Rising from the Sands

From next week's Economist:

A great piece on the rise of the Middle East economies including an interesting story with some background on the City of Dubai.

Having been to Dubai a few times, I can tell you that the story out there is compelling.  This one city is home to a quarter of our planet's construction cranes, they are spending massively to diversify their economy into industries such as IT, bio, media and manufacturing as oil reserves shrink.  Separately, Dubai has allocated a massive $15 billion dollars for public infrastructure alone over the next five years.

But is this sustainable?  Even though many Middle East cities are flourishing attracting talent and harnessing technological assets, can these places be models for the other big "T" that being, tolerance?   What do you think?

Aleem Kanji

So, Mister Mayor...

So, The Advocate asked five big city mayors, “Why should young gay professionals move to your city?”  (h/t Allison Kemper) 

Of course, even The Advocate ignored the actual implications of the Gay/Lesbian Index and instead went with a "gays are good for economic development" argument.  Which, in turn, allowed the mayors to ignore the importance of tolerance, diversity and inclusiveness.  So for many mayors, the answer seems to be cheap housing.  "Please, come and gentrify my city..."

I actually like Allison's take on it much more:

I wonder what the mayors would say about the underlying legal framework. Inviting gay professionals to Kansas City when they have less than no legal rights once they get there is outrageous.

It's hard for Americans to see the difference between living with legal discrimination and living without it. The mayors point to night life and real estate prices, but people are willing to pay a high premium to have rights under the law. Boston and SF are expensive for a reason.

These guys think that they can capture the market by telling people about art galleries. What they don't get is that the sunk costs, the table stakes are the presence of progressive laws and the promise of future improvements in those laws. For many of the same reasons that companies locate in Delaware, queers locate in Boston.

Once you've paid the ante, the art galleries will follow. But you have to ensure you have a competitive institutional framework. You can't just wave cheap real estate flyers. The Kansas City mayor almost got it when he said you can stay at home more cheaply in Kansas City. He should have known that wouldn't cut it.

Way to go, Allison!

posted by Kevin Stolarick

Tolerance with Andy and Mahmoud

While visiting New York a few weeks back, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke at Columbia University. During the Q/A Ahmadinejad denied that homosexuals exist in Iran, saying, "In Iran, we don't have homosexuals, like in your country."

Andy Samberg, Fred Armisen (as Mahmoud), Maroon 5 front man Adam Levine and the crew of Saturday Night Live have responded via music video and really highlight the value that tolerance plays in terms of creating a social context for creativity and economic growth. Such as one finds in New York, the Bay Area, London, Austin, Toronto, etc.

posted by David

Getting Ahead

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.

Each map shows the best regions based on a variety of criteria all evenly weighted.  In this case, "Getting Ahead" shows the combination of cities that rate the best based on:

    Tolerance (higher is better)

    Growth

    Number of Creative Class young & single in the region

 

The criteria used for each map are listed & described in the region to the left of the map. 

Only data for major US cities (populations above 250,000) has been included.

The map itself is a heat map overlay on a standard Google Map.  So, all of the usual Google map features are available: pan, zoom in , zoom out, change the background, etc...

The "hotter" -- yellow areas are those places that do the best on the combined criteria.

Getting Ahead Map

Come back Monday to see next week's map: Starting a Family

New Study on Creative Class & Voting

Thomas Chapman, Jonathan I. Leib, and Gerald R. Webster have a article in the latest edition of Southeastern Geographer (link here sub to MUSE reqd) titled "Race, the Creative Class, and Political Geographies of Same Sex Marriage in Georgia" (abstract below).

