New Geography

Tag: middle class

  • Taking Flight from Asia

    Viewed from a 50-year perspective, the rise of East Asia has been the most significant economic achievement of the past half century. But in many ways, this upward trajectory is slowing, and could even reverse. Simply put, affluence has led many Asians to question its cost, in terms of family and personal life, and is sparking a largely high-end hegira to slower-growing but, perhaps, more pleasant, locales.

    The Asian Century may have arrived, but many Asians – disproportionately entrepreneurial, well-educated and familial – are heading elsewhere. In the United States, they have surged past Hispanics as the largest source of immigrants and now account for well over a third of all newcomers. But that’s just the tip of this wave: Recent Gallup surveys reveal that tens of millions more – 40 million from the Indian subcontinent and China alone – would come if they could. This is far more than the 5 million in Mexico who would still like to move here.

    For the most part, these highly urbanized Asians are headed to places that may not be exactly pastoral, but are decidedly less-crowded places, either in the suburbs of great cities or, increasing, to sprawling low-density regions such as Houston, Dallas, Charlotte and Phoenix. In large swaths of Los Angeles County’s San Gabriel Valley, parts of the southeastern Orange County as well as the Santa Clara Valley, six cities, including tony San Marino, already are majority Asian, and many, including several in Orange County, are either there or well on the way.

    For the most part, these primarily suburban places, widely disdained by the dominant media and academic classes, appear to seem awfully nice to Asian immigrants. Nationwide over the past decade, the Asian population in suburbs grew by almost 2.8 million, or 53 percent, while their numbers expanded in core cities by 770,000, or 28 percent. In Southern California, the shift is even more pronounced: In Los Angeles and Orange counties – the nation’s largest Asian region, the suburbs added roughly five times as many Asians as did the core city. There are now roughly three Asian suburbanites for every core city dweller in our region.

    This is not just an American phenomenon. Asians, by far the fastest-growing large ethnic group in Canada, constitute a majority in many Toronto suburbs, like Markham, Brampton, Mississauga and Richmond Hill. The same pattern is seen in areas around Vancouver, such as Richmond, Greater Vancouver, Burnaby and Surrey. Asians, who, following New Zealanders, constitute a majority of newcomers in Australia, also tend to settle in suburbs, particularly newer ones.

    It’s most important to understand the reasons these people leave their homelands. Historically, people immigrate from places where there is a perceived lack of opportunity. Yet, many of the Asian countries seeing people leave – places like Singapore, Taiwan and China – have enjoyed consistently higher economic growth rates than any of the destination countries. What these immigrants increasingly understand is that, as their country’s GDP has surged, their quality of life has not and, in many ways, has deteriorated.

    These are the sometimes subtle but important things that tend to be ignored by geopoliticians and urban ideologues, attracted by the density and transit-richness of the Asian cities. “Everyday life,” observed the great French historian Fernand Braudel, “consists of the little things one hardly notices in time and space.” And, by these measurements, life in the United States, Canada or Australia is simply better than that in most Asian countries.

    In contrast, urban Asia, although rich and often colorful, has become an increasingly difficult place both for everyday life and for families. A nice salary might be satisfying, but is unlikely to be large enough to buy a house or apartment in places like Taipei or Hong Kong, where the cost of even a tiny apartment equals more than twice – adjusted for income – what would be sufficient to purchase a house in Irvine, and four times as much as an even larger residence in Houston, Dallas or Phoenix. Not surprisingly, most Asians in America feel they are living better than their parents, compared with their counterparts at home. Only 12 percent would choose to move back to their home country.

    Beyond housing, life in hyperurbanized Asia does not buy much happiness. Prosperous Singapore, for example, is one of the most pessimistic places on the planet, while ultradense South Korea has been ranked as among the least-happy nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, ranking 32nd of 34 members. The country also suffers from among the highest suicide rates in the higher-income world.

    This reflects the often-ignored impacts of dense urbanization, including rising obesity, particularly among the young, who get less exercise and spend more time desk-bound. The air is foul, particularly in Beijing, no matter how much money you have. A healthy bank account does not exempt one from emphysema.

    Others complain about the dangers of a political system where wealth can always be confiscated by the state; no surprise, then, that a new survey shows roughly half of China’s millionaires are looking to move, primarily to the U.S. or Canada. During 2010-11, the number of Chinese applying for a U.S. investor visa, which requires a $1 million investment in the country, more than tripled, to more than 3,000. Repression of political thought and, particularly, against religion, also ranks as a major cause for leaving the homeland.

