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Intelligence Density and the Creative Class
Doofus writes "The Atlantic has an interesting review of some open-sourced work by Rob Pitingolo about the comparative educational attainment levels of various metropolitan areas. While people are now capable of being far more mobile than in generations past, many people remain within 100 miles or so of where they were born. For the technology-partition of the creative class, this is less likely to be the case, in my personal experience. Do we technical people put interesting work and the concentration of human educational capital ahead of other considerations when deciding on a move? Or is it more complicated? Is it more about the fact that the creative jobs are where the creative people are?"
With employment being fungible for the vast majority where to live is driven by how one wants to live. I look for high density and diversity in restaurants. You want something else.
There's more to it than this.
you must factor in average height as well.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The more specialised you are, the fewer job openings you have - that will use your speciality (yes, obviously you could get a lesser job, but isn't that a waste of your talents and so ultimately unsatisfactory?). That means you have to range further to find those rarer openings. So in that respect more educated people will have a tendency to be more mobile, though not always through choice. And not always viewing it as a good thing: having to move from country to country to chase the next step of career progression.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
So why would you have to move to create a concentration of "human educational capital"? We've got this think called the Internet ... you don't see all those jobs that were outsourced to India requiring that their workers move to North America or Europe.
Most of us go to where the jobs are. Google, Microsoft, Intel and Apple are all pretty large employers of creative people. If I can make $25K more per year if I move, chances are I'll move. So they end up having large concentrations of creative people because most people move where the jobs are. Good luck finding a high-paying, interesting tech job in rural America. Yes, you -can- "telecommute" but most of the time you get paid a lot less than if you go to the cube farm.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I think this article misses the boat right off the bat by equating intelligence/technical ability with being creative. There are numerous examples of intelligent/technical people who don't have an ounce of creativity in their bodies.
There is going to be more people with degrees per square mile where there are many artsy people, San Fransisco for example. Arts grads get paid less and therefore will probably be more confined, perhaps to coffee shops. ;)
Computer engineering and programmers get very good pay and large offices, like at Google. They are going to more spread out, like in Silicon Valley.
I work for a small northern Canada tech company with people with engineering, math, commerce and science degrees, in a small office of about 10 people. Around the office in my city (Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada) has a lot of high school graduate diamond mine workers, oil workers, and engineering companies working for all of our industries and many arts grads without jobs (no surprise). I think measuring people with degrees per square mile is a good idea because our industry workers without degrees are barely in town and few are often living here for long. I think that it makes for innacurate findings.
BTW, sorry for any rambling, bad spelling or grammar, little sleep, apartment burnt down, etc.
To achieve maximum flamage, these numbers should be cross referenced by religious views, political affiliation, and choice of text editor :-D
The linked page doesn't contain the word 'open', 'source' or even 'license'. WTF? Should I add "open-sourced" to my submissions to get them accepted too?
Many people in the IT field are less social and have a smaller group of friends outside of work, so picking up and moving isn't as big of a change. Not everyone fits this, but I'm sure it impacts the results.
The basic assumption is that population density (of the normal sort) is important. This college-degree density is just (population density) * (proportion of population with college degrees), and as his figures show, the first term ends up being more important in most cases.
Furthermore, even anecdotal evidence doesn't really support him, despite SF coming out at the top of his list. Although there's plenty of "knowledge economy" in SF, it's ultra-sprawl Silicon Valley that's actually where the heart of the action is.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
There is a considerable history of computer professionals earning pretty good pay checks. The mobility of these techs is highly linked to their financial ability to move where they please. A 90K per annum computer tech is far more able to accept offers than a 30K school teacher who may actually be better educated and more able.
That's how far I moved recently, after seriously considering a position 7780 kilometers away. And I settled with the closer one, not because it was closer (which, with that distance, doesn't really matter anyway), but because it would be also interesting for my wife. So, yeah, I'd say I'm willing to move far away looking for interesting things to do.