The intense debate over same sex marriage is replete with competing visions of 'moral' and cultural landscapes. We examine this issue in an electoral context as it played out in the state of Georgia in 2004, first in the state legislature and then in a statewide referendum. In analyzing the socio-spatial patterns within the state, we direct attention to two issues and their impact on the voting outcome. The first is African American discourse in supporting or opposing the amendment, in terms of same sex marriage as a civil rights issue or as a conservative religious 'moral' issue. Secondly, we look at how Richard Florida's thesis of the 'creative class' has influenced the spatial outcome of the vote in terms of intersections of the political-economy and local culture. Both discourses are linked with the so-called 'culture wars' raging across American society as a whole, and they help illustrate some unique geographies that play out within a local context.

Among their findings, they found a very strong and significant negative correlation between the Creative Class in a region and the percentage of the population who voted in favor of Georgia's anti-same sex marriage constitutional amendment.   (The larger the Creative Class population, the larger the number of people voting against the amendment.)

It seems that once again actual results point to Creative Class populations living hand-in-glove with regional tolerance...

posted by Kevin Stolarick

Google Testifies on Immigration

Great video of Google's VP for People Operations Laszlo Bock -- a Romanian immigrant -- testifying on Capitol Hill regarding the practical benefits of immigration to Google and the US. It is a great testimony and confirms much of what we know on immigration and talent. People need to see this.

posted by David

It's All Connected

Immigrants and Baby Boomers Futures' Converge

From HispanicBusiness.com (hat tip:  Connie Majure-Rhett of the Wilmington NC Chamber)

The quality of life for some 80 million graying baby boomers in the U.S. may depend in large part on the fortunes of another high-profile demographic group: millions of mostly Hispanic immigrants and their children.

With a major part of the nation's population entering its retirement years and birth rates falling domestically, the shortfall in the work force will be filled by immigrants and their offspring, experts say. How that group fares economically in the years ahead could have a big impact on everything from the kind of medical services baby boomers receive to the prices they can get for their homes.

Full story here.

Who knew that the new immigration bill was going to impact the healthcare your parents are going to get??

posted by Kevin Stolarick

Slowly but steadily and surely...

Tolerance for Gay Rights at High-Water Mark

Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs survey, conducted each May, finds current public tolerance for gay rights at the high-water mark of attitudes recorded over the past three decades. There is still considerable public opposition to complete equality for gays, particularly with respect to marriage. However, after several years of lower support for gay rights, support is now springing back to the relatively high levels seen in 2003. The clearest example of the recent renewal in pro-gay rights attitudes comes from a question asking Americans whether they believe homosexual relations should be legal. Public tolerance for this aspect of gay rights expanded from 43% at the inception of the question in 1977 to 60% in May 2003. Then in July 2003, it fell to 50% and remained at about that level through 2005. Last year, it jumped to 56% and this year it reached 59%, similar to the 2003 high point.

Full story here.

posted by Kevin Stolarick

Gay Sherrif! Gay County Commissioner! Next, Gay Mayor? Where??

Somewhere in Europe, right?  (nope) Or, maybe Madison, Wisconsin -- after all they think Karl Marx is raging right-wing lunatic so it must be them, right? (wrong again).

How about Dallas? (Yes, the one in Texas).

Time magazine has a great story in this month's issue that talks about the new "lavendar" blush on that yellow rose (hat tip: Chi Chi Hoffner).  Full story here.

(As an added bonus, see if you can find the uncredited quote from our friend Gary Gates.)

posted by Kevin Stolarick

We're Going to Need a New Term...

"Minority" just isn't going to work much longer.

Minority Population Tops 100 Million

The nation’s minority population reached 100.7 million, according to the national and state estimates by race, Hispanic origin, sex and age released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. A year ago, the minority population totaled 98.3 million.

“About one in three U.S. residents is a minority,” said Census Bureau Director Louis Kincannon. “To put this into perspective, there are more minorities in this country today than there were people in the United States in 1910. In fact, the minority population in the U.S. is larger than the total population of all but 11 countries.”

Full release from U.S. Census Bureau here.

