New Geography

Category: Economics

  • Bipartisan Distrust of the Beltway

    Much has been written and spoken about the deep divide between “red” and “blue” America, but the real chasm increasingly is between Washington and the rest of the country. This disconnect may increase as both conservatives and liberals outside the Beltway look with growing disdain upon their “leaders” inside the imperial capital. Indeed, according to Gallup, trust among Americans toward the federal government has sunk to historic lows, regarding both foreign and domestic policy.

    The debate over Syria epitomizes this division. For the most part, Washington has been more than willing to entertain another military venture. This includes the Democratic policy establishment. You see notables like Anne Marie Slaughter and the New York Times’ Bill Keller join their onetime rivals among the neoconservative right in railing against resurgent “isolationism” on the Right.

    Yet some people, like the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, who pushed for our disaster in Iraq, now insist that turning away from a Syrian involvement would be “disastrous for the nation in very clear ways.”

    Yet, out in the country, where people, even those who (like me) supported Iraq initially, know that that war was not worth the price, in blood, treasure or damage to national unity. The citizens are not remotely interested in getting a second shot of neoconservative disaster in Syria. A recentCNN poll found that seven in 10 would oppose attacking Bashar al-Assad’s regime without congressional approval, which about 60 percent think Congress should not give.

    This is not a partisan consensus, but an outside-the-Beltway one. Liberals, who might be expected to rally behind their president, have remained deeply divided. At the grass-roots level, both left-wing groups, like Moveon.org, and those on the right, notably Tea Party factions, have opposed entering the Syrian quagmire. One liberal writer, utterly confused by the new alignment, admitted he was looking to the “far-right fringe” with its “abominable” nativist and racist views, to “salvage our Syria policy.”

    Similarly, most conservatives who in the past instinctively supported intervention have turned decisively dovish. Increasingly, as one conservative commentator acidly put it, the support for war reflects “an insider urge to use U.S. military power,” which helps “advance the careers of government officials through bigger budgets, new departments and more exposure and influence.” It also helps the think tanks, consulting firms and others who benefit from foreign adventurism.

    Syria suspicions

    This cynicism, felt on both sides of the political chasm, is what doomed the president’s Syria adventure and left him to the tender mercies of Vladimir Putin. Americans in general, suggests the National Interest’s Robert Merry, have concluded that “the country’s elites – of both political parties and across the political spectrum – have been wrong on just about everything they have done since the end of the Cold War.”

    This chasm between the ruled and the rulers has both widened and deepened during the Obama years. Initially, Democrats supported the idea of a strong federal expansion to improve the economy. Yet, as it turned out, the stimulus and other administration steps did little to help the middle and working classes. The Obama economic policy has turned out to be at least as much – if not more – “trickle down” than that of his Republican predecessor.

    Similarly embarrassing, the administration’s embrace of surveillance, as demonstrated by the National Security Agency revelations, has been no less, and maybe greater, than that of former vice president Dick Cheney and his crew of anti-civil libertarians. And it’s been the Left, notably, the British Guardian newspaper, that has led the fight against the mass abuse of privacy. Americans as a whole are more sympathetic to leaker Edward Snowden and increasingly concerned about government intrusions on their privacy. A July Washington Post-ABC News poll found fully 70 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans said the NSA’s phone and Internet surveillance programs intrude on some Americans’ privacy rights. Nearly six in 10 political independents who saw intrusions said they are unjustified.

    The Right intrinsically opposes expansion of the civilian part of the federal government, but it supported the national security state both during the Cold War and after 9/11. This has now begun to change. The revelations about IRS targeting of Tea Party and other grass-roots groups likely have not reduced their fears of Big Brother. Yet, by better than 2-1, Democrats, according to a Quinnipiac survey, also supported appointing a special prosecutor to get to the bottom of this scandal.

    Beltway boom-times

    Besides shared concerns over Syria, the NSA and IRS, grass-roots conservatives and liberals increasingly reject the conventional wisdom of their Washington betters. What increasingly matters here is not political “spin,” but the breadth of anti-Washington sentiment. After all, while most of the country continues to suffer low economic growth, the Washington area has benefitted from the expansion of federal power. The entire industry of consultants, think tanks, lawyers and related fields, no matter their supposed ideologies, has waxed while the rest of America has waned.

    This has been a golden era for the nation’s capital, perhaps the one place that never really felt the recession. Of the nation’s 10 richest counties, seven are in the Washington area. In 1969, notes liberal journalist Dylan Matthews, wages in the D.C. region were 12 percent higher than the national average; today, they are 36 percent higher. Matthews ascribes this differential not so much to government per se, but on the huge increase in lobbying, which has nearly doubled over the past decade.

    Matthews draws a liberal conclusion, not much different than one a conservative would make, that “Washington’s economic gain may be coming at the rest of the country’s expense.” Washington may see itself as the new role model for dense American cities but this reflects the fact that it’s one of the few places where educated young people the past five years have been able to get a job that pays well.

    This is intolerable to Americans of differing political persuasions. It is not just a detestation of government but also of the Washington-centered media, which has sent some 20 of its top luminaries into an Obama administration that, at least until recently, has managed to spin them better than any of its predecessors. Not surprisingly, along with that of Congress, themedia’s credibility has been crashing to historic lows, with 60 percent expressing little trust in the fourth estate.

    New generation

    These trends might gain velocity as the millennial generation begins to shape American politics. Indeed, although they have supported Obama against his GOP opponents, their activism is more grass-roots than governmentally oriented. Only 6 percent of recent college graduates want to work for government at any level, down from 8 percent in 2008; barely 2 percent would consider joining the federal workforce.

    As generational chroniclers Mike Hais and Morley Winograd point out, millennials – those born from 1983-2003 – tend to be liberal, but not strongly supportive of top-down, administrative solutions. “Millennials,” Winograd notes, “believe in solving national issues at the local, community level. They are as suspicious of large government bureaucracies as any libertarian but as dedicated to economic equality and social justice as any liberal.”

    Winograd’s notion of “pragmatic idealism” might include dispersing power and influence away from Washington. Perhaps, as some have suggested, putting Congress “on the road,” for example, forcing it to legislate, say, at the convention center in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., or Ontario, Calif. Maybe lawmakers might have to confront what life is like for their subjects, who do not live privileged lives funded by our tax dollars. Instead of croissants in Georgetown, let them eat bread and tortillas.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    This piece originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

  • California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude

    California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a century, for both better and worse, California has defined progress, not only for America but for the world.

    As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates,  the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as  the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.

    At the same time, the Golden State now suffers the highest level of poverty in the country—23.5 percent compared to 16 percent nationally—worse than long-term hard luck cases like Mississippi. It is also now home to roughly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients, almost three times its proportion of the nation’s population.

    Like medieval serfs, increasing numbers of Californians are downwardly mobile, and doing worse than their parents: native born Latinos actually have shorter lifespans than their parents, according to one recent report. Nor are things expected to get better any time soon. According to a recent Hoover Institution survey, most Californians expect their incomes to stagnate in the coming six months, a sense widely shared among the young, whites, Latinos, females, and the less educated.

    Some of these trends can be found nationwide, but they have become pronounced and are metastasizing more quickly in the Golden State. As late as the 80s, the state was about as egalitarian as the rest of the country. Now, for the first time in decades, the middle class is a minority, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

    The Role of the Tech Oligarchs.

    California produces more new billionaires than any place this side of oligarchic Russia or crony capitalist China. By some estimates the Golden State is home to one out of every nine of the world’s billionaires. In 2011 the state was home to 90 billionaires, 20 more than second place New York and more than twice as many as booming Texas.

    The state’s digital oligarchy, surely without intention, is increasingly driving the state’s lurch towards feudalism. Silicon Valley’s wealth reflects the fortunes of a handful of companies that dominate an information economy that itself is increasingly oligopolistic.  In contrast to the traditionally conservative or libertarian ethos of the entrepreneurial class, the oligarchy is increasingly allied with the nominally populist Democratic Party and its regulatory agenda. Along with the public sector, Hollywood, and their media claque, they present California as “the spiritual inspiration” for modern “progressives” across the country.

    Through their embrace of and financial support for the state’s regulatory regime, the oligarchs have made job creation in non tech-businesses—manufacturing, energy, agriculture—increasingly difficult through “green energy” initiatives that are also sure to boost already high utility costs. One critic, state Democratic Senator Roderick Wright from heavily minority Inglewood, compares the state’s regulatory regime to the “vig” or high interest charged by the Mafia, calling it a major reason for disinvestment in many industries.

    Yet even in Silicon Valley, the expansion of prosperity has been extraordinarily limited. Due to enormous losses suffered in the current tech bubble, tech job creation in Silicon Valley has barely reached its 2000 level. In contrast, previous tech booms, such as the one in the 90s, doubled the ranks of the tech community. Some, like UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti, advance the dubious claim that those jobs are more stable than those created in Texas. But even if we concede that point for the moment,  the Valley’s growth primarily benefits its denizens but not most Californians. Since the recession, California remains down something like 500,000 jobs, a 3.5 percent loss, while its Lone Star rival has boosted its employment by a remarkable 931,000, a gain of more than 9 percent.

