Urbanization and Democracy

Ed Glaeser, writing in the Boston Globe, notes their strong connection (via Mark Thoma):

Across countries today, there is a robust correlation between urbanization and democracy. This correlation reflects many things, such as the tendency of more urban places to be richer and better educated, but it also surely reflects the role that cities play in supporting the coordinated action that creates and defends democracies

Celebrating Pittsburgh

This New York Times Sunday Travel piece celebrates the Pittsburgh I know and love.  Writer, Jeff Schlegel hones in some of the city's true gems.

Pittsburgh has undergone a striking renaissance from a down-and-out smokestack to a gleaming cultural oasis. But old stereotypes die hard, and Pittsburgh probably doesn’t make many people’s short list for a cosmopolitan getaway. Too bad, because this city of 89 distinct neighborhoods is a cool and — dare I say, hip—city. There are great restaurants, excellent shopping, breakthrough galleries and prestigious museums. The convergence of three rivers and surrounding green hills also make it a surprisingly pretty urban setting. And if the Pirates are in town, head over to PNC Park. Besides the game, the ballpark offers a great excuse to explore downtown Pittsburgh and the river views.

The slide show is terrific. (Image of the Mattress Factory from the NY Times).

America's Got Talent ... Troubles

Clive Crook in the Financial Times:

A startling and profoundly important fact about the US economy has received surprisingly little attention. The educational quality of the country’s workers is starting to decline – not just relatively (because other countries are catching up and moving ahead) but also, for the first time, in absolute terms. Over the coming years, baby-boomers departing from the labour force will have better educational qualifications than the younger workers replacing them. If the ultimate source of an economy’s ability to grow and prosper is its human capital, the US is in trouble.

For decades the educational quality of the US labour force surged. In 1940, less than 5 per cent of the population aged 25-64 had at least a four-year college education. By 2000, the proportion had increased to nearly 30 per cent. Successive generations of workers improved on the educational attainments of their predecessors. Retiring workers were replaced by better-educated youngsters. This remorseless accumulation of human capital helped fuel the country’s postwar growth. According to at least one authoritative study, it was the principal driver.

This trend came to a halt with workers now aged 55-59. Younger cohorts are no better educated than these soon-to-retire boomers. Broadly speaking, educational quality has topped out – and on at least one measure, it is actually deteriorating. In 2006, Americans aged 55-59 collectively possessed more masters degrees, professional degrees and doctorates than Americans aged 30-34. This impending loss of educational capital is entirely outside the country’s experience.

The numbers come from a recent study by Jacob Funk Kirkegaard of the Peterson Institute for International Economics: The Accelerating Decline in America’s High-Skilled Workforce: Implications for Immigration Policy. As the title suggests, Mr Kirkegaard is chiefly concerned with the US visa system, which discriminates in a variety of ways against high-skilled immigrants. Easier entry of immigrants with scarce skills – for which high-tech employers such as Intel, Microsoft and others tirelessly plead – is the quickest and easiest fix and Mr Kirkegaard makes an unanswerable case for it. But the deeper problem, as he notes, lies with the education system. What is going on?

The US has always depended on "imported" talent at both the high and low end.  Superb universities, strong research institutions and vibrant high-tech industries primed the pump of this system.  But the problem runs far deeper through the education and development pipeline and as James Coleman and collaborators have pointed out right down to the early-childhood development system.  What's going on, indeed?

Humanities and Social Sciences Talk

Phillip Jeffrey has posted pictures and notes from my June 5th talk for Research in Society Lectures at the 77th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences (Congress 2008) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Fatness Index

Source: Strange Maps (via Andrew Sullivan).

Denser

Sacramento has developed a new blueprint for density. The Wall Street Journal reports:

For decades, backers of "smart-growth" planning principles have preached the benefit of clustering the places where people live more closely with the businesses where they work and shop. Less travel would mean less fuel consumption and less air pollution. Several communities built from scratch upon those principles, such as Celebration in Florida, sprouted across the country. But they were often isolated experiments, connected to their surroundings mainly by car. So, as gasoline remained cheap, the rest of the country continued its inexorable march toward bigger houses and longer commutes.

Now, smart-growth fans see a chance to reverse that ... Over the past 50 years, cheap gasoline has encouraged developers to build communities further and further away from city cores. Now, city planners are experimenting with "smart growth" that keeps work and shopping close to home.