    The family – the historic centerpiece of cultures from India to Korea – may constitute the biggest victim of the hypercompetitive, ultradense Asian lifestyle. Hong Kong, Singapore and Seoul suffer among the world’s lowest fertility rates, with rates around 1. Meanwhile, Shanghai’s fertility rate has fallen to 0.7, among the lowest ever reported, well below China’s “one child” mandate and barely one-third the rate required simply to replace the current population. Due largely to crowding and high housing prices, 45 percent of couples in Hong Kong say they have given up having children.

    For those who do want to start a family, it increasingly makes sense to immigrate. This is evident in rising emigration from China’s cities, Hong Kong and Singapore, where roughly one in 10 citizens now lives abroad, often in lower-density communities in Australia, Canada and the United States.

    The nature of those immigrating is critically important. We are long past the days when the average Asian migrant is a physical laborer or a small-scale merchant. Now, the more typical newcomer is a student or a highly qualified professional. In Australia, Asians, notably from India, China and Taiwan, make up the vast majority of immigrants who qualify for entry under skills-oriented criteria.

    This pattern also can be seen in the United States. Asians now constitute a majority of workers in Silicon Valley. They also tend to concentrate in what may be best described as the country’s largely suburban nerdistans – magnets for high-tech workers – places like Plano, Texas, Bellevue, Wash., Irvine and large swaths of Santa Clara County.

    Does all this mean Asia is about to experience a precipitous decline? Not at all. But it is also increasingly clear that the dense model of development adopted on much of that continent – exacerbated by a mass movement to cities – is not, in a larger social sense, truly sustainable. Societies that become difficult for families, and exact too much stress on their residents, are destined to suffer maladies from ultrarapid aging, shrinking workforces and a host of psychological maladies.

    These strains will become more evident over time. Already, most Asian societies, from Japan and China to Singapore and Taiwan, are experiencing less growth, linked in part to financial pressures from a rapidly aging society. The economic motivations for staying in Asia will likely decline, accelerating the flight both of financial and, more importantly, human capital.

    Every society relies on the resourcefulness of its people, particularly the young. The loss of skilled individuals and, especially, families suggests we may have already witnessed the peak of the half-century-long Asian ascendency, well before the American era has even come to its oft-predicted demise.

    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.

    Singapore skyline photo by Bigstockphoto.com.

  • Well-Heeled in the Windy City

    A couple weeks ago, noting the apparently immunity of global city Chicago to problems elsewhere in the city, I asked the question: What happens when global city Chicago realizes there’s a good chance it can simply let the rest of the city fail and get on with its business?

    I’d argue we’re seeing the results right before our eyes.

    At the same time murders in significant parts of the city are even higher than during the peak of the crack epidemic, when the city says its too poor to hire more cops, when 54 schools are closed and a 1000 teachers laid off, half the mental health clinics closed, libraries cut back, etc., Chicago has found a nearly limitless stream of money for elite amenities, most recently – and appallingly – $50+ million in TIF subsidies for a new DePaul arena. There’s also been hundreds of millions of dollars more in corporate welfare under Daley and Rahm.

    Investing in success is a great idea – if you plan to harvest a return on that investment to fund city services and your safety net. It’s clear there’s no intention of doing this in Chicago. I discuss this in my most recent City Journal piece, “Well-Heeled in the Windy City.” Here’s an excerpt:

    Clearly, cities like Chicago must retain a substantial portion of upscale residents and businesses. Detroit and other cities show the results of failure on this front. Yet the moral case for elite amenities has always rested on the assumption of a broader public good: what benefited the wealthy would also make life better for the rest of the city….Under Emanuel’s leadership, though, Chicago has made peace with a two-tier society and broken the social contract. Rather than trying to expand opportunity, Chicago has bet its future on its already successful residents—leading some on the left to call Emanuel Mayor 1 Percent. The Windy City isn’t alone in following this strategy. Detroit has gone bankrupt, but that hasn’t stopped city government from lavishing $450 million in subsidies on a new Red Wings arena.

    Since I critique bike infrastructure as part of Chicago’s splurge for the elite, I want to clarify that point here where there are lots of bike advocates. I strongly support bike infrastructure. In fact, I once gave a presentation where I said protected bike lanes and bike share should be Rahm’s top two transport priorities on taking office because they are cost-effective and can leverage outside funds. However, even the most passionate advocates must admit that the optics are bad on making a full court press on bike lanes when cutting core services elsewhere. More importantly, Rahm’s explicit rationale on bike infrastructure has been luring talent for the tech economy, thus it is an elite focused venture. For example, the Sun-Times reported:

    Emanuel called protected bike lanes central to the city’s sustainability plan and his efforts to make Chicago the high-tech hub of the Midwest. Chicago “moved up dramatically” in the list of major cities whose employees bike to work, he said.

