Anthropology of Ideology Alert No. 1

I think this post is exactly the type of post that could use a little more of what Tyler Cowen dubs "anthropology of ideology" - not to mention a refresher course in grammar and writing.

Unfortunately, what research we do have has been unable to find the true causal mechanisms to what is shaping up to be one of America's most vexing urban problems. It is somewhat unclear whether the new residents were full douche bags before they arrived, or whether they were transformed into douche bags upon moving into their new abodes. Is douchebagness produced by the local environment? Do the handful of non douche bag residents run the risk of becoming douche bags do to increased exposure to small dogs, overpriced handbags and DINKs? Or are douche bags somehow integral to the production of new urban space? As cities slowly but surely rezone every inch of waterfront land for high rise condos in the hoping of luring the Richard Florida Fan Club, a massive influx of complete, utter, quasi and mega class douche bags to what may have once been somewhat interesting, gritty or real places is inevitable.

What is it about our time and technology which has seemingly enabled and encouraged people to disseminate such gibberish? When did it become OK to publish unsolicited opinion with out so much as looking at data or collecting a single solitary fact?  My sense is this is worse in urban planning related matters than in most other fields, but that may simply be because it's my field.

Karl Marx: Journalist, Blogger

A list of his posts is here (via Mark Thoma).  I got a kick out of this quote, from a new Marx biography by Francis Wheen:

After gaining his doctorate [Marx] thought of becoming a philosophy lecturer, but then decided that daily proximity to professors would be intolerable. 'Who would want to have to talk always with intellectual skunks, with people who study only for the purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world!' Besides, since leaving university Marx had been turning his thoughts from idealism to materialism, from the abstract to the actual. 'Since every true philosophy is the intellectual quintessence of its time,' he wrote in 1842, 'the time must come when philosophy not only internally by its content, but also externally through its form, comes into contact and interaction with the real world of its day.' That spring he began writing for a new liberal newspaper in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung; within six months he had been appointed editor.

Lots more here and here.

Intellectuals vs. Journalists?

Washington Monthly's  Kevin Drum disagrees with Tyler Cowen's plea for "intellectual anthropology."

Actually, this kind of amateur anthropology goes on all the time, and it obviously has its uses. But it also has its drawbacks: the conventions of social interaction allow people to obfuscate, prevaricate, evade, and just generally lay on the charm in ways that frequently blur distinctions instead of sharpening them. And human beings being the social primates that we are, we often give views that we hear in person more weight than they deserve simply because we heard them in person.

So I disagree: When it comes to important issues of public policy this kind of personal interaction should be secondary. For the most part, we shouldn't judge people by what they say in private or how they act around their kids. We shouldn't judge presidential candidates by how sociable they are on the press plane or whether they'd make a good drinking buddy. That's how we ended up with George Bush. We should judge them mostly by their public record: their speeches, their actions, their roll call votes, and their funding priorities. Anthropological research, aka hanging out and having a few beers, is fun and interesting, but it's not necessarily a superior guide to what someone really thinks or what they'll really do when the crunch comes.

After reading this, I immediately asked myself: Is this the difference between academic and journalistic styles and norms? In my experience, academics are much tougher critics of ideas than journalists, but they tend to be more civil. That is, they want to take down an idea, not a person. So, they tend to restrict their criticisms to the realm of ideas and don't get into personal motivations and attacks. They are colleagues with many of the people they debate. Journalists are less concerned with ideas and principles. Their focus is on personal motivations. They see themselves as a check on the system and don't give a hoot if they hurt someone's feelings. It's just part of their job.  For some, the goal is a personal take down; and in this day and age, that can get pretty nasty.

Am I overdrawing this one - your thoughts?

Philly Style

Rolling Stone's recent "hot issue" named  Philadelphia a hot music scene. Airoots, one of my favorite urban blogs has an interview with DJ Diplo who relocated his music label the the city of brotherly love. Here's the money quote.