Sacramento -- yoked to the car and mired in one of the lousiest housing markets in the country -- offers an intriguing laboratory for that idea. Four years ago, just as oil was gaining momentum in its torrid climb to $140 a barrel and beyond, the six-county region adopted a plan for growth through 2050 that roped off some areas from development while concentrating growth more densely in others, emphasizing keeping jobs near homes. The local governments in the area aren't compelled to follow the so-called Blueprint, but the plan -- backed by a strange-bedfellows coalition of ordinary citizens, politicians, developers and environmentalists -- shows signs of working, nonetheless.

Sacramento benefits immensely not just from being the state capitol but from its location in the Nor-Cal mega - an affordable one at that. Oh ... and time costs, not just oil ...

Soul of the Forbidden City

Michael Meyer's new book, The Last Days of Old Beijing, argues that the city's history, authenticity and soul are being erased. As Kate Sekules points out in this New York Times book review:

This summer, widespread Beijing fatigue is an inevitability. But it’s high-flying Olympic Beijing that may become overfamiliar, a city that’s appeared before our very eyes as in a scene from “The Matrix.” This is not Michael Meyer’s town. The Beijing he has called home is being systematically eradicated, and this book is his testament.

But New Yorker architecture critic, Paul Goldberger demurs at least to a point:

But now Mao’s Beijing is nearly as much a part of the past as the Forbidden City. The factories are being pushed to the outskirts, and in their place the city has developed a skyline. It isn’t like the height-obsessed skyline of Shanghai, or the tight, congested skyline of Hong Kong. In Beijing, the towers are sprinkled all over the place. Most of them are mediocre, and some are ridiculous—a few have pagodalike crowns, to satisfy a former mayor who insisted that new buildings appear Chinese—but a handful are among the most compelling buildings going up anywhere in the world. In Beijing, the latest trend is architecture that will force the world to pay attention, and the result is a striking, unmistakably twenty-first-century city, combining explosive, relentless development with a fondness for the avant-garde. Beijing is as ruthlessly unsentimental today as it was in Mao’s time, with little patience for history if it gets in the way of development, and yet the city doesn’t feel as if it were defined solely by growth, like Shanghai, or like the kind of entirely manufactured environment that you see in Dubai. When I visited Beijing recently, the architect Ole Scheeren said to me, “I think Beijing is incredibly strong in its ability to completely override its own history and yet not surrender its identity.”

Goldberger has more to say, specifically on Beijing's Olympic architecture, here.

(Image from the New Yorker).

The Long Tail in Question

A new study by Harvard Business School's Anita Elberse marshals substantial empirical evidence that "hits" still matter quite a bit, a seeming refutation of Chris Anderson's popular long tail thesis.  According to Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal:

Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard's business school who takes the same statistically rigorous approach to entertainment and cultural industries that sabermetricians do to baseball, ... looked at data for online video rentals and song purchases, and discovered that the patterns by which people shop online are essentially the same as the ones from offline. Not only do hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online, but the evidence suggests that the Web is actually causing their role to grow, not shrink.

Anderson responds here. Here's Elberse's reaction, Tyler Cowen weighs in here.

Here's Elberse's site: Her research looks very interesting.

Safest Places to Drive

Detroit does well, so do lots of Michigan communities.  Sioux Falls, Fort Collins, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Cedar Rapids and Lexington also do very well. The report is here. There's also a New York Times story (via Tyler Cowen).

Poor, Sexy and Smart

Science Magazine reports (h/t: Kevin Stolarick):

Berlin's mayor, Klaus Wowereit, likes to joke that the city is "poor but sexy." He may now want to add "and smart." Despite chronic budget shortfalls, Berlin's city government has pledged €160 million ($250 million) over the next 4 years to attract top researchers to the city's four main universities as well as its research institutes.

The impetus for the "Berlin International Forum for Excellence" came from Jürgen Zöllner, the city's senator for science and education. He initially proposed a new "superuniversity," but the city's existing universities feared that the new institution would lure away their best talent. Instead, the city will set up a foundation that will identify existing "areas of excellence" and distribute funds to top up salaries of world-class researchers, set up graduate schools, and attract visiting scholars to the city.

Berlin's universities and scientific institutes will work together in governing the new foundation, Zöllner said in announcing the plan yesterday. It's a chance to make Berlin "one of the most important locations for research in the world," he crowed. That level of collaboration is unusual, says former federal undersecretary for research Wolf-Michael Catenhusen, whom Zöllner charged with negotiating an alternative to the superuniversity. "It is as if MIT, Harvard, and Boston University were all to cooperate on a project." Catenhusen says the foundation's planners hope to attract additional private donations to boost the pot of funds.

My colleague, Stolarick notes that: ""To help put the size of the investment into perspective, Berlin had a population of 3.4 million in 2006." The competition for talent is heating up.