Premeditated Thought

Economic Revivals and Net-Migration

Yesterday  morning I awoke at 7:30 to find out Broadway stage-hands had gone on strike at midnight.  That event would rarely register in my consciousness, except that in twelve hours I was supposed to meet a friend at Spring Awakening.  (Aside: if its soundtrack is supposed to be so good, where are its fans among indie music partisans?  Sorry, but based on the snippets I've heard, musicals are still forced to pander to late majority innovation adapters, keeping it staid and irrelevant.  Still, I was curious about the hubbub.)

With plans with my theater-crazy friend in doubt and still pre-caffeine, I scrambled to beat the tourists to alternative plans.   Eventually I found myself to nytheater.com's review of "A Glance At New York," a revival of an 1848 vaudeville hit first performed at this years Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  (The reviewer, Martin Denton, says "I'm not sure that I've ever seen any work of theatre this Brechtian and this postmodernly deconstructionist accomplish its artistic goals so effectively.")  It's just 50 minutes long; if you're in New York with an hour to kill and $20 to spare, I promise you an interesting theater experience.

Today, wanting to learn more about the play, I googled "A Glance at New York."  And that's where my worlds collided.  The characters in the play comprise different New York stereotypes, including the poorest of Irish immigrants.  My internet search led me away from mid-nineteenth century immigration to the current problem of migration in upstate New York.

In August, The New York Federal Reserve Bank in Buffalo published this report about brain drain in upstate New York.  The standard narrative is that the rust belt, the high plains, and other economically depressed areas suffer a net out-migration as its most educated and ambitions residents look to greener pastures.  The report questions this narrative.  Among its findings:

Compared with U.S. states, upstate New York’s net outflow of college-educated workers reflects a lack of a “brain gain” rather than an unusually large “brain drain.” College-educated adults are not moving to the region fast enough to stem natural out-migration flows.

Research suggests that job opportunities and local amenities influence choice of location. While regional amenities such as a favorable climate, cultural offerings, and family and social networks are attractive forces, they may not be enough to attract college-educated workers if good job opportunities do not exist. Similarly, job prospects may not be sufficient to sway a relocation decision if a region is not perceived to be a desirable place to live. Both factors are important policy considerations.

The report cites some interesting statistics:

• Out-migration from upstate is on par with the median of the United States (13.4% in upstate vs. 13.5% nationwide.  California is lowest, Alaska highest).  The correlation between out-migration and economic growth was called into into question in general.  By contrast, economic growth does seem to correlate with in-migration.
• States with the strongest net inflows of the educated population are mainly in the South and West, including Nevada, Arizona, and Florida. While out-migration rates for these states tend to be about average, in-migration rates are at least three times as great.
• If upstate New York were a state, it would have the nation’s lowest in-migration rate, 9.3 percent.  (Louisiana is lowest, Nevada highest.)

Policy makers may draw various conclusions from this report.  Most obviously, upstate suffers from low rates of in-migration.  Some of the causes of this cannot be controlled, such as the weather, and will be a constant handicap.  However, policy makers can make upstate a more desirable place to do business. 

In addition policy makers may decide that upstate needs to lower out-migration as a stopgap before business conditions improve and economic growth recovers.  Given the handicap of upstate's weather, a joint focus on in- and out-migration solutions is warranted.

Superstar Cities: Inequality, Part III

Recently it was reported that more people are leaving cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Seattle  than are moving there.  Where are they going?  To Phoenix, las Vegas, Riverside CA, and, uh, Plano.  This is based on census data that ingores natural increase/decrease or international migration.  It seems that people on the whole are drawn away from cities that seem to be doing especially well economically.  Richard Florida has fun with this argument on his blog.

Not so fast.  What Barone [ Michael Barone, U.S. News and World Report ] fails to consider is that these overall trends mask a deeper demographic shift...