    Much of this has to do with the changing nature of California’s increasingly elite-driven economy. Back in the 80s and even the 90s, the state’s tech sector produced industrial jobs that sparked prosperity not only in places like Palo Alto, but also in the more hardscrabble areas in San Jose and even inland cities such as Sacramento. The once huge California aerospace industry, centered in Los Angeles, employed hundreds of thousands, not only engineers but skilled technicians, assemblers, and administrators.

    This picture has changed over the past decade. California’s tech manufacturing sector has shrunk, and those employed in Silicon Valley are increasingly well-compensated programmers, engineers and marketers. There has been little growth in good-paying blue collar or even middle management jobs. Since 2001 state production of “middle skill” jobs—those that generally require two years of training after high-school—have grown roughly half as quickly as the national average and one-tenth as fast as similar jobs in arch-rival Texas.

    “The job creation has changed,” says Leslie Parks, a long-time San Jose economic development official. “We used to be the whole food chain and create all sorts of middle class jobs. Now, increasingly, we don’t design the future—we just think about it. That makes some people rich, but not many.”

    In the midst of the current Silicon Valley boom, incomes for local Hispanics and African-Americans, who together account for one third of the population, have actually declined—18 percent for blacks and 5 percent for Latinos between 2009 and 2011, prompting one local booster to admit that “Silicon Valley is two valleys. There is a valley of haves, and a valley of have-nots.”

    The Geography of Inequality

    Geography, caste, and land ownership increasingly distinguish California’s classes from one another. As Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and the wealthier suburbs in the Bay Area have enjoyed steady income growth during the current bubble, much of the state, notes economist Bill Watkins, endures Depression-like conditions, with stretches of poverty more reminiscent of a developing country than the epicenter of advanced capitalism.

    Once you get outside the Bay Area, unemployment in many of the state’s largest counties—Sacramento, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Fresno, and Oakland—soars into the double digits. Indeed, among the 20 American cities with the highest unemployment rates, a remarkable 11 are in California, led by Merced’s mind-boggling 22 percent rate.

    This amounts to what conservative commentator Victor Davis Hanson has labeled “liberal apartheid,” a sharp divide between a well-heeled, mostly white and Asian population located along the California coast, and a largely poor, heavily Latino working class in the interior. But the class divide is also evident within  the large metro areas, despite their huge concentrations of affluent individuals. Los Angeles, for example, has the third highest rate of inequality of the nation’s 51 largest metropolitan areas, and the Bay Area ranks seventh.

    The current surge of California triumphalism, trumpeted mostly by the ruling Democrats and their eastern media allies, seems to ignore the reality faced by residents in many parts of the state. The current surge of wealth among the coastal elites, boosted by rises in property, stock, and other assets, has staved off a much feared state bankruptcy. Yet the the state’s more intractible problems cannot be addressed if growth remains restricted to a handful of favored areas and industries. This will become increasingly clear when, as is inevitable, the current tech and property boom fades, depriving the state of the taxes paid by high income individuals.

    The gap between the oligarchic class and everyone else seems increasingly permanent. A critical component of assuring class mobility, California’s once widely admired public schools were recently ranked near the absolute bottom in the country. Think about this: despite the state’s huge tech sector, California eighth graders scored 47th out of the 51 states in science testing. No wonder Mark Zuckerberg and other oligarchs are so anxious to import “techno coolies” from abroad.

    As in medieval times, land ownership, particularly along the coast, has become increasingly difficult for those not in the upper class. In 2012, four California markets—San Jose, San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles—ranked as the most unaffordable relative to income in the nation. The impact of these prices falls particularly on the poor. According to the Center for Housing Policy and National Housing Conference, 39 percent of working households in the Los Angeles metropolitan area spend more than half their income on housing, as do 35 percent in the San Francisco metro area—both higher than 31 percent in the New York area and well above the national rate of 24 percent. This is likely to get much worse given that California median housing prices rose 31 percent in the year ending May 2013. In the Bay Area the increase was an amazing 43 percent.

    Even skilled workers are affected by these prices. An analysis done for National Core, a major developer of low income housing, found that prices in such areas as Orange County are so high that even a biomedical engineer earning more than $100,000 a year could not afford to buy a home there. This, as well as the unbalanced economy, has weakened California’s hold on aspirational families, something that threatens the very dream that has attracted  millions to the state.

    This is a far cry from the 50s and 60s, when California abounded in new owner-occupied single family homes. Historian Sam Bass Warner suggested that this constituted “the glory of Los Angeles and an expression of its design for living.” Yet today the L.A. home ownership rate, like that of New York, stands at about half the national average of 65 percent. This is particularly true among working class and minority households. Atlanta’s African-American home ownership rate is approximately 40 percent above that of San Jose or Los Angeles, and approximately 50 percent higher than San Francisco.

    This feudalizing trend is likely to worsen due to draconian land regulations that will put the remaining stock of single family houses ever further out of reach, something that seems related to a reduction in child-bearing in the state. As the “Ozzie and Harriet” model erodes, many Californians end up as modern day land serfs, renting and paying someone else’s mortgage. If they seek to start a family, their tendency is to look elsewhere, ironically even in places such as Oklahoma and Texas, places that once sent eager migrants to the Golden State.

    Breaking Down the New Feudalism: The Emerging Class Structure

    The emerging class structure of neo-feudalism, like its European and Asian antecedents, is far more complex than simply a matter of the gilded “them” and the broad “us.” To work as a system, as we can now see in California, we need to understand the broader, more divergent class structure that is emerging.

    The Oligarchs: The swelling number of billionaires in the state, particularly in Silicon Valley, has enhanced power that is emerging into something like the old aristocratic French second estate. Through public advocacy and philanthropy, the oligarchs have tended to embrace California’s “green” agenda, with a very negative impact on traditional industries such as manufacturing, agriculture, energy, and construction. Like the aristocrats who saw all value in land, and dismissed other commerce as unworthy, they believe all value belongs to those who own the increasingly abstracted information revolution that has made them so fabulously rich.

    The  Clerisy: The Oligarchs may have the money, but by themselves they cannot control a huge state like California, much less America. Gentry domination requires allies with a broader social base and their own political power. In the Middle Ages, this role was played largely by the church; in today’s hyper-secular America, the job of shaping the masses has fallen to the government apparat, the professoriat, and the media, which together constitute our new Clerisy. The Clerisy generally defines societal priorities, defends “right-thinking” oligarchs, and chastises those, like traditional energy companies, that deviate from their theology.

    The New Serfs: If current trends continue, the fastest growing class will be the permanently property-less. This group includes welfare recipients and other government dependents but also the far more numerous working poor. In the past, the working poor had reasonable aspirations for a better life, epitomized by property ownership or better prospects for their children. Now, with increasingly little prospect of advancement, California’s serfs depend on the Clerisy to produce benefits making their permanent impoverishment less gruesome. This sad result remains inevitable as long as the state’s economy bifurcates between a small high-wage, tech-oriented sector, and an expanding number of lower wage jobs in hospitality, health services, and personal service jobs. As a result, the working class, stunted in their drive to achieve the California dream, now represents the largest portion of domestic migrants out of the state.

    The Yeomanry: In neo-feudalist California, the biggest losers tend to be the old private sector middle class. This includes largely small business owners, professionals, and skilled workers in traditional industries most targeted by regulatory shifts and higher taxes. Once catered to by both parties, the yeomanry have become increasingly irrelevant as California has evolved into a one-party state where the ruling Democrats have achieved a potentially permanent, sizable majority consisting largely of the clerisy and the serf class, and funded by the oligarchs. Unable to influence government and largely disdained by the clerisy, these middle income Californians are becoming a permanent outsider group, much like the old Third Estate in early medieval times, forced to pay ever higher taxes as well as soaring utility bills and required to follow regulations imposed by people who often have little use for their “middle class” suburban values.

    The Political Implications of Neo-Feudalism

    As Marx, among others, has suggested, class structures contain within them the seeds of their dissolution. In New York, a city that is arguably as feudal as anything in California, the  emergence of mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio reflected growing  antagonism—particularly among the remaining yeoman and serf class— towards the gentry urbanism epitomized by Mayor Michael “Luxury City” Bloomberg.

    Yet except for occasional rumbling from the left, neo-feudalism likely represents the future. Certainly in California, Gov. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit with the intellectual and political skills needed to oversee a neo-feudal society, remains all but unassailable politically. If Brown, or his policies, are to be contested, the challenge will likely come from left-wing activists who find his policies insufficiently supportive of the spending demanded by the clerisy and the serfs or insufficiently zealous in their pursuit of environmental purity.