Y, la versión española está disponible aqui.  (hat tip Babel Fish).

posted by Kevin Stolarick

10 Best Cities for African American

In it's May issue, Black Enterprise Magazine, released it's ranking for the top 10 cities for American African Americans.    Here are the top ten:

1. Washington, DC
2. Atlanta, GA
3. Raleigh-Durham, NC
4. Houston, TX
5. Nashville, TN
6. Dallas, TX
7. Charlotte, NC
8. Indianapolis, IN
9. Columbus, OH
10. Jacksonville,FL

These top ten cities....

All have a higher percentage of black high school graduates than the national average.

Nine have a higher percentage of black college graduates than the national average.

Seven boasted median black household incomes above the national average.

Four out of 10 have a African American mayor.

The rankings were created from an analysis of economic indicators (African American educational attainment levels, job growth, number of black-owned businesses, black home ownership rates, etc.), as well as an evaluation of results from a web survey that received more than 2000 respondents.

Check out the full feature here.

posted by Steven

Why Diversity Training Doesn't Work

Time Magazine reports (pointer from New Economist):

Some decades ago, the powers that be declared that employee diversity was a good thing, as desirable as double-digit profit margins. It's proving just as difficult to achieve. Companies try all sorts of things to attract and promote minorities and women. They hire organizational psychologists. They staff booths at diversity fairs. They host dim-sum brunches and salsa nights. The most popular--and expensive--approach is diversity training, or workshops to teach executives to embrace the benefits of a diverse staff. Too bad it doesn't work.

A groundbreaking new study by three sociologists.  ...found no real change in the number of women and minority managers after companies began diversity training. That's right - none. Networking didn't do much, either. Mentorships did. Among the least common tactics, one - assigning a diversity point person or task force - has the best record of success.

The paper published in the American Sociological Review is here.

This is sad but understandable: Most corporate diversity are compliance driven not performance driven. I saw exactly the same thing in my earlier research (here and here) on corporate efforts to implement pollution prevention and other green technology. Compliance driven firms got zero result.  The ones that saw results were those whose green practices evolved out of more general high-performance strategies designed to minimize waste and pollution not simply because it was mandated but part of their overall efforts to improve efficiency and productivity. The biggest bang came from small day-to-day improvements made by factory workers. On the diversity front, a large-scale study by the Gallup Organization and University of Delaware researcher, David Wilson has found that corporate diversity has significant effects on employee, satisfaction, retention and business performance. But in order for diversity efforts to really effect the bottom-line they can't be about compliance and quotas, they have to be part of a general strategy to attract and retain talent and stimulate innovation and creativity.

Time Magazine reports (pointer from New Economist):

Some decades ago, the powers that be declared that employee diversity was a good thing, as desirable as double-digit profit margins. It's proving just as difficult to achieve. Companies try all sorts of things to attract and promote minorities and women. They hire organizational psychologists. They staff booths at diversity fairs. They host dim-sum brunches and salsa nights. The most popular--and expensive--approach is diversity training, or workshops to teach executives to embrace the benefits of a diverse staff. Too bad it doesn't work.

A groundbreaking new study by three sociologists.  ...found no real change in the number of women and minority managers after companies began diversity training. That's right - none. Networking didn't do much, either. Mentorships did. Among the least common tactics, one - assigning a diversity point person or task force - has the best record of success.

The paper published in the American Sociological Review is here.

This is sad but understandable: Most corporate diversity are compliance driven not performance driven. I saw exactly the same thing in my earlier research (here and here) on corporate efforts to implement pollution prevention and other green technology. Compliance driven firms got zero result.  The ones that saw results were those whose green practices evolved out of more general high-performance strategies designed to minimize waste and pollution not simply because it was mandated but part of their overall efforts to improve efficiency and productivity. The biggest bang came from small day-to-day improvements made by factory workers. On the diversity front, a large-scale study by the Gallup Organization and University of Delaware researcher, David Wilson has found that corporate diversity has significant effects on employee, satisfaction, retention and business performance. But in order for diversity efforts to really effect the bottom-line they can't be about compliance and quotas, they have to be part of a general strategy to attract and retain talent and stimulate innovation and creativity.

