An international trade war is brewing between the United States and Brazil. No, I'm not talking about the US sugar cartel and the demise of our beloved Twinkies. The issue is talent and how Brazil wants to protect its brain drain pipeline to the United States. Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan applying the pressure for purposes of extradition: Rep. Tim Ryan scored a victory in his six-year battle to extradite an Air Force pilot's accused killer from Brazil by getting the House Appropriations Committee to defund immigration visas for its citizens. ... ... "Brazil does a lot of commerce with the ... Read More
Geography of Aspiration
May 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Places have ambition. In this urban hierarchy, you aim to be New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. In the part of the Rust Belt west of the Cuyahoga River, Chicago is the city of dreams. In any development scheme, you pick a star and try to replicate it in your own backyard. "The Next Silicon Valley!" Yet all the schemes, placemaking, and tolerance overlook what makes a global city such as New York so great: New York, on the other hand, will fight you every moment of every day. It will force you to justify your own existence and roll up the carpet while you’re still on it. It will throw ... Read More
How Gallium Nitride Could Help Power the World
May 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Umesh Mishra thinks day in and day out about power conversion—the trillions of adjustments in voltage, frequency, and current made daily to deliver electricity from wall outlets to computers, TVs, virtually any electronic device. And he thinks about the gadgets that do the converting, mostly built using silicon. Collectively, those converters waste nearly as much power in the form of heat as all the energy produced by all the renewable sources in the United States. On average, silicon-based converters are only 90 percent energy-efficient. The 10 percent that is lost dissipates as heat ... Read More
Migration Economies and Portland
May 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Migrants moving into a region stimulate economic growth. Newcomers demand more housing and local services, to name a few ways the inbound impact the economy. Over the course of the 20th century, the relationship between metros and migration transformed: At the time of the Great Migration in the 1920s—when more than two million African Americans abandoned the South for industrial centers in other regions—less-educated individuals were more likely to migrate in search of better lives. Today, the opposite is true: The more education a person has, the more mobile he or she is. College ... Read More
Era of Dying Places
May 21, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
From the lofty peak of the Industrial Era, around 1910, a community with a declining population was dying. A city's prowess was defined by the number of residents. Recent Pittsburgh labor force history confounds this conventional wisdom. While the population declined, the workforce grew. While Pittsburgh was "shrinking" and a Rust Belt basket case, more and more people were seeking employment there. To further complicate the narrative, the Pittsburgh workforce is increasingly well educated. The typical term is "brain gain." The labor force is getting bigger. More talent with a college ... Read More
Stuck in Canada
May 20, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Ideally, the unemployed move where the jobs are. U.S. workers are among the most geographically mobile in the world. Canada is in the tier below. Less moving is a drag on economic productivity. Provincial borders are barriers to migration: Mr. Amirault and his co-writers show that both distance and language are important factors in determining population flows, reinforcing previous research. But their work also suggests that these factors don’t fully explain Canadians’ rootedness. In their simulations, they controlled for well-known variables, including distance and language. Their ... Read More
Major Lessons From the Minor Leagues
May 20, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
We know—especially after viewing this graphic in Pacific Standard—what a lousy deal capturing a sports team can be for the municipal purse, especially if building a new stadium is part of the bait. What about a notch down, in the minors? Does having a team or a new stadium repay the rosy visions of small-town boosters seeking government subsidies to lure in a AAA franchise? According to a study by Nola Agha, an assistant professor of sports management at the University of San Francisco, they just may. Unlike their MLB uncles, having a minor league club in town may bring measurable ... Read More
Rural Talent Migration
May 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Rural America is dying. Rural America is in good company. Half of the countries of the world are experiencing demographic decline. The typical reaction is to plug the brain drain. That doesn't work. Also, such policies are anti-economic development. Restricting geographic mobility does more harm than good (if it does any good at all). Some communities embrace attraction. Rural Kansas is dangling carrots in front of prospective residents. Such schemes have a poor track record. Luring immigrants, as Iowa has done, is more effective. But what happens if the source country of those immigrants ... Read More
Gentrification in Buffalo
May 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Portland is dying. Buffalo is gentrifying. We live in interesting times: "This is much more though a forced migration that is coming and I think that is the tone that has really upset the neighborhood," said Ricardo Herrera, executive director of the Buffalo Federation of Neighborhood Centers. The Rust Belt is full of Detroits. The Sun Belt is full of Houstons. What is wrong with the Rust Belt? What is right with the Sun Belt? That's about the extent of our policy geography. The scale of analysis is too coarse. Mesofacts muddle the picture. I advocate for pulling apart the Rust Belt, ... Read More
Portland Is Dying
May 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
What does a dying city look like? Brains are draining. The population is shrinking or aging, or both. Vibrant, creative class cool Portland is the antithesis of dying. Yesterday, journalist Annalyn Kurtz tweets: "See! The Portland labor force lost 25,000 workers in the last year. http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LAUMT41389006." What in the name of Richard Florida is going on here? The link will take you to the Bureau of Labor page with a bunch of employment data for Portland (select data recreated below). You can see the boom, the fuel for Portlandia. More recently, the labor force number ... Read More