    The economy in California and elsewhere likely will determine the viability of neo-feudalism. If a weaker economy forces state and local government budget cutbacks, there could be a bruising conflict as the various classes fight over diminishing spoils. But it’s perhaps more likely that we will see enough slow growth so that Brown will be able to keep both the clerisy and the serfs sufficiently satisfied. If that is the case, the new feudal system could shape the evolution of the American class structure for decades to come.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    This piece originally appeared at The Daily Beast.

     

  • The Unrise of the Creative Working Class

    Scarcity leads to creativity out of necessity. That’s the pop culture meme at least. Think “starving artist,” or the survivors in Survivor. The thinking has penetrated the business culture as well. For example, in the shadow of the 2008 recession, Google founder Sergey Brin, in a letter to his shareholders, writes: “I am optimistic about the future, because I believe scarcity breeds clarity: it focuses minds, forcing people to think creatively and rise to the challenge.”

    But a recent book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, by Ivy League psychologists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, states otherwise. Through years of investigative research, the authors found that people operating from a bandwidth of scarcity don’t have the luxury of preemptive thought. Rather, being in survivor mode saps a person’s cognitive reserve.

    “Think about being hungry,” says Shafir in a piece in Pacific Standard. “If you’re hungry, that’s what you think about. You don’t have to strain for years—the minute you’re hungry, that’s where your mind goes.” The mental preoccupation extends to unpaid utility bills, debt, or, more generally, anything that’s life-pressing, he adds. The effect drains resources from a person’s “proactive memory”.

    Think of the absence of scarcity, then, as the freedom to think, visualize, and create. The results of Mullainathan and Shafir’s findings have implications for cities. Specifically, it’s widely theorized that cities must innovate to survive, and it is a city’s creative reservoir—which is dependent on the size of its educated workforce—that will nurture innovation. This is how  a city of soot can evolve into a city of software, not unlike what has occurred in Pittsburgh.

    But what about  Rust Belt cities struggling with high rates of poverty? Over 36 percent of Detroit’s 700,000 plus are below the poverty line. In Cleveland, the poverty rate is 33 percent of nearly 400,000. The national poverty rate is 14 percent.  This is a ridiculous amount of brain capacity consumed by unforgiving reality.  No wonder Detroit inches to get a leg up. The feral dogs, abandoned houses, and creditors looking for money have eaten up the capability to envision. Hence, the collective exasperation, and the bankruptcy death spiral.

    What will save the Clevelands and Detroits? The most prescribed cure is to find a way to attract more educated people. This has led cities across the country to compete for the vaunted “creative class” professional demographic. To urban theorist Richard Florida, to get creative types a city must have “[an] indigenous street-level culture – a teeming blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line between participant and observer or between creativity and its creators.”

    According to Florida, a city needs to know it is on stage,and compete for the attention of a select demographic. In theatre parlance, this is called “capturing the audience experience.”  In urban place-making parlance it is called  “principles of persuasion” that emphasize novelty, contrast, surprise, color, etc.

    Robin_Williams_779552

    In other words, cities must become the collective embodiment of Robin Williams.

    Then, once you get your audience, you just watch them go,  says Florida, as creativity is “a social process.”  Creativity is bred by “the presence of other creative people.”  The scarcity of creativity in a poor city hypothetically gets filled up by the big-bang spontaneity of two creative types talking, neurologically egged on, no doubt, by a festival performer on stilts in a clown suit sauntering before them.

    If this strategy sounds like an overly simplified way to change what ails Detroit and Cleveland, it’s because it is. In fact Florida himself acknowledged this, stating in Atlantic Cities that, “On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits [to the poor].”  In fact, because housing costs rise, it  makes the lives of lower- and middle-income people worse.

    But cities keep revitalizing this way because it is a feel-good prescription that is politically palatable. Who hates art, carnivals, drinking, and eating?  Displays of abundance provide the incentive to look the other way. Writes Thomas Sewell, “The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics”.

    Where does that leave the millions operating on the wrong side of scarcity? Florida’s answer is for cities to somehow convince corporate America to pay their service workers more. While admirable, I doubt Daniel Schwartz, CEO of Burger King, is listening.

    Another option would be refocusing the lens through which modern urban revitalization is viewed. The default setting is to compete for scarcity of the educated elite. Instead, we should alleviate the scarcity from the struggling.  But flipping this script requires cities to give up on the idea that there is some audience that will save them. It is a city’s people who ultimately ruin or save themselves.

    In the meantime, the urban play continues. Cleveland is directing $4 million dollars of its casino windfall profits into the creation of an outdoor chandelier  that will hang at an intersection outside of Playhouse Square, the city’s theater district. The design, evoked by chandeliers inside the Playhouse itself, is intended to blur the line between drama and reality, and will “add glittery outdoor glamour to a district that tends at times to look gray and lifeless,”  according to architecture critic Steven Litt–all the while making the intersection “feel like a giant theater lobby”.

    But the script on Cleveland’s streets is one of hardship, not glittery glamour. Here’s hoping the outdoor chandelier illuminates that scarcity to those walking beneath it.

    This piece was originally published in Belt Magazine.

    Richey Piiparinen is a writer and policy researcher based in Cleveland. He is co-editor of Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology. Read more from him at his blog and at Rust Belt Chic.

    Lead photo by David Shvartsman.

  • The Next Urban Crisis, And How We Might Be Able To Avoid It

    Urban boosters are rightly proud of the progress American cities have made since their nadir in the 1970s; Harvard economist Ed Glaeser has gone so far as to proclaim “the triumph of the city.” Yet recent events — notably Detroit’s bankruptcy and the victory of left-wing populist Bill de Blasio in the Democratic primary of the New York mayoral election — suggest that the urban future may prove far more problematic than commonly acknowledged.

    Detroit’s bankruptcy revealed the unsustainable fiscal problems facing most major urban centers, including, most importantly, President Obama’s political base of Chicago. This summer, Moody’s downgraded the Windy City’s credit rating three notches, noting the unsustainable nature of its pension obligations. Some 37 cities have filed for bankruptcy since 2010, most of them small, and as many as 20 others may be on the verge, including larger places like the California cities of Oakland and Fresno, and Providence, R.I.

    My hometown of Los Angeles may not be far behind. Perhaps the most union-dominated big city in America, the City of Angels’ pension obligations have gone from 3% of the city budget a decade ago to 18% last year. They are rising at a phenomenal 25% annual rate, according to a recent report by an independent watchdog, California Common Sense.

    Given this background, the political tides in New York suggest a worsening of the crisis. Thanks to the Bernanke-inspired Wall Street boom, the New York economy has not suffered the extreme fiscal distress of other big cities. But its fiscal condition is far worse than Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his well-oiled media machine might suggest. Under Bloomberg city spending grew 55% while pension costs have grown 300%.

    With de Blasio likely to be the next mayor, we can expect the bleeding to get worse. Many business people rightly fear a de Blasio’s administration will raise taxes in order to meet public employee demands. Faced with financial shortfalls, de Blasio’s response, notes historian Fred Siegel, is likely to be similar to that of his hero, former Mayor David Dinkins, who consistently gave in to public unions and raises taxes.

    But it’s not enough to dismiss de Blasio as a throwback. His victory reveals the depth of a profound social crisis beneath the glitz and glitter of Bloomberg’s luxury city. Similar class and geographic divisions can be seen throughout the country but inequality seems most egregious in New York. A recent analysis of inequality by University of Washington demographer Richard Morrill found New York to be the least egalitarian big metro area in America.

    This is borne out by other research: the New York City comptroller’s office found that the top 1% account for roughly a third of Gotham’s income, twice as high a share as in the rest of the country. Incomes have surged on Wall Street but most New Yorkers — two-thirds of whom are racial minorities — have struggled to keep pace. Controlling for cost, in fact, the New Yorker’s average paycheck is among the lowest among the nation’s 51 largest metro areas. Nearly half the city’s residents, notes theNation, are either below the poverty line or just above it.

    Bloomberg’s policy focus on ultra-dense development geared to Wall Street, the global rich, and the needs of the all-powerful, largely Manhattan real estate community has done very little for the vast majority of New Yorkers. This reality has lent credibility to de Blasio’s “tale of two cities ” stump speech and the growing rejection of Bloomberg’s legacy.

    Not that all of this can be laid at Bloomberg’s feet. New York’s economy has been changing for decades. New York of the 1950s was a manufacturing, trade and fashion superpower, employing hundreds of thousands of middle- and working-class residents. Large corporations employed large numbers of white- and pink-collar workers. This made New York, although always with its extremes, still a very middle- and working-class city.

    New York’s blue-collar economy has withered to a degree unmatched in most other U.S. cities. The port, the city’s original raison d’etre , lost its primacy to Los Angeles-Long Beach by 1980 and now ranks third in cargo value behind Houston-Galveston as well. The manufacturing sector, which employed a million in 1950, has shriveled to 73,000 jobs today (note that a small part of the decline is due to the BLS’ reclassification of some jobs to other sectors, and other statistical changes). Manufacturing employment in NYC has shrunk 39% since 2004, the worst performance of any major metropolitan area.

