Richard Florida

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pages: 356 words: 91,157

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It by Richard Florida

affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business climate, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, Columbine, congestion charging, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, failed state, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land value tax, low skilled workers, Lyft, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, occupational segregation, off-the-grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, plutocrats, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, sovereign wealth fund, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white flight, young professional

Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 2. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 3. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); Richard Florida, “The New American Dream,” Washington Monthly, March 2003; Richard Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). 4. Richard Florida, “More Losers Than Winners in America’s New Economic Geography,” CityLab, January 30, 2013, www.citylab.com/work/2013/01/more-losers-winners-americas-new-economic-geography/4465. 5.

Richard Florida, “More Losers Than Winners in America’s New Economic Geography,” CityLab, January 30, 2013, www.citylab.com/work/2013/01/more-losers-winners-americas-new-economic-geography/4465. 5. Joel Kotkin, “Richard Florida Concedes the Limits of the Creative Class,” Daily Beast, March 20, 2013, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/20/richard-florida-concedes-the-limits-of-the-creative-class.html; Richard Florida, “Did I Abandon My Creative Class Theory? Not So Fast, Joel Kotkin,” Daily Beast, March 21, 2013, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/21/did-i-abandon-my-creative-class-theory-not-so-fast-joel-kotkin.html. 6. Richard Florida, “How Rob Ford’s Pride Snub Hurts the City of Toronto,” Toronto Star, April 23, 2012, www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2012/04/23/how_rob_fords_pride_snub_hurts_the_city_of_toronto.html; Richard Florida, “Toronto Needs a Muscular Mayor,” Globe and Mail, November 30, 2012, www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/richard-florida-toronto-needs-a-muscular-mayor/article5822048; Richard Florida, “What Toronto Needs Now: Richard Florida Offers a Manifesto for a New Model of Leadership,” Toronto Life, October 22, 2012, www.torontolife.com/informer/features/2012/10/22/what-toronto-needs-now.

Richard Florida, “How Rob Ford’s Pride Snub Hurts the City of Toronto,” Toronto Star, April 23, 2012, www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2012/04/23/how_rob_fords_pride_snub_hurts_the_city_of_toronto.html; Richard Florida, “Toronto Needs a Muscular Mayor,” Globe and Mail, November 30, 2012, www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/richard-florida-toronto-needs-a-muscular-mayor/article5822048; Richard Florida, “What Toronto Needs Now: Richard Florida Offers a Manifesto for a New Model of Leadership,” Toronto Life, October 22, 2012, www.torontolife.com/informer/features/2012/10/22/what-toronto-needs-now. See also Zack Taylor, “Who Votes for a Mayor Like Rob Ford?,” The Conversation, November 13, 2013, http://theconversation.com/who-votes-for-a-mayor-like-rob-ford-20193; Zack Taylor, “Who Elected Rob Ford, and Why?


pages: 265 words: 74,941

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

Economy,” report for the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Global Insight, 2006. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Conference of Mayors. 3. Richard Florida, “A Creative Crossroads,” Washington Post, May 7, 2006, retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/05/AR2006050501750.html; Florida, “Where the Brains Are,” Atlantic, October 2006. 4. Richard Florida, Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 5. Richard Florida, Who’s Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, Canadian edition (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008). 6.

I’ve been studying the role of housing policy in postwar suburbanization since my twenties. I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis at Rutgers and my doctoral dissertation at Columbia on this, as well as several of my earliest published papers. See Richard Florida and Marshall Feldman, “Housing in U.S. Fordism,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 12, no. 2 (1988): 187–210; Richard Florida and Andrew Jonas, “U.S. Urban Policy: The Postwar State and Capitalist Regulation,” Antipode 23, no. 4 (1991): 349–384. 5. Data on average travel speeds are from Randal O’Toole as cited in Neil Reynolds, “America’s Fast Track to Wealth,” Globe and Mail, October 9, 2009. 6.

: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life, Canadian edition (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2008). 6. Kelly Evans, “Why College Towns Are Looking Smart,” Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2009. 7. I provide figures on these trends in Richard Florida, “Town, Gown, and Unemployment,” Atlantic, May 20, 2009, retrieved from http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/ richard_florida/2009/05. 8. Edward L. Glaeser, “How Some Places Fare Better in Hard Times,” New York Times, March 24, 2009. Chapter 12: Death and Life of Great Industrial Cities 1. Robert Pirsig’s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (New York: HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2008); Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (New York: Penguin Press, 2008); Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008). 2.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

As he says, “step by step we develop our society from the citizens [up], first at the city level and then up to other levels, civil society and [the] culture of local democracy, which is missing in so many countries.” 12. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 9. 13. See Benjamin R. Barber, on the Mailer campaign, “Birthday Party Politics,” Dissent, Summer 1973. 14. Richard Florida, “It’s Up to the Cities to Bring America Back,” BusinessInsider.com, February 3, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/richard-florida-its-upto-the-cities-to-bring-america-back-2012-2. 15. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City, New York: Penguin, 2011, p. 15. 16. Max Weber, The City, Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1985, p. 25. 17. Edward C. Banfield, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, New York: Free Press, 1958. 18.

On the Sustainable Cities Collective website, see Aafrin Kidwai, “For Cities: To Be Dense or Not to Be Dense, That is (not) the Question,” Sustainable Cities Collective, August 8, 2012, http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/sustainable-cities/55401/cities-be-dense-or-not-be-dense-not-question. 13. Julianne Pepitone@CNNMoneyTech, tweet, February 25, 2013. 14. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited, new introduction, New York: Basic Books, 2012, p. xi. 15. James M. Quane, William Julius Wilson, and Jackelyn Hwang, “The Urban Jobs Crisis: Paths toward Employment for Low-Income Blacks and Latinos,” Harvard Magazine, May–June, 2013. 16. Richard Florida offers a provocative picture of inequality in American cities for which his arguments try to provide an explanation, in his Rise of the Creative Class, p. xvi.

A GLOBAL PARLIAMENT OF MAYORS Bottom-up Democracy and the Road to Interdependence Notes Index ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book builds on an encompassing corpus of work undertaken earlier by a host of scholars who, knowing the urban field far better than I ever will, have made the city their subject and sometimes their lifework. Much of what I do here is merely to hold up a megaphone before them so that their measured and persistent voices on behalf of the redemptive potential of the urban can be widely heard. Tom Bender, Manuel Castells, Eric Corijn, Mike Davis, Richard Florida, Edward Glaeser, David Harvey, Peter Marcuse, Saskia Sassen, Richard Sennett, and Ronald van Kempen—and before them Lewis Mumford, Max Weber, Jane Jacobs, and the many others who are cited below—have built a scholarly edifice I feel lucky to have been able to inhabit and explore. My task has been to apply the results of their work to the challenge of establishing a form of constructive interdependence—global democratic governance—in which cities are prime actors.


pages: 288 words: 83,690

How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

But that’s Richard Florida’s business: convincing cities that gentrification is their only choice for an economic reboot. Ever since his landmark book The Rise of the Creative Class was published in 2002, Florida, who is also the director of cities at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto and a senior editor at The Atlantic, has been urging broke cities to attract the “creative class” in order to revive themselves. And since there’s quite literally almost no US city more broke than Detroit, maybe it’s no surprise that, as one activist told me, “they love some Richard Florida here.”

