The Big Sort (63 page)
Authors: Bill Bishop
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*"City" here and elsewhere in this book refers to a metropolitan area Technically, "city" is a political designation. Washington, D.C., for example, is limited to the District of Columbia. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget, however, determines regions that effectively work as one economic unit. The "city" of Austin falls almost entirely within one county. The Austin metropolitan area includes five countiesâa far more accurate description of the Austin economy than the antiquated and more arbitrary political designation.
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*Income inequality increased not only regionally but also among individuals. Beginning in 1969, the most common measure of family income inequality increased steadily. Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal,
Polarized America The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches
(Cambridge, MA MIT Press, 2006), p. 6.
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*There are wheels within wheels in the Big Sort. Dora Costa, an MIT economist, argues that since college-educated people increasingly marry others with similar levels of education, they tend to congregate in larger cities where both husband and wife have a better chance of finding fulfilling work. In 1970, 29 percent of what Costa calls "power couples" lived in cities of more than 2 million people. By 1990, 50 percent of these highly educated pairs lived in large cities. The "bundling" of educated people has further exacerbated regional disparities in income. See Dora Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, "Power Couples- Changes in the Locational Choice of the College Educated, 1940â1990,"
Quarterly Journal of Economics
115, no. 4 (November 2000) 1287â1315. Also available at
http://web.mit.edu/costa/www/bindqje8 pdf
.
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*We compared the number of people who were ten to twenty-four years of age in 1990 with the number of those twenty to thirty-four years of age in 2000
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â In 2003, twenty-one cities had above-average output in technology-related industries and produced patents at above the national per capita rate. They were San Diego, Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Jose, Phoenix, Denver, Boston, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Washington, Rochester (Minnesota), Boise, Portland, Raleigh-Durham, Austin, Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas.
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*For details, see Florida's 2002 book,
The Rise of the Creative Class.
From the middle of 2001 through the middle of 2002, Florida, Gary Gates, and Kevin Stolarick worked with Robert Cushing on a series of studies. Those studies resulted in a series of newspaper articles I wrote with Mark Lisheron for the
Austin American-Statesman
in 2002. See Bill Bishop and Mark Lisheron, "Cities of Ideas,"
Austin American-Statesman,
http://www.statesman.com/specialreports/ content/specialreports/citiesofideas/
.
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*In
Making Democracy Work Civic Traditions in Modern Italy
(1993), Putnam explored the differences between thriving northern Italy and the dragging south. He concluded that the stronger economy and more efficient government in the north were results of the region's strong civic traditions. In speeches, I heard Putnam say that the number of choral societies in a city predicted how quickly the local government would answer the phone. The greater number of civic organizations (such as choral societies) made northern Italy's economy more vibrant and its government more efficient than those in the less connected south
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*Solow's paper "Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function" led to his being awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in economics.
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*Jane Jacobs is best known for her book on urban design,
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
(1961), a work that undergirds today's New Urbanist movement. But most of Jacobs's time was spent producing her trilogy about economic growth
The Economy of Cities
(1969),
Cities and the Wealth of Nations
(1984), and
The Nature of Economies
(2000).
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*More recently, MIT president Susan Hockfield noted that in semiconductor electronics, "the applied work transformed the fundamental researchânot just the other way around" (speech, Brookings Institution, April 28, 2006).
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*Smart companies realized the need for face-to-face contact among workers. Businesses feared becoming the next Xerox, whose scientists developed pieces of the personal computer in the 1970s at the company's Palo Alto Research Center but failed to transmit that knowledge to the developmental engineers in Dallas or Xerox management in Stamford, Connecticut As a result, BMW opened its Research and Engineering Centre north of Munich, where it commingled its research, design, development, and production engineering staffsâand designed the office so that nobody would have to walk more than 50 meters (164 feet) to meet a coworker. So much for the triumph of technology over distance
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*We compared the twenty-one metropolitan areas with the most technology to the nation as a whole, using surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago The center's General Social Survey asked people whether they thought of themselves as liberal or conservative.
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* In Mark 16.15â18,the Great Commission supplies the basis for a more fundamentalist Christianity In this Gospel, Jesus orders his disciples to "proclaim the Good News to all creation." And then, "He who believes and is baptized will be saved, he who does not believe will be condemned." How will believers be identified? Jesus says that they will "cast out devils; they will have the gift of tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands and be unharmed."
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*Heavenly sunshine, heavenly sunshine,
Flooding my soul with glory divine.
Heavenly sunshine, heavenly sunshine,
Hallelujah' Jesus is mine
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*Race trumped religion in Green's polling Black Protestants were the most Democratic of the groups, followed closely by Jews and Latino Catholics.
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*Warren explained the overwhelming support for Bush at Saddleback by saying, "It's Orange County." But Bush received only 60 percent of the vote in that county in 2004
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*Disney shared many tricks of the trade in training sessions held for church leaders, Second Baptist Church minister Gary Moore told me. For instance, the entertainment company talked to trainees from megachurches about how popcorn and cotton candy smells are pumped onto Disney's "main streets" as a way to attract people into stores. Ministers have adopted this technique to lure people into church dinners or religious dinner theaters.