    A similar, albeit less dramatic decline has occurred in white-collar employment, in part due to the movement of large companies out of the city. In 1960 New York City boasted one out of every four Fortune 500 firms; today there are 46. And even among those keeping their headquarters in Gotham, many have shipped most of their back office operations elsewhere. Employment has even dropped in the “booming” financial sector, down 7.4% since 2007. The big employment gains have been almost entirely concentrated in the low-wage hospitality and retail sectors.

    If inequality is now greater in New York, the overall economic situation in other cities is, if anything, worse. New York at least has Wall Street, media and a constant infusion of wealth from the rest of world to keep its economy going and stave off the bond-holders. Yet even New York’s economy is underperforming its periphery. The city’s unemployment rate is 8.7% while the surrounding suburbs stand at 7.5%. This gap exists in almost all major metropolitan areas ; among the 51 largest metros the core unemployment rate is 8.8 percent compared to 7.1% in the suburbs.

    The gap is wider in other major cities. In the Chicago area, unemployment in the city is 2 percentage points higher than in the suburbs; in Los Angeles, the city unemployment rate is near 12%, three points higher than in suburbs. This, of course, all pales to Detroit where the city jobless rate stands at over 18% compared to 10% in the suburbs.

    Rather than “cure poverty” or export it to the suburbs, as is regularly claimed, cities retain a poverty rate twice as high as in the suburbs. And although hipsters and the global rich dominate media coverage, the vast majority of the population growth in urban cores over the past decade — upward of 80% — has come not from hipsters but the poor.

    These woes have been largely ignored by the press, but, as de Blasio’s primary victory shows, cannot be hidden forever. True, big investments aimed at attracting the “hip and cool” urban element have helped real estate speculators in selected districts, but has precious little positive impact on the neighborhoods where most urbanities reside.

    Unless addressed, the inequality in core cities suggests a similar lurch to the left could be seen in other cities. What is needed now is a new strategy that promotes the kind of broad-based economic growth that would make the urban “triumph” more than an empty one.

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Photo courtesy of Bill de Blasio.

  • Fast-Growing Mining and Oil & Gas Industries, and the Huge Number of Supply-Chain Jobs They Create

    The fastest-growing industry in the U.S since 2010 isn’t large or well-known. In fact, nearly half of the estimated 5,100 jobs in support activities for metal mining are located in one state: Nevada. Nonetheless, employment in this niche mining industry has ballooned 53% since 2010, and it creates a huge number of supply-chain jobs in other parts of the economy.

    Four of the five fastest-growing industries from 2010-2013, based on EMSI’s 2013.2 employment dataset, are related in some form to mining and oil & gas. These industries (e.g., oil & gas pipeline construction and support activities for oil & gas operations) have been carried by the boom in oil and natural gas production in pockets of the U.S., from North Dakota to Pennsylvania to Texas. And their growth has sparked new jobs in other sectors.

    This is especially the case for support activities for metal mining. For every job in this industry, another 6.1 supply-chain jobs are created elsewhere. That means the tiny industry accounts for a much more significant 36,180 jobs in all. (Note: This does not count the induced effects that come when employees and other income claimants spend what they make on food, clothes, and other goods and services.)

    NAICS Code Description 2013 Jobs % Change Since 2010 Supply-Chain Jobs Multiplier Total Supply-Chain Jobs
    Source: EMSI Wage-and-Salary and Self-Employed Workers (2013.2) and EMSI Input-Output Model
    213114 Support Activities for Metal Mining 5,103 53% 7.09 36,180
    212322 Industrial Sand Mining 5,241 49% 1.75 9,172
    237120 Oil and Gas Pipeline and Related Structures Construction 145,870 49% 1.68 245,062
    213112 Support Activities for Oil and Gas Operations 302,077 43% 2.15 649,466
    212234 Copper Ore and Nickel Ore Mining 15,109 37% 2.7 40,794
    532412 Construction, Mining, and Forestry Machinery and Equipment Rental and Leasing 70,151 36% 2.74 192,214
    333132 Oil and Gas Field Machinery and Equipment Manufacturing 78,502 32% 2.12 166,424
    212221 Gold Ore Mining 15,738 32% 1.86 29,273
    211112 Natural Gas Liquid Extraction 6,374 28% 1.85 11,792
    TOTAL 644,165 1,380,376

    Mining and similar extraction-based industries take a lot of equipment and materials to operate, so their growth is felt by a wide variety of suppliers. Altogether, the nine mining and oil & gas industries highlighted above — all of which have grown at least 28% since 2010 — account for 644,165 estimated jobs. And when you consider the spin-off jobs in their supply chain, the employment number more than doubles to 1,380,376. (As reader Gene Hayward calculated, when you add the direct and supply-chain jobs created since 2010, these nine industries account for nearly 600,000 total jobs created in three-plus years. Keep in mind EMSI’s 2013 job numbers are estimates and are based on historic and projected data).

    To understand what we mean by “supply-chain jobs,” it’s helpful to look at the different components of EMSI’s job multiplier:

    • Initial: Jobs in the focus industry (e.g., support activities for metal mining).
    • Direct: Jobs in the supplying industries.
    • Indirect: The subsequent ripple effect in further supply chains. These are the suppliers of the suppliers.
    • Induced: This change is due to the impact of the new earnings created by the initial, direct, and indirect changes (otherwise known as the income effect). These earnings enter the economy as employees spend their paychecks in the region on food, clothing, and other goods and services.

    As we mentioned earlier, we’ve only included the first three components in this analysis. These are the jobs directly related to these industries’ supply chains, and the indirect suppliers of their supply chain. So these industries, especially support activities for metal mining, have deep roots in the economy — the more they grow, the more the economy as a whole grows. But how do the supply-chain job multipliers in these mining and oil & gas industries compare to other export-based industries?

    Comparing Supply-Chain Multipliers

    Support activities for metal mining packs serious job-creation punch, and its 7.1 supply-chain job multiplier compares favorably with other industries with hefty multipliers. The largest supply-chain multiplier in the mainstream manufacturing sector belongs to light truck and utility vehicle manufacturing (a whopping 15.0), while cyclic crude and intermediate manufacturing and cheese manufacturing are both at 10.2. This means that every job in these these heavyweight sectors leads to between nine to 14 new jobs in the U.S.

    supplychainmultipliers

    Impressive. But various processing and refining industries have even larger supply-chain multipliers. The largest supply-chain multiplier in the U.S. is petroleum refineries (20.8), followed by soybean processing (19.1). What makes an industry’s multiplier so large (or so small)? Here’s an explanation from EMSI co-founder and chief economist Hank Robison:

    The size of supply-chain employment multipliers generally reflects a mix of three things: 1) the number and complexity of steps involved in producing the good, 2) capital requirements, and 3) the vertical integration of the production process (in a vertically integrated industry most of the production steps occur within the industry itself). Producing a quart of common motor oil provides a good example of a process resulting in a large employment multiplier. Producing refined oil products entails a complex many-stepped process – starting with exploration, and then drilling, oil field to refinery transportation, testing, treating and refining, and finally packaging of the end product. Oil refining is as capital intensive as it gets; refineries represent enormous capital investments, with sophisticated cracking towers, gauges, piping and more. And finally the production of refined oil products reflects a very disintegrated production process: the bulk of the labor embodied in the final product is added in the earlier production steps, e.g., in exploration, drilling, transport, etc. It is little wonder then that at 20.83, the supply-chain employment multiplier for the petroleum refining (NAICS 324110) sector is the largest of all employment multipliers in the US IO Model.

    Consider now an industry at the other end of the supply-chain employment multiplier spectrum, soil preparation, planting, and cultivating (NAICS 115112). Operating under contract from farmers, firms in this sector conduct a variety of basic farm support activities. Their capital investment in tractors, tillers and such is relatively modest, and they often use the equipment of the contracting farmer. Compared to manufacturing, and most other sectors, their production process entails few steps: buy some fuel, maybe some seed, and go to work. There is little room for vertical integration as they add all but the smallest sliver of the labor entailed in delivering their end product – season-ready land. It is little wonder that their supply-chain employment multiplier is a mere 1.02, one of the lowest of all supply-chain employment multipliers in the US IO Model.

    SupplyChainMultipliers_Low

    Joshua Wright is an editor at EMSI, an Idaho-based economics firm that provides data and analysis to workforce boards, economic development agencies, higher education institutions, and the private sector. He manages the EMSI blog and is a freelance journalist. Contact him here.

  • America’s True Power In The NAFTA Century

    OK, I get it. Between George W. Bush and Barack Obama we have made complete fools of ourselves on the international stage, outmaneuvered by petty lunatics and crafty kleptocrats like Russia’sVladimir Putin. Some even claim we are witnessing “an erosion of world influence” equal to such failed states as the Soviet Union and the French Third Republic. “Has anyone noticed how diminished, how very Lilliputian, America has become?” my friend Tunku Varadajaran recently asked.