The Twin Cities' Strategy

In the current issue of The Next American City Reese Fayde, CEO of Living Cities: The National Community Development Initiative, highlights the powerful economic impact immigrants are affecting in the Twin Cities, especially in new business starts.

Some evidence:

Professor Rob Fairlie of the University of Santa Clara—a leading authority on entrepreneurship—notes that immigrants are more inclined to start new businesses than their native-born counterparts. Based on his research, he suspects that there are over a million immigrant businesses created each year.

Immigrant-owned businesses still include traditional restaurants and groceries like Manny’s Tortas. But they also run the gamut from professional services to high-growth technology companies. As Mayor Michael Bloomberg quipped in recent Congressional testimony on immigration, it is “pure fantasy” to imagine life in a major city without immigrants. According to Michael Porter, chairman of the Boston-based Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, they change the face of entrepreneurship in inner cities, providing “a much-needed shot of economic vibrancy to distressed neighborhoods.” And yet few urban communities have actively sought and supported immigrant entrepreneurs as a revitalization tactic.

And as she points out:

The Twin Cities’ efforts to support immigrant entrepreneurship offers lessons for other urban communities. One of the most important aspects of the Twin Cities’ approach is its celebration of the increasing diversity of the city. The city has reached out to Latino, Somali and Hmong immigrants, taking language, culture and the unique needs of immigrant entrepreneurs into consideration. These efforts to better understand immigrants have led to noteworthy innovations, including the development of on-site technical assistance in an entrepreneur’s native language and the country’s first small business finance tool for Muslims that does not charge interest and is consistent with Islamic banking norms.

Check out the full story here.

Tell us about creative strategies working in your community. Use the comment section below or send Amanda and email at Amanda@CreativeClass.org.

Go Jersey

Jersey lawmakers on Thursday approved the civil union bill, putting same-sex couples within a pen's stroke of acquiring the rights and benefits of marriage. At the same time, Governor Corzine and powerful legislators declared that after a law is in place, they would be open to an amendment granting gay activists what they have sought: the word "marriage" itself. In the Assembly the measure passed 56-19; in the Senate it was 23-12. Just a couple of years ago, the kind of bill we are going to pass today was unthinkable. Unthinkable!" said Assemblyman Wilfredo Caraballo, D-Newark, a sponsor.  He acknowledged gay advocates' unhappiness with the bill but promised that he "will not rest until the word 'marriage' matters for all of us." Corzine, too, suggested that the law could change in favor of the word "marriage." Assemblyman Reed Gusciora, D-Mercer, who last week became the first New Jersey legislator to declare his homosexuality, reminded his colleagues that "Jefferson's credo" -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- was part of "a living document." The constitution, he said, "didn't apply to women, to African-Americans, Hispanics, gays or lesbians. It evolved." Read the entire story here.

I for one am incredibly proud of my home state. And now my George Mason colleague, Tyler Cowen has one more thing to add his list of favorite things about New Jersey.

New Orleans immigrant baby boom

Hispanic and Latino Immigrants have been streaming into New Orleans for some time now to help with post-Katrina rebuilding. So now the New York Times is reporting a baby-boom among these new immigrants. The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals saw more than 1200 pregnant women between January and Thanksgiving; virtually all were Latino immigrants, the Times reports. "Before the storm only 2 percent were Hispanic, now about 96 percent are," a head nurse at the department told the Times.  More here (sub required).

Why diversity matters

Last night I read an advance copy of a remarkable new  book, The Difference by the University of Michigan's Scott Page.  Page argues not only that diversity leads to better decisions and improved economic growth among other things, but that cognitive diversity or diversity of thought, is related to and reinforced by identity diversity of people and groups. Page's work is the definitive work on why diversity is important and how it matters to economic growth. Here's how Princeton describes it.