    “It’s part of my effort to recruit entrepreneurs and start-up businesses because a lot of those employees like to bike to work,” he said.

    “It is not an accident that, where we put our first protected bike lane is also where we have the most concentration of digital companies and digital employees. Every time you speak to entrepreneurs and people in the start-up economy and high-tech industry, one of the key things they talk about in recruiting workers is, can they have more bike lanes.”

    I’m simply taking the mayor at his word. (See also here and here).

    This piece originally appeared at The Urbanophile.

  • There’s Real Economic Development Gold in El Dorado—Arkansas

    For centuries, explorers searched for the legendary golden city of El Dorado, seeking instant wealth in the jungles of South America. But today’s treasure trove may be found much closer to home; cities like El Dorado, Arkansas, for example, that have successfully linked their economic development strategy to improving the educational attainment of their residents.

    El Dorado, a city of about 20,000 people that was at the heart of Arkansas’s oil boom in the 1920s has been hard pressed to reprise that economic growth experience in this century.  Instead of chasing after the fool’s gold of becoming cool, it has found a way to attract new residents and increase its economic vitality by promising its public school students a free college education if they graduate from high school with good grades. That promise has the potential to provide the critical glue in holding together a broad based economic recovery not just for cities such as El Dorado but for entire states or even the country.

    The El Dorado Promise is a scholarship program established and funded by Murphy Oil Corporation, the town’s largest employer. Modeled after a similar program in Kalamazoo, MI, It provides graduates of the city’s high school a scholarship covering tuition and mandatory fees that can be used at any accredited two- or four-year, public or private, educational institution in the US up to an amount equal to the highest annual resident tuition at an Arkansas public university.

    Since its inception in 2007, 1239 students have taken advantage of the offer. Over 90% of them have completed at least one year of college. The first high school class to enjoy this benefit has graduated after five years from college at a rate almost 40% greater than the state’s higher education student population. These gains in acquiring the skills necessary to be competitive in today’s global economy have been achieved by virtually all of the city’s high school students, over 90% of whom graduated from high school last year.

    Furthermore the culture of a college-bound student population is now permeating throughout the school district, with a recent study finding that students in grades three through eight in the city scored significantly higher than their matched peers in nearby school districts in both math and literacy. The greatest gains have come from those who were the youngest when the Promise was announced.

    The goal of the El Dorado Promise was not just greater educational attainment, however. The visionaries who established the program also wanted to use this program to improve the community’s economic vitality and quality of life. They have clearly done that.  Enrollment in the city’s schools was up 5% in just the first four years of the program’s existence. As the Promise website says, “the prospect of an increasingly educated workforce gives economic development leaders new tools to attract businesses to the region.”

    The first such Promise was made in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 2005 by still anonymous benefactors seeking to restore the reputation of a city made famous in 1942 by the Glenn Miller Orchestra’s hit tune about a “gal” who lived there. Rather than raise taxes to balance the city’s budget, those who established the Kalamazoo Promise offered a fully paid four-year scholarship to any public institution of higher education in Michigan to any student who went to the city’s high schools for all four years. Under the terms of the Kalamazoo Promise, students have no obligation to repay the money or even to reside in Kalamazoo after they graduate from college.

    The results are very similar to those of El Dorado. Kalamazoo’s student population is up 17.6% and dropout rates have been cut in half. Ninety percent of the city’s female African-American high school graduates have gone on to college. On the economic front, the proportion of residential construction in the city rose sharply from around 30% to nearly 50% of all permits issued in the greater Kalamazoo area. The community’s careful tracking of the results has identified 1600 families who say they are living in the city because of the Promise.

    The economic challenges that caused El Dorado and Kalamazoo to up their game in getting local residents to graduate from high school and go on to college are no different than the challenge facing the country as a whole  in trying to create a competitive workforce in today’s increasingly global and technology driven economy.  For example, the Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that 62% of the jobs in the United States by the year 2018 will require at least some college education – for example a certificate for a specific skill – and that more than half of those jobs will require a bachelor’s degree. Unless the nation wants to fill those jobs with immigrants from other countries, it will have to do a much better job of giving each American who graduates from high school a chance to pursue a two year skill certificate or a baccalaureate degree. 