(1425 and 4834 miles, for those who don't use metric)
if "Is it more about the fact that the creative jobs are where the creative people are?" where true then if you where living somewhere where there where no creative jobs, then it would mean that you are not a creative person and if you have moved to get a job then this 'fact' is incorrect. I think the location of creative jobs has more to do with large bodies of water than any other factor.
Having a college degree makes you statistically more likely to have a job, and to be more highly compensated, but it's not at all clear to me that having a degree makes you part of a "creative class", whatever the fuck that is. Having a college degree also means you are statistically more likely to be white and to come from an affluent family. The transition from "educational attainment" to "smarter people" to "creative class" sounds great while sipping an $8 coffee and listening to indie rock, but in the real world it's pretty fucking condescending.
Carpenters are creative. ...
Mechanics are creative.
Landscapers are creative.
Welders are creative.
Stonemasons are creative.
Not all. Maybe not most. But probably not a great deal more or less than are coders, analysts, lawyers, doctors, accountants (maybe I'll give you that one!), and economists.
is to riff upon the concepts of intelligence, education, creativity, mobility, and technology
basically, you can say just about anything within that huge scattershot area... and signify absolutely no thought of any value whatsoever
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't really understand the connection between "Creative" and "College Educated." Considering that many creative people (especially in the cultural arts) either never went to college, or dropped out... Also, considering that many people that go to college don't have a creative bone in their bodies... I'm not sure the correlation of degrees to populated area is really appropriate as a measure of creativity.
Plus, the "creative class" seems a bit strange...
Y'all are thinking too much. Some of us just like to be near our loved ones.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
this really depends more on if you are a contractor or direct emplyee.
Contractors go where the money is.
they tend to be nomads.
We are more Mobile but we also have to help take care of our family: our parents who live longer, and our other relations not to mention children and the need for parents or grand parents to help care for our kids, etc. Technology lets' us travel more, and stay connected when we do. It also helps us connect to our growing networks of friends and family.
However, there are many economic reasons to stay close to a birth location assuming that is near other family members. Of course there are exceptions including those who really want to "get away" and those who have the wealth or work need to relocate (say to SF or NY). These reasons can not helped or hurt by technology other than technology lets people live longer, and may help older people stay more independent longer.
Until there is a robot that can stay home with Mom and look after her, help her take her meds and buy her groceries, do light household and yard work, etc. Then there really isn't any other technology (besides money) that can help us.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Hell, I like to live within close driving distances of decent surf and snow. The technology jobs can either move to where I am or do without my onsite services. I'm not going to work in Omaha or Dallas no matter how good the pay is!
You go where the money is.
Some jobs have opportunities just about everywhere, nursing is a good example, so you can stay in your local area. (I am aware of hiring freezes by hospitals because of an abundance of nurses, but it would be rare to not find a nursing job within 100 miles of where you live.) Other jobs are spread out more. How many professional athletes and professional team managers reside within 100 miles of where they grew up? You have to go where the money is.
...not very smart. First off, it's silly to equate "smart" to "educated." Smart children of illegal immigrants who pick strawberries don't tend to go to college. Dumb children of business executives tend to go to college and get a degree in something, e.g., education, that doesn't require mastering any speficic, difficult body of knowledge. A college education is a middle-class entitlement in the U.S., like Social Security and Medicare.
The other silly thing about it is that first he tabulates the density of degree holders and finds out that degree holders are more dense where people are more dense. Wow, blinding insight. Then he tries to eliminate the effect of population density using a linear regression, which isn't the right tool for the job. If he wants to eliminate the effect of population density, he should just start with the percentage of the population that has a degree. His linear regression method produces results that obviously don't make much sense, e.g., that Oklahoma City has 544% more people with degrees than you'd expect. (See the note at the bottom of the chart.) Presumably this indicates that not only does every adult in Oklahoma City have a degree, but so do all their children, as do their dogs, cats, and major household appliances.
Find free books.
