Tag Archives: Richard Florida

Data on the growing conservatism of the American public

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A number of commentators have explored recent data from Gallup regarding America’s increasing conservatism. Richard Florida takes a stab at the data here. Here are Florida’s conclusions:

Conservatism, at least at the state level, appears to be growing stronger. Ironically, this trend is most pronounced in America’s least well-off, least educated, most blue collar, most economically hard-hit states. Conservatism, more and more, is the ideology of the economically left behind.  The current economic crisis only appears to have deepened conservatism’s hold on America’s states. This trend stands in sharp contrast to the Great Depression, when America embraced FDR and the New Deal.

Liberalism, which is stronger in richer, better-educated, more-diverse, and, especially, more prosperous places, is shrinking across the board and has fallen behind conservatism even in its biggest strongholds. This obviously poses big challenges for liberals, the Obama administration, and the Democratic Party moving forward.

But the much bigger, long-term danger is economic rather than political. This ideological state of affairs advantages the policy preferences of poorer, less innovative states over wealthier, more innovative, and productive ones. American politics is increasingly disconnected from its economic engine.  And this deepening political divide has become perhaps the biggest bottleneck on the road to long-run prosperity.

Interesting thoughts. A few questions about this:

1. Is this a long-term trend or a relatively recent development that could be reversed relatively quickly?

2. How might these demographics tied to each party interact with the public image of the parties that suggests Republicans are about the wealthy and Democrats are on the side of the working class?

3. Does this suggest that the economic engines of America are primarily in Democratic areas (which I assume Florida would see as being located in central cities and the surrounding areas)? Is this the case because of particular Democratic policies or is this the result of other factors?

4. What would an analysis beyond correlations reveal? How do these different factors interact?

Wellbeing among American cities

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Gallup surveyed 188 metropolitan areas in the United States in 2010 and then ranked the cities according to their Well-Being Index. Here is the top 5:

1. Boulder, Colorado

2. Lincoln, Nebraska

3. Fort Collins-Loveland, Colorado

4. Provo-Orem, Utah

5. Honolulu, Hawaii

Here is some information on how the index was calculated:

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index score is an average of six sub-indexes, which individually examine life evaluation, emotional health, work environment, physical health, healthy behaviors, and access to basic necessities. The overall score and each of the six sub-index scores are calculated on a scale from 0 to 100, where a score of 100 represents the ideal. Gallup and Healthways have been tracking these measures daily since January 2008.

In terms of analysis of these findings, Richard Florida has some thoughts. My guess is that Florida will tie these findings to own ideas about the creative class, a group that tends to live in cities that are college towns, have younger populations, higher level of innovation, and more cultural opportunities.

(A side note: I’m not sure who came up with the headline for Florida’s thoughts but calling these “America’s New Happiest Cities” may not exactly be the same things as measuring “well-being.” The Gallup index goes beyond “life evaluation” and “emotional health” to include other factors like physical health and workplace environment.)

Richard Florida argues cities increase levels of inequality

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Richard Florida, dubber of the Creative Class, argues that data shows that cities exacerbate levels of inequality:

“Something fundamental has changed in our economy, and it’s happening at the metropolitan level,” explains Baum-Snow. “If we want to understand what’s causing the wage gap, we now know we need to look at the unique economies of our larger cities,” adds Pavan.

Both the U.S. and the world have grown increasingly spiky, with our socio-economic divide increasingly overlaid with a growing economic geography of class.  Big cities like New York and LA have attracted wealthy people not just from America but from around the world.  This trend reflects the growing advantages of geographic clustering or agglomeration.  The larger and more populous a city or region, the more likely it is to have the human capital and economic ecosystems required to support the most advanced — and hence the highest-paying — technologies and industries.  Bigger cities attract more innovators, more entrepreneurs, and more highly skilled and ambitious people in general, and provide a fluid environment where these individuals can combine and recombine their skills. Big cities also generate powerful economies of scale and scope, resulting in higher rates of innovation, new firm formation, and productivity.  They attract better-educated, better-trained, more-experienced workers, driving up wages.

At other side of the spectrum, manufacturing, which once clustered in and around large cities and metros, has shifted to less expensive suburban, exurban, and off-shore locations. And large cities have become home to a large and growing contingent of lower-skill, lower pay service jobs — from childcare and food preparation to retail sales and personal services.  Taken together these factors have in effect divided or bifurcated the labor market in big cities into highly paid “creators” and much lower-paid “servers.”

