Richard Florida

As we saw yesterday, Michael Mandel argues that commercial innovation in the U.S. has slowed in recent years. To shed light on this, my team and I tracked U.S. patent data for the past decade - and for the entire 20th century. More »

In a widely read cover story published earlier this month, Business Week's chief economist Michael Mandel asks, "To what degree has American innovation been 'interrupted'?" Mandel argues that the economic crisis is partly the result of America's failure to generate high-impact commercial innovations: "What if, outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted?" More »

Why do people buy green products? A new study (h/t: Charlotta Mellander) finds that green purchases are less about energy savings or cost savings and more about image. Prius owners pay a significant premium over many conventional fuel-efficient cars. When asked about the top motivating factors behind their purchase, the comment, "makes a statement about me" was at the top of the list, while "higher fuel economy" came in third, and "lower emissions," fifth. The… More »

Most people think the biggest threat to globalization is mounting economic nationalism and trade protectionism. That may well be true. But in a thoughtful and provocative article in the Harvard Business Review, George Stalk argues that globalization faces another threat - a looming infrastructure crisis that is creating huge bottlenecks in the flow of global products and services. More »

In the wake of Michael Jackson's death, there's been no shortage of predictions about how his passing represents the end of the "age of celebrity." More »

Nashville may be the center of the recorded music industry and, while it has attracted scads of musicians over the past several decades, it remains a narrower kind of music scene compared with say Brooklyn, according to analysis by my U of T colleague Dan Silver. In an earlier post, I explored Jack White's move from Detroit to the Music City. Silver picks up on the Punch Brothers' Nashville-to-Brooklyn relocation, making an important distinction between music… More »

Even with the bursting of the housing bubble, it still costs a whole lot more to live in some places than others. New York City, Washington, D.C., L.A., and San Francisco, for example, remain much more expensive than most other U.S. cities and regions. But why?There's the old real estate adage: location, location, location - people pay more to be in more central and better places. But that still begs the question of what makes certain places better?The clustering… More »

The new unemployment figures were released yesterday. The news isn't good. My fellow Atlantic correspondent, Conor Clarke, has already put the new figures in context and points to David Leonhardt's perspective. The AP's Christopher Rugaber has a particularly nice take. The past year has put more than six million workers on the unemployment roles. 6.4 million Americans "want a job," and the total ranks of the unemployed have swelled to more than 15 million people,… More »

One consequence of the economic crisis is that the rate of home ownership has been slipping, as the chart below shows (via Calculated Risk). A growing number of economists and urbanists question whether the United States has put too much emphasis on homeownership and over-invested in housing. Ever since the Great Depression, America has generously subsidized homeownership through the tax code and by other means. Housing does take up a significant share of U.S.… More »

Were you - like me - ever amazed at how so many people could afford bigger and bigger homes, New England beach houses and Florida condos, expensive cars? The answer, according to a terrific article by Ben Funnell in the Financial Times, is simple: cheap, available credit. Debt, he says, is "capitalism's dirty little secret." Cheap mortgages, cheap car leases, and the use of home as veritable ATM's created fictitious living standards for the middle class and the… More »

The economic crisis appears to be causing a slight but noticeable shift from the suburbs to the cities, according to an analysis of recent Census data by Brookings demographer William Frey, reported in the Wall Street Journal. "The central-city population in U.S. metropolitan areas with more than one million people (excluding New Orleans ...) grew at an annual rate of 0.97% between July 2007 and July 2008 ...That compared with a growth rate of 0.90% in 2006-2007,… More »

Writing in this magazine, I argued that the economic crisis was reshaping America's economic geography, with big city centers and mega-region hubs like New York City, talent-rich regions like greater D.C., and college towns weathering the storm relatively well, while Rustbelt cities and shallow-rooted Sunbelt economies being much harder hit. Take a look at the graph below from the newly released SP/Case-Shiller Home Price Index for April.Phoenix and Las Vegas have… More »

Bikes have replaced cars as the preferred mode of transportation in Amsterdam, according to a new study (reported in the Oregonian via Planetizen):"The bicycle is the means of transport used most often in Amsterdam," reports Bike Europe. "Between 2005 and 2007 people in the city used their bikes on average 0.87 times a day, compared to 0.84 for their cars. This is the first time that bicycle use exceeds car use."When I started cycling in the Boston area a decade or… More »

Dutch start-up SellaBand has built a platform that allows artists to crowd-source funding from music-lovers around the world. Established in 2006 by two Sony-BMG music executives, it provides a Bowie-bond like process for up-and-coming bands to raise $50,000 to record their album by selling ten dollar "parts" to online "believers." More »

Ed Glaeser has some very sensible things to say about the shrinking cities brouhaha.. Despite the growing hype, there's not a shred of evidence that the Obama administration is considering bull-dozering anything. Glaeser says it makes a heck of a lot more sense to favor people over places. Invest in human capital and encourage people to be mobile, Glaeser contends, promise much better long-term economic payoffs than undertaking expensive and dubious strategies to try to revive dying places. More »

Globalization skeptics have long complained about the alleged out-sourcing of good, high-paying American jobs. But even globo-optimists, like Tom Friedman, have conceded that U.S. jobs are vulnerable with the rise of a flat world. In a 2006 essay in Foreign Affairs, Princeton economist and Obama adviser Alan Blinder argued that globalization would likely bring about a mass off-shoring of American jobs. Blinder later used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to estimate… More »

Crosscut argues that it's time for Seattle and other cities to learn from NYC's example and start turning old elevate structures into parks and other good uses (pointer via Planetizen). More »

More photos of "kitchens to go" over at Metropolis. More »

While the business press points to May's slowdown in the pace of layoffs as an early sign of recovery, Harvard economist Jeffrey Frankel says not so fast. Frankel, who's also a member of the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, prefers an alternative indicator of employment - total hours worked - which he says provides a better gauge of economic cycles (pointer from Economix). Speaking entirely for myself, I like to look at… More »

Tracking the career and location decisions of graduating college students provides interesting clues about America's evolving economic landscape. New college grads are on the front-lines of rapidly changing economic circumstances making a series of inter-connected decisions about what job to take, what field to pursue, and what city and labor market to locate in. And, because they are both highly skilled and highly mobile - new college grads are three to five… More »