Thank you. Some of the most creative people I know are carpenters, furniture makers, and other craftsmen. Or are musicians, or painters, or chefs. Most of these people went to a community college at most. Using college degrees to indicate creativity shows a misunderstanding of creativity.
I cantankerously but humbly disagree with every conclusion of this article. I don't agree that college-trained people are generally smarter. I readily agree that college educated people are better at manipulating and understanding symbols and words than the general population. But they are not better at using the vast amount of stored knowledge and experience stored in those words and books to make their lives better. They are marginally better but not greatly so.
I live in Portland Oregon USA and hear constantly about the movement of smart and creative people into smart and creative cities, of which Portland is proclaimed to be. It is simply not true. People move here because life is easy here. We are a thousand miles from any urban center of global consequence.
For example, we have a company called Wieden+Kennedy, who are a world-renowned employer of creative people. They make advertising. Everybody loathes advertising, and everyone does as much as possible to minimize their exposure to it. If a person is really creative, then why would they be wasting their creativity on advertising? Hense they are not creative: they're just people who have the annoying talent of recycling cliches to sell things that no one would buy if they weren't persuaded to do so by 'creative' people.
Real creative people make useful things and solve real problems. In Portland, 'creative' people make nothing and create real problems.
As for the relationship between technical abilities and creativity: there is very little. Look at the vast majority of postings here on Slashdot that follow every story. Dim, moronic, childish, dull, embarrassing. Not creative. If there were any intrinsic connection between creativity and technical/scientific/engineering ability, we would see it here. We don't.
Creativity is what creativity does. You can't measure it. It's not a fashion and real creativity is rarely noticed for what it is.
The summary is really, really misleading. I really wanted to know about this "intelligence density", and which citieas hosted the biggest proportion of graduates every 1000 people. I wanted to compare Bologna with Oxford, Paris, Rome, Boston...
But then I realised this study was limited to a single country.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
I have almost 300 hours of undergrad/grad credit, and some killer real-world experience. I could be quite substantially richer by living somewhere else. But the idea of being able to afford More Shiny Things isn't nearly as appealing to me as being able to eat Sunday lunch after church with my parents and brother, or catch a baseball game after work with my friends.
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. - Matthew 6:21
Smart people are more tightly compact when.... the entire population is more tightly compact? Whoa! This is some serious science. He could have maybe (I don't know) thrown in some statistics to see if the density of degree holders (what a great definition of "smart") is greater than the mean you would expect for the density in question. But whatever... San Francisco #1!!!!
I have found that willing to take short term (3 months) or medium term (6 month) assignments and travel a bit has led to better money, more interesting work, and more opportunities. A VP at my company once told me that to get very far would require flexibility in this area, now I personally live in the same town for the last 40 years but I have done lots of out of town assignments in other parts of the country and world. And have made it know that I WOULD move if required.
You go where the work is. If you pick an area and wait until you get employment in that area, you could be years between jobs. For IT work, metro centers and restaurant selection are pretty much a given. Except for Cajun. Tough to find good Cajun out of the south.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Am I missing something? Like the section where he did the obvious thing and correlated degrees and economy? Most obviously there's the overall level of economic activity, but the type of economic activity will also be a major player. He points out Nashville has a high density, a quick Googling suggests this is a major healthcare/biotech centre. He also mentions Seattle where apparently the biggest employer is the University of Washington, is another a healthcare/biotech hub though there's also MS, Boeing... San Fran has Silicon Valley, Stanford, a financial centre, oh and apparently is also a healthcare/biotech hub (not sure how much the tourism sector plays into this).
It's called employment. Doing business. Economics.
He notes concern over places where urban areas have higher degree density. People do commute, more in some places than others (he is using census i.e. residence data). On top of that, some places have planning/zoning that specifically encourage out-of-centre business parks. You'll still have high concentration of where smart people work in both central and urban areas.