On the other side, Florida also shows a (very modest) correlation that city size is related to higher wages. But overall, Florida argues that cities draw both the uber-wealthy and those who “serve” the city.

Florida doesn’t present much data here so we would need more analysis in order to figure out what is going on. Does this argument present a  counterpoint to these two articles about the future of cities and suburbs in Foreign Policy last fall? It is hard to tell – Florida also says that cities are centers of innovation and entrepreneurship. And even if cities do have extreme levels of inequality, do they benefit larger society enough to offset the inequality within their borders?

(Interestingly, both Florida’s data and the study he cites use metropolitan areas to mean cities. This makes a lot of sense: central cities and suburbs should be viewed more often as single, interdependent units. Would the inequality be even more pronounced if the analysis was limited to central city borders?)

Conference on colleges and universities as critical part of regional development

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A recent conference suggested that colleges and communities could cooperate more closely in order to foster economic development:

Colleges must play a greater, and more deliberate, role in helping regions innovate and thrive in an increasingly competitive and globalized economy, speakers urged this week at a conference on higher education and economic development.

Economic development is “no longer about attracting businesses,” said Sam M. Cordes, co-director of the Purdue Center for Regional Development. “It’s about attracting people, about attracting talent.”

Participants in the two-day conference, “Providing a Uniquely American Solution to Global Innovation Challenges: Unleashing Universities in Regions,” delved into the various ways colleges can help build stronger local economies, including acting as conveners for conversations about regional development, aligning their curricula with local elementary and secondary schools, and producing and retaining well-educated workers.

This is a popular topic these days, particularly in difficult economic times. People like Richard Florida have linked the presence of research universities and their graduates with cities that have a larger concentration of the “creative class,” which then leads to more development. There are a lot of cities and communities that hope they can tap the local college in order to boost the local economy. It looks easy: the local university has a bunch of PhDs and eager students.

But how exactly this is supposed to happen is less clear.  I remember the battle that took place in South Bend in the last five years. The University of Notre Dame wanted to expand and partner with the community to construct an “innovation center” that would blend the university and businesses. However, this became controversial as it involved bulldozing a number of houses, bringing up some of the old issues between the wealthy school and less wealthy city.

It sounds like this conference offered more specific ideas of how the university can partner with local communities and businesses in order to prompt growth. Since each school and community offers unique advantages (and disadvantages), such partnerships are likely to take a good amount of work. Both the school and community need to feel that they will benefit from the time and hard work that is necessary to put something together.

Richard Florida cited by UK Conservatives

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The Economist takes a look into the background of urban thinker Richard Florida, who has recently been cited by leading British Conservatives. Here an excerpt about Florida’s background:

Although less well-known in Europe, he is as close to a household name as it is possible for an urban theorist to be in America. In his best-selling books, highly paid speeches and frequent television interviews, Mr Florida has extolled one core idea: that the creative sector is the growth engine for Western economies as menial work migrates to developing countries.

Mr Florida’s definition of creative goes beyond the obvious artists and musicians to include anyone open to new ideas. He says businesses must give space and flexibility to these freethinkers, and that cities must attract lots of them to be successful. This means they must be green, clean, tolerant and cultured, typically with large gay and ethnic-minority populations…

His superstar status, as much as his ideas, have made him enemies. One Canadian newspaper columnist, fed up with his high profile after he became head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at Toronto University three years ago, started handing out badges that read “Please stop talking about Richard Florida”. More seriously, other academics have denounced his “snake oil economics”, his use of statistics and his confusion of causation and coincidence. Joel Kotkin, another writer about cities, points out that over the past 20 years far more jobs in America have been created in boring suburbs than in the multicultural city centres beloved of Mr Florida.

He describes himself as fiscally conservative and socially liberal.

There are some interesting things to think about based on this story:

1. How much evidence is there that Florida’s ideas can bring about a “quick fix” to depressed locations? In England, are they looking to his ideas for a quick turnaround or is this a long-term project?

2. I’ve seen and read some of this criticism of Florida by other academics. Some of it did seem based on envy of his status and money-making abilities – his books have done well, he is an expensive speaker, and he has had the ear of a number of politicians. At the same time, there are legitimate concerns about whether his ideas work in the real world. I’m particularly struck by Kotkin’s criticism as noted in this story – job growth in America has been primarily in the suburbs.