So with little money in municipal coffers and little hope for a better future, it seems that politicians and planners (and in the case of Detroit, the corporations and nonprofits that have replaced them) have managed to turn a blind eye to the warnings of the profession’s foundational texts. Cities have pursued whole-hog Richard Florida’s strategies for wooing millennials without considering the serious limitations of those strategies and the profound effects they may have on everyone else. They ignore that Richard Florida has admitted that the creative class is not a silver bullet, and they forget that Jane Jacobs, the other most famous urbanist in America, talked not only about what makes city blocks cute and community-oriented but also about all the ways in which governments encourage the destruction of places for the middle class.

According to Florida, this class of people accounted for 24 percent: Richard Florida, Rise of the Creative Class Revisited (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 45. How exactly this would be done remains a mystery: Lisa Baugh, “Five Ways the Freelance Economy Fails the Poor and the Middle Class,” Salon, June 5, 2015. Millennials… are on a never-ending “quest for experience”: Florida, Rise of the Creative Class, 134, 135–136, 245. technology, talent, and tolerance: For a good summary of Florida’s “technology, talent, and tolerance” approach to economic development, see Hazel Borys, “Richard Florida on Technology, Talent, and Tolerance,” Place Makers, November 18, 2013.


pages: 325 words: 73,035

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life by Richard Florida

Abraham Maslow, active measures, assortative mating, back-to-the-city movement, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, Celebration, Florida, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic transition, edge city, Edward Glaeser, epigenetics, extreme commuting, financial engineering, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, happiness index / gross national happiness, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, invention of the telegraph, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, megacity, new economy, New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-work, power law, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, World Values Survey, young professional

Chapter 7 1 Dan Pink, Free Agent Nation, Warner Books, 2001. 2 Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society, Harper Business, 1993; Drucker, “Beyond the Information Revolution,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1999, pp. 47-57; Drucker, “The Next Society,” The Economist, November 1, 2001, pp. 1-20. Fritz Machlup is often credited with the term “knowledge worker” from his 1962 book The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, Princeton University Press, 1962. 3 See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, Basic Books, 2002. Data updated by Kevin Stolarick. 4 “The World’s Richest People,” Forbes, March 8, 2007. 5 Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, “Inside the Black Box of Economic Development: Human Capital, the Creative Class, and Tolerance,” Journal of Economic Geography, 8, 5, 2008. 6 The correlations between occupation and per capita income are as follows: computer and math (.659); business and finance (.549); arts, entertainment, and media (.511); sales (.480); engineering and architecture (.472); science (.393); law (.390); and management (.358). 7 The correlations with regional income are as follows: health care occupations (.052); education occupations (.055). 8 See for example, Alfred Weber, Theory of the Location of Industries, University of Chicago Press, 1929 (1st ed., 1909). 9 Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide, Basic Books, 1984. 10 Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, Cosimo Classics, abridged ed., 2006 (1st ed., 1890). 11 Michael Porter, “Clusters and the New Economics of Competition,” Harvard Business Review, November-December 1998; Porter, “Location, Clusters, and Company Strategy,” in Gordon Clark, Meric Gertler, and Mayrann Feldman, eds., Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, 2000; and Porter, “Location, Competition, and Economic Development: Local Clusters in a Global Economy,” Economic Development Quarterly 14, 1, February 2000, pp. 15-34. 12 Joseph Cortright and Heike Mayer, Signs of Life: The Growth of Biotechnology Centers in the US, Brookings Institution, Center for Metropolitan Policy, 2001. 13 Pui-Wing Tam, “New Hot Spot for High Tech Firms Is the Old One,” Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2006. 14 Ann Markusen and Greg Schrock, “The Distinctive City: Divergent Patterns in Growth, Hierarchy, and Specialization,” Urban Studies 43, 8, July 2006, pp. 1301-1323. 15 Maryann Feldman and Roger Martin, “Jurisdictional Advantage,” National Bureau of Economic Research, October 2004. 16 Dan Fitzpatrick, “Extreme Commuters at PNC Raise Eyebrows,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 7, 2005. 17 Robert D.

Friedman, The World Is Flat,” Journal of Economic Literature 45, 1, 2007, pp. 83-126. 4 Urbanization data are from “World Population Prospects: The 2006 Revision Population Database,” Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations 2007, esa.un.org/unpp. 5 “Q&A with Michael Porter,” Business Week, August 21, 2006, www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_34/b3998460.htm. 6 Richard Florida, “The World is Spiky,” Atlantic Monthly, October 2005. 7 Gulden used the light that is visible from space at night as a basis for estimating economic activity. He calibrated the light data using estimates of gross regional product (GRP) compiled for the lower forty-eight U.S. states. He translated this physical economic activity into standard units by renormalizing the total for each nation to agree with that nation’s 2000 GDP in 2000 U.S. dollars at current market exchange rates.

He then overlaid the light maps with detailed population maps from the Land-Scan 2005 population grid, developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The result consistently estimates economic activity for every 30 arc-second grid cell (less than 1 square kilometer) in the world. For more on this methodology, see Richard Florida, Timothy Gulden, and Charlotta Mellander, “The Rise of the Mega-region,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society 1, 1, 2008. See also William Nordhaus et al., “The G-Econ Database on Gridded Output: Methods and Data,” Yale University, May 12, 2006; Nordhaus, “Geography and Macroeconomics: New Data and New Findings,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 7, 2006, pp. 3510-3517.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Richard Morrill, “The Emerging Geography of Inequality,” New Geography, September 4, 2013, http://www.newgeography.com/content/003912-the-emerging-geography-inequality. 110. David King, “Sprawl and Economic Mobility: A Comment,” Getting from Here to There (blog), July 29, 2013, http://davidaking.blogspot.com/2013/07/sprawl-and-economic-mobility-comment.html. 111. Jim Russell, “Richard Florida Explains Why Density Doesn’t Impact Innovation,” Pacific Standard, January 11, 2014, http://www.psmag.com/navigation/business-economics/richard-florida-explains-density-doesnt-impact-innovation-72679; Wendell Cox, “Density is Not the Issue: The Urban Scaling Research,” New Geography, July 30, 2012, http://www.newgeography.com/content/002987-density-not-issue-the-urban-scaling-research; Bruce Katz, “Big Idea 2014: Goodbye Silicon Valley, Hello Silicon Cities,” Brookings Institution, December 30, 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2013/12/30-silicon-cities-katz. 112.

Indeed, when average urban incomes are adjusted for the higher rent and costs, the middle classes in metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Miami, and San Francisco have among the lowest real earnings of any metropolitan area.32 Core cities have also not been too kind to the working-class minorities and immigrants who historically migrate to the metropolitan area in search of economic opportunity. Advocates of the creative class, including Richard Florida, worship mightily at the altar of ethnic diversity.33 Yet as the Urban League points out, the very cities most praised as exemplars of urban revival—San Francisco, Chicago, and Minneapolis—also suffer the largest gaps between black and white incomes.34 Indeed, in some of the most heralded “creative class” cities, both struggling ethnic newcomers and African Americans not only are economically marginalized but are becoming a smaller percentage of the population as costs have risen and good job opportunities have shrunk.