    A promise that rewards good academic performance in high school with a scholarship that pays for four years of college tuition has demonstrated it can make a major difference in achieving our educational and economic goals. Now it’s time for the rest of the country to find the gold that Kalamazoo and El Dorado have already discovered. Just as the country, as part of its overall economic development strategy, once expanded access to a universal free education first for primary schools and later for high schools, it must now find ways to make these two pioneering cities’ promise to their young people America’s Promise to all of its youth.

    Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais are co-authors of the newly published Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America and Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics and fellows of NDN and the New Policy Institute.

    Graduation photo by Bigstock.

  • Middle-Wage Jobs That Have Survived, and the States That Are Fostering Them

    Middle-skill jobs are in the same camp as green jobs, STEM jobs, and other groups of occupations that garner lots of attention: They can be defined many ways, by many rubrics. Regardless of the definition, however, it’s clear that middle-skill, or middle-wage, jobs have been in decline for years.

    New research from the Federal Reserve indicates the share of middle-skill jobs in the workforce has dropped from 25% in 1985 to just above 15% today, part of the hollowing-out effect that David Autor of MIT has documented. And as our chart above shows, middle-wage jobs — those that pay between $13.84 and $21.13 per hour, as defined by the National Employment Law Project — sustained much deeper cuts during the 2008-2009 recession than high- and low-wage jobs.

    But not every middle-skill, middle-wage job is now extinct because of automation and offshoring. A subset of mid-wage manufacturing jobs (along with jobs in energy, health care, and other sectors) are among the healthiest post-recession occupations in the U.S. Furthermore, in a handful of states (Wyoming, Iowa, North Dakota, Michigan), mid-wage fields account for more than or close to 40% of all new jobs since 2010.

    Mid-Skill or Mid-Wage?

    For our analysis, we used middle-wage jobs instead of middle-skill jobs (i.e., those that require less than a bachelor’s degree but more than a high school degree). This is because some occupations that the BLS has assigned a mid level of education (e.g., registered nurses) often require a higher level of education by employers.

    This methodology is similar to the one used by Autor is his 2010 study. For a brief synopsis of why Autor used wage to approximate skill, see here.

    Share of New Jobs in Mid-Wage Category

    In the U.S., a quarter of all new jobs since 2010 fall in the mid-wage range. That’s a slightly smaller share than high-wage jobs (29%), while almost half (46%) of new jobs have been low-wage.

    ShareNewJobsbyWage

    No state has stood out more than Wyoming, where 45% of new jobs since 2010 have been mid-wage — well ahead of Iowa (37%), North Dakota (36%), and Michigan (35%). Texas (25%) and California (23%) have created the most total new middle-wage jobs in the nation, but they’re in the middle of the pack in terms of the share of all new jobs.

    State-MidWage-ShareAt the bottom, Rhode Island is the only state that’s lost middle-wage jobs the last few years. Coincidentally, it’s also seen a decline in high-wage jobs, meaning all of its job growth has been in occupations that pay $13.83 or lower.

    Meanwhile, Mississippi (10%) and New York (13%) have the lowest share of new mid-wage jobs among states that have seen job increases.

    Generally, states with higher cost of living are at the bottom in mid-wage job growth, with the exception of Mississippi. (It’s worth noting 80% of new jobs in Mississippi have been low-wage).