3. In another part of the story, The Economist hints that politicians who court thinkers or adopt ideologies can often be left struggling to convey or act upon these ideas. On one hand, it is remarkable that Florida gets so much attention from politicians – few academics ever draw this kind of attention. On the other hand, when social scientists and urban thinkers do have a chance to influence politics, what are the outcomes?

h/t The Infrastructurist

Kotkin: election results “the smackdown of the creative class”

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Amongst pundits sifting through the election returns, I have only seen Joel Kotkin explore how votes broke down by broad location categories: cities vs. suburbs. Before the election, Kotkin suggested that both parties were fighting over middle-class suburbanites (and the Democrats were losing at this). Afterward, he continues this argument and suggests the creative class and bourgeois bohemians were overwhelmed by the middle-class, suburban vote:

More than anything, this election marked a shift in American class dynamics. In 2008 President Obama managed to win enough middle-class, suburban voters to win an impressive victory. This year, those same voters deserted, rejecting policies more geared to the “creative class” than mainstream America.

A term coined by urban guru Richard Florida, “the creative class” also covers what David Brooks more cunningly calls “bourgeois bohemians”–socially liberal, well-educated, predominately white, upper middle-class voters. They are clustered largely in expensive urban centers, along the coasts, around universities and high-tech regions. To this base, Obama can add the welfare dependents, virtually all African-Americans, and the well-organized legions of public employees…

But the real decider–to use George W. Bush’s unfortunate phrase–remains the much larger, more amorphous middle class. Given the economy of the past two years, the subsequent alienation of this group should pose no mystery. Suburban swing voters didn’t suddenly turn into racists or right-wing cranks. Instead they have seen, correctly, that Obama’s economic policy has to date worked to the advantage of others far more than themselves or their families. Until the Democrats and Obama can prove that they once again can serve the interests of these voters, they will continue to struggle to recapture the optimism so appropriate two years ago.

I would love to see some actual numbers on this. It seems like Richard Florida could post some maps like he has recently been doing on Atlantic.com that would correlate voting patterns with the presence of the creative class.

I wonder if Kotkin would suggest this is a continuation of the older “culture wars” idea (progressives vs. conservatives, religious vs. non-religious, etc.) or a new trend (the creative class vs. middle-class suburbanites).

More broadly, how big will the creative class in America grow to be? Is it possible, or even desirable, that a significant number of Americans become part of the creative class or the bourgeois bohemians?

Cities using art as a development tool

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USA Today describes the attempts of some cities, including Grand Rapids, Michigan, to use art as a development and economic tool.

This is not a new phenomenon. Richard Florida, in particular, has promoted this with his ideas about the “creative class.” But, perhaps we will see a rise in this sort of activity as cities look for non-traditional economic foundations.

h/t The Infrastructurist

Looking for the “great reset” button in Asheville

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Earlier this year, Richard Florida released a book titled The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity. This book about economic development is apparently on the minds of some leaders in Asheville, North Carolina:

In other words, there’s a “new normal’’ emerging, with people saving more of their hard-earned money, and civic leaders having to ask what’s going to be the best investment of tax money in our sidewalks, bridges, and highways as well as what can encourage small businesses to take root here and nurture new jobs.

Florida is no stranger to Asheville, which served almost as a poster child for his 2002 bestseller “The Rise of the Creative Class.” The sociologist showed interesting research that the diversity and tolerance for different lifestyles that attract creative individuals may mean as much to the economic health of a community as industrial parks and factories that economic developers have traditionally touted.

I suspect there a lot of communities asking similar questions: how do we forge a viable and sustainable economy based on the realities of today’s economic landscape? Neal suggests Asheville leaders think they have the ability to capitalize on some of Florida’s ideas including attracting young human capital (“the creative class”) and being part of the megaregion of “Charlanta.”

Predicting working class job growth

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Richard Florida (of The Rise of the Creative Class fame) writes at Atlantic.com about where working class jobs will increase in the future.

The largest metro areas are expected to have the greatest amount of blue-collar job growth. Why these places are expected to have this kind of growth is left unexplained.

Overall, Florida describes the situation:

The good news is that the U.S. will continue to create relatively high-paying working class jobs. These jobs will continue to provide good livelihoods for the workers fortunate enough to have them. The bad news is that their rate of growth will be sluggish and not nearly enough to provide the amount of good, family-supporting jobs required to undergird a middle class of lower-skilled workers.

Takeaway: there will be some good blue collar jobs in the future – but they will be limited.