Church affiliation, if not in free fall, is clearly on the downward trend, particularly among the working class and the young, although interest in spiritual values does not seem to be waning. Secularism, singleness, and childlessness have gained particular social cache for over a generation, especially among the well-educated. Contemporary social thinking, as epitomized by “creative class” theorist Richard Florida, essentially links “advanced” society to the absence of religious values. Indeed, the current fashions in urbanism not only disdain religiosity but often give remarkably short shrift to issues involving families.99 The question is not whether there should be a debate or, if you will, a “war” over culture, but on what terms this struggle should be waged.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

mod=ITP_opinion_0&tesla=y. 7 Jan Woronoff, Japan: The Coming Social Crisis (Tokyo: Lotus Press, 1984), 312; Alex Martin, “Japan’s Glut of Abandoned Homes: Hard to sell but bargains when opportunity knocks,” Japan Times, December 26, 2017, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/12/26/national/japans-glut-abandoned-homes-hard-sell-bargains-opportunity-knocks/#.W_Ap7OhKiUk; Jonathan Soble, “A Sprawl of Ghost Homes in Aging Tokyo Suburbs,” New York Times, August 24, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/world/a-sprawl-of-abandoned-homes-in-tokyo-suburbs.html; Hiroko Tabuchi, “For Some in Japan, Home Is a Tiny Plastic Bunk,” New York Times, January 1, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/business/global/02capsule.html. 8 Nate Berg, “Why China’s Urbanization Isn’t Creating a Middle Class,” City Lab, February 29, 2012, https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/02/why-chinas-urbanization-isnt-creating-middle-class/1357/; “City Chickens and Country Eggs,” Economist, August 4, 2013, https://www-economist-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/analects/2013/08/04/city-chickens-and-country-eggs; Eva Dou and Dominique Fong, “Homeward Bound: Beijing Boots Migrant Workers to Trim Its Population,” Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijing-evictions-of-migrant-workers-sparks-outrage-1511962464. 9 Kai-Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2018), 141; Hao Jingfang, “Folding Beijing,” in Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, trans. Ken Liu (New York: Tor, 2016), 221–62. 10 Richard Florida, “The Problem of Urbanization Without Economic Growth,” City Lab, June 12 2015, https://www.citylab.com/life/2015/06/the-problem-of-urbanization-without-economic-growth/395648/; Richard Florida, “When Urbanization Doesn’t Help,” City Lab, June 22, 2016, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/06/disparities-of-urbanization-global-china-india/487625/; Susanne Frick, and Andres Rodriguez-Pose, “Big or Small Cities: On City Size and Economic Growth,” VoxEU, October 20, 2017, https://voxeu.org/article/city-size-and-economic-growth. 11 Ivette Saldaña, “Estados del norte, los mas atractivos para la IED,” El Financiero, April 7, 2008, http://biblioteca.iiec.unam.mx/index.php?

Relegated to tiny stacked boxes, ordinary citizens pour into parks and scenic streets, thirsting for open air and elbowroom, so that our leaders could have their show of grandeur.50 From “Creative Class” to a “New Urban Crisis” The principal concern of many city leaders around the world has been to attract the young, educated professionals identified by the urban theorist Richard Florida as “the creative class.”51 To be sure, these people bring wealth and economic advantage to cities, but they are mostly single or childless, and not likely to recreate the stable, family-oriented neighborhoods of the historic city, with a thriving middle class and working class. The most favored cities naturally draw the very rich, but they also attract many young people in the “creative class” who cannot afford to stay very long, particularly if they want to buy property or have children.52 The average millennial with college debt would need twenty-seven years to save up for a down payment in the San Francisco metro area, according to one study.53 Most of the young people who move to elite cities are likely to be short-timers indulging the “urban phase” of their life before heading elsewhere.

Decades ago, the National Urban Coalition noted that urban revitalization programs generally produced some overall economic benefit for cities, but at the cost of “the deprivation, frustration and anger of those who are becoming the new urban serfs.”56 Today, big cities continue to draw the wealthy and the well-educated, with impoverished residents pushed to the margins, and little in between.57 The result is “rising inequality, deepening economic segregation, and increasingly unaffordable housing,” which Richard Florida describes as a “new urban crisis.”58 Some of those living in the cities outside the “glamour zone” feel trapped—victims of an urban system that doesn’t provide opportunity for them. A backlash against gentrification has appeared in many cities, such as Ontario, Berlin, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New Orleans.59 Tactics for repelling gentrifiers have included vandalism and even arson.60 Jawanza Malone, executive director of Chicago’s Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, says that city leaders purposely neglect some neighborhoods while giving priority to the high-end economy and real estate speculation.


pages: 484 words: 131,168

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart by Bill Bishop, Robert G. Cushing

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, assortative mating, big-box store, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Maslow's hierarchy, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, Ralph Nader, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, union organizing, War on Poverty, white flight, World Values Survey

Often in the middle of the night, a new set of charts and Excel files would arrive in my e-mail in box, and I'd see that Bob had made another remarkable discovery. Our interest initially was why a small group of cities, Austin among them, were growing so fast and so rich. In 2002, we began working with a band of researchers, including Richard Florida and Kevin Stolarick, then at Carnegie Mellon University; Gary Gates at the Urban Institute; Joe Cortright in Portland, Oregon; and Terry Nichols Clark at the University of Chicago. What we found was that these tech-rich and innovative cities were benefiting from a special kind of migration. There have always been patterns to migration and development.

People with college degrees were "remarkably evenly distributed" among America's cities, according to Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser.3 If such economic, partisan, and educational balance was the American way, by 1980 a decidedly un-American trend began. Places stopped becoming more alike and began to diverge. The economic landscape stopped growing flatter, and, in Richard Florida's description, it got spikier.4 The country got particularly spiky after 1980 as Americans segregated by education. In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, education levels surged nationally. In 1970, 11.2 percent of the population had at least a college degree. That figure increased to 16.4 percent in 1980, nearly 19 percent in 1990, and 27 percent in 2004.

By 2000, Michael Porter found "striking variation in average wages" across economic regions, with average pay ranging from just over $19,000 a year in western Nebraska to over $52,000 in San Francisco.14 Wages during the 1990s increased 7.1 percent a year in Austin, but only 1.8 percent a year in Wheeling, West Virginia.15 Growing wage inequality tracked increasing political polarization, according to political scientists Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal. The nation's income distribution grew more unequal in parallel with the rising partisanship in Congress.16 Occupation Richard Florida was a professor of regional development at Carnegie Mellon University when he noticed a switch in the way businesses went about hiring new workers. Instead of people moving to corporations, corporations had begun moving to where pools of talent were deepening. Florida, Kevin Stolarick, and a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon identified a new class of workers.


pages: 512 words: 131,112

Retrofitting Suburbia, Updated Edition: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs by Ellen Dunham-Jones, June Williamson

accelerated depreciation, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, call centre, carbon footprint, Donald Shoup, edge city, gentrification, global village, index fund, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, knowledge worker, land bank, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, megaproject, megastructure, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, postindustrial economy, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, skinny streets, streetcar suburb, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

Hank Dittmar and Gloria Ohlund (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004). 14 David Goldberg, “BellSouth’s Atlanta Metro Plan: A Case Study in Employer-Driven ‘Smart Growth,’” Sprawlwatch Clearinghouse, 2000, http://www.sprawlwatch.org/bellsouth.html. 15 See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2005); and Richard Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). 16 This particular summary comes from Richard Florida, “Response,” Journal of the American Planning Association 71:2 (Spring 2005): 203. 17 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, xix. 18 Quoted in Emily Eakin, “Creative Cities and Their New Elite,” New York Times, June 1, 2002.