    State Name 2013 Jobs New Jobs Since 2010 (Total) New Jobs Since 2010 (Mid-Wage) Share of New Jobs Since 2010 (Mid-Wage)
    Source: QCEW Employees, Non-QCEW Employees & Self-Employed – EMSI 2013.3 Class of Worker
    Wyoming 319,672 7,607 3,411 45%
    Iowa 1,689,811 58,987 21,902 37%
    North Dakota 492,918 71,607 25,970 36%
    Michigan 4,391,882 214,075 74,536 35%
    Arizona 2,805,158 155,430 53,115 34%
    Alaska 388,436 9,790 3,296 34%
    New Mexico 913,612 13,215 4,315 33%
    Oklahoma 1,786,664 66,837 21,153 32%
    Minnesota 3,007,618 128,418 39,433 31%
    Pennsylvania 6,215,891 123,999 37,616 30%
    Vermont 356,643 10,494 3,158 30%
    Hawaii 742,002 27,637 8,262 30%
    Kentucky 2,038,143 72,485 21,562 30%
    South Carolina 2,085,991 83,597 24,601 29%
    Wisconsin 2,989,657 60,737 17,661 29%
    Louisiana 2,143,399 64,696 18,736 29%
    Ohio 5,585,543 159,403 44,960 28%
    Indiana 3,160,881 146,127 40,050 27%
    Kansas 1,530,232 35,131 9,471 27%
    Colorado 2,668,013 153,362 40,122 26%
    Nebraska 1,059,262 28,648 7,430 26%
    Texas 12,485,450 904,317 226,927 25%
    Tennessee 3,061,383 144,846 34,657 24%
    Utah 1,408,139 112,919 26,974 24%
    California 17,523,783 913,413 208,707 23%
    Massachusetts 3,679,152 149,301 33,836 23%
    Oregon 1,908,085 66,034 14,817 22%
    North Carolina 4,564,124 202,606 45,008 22%
    Georgia 4,449,841 182,068 40,297 22%
    Montana 511,880 18,730 4,122 22%
    Maryland 2,881,471 103,598 22,439 22%
    Nevada 1,260,218 47,951 10,160 21%
    Idaho 724,549 26,236 5,250 20%
    South Dakota 472,376 12,811 2,476 19%
    District of Columbia 775,185 23,111 4,378 19%
    Washington 3,379,817 140,985 26,352 19%
    West Virginia 789,978 22,278 4,134 19%
    Arkansas 1,302,641 15,044 2,652 18%
    Illinois 6,243,694 178,096 30,999 17%
    Missouri 2,988,014 62,799 10,803 17%
    Maine 672,708 2,998 508 17%
    Delaware 453,952 12,810 2,133 17%
    Florida 8,370,099 373,274 61,868 17%
    Alabama 2,084,701 22,075 3,605 16%
    Connecticut 1,831,478 44,701 7,161 16%
    Virginia 4,175,545 133,765 19,079 14%
    New Jersey 4,211,361 104,096 14,478 14%
    New Hampshire 702,271 13,694 1,877 14%
    New York 9,602,939 325,490 43,591 13%
    Mississippi 1,255,654 22,961 2,236 10%
    Rhode Island 503,723 5,140 -46 –
    Total 150,645,641 6,080,429 1,502,652 25%

    Mid-Skill, Mid-Wage Occupations on the Rise

    The list of still-vibrant middle-wage jobs is long, and most typically require on-the-job training, work experience, or short-term certificates and degrees that community colleges specialize in. This includes customer service representatives (up 6%) and heavy/tractor-trailer truck drivers (up 7%), two occupations that have each added more than 118,000 estimated jobs since the start of 2010. Both offer solid, mid-tier earnings ($14.91 and $18.14 median hourly earnings, respectively).

    Other examples of strong mid-wage occupations:

    • Machinists have the best combination of total jobs added from 2010 to 2013 (nearly 50,000) and percentage job growth (14%). This occupation is just one of several on-the-rebound production fields: computer controlled machine tool operators (17% growth since 2010), welders (11%), and inspectors, testers, sorters, samplers, and weighers (8%) have also performed well post-recession.
    • The fastest-growing mid-wage jobs are clustered in energy fields, specifically oil and gas: roustabouts (38% growth since 2010), oil, gas, and mining service unit operators (38%), helpers of extraction workers (28%), and extraction workers, all other (22%). Next in percentage growth since 2010 are computer controlled machine tool operators (17%).

    These occupations are the cream of the crop in terms of recent job growth, and there are dozens of other viable mid-wage professions.

    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.

  • Twitter And The Real Economy Of Jobs

    With Twitter’s high-profile IPO, the media and much of the pundit class are revisiting one of their favorite themes: the superiority of the brash, young urban tech elite, who don’t need to produce much in the way of profits to be showered with investor cash.  Libertarians will celebrate the triumph of fast-paced greed and dismiss concerns over equity; progressives may dislike the easy money but will be comforted when much of it ends up supporting their candidates and causes.

    Lost amid this discussion is any sense of reality about the economy for the rest of us. To be sure, in large part due to the Fed, the Bay Area and Manhattan are awash in money. But these places are barely typical of their regions, much less the nation, and are not attuned to creating a prosperity that will benefit more than a slight percentage of our population.

    The focus on digital uber alles is endorsed by a new school of American economics that essentially cedes the future to information-based industries and considers tangible activities like fossil fuel production, manufacturing and construction passé. In the mind of its devotees, such as UC Berkeley’s Enrico Moretti, author of The New Georgaphy of Jobs, information industries, clustered in ultra-expensive, overwhelmingly white (and Asian) enclaves, are the lodestones of our economic future.