"cant afford new york - my rent in philly is 300 bucks a month."

Geonomics

Don Tapscott, my neighbor in Toronto and my colleague at the Rotman School, is one of the smartest thinkers on the internet around.  Now, Dave Atkins (via All About Cities) applies the theories of Don's terrific book, Wikinomics to cities.

Getting to Know You

When Rise of the Creative Class was published I was shocked by the vehemence of personal attacks - some of them quite vicious and insulting - that came my way. I was said to have a gay agenda, to be anti-family, and of attempting to undermine the precepts of Judeo-Christian civilization. I took this quite hard at first, and it took some time to develop a thicker skin. I`m told that great public intellectuals like Robert Putnam also were surprised and hurt by the vehemence of personal attacks that came their way. Having faced this this made me considerably more sensitive when writing about others.

So this post by Tyler Cowen resonated big time with me.

I'd like to propose a new research convention.  Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset thereof) really wants or means, I'd like them to list their personal anthropological experience with the subjects under consideration. ...  Tell us how much field work you did, who you did it with, how much they trusted you, and what you wish you could have done but didn't. 

Bryan Caplan adds:

Since the publication of my book, I've been meeting a much wider range of people. I've talked to an elite Republican book club, a room full of vaguely Marxist academics at the New School, retirees, Cato, Heritage, a conference of largely leftist philosophers, the State Department (!), the Yale law school, DC economists, and UVA social scientists. I've also spoken on a wide range of radio shows and podcasts, left and right.

What have I learned?  Primarily, I'm more convinced than ever that virtually everyone is sincere. The legions of people who imagine that their opponents secretly agree with them are utterly deluded. Even when you've got undeniable facts on your side, your opponents probably think that those facts don't matter; you're missing the deeper picture.

The lesson I draw: Sincerity is greatly overrated. It's an easy and widely distributed virtue. So what is in short supply? Common-sense. Literalism.  Staying calm.  Listening.  Sticking to the point.  Accepting and working through hypotheticals. 

If you've got these, I'd like to meet your tribe.

I could not agree more. In the age of attack journalism, these are words to live, and work by. I will do my best to abide by them.

 

Real Estate and the Creativity Index

Over at Time Magazine`s Curious Capitalist, Justin Fox compares the Case-Shiller Housing Price Index which measures appreciation since 1987 to my Creativity Index. His results, here, and after the jump. Michael Wells weighs in with a comment on this blog. Michael has much to be happy about given Portland`s long and short-run performance.

I`m actually struck by the pattern Fox documents and believe it fits in rather well with my theory. I promise to dig into it even more once I`ve had a chance to digest the data. But for now, let me just jot down some quick reactions.

First of all, my earlier post which Fox points to was about the recent turnaround in the Case-Shiller Index as was a post here earlier today.

That said, over the long-run, the big outliers in terms of the Creativity Index boil down to  two cities - Miami and Las Vegas - both of which perform much better on the Case-Shiller Index over the past two decades than their (low) scores on my Creativity Index would suggest. One explanation might be that both regions have high Gay Index values (their technology and talent scores are low) which as Charlotta Mellander and I have found are extremely closely associated with median housing prices.

However, I think there is another, even more significant factor at work. The significant real estate appreciation experienced by Miami and Las Vegas over the past couple of decades was speculative and thus badly out of whack with their economic fundamentals. These are fun-and-games resort destinations which saw huge and unsustainable gains during the go-go  years of the housing boom.

My main point is that now things are coming back to earth - and more into line with what the Creativity Index would predict. After two decades of significant appreciation Miami and Las Vegas have experienced big declines and are headed for even bigger ones, as the Case-Shiller Index documents. (I live in Toronto and want a house in warm weather and I`m prepared to wait it out another year or two until the south Florida market starts to really correct). My top Creativity Index regions - places like San Francisco, DC, Boston, Seattle, Portland, Denver, etc. - are showing mixed performance - some are declining more than others. But, if my priors are right, they should decline much more modestly than Miami and Las Vegas, and rebound quicker once things start to turn around.  A number of these markets are actually seeing mixed performance. The DC market, which I know very well (having sold a house there this past summer) is declining overall on Case-Shiller. But it is really a tale of two markets with steep declines in far-off suburbs, while the city and close-in markets seem to be holding on.