.); ISBN 978-1-118-02767-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-02768-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-02769-1 (ebk) 1 . Suburbs—United States—Planning. 2. Sustainable development—United States. I. Williamson, June. II. Title. HT352.U6D86 2011 307.760973--dc22 2010051102 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 FOREWORD By Richard Florida Remaking our sprawling suburbs, with their enormous footprints, shoddy construction, hastily put up infrastructure, and dying malls, is shaping up to be the biggest urban revitalization challenge of modern times. Suburbia isn’t as suburban as it used to be. In fact, the lines between urban and suburban are blurring.

Wielding careful research, eyeopening before-and-after case studies, and a panoply of urban design solutions, Retrofitting Suburbia presents a highly convincing argument for both the desirability and the feasibility of redeveloping failed suburban properties into more sustainable places. A must-read for individuals involved in real estate design and development, this extremely timely book’s vision of suburban change has important implications for our national financial future; it should be studied by decision makers at every level. RICHARD FLORIDA is Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and author of The Rise of the Creative Class and the recently published book The Great Reset. 2011 UPDATE RETROFITTING SUBURBIA IS MORE RELEVANT THAN EVER The question of what to do with dead malls, dying strips, and other underperforming suburban property types continues to grow in importance.


pages: 223 words: 58,732

The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, computer age, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Santayana, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meritocracy, microaggression, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, one-China policy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, telepresence, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, World Values Survey, Yogi Berra

The number of unoccupied apartments in New York rose by almost three-quarters at the turn of the century to thirty-four thousand in 2011.49 London has witnessed similar growth. The new residents then lock in their gains by restricting land use, which keeps values high. Richard Florida calls them the ‘new urban Luddites’, who exploit an ‘enormous and complex thicket of zoning laws and other land use regulations’ to keep the others out. Tyler Cowen has coined a new acronym to replace Nimbys (Not in My Backyard): Bananas (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).50 Such risk aversion breeds its own failure. So deeply rooted is gentrification that Richard Florida has now modified his widely acclaimed thesis about the rise of the creative classes. Cities are becoming too successful for their own good.

The rich and the poor no longer live near each other, and the middle class is hollowing out. In 1970 only about one in seven American families lived in neighbourhoods that were unambiguously ‘affluent’ or ‘poor’.40 By 2007 that number had risen to almost one in three. ‘When all is said and done, the suburban crisis reflects the end of the era of cheap growth,’ says Richard Florida, a leading scholar of urban revival.41 Sprawl no longer means growth, as it once did in the US. It spells isolation. It should come as little surprise, therefore, that the murder rate has fallen by 16.7 per cent in the US cities since the turn of the century, while rising by 16.9 per cent in the suburbs – almost an exact mirror image.42 Slumburbia has also given rise to a new form of poverty: the amount of time people have to spend in their cars driving from one part-time job to another.

Occupants of the social housing units were not just forced to enter the tower separately. They were also denied access to its gym, swimming pool and other amenities. In San Francisco, an ideas factory for America’s most liberal social policies, more than six in ten homes are now worth more than $1 million. As Richard Florida says, ‘In the US your ZIP code is increasingly your destiny.’ It will be interesting to see if Sadiq Khan, who was elected London’s mayor on an inclusive mandate just weeks before the Brexit referendum, has better luck than Bill de Blasio. The odds are against him. The jobs market offers a snapshot of rising inequality.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

Making such people feel welcome, in turn, was the way to achieve prosperity, as we could clearly see from successful cities like Austin and San Francisco. This idea, which raged through the Bush years and which rages still, was given memorable expression by a professor of economic development named Richard Florida, specifically in his 2002 bestseller, The Rise of the Creative Class. Yes, the “creative class.” We’ve heard several flattering ways of describing the professional cohort, and now we come to the most obsequious designation of them all. According to Richard Florida, “creatives” were “the dominant class in America,” because the thing they controlled—“creativity”—had become “the decisive source of competitive advantage”; “new technologies, new industries, new wealth and all other good economic things flow from it.”13 In Florida’s reasoning, this “creative class” included traditional artists and intellectuals, but the creatives who really mattered were people who worked in tech, people who worked in offices, people with advanced degrees.

The many, many bike paths that were built in hopes that professionals would show up and ride upon them? By and large, those were built by Democrats. All those art districts and street fairs? Democrats. Indeed, Republicans were excluded from competing for the favor of the new dominant class almost by definition, since one of Richard Florida’s requirements was that cities perform well on what he called the “Gay Index.” Sure, those vulgar Republicans could offer crass inducements like low taxes, but in the age of creativity it was supposed to be your town’s theatrical performances and its carefully handmade cupcakes that truly opened the door to prosperity.

Bush’s administration was not that it favored the rich; it was that it favored the wrong rich—the “old-economy” rich. Similarly, the problem with the intense Republican partisanship of those years was that it turned a deaf ear to the voices of the country’s most important and creative industries (such as Wall Street and Silicon Valley), since such places chose Democrats as a matter of course. Richard Florida wept for unfairly ignored industries, but he expressed little sympathy for the working people whose issues were now ignored by both parties. In fact, he sometimes seemed to regard these people as part of the problem. In the summer of 2008, Florida told a British newspaper that “the creative class anticipates the future, while the working class tends to seek protection from it.”


pages: 104 words: 34,784

The Trouble With Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure by Shawn Micallef

big-box store, call centre, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, gentrification, ghettoisation, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, knowledge worker, liberation theology, Mason jar, McMansion, new economy, post scarcity, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, World Values Survey

In some ways, brunch and other forms of conspicuous consumption have blinded us to ever-more-precarious employment conditions. For award-winning writer and urbanist Shawn Micallef, brunch is a way to look more closely at the nature of work itself and a catalyst for solidarity among the so-called creative class. Drawing on theories from Thorstein Veblen to Richard Florida, Micallef traces his own journey from the rust belt to a cosmopolitan city where the evolving middle class he joined was oblivious to its own instability and insularity. The Trouble with Brunch is a provocative analysis of foodie obsession and status anxiety, but it’s also a call to reset our class consciousness.

Remember how busy everybody says they are? If such a state wasn’t so readily accepted as our collective identity, we might stop talking about it and do something meaningful to change it. This creative-class socio-economic subset of the middle class was identified and brought into popular thought by the academic Richard Florida in his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class. Published just over one hundred years after Veblen published Theory of the Leisure Class, Florida’s book came at a time when modern Western society had undergone major shifts since Veblen’s era with deindustrialization and the emergence of a service-based economy.