    But what about those lacking degrees from elite colleges? The economist Tyler Cowen suggests that the 85% of the population without the proper cognitive pedigree will need to adopt the survival strategies of the poor in Latin America, including a diet heavy in beans.

    Another suggestion is that they can cut hair, walk dogs, and work on the houses of the digerati; given the extraordinary housing prices in the places where the anointed live, how they will afford to live anywhere near them is a bit of mystery. Yet most now putative middle-class Americans are not likely to walk easily to go into that dark night of limited opportunity. There remain economies anchored to more mundane industries, such as energy, construction, manufacturing and logistics, that still offer paths of upward mobility to people who didn’t go to Harvard, MIT or Stanford. These industries also employ more engineers and scientists than the IT sector, and in the case of energy produce more economic benefit to local economies, according to a 2007 study by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

    In contrast celebrated social media firms, overwhelmingly concentrated close to the venture capital spigot, are both geographically constrained and and employ shockingly  few workers. The darlings of the bubblicious tech boom — Twitter, Facebook, Zynga, LindedIn and Google — employ roughly 58,000 people combined; in contrast the old-line tech firm Intel employ 85,000 people, half in the U.S., while ExxonMobil provides livelihoods to 80,000.

    In term of profits, the supposed holy grail of business, it’s not even close. In Exxon’s disappointing last quarter it racked up $6.9 billion. By contrast Google earned $3.1 billion, while Facebook made $333 million and LinkedIn $3.7 million. Yet what the new tech oligarchs lack on the balance sheet, they seem to make up for with a combination of presumed potential and PR panache.

    The money that has flowed to tech companies in San Francisco has and the much more important Silicon V alley has transformed these geographies,  peninsula  into something resembling glorified gated communities, populated by those lucky enough to have bought earlier and, increasingly, by techno-coolies shipped in from abroad.

    With the cost of housing soaring, the Bay Area has lost domestic migrants until very recently. Meanwhile,  the strongest household growth is taking place in less glitzy metro areas like Houston and other Texas cities, Atlanta, Raleigh and Jacksonville. With the worst of the recession over, most new jobs, once again, according to Moody Analytics, are likely to be  created largely in Sun Belt locations such as Texas, Arizona, Georgia and even Nevada as well as the Great Plains and Intermountain West.

    The people who settle in these places are not, as often asserted dummies stuck at the low rung of the meritocracy; the cities with the fastest-growing college-educated populations are primarily in the Sun Belt and Intermountain West, such as Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Nashville.

    Although many of the new economists believe these areas are generating mainly “crummy” jobs, employment is expanding in higher-wage areas such as energy and manufacturing as well as services and even high-tech. What these unfashionable regions offer are good business conditions, reasonable housing prices and usually lower taxes. Increasingly these seem like the remaining future bastions of middle-class jobs and lifestyles while the coasts mint the most billionaires, many in tech and finance.

    Ideally America’s economy should benefit from both Twitter and wildcatters. But increasingly Silicon Valley, led by Google, has chosen to wage an economic war on competing sectors, notably the fossil fuel industry,  including producers of relatively clean, abundant and cheap natural gas. By doing this they also threaten America’s nascent industrial renaissance, and particularly the country’s heartland. These jobs may not replace all those lost in past decades, but they tend to be higher paying and offer communities, particularly in the Midwest and Southeast, opportunities that few previously thought possible.

    Tech boosters like Moretti tend to claim that jobs created by social media and software firms are more solid, and permanent, than those in more traditional sectors. This is absurd. Tech employment has become, if anything, more unstable than energy. Indeed between 2000 and 2008, Valley tech companies lost well over 100,000 jobs; even with the current bubble, Silicon Valley’s STEM employment, according to estimates by Economic Modeling Specialists Inc., has only now started to make up for what was lost in the last recession.

    Of course, energy, as well as manufacturing, suffer through cycles, although the opening of the developing world economies has created a vast, and likely permanent, long-term market. New technologies, including fracking and horizontal drilling, also suggest that resources may not erode as quickly as in the past.

    Rather than celebrate or at least coexist with the tangible economy’s power, the tech oligarchs , along with their allies on Wall Street and within the political-media class, seem intent on stamping them out. One manifestation of this alliance could be seen in the recent pronunciamento against the Keystone Pipeline signed by three prominent oligarchs: Bay Area hedge fund manager Tom Steyer, retiring New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, the designer of the TARP bailouts and first rescuer of Wall Street’s worst miscreants.