To my mind, the biggest outliers in in terms of short-run Case-Shiller performance are San Diego and Charlotte, though both are in sync with the Creativity Index over the long-run. San Diego has been hard hit in the past year or so, which I would not have expected given its location, long-run super-star status, high-tech economy, and Creativity Index score. But the region is known for boom and bust real estate cycles. Charlotte has been much stronger than I would expect in the current downturn, perhaps due to its strong financial sector.

Fox says this is the last of his housing market posts for a while. I hope not.  He`s been doing yeoman`s work helping advance our understanding of the unfolding dynamics of the housing and real estate markets which are sure to play a big role in U.S. and regional economic performance over the next couple of years.  Anyway, I have another one to throw into the mix:  Housing in Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane continues to appreciate like crazy.  Canada and Australia have surged ahead of the US on the UN Human Development Index. Might global indicators like the UN Human Development Index or my own Global Creativity Index help to explain these differences among international housing markets.

Housing Market Mayhem

This chart reflects the new S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index data (chart via Tom Iacono of Seeking Alpha). A table by region is after the jump.  Tampa, Miami, Detroit, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and San Diego have seen the biggest annualized declines. My sense is that we are a long way from the bottom in all of these markets with the partial exception of San Diego.  Seattle, Portland and Charlotte remain up for the year.  Dallas and Atlanta are treading water. Boston, New York and Denver are down, but not by a whole lot. 

I still believe we are looking at two or three separate housing markets. The crash will be worst in areas where housing investment was highly speculative and where the underlying economy is shallow, and in older regions like Detroit where the economy has turned quite negative.  Regions where economic fundamentals remain more stable, where there is a sizable creative economy, and which have been long-run super-star real estate markets may decline but the decline will be much less severe than in other markets and they will be much more likely to rebound in time.

If you live in a cold climate like me and are looking for the vacation home in warm weather, my advice is to hold on for a season or two (or make very aggressive offers). These markets still have a long way to fall and asking prices have not yet adjusted to the new market reality. 

Human Development

The latest edition of the UN's Human Development Index is out. I could quibble with its methodology but I think it gets it just about right. Iceland ranks first of the 177 countries ranked in the report, followed by Norway, Australia, Canada, Ireland and Sweden.  The United States has slipped to 12th, around the same position as Spain.  And that's the US as a whole.  But because the US is highly unequal, socially economically and regionally, some areas in the US are likely to be quite a bit lower than this, while others are higher.

The UN ranking seems similar to my own Global Creativity Index rankings in Flight of the Creative Class.  It sheds light on the real competitors in terms of quality of life, development and potential talent attraction, which as I argued in Flight, are and will be mainly smaller countries. 

The much talked about up and coming growth machines of China and India are much lower. China is 81st, behind Colombia, the Ukraine, Bosnia, Brazil and Kazakhstan. India is 128th behind all of them and Botswana and Namibia. Are these really the nations, experts, journalists and the leadership of advanced countries should be worried about and comparing themselves to? At least during the "competitiveness debate" of the 1980s and 1990s, people were talking about the US, Japan, Germany and the Scandinavian countries.

It's prosperity we're after, rather than just income and growth, the UN rankings tell a pretty reasonable story.  The ranking table is here.

Bacon's Prosperity

Jim Bacon has a nice post on suburbs vs. cities, families vs. gays, and the Kotkin-Florida exchange. Not sure I agree with everything he has to say, but he's right that population and job growth do NOT equal prosperity.  Per capita income is one way to get at it, but at the Prosperity Institute were trying to do better than that. As I write, our deputy director, Kevin Stolarick is over in Sweden meeting with Charlotta Mellander who runs a sister institute there to work on developing a new and improved Prosperity Index.  More to come.

