Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

How the Internet Should Increase Geographic Mobility

May 3, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
internet-travel

You go where you know. Relocation is risky business. Another law of migration from Ernest George Ravenstein: "Most migrants only proceed a short distance, and toward centers of absorption." Moving far from home is the exception, not the rule. Knowledge doesn't travel very well. A successful transfer of ideas usually requires face-to-face interaction. The geography of venture capital looks a lot like the distance decay of migration: Fiber networks cross the world. Data bits move at light speed. The globe has been flattened, and national boundaries obliterated. Yet in Silicon Valley, the ... Read More

Talent Retention Subsidies

May 2, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
brain-drain

Brain drain is a positive indicator. When an individual leaves her hometown, she benefits. The community did an excellent job educating its children. The best and brightest migrate. Michigan has decided to put a stop to all of this economic development: Michigan is working to keep college graduates in the state, and new legislation seeks to slow the "brain drain" with an additional incentive: A tax credit for student loan payments. "For me, it's kind of a first step in talent retention," said sponsoring state Rep. Andy Schor, D-Lansing, "We have some of the best colleges and universities ... Read More

Trying to Fix Broken Economics

May 2, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
broken-economics

Here is a list of economic questions that have something in common. In a recession, should governments reduce budget deficits or increase them? Do zero percent interest rates stimulate economic recovery or suppress it? Should welfare benefits be maintained or cut in response to high unemployment? Should depositors in failed banks be protected or suffer big losses? Does income inequality damage or encourage economic growth? Will market forces create environmental disasters or avert them? Is government support necessary for technological progress or stifling to innovation? What these ... Read More

Talent Geography 101

May 1, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
talent-geography

I dreaded holidays while in graduate school. Over dinner or at a party, someone would ask me about my studies. Geography was my major. Did I study rocks? What is the capital of Burkina Faso? I've had years of experience explaining geography as a social science, even to other social scientists. The discipline of geography is a mystery. I've encountered a number of clever definitions. "The why of the where" comes to mind. Each geographer has to figure out what she does, what geography is. For me, geography is how two or more places are connected across space. Undergraduates in Boulder, ... Read More

Millennials: A Generation With Unrealistic Expectations

May 1, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
want-v-need

Young people coming of age over the past decade or so have been referred to as Millennials, or, in a nod to their individualistic nature, Generation Me. Newly published research suggests they could also be called the generation with unrealistic expectations. An analysis of the values and ambitions of American 12th graders finds “a growing discrepancy between the desire for material rewards and the willingness to do the work usually required to earn them.” Psychologists Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and Tim Kasser of Knox College report that, for high school seniors in ... Read More

Can We Make a Rationed World a Rational World?

May 1, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
rations

The Atlantic named him one of its Brave Thinkers of 2012, while The Economist dubbed him a "polemical plant scientist." What Stan Cox is for sure is a senior researcher at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, working on breeding perennial grains for new, ecologically-sound food systems.  He’s also a writer, and last year’s accolades from The Atlantic followed largely on the strength of his previous book, Losing Our Cool, in which Cox argued that the developed world needs to greatly reduce our dependence on air conditioning. In his latest book, Any Way You Slice It, Cox makes the case ... Read More

Twilight of the Middle Class?

April 30, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
picket-fence

NEW YORK (Reuters) - It's evening in America. That is the worrying news from the latest Heartland Monitor Poll, conducted quarterly and sponsored by the insurer Allstate and National Journal. The researchers made a striking finding: The U.S. middle class, long the world's embodiment of optimism and upward mobility, today is telling a very different story. The chief preoccupation of middle-class Americans is not the dream of getting ahead, it is the fear of falling behind. The poll found that 59 percent of its respondents—a group of 1,000 people selected to be demographically ... Read More

With Electric Cars, Opening a Two-Way Road to the Bank

April 29, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
A small fleet of Mini Coopers at the University of Delaware both draw electric power from the grid and return it, based on the needs of the moment. (PHOTO: UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE)

The feds have dubbed it “tiny but promising,” but “vehicle-to-grid” electrical regulation officially has gotten off the ground in a small way. Last Friday the University of Delaware flipped the switch connecting—via car charging stations—a small fleet of electric-powered Mini Coopers to electric-grid managers PJM Interconnection. (Actually, the switch was flipped on February 27; last week’s event was a sort of debutant’s coming-out party for the technology.) In a piece subtitled "A New Spin on Car Payments," Dan Ferber told us in the November 2011 issue of Miller-McCune (the ... Read More

Big Data, Big Money

April 25, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
stock-market-growth

Now that we know a single hacked Twitter account can erase $136 billion from the American stock market in seconds, maybe it’s time to re-evaluate this whole “let the machines do the trading” strategy. Or not. A remarkable study, published this week in Nature Scientific Reports, details how a simple Google Trends algorithm makes a better day trader than most of the suits on Wall Street. Tobias Preis, of the University of Warwick, led a trio of researchers in designing the trading strategy. It started with a simple idea: Investors—whether skittish or bullish—make financial ... Read More

Would You Give Up 9 Months of Your Life for Professional Prestige?

April 25, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
academic-journals

What would you give for a tangible achievement that carries enormous professional prestige? If you’re an economist, and the achievement is a paper published in the American Economic Review, the answer seems to be three-quarters of a year of your life. Or, looking at it a different way, about three-quarters of a thumb. That’s the tentative conclusion of three economists from Erasmus University in the Netherlands. They took an offhand comment by a colleague—“I would give my right arm for a publication in the American Economic Review”—and decided to test whether, for the average ... Read More