    But for some, like the politically connected billionaire Steyer, there’s more to this more than just misguided idealism. Steyer and his allies, such as Google and associated venture firms, have sought to profit mightily by backing renewable energy ventures dependent on regulations mandating their use and guaranteeing high prices.

    The price of this enlightened progressive profit-taking largely falls on working class Californians, and traditional industries, which get stuck with exorbitant energy prices. We can see similar phenomena in New York State, where grandees now finance  much of the anti-fracking movement, joined by academics,  Manhattan glitterati and gentry landowners. In contrast to Pennsylvania and Ohio, where new energy development is sparking manufacturing and opportunities in formerly destitute communities, the anti-fracking band seems destined to keep upstaters the economic equivalent of fat, dumb and pregnant.

    Perhaps we should call the new concert of tech, media and finance “Billionaires for Poverty.” Their approach — backed by the new economists –  leaves most Americans only the prospect of a dim future envisioned, with people huddled together, like our grandparents in small apartments, working at low wages with little hope of advancement. Perhaps some will be satisfied with a higher minimum wage, more digital gadgetry, and an expanded welfare state in lieu of a middle-class existence.

    Instead of waging a senseless economic war that is sure to expand class divisions perhaps the best economic model would be to encourage growth of both the tangible and digital economies.  According to my colleague Mark Schill of the Praxis Strategy Group, the tech and energy sectors employ roughly the same number of people, 2.4 million, and pay around the same average wages, slightly above $100,000.

    Texas has benefited by going after both sectors, something  California as well as New York have disdained to do. Indeed even in tech, Texas is gaining ground, since 2001 adding tech jobs at a much faster pace than than California. The Lone Star state could, at the current rate, equal the Golden State in this critical field within a decade or two.

    But there’s no real competition in the energy sweepstakes. Since 2001 Texas has added some 208,000 jobs in this field, and now employs over 580,000. In contrast California, whose fossil fuel resources may match or even exceed Texas’, has created barely 20,000, for a total of 185,000. Critically, IT work generally employs only college graduates, while the energy industry employs, often at high wages, not only geologists and other highly trained workers but blue-collar workers on rigs, driving trucks, or monitoring equipment.

    Providing broad opportunities for the mass of Americans — not enriching the few, even if they happen to be hip and cool — should be the primary objective in an economy in a democracy. The supremacy of the emerging digital economy may be OK for people at Twitter or Facebook, but how many of the rest of us want our children to grow up with little chance of reaping much from the economy except an updated app that allows them to stay in touch with their largely unemployed or underemployed “friends.”

    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.

    Midwest drilling rig photo by Bigstock.

  • 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.

  • Democratic “Upstairs-Downstairs” Coalition at Risk

    Michael Bloomberg’s passing from New York City Hall, and his likely replacement as mayor by a fire-breathing populist Democrat, Bill de Blasio, marks a historic shift, not just in urban politics but, potentially, also national politics. For 20 years, under first Rudy Giuliani and then Bloomberg, New Yorkers accepted a form of “trickle down economics” where Wall Street riches flowed into city coffers and kept Gotham, at least on the surface, humming and solvent.

    That period ended with Tuesday’s election, and with it, the unraveling of one of the great contradictions in modern American politics: the melding of liberalism with a plutocratic elite. Bloomberg epitomized this synthesis, and with his departure, the formula of blending social and “luxury city” liberalism now appears to have run its course. Bloomberg himself appears to have realized the jig could be up, last weekend accusing de Blasio of running a racist campaign based on “class warfare.”

    But for the American Left, now emerging from its Obamian slumbers, de Blasio’s focus on class has also turned him into a national hero. The Nation hails de Blasio as the harbinger of “the rebirth of economic liberalism.” He has won the backing of the magazine’s influential publisher, Katrina van den Heuvel, as well maverick plutocrat-progressive George Soros and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean.

    To be sure, class warfare has made de Blasio. His plans to raise more taxes from the rich appeals both to the middle class and, more importantly, to the poor and near poor. Those last two groups account for nearly half the “luxury city’s” population. The same middle class New Yorkers who may have voted for a hard-edged Republican, like Giuliani, or a pragmatic billionaire, like Bloomberg, when they feared for their lives and simply wanted the city cleaned up. They now are more concerned with economic issues. De Blasio was the one New York politician to understand the sea change.

    “This election is not going to be about crime, as some previous elections were,” de Blasio told National Journal last month. “It used to be, in New York you worried about getting mugged. But today’s mugging is economic. Can you afford your rent?”