Our Return to Noosa in April of 2008

Richard and members of our team just spent a great week in Noosa (see more here) and we are now preparing for our team to return there in April to work with community members. There has been a lot of email traffic already about the shire's path toward authentic, sustainable economic growth in the Creative Economy and we are looking forward to more great dialogue on the opportunities and challenges ahead. The last week only confirmed that the people of Noosa are thoughtful and intelligent and we look forward to working with (and hearing from) more citizens and leaders in Noosa during our CCLP in April.

Connectivity

Jim Russell (guesting over at Where Blog, check out his own blog here) makes a very good point:

Globalization, often mischaracterized as the destruction of geography, redefines a place in terms of connectivity. You can map these relationships and easily comprehend how each city has its own profile. A city's global network is how I would define a place ...

This paper by Peter Taylor and Robert Lang examines the connections between global cities finding that:

U.S. cities overall—and particularly non-coastal cities—are generally less globally connected than their European Union and Pacific Asian counterparts. ... Chicago is the only high ranking U.S. city not located in a coastal state.  While important service connections exist among certain U.S. cities and particular global regions, U.S. cities are more strongly linked to other U.S. cities than to cities around the globe. New York is the only U.S. city with more non-U.S. cities than U.S. cities in its top ten list of strongest global connections. Only three non-U.S. cities make Miami's top 10 list, for example, while Pittsburgh's list contains none. Even the most globally-connected U.S. cities are more locally oriented than cities in the EU.

The Divider

Joel Kotkin is up to his old tricks, trying to draw a false divide between "family friendly" communities and those oriented to the "young and restless, the 'creative class', and the so-called 'yuspie'--the young urban single professional" in his words. I've read this same article from Kotkin at least ten times now. 

First off, it's always important to point out that Kotkin loves to argue with himself. Just have a look at his book, The New Geography where he goes overboard in extolling the virtues of urban centers for the very same reasons he now criticizes them. 

But the real issue is that there is no divide here. The best cities and the best regions offer something for everyone. Look, nuclear families with children under 18 in the household account for less than a quarter of all households. Single people make up more than 50 percent. Gary Gates' detailed research has shown lots of gay couples resemble heterosexual married couples, lots of others have kids, and that the gay and lesbian community is coming more and more to resemble America broadly and is growing most rapidly in many of Kotkin's preferred places.

Kotkin mentions married people are more successful than single people.  Perhaps.  But Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and Mark Cuban were mighty successful BEFORE they were married. Many entrepreneurs have to front-load their careers, as I argued in Rise. They have to work extremely hard to make it, and thus postpone marriage. Is Kotkin implying regions should not want these kinds of entrepreneurial front-loaders. I hope not. And of course they built their businesses in communities like Seattle, Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area, just the sort of life-style meccas, Kotkin argues against.

I could go on and on, but I simply want to point out that I covered all of this in Rise (a quick excerpt after the jump, along with a useful table).  I'll have much more to say on all of this in Who's Your City where we rank communities across five key life-stages - single, young professional, married with children, empty-nester, and retiree.

I'd like to write more, and provide even more specifics and data, but I'm rushing to catch the plane home from Australia. I'll try to follow with more later. But let me add just one last thing.

How about a little wager to make things interesting? . Lets have a bet on which city-regions will perform best over the next decade measured by per capita income, innovations, and growth in wealth. I take my creativity index regions - San Fran, Austin, Seattle, Boston, Washington DC, plus NY and LA.  Globally, I'll take London, Toronto, Vancouver, Amsterdam and Stockholm.  Joel can have his favorite places. I've made this offer to Joel before and I'll make it again. I'm putting my money down now.  Any takers?

UPDATE: Arnold Kling (long an inspiration to me as a blogger) writes:

I'll take Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Fairfax, ...whoa, there--you said regions? That doesn't leave me much. Given that there are suburban enclaves as well as urban hip zones in all of these regions, maybe this is a silly argument.