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* Martineau's article definitely fails any twenty-first-century measure of political correctness But the adman foresaw that the market was getting more complicated. Although all classes of people liked accumulating things, Martineau wrote, the growing middle class was most interested in buying experiences, "spending where one is left typically with only a memory" ("Social Class and Spending Behavior," p. 129). Forty-one years later, B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore would write
The Experience Economy. Work Is Theater and Every Business a Stage.
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* In 2004, 34 percent of those buying Toyota Prius hybrid cars said that they purchased the vehicle because it "makes a statement about me." By 2007, that number had risen to 57 percent. Micheline Maynard, "Say 'Hybrid' and Many People Will Hear 'Prius,'"
New York Times,
July 4, 2007, p. A1.
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*Eight out of ten Americans told Yankelovich Partners in 2003 that they felt inundated by advertisements and, when given a chance, they reacted against unwanted commercial messages. Ten million Americans signed up for a national no-call list in the first four days the service was offered in 2003. See ]. Walker Smith, Ann Clurman, and Craig Wood,
Coming to Concurrence. Addressable Attitudes and the New Model for Marketing Productivity
(Evanston, IL Racom Communications, 2005), pp. 17â18.
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â A Public Agenda poll released in January 2005 found sharp decreases in the percentage of Americans who said that "deeply religious" public officials might at times need to "make compromises" in their convictions in order to "get results while in government " "Religion and Public Life, 2000â2004. Survey Shows Religious Americans Less Likely to Support Compromise," January 23, 2005,
http://www.publicagenda.org/research/research_reports_details.cfm?list=1
.
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* The fear that people could use psychological techniques to gain control of the political system was described in Eugene Burdick's cold and eerie 1956 novel
The
Ninth Wave
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* There are product equivalents to the research on insurance sales Emanuel Rosen wrote in
The Anatomy of Buzz
that Birkenstocks made such a strong political statement that it "took the company years to convince mainstream customers to wear the sandals" (p. 64).
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*Similarly, Jewish migrants were attracted to the small village of Bethlehem in northern New Hampshire. The old resort town now has a Jewish film festival in the summer, and two of the five members of the town's board of selectmen are Jewish. See Sarah Schweitzer, "In N H. Town, a Cultural Widening,"
Boston Globe,
June n, 2007, p. A1.
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*In Portland, according to Cortright, young people living within three miles of the center of town are more than twice as likely to have a college degree as those living in the suburbs. The same is true in Chicago and New York. In Phoenix, San Antonio, and Las Vegas, the distribution is reversed, with suburban young people being twice as likely to be college educated as their peers in the central city.
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â journalist Chris Anderson described this phenomenon, which he called "the long tail," from the producer's point of view in an article he wrote for
Wired
magazine in 2004. Anderson's metaphor was based on the statistical bell curve. His point was that digital technology, cheap transportation, and the Internet have made it possible and profitable to sell to the smaller markets found on the long tails of the bell curve. Anderson contended that there are huge volumes of sales within these smaller markets. From a consumer's point of view, however, it still makes sense to live around those with similar tastes. See Chris Anderson, "The Long Tail,"
Wired,
October 2004,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
.
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*Minorities were an exception to this alignment; they were likely to be both strict fathers and Democrats
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*The names of these lifestyle subdivisions leave nothing to doubt. The
Washington Post
reported similar lifestyle subdivisions in northern Virginia: "Dominion Valley" has golf and white columns, "Brambleton" has high-speed Internet connections and a patchouli-scented slogan, "Connect with life" (McCrummen, "Redefining Property Values," p A1)
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â Some colleges refuse to allow these kinds of segregated living arrangements. Williams College permits "no special interest housing." A Williams spokesman said, "The belief is that students will interact more with people who are different from them if their residence hall isn't segregated" (Schweitzer, "Like Recycling?")
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* Lesthaeghe and those working in this field called the change in families that took place as the economy switched from farms to factories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the "first demographic transition." The change he saw beginning in the 1960s was tied to the gradual decline of industry and the rise of service employment Lesthaeghe called this the "second demographic transition." The change was gradual, of course, but it is interesting that in the unraveling year of 1965, the
New York Times
announced in a front-page story that the "shift in the nation's employment from goods manufacturing to services has become so pronounced that it is no longer correct to call the United States economy an 'industrial economy.' It is a 'service economy."' The number of people making tangible goods had begun declining in 1953. By 1965, fewer than half of the nation's workers (45 percent) were employed making, mining, or harvesting
{New York Times,
June 28, 1965, p. A1).
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* In his history of the conservative movement, George H. Nash wrote, " In 1945 no articulate, coordinated, self-consciously conservative intellectual force existed in the United States" (
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945
[New York Basic Books, 1976], p. xiii).
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The shift wasn't due entirely to a change in generations. Philip Converse found that the decline in partisanship spanned all age groups (
The Dynamics of Party Support
, p 59). Skocpol wrote that the "great civic transformation of our time happened too abruptly to be attributable primarily to incremental processes of generational replacement" (
Diminished Democracy
, P. 175).
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* The Discovery Institute funded $3 6 million in research between 1996 and 2005. See Jodi Wilgoren, "Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive,"
New York Times,
August 21, 2005
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* One bumper sticker I see in my neighborhood actually states,
NATURE IS GOD.