    In reality, it’s our politicians who have gotten small, not America. In our embarrassment, we tend not to notice that our rivals are also shrinking. Take the Middle East — please. Increasingly, we don’t need it because of North America’s unparalleled resources and economic vitality.

    Welcome then to the NAFTA century, in which our power is fundamentally based on developing a common economic region with our two large neighbors. Since its origins in 1994, NAFTA has emerged as the world’s largest trading bloc, linking 450 million people that produce $17 trillion in output. Foreign policy elites in both parties may focus on Europe, Asia and the Middle East, but our long-term fate lies more with Canada, Mexico and the rest of the Americas.

    Nowhere is this shift in power more obvious than in the critical energy arena, the wellspring of our deep involvement in the lunatic Middle East. Massive finds have given us a new energy lifeline in places like the Gulf coast, the Alberta tar sands, the Great Plains, the Inland West, Ohio, Pennsylvania and potentially California.

    And if Mexico successfully reforms its state-owned energy monopoly, PEMEX, the world energy — and economic — balance of power will likely shift more decisively to North America. Mexican President Pena Nieto’s plan, which would allow increased foreign investment in the energy sector, is projected by at least one analyst to boost Mexico’s oil output by 20% to 50% in the coming decades.

    Taken together, the NAFTA countries now boast larger reserves of oil, gas (and if we want it, coal) than any other part of the world. More important, given our concerns with greenhouse gases, NAFTA countries now possess, by some estimates, more clean-burning natural gas than Russia, Iran and Qatar put together. All this at a time when U.S. energy use is declining, further eroding the leverage of these troublesome countries.

    This particularly undermines the position of Putin, who has had his way with Obama but faces long-term political decline. Russia, which relies on hydrocarbons for two-thirds of its export revenues and half its budget, is being forced to cut gas prices in Europe due to a forthcoming gusher of LNG exports from the U.S. and other countries. In the end, Russia is an economic one-horse show with declining demography and a discredited political system.

    In terms of the Middle East, the NAFTA century means we can disengage, when it threatens our actual strategic interests. Afraid of a shut off of oil from the Persian Gulf? Our response should be: Make my day. Energy prices will rise, but this will hurt Europe and China more than us, and also will stimulate more jobs and economic growth in much of the country, particularly the energy belts of the Gulf Coast and the Great Plains.

    China and India have boosted energy imports as we decrease ours; China is expected to surpass the United States as the world’s largest oil importer this year. At the same time, in the EU, bans on fracking and over-reliance on unreliable, expensive “green” energy has driven up prices for both gas  and electricity.

    These high prices have not only eroded depleted consumer spending but is leading some manufacturers, including in Germany, to look at relocating production , notably to energy-rich regions of the United States. This shift in industrial production is still nascent, but is evidenced by growing U.S. manufacturing at a time when Europe and Asia, particularly China, are facing stagnation or even declines. Europe’s industry minister recently warned of “anindustrial massacre” brought on in large part by unsustainably high energy prices.

    The key beneficiaries of NAFTA’s energy surge will be energy-intensive industries such as petrochemicals — major new investments are being made in this sector along the Gulf Coast by both foreign and domestic companies. But it also can be seen in the resurgence in North American manufacturing in automobiles, steel and other key sectors. Particularly critical is Mexico’s recharged industrial boom. In 2011 roughly half of the nearly $20 billion invested in the country was for manufacturing. Increasingly companies from around the world see our southern neighbor as an ideal locale for new manufacturing plants; General Motors GM -0.96%, Audi , Honda, Perelli, Alcoa and the Swedish appliance giant Electrolux have all announced major investments.

    Critically this is not so much Ross Perot’s old “sucking sound” of American jobs draining away, but about the shift in the economic balance of power away from China and East Asia. Rather than rivals, the U.S., Mexican and Canadian economies are becoming increasingly integrated, with raw materials, manufacturing goods and services traded across the borders. This integration has proceeded rapidly since NAFTA, with U.S. merchandise exports to Mexico growing from $41.6 billion in 1993 to $216.3 billion in 2012, an increase of 420%,while service exports doubled. MeanwhileU.S. imports from Mexico increased from $39.9 billion in 1993 to $277.7 billion in 2012, an increase of 596%.

    At the same time, U.S. exports to Canada increased from $100.2 billion in 1993 to $291.8 billion in 2012.

    Investment flows mirror this integration. As of 2011, the United States accounted for 44% of all foreign investment in Mexico, more than twice that of second-place Spain; Canada, ranking fourth, accounts for another 10%. Canada, which, according to a recent AT Kearney report, now ranks as the No. 4 destination for foreign direct investment, with the U.S. accounting for more than half the total in the country. Over 70% of Canada’s outbound investment goes to the U.S.

    Our human ties to these neighbors may be even more important. (Disclaimer: my wife is a native of Quebec). Mexico, for example, accounts for nearly 30% of our foreign-born population, by far the largest group. Canada, surprisingly, is the largest source of foreign-born Americans of any country outside Asia or Latin America.

    We also visit each other on a regular basis, with Canada by far the biggest sender of tourists to the U.S., more than the next nine countries combined; Mexico ranks second. The U.S., for its part, accounts for two-thirds of all visitors to Canada and the U.S. remains by far largest source of travelers to Mexico.

    These interactions reflect an intimacy Americans simply do not share with such places as the Middle East (outside Israel), Russia, and China. There’s the little matter of democracy, as well as a common sharing of a continent, with rivers, lakes and mountain ranges that often don’t respect national borders. Policy-maker may prefer to look further afield but North America is our home, Mexico and Canada our natural allies for the future. Adios, Middle East and Europe; bonjour, North America.

    This story originally appeared at Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    NAFTA logo by AlexCovarrubias.

  • A Map Of America’s Future: Where Growth Will Be Over The Next Decade

    The world’s biggest and most dynamic economy derives its strength and resilience from its geographic diversity. Economically, at least, America is not a single country. It is a collection of seven nations and three quasi-independent city-states, each with its own tastes, proclivities, resources and problems. These nations compete with one another – the Great Lakes loses factories to the Southeast, and talent flees the brutal winters and high taxes of the city-state New York for gentler climes – but, more important, they develop synergies, albeit unintentionally. Wealth generated in the humid South or icy northern plains benefits the rest of the country; energy flows from the Dakotas and the Third Coast of Texas and Louisiana; and even as people leave the Northeast, the brightest American children, as well as those of other nations, continue to migrate to this great education mecca.

    The idea isn’t a new one – the author Joel Garreau first proposed a North America of “nine nations” 32 years ago – but it’s never been more relevant than it is today, as America’s semi-autonomous economic states continue to compete, cooperate … and thrive. Click on the thumbnail of our map to see our predictions for the job, population and GDP growth of these 10 regional blocks over the next decade, and read on below for more context.

    View the map graphic at Forbes.com.


    INLAND WEST

    The Inland West extends from the foothills of the Rockies to the coastal ranges that shelter the Pacific Coast. This is the West as we understand it historically, a land of spectacular scenery: icecaps and dry lands, sagebrush, high deserts and Alpine forests. From 2003 to 2013, it enjoyed the most rapid population growth in the nation: 21%. It is expected to continue to outgrow the rest of the country over the next decade, as the area boasts the highest percentage of young people under 20 in the U.S.

    Much of this growth was driven by a combination of quality of life factors — access to the outdoors and relatively low housing prices — as well as strong economic fundamentals. Over the past decade the area has enjoyed nearly 8% job growth, the strongest in the country, with the highest rate of STEM growth in the nation over the past decade.  Boise, Denver and Salt Lake City have posted stellar employment growth due to the energy boom and growth in technology. The western reaches of the region — the inland parts of Washington, Oregon and California — have not done as well. These areas suffer from being “red” resource- and manufacturing-oriented economies within highly regulated, high-tax “blue states.”

    THE LEFT COAST

    The Northeast may still see itself as the nation’s intellectual and cultural center, but it is steadily losing that title to the Left Coast. This region sports a unique coastal terroir, with moderate temperatures, though it may be a bit rainy in the north. The climate requires less power than elsewhere in the country for heating and air-conditioning, making its residents’ predilection for green energy more feasible.

    Over the past 20 years, the Left Coast — the least populous nation with some 18 million people — has rocketed ahead of the Northeast as a high-tech center. It has by far the highest percentage of workers in STEM professions — more than 50% above the national average — and the largest share of engineers in its workforce as well. No place on the planet can boast so many top-line tech firms: Amazon and Microsoft in the Seattle area, and in the Bay Area, Intel, Apple, Facebook and Google, among others.

    Over the next decade, the Left Coast should maintain its momentum, but ultimately it faces a Northeast-like future, with a slowing rate of population growth. High housing prices, particularly in the Bay Area, are transforming it into something of a gated community, largely out of reach to new middle-class families. The density-centric land use policies that have helped drive up Bay Area prices are also increasingly evident in places like Portland and Seattle. The Left Coast has the smallest percentage of residents under 5 outside the Great Lakes and the Northeast, suggesting that a “demographic winter” may arrive there sooner than some might suspect.