Yes, that`s exactly my point. They are enclaves within broader regions.  Google runs its bus from San Francisco to its Silicon Valley headquarters for precisely this reason. My wife and I both commuted from Northwest DC to Northern Virginia. As I wrote in Rise, great regions are really federations of great neighborhoods and communities offering something for all sorts of different kinds of people. Family people who work in finance can commute from Silicon Valley to San Fran, while those who do government related work can commute from NoVa to downtown DC.  Gays, singles, Dinks and what not can do the reverse. It`s not either-or, it`s both.

Rise of China's Cities

Over at The Prospect, Rob Gifford writes (via New Economist):

In the US, there are nine cities with more than 1m inhabitants. In China, there are 49. You can be travelling across China, arrive in a city that is twice the size of Houston, and think: I've never even heard of this place. ... The new Route 312—which runs all the way from Shanghai to the western border with Kazakhstan—is part of the change, dramatically cutting the journey time for people and goods going to Nanjing, Shanghai and the coast. The spread inland of factories and companies in search of lower costs has helped too, as have remittances from migrants working near the coast. This growing wealth is in turn changing some of the patterns of inland migration. Shanghai is still the promised land for migrant peasants, but there are now more mini-promised lands: regional capitals such as Hefei, or other cities further inland, such as Xi'an and Lanzhou, to which people are travelling to find work because there is now work there. For the first time, some factories on the coast have a labour shortage, and one reason is that people can now find jobs (albeit not so well paid) in China's interior. This emergence of the inland cities is actually a re-emergence. The countryside has always been poor. But for centuries Chinese cities were far more prosperous than their counterparts elsewhere in the world. The government is doing everything to encourage it. ... Either way, the party in Hefei, as throughout China, knows that the market economy could be its salvation; the party also knows that the inequalities thrown up by the new economy could be its downfall.

Urbanophobia

David Olive of the Toronto Star coins a new term for the "disdain leaders in senior levels of government have for cities" - and it's a very good one. "North America is unique in its traditional denigration of cities," he writes, adding that: "The phenomenon is especially pronounced in Canada ..." Boy, the America's senior leadership seems to really revile it's cities too. But one thing is for sure, Canada's urban journalists are a whole lot better than their U.S. counterparts. Come to think of it: Are there any urban journalists writing for major U.S. dailies?

The full story is here.

Class and the Democratic Primaries

Chris Bowers who has emerged as one of the most interesting analysts of American electoral politics, in particular charting the reasons why Obama's faltered - weighs in on this key issue.

While progressive creative class types skew non-Christian, skew high income, and self-identified liberal, the largest connection between them will be that they have at least four-year degrees. In fact, education might be one of the largest class divides in this country, surpassing even most differences in income levels. It difficult to expect more detailed, psychographic information simply from exit polls, but determining how different classes in America are voting would not only provide more information on American elections, but on America itself. 

The entire post is well worth reading

Creative Feedback

Saturday's column is attracting lots of attention. My quick perusal reveals that it was the 4th most e-mailed and the 11th most popular as of Sunday.

It's recieved a ton of comments and feedback especially over at the Globe and Mail, here.  Around the blogsphere, here's what Mark Kuznicki, Peter Gordon (Peter I'll be digging into the issues of labor and real estate markets you mention in Who's Your City?), and Steve at the Most Important Element have to say. I also recieved a ton of e-mails which is great - some samples after the jump.

I value criticism and find that I learn the most from my critics. So let me respond to the two main lines of criticism surfacing here. The first is something I've grown used to, another round of hemming and hawing about gays and growth, including someone who actually links to an old article by Steven Malanga that has been throroughly debunked, here and here. For those so inclined, here is a longish paper with Kevin Stolarick and Charlotta Mellander where we dig into competing theories of what drives economic development.

