Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

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Demographic Deception

June 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
pittsburgh-aerial-view

For policy concerns such as brain drain, demographic facts take a backseat to mesofacts. What are mesofacts? Samuel Arbesman coined the term: Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in ... Read More

This Is Your Town on Fracking

June 17, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
williston-fracking

This post originally appeared on OnEarth, a Pacific Standard partner site. Not long ago I found myself stranded in Williston, North Dakota. You might have heard of it. Despite being the eighth-largest city in the 48th most-populous state, Williston has won some infamy in recent years. It's at the center of an oil boom that’s likely to make the United States a net exporter of fossil fuels in just a few short years, something that was unthinkable as recently as half a decade ago. North Dakota now produces more oil than any state except Texas, thanks to technical advances that let drillers ... Read More

Germany’s Demographic Bust

June 14, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
heidelberg-university

Germany is dying. Hey, don't shoot the messenger. Concerning demographic decline, only Japan ranks worse. The population is shrinking. German companies need talent. The uneasy relationship with immigrants: Germany has long had a complex attitude to outsiders. As its economy boomed during the Wirtschaftswunder years in the 1950s and 1960s, it imported huge numbers of foreign workers from southern Europe and Turkey. Know as Gastarbeiter (guest workers), they were meant to be temporary, and no effort was made to integrate them. Yet most of them settled. Their offspring form the core of ... Read More

The Superman Economy

June 14, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
man-of-steel

The newest addition to the Superman canon, Man of Steel, is different than the previous kryptonite-concerning films in at least two ways: 1) It’s the first time a Brit has played the quintessential American legend, and 2) it features the hairiest Clark Kent to date. Aside from those details, the lore of Superman is something most of us know well. We know of his 1938 roots, identify with his immigrant status, and admire his strong jawline. So despite the awesomeness of DC Comics and the inarguable role of Kal-El in American culture, it’s hard not to ask: another Superman movie? Man of ... Read More

Why eBay Failed in China

June 14, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
ebay-hq

In was around the mid-2000s when many Internet-based sales companies started eyeing China as the big economic prize. With a rapidly expanding middle class and over one billion people, the country had—and still has—enormous purchasing power. eBay, the San Jose, California-based online consumer-to-consumer corporation, nearing its 10th birthday at the time, entered the country in 2004 with hopes of beating competitors to the reward. Two short years later, then Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman flew to Shanghai to announce the company’s exit from China’s online auction market. So why ... Read More

Farmers Don’t Make Money From Farming

June 13, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
farm

It probably would not surprise you to hear that most profitable American farms are large industrialized operations. That's just how things work now. But it might surprise you to find out that an overwhelming majority of farmers—based on the definition of the word—are not part of those big-industry outfits. Most American farms are tiny. And nearly all tiny American farms lose money. From the latest USDA report: Despite high prices for many crops, 2012 was no exception, with median farm income projected to be -$2,799. Most farm households earn all of their income from off-farm ... Read More

Crisis-Wracked Town Bets on Smurf-Based Economy

June 13, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
juzcar

Can a roadside attraction scam save a Spanish town? So far, yes. The below (creepy) video summarizes one of the few programs to have found success combating southern Europe's now five-year-old unemployment crisis. The scheme recalls American highway towns' use of kitsch to lure passing travelers—free ice water, unlikely museums, cryptozoology. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnao8tRsIPY In the U.S., advertisements for stops to behold the World's Largest Ball of String or a Real Dinosaur Footprint generally carry a sense that everyone's in on the joke. It's not clear there was ... Read More

The Music Festival Bubble

June 13, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
coachella

If you haven’t already, grab your feather earrings and fanny pack, because we’re deep into summer music festival season. Like you could’ve already seen Vampire Weekend at five different festivals across the country deep. With April’s mega-popular Coachella marking the unofficial start of the season, festivals across the country are now anticipating their own waves of crowds to turn up, scope out the best port-a-potty, and spend lots of money. Festivals have long been popular—the 1724 Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester, I hear, was a rager—but their recent surge in ... Read More

Madison’s Portland Problem

June 12, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
madison-wisconsin

By most accounts, including my own, Madison is a thriving metro. As a big college town with a major research university, the capital city of Wisconsin should be a Creative Class star. When Richard Florida's first book came out, it was exactly that. A decade later, according to Florida's own assessment, it still is: In another of Florida’s measures, Madison is 21st on the “creativity index of all metros,” also unchanged since 2002. The city finishes in front of both Los Angeles and the New York metropolitan area. This index combines what Florida calls the three T’s: the creative-class ... Read More

People Develop, Not Places

June 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
people-develop

"People Develop, Not Places" is an odd tagline for a geographer. I picked it up from economist Michael Clemens. Place-centric thinking hinders economic development policy. Clemens and Lant Pritchett tackle this problem, recommending replacing "income per resident" with "income per natural": If we interpret income per capita to indicate material welfare, this is unsatisfactory. While production has a place, people, not patches of Earth, have well-being. The focus on income per resident has rested more on the spread and use of national accounts data and on statistical cost and convenience ... Read More