Richard Florida

How has the economic crisis affected the happiness and well-being of Americans? Newly released data from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index enables us to take a look. At the national level, not so much: The mid-year 2009 score is 65.1, a moderate decline from 65.5 in 2008. (Catherine Rampell of Economix provides a nice summary of the survey methods, indicators, and key findings.)But, rising unemployment appears to have a significant relationship to the… More »

Yesterday, we looked at the relationship between drug use and the concentrations of certain kinds of jobs in states. We saw that cocaine is more likely to be used in states where lawyers make up a larger share of the workforce, while marijuana use is associated with states with higher concentrations of artists, scientists, architects, and educators. Today, we turn to the relationships between drug use and personality. Psychologists define personality according to… More »

Yesterday, we looked at the relationship between drug use and class. We found that drug use was significantly associated with the percentage of the creative class in a state, and negatively so with the percentage of people employed in the working class. Today, I dig a bit deeper into the relationship between drug use and specific types of professional, knowledge-based, and creative jobs--management, business and finance, architecture and engineering, science,… More »

Yesterday, we looked at the relationship between drug use and economic patterns. We saw that drug use was associated with both higher levels of state economic output as well as higher levels of unemployment. Today, I turn to the relationships between drug use and economic class. My colleague Charlotta Mellander charted the relationships between drug use and the percentage of a state's economy that is made up of two classes: the creative class--that is, people who… More »

Yesterday, I looked at the relationship between drug use and politics. We saw that states that voted for Obama had higher levels of marijuana and cocaine use than those that voted for McCain. But perhaps economic factors lie behind those political trends. We know that Obama drew from less affluent minority voters and also from more well-educated, creative class voters. Perhaps the associations between drug use and voting patterns reflect deeper economic patterns. More »

Yesterday, I looked at the relationship between drug use and politics. We saw that states that voted for Obama had higher levels of marijuana and cocaine use than those that voted for McCain. But perhaps economic factors lie behind those political trends. We know that Obama drew from less affluent minority voters and also from more well-educated, creative class voters. Perhaps the associations between drug use and voting patterns reflect deeper economic… More »

Ryan Grim's new book, This is Your Country on Drugs, has revived interest in drug use and drug policy. Around the time it hit the streets, this map of drug use by state (via Map Scroll) started circulating around the Internet. More »

It's more than a jobless recovery, we've been looking at a jobless decade or more, at least in terms of private sector jobs, according to Business Week's chief economist, Michael Mandel.Beneath this trend lies a broad and fundamental restructuring of the U.S., and virtually every other advanced economy - the decline of manufacturing and the rise of professional, knowledge-based, and creative work on the one hand, and lower-end service work on the other. This chart… More »

American attitudes toward immigration are hardening, according to a new Gallup poll. Half of all Americans say immigration should be "decreased" - up 11 points from 39 percent last year. More »

Yesterday, we looked at the relationship between housing prices and income. Today, we turn to the relationship between housing prices and wages. Wages are a useful way to gauge regional housing prices because they only count money that is earned by doing work. Income, on the other hand, counts any and all earnings from investments, interest, dividends transfers, and other sources. The graph below plots housing prices in 2009 against wage levels for 2008 (the most… More »

Last week, we looked at the relationship between past and current housing prices. We saw that there are some regions where housing prices have fallen more than what might be expected based on national trends, while prices have declined considerably less than expected in others. Today, we shift gears looking at the relationship between housing price and incomes. The graph below compares median housing prices in 2009 to income per capita levels in 2007 (the most… More »

Earlier this week, Foreign Policy released the latest edition of its Failed States Index (via Daily Dish's Patrick Appel). It's based on a database of 12 indicators of state cohesion and performance for 177 nations. So my colleague Charlotta Mellander decided to compare it to our Prosperity Institute economic development database which has a wide range of indicators for output, productivity, human capital innovation, life satisfaction, human development, and… More »

The U.S. economy has shed 7.2 million jobs since the onset of the recession. But the economic pain of unemployment has not been spread equally, according to a new analysis by my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute. More »

Yesterday, I compared 2009 housing prices to their 2006 baseline. Today, I turn to the change in housing prices. The graph below plots the percentage units change in housing prices between 2006 and 2009 against the 2006 baseline price. More »

Housing prices continue to fall nationally but the economic impacts of the crisis are being felt unevenly across the country. Housing values are off roughly a third from their peak in mid-2006, according to the Case-Shiller Home Price Index. Phoenix and Las Vegas have taken the biggest hits, suffering declines of more than 50 percent in the past year. Miami, San Diego, L.A., and Tampa have also been hard hit. Detroit has seen housing prices sink to mid-90s levels.… More »

The impacts of the economic crisis continue to be felt unevenly across the country. I've previously looked at the factors associated with higher rates of regional unemployment. But which places have seen the biggest jumps in unemployment since the crisis hit? To get at this, my colleague Charlotta Mellander conducted a straightforward statistical exercise called a "residual analysis." It's a simple way to track how a location performs relative to the performance of… More »

Overall, the trend in patenting is up - both in absolute numbers and controlling for population. Innovation has increased over the past decade, but not at the breakneck pace of the 1980s and 1990s. There have been two dips in patenting over the past decade - the first in the wake of the tech crisis of 2001 and the second, more recently, concurrent with the onset of the housing and financial bubbles and the subsequent economic crisis. More »

The past couple of days, I've looked at the trends in overall patents and nationality of inventor. Today I turn to the regional distribution of innovation across U.S. regions. It's well-known that high-tech industries are concentrated and clustered in areas like Silicon Valley, Greater Boston, Seattle, Austin, and North Carolina's Research Triangle. Paul Krugman won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the relationships between urbanization, trade, and… More »

Here's a map of job postings by metro area (h/t: Steven Pedigo). The map controls for population. D.C. has the most openings and Baltimore is second. San Jose, Austin, Hartford, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, Boston, Las Vegas, Charlotte, and San Francisco all are doing reasonably well, relatively speaking. More »

Yesterday, we looked at overall trends in U.S. innovation measured by patents. Today, we break out U.S. patents between U.S.-resident and non-resident or foreign inventors patenting in the U.S. Numerous studies have shown that, over the past two or three decades, the role of foreign scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs in U.S. innovation has increased. Recent research by AnnaLee Saxenian and Vivek Wadhwa and others finds that anywhere between a third and… More »