The second line of criticism is more interesting. It zeros in on what some see as an alledged dichtomy between my theory of the creative class and the notion that every single human being is creative. Actually these constructs are not at odds at all, rather they are one in the same.  Right now 35-40 percent of us have the good fortune to work in occupations where we are paid to do creative and at times fulfilling work.  That does not mean than the rest of us are not creative. Rather, the key is to continuously expand the boundaries of the"creative class" by tapping and harnessing this untapped resevoir of creativity. The creative class is the first class that is a universal one, meaning that it can extend to a much broader segement of the population. This is a central issue of class analysis, and one that vexed Marx among others (who saw the proletariat as a universal class). It's something I've been thinking about since graduate school. I outline this in both Rise and Flight. In the preface to the Australian edition of Rise, Terry Cutler sees my contribution on this score quite clearly, writing that my most fundamental idea is that the key to economic prosperity lies in "stoking the creative furnace that lies deep within every human being."  An abdridged version of my thinking on the matter is here.

India and China

China is witnessing a musical explosion.

As she would anywhere in the world, Karen O of the arty New York rock band the Yeah Yeah Yeahs strode onto a festival stage here last month in costume, looking like a wild, futuristic harlequin in her cape of silver wings and blue-and-green striped tights. Shouting to 10,000 mud-soaked fans who shouted her lyrics right back at her, she thanked them in gasps of Mandarin: “Xie xie ni!”A couple of days earlier the Brooklyn rapper Talib Kweli was at a gleaming new club across town. And last Sunday, Linkin Park, a group of rap-rock titans with worldwide sales of 45 million, played in Shanghai to a sold-out stadium crowd of 25,000. They are among the latest in a growing tide of Western acts hoping to crack the vast new entertainment market of China.

India is seeing continued migration to its cities.

These passengers are also part of a great migration that is changing the world. Goldman Sachs, which has published projections about the Indian economy, predicts that 31 villagers will continue to show up in an Indian city every minute over the next 43 years — 700 million people in all. This exodus, with a similar one in China, helped push the world over a historic threshold this year: the planet, for the first time, is more urban than rural.

Both from the Sunday Times (sub req).

Every Single Human Being is Creative

My new Globe and Mail column is out.

I recalled hose Saturdays recently when I had my hair cut in Toronto. It turned out that the hairdresser, a stylish young man in his late 20s or early 30s, was once a resident of Birmingham, an upscale suburb of Detroit that I knew well because my wife lived there when we met.  Without thinking, I said, "My wife used to get her hair done in Birmingham; what salon did you work in?"  "I wasn't a hairstylist then, man. I worked for General Motors," he said.  "Really?" I said, trying to dig myself out of a hole. "What plant did you work at?" "Plant?" came his reply. "I didn't work in a factory — I'm a mechanical engineer and I worked on new product development."

My jaw dropped. This man had quit a high-paying job in a good company so he could cut people's hair. He had left the creative class because it wasn't creative enough for him and had gone into a service industry to express his creativity.

The rest is here.

Disneyfication of Toronto?

Move Smartly, a Toronto neighborhood and real estate blog, worries about the future of the city's Distillery District.

The Death and Life of Hollywood

Marc Andreessen (via Borjas) argues persuasively that the writers' strike will essentially kill Hollywood as we know it. Hollywood he argues is based on an industrial model where big companies have controlled distribution and talent. New technology is fundamentally disrupting that pattern, allowing more efficient and decentralized production and distribution of content. As a result, he contends that a new entertainment business model will emerge - along the lines of Silicon Valley - where talent owns and controls the means of production.

The classic Hollywood economic model is built around the existence of a few very large companies -- studios -- that dominate production, marketing, and distribution. ... As a consequence, talent gets paid like hired guns, not owners. As a consequence of that, talent bands together to form unions. ...

In Silicon Valley, there are many companies, large and small, that create, market, and distribute products -- and more such companies all the time. ... In Silicon Valley, the creators of the product -- the talent -- are owners: owners of their product, and owners of their company. ...  in a world where there can be many companies, the best creative talent will be drawn to the situations in which they will be owners, and will be compensated as owners. Because of that, in technology, creators get paid like owners. 