    CITY-STATE LOS ANGELES

    Once called “an island on the land,” southern California remains distinct from everywhere else in the country. Long a lure for migrants, it has slipped in recent decades, losing not only population to other areas but whole industries and major corporations. The once-youthful area is also experiencing among the most rapid declines in its under-15 population in the nation. Yet it retains America’s top port, the lion’s share of the entertainment business, the largest garment district–and the best climate in North America.

    THE GREAT PLAINS

    The vast region from Texas to Montana has often been written off as “flyover country.” But in the past decade, no nation in America has displayed greater economic dynamism. Since the recession, it has posted the second-fastest job growth rate in the U.S., after the Inland West, and last year it led the country in employment growth. The Dakotas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Kansas all regularly register among the lowest unemployment rates in the country.

    The good times on the Plains are largely due to the new energy boom, which has been driven by a series of major shale finds: the Bakken formation in North Dakota, as well as the Barnett and Permian in Texas. The region’s agricultural sector has also benefited from soaring demand in developing countries.

    Most remarkable of all has been the Plains’ demographic revival. The region enjoyed a 14% increase in population over the past 10 years, a rate 40% above the national average, and is expected to expand a further 6% by 2023, more than twice the projected growth rate in the Northeast. This is partly due to its attractiveness to families — the low-cost region has a higher percentage of residents under 5 than any other beside the Inland West.

    But outside of the oil boom towns, don’t expect a revival of the small communities that dot much of the region. The new Great Plains is increasingly urbanized, with an archipelago of vibrant, growing cities from Dallas and Oklahoma City to Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo.

    Its major challenges: accommodating an increasingly diverse population and maintaining adequate water supplies, particularly for the Southern Plains. The strong pro-growth spirit in the region, its wealth in natural resources and a high level of education, particularly in the northern tier, suggest that the Plains will play a far more important role in the future than anyone might have thought a decade ago.

    THE THIRD COAST

    Once a sleepy, semitropical backwater, the Third Coast, which stretches along the Gulf of Mexico from south Texas to western Florida, has come out of the recession stronger than virtually any other region. Since 2001, its job base has expanded 7%, and it is projected to grow another 18% the coming decade.

    The energy industry and burgeoning trade with Latin America are powering the Third Coast, combined with a relatively low cost, business-friendly climate. By 2023 its capital–Houston–will be widely acknowledged as America’s next great global city. Many other cities across the Gulf, including New Orleans and Corpus Christi, are also major energy hubs. The Third Coast has a concentration of energy jobs five times the national rate, and those jobs have an average annual salary of $100,000, according to EMSI.

    As the area gets wealthier, The Third Coast’s economy will continue to diversify. Houston, which is now the country’s most racially and ethnically diverse metro area, according to a recent Rice study, is home to the world’s largest medical center and has dethroned New York City as the nation’s leading exporter. Mobile, Ala., seems poised to become an industrial center and locus for trade with Latin America, and New Orleans has made a dramatic comeback as a cultural and business destination since Katrina.

    THE GREAT LAKES

    The nation’s industrial heartland hemorrhaged roughly a million manufacturing jobs over the past 10 years, making it the only one of our seven nations to lose jobs overall during that period. But the prognosis is not as bleak as some believe.

    Employment is growing again thanks to a mild renaissance in manufacturing, paced by an improving auto industry and a shale boom in parts of Ohio. The region has many underappreciated assets, such as the largest number of engineers in the nation, ample supplies of fresh water and some of the nation’s best public universities. With fifty-eight million people, it boasts an economy on a par with that of France.

    Yet we cannot expect much future population growth in the Great Lakes, the second most populous American nation. Its population is aging rapidly, and the percentage under 5 is almost as low as the Northeast.

    THE GREAT NORTHEAST

    The Northeast–which excludes the city-state of New York–has been the country’s brain center since before the American Revolution. This region is home to some 41 million people, and leads the nation in the percentage of workers engaged in business services, as well as in jobs that require a college education. With average wages of $76,000, $19,000 above the national average, the area boasts a GDP of $2.2 trillion, about equal to that of Brazil.

    The Northeast is one of the country’s whitest regions — Anglos account for over 70% of the population — and one of the wealthiest. In many ways, it resembles aging Western Europe in its demographic profile. The Northeast is the most child-free region outside the retirement hub of south Florida. Coupled with sustained domestic out-migration, its population growth is likely to be among the slowest in the nation in the decade ahead.

    Good thing its residents are highly educated — diminishing numbers and the consequent decline in political power suggest that the Northeast may need to depend more on its wits in decade ahead.

    CITY-STATE NEW YORK

    The Big Apple’s much heralded comeback has assured its place as one of the world’s great global cities. But the city faces challenges in terms of soaring indebtedness, rapid aging, a weak technical workforce, expensive housing and high taxes. It also will struggle with competition from rising cities of the other nations such as San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Houston, each of which threatens New York’s traditional role in key sectors of the economy.

    THE SOUTHEAST MANUFACTURING BELT

    At the time of the Civil War the southeastern United States was both outpeopled and outmanufactured. Today the Southeast, is the largest region in terms of population (60 million) and is establishing itself as the country’s second industrial hub, after the Great Lakes.

    It is attracting large-scale investment from manufacturers from Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Although most of the region still lags in educational attainment, the education gap with the Northeast and Great Lakes is slowly shrinking. The population holding college degrees has been expanding strongly in Nashville, Raleigh, Birmingham, Richmond and Charlotte.

    More babies and the migration of families, including immigrants, to this low-cost region suggest an even larger political footprint for the Southeast in the decades ahead. Population growth has been more than twice as fast since 2001 as in the Northeast, a trend that is projected continue in the next decade. The region looks set to become smarter, more urban and cosmopolitan, and perhaps a bit less conservative.

    CITY-STATE MIAMI

    Greater Miami often seems more the capital of Latin America than it does an American region. Its population is heavily Hispanic, and trade, finance, construction and tourism tend to focus southward. But Miami faces the constraints of an aging, and largely childless, population–which means it will continue to rely on newcomers both from abroad and from the colder regions of the U.S.

    This story appears in the September 23, 2013 issue of Forbes.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    Mark Schill is Vice President of Research at Praxis Strategy Group, an economic development and research firm working with communities and states to improve their economies.

  • Southern California’s Road Back

    If the prospects for the United States remain relatively bright – despite two failed administrations – how about Southern California? Once a region that epitomized our country’s promise, the area still maintains enormous competitive advantages, if it ever gathers the wits to take advantage of them.

    We are going to have to play catch-up. I have been doing regional rankings on such things as jobs, opportunities and family-friendliness for publications such as Forbes and the Daily Beast. In most of the surveys, Los Angeles-Orange County does very poorly, often even worse than much-maligned Riverside and San Bernardino. For example, in a list looking at “aspirational cities” – that is places to move to for better opportunities – L.A.-Orange County ranked dead last, scoring well below average in everything from unemployment to job creation, congestion and housing costs relative to incomes.

    Yet, Southern California possesses unique advantages that include, but don’t end at, our still-formidable climatic and scenic advantages. The region is home to the country’s strongest ethnic economy, a still-potent industrial-technological complex and the largest culture industry in North America, if not the world.

    In identifying these assets, we have to understand what we are not: Silicon Valley-San Francisco, or New York, where a relative cadre of the ultrarich, fueled by tech IPOs or Wall Street can sustain the local economy. Unlike the Bay Area, in particular, our economy must accommodate a much larger proportion of poorly educated people – almost a quarter of our adult population lacks a high school degree. This means our economy has to provide opportunities for a broader range of skills.

    Nor are we a corporate center such as New York, Houston, Dallas or Chicago. We remain fundamentally a hub for small and ethnic businesses, home to a vast cadre of independent craftspeople and skilled workers, many of whom work for themselves. In fact, our region – L.A.-Orange and Riverside-San Bernardino – boasts the highest percentage of self-employed people of any major metropolitan area in the country, well ahead of the Bay Area, New York and Chicago.

    Policy from Washington has not been favorable to this grass-roots economy. The “free money for the rich” policy of the Bernanke Federal Reserve has proven a huge boom to stock-jobbers and venture firms but has not done much to increase capital for small-scale firms. Yet it is to these small firms – dispersed, highly diverse and stubbornly individualistic – that remain our key long-term asset, and they need to become the primary focus on regional policy-makers.

    Ethnic Networks

    Immigration has slowed in recent years but the decades-long surge of migration, largely from Asia and Mexico, has transformed the area into one of the most diverse in the world. More to the point, Southern California has what one can call diversity in depth, that is, huge concentrations of key immigrant populations – Korean, Chinese, Mexican, Salvadoran, Filipino, Israeli, Russian – that are as large or larger than anywhere outside the respective homelands. Foreigners also account for many of our richest people, with five of 11 of L.A.’s wealthiest being born abroad.