In 2007 he left Pittsburgh for a high-profile job heading up the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. Already a star in academic and urban circles, Florida’s arrival in Toronto was met with typical Canadian enthusiasm when an American of note pays attention to us, and he was feted and given ample coverage. The Globe and Mail newspaper even awarded him a monthly column called ‘Richard Florida Visits,’ where he offered an outsider’s first impressions of Toronto, awkwardly packaged with a strong whiff of Canadian desperation (akin to Sally Field’s ‘You like me, right now, you like me’ Oscar speech) that set Florida up for some blowback, particularly from the would-be creative class itself.


pages: 385 words: 118,314

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis by Leo Hollis

Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Disneyland with the Death Penalty, Donald Shoup, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Enrique Peñalosa, export processing zone, Firefox, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, Long Term Capital Management, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, negative equity, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, place-making, power law, Quicken Loans, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, spice trade, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, trade route, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

This sector was the one area of the global economy that was least affected by the credit crunch; in 2008 it generated $592 billion, more than double its turnover in 2002, which suggests an annual growth of 14 per cent. The knowledge economy forces us to think again about how we work, and what we do; it could also allow us to think about the city anew. According to Richard Florida, the extent of the creative classes is having a profound impact on the success of cities. Using the broadest definition of the knowledge economy as possible – ‘science and technology, arts and design, entertainment and media, law, finance, management, healthcare and education’9 – Florida shows that since the decline of industry in the west, this new class of worker has risen at a gallop: 5 per cent of all employment in 1900, 10 per cent in 1950, 15 per cent in 1980 and more than 30 per cent by 2005.

Why, for example, should one try and develop a microprocessor industry from scratch when it is easier to invest and trade in the latest technology from Incheon or Seoul in South Korea, where the scale of production is unbeatable, and there is a level of expertise and infrastructure that is hard to compete with? Similarly, why go anywhere other than Bangalore for your end-to-end software problems? This inequality amongst cities gives people more choice about where they want to live. As urban economist Richard Florida observes, ‘The place we choose to live can determine the income we earn, the people we meet, the friends we make, the partners we choose, and the options available to our children and families.’11 An 2008 survey of 8,500 people in fourteen major cities showed that 75 per cent of residents had ‘chosen’ their city.

The creative city needs creative people, and this is becoming an increasingly mobile marketplace that has to cope with many changing dimensions. With all this passion for newness and mobility, it is often easy to forget what is already there. This brand new, hypermobile vision of the future comes with a warning: things are not as fluid, open and fresh as the economists would have us believe. Richard Florida was the first to coin ‘the creative class’ as a new, dynamic social and economic group who were having a profound impact on urban regeneration. The new human economy, he proposes, will be split between those who are mobile and those who are stuck. Knowledge workers will move around the world in search of places of excellence: ‘The mobile possess the means, resources and inclination to seek out and move to locations where they can leverage their talents.’12 It was this creative class that David Cameron had in mind when he launched Tech City in 2010.


pages: 296 words: 76,284

The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving by Leigh Gallagher

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Burning Man, call centre, car-free, Celebration, Florida, clean water, collaborative consumption, Columbine, commoditize, crack epidemic, demographic winter, East Village, edge city, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, Quicken Loans, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Sand Hill Road, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, Zipcar

But with people spending so much time in their cars and in their houses, and with many communities lacking a walkable town center or pleasantly walkable residential streets, the spontaneous interaction that comes from, for example, walking down a Main Street or a central square or even down the block is harder to come by. And that spontaneous interaction is important, as a growing body of research has shown. Researchers have found that when people bump into each other, good things happen. Both the Harvard economist and urban scholar Edward Glaeser and the urban theorist Richard Florida have linked higher-density or pedestrian-friendly places to higher levels of innovation. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, is moving his company from suburban Henderson, Nevada, to downtown Las Vegas precisely because he believes the “serendipitous collisions” that happen when people are freer to walk between the office and local cafés, restaurants, and other public places will make his employees happier, help them forge closer relationships with one another, and lead to the faster cultivation of new ideas.

El Paso recently became the first city in the United States to require that architects working on city projects be accredited in New Urbanism, while the Texas Department of Transportation has adopted the rule book that guides New Urbanism street design as recommended practice. “The dynamic is changing,” says Benjamin Schulman, former communications director for CNU who is now with the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Delivering the closing night keynote speech at the CNU conference in West Palm Beach, celebrity author and urban theorist Richard Florida acknowledges these recent successes. “Isn’t it interesting,” he says, “that the world has come to us?” Perhaps the biggest proof of the growing adoption of New Urbanism theories is that the large home builders, who don’t tend to care much for the social aspect of the movement or the well-intended principles behind it, are starting to build New Urbanism–style communities themselves.

Across the nation, everything from store retail chains to sports stadiums to corporate headquarters to young families have been moving into cities and leaving the suburbs behind. • • • To see that cities are resurgent centers of wealth and culture, all you need to do is set foot in one. Or you can simply set foot in a bookstore. A litany of volumes have come out in the past few years praising cities and urbanism, titles like Richard Florida’s popular The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life and The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work; Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay; The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt; and Edward Glaeser’s love letter to cities, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

Reich, “Totally Spent,” New York Times, February 13, 2008. 25. Robert Reich, “Unjust Spoils,” The Nation, July 19, 2010. 26. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 77; ibid., 37. 27. Ibid., 191. 28. Richard Florida, “The Future of the American Workforce in the Global Creative Economy,” Cato Unbound, June 4, 2006, www.cato-unbound.org/2006/06/04/richard-florida/future-american-workforce-global-creative-economy. 29. Ross Perlin, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy (New York: Verso Books, 2012), 125. 30.

However, past experience shows that the receding of institutions does not necessarily make space for a more authentic, egalitarian existence: if work and life have been made more flexible, people have also become unmoored, blown about by the winds of the market; if old hierarchies and divisions have been overthrown, the price has been greater economic inequality and instability; if the new system emphasizes potential and novelty, past achievement and experience have been discounted; if life has become less predictable and predetermined, it has also become more precarious as liability has shifted from business and government to the individual. It turns out that what we need is not to eliminate institutions but to reinvent them, to make them more democratic, accountable, inclusive, and just. More than anyone else, urbanist Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, has built his career as a flag-bearer for the idea that individual ingenuity can fill the void left by declining institutions. Like new-media thinkers, with whom he shares a boundless admiration for all things high tech and Silicon Valley, he also shuns “organizational or institutional directives” while embracing the values meritocracy and openness.

Many of us believe that art and culture should not succumb to the dictates of the market, and one way to do this is to act as though the market doesn’t exist, to devise a shield to deflect its distorting influence, and uphold the lack of compensation as virtuous. This stance can provide vital breathing room, but it can also perpetuate inequality. “I consistently come across people valiantly trying to defy an economic class into which they were born,” Richard Florida writes. “This is particularly true of the young descendants of the truly wealthy—the capitalist class—who frequently describe themselves as just ‘ordinary’ creative people working on music, film or intellectual endeavors of one sort or another.” How valiant to deny the importance of money when it is had in abundance.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

As political scientist Larry Bartels reminds us, “traditional class politics is alive and well.”6 Yet although rich liberals remain a small minority of their class, their ranks are growing—along with their influence. This shift reflects the changing sources of wealth creation, with the rise of the knowledge economy and what Richard Florida calls the “creative class.” People who already trend liberal—like super-educated coastal professionals—make up an ever larger slice of the rich. Most of the big money is being made these days in blue states, not in red states. There are other trends at work, too, such as rising pressures on the upper class and corporations to become more socially responsible; the growing liberalism of elite schools where the rich and the future rich are educated; the cintro.indd 4 5/11/10 6:29:10 AM introduction 5 radicalization of the Republican Party; and the changing priorities of longtime wealthy people who are turning their focus away from making money to solving social or global problems.