Entertainment is a huge industry, and it's business model is now shifting to one that is more fully in sync with the creative economy.

Immigration and Prosperity [Guest Blogger: Alison Kemper]

According to an article in yesterday’s New York Times, transfers from emigrants to their home countries is an enormous economic phenomenon.

Posted by Kevin Stolarick for Alison Kemper

Why I Love My Job

We are wrapping up an incredible week in Noosa, Australia.  I'll be posting more on this later, but here's a press report on what we're doing.

Noosa is a community that reflects all the core values and could become a model of the creative age. Just recognized as a UN biosphere community, Noosa is at the cutting-edge of sustainable, inclusive and creative development. We're excited to be partnered with the stewards and people of this great community.

We'll be foregoing turkey and football for baramundi and surfing this thanksgiving.

Beyond Silicon Valley

Irving Wladawsky Berger writes:

Rather than attempting to fashion the initiative after Silicon Valley, Design-London is taking the seemingly radical step of building on the strengths of London - its history, culture, tradition, infrastructure, diversity and talent base - and come up with its own model.  They emphasize creativity and design, in addition to innovation, because of their belief that these are qualities at which London has particularly excelled through the ages.

While you're at it have a look at this take on "Sweatshop Silicon Valley."

Soul of the City?

Tony Judt writes on "The Wrecking Ball of Innovation" identifying the fundamental contradiction of our time.

In which case who, today, will take responsibility for what Jan Patocka called the "Soul of the City"? There are two overriding reasons to worry about the soul of the city, and to fear that it cannot be satisfactorily substituted with a story of indefinite economic growth, or even the creative destruction of the wrecking ball of capitalist innovation. The first reason is that this story is not very appealing. It leaves a lot of people out, both at home and abroad; it wreaks havoc with the natural environment; and its consequences are unattractive and uninspiring. Abundance (as Daniel Bell once observed) may be the American substitute for socialism; but as shared social objectives go, shopping remains something of an underachievement. ...

Peaks and Valleys

In its review of innovation in Europe, The Economist concludes that the EU is lagging in the spiky world and that clusters may be losing their luster (h/t: Kevin).

Brave New Border

We're in Australia where nearly everyone we meet, including expats and Canadians, asks why America has seemingly lost the plot on internationalism in a global world. People don't even mention the Bush administration, but politely ask: "Do you think the American empire is starting to decline?" Ouch. Now Felix Salamon reports that:                         

Already taking two fingerprints from every non-citizen entering the country, the DHS has now announced that it will require ten fingerprints at Dulles from November 29, and   at JFK and eight other airports in early 2008. ... By the end of 2008, the Department of Homeland Security wants to fingerprint everybody   exiting the country as well.  ... The DHS wants the airlines to do it at the gate, but they hate the idea, which would seem to positively guarantee further delays. The alternative is to do it at the security screening, which of course is such a pleasant breeze right now. ...  So millions are inconvenienced to no end. No wonder London is looking increasingly welcoming...                        

I cannot even imagine the experience of being finger-printed while traveling. It's outside the pale of my imagination and I would certainly think twice about traveling to a country where they put me, my family and colleagues through it.

Since as it has no real effect on security and will only damage the US economy, what could be motivating such patently bizarre behavior?

Jane Jacobs Podcast

Her 1979 Lost Massey Lecture, here (h/t: Betsy Donald).

Where Innovation Comes From

This new study from the Philadelphia Fed finds that human capital is the most important factor in innovation. It's talent that's the real driving force behind innovative clusters of business.

Department of Wishful Thinking

This study of the "ethical economy" says that talent is no longer the source of economic growth. Instead real value comes from creative industries which package, brand and sell content.  Aren't those creative industries based on talent to begin with?

In the future, it argues value-creation economic growth will come from ethical economic communtities. Huh?

