners, cooks, laundry workers and security staff. Many low-skilled jobs cannot readily be mechanized or imported: the elderly cannot be cared for by a robot or from abroad. And as people get richer, they increasingly pay others to do arduous tasks, such as home improvements, that they once did themselves, freeing up time for more productive work or more enjoyable leisure. Thus as advanced economies create high-skilled jobs, they inevitably create low-skilled ones too.

The (Financial) World is Really Spiky

According to a fascinating new special report in the Economist:

In time, the early 21st century may come to be seen as a golden era for a different sort of globalised city-state. Its protagonists are found in London's Mayfair, lower Manhattan and Hong Kong's central business district. ... Technology, some predicted, would end this sort of clustering in city centres. Why would financiers want to live and work in pricey, jam-packed urban jungles? Armed with broadband, mobile phones and BlackBerries, they could work from almost anywhere. Yet as this summer's market turmoil showed, a BlackBerry operated from a beach is not always enough. Besides, those urban jungles have their compensations. So rather than dying out, financial centres are proliferating.

Today's financial centres—the cities where big financial transactions are done and a dizzying array of financial products are traded—include not only long-established places such as New York, London and Tokyo, but also a growing number of newer financial hubs in Asia, the Middle East and beyond. ... Unlike the walled medieval city-states, today's financial centres are increasingly dependent on their connections to one another. Technology, the mobility of capital and the spread of deregulation around the globe have created a vibrant and growing network. When one city is asleep, another is wide awake, so trading goes on round the clock. The number of transactions between financial centres has surged recently as investors have diversified across regions and asset types.

What do they have that others don't? They score well on a package of key criteria that global financial firms are looking for: plenty of skilled people, ready access to capital, good infrastructure, attractive regulatory and tax environments and low levels of corruption. Location and the use of English, the language of global finance, are also important.

Finding and retaining good people has become an ever more important factor. Steven Kaplan and Joshua Rauh, a pair of economists at the University of Chicago, reckon that capital deployed per employee (the amount of money firms have invested divided by the number of staff) at the top 50 American securities firms surged from an average of $136,000 in 1994 to $1.79m in 2004.

For many skilled professionals who can pick and choose their place of work, quality of life matters a lot.

 

Selling Out?

Brand Avenue reviews Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture.

Heath and Potter (listen to a radio interview here) spell out the relationship between the construction of "counterculture" and its broad and profound effects on consumer behavior. After all, what is the true value of "rebellion" and "avant-garde" ideas and actions? Could it be that these things, rather than fulfilling some nebulous concept of societal progress, are really just manifestations of capitalism's cutting edge, defining new markets and identifying new needs?

Here's a short excerpt from the book:

The concept of countercultural rebellion and its elusive twin—cool—have resulted in a status competition that has driven consumption to unprecedented heights. It's not conformism that leads us to spend, spend, spend on the unnecessary and the ephemeral, but its opposite: the quest to distinguish ourselves from the masses through our enlightened, hip, or just plain rebellious consumer preferences. And marketers of products ranging from cars (the Volkswagen Bug) to computers (the Mac) to shoes (Doc Martens) have been reaping huge harvests from the countercultural seeds that were sown in the 1960s. The point was never underlined more heavily than when Kalle Lassen, editor of the ragingly anti-capitalist Adbusters magazine, came out with the Black Spot sneaker: a "subversive" running shoe that Lassen hoped would "uncool Nike" and "set a precedent that [would] revolutionize capitalism." As Heath and Potter point out, there is nothing "subversive" about trying to beat Nike. "That's called marketplace competition. It's the whole point of capitalism...."

Retired, Not Dead

Kevin Stolarick of the Creative Class Group and Lisa Taber of FortiusOne have paired up to develop a series of 'heat maps' that show the hottest places in the country based on your lifestage and some preselected criteria.  The maps allow you to zoom in on specific parts of the country or see how your current city compares to others.

Retired, Not Dead Map

Come back Monday to see next week's map: Place to Retire

Dear Gawd, Why Don't You Just Kill Me!

Randstad USA is forcing their twentysomething employees to work alongside the older generation.  As a former corporate communications director and Gen Xer, I can tell you that no X or Y's or Millenlials like to be forced into unnatural partnerships.  Just give us freedom and flexibility to do our jobs!  Baby boomers need to step off their philosphical corporate management style.

See the full story from BusinessWeek, here.

Posted by Rana

The GM Plant and the Hair Salon

Today, I went to get my haircut in Toronto. I got a recommendation for a nice salon from the guy who renovated our house. It was first appointment so I tried to make small talk with the stylish young fellow wielding with the sheers. He asked me me where I'm from.

"DC," I said.

"How 'bout you."

"I moved from Detroit. I worked at GM and lived in Birmingham."

"Hmmmmm... Small world... My wife's from Birmingham. It's a nice place. What brought you to Toronto. Did your plant shut down?"

"Oh no," he replied. "I'm an engineer."

"So, why'd you leave?"

"It was sooooooooo BOOOORRRRRRRRRING, I couldn't stand it. This  is soooooo much better - so much more energy. I can be me."

Duh ... The Creative Class

"So what is left of Marxism? It is still about expanding democracy, which is still so fragile in much of the world. The utopian aspect of thinking beyond the present - for all of the dangers associated with attempting to impose utopias - at least arms us with a way to think critically about what needs to be changed. ... Without vision though, politics circles endlessly around its present conceptions. In the absence at the moment of a material force to assist us in a progressive direction, change happens, perhaps not in determined, predictable ways as he might have thought. But it happens, and humans still make their own history even if not under circumstances chosen by themselves."

The original post is from the University of Michigan's Ronald Suny (pointer via Mark Thoma).

For Marx, the working class or proletariat was the "material force" for change brought together firstly by its common labor and second by its tough working conditions.  The creative class in reality is a far more universalizing force. Every single human being is creative - what everyone of us truly shares is not our physical labor but our innate creativity. The failure is not one of "material conditions" but of a left - and of so-called "progressive" politics that is bereft of vision and cannot see the reality right before their very eyes.

What would Marx say about that?

Gray Areas

The New York Times maps the best places for pre-seniors ages 55-64.

Why Place Matters - to Music

Taylor Clark has a fascinating article in Slate about Portland's rise as the indie music capit