In earlier times, a concentration of smarts and sophistication often only meant local coffeehouses with better folk singers and poets, not to mention cab drivers who could quote Nietzsche. Think of Cambridge or San Francisco in the 1970s. Now it means entrepreneurs with a knack for inventing new products and services. The more that people like this congregate in one place, the more economic dynamism there is—as “creative class” guru Richard Florida argues in his book Who’s Your City. In a knowledge economy, the breakthroughs that produce wealth emerge from social processes: the exchanging and synthesizing of ideas or discoveries. “The more smart people, and denser the connections among them, the faster it all goes,” wrote Florida. In turn, the growth that comes from a concentration of highly educated people draws yet more educated people in search of opportunity.

Those involved in culture and art rely on their imagination, rather than on their competence in practical affairs, to succeed. Often, they are nonconformists whose originality comes from taking a critical or untraditional look at the world and pushing the boundaries of acceptable expression. As Richard Florida wrote in The Rise of the Creative Class, “the new lifestyle favors individuality, self-statement, acceptance of difference, and the desire for rich multidimensional experiences.”12 The lifestyle of cultural workers also tends to reinforce a bohemian outlook, given that the pay can be low and sporadic, and the working hours can be erratic.


pages: 372 words: 89,876

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

I have also had the privilege to receive help and advice from true luminaries, such as Richard Saul Wurman, Saul Kaplan, Kevin Kelly, Jared Spool, Peter Vander Auwera, Dan Roam, Thor Muller, Paul Pangaro, Lane Becker, Peter Morville, Lou Rosenfeld, Nilofer Merchant, John Hagel III, JP Rangaswami, Doc Searls, Stowe Boyd, Jay Cross, Marcia Conner, Ben Cerveny, Chris Brogan, Bob Logan, David Armano, Alex Osterwalder, and Don Norman. Although I don’t know them personally, for the ideas in this book, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the works of Gary Hamel, Clayton Christensen, Arie de Geus, Ricardo Semler, Eric Beinhocker, Daniel Pink, Richard Florida, Stewart Brand, Bill McKelvey, Stafford Beer, Herbert Simon, John Boyd, and perhaps most of all, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, many of whose groundbreaking ideas are only now being realized. For the access they provided to connected companies and their inner workings, I must thank Ray LaDriere, Kevin Kernan, Michael Bonamassa, Jerry Rudisin, Sunny Gupta, Adrian Cockcroft, Harry Max, Mary Walker, Mark Interrante, Ben Hart, Livia Labate, Sherri Maxson, and Sharif Renno.

Service providers, on the other hand, usually can offer only their reputations. — Alan Greenspan Industrialization is a phase, and in developed nations that phase is ending. Growth in developed economies will increasingly come from services. The Great Reset In The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, Richard Florida points to a shift from an economy based on making things to one that is increasingly powered by knowledge, creativity, and ideas: Great Resets are broad and fundamental transformations of the economic and social order and involve much more than strictly economic or financial events. A true Reset transforms not simply the way we innovate and produce but also ushers in a whole new economic landscape.

While workers are being laid off in many industries, technology companies like Facebook and Google are suffering from critical shortages, struggling to fill their ranks and depending heavily on talent imported from other countries that place a higher priority on technical education: The whole approach of throwing trillions of public dollars at the old economy is shortsighted, aimed at restoring our collective comfort level. Meaningful recovery will require a lot more than government bailouts, stimuli, and other patchwork measures designed to resuscitate the old system or to create illusory, short-term upticks in the stock market, housing market, or car sales. –Richard Florida We no longer live in an industrial economy. We live in a service economy. And to succeed in a service economy, we will need to develop new habits and behaviors. And we will need new organizational structures. An Emerging Service Economy Since 1960, services have dominated US employment.


pages: 204 words: 67,922

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley

Alan Greenspan, assortative mating, call centre, clean water, commoditize, company town, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Edward Glaeser, extreme commuting, feminist movement, financial independence, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, informal economy, insecure affluence, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, Michael Shellenberger, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, off grid, oil shock, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Ponzi scheme, positional goods, post-industrial society, post-materialism, principal–agent problem, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Moderation, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

The strike never materialized, but the artists won their battle anyway. By the end of the 1970s, “loft conversions” outpaced new housing construction in New York.20 And of course today, the marriage of art and commerce is seen as the lifeblood of urban economic revitalization. At least since Richard Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class to describe the emergence of a new, powerful group of intellectual workers, ICE— as in intellectuals, culture, and education, a term coined by John Sexton, the president of New York University, to promote the university’s role in the city—is seen by developers and urban planners as a necessary complement to FIRE—finance, insurance, and real estate—in any thriving, post-industrial metropolitan economy.

Not only do places like Richmond, Virginia, and even Princeton, New Jersey, now brag that they offer “downtown lofts” (even if some of these are, in fact, new constructions made to look like old industrial conversions), a bohemian-type lifestyle has come to dominate the upper echelons of the new economy. By this I don’t just mean that—as Richard Florida asserts—“creativity” is now cherished and rewarded in a growing sector of the high-wage economy. I mean that the very rhythms of work of most professionals today could be clearly seen in the natural light of the artist live-work lofts of 1960: an integration of home and work; odd hours; individualized, nonsalaried work; status insecurity; social networking; and so on.

Let kids be kids, they tell us. Just as quickly they add that children, these days, don’t have enough creative time for imaginative play. We are stunting their creative growth by scheduling them so much. And, of course, the new elite wants to fashion their offspring into visionary thinkers to lead Richard Florida’s Creative Class. But parents respond ambivalently: It is a high-risk strategy, after all, to just let your kids do what they please and hope that your supersmart genes shine through—especially in an era with so many “lowbrow” temptations all around us. Some parents try to solve both problems—the potential of overscheduling to kill creativity and the temptations of brain-numbing diversions—in one fell swoop by subscribing to the Waldorf approach to schooling, which bans plastic toys, television, fast food, and the rest of popular culture in an effort to protect young ones so that their minds can develop naturally and purely18 The irony in this anti-structure backlash movement is that lying just underneath all the rhetoric about “allowing kids just to be kids” is the argument that we are going to do this so that they will be stronger, faster, smarter, better (when it comes time to apply to college, of course).


pages: 247 words: 69,593

The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time by Allen Gannett

Alfred Russel Wallace, collective bargaining, content marketing, data science, David Brooks, deliberate practice, Desert Island Discs, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gentrification, glass ceiling, iterative process, lone genius, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, pattern recognition, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, too big to fail, uber lyft, work culture

Office space in the formerly rundown SoMa neighborhood: Details drawn from “MarketBeat Manhattan Q1 2017,” Cushman & Wakefield (2017), http://www.cushmanwakefield.com/​en/​research-and-insight/​unitedstates/​manhattan-office-snapshot/; “MarketBeat San Francisco Q1 2017,” Cushman & Wakefield (2017), http://www.cushmanwakefield.com/​en/​research-and-insight/​unitedstates/​san-francisco-office-snapshot/; and “San Francisco,” RedFin (2017), https://www.redfin.com/​city/​17151/​CA/​San-Francisco. Richard Florida: Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2014). In one study: Brian Knudsen et al., “Urban Density, Creativity, and Innovation,” Creative Class, May 2007, http://creativeclass.com/​rfcgdb/​articles/​Urban_Density_Creativity_and_Innovation.pdf. This is the process: For more on the knowledge spillover, see David B.