    These networks are critical in a place lacking a strong corporate presence. Our international connections come largely as the result of both the ethnic communities as well as our status as the largest port center in North America, which creates a market for everything from assembly of foreign-made parts to trade finance and real estate investment. Southern California may be a bit of a desert when it comes to big money-center banks, but it’s home to scores of ethnic banks, mainly Korean and Chinese, but also those serving Israeli, Armenian and other groups.

    For the immigrants, what appeals about Southern California is that we offer a diverse, and dispersed, array of single-family neighborhoods. Both national and local data finds immigrants increasingly flocking to suburbs. Places like the San Gabriel Valley’s 626 area, Cerritos, Westminster, Garden Grove, Fullerton and, more recently, Irvine, have expanded the region’s geography of ethnic enclaves.

    These enclaves drive whole economies, such as Mexicans in the wholesale produce industry or the development of electronics assembly and other trade-related industry by migrants largely from Taiwan. Global ties are critical here. Korean-Americans started largely in ethnic middleman businesses, but have been moving upscale, as their children acquire education. They, in turn, have helped attract investment from South Korea’s rising global corporations, including a new $200 million headquarters for Hyundai in Fountain Valley, as well as a $1 billion, 73-story new tower being built by Korean Air in downtown Los Angeles.

    Tech Industrial Base

    During the Cold War, Southern California sported one of the largest concentrations of scientists and engineers in the world. The end of the Cold War, at the beginning of the 1990s, severely reduced the region’s technical workforce, a process further accelerated by the movement out of the region of such large aerospace firms as Lockheed and Northrop. The region has roughly 300,000 fewer manufacturing jobs than it had a decade ago, largely due to losses in aerospace as well as in the garment industry.

    Yet, despite the decades-long erosion, Southern California still enjoys the largest engineering workforce – some 70,000 people – in the country. It also graduates the most new engineers, although the vast majority of them appear to leave for greener pastures. One looming problem: a paucity of venture capital, where the region lags behind not just the Bay Area, but also San Diego and New York. This can be seen in the relative dearth of high-profile start-ups, particularly in fields like social media, now dominated by the Bay Area.

    But the process of recovery in Southern California does not require imitating Silicon Valley. Instead we need to leverage our existing talent base – and recent graduates – and focus on the region’s traditional strength in the application of technology. A recent analysis of manufacturing by the economic modeling firm EMSI found strong growth in some very promising sectors, including the manufacturing of surgical and medical equipment, space vehicles and a wide array of food processing, an industry tied closely to the immigrant networks.

    Cultural Complex

    For most Americans, and even more so among foreigners, the image of Southern California is shaped by its cultural exports, not only in film and television but in fashion and design. This third sector epitomizes the uniqueness of the region, and provides an economic allure that can withstand both the generally poor business climate and the incentives offered by other regions.

    After a period of some stagnation, Hollywood again is increasing employment. Roughly 130,000 people work in film-related industries in Los Angeles, which is now headed back to levels last seen a decade earlier but still well below the 146,000 jobs that existed in 1999.

    At the same time, the sportswear and jeans business in Los Angeles, and the surfwear industry in Orange County, remain national leaders. Overall, the area’s fashion industry has retained a skilled production base – over twice that of rival New York’s – and has been aided, in part, by access to Hollywood, lower rents and labor costs than in New York.

    Taken together, these sectors – ethnic business, sophisticated manufacturing and culture – could provide the basis for a renaissance in the local economy. The smaller firms in these fields, in particular, need a friendlier business climate, a more evolved skills-training program from local schools and a better-maintained infrastructure. More than anything, though, they require an understanding on the part of both government and business that their success remains the best means to reverse decades of relative decline.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    This piece originally appeared at The Orange County Register.

  • South Korea, What Will Limit the World’s Global Underdog?

    South Korea is a small country with grit. The shrimp sized peninsula is a national success story that transformed itself from impoverished conditions to industrial riches in a remarkable 68-year postwar period. The country experienced the fastest growth in per-capita GDP since the 1960. According to the World Bank, South Korea’s GDP per capita in 1960 was $155 and has risen to $22,424 today, which is greater than the national wealth of their Chinese neighbors.

    Korea’s rise to world prominence did not come easily. The country rose to its ranks after being destroyed by a half-century of Japanese colonization and from the ashes of the divisive Korean War, which left its cities, including the capital, Seoul, in ruins. At war’s end GDP stood at less than $200 per capita, no natural resources, and a third of the population was homeless.  Today it is home to a number of Fortune Global 500 conglomerates, most notably, Samsung at no. 14, SK Holdings no. 57, POSCO no. 167, and Hyundai no. 206.

    The country also took a tortuous path towards democracy, living under authoritarian and military-dominated regimes until 1945. Now it is not only a thriving, and often contentious democracy, but now boasts its first female president.   

    But the question is: will South Korea’s miraculous rise to power give enough reason to believe that Korea is capable of global influence and expansion? For the most part, the answer – at least for the near future – is yes.

    This trajectory will continue even though the country – known as the “shrimp among the whales” – lives next door not only to its unpredictable northern rival, but also in the same neighborhood as three world powers. Yet in qualitative terms it is increasingly out-performing their rivals and is one of the top tech capitals in the world. This place is literally wired for success: Number one in e-government and top five in the global gaming market, with the fastest and cheapest broadband connection on earth.

    Due to the smallness of the domestic market – the country is home to only 48,955,203 people – Korean businesses need to operate on a global scale. Heavily dependent on international trade, the country, in 2011, ranked as the world’s eighth largest exporter and ninth largest importer. An example of this is Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone maker. This will lead Korean firms to continue to invest heavily on a global basis.   

    Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment can be seen in smart phones, an area that long-time electronics leader – and former colonial overlord – Japan has stumbled in. According to the Wall Street Journal, Strategy Analytics reported Samsung’s smartphone shipments grew to 69.4 million units in the quarter, giving it a market share of 33% – almost twice that of Apple.

    Samsung’s growing cash reserves evidence its strength as a fierce competitor to Apple and questions Apple’s ability to return to its market leadership. Some commentators predict Apple will need to make price reductions or find an unforeseen market that does not compete. But its most recent blow in the American markets came after the ITC ban on the import and sale of some Samsung products into the U.S. This moment can be the saving grace for Apple but Samsung continues to gain market share and, unlike its Silicon Valley competitor, it is highly diversified as one of the world’s most sophisticated maker for processors, memory, and high-resolution screens.

    But these accomplishments have had their downside. The hyper-connectivity has engendered a “digital addiction” among young children. Concerned of this has become so pronounced that Korea’s science and education ministries announced its policy package in June to “wean students off of their dependency” through boot camps.

    Yet for now, the country’s positive trajectory seems assured. This is not just a matter of technology and manufacturing. The Korean entertainment industry  now ranks seventh in the world according to consulting firm PwC and is home to global stars like Psy of “Gangnam Style” and singer, Rain, whose influence in the music industry is unprecedented ranking him the most influential artist in TIME’s 100 list three years in a row. In the world of pop culture Korea tops the list among the Asian country competitors.  

    Besides entertainment, Korea’s global footprint has been growing exponentially.  Korea’s direct foreign investment history in the U.S. increased steadily ever since the onset of South Korea’s financial crisis in 1997.   Korean investment in the U.S. has jumped from $15.7 billion in 2010 to $24.5 billion in 2012. In particular, Korea has been investing heavily in its East Asian neighbors. South Korean companies were the biggest investors in Indonesia with POSCO, the country’s leading steelmaker, topping it off with a $6 billion joint venture deal with Indonesian steelmaker Kraktau Steel.

    Korean corporations also have been establishing new homes in the U.S. over the years. For example, Hyundai Motors has built its U.S. Headquarters in Fountain Valley in Orange County to “secure its long-term future in California,” as stated in its press release. The two-year and 500,000 square feet development has cost $200 million and is located visibly alongside the I-405 freeway. The project symbolizes economic growth in California and projects a positive outlook for the future of Hyundai as a rising automotive leader in the world. Hyundai’s move also makes Samsung’s plans to build its North American headquarters in San Jose no surprise. Another example is SK Planet, a South Korean Internet services giant, that is planning to invest anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion in the U.S. over the next few years.

    South Korea also has been one of the top three Asian countries to participate in the “East looks West” trend in foreign property investments. In hunt for safe and affordable places to invest, South Korean firms and individual investment in U.S. real estate have surged in the past year. South Korea takes the second-lead after Singapore in investing the U.S. market. According to Real Capital Analytics, Singapore invested $1.87 billion, South Korea $1.83 billion, and China $1.52 billion for a combined total of $5.2 billion in commercial real estate in 2013 alone.  South Korea’s Mirae Asset Global Investments recently acquired Chicago’s West Wacker Drive building for $218 million. A group of South Korean investors also bought the Washington Harbour complex at the U.S. capital for $373 million in July.

    Another noteworthy venture is the Korean Air’s plan to develop the tallest hotel skyscraper in the West at the site of the 1950s Wilshire Grand Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Expected to be completed in 2017, the 73-story hotel is estimated to cost $1 billion. The skyscraper reinforces Korea’s determination to build its image as an aggressive, forward thinking investor.  