*Golf clap*
I've only moved for a job once, and that had a lot more to do with the recession than anything else, and hopefully, I'll never do it again. I think the real division here is between people for whom their career is their supreme consideration and those for whom it is not. Personally, I don't give a rat's ass about "career" beyond making sure that my needs are met with a little left over for some luxuries. I do pretty well: I've worked as an independent contractor for the last several years, so it varies from year to year, but I usually gross somewhere in the low six digits. My career-driven counterparts tend to make about 20% more than me, which is not enough for me to disrupt the rest of my life, and I'm not sure what would be. If I wasn't putting a kid through college, I'd probably work a lot less.
I used to be career-driven. Over the course of the last twenty years, I discovered that how happy or unhappy I was at any given time had next to nothing to do with how much money I was making -- as long as I was making enough to avoid privation -- and very little to do with what I was doing at work. It's not like it's going to be any great comfort to have my peak earnings and my job references on my epitaph.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Degrees/100k Population of those cities would reveal a different figure that give Education to Population density, which when considered with the prior figures of the author might indeed suggest where "the action is".
This would make some small areas stand out by looking at a different "concentration". Something like "Bankers per city" in Connecticut.
Although there's plenty of "knowledge economy" in SF, it's ultra-sprawl Silicon Valley that's actually where the heart of the action is.
Members in and around Santa Clara, California are currently renting these titles much more than other Netflix members.
That's in the heart of the action... what movies do your neighbors rent?
In greate part creativity comes from the tension between the need for a solution and the available resources. (Necessity is the mother of invention.)
The Amish, who will not use electricity and certain other "modernities" are brilliantly creative at solving problems without those resources.
I bet the average Amish farmer (and perhaps any successful farmer) is much more creative than the average Slashdotter.
and pipes in dozens of different ways, depending on the specifics and constraints of the problem as well as available materials.
Craftsmen can be and are most definitely creative and intelligent. Frankly, most artists I know are pretentious, self-aggrandizing wankers. They may speak with authority, but much of what they say is nonsense just the same.
Creativity is far more prevalent and diverse than your apparently narrow perspective seems to allow.
Most of us are not itinerant workers. We don't literally go where the next job is, with no locality. But at certain transition points in our lives, we examine the potential employment opportunities while judging where to transfer. I try to "go where the jobs are" which is not the same thing as to "go where the job is".
Someone like me would decline a job in Nashville unless it was stupendously high paying, to the point where it would offset my belief that I would not be happy there and I would not find a continued career after the job is over. A place like the S.F. Bay Area, while expensive to live, offers a hope of continued employment in many different jobs that would suit me. So the jobs in the Bay Area can attract me even before I've interviewed or been given an offer with any specific employer, while a fully committed job offer with one employer in Nashville would not attract me, because Nashville doesn't have that promise of many other relevant employers. Even now, when the Bay Area is said to have above average unemployment, it holds more promise for a specialized techie than some other podunk place.
Chicken and egg, sure, but not my problem as I'm not part of the Nashville leadership... this is where I agree with the comment about universities. They serve a big role in allowing the critical mass of employers to flourish in the same area, and hence to become attractive at this collective level.
I disagree with the thesis of this post. In my experience, technical people are not the most mobile people in the work force. People involved in high level business positions, airline pilots, diplomats, or people into artsy careers (music, acting) are way more mobile than tech people when it comes to moving far away from where they were born. Stop thinking you are special just because you know how to use computers.
I'm in the Pittsburgh area. You can get a world class education here, pretty much regardless of the field. If you're into medicine there's Pitt. If you're into the law, there's Pitt and Duquesne. If you're into business, there's Point Park. If you're into CS, there's CMU. All within 15 miles of where I live. Why would I need to leave?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Currently I live 370 miles from where I grew up, as the car drives. But previously I was living 8 thousand miles away via great circle route (longer by actual air routes), but "commuting" roughly 9k miles to where my primary job site was located (for roughly 2-4 week on, 4-8 week off cycles, the off time working from my home office).