Gannett makes clear that creating hit products and campaigns is not something mystical, but rather a critical skill to learn and arm yourself with.” —Meagen Eisenberg, CMO of MongoDB “If you want to understand creativity, and cultivate and maximize your own, The Creative Curve is the book you need.” —Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class “The Creative Curve is a must-read for digital marketers. Our job is to tell amazing stories that resonate with our audience. Gannett makes it clear that honing this skill not only is possible but has a well-traveled road map.” —Beverly Jackson, vice president of social strategy for MGM Resorts International “In The Creative Curve, Allen Gannett demystifies creativity and gives readers the tools to launch more creative lives.

In its immediate vicinity, you’ll find the headquarters of Twitter, Salesforce, Pinterest, and Zynga, as well as offices for major companies including Google, Yelp, and Adobe. As more and more tech companies migrate to the neighborhood, more people seem to want to follow their path. Engineers want to be near other engineers. CEOs want to be near other CEOs. Sociologists call this effect clustering. For decades, Richard Florida, best known for his book The Rise of the Creative Class, has been studying the impact that density has on creativity. In one study, he and a research team studied over 240 different metropolitan areas, and compared the density of creative workers to the number of patents—a reflection of the level of innovation.


Multicultural Cities: Toronto, New York, and Los Angeles by Mohammed Abdul Qadeer

affirmative action, business cycle, call centre, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, game design, gentrification, ghettoisation, global village, immigration reform, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, market bubble, McMansion, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, place-making, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional

These propositions will illuminate the search for patterns in multicultural cities in the chapters to come. The diversity of people, activities, and roles has been the strength of cities. Peter Hall traces diversity as the source of creativity even in ancient and medieval cities.45 Jane Jacobs has identified diversity as the driving force of urban economy and social life.46 Richard Florida offers the theory that “regional economic growth is powered by creative people who prefer places that are diverse, tolerant and open.”47 Yet this diversity is sustained by the city serving as the common ground. Its collective life, shared space, services, and institutions contribute to the formation of values, beliefs, and behaviours.

They are further finding that a lot of opportunities are turning into contractual self-employment, many of which turn into ethnic niches, for example, Latino limo drivers in New York and Taiwanese computer-game designers in Los Angeles. The economic base of cities is increasingly determined by their infrastructure, educational and research institutions, community services, and cultural life. The talent and creativity of a city’s workforce is its resource base. Richard Florida may be overplaying the role of the creative class in economic growth, but the education, skill, and diversity of a city’s population are undoubtedly strong determinants of economic prosperity.81 Cultural pluralism and its associated ethnic diversity are marks of cosmopolitanism that attract global capital and talent.

A Time for Reconciliation, Report of the Commission de Consultation sur les Pratiques d’Accommodement Reliées aux Différences Culturelles, (Quebec, 2008), 19. 43 Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Baha Abu-Laban, “Reasonable Accommodation in a Global Village,” Policy Options 26, no. 8 (2007), 30. 44 Julius Grey, “The Paradox of Reasonable Accommodation,” Policy Options 26, no. 8 (2007), 34–5. Notes to pages 36–44 279 45 Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), 6. 46 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 14. 47 Richard Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class (New York: Collins, 2005), 62. 48 William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, act 3, scene 1. 49 Janet Abu-Lughod, Changing Cities: Urban Sociology (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 140. 50 James Holston and Arjun Appadurai, “Cities and Citizenship,” Public Culture 8 (1996),188–9. 51 Ibid., 200. 52 Ash Amin, “The Good City,” Urban Studies 43, nos. 5/6 (May 2006),1012. 53 Susan S, Fainstein, The Just City (Ithaca; Cornell University Press, 2010), 3. 54 Ibid., 43. 55 Leonie Sandercock, Mongreal Cities (London: Continuum, 2003), 87. 56 Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, trans.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

Although such views are intended for domestic consumption, governments in affluent economies bought into the corporate rhetoric of the global war for talent and the idea that competitive advantage cannot be sustained by relying on the talents of the national workforce. Upgrading the skills of the existing workforce needed to extend to attracting the most highly skilled and talented workers from around the world. Richard Florida is a leading proponent of this line of argument. He states that the United States now confronts its biggest challenge since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, “the new global competition for talent, a phenomenon that promises to radically reshape the world in the coming decades.” Gone are the days when the economic might of nations depended on their natural resources, manufacturing excellence, military dominance, or scientific and technological prowess.

Reich, The Next American Frontier (New York: Penguin, 1983), 127, taken from D. Coates, Models of Capitalism, Growth and Stagnation in the Modern Era Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 18. Phillip Brown and Hugh Lauder, Capitalism and Social Progress: The Future of Society in a Global Economy (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 19. Richard Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class (New York: Harper Business, 2005); Phillip Brown and Stuart Tannock, “Education, Meritocracy and the Global War for Talent,” Journal of Education Policy, 24, no. 4 (2009): 377–392. 20. AnnaLee Saxenian, The New Argonauts: Regional Advantage in a Global Economy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). 21.

Moving the Back Office to India,” Asia-Pacific Research Center, Stanford University, Working Paper (2003), 29. http://APARC.stanford.edu. See also Stephen Cohen, Bradford De Long, and John Zysman, “Tools for Thought: What Is New and Important about the E-economy?” Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy, BRIE Working Paper 138 (January 1, 2000); Martin Kenney and Richard Florida (eds.), Locating Global Advantage (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 2003). The WTO superseded the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATTS) established following World War II. See United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), World Investment Report 2005: Transnational Corporations and the Internationalization of R&D, 88–89. www.unctad.org/wir Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Information Technology Outlook (Paris: OECD, 2006), 8.


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Their book illuminates the ongoing ability of cities to preserve and thrive in the face of all manner of adversity, as platforms to harness and unleash the human creativity which stands as the engine of human progress. Their book is essential reading for political and business leaders and each and every one of us who cares about and wishes to help create a better collective future.’ Professor Richard Florida, University of Toronto and author of The Rise of the Creative Class ‘A sweeping survey of the history and modern challenges facing cities that will persuade you that they are the key to a happier and more sustainable future together.’ Baroness Minouche Shafik, President and Vice-Chancellor, London School of Economics and Political Science ‘Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin have written a compelling volume explaining why cities will survive and thrive despite the twin threats of remote work and pandemic.

Historians, economists, sociologists, urban planners and other experts all look at cities through different lenses. Each are valuable, but problems do not emerge in disciplinary silos, nor do solutions. We are far from the first to recognize the fundamental importance of cities to the modern world. Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs and many other excellent books over recent years have laid a trail before us, as have canonical works such as Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Paul Bairoch’s Cities and Economic Development.