    The leaders of the country have typically been supportive of their conglomerates but also recognize the downfalls in investing too much in a single business. South Korea’s Iron Lady, President Park Geun-hye, has promised to address the country’s major issues starting with the “economy’s excessive reliance on a small number of huge conglomerates”.  For instance, Seoul has offered $1 billion to small and mid-sized exporters in order to reach its targeted export growth of 4.1% in 2013. The South Korean government has also garnered free trade agreements in Europe, India, and reportedly help boost the U.S. auto industry.  

    Yet like other Asian countries, Korea faces some large long-term challenges. It lacks the girth of China, or the EU, not to mention the resources and entrepreneurial system for the United States. Perhaps even more serious, the country now suffers among the lowest birthrates in the world. Although this may not yet be a critical problem, lack of production in this area could threaten the country’s long-term economic position.

    Equally important, research has found that couples that do have children are born with health risks due to the extreme dense way of living. Since the 1970s, the population ballooned and the limited land for residential use led to the mass construction of high-rise apartments. The high density and aesthetically displeasing public spaces in the largest cities makes Korea an unattractive place for foreigners to live undermining it as a global country. For example, Seoul, the country’s capital, ranks highest in population density among OECD countries, a problem in terms of future fertility.

    Development in the services industry will also become critical overtime because of the country’s heavy reliance in manufacturing. Korea does not outsource like its competitors, which has largely contributed to its wealth. But in order to be ranked as a premier nation, services will have to become a higher priority, meaning growth in its skilled work force. Korea lacks the managerial, administrative, and professional social capital that give U.S., Japan, U.K., and Germany their world status. According to Global Insight, 30% of the nation’s economy comes from manufacturing where as the U.S. and Japan have only 13% and 20% in manufacturing jobs, respectively, with a majority of their jobs in services.  

    Despite its massive economy derived mainly from conglomerates and the wealthy few, Korea faces challenges in a number of areas: the diversity of its labor pool, new diplomatic strategies, declining demographics, lack of natural energy resources, and environmental sustainability. As they are keys to Korea’s continued success, the country’s long-term prominence falls into question.

    Grace Kim is an undergraduate at Chapman University majoring in Business Administration and Communication Studies who is also the President of the Chapman Real Estate Association and Editor in Chief of Meta-communicate, the Communication department’s undergraduate research journal.

    Photo from Wiki Commons by user tylerdurden1.

  • Rust Belt Chic And The Keys To Reviving The Great Lakes

    Over four decades, the Great Lakes states have been the sad sack of American geography. This perception has been reinforced by Detroit’s bankruptcy filing and the descent of Chicago, the region’s poster child for gentrification, toward insolvency.

    Yet despite these problems, the Great Lakes’ future may be far brighter than many think. But this can only be accomplished by doubling down on the essential DNA of the region: engineering, manufacturing, logistics, a reasonable cost of living and bountiful natural resources. This approach builds off what some local urbanists, notably Jim Russell, have dubbed “rust belt chic.”

    With a population of 58 million, the Lakes region boasts a $2.6 trillion economy equal to that of France and far larger than the West Coast’s. (We define the region geographically as comprising the western ends of New York and Pennsylvania, northeastern Minnesota, and Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.) Despite the growth in auto manufacturing in the South, the Great Lakes region still accounts for the vast majority of jobs in the resurgent industry, now operating at record levels of capacity.

    Since 2007, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin have ranked among the top five states for growth in industrial jobs, adding a half million new manufacturing jobs since 2009.

    To build on this progress the region needs to focus on its human assets. This starts with by far the nation’s largest concentration of engineers, some 318,000, which stems from the oft unappreciated fact that manufacturing employs the majority of scientists and engineers in the nation. It also accounts for almost 70% of corporate research and development. This includes disciplines such as mechanical engineering, which according to a recent EMSI study, has enjoyed steady job and income growth over the past 20 years.

    Another critical asset is the concentration of skilled trades, the workers most sought after by employers, according to a recent Manpower survey. To keep this advantage, the area needs to focus on educating its workforce — particularly in neglected inner city neighborhoods — with skill training for jobs that actually exist and are expected to grow. This is already occurring in some states, such as Ohio.

    To be sure, traditional manufacturing jobs, particularly for the unskilled and semi-skilled, likely will never come back in large numbers. But the earnings level for skilled workers will remain well above the national average, and may increase even further as shortages develop.

    Some dismiss such blue-collar strengths as a critical weakness. They suggest that area residents might decamp for places like Silicon Valley where they can find livelihoods cutting hair and providing other personal services for the digerati.

    Of course, no sane Great Lakes leader would endorse this approach in public, but many, instead of embracing “rustbelt chic” prefer to recreate a faux version of America’s left coast. This obsession goes back at least a decade, reaching its most risible level during the time of former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm. Her strategy focused on turning its cities — including Detroit — into “cool” burgs.

    This clearly did little to turn around either already beleaguered state or cities; “cool” did not save Detroit from bankruptcy. Indeed cool represents just one variation in a myriad of Rust Belt elixirs, including casinos, convention centers, “and creative class oriented arts districts. Virtually all the strategies being adopted in Detroit have already been applied in Cleveland, including by the same entrepreneur, Quicken Loans Chairman Dan Gilbert, with very little tangible economic benefit.

    Yet despite this history, Detroit — the poster child of public malfeasance — once again is pinning its hopes on luring the “creative class” to Motor City. It starts with the usual stab at subsidizing housing, office and retail around the central core. This is being jump-started by taking Quicken Loans jobs already in the area’s suburbs, meaning little net regional advantage.

    Even more absurd, Michigan taxpayers are being asked to pony up to as much as $440 million for a new stadium in Detroit for the Red Wings hockey team. In contrast to this beneficence, many remaining established, older smaller neighborhood businesses — many of them deeply entrenched in the Rust Belt economy — get stuck with ever higher tax bills and reduced levels of public service.

    To be sure, this approach can succeed in building hipster cordon sanitaire — a miniaturized but utterly derivative urban district — that can be shown to investors and visiting, and usually core-centric, journalists. It also can enrich speculators and those politicians who service them, but represents a marginally effective means of reviving the city, much less the regional, economy.

    Instead of chasing hipsters , Cleveland urban strategist Richey Piiparinen suggests cities such as his rebuild their economies from the ground up, tapping the strong industrial skills, work ethic and resilient culture deeply embedded in the region. Large factories may not return en masse to Cleveland, Detroit or Chicago, but a strong industrial economy and a culture embracing hard work could stir growth in service-related fields as well.

    Geography and location provide other opportunities . The area’s natural resources — the Great Lakes contain one-fifth of the world’s supply of fresh water — constitute a profound competitive advantage against drought stricken economies in the Inland West, the southern Great Plains and parts of the Southeast. Water is an essential element in many industrial processes, including fracking, a serious issue in parts of the Rust Belt. Miles of attractive coastline could be used to lure not only factories, but high-tech businesses, tourists and educated professionals who can choose their location.

    The Great Lakes also are a natural conduit for the $250 billion trade with Canada, with its vast resource-based economy and growing population . Instead of funding better bars, art galleries and sports venues, or hoping to attract tourists and conventioneers to traipse to Cleveland in December, what the region really needs, noted a recent Brookings report, is better infrastructure, such as bridges, ports, freight rail and roads.

    Critical too are the region’s strong engineering schools. Of the nation’s top 10, four — Carnegie Mellon, Purdue, the University of Michigan, and the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana — are located in the Rust Belt. The Great Lakes may not be home to the Ivy League, but it remains the nursery of practical applied intelligence.

    Emerging demographic trends could also play a positive role. The millennial generation will soon be approaching the age when they wish to start businesses, get married, have children and buy homes. A good target would be those seeking a single-family home and a reasonable cost of living; both are increasingly difficult to attain in much of the Northeast and coastal California where the cost of housing, even adjusted to income, can be easily two to three times higher.

    Indeed, despite decades of demographic stagnation, the region already boasts higher percentages of people under 15 than the Northwest, the Northeast (including New York) and has about the same percentage of kids as the rapidly growing Southeast. For a new generation, the Great Lakes could emerge as a destination, not a place to avoid.

    This requires the region becoming more attractive to newcomers, whether from abroad or within the country. As urban analyst Aaron Renn suggests, the Great Lakes has to become more culturally open to outsiders and immigrants. Cities such as Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit were once magnets for immigrants from Europe and people coming from America’s rural hinterlands, notably the south.

    Restoring appeal to outsiders does not mean denying the region’s proud past, and throwing away its historic assets, but instead focusing on its core values. For many reasons — geography, weather, history — the region cannot remake itself into California, the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast Corridor. Instead the Great Lakes can best restore its legacy as an aspirational region by focusing on the very real things that constitute its historic DNA.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study, The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

    This piece originally appeared at Forbes.

    Great Lakes map by BigStock.