Not in my experience. I had to go to trade school at a community college because my parents made too much money to get financial aid, and had too much debt to throw $60,000 at a university.
-I couldn't swing the 4.1 gpa necessary to get one of the two full ride merit scholarships in existance.
-My military father told me I'd kill myself if I joined the military.
-I didn't want to take on $60,000 dollars in high interest loans that I couldn't discharge in bankruptcy.
So now I get to study metalworking & math 3 years of highschool below my capabilities while I wait out the clock to turn 23. There are other solutions including adult adoption, divorce, or homelessness, but my parents are too ethical for divorce, my relatives are too ethical for adoption, and I'm too proud to dress up like a hobo for some low interest handouts from the government.
So now: I get to pay for trade shool with credit cards while I listen to my classmates boast about how:
-they get $2000/month for being shitcanned from their last job
-on top of another $2000/month in zero interest debt for being a student.(which we all know the government will forgive just about the time I'm starting college)
I watch them plunder this shit away on booze and video poker when they could be accumulating enough money to retire like a king in the 2nd/3rd world without working another day of their life.
I got shit canned from my last job too, but cared too much about what my boss thought of me to fight him in unemployment hearings.
So no: a college education is not a middle-class entitlement. Not in my experience.
Maybe a lower class entitlement... Maybe even a lower middle class entitlement...
But definately not an entitlement available to me.
Glenn Beck is an asshole, but fuck the government, and fuck the poor. They have all the opportunities in the world and they plunder them all because they've had their imagination bread out of them.
The government pays them to be lower class, so why would they ever aspire for more? Even if they wanted they don't have the imagination to believe it's possible.
Right! Have we learned nothing from "Trading Places?"
If you want to compare the "intelligence densities" of Oxford and Paris, this isn't the study you want, because it only compares metropolitan areas in the United States.
Oh, it seems you've already realized that.
Wait, what was the point of your comment again? Because I can't discern anything but "flamebait".
Other than demonstrating that the Great Society is an abject failure, that is...
not only does every adult in Oklahoma City have a degree, but so do all their children, as do their dogs, cats, and major household appliances.
"My fridge is smarter than your honor student."
Creative regions, human capital, creative class are important research subjects. For your questions, IMHO one of the most interesting research in this field; The Economic Geography of Talent, Author: Richard Florida, Published in: journal Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Volume 92, Issue 4 December 2002 , pages 743 - 755. In this article author develops diversity index and coolness index. From the abstract; Talent is associated with the diversity index. Furthermore, the economic geography of talent is strongly associated with high-technology industry location. Talent and high-technology industry work independently and together to generate higher regional incomes. In short, talent is a key intermediate variable in attracting high-technology industries and generating higher regional incomes.
We IS not smart? I absolutely agree.
Why mention religious views twice in a list of 3 items?
I live well within the 100 miles from where i was born, 'cause I've never moved from my home city.
But at the end of the 1980's and into the 90's we had a lot of people move here.
Most of the people I knew that went away to college had no problem moving somewhere else to get a job. Only a few of them came back to live here, and those usually are working for Microsoft, or another company like that.
The people like me that went to community colleges or got a job after high school, tended to stay in the area.
While I find the census to be boring to do (had one of the workers come to my door the other day because i guess i forgot to send mine in, but like he said, thats job security for him), all in all, it doesn't really answer all the questions that would give a lot of useful information.
Maybe they should have a social/economic type census. Of course, i'd probably forget to mail that also...
Be seeing you...
Go where the jobs are. Duh!
yup
... degree holders are more dense where people are more dense. Wow, blinding insight.
Yeah. On the other hand, if (for example) you're an employer looking to locate an office near lots of potential employees, degree-holders-per-square-mile might actually be the right number for you.