    His argument is sticking, in large part, because perhaps nowhere are the limitations of gentry urbanism so obvious as in New York. The wealth of Wall Street, protected by the tax code and bathed in Bernanke bucks, has expanded inequality. As Wall Streeters have partied, most New Yorkers have not done well. Indeed, according to a recent study by University of Washington demographer Richard Morrill, the once-proudly egalitarian city has become the most unequal big city in the country, worse even than the most racially divided, historically underdeveloped Southeast.

    Here are the facts. In New York, the top 1 percent earns roughly twice as much of the local GDP than is earned in the rest of country. Yet, controlling for costs, the average paycheck is among the lowest in the nation’s 51 largest metro areas, behind not only San Jose, but Houston, Raleigh, N.C., and a host of less-celebrated burgs. There’s only so much middle-class families can do when the cost of living in Manhattan is twice the national average, and the median Manhattan apartment price about $4,000 a month. These economic facts, not crime or mayhem in the streets, explains why, since 2000, the region has lost the most net domestic migrants – some 1.9 million – in the country, sending along $50 billion elsewhere, almost $15 billion in household income just to Florida, the most common destination.

    National leftward shift

    The de Blasio triumph is not solely a New York story. Nationally, this opens a new chapter in the evolution of the American Left. If de Blasio continues his surge and becomes the first openly leftist New York mayor in a generation, the pressure to shift Democratic Party politics to the left could become as inexorable as the Tea Party’s shove to the right has been for the Republicans.

    Like the Republican schism, about which much has been written, the reason for the Democratic lurch to the left is grounded in class realities. In the GOP case, the Tea Party derives support from largely unconnected middle- and working-class Republicans, as opposed to country club or corporate types. For its part, the modern Democratic Party fuses two dissimilar groups: the “upstairs” well-educated gentry, with their urbanist and green politics, and the broader, but less-influential “downstairs” working-class element, concerned about jobs, making more money and likely aspiring to own a home in the suburbs.

    Now that they don’t have to toe the line for another Obama presidential run, leftist Democrats, including what’s left of the labor movement, are less compelled to defend his economic record. Under the current administration, already-troublesome income inequality in the country has been accelerating, to the benefit primarily of the vilified 1 percent. Race, which has served as a rallying cry for both white liberal and minority Democratic voters, likely will lose some of its appeal now that the first African-American president will not appear on the ballot.

    Conflicts loom

    This conflict between populist and gentry factions figures to arise over a host of issues in months to come. One looming issue may be the Keystone XL pipeline, favored by most private-sector unions, but vehemently opposed by greens and their gentry allies. President Obama may find that parts of his party, particularly in the inland West, the Great Plains, Louisiana and Appalachia, care more about jobs than environmental purity.

    Another flash point may emerge over who Obama will choose as head of the Federal Reserve. Wall Street favors Larry Summers, a convenient ally to Obama, whose relations with high finance are complicated by his occasional flights of populist fancy. But, big-business ties and Summers’ role in deregulation during the Clinton era arouse suspicion among more hard-left Congress members; already three left-leaning Democratic senators – Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts – appear to oppose a Summers nomination.

    Expect more of this in the future. Some labor unions, including the powerful Teamsters and UNITE, now fear their health care coverage could be sacrificed under Obamacare. The most powerful force in urban Democratic politics, public employees, fear they may be caught between efforts, most notably in Detroit and, possibly, the president’s adopted hometown, Chicago, to revive cities by ransacking their pensions. This may occur even as powerful real estate and corporate interests – primary funders of gentry urbanism – win subsidies from taxpayers for their ambitious plans.

    These contradictions within the Democrats’ unwieldy “upstairs-downstairs” coalition have been papered over for years by focusing on social and racial issues. They were often aided by Republicans, seemingly always looking for ways to alienate persuadable voters. Democrats, like de Blasio, may find that waging class warfare returns more than running on troublesome issues like climate change, guns, hygienic fascism (a Bloomberg specialty) or abortion; in some surveys, a majority of Americans favor some form of redistribution of wealth.

    Unless there is a change in the country’s economic direction, growing inequality could undermine the unnatural marriage of the gentry and the Left. In retrospect, the real political genius of Barack Obama has been to keep this contradictory coalition intact through his image, mastery of media and rhetoric. But, as the post-Bloomberg reality in New York suggests, at some point even the most agile politician can not keep fundamental social conflict swept under the rug forever.

    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.

    Photo courtesy of Bill de Blasio.

  • 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.