Richard Florida

Felix Salmon points to Michael Lewis' review of the new Warren Buffet biography by Alice Schroeder. More »

Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers identify one (pointer via Mark Thoma)... More »

TIME does the future of work. Clergy and butlers are among the happiest workers; musicians and dentists are fairly happy; roofers and gas station attendants not so much. This interactive graphic tells me I'm happier as a professor than author - I couldn't find "blogger" on the list... More »

A new Gallup poll finds that:The decline in Republican Party affiliation among Americans in recent years is well documented, but a Gallup analysis now shows that this movement away from the GOP has occurred among nearly every major demographic subgroup. More »

Same-sex couples have been getting married for five years now in Massachusetts. Gary Gates of UCLA's Williams Institute has done the number-crunching and identifies intriguing economic benefits. "Data from the American Community Survey suggest that marriage equality has a small but positive impact on the number of individuals in same-sex couples who are attracted to a state. However, marriage equality appears to have a larger impact on the types of individuals in… More »

Class is a word that elicits strong, and sometimes strange, reactions from many Americans. Once a powerful construct understanding economies and societies, class has been all but banished from the lexicon of social scientists and from the public conversation. It's time we put class back in the center of our vocabulary, especially so during this ongoing economic crisis and reset. The impacts of the crisis have been extremely uneven by class - hitting hardest at the… More »

Indianapolis takes first place and Boston second (so much for the curse of the Bambino). New York is 12th, D.C. 35th, L.A. 14th, Chicago 23rd. The ranking, by the Toronto Star, calculates the winning percentages since 2000 for the 37 U.S. and Canadian cities with at least two professional sports teams. Map from the Toronto Star. More »

Tyler Cowen points to a new NBER study that concludes that the shadow banking system is misnamed: it's part of the real banking system and at the heart of the financial crisis: More »

This spring's 2.3 million newly minted college grads are understandably worried about their economic future. Unemployment among their peers is on the rise, according to this analysis by Chicago-area employment services firm Challenger Gray & Christmas, which found the unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds jumping to 13.2 percent this spring, up from 9.2 percent a year ago. Saturday's Wall Street Journal reports that many of the past decade's "youth magnet"… More »

Is the new Yankee Stadium a "flop?" The Yankees - I must confess I am a Newark-born life-long fan - are losing and tickets aren't selling. The Wall Street Journal asks: "The question is whether all the trouble ultimately will be worth it. If the new stadium fails to augment the Yankees' payroll advantage over competing clubs, and if its propensity to allow home runs makes it difficult to craft an effective pitching staff - what was the point?" The real question is… More »

Foreclosures are surging in the Chicago suburbs, according to this report in Chicago Business (h/t: Alison Kemper). Foreclosures jumped between 25 and 70 percent in suburban counties outside the city. Foreclosure filings for the six-county metro area are the the highest since the onset of the housing crisis. The main cause of the new foreclosure wave appears tied more to the real economy than to the financial mess. But, the most interesting item in the report is… More »

Calling all urbanists and sustainable environmentalists. The car-less German suburb story is the most e-mailed at the New York Times. More »

Anti-immigration sentiment has been rising in the U.S. and Europe as the economic slump deepens. But how has the relationship between mobility and the economy played out historically? How have economic crises affected immigration and global flows of people? A new study by economists Timothy Hatton of the Australian National University and Harvard's Jeffrey G. Williamson takes a close look, examining changing patterns of global mobility and immigration, as well as… More »

Amazing video of brand new suburban homes being razed by bulldozer. Apparently, Guaranty Bank of Austin took over the homes in foreclosure - four in a suburban Texas development and another 12 in one suburb in California - and is knocking them down ostensibly to promote a "safe environment" for neighbors, and more likely because it is cheaper to destroy them them to keep them on their books.This may be just the tip of the iceberg. Once desired, suburban and… More »

Source: New York Times. Countries where people eat faster have higher rates of economic growth. Floyd Norris discusses the findings of recent OECD research:The fastest eaters were in North America; the United States, Canada and Mexico were the only three nations to report fewer than 75 minutes a day devoted to eating and drinking.As the accompanying chart shows, the 10 countries where people spend less than 100 minutes eating and drinking each day have, as a group… More »

The U.S. lost 563,000 jobs in April, down 100,000 or so from the 663,000 jobs lost in March. But the unemployment rate continued to rise, increasing from 8.5 percent in March to 8.9 percent last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This brings total job loss to 5.7 million since the onset of the recession in December 2007. (Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported reported that unemployment was "less bad" in April as private companies cut… More »

Mercer's annual ranking of the world's "most liveable cities" is out. Vienna took the top spot. But Swiss cities do very well with Zurich and Geneva taking the second and third spots, with Bern in 9th. Canada does well too - with Vancouver fourth, Toronto 15th, Ottawa 19th, Montreal 22nd and Calgary tied with Singapore for 26th. Australia and New Zealand punch above their weight - Auckland is fifth, Sydney 10th, Wellington 12th, Melbourne 17th, Perth 21st, Adelaide… More »

The other day I showed Pew data on the things Americans consider necessities. I speculated that the economic crisis has brought us to an inflection point. We're seeing the decline of the old auto-housing consumption bundle which powered post-war growth. And while certain new trends in consumption and lifestyle are emerging, nothing has yet come to form a "new normal."Writing in Esquire, the ever-insightful Nate Silver looks into whether or not America's once-great… More »

Seeking Alpha comments on why railroads will make us richer: "Along the northeastern corridor, there are cities that made the jump from industrial to post-industrial economy fairly successfully, namely, those that had developed knowledge-intensive industries like finance or technology even as industry was beginning to leave center cities. In between these successful cities are interspersed others that were heavily reliant on industry, and which didn't fare nearly… More »

The Pew Research Center recently asked a sample of Americans what they consider to be life's necessities. Here's a chart with the key results. More »