In the Economic Geography of Talent (Carnegie Mellon 2005), Richard Florida looked at what made capable people come to work in technology-using clusters. The study – which mixed focus groups with statistical surveys – started from the hypothesis that what would bring talent together was a mixture of economic opportunity, diversity and amenity, including climate, housing costs and the like. The conclusion was that talent was intensely concentrated geographically; that the single greatest attractor to talent was the presence of other talent; and that high technology industries attracted talented people, who in turn drew in more of their fellows, which in turn created more high technology industry. Regional income levels were important, but probably a consequence rather than a cause of talent clusters. Social factors had some impact on this. Specifically, tolerance for diverse life styles was significant, with the density of gay-related facilities proving particularly important to the statistics and interviews. (See www.chforum.org/scenarios2009/agents.shtml for more.) One additional factor is this. Above average income in technology clusters tend to be earned by non-technologists. Those with technical qualifications earn below the regional median for professionals. The chief reason seems to be associated witht he ability to manage human networks. Technologists tend to be introverted, score highly on schizoid and neuroticism scales. That is, they are bad at handling the huge complexity of human interaction, the heart and soul of management. What is the relevance of that? Well, local networks take a while to create, so people who live through them are pinned to that locale. People who are essentially unconnected to their local society can easily move. Sad, but...
Choose where you want to live and then find or create your job. Both my wife and I did this independently. Far more satisfying life.
From the original post: " Do we technical people put interesting work and the concentration of human educational capital ahead of other considerations when deciding on a move? Or is it more complicated?"
I know of very few people who would move anywhere without a job offer in hand. Granted, anyone who goes to college has had a chance to move to some other part of the country, so there is this once-in-a-lifetime concept of choosing a geographic area without actually having a job. The study tries to describe where these degree holders end up. OK, but what does it prove other than the number of jobs for college grads?
From the article, there is the concept of "sprawl". If you go back to the list of cities, you can see that the top 4 (SF, NY, Boston, Washington) are structured in such a way that living in the outer suburbs is not brimming with incentives as it might be in say, Nashville. In the four "top" cities, commuting from the outer suburbs is a logistical problem, and the suburban cost of living is relatively high. In the lower-ranked cities, you can live a LONG way from downtown and the commute is easy. The alternative is to needlessly overpay to live in the city.
I live in an outer suburb of a midwestern city. I have an enormous house, in a development with lots of amenities, for less money than it would cost to buy a small condo downtown. It's a sleepy little town, there crime is low and the schools are good. Management of the big city is corrupt, incompetent, and focused on welfare recipients. Costs are needlessly bloated. No thanks. They were practically daring me to move to the outer suburbs, so I did it. When I need to be downtown, I can get there in 30 minutes. Time well spent, IMHO.
If I can make $25K more per year if I move, chances are I'll move.
I sincerely hope you factor in the relative cost of housing before making a decision like that. I could make half my salary working downstate and still support a much better standard of living. For what I paid for my 3 bedroom condo, I could buy a 5000 square foot house with 3 car garage and detached apartment (I almost did, btw, but the market wouldn't let me sell...) Likewise, moving from 50k job in a small-medium size midwestern town to a place like San Francisco at 75k will put you squarely in the poor house.
I have a college degree and work in a salaried position in a large metropolitan area. My uncle has a high school education and lives in a rural area. Compared to him,
I'm not bitter; I really believe my life has been improved by having a college degree. However, those who think a degree will improve your standard of material living are grossly mistaken. Even though I work with white-collar folks, they're just as vindictive and greedy and dishonest as their blue collar counterparts; however, they feel it is somehow "different" because they justify it with more eloquent terms. They point to the absolute dollar value of compensation as proof that they're somehow better than their blue-collar counterparts, yet fail to realize the income relative to expenses is about the same, and in terms of actual ownership, seldom have more (and often less) than their "unsophisticated" blue collar counterparts.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I loved the analysis and the numbers but something didn't sit right with me. You hit the nail on the head, equating creativity with attainments of college degrees. 40% of the students with an IQ more than 140 are at risk of dropping out. They are intelligent but don't get degrees. They may or may not be creative, just like the automaton grad student who teaches and memorizes but does no thinking.