In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to each other. The Difference is about how we think in groups, about how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity-not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and Page proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that cloud standard debates about diversity, he explains why difference beats out homogeneity, whether you're talking about citizens in a democracy or scientists in the laboratory. ...Page changes the way we understand diversity--how to harness its untapped potential, how to understand and avoid its traps, and how we can leverage our differences for the benefit of all.

The book will be published by Princeton University Press in 2007. In the meantime, check out  his website and research, here.

Immigrants make cities safer

That's the thrust of a   neat piece in Sunday's New York Times by Eyal Press based largely on the work of the brilliant Harvard sociologist, Robert Sampson. Press writes:

"In a national survey conducted in 2000, 73 percent of Americans said they believe that immigrants are either “somewhat” or “very” likely to increase crime, higher than the 60 percent who fear they are “likely to cause Americans to lose jobs.”... So goes the conventional wisdom. But is it true? ..."

"The most prominent advocate of the “more immigrants, less crime” theory is Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the sociology department at Harvard... Based on information gathered on the perpetrators of more than 3,000 violent acts committed between 1995 and 2002, supplemented by police records and community surveys, it found that the rate of violence among Mexican-Americans was significantly lower than among both non-Hispanic whites and blacks."

In June, Sampson and I drove out to a neighborhood in Little Village, Chicago’s largest Hispanic community. The area we visited is decidedly poor: in terms of per capita income, 84 percent of Chicago neighborhoods are better off and 99 percent have a greater proportion of residents with a high-school education. As we made our way down a side street, Sampson noted that many of the residents make their living as domestic workers and in other low-wage occupations, often paid off the books because they are undocumented. In places of such concentrated disadvantage, a certain level of violence and social disorder is assumed to be inevitable. ...Yet for all of this, the neighborhood was strikingly quiet. And, according to the data Sampson has collected, it is surprisingly safe. The burglary rate in the neighborhood is in the bottom fifth of the city. The overall crime rate is nearly in the bottom third."

"Sampson’s theory may be the most provocative yet. Could America’s cities be safer today not because fewer unwanted children live in them but because a lot more immigrants do? Could illegal immigration be making the nation a more law-abiding place?"

More here.

Go Jersey

Jersey is my home state and Newark my original hometown, so I was more than intrigued by this post by  Craig Schoonmaker over at Newark USA.  Craig is writing in response to my oped with Gary Gates in last Sunday's Daily News on how New Jersey's recent court decision on gay unions could tip the scales in the state's favor. Schoonmaker, creator of the term "gay pride"  is a transplant from Manhattan to Newark.

"Manhattan has long atracted gay men from all over the world. I myself left New Jersey for Manhattan in 1965, and stayed there for 35 years until the crammed-jammed, frazzled existence of that overcrowded and increasingly expensive island propelled me back to New Jersey, where I have SPACE and TREES and FLOWERS in a semi-suburban part of Newark a half hour car ride from the Village. Now, in addition to the push of overcrowding and high expenses of all kinds in Manhattan, New Jersey could also benefit from the pull of a society even more tolerant than New York, where they can actually marry and enjoy the economic security of being able to pool their resources to buy a house..."

The immigration advantage

Openness to immigration has long been the core competitive advantage of the United States. Now a new study provides new data on just how much immigrant entrepreneurs have added to America's high-tech edge.  Sponsored by the National Venture Capital Association, it found that immigrants started 25 percent of the new venture-backed companies in the U.S. over the past 15 years,  with a market capitalization of more than $500 billion, and nearly half (47 percent) of venture-backed companies. Two-thirds of the immigrant founders surveyed said that current U.S. immigration policy hinders the ability of future foreign-born entrepreneurs to start American companies.

A story on CNN.com quoted Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, who came to this country from Taiwan at the age of ten, as saying: "Yahoo would not be an American company today if the United States had not welcomed my family and me almost 30 years ago. We must do all that we can to ensure that the door is open for the next generation of top entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists from around the world to come to the U.S. and thrive."

Read the full report here.