Laws of Urban Energy

Anya Kamenetz has a powerhouse article in Psychology Today drawing from an incredibly wide array of current research in psychology, sociology, economics, geography and urban studies showing why geographic clustering of economic activity matters more today than ever before.

Spiky Talent World

Mark Perry (via Greg Mankiw) explains:

the pattern of income distribution in the NFL is strikingly similar to the income inequality of the general population, and is actually slightly greater in the NFL... perhaps this pattern of income distribution is a natural and expected outcome of any extremely competitive environment where talent is scare, valuable and highly paid, whether it's the NFL or the overall economy.

Diversity, Innovation and Economic Growth

Philippe Legrain so gets it:

The biggest economic benefit of diversity is that it stimulates new ideas, which are the source of most economic growth, which in turn pays for the good schools, hospitals and other public goods that we value.    

The exceptional individuals who come up with brilliant new ideas often are immigrants. Instead of following the conventional wisdom, immigrants tend to have a different point of view and notice new details. As outsiders, they are more determined to succeed. Of Britain’s Nobel-prize winners, 21 arrived in th e country as refugees.    

Most innovations nowadays come not from individuals, but from groups of  talented people sparking off each other – and foreigners with different ideas, perspectives and experiences add something extra to the mix. If there are 10 people sitting around a table trying to come up with a solution to a problem and they all think  alike, then they are no better than one. But if they all think differently and bounce new ideas and reactions off one another, they can solve problems better and faster, as a growing volume of research shows.

If You Think Coming Up with a Band Name is Tricky

Over at Slate, Witold Rybczynski illuminates how architecture firms come up with those cool - or funny sounding - names.

Not satisfied with being perceived as respectable or corporate professionals, these architects want to be seen as subversive artists, bad boys—and girls—with laser cutters.

The Big Squelch

The typically calm and always pro-Pittsburgh Mike Madison at Pittsblog may be losing his cool:

I went out of my way the other day not to pile criticism on the Allegheny Conference for Community Development, after the Trib published a pretty scathing review of that outfit. Why stir up addiitonal trouble on the eve of the ACCD's annual meeting. Then the ACCD's chair, James Rohr of PNC, essentially declares at that meeting that Pittsburghers should stop talking about change and the future of the region. Things are just fine the way they are! Dan Fitzpatrick in the P-G writes up the details.vJim Rohr reminds me of Kevin Bacon, in the movie Animal House. There's a moment toward the end of the film, during the parade/riot scene, when Bacon -- who has a minor role as a freshman ROTC and fraternity recruit -- stands in the middle of the sidewalk and screams, "All is well! Remain calm!"vAnd the onrushing horde of townspeople crushes him.  Literally.  Flat as a pancake. Where is Pittsburgh's Senator Blutarsky?

I feel your pain, Mike, and be careful:  A leading historian based in Pittsburgh once told me, "Watch your back, they always shoot the messenger."

Costs of War

Tyler Cowen on why the Iraq war costs more than most people think.

De-Gentrification Update

Ryan Avent's comment seems about right to me:

I’m not that familiar with Red Hook, but from the description in the story, it sounds to me like gentrification didn’t fail, it just got ahead of itself. Let’s be honest, a lot of the push of gentrification stems from property prices and ease of commute. The flavor of a location matters, but it takes a lot of flavor to overcome real disadvantages in cost and location.  ...

Look, lots of other cities around the country have been able to put together thriving cultural scenes, but there’s no substitute for New York. New York may well lose the kind of people that are happy to make it in Buffalo, but those people aren’t the ones that put New York on the map. For many, many people of a certain creative inclination, there is no substitute for New York. Those people stayed there through the crack days, and they’ll stay through the gilded days. Which isn’t to say that other places won’t benefit mightily from New York’s growth and subsequent pricing out of marginal artists. It’s just to point out that those cities are competing for the marginal artists. The best go to New York.

   

The Creative Mind