Richard Florida

Yesterday, I posted on the new Prosperity Index that ranked Finland first, Canada seventh, and the United States ninth. Last evening, my colleague Charlotta Mellander took a quick look at some factors that might be associated with a high ranking, running some simple statistical correlations. The most highly correlated factors (all with a correlation coefficient above .75): total factor productivity, human capital, the creative class, GDP per capita, and… More »

A new report on prosperity ranks Finland first and the United States ninth. Scandinavian and North European countries dominate the top spots. Canada is seventh. The report looks at nine factors that shape prosperity: economic fundamentals, entrepreneurship and innovation, democratic institutions, education, health, safety and security, governance, personal freedom, and social capital. More »

Last week, the Pew Research Center recently released its report on marriage in America. Based on data from the U.S. Census American Community Survey for 2008, it provides a wealth of data on marriage and divorce across the 50 states. Check out the map here. Catherine Rampell provides a nice summary over at Economix. The thing that jumped out at me was the "Larry King" statistic - the number of people who have been married three or more times. About one-in-twenty… More »

Earlier this week Catherine Rampell posted this map over at Economix. It shows the percentages of workers who drove to work alone by state and is based on U.S. Census data. More »

The Obama administration is making moves on urban policy, according to the Washington Post. An urban czar has been appointed (former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion Jr.) and $20 billion in stimulus money is being directed to urban programs outside education. The approach is winning applause from local officials and urban thinkers, who credit the administration for quietly beginning the most ambitious new policy for the nation's cities since the Great… More »

What determines the level of attachment people have to their communities? And how do those levels of attachment and community satisfaction affect local economies? These are big questions that cross the boundaries of urbanism, economics, sociology, and psychology. For the past several years, the Gallup Organization, in partnership with the Knight Foundation, has conducted a substantial multi-community survey called "Soul of the Community." I worked on earlier… More »

The Wall Street Journal asked six experts to come up with lists of the "next youth magnet cities." I was one of them. The top spot was a tie - D.C. and Seattle, followed by NYC, Portland (OR), Austin, San Jose, Denver, Raleigh-Durham, Dallas, Chicago, and Boston. You can see the list and read the full story here. Below is what I sent to the Journal.My Rankings.These are based on my own rankings of the best places for young, professional singles, aged 20-29 in Who's… More »

Creative jobs are not only a big factor in the success of urban areas, they help to power growth in rural areas too. New research by my colleagues at the Martin Prosperity Institute examines the role of creative jobs in the economic development of rural communities in Ontario. In the decade 1996 to 2006, creative class jobs led job growth in rural Ontario at 22 percent, considerably ahead of working class jobs which grew at 13 percent and service class jobs which… More »

Quite a scene in Pittsburgh last night in the wake of the G-20 on Forbes Avenue, in front of the Carnegie Museum, a block or two away from the campuses of the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. It's literally two blocks from my old Heinz School office, a block from my favorite coffee shop, and three blocks from where I lived. Here are some eyewitness reports from the Post-Gazette. Drew Singer, editor of the student newspaper The Pitt News,… More »

Jane Jacobs long ago showed us that cities are complex adaptive systems. Now new research by cognitive scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute finds that not only are cities organized along the same complex principles as the human brain, but evolve in ways that mirror the brain's evolution."Natural selection has passively guided the evolution of mammalian brains throughout time, just as politicians and entrepreneurs have indirectly shaped the organization of… More »

What does the music you listen to say about your personality, and what determines the kinds of music we like? Watch this video by path-breaking Cambridge University psychologist Jason Rentfrow and find out. More »

The ongoing debate over high-speed rail generates heated passions on all sides. Those opposed see high-speed rail as too costly and the U.S. as lacking the density to make the numbers work. Those in favor argue that high-speed rail is a way to move the U.S. to smarter, more energy-efficient transportation alternatives. My own take is that high-speed rail offers a mechanism to both expand and intensify the use of urban space leading to what geographers call a new… More »

The latest in truly alternative transport, this human-powered party machine is a converted cargo bike built by Portland, OR bike-maker Metrofiets for Hopworks Urban Brewing (h/t Joe Cortright). BikePortland provides full technical details. More »

The U.S. unemployment rate is 9.7 percent, the highest in some time, but the burden of unemployment is spread unevenly across the economy. Production workers face a 15.1 percent unemployment rate, while unemployment among construction and extraction workers stands at 17 percent. But unemployment among management and professional workers is only 5.4 percent. Researchers at the Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) previously identified long-run differences in the… More »

The big story last week was the census report on the fall-off in Americans' incomes. The New York Times' David Leonhardt called it a "lost decade" with 2008 median household income of $50,303 falling beneath the 1998 figure of $51,295. While the national pattern is troubling, the trend in U.S. income varies widely by state. Kevin Stolarick, research director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, compiled state-by-state statistics comparing incomes in 2007-2008 and… More »

Business Week economist Michael Mandel has produced a terrific chart comparing college costs to the earnings of young college graduates (25- to 34-year-olds) from 1991 to 2008 (below). While the lines track one another for most of the 1990s, they began to diverge by the late 1990s, and the gap has grown considerably over the past decade. Mandel finds that college costs in real terms are up by 23 percent since 2000, while real pay for young college grads has fallen… More »

Stress is a fundamental fact of life these days. But which parts of the country have the most stressed-out people? This map from the the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being survey shows the stress levels for each of the 50 states. The map reflects the fraction of survey respondents who said they experienced stress "during a lot of the day yesterday" between January and June 2009. More »

A new study by University of Michigan economist and MPI associate David Albouy, published in the Journal of Political Economy, finds that workers in expensive cities - including those in the Rustbelt and even hard-hit Detroit - pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes. Overall, urbanites pay 27 percent more in federal income taxes than workers with similar skills in a small city or rural area. Here's a summary of the study. More »

The bailout is big. But, where exactly is it going? Thanks to the efforts of ProPublica, we can track bailout funds by state. The map below, based on their data, shows the geographic distribution of bailout spending. More »

Political scientist, Andrew Gelman has some great graphs on the connection between economics and ideology. Comparing income levels, ideology and party idenitification, he and collaborator Daniel Lee found the connection between income and party identification was strongest among conservative Republicans. But the relationship was "close to zero" for liberals. Liberal Dems were spread across all income groups, while conservative Dems had much lower income levels.My… More »