...As Harvard economist Edward Glaeser has shown, the human capital levels of U.S. regions are diverging, and highly-educated, highly-skilled people are becoming more concentrated. New York City attracted more than 250,000 college graduates between 2000-2005, according to a recent New York Times report.  Another indicator of this trend is the rise of what Wharton real estate expert Joseph Gyourko has dubbed "super-star" cities, places  like San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Seattle, Boston, Austin, Raleigh-Durham, and Nassau-Suffolk, NY,  which have had 40-plus years of housing appreciation  that far outdistances the national average. Even though Brooklyn and Queens have lost total population, the New York Times recently reported that housing values have gone up another 25 percent in 2006, at a time when most economists say the U.S. housing market is cooling and the overall bubble has burst.

Just like the winners and losers of globalization and the education gap in marriage, a growing disparity in cities will divide them into superstars and also-rans.  Just like people marry similarly educated people, they also want similarly educated people as friends.  Creative people want to hang out with creative people.  As the skilled and educate cluster in superstar cities, this becomes a self-reinforcing trend. 

If this is happening as Richard Florida claims it is, the opposite end of the spectrum can't be pretty.  Cities like Las Vegas, by implication, are populated by an increasing under-skilled and under-educated workforce as compared to the superstar cities.

The irony in all this is that globalization, made possible through leaps in communication, was to supposed to free us from location.  It turns out it is pretty hard to have a beer with someone over the internet. 

Visualizing Social Networks

Yesterday I braved the wind and 20-degree temperatures to walk up to the  Darlene Charneco Gameland exhibit at the Morgan Lehman Gallery. 

This is Attractor from Gameland.

The Gallery explains

Through the images in Gameland, Charneco continues to explore the meeting points of real life and virtual life... In this exhibition, Charneco investigates social networks and the gradual reorganization of information on the web into shareable and intuitively nagivable 3D spaces.  She is inspired by the blurring boundaries between dream and waking activities, the implications of our rapidly increasing interconnectivity and the evolution of an accessible collective memory.

Because of the blustery day, I had the gallery to myself for a time, and was lucky that Darlene herself was there.  In our conversation, she brought up the work of Valdis Krebs, who's software analyzes and displays networks in interesting ways.  Here is analysis of recent Top 10 political books broken down by political-right (red), political-left (blue), and independent (purple).  (map and explanation from orgnet).

The maps are based on book buying data: "Customers who bought this item also bought...". Two books are linked if they are often bought by the same customers. Specifically, we looked at the top 10 political books [in sales, according to Amazon] and their network neighborhood. Our InFlow software created the visualization based on the data alone.

To see more about Valdis Krebs' social network analysis work, check out the orgnet website.  The site describes many practical applications (including my favorite, looking for leaders on sport's teams) and his methodology.

Chinese takeout and the Knicks

Some fantasies are more easily fulfilled than others.  Fortunately, I aim low.

I first saw Annie Hall at a movie theater on 34th Street and 3rd Avenue.  I'd like to say it was one of those rainy days that make you happy to be a New Yorker, if you know what I mean.  In one scene, Alvy Singer (Woody) comes home with Annie (Diane Keaton), grabs a container of chinese takeout from the refrigerator, and flips on the tube to catch the middle of a Knick game.

"That's something I want to do when I grow up," I thought.

Fortunately, Diane Keaton's unwillingness to participate nohwisthstanding, that fantasy was well within my grasp. 

Today, while reading Richard Florida's ever interesting CreativeClass blog, I noticed that Moby himself has a blog.  No, Moby is not in a fantasy, though I think I'm in hot enough water already.    But Moby is blogging.  Here's an entry:

i've been putting more photos up on moby.com under 'visuals' & 'moby photos', i believe.
weird photos, but photos nonetheless.
moby

And I thought, well, I'd like to blog and share some of my thoughts.  And now, thanks to Mena and the rest of the wonderful folks at six apart, I can.  Which leaves me looking for my next unfullfilled fantasy.