Today, there are more than 500 urban areas with over 1 million residents and 40 with over 10 million.15 In extreme cases, the process of sprawl has led to adjacent cities merging into single urban agglomerations. One such example is the melding together of Tokyo, Yokohama, Chiba and a number of other nearby cities into Greater Tokyo, the largest city in the world with a population of 37 million. Back in 2008, the urbanist Richard Florida and colleagues identified 40 such ‘mega regions’ around the world that together accounted for two-thirds of global economic output.16 The trend has further accelerated since then. The rapidly growing Pearl River Delta area in China, for example, encompasses nine increasingly interconnected cities with a total population of 65 million, equivalent to that of the UK or France, and a total output of $1.2 trillion, nearly equivalent to that of Spain.17 In his 1961 magnum opus The City in History, renowned historian Lewis Mumford described the city as both a container and a magnet.18 As cities have continued to bleed outwards, it is the magnet that has become the most apt metaphor for understanding our urban world.


pages: 460 words: 131,579

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Black Swan, blood diamond, borderless world, business climate, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Exxon Valdez, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, George Gilder, global supply chain, Golden arches theory, hobby farmer, industrial cluster, intangible asset, It's morning again in America, job satisfaction, job-hopping, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meritocracy, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Naomi Klein, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Norman Macrae, open immigration, patent troll, Ponzi scheme, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, profit motive, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, vertical integration, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional, Zipcar

Tom Peters (chapter four) has been the most influential guru of the past two decades, not just because of what he has said, interesting though that is, but also because of the way that he has said it. In recent years the subject has been redefined by a group of journalists (such as Tom Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell) and non–business school academics (such as Richard Florida and Robert Reich) who have jumped on the bandwagon. They are the subject of chapter five. Part three examines the forces that are shaping the current management revolution. Chapter six looks at the way that traditional corporate structures, particularly top-down systems of command and control, have been reconfigured in the past three decades.

The other four were journalists (Thomas Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell), a retired CEO (Bill Gates), and an academic from a department of education rather than business (Howard Gardner).2 Bill Gates’s position on the list is hardly surprising: he is arguably the world’s most thoughtful businessman as well as one of its most successful entrepreneurs. It is impossible to listen to him talk about one of his many passions—healthcare, say, or energy—without being impressed by his combination of expertise and originality. But what about Tom Friedman and Howard Gardner? And what about people lower down the list, such as Robert Reich and Richard Florida? Since 2000, the management theory business has been revolutionized by the arrival of two new kinds of practitioners: journo-gurus from the world of “big media” and academic entrepreneurs from what business school professors might well regard as the wrong side of the tracks (or, in the case of Harvard, the river Charles).

They also share his enthusiasm for education and training: a succession of blue-ribbon business panels has echoed the basic argument of The Work of Nations. The Florida Option The most irritating thing about Reich is not his tendency to turn his nose up at business but his willingness to prostrate himself before what he calls “symbolic analysts.” Yet Reich is restrained about these übermensch compared with Richard Florida, a specialist on urban studies who currently teaches at the University of Toronto. Florida has gone two better than Reich. He has given the symbolic analysts a sexier name—the creative class—and he has given them the starring role in everything he writes. Florida’s career-making book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life (2002), is an odd mixture of Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) and Candace Bushnell’s Sex in the City.


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Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

New York Times, March 14, 2009, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/ 03/15/business/15school.html. 180 Courses in entrepreneurialism are among: Personal interviews with deans of a number of business schools in North America. 180 Harvard Business School, a longtime: http://www.hbs.edu/entrepreneurship/, accessed September 5, 2012. 181 Richard Florida has long discussed: Richard Florida’s website, accessed September 5, 2012, http://www.creativeclass.com/ richard_florida/books/the_rise_ of_the_creative_class; Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 181 A 2012 study for the Center: http://nycfuture.org/content/articles/ article_view.cfm?

Harvard Business School, a longtime training ground for the corporate elite and consultancies, recently opened the $25 million “i-lab” or Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship (named after an HBS alum who invested in Intel and Apple). Where in previous decades graduate-level business programs focused on how to use capital efficiently, more and more courses now focus on how to harness creativity. The widespread pivoting from product concept to business creation is beginning to revive and remake cities. Richard Florida has long discussed the role of the “creative class”—the 40 million or so working in the fields of design and architecture, art, media, entertainment, science and technology, education, and health care—in driving the innovation and economic growth in cities. But even Florida might be surprised at how fast creatives are transforming such giant cities as New York, Berlin, and, perhaps, even staid Singapore.


pages: 287 words: 82,576

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream by Tyler Cowen

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, business climate, business cycle, circulation of elites, classic study, clean water, David Graeber, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, East Village, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, gig economy, Google Glasses, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, income inequality, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, security theater, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, working-age population, World Values Survey

Ultimately that means that our current dilemmas will continue until they reach their breaking points. Sadly, there isn’t any “fix” above and beyond waiting for some parts of our current institutions to crumble away and eventually be replaced. I argue that in the longer term, social change will boil over once again, in uncontrollable ways, or, to borrow a phrase from urban economist Richard Florida, America is headed for a “Great Reset.” A Great Reset is what happens when you postpone change for too long, and it is like opening up a valve on an overheating engine; there is a sudden rush of outward force, and not always in a pleasant or orderly manner. In medieval times, for instance, the Catholic Church sought to shut down a lot of theological dissent.

The reality is that the breaking of America into different groups, while often driven by money, is in fact not about money alone. Education and social class are also very important as segregators and dividers. The most heavily segregated cities, across a variety of metrics, including education, social class, and sometimes race, tend to be what urban researchers Richard Florida and Charlotta Melander label “high-tech, knowledge-based metros.” That is again a sign of the complacent class at work. For instance, we can look at where the working class is least segregated from the non–working class as one metric for the mixing of social classes. That list of least class-segregated cities is Hartford, Providence, Buffalo, Virginia Beach, Orlando, Milwaukee, New Orleans, Rochester, Las Vegas, and Cincinnati, in that order.

It has created a new set of entry barriers, as if only the right kind of “tolerant” people are supposed to be living in particular neighborhoods, or maybe only they can afford it or only they feel comfortable there by fitting in. The college culture sounds tolerant when you talk about it at a cocktail party, but on the ground, the reality is less rather than more mixing and again the cementing of America’s social and also economic stasis.11 Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander have ranked the most and least segregated areas in the United States, using metrics of income, education, and also occupation. By these measures, the most segregated area is Austin, Texas, where wealthy, college-educated professionals are least likely to live near their less-educated counterparts in the area.


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The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City by Alan Ehrenhalt

anti-communist, back-to-the-city movement, big-box store, British Empire, crack epidemic, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Frank Gehry, gentrification, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, land bank, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, McMansion, megaproject, messenger bag, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, Peter Calthorpe, postindustrial economy, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, working poor, young professional

It will not come to Detroit or Buffalo in the way it is coming to Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C. Some cities will lack the central job base to generate a large-scale affluent urban revival, and will lag behind their more fortunate counterparts by a long period of years, if they ever get there at all. This is the argument of scholars such as Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida, who see an increasing bifurcation between cities economically equipped to regenerate themselves in the twenty-first century and those whose obsolete industrial economies will leave them mired in the downtown blight and exurban outward pressures of an earlier era. They have a point. There is no evidence that Detroit will produce a large cohort of downtown dwellers anytime soon.

This was a common refrain across the big Sun Belt cities. In the words of Michael Smith, Charlotte’s director of downtown development, the bankers who dominated the town’s economic strategy felt that they had to have downtown amenities “to attract hip young professionals.” Virtually all of these Sun Belt cities agreed with the geographer Richard Florida’s argument that future prosperity depended on the ability to lure the “creative class,” and that this could be done only with a thriving urban culture. More broadly, though, there was a perception that the twenty-first-century world was dividing rapidly into global cities and cities that were second-tier, no matter what their metropolitan size, and that rebuilding (or creating) a downtown was the only way to move into the first rank.

As this process was unfolding, several urban scholars published work on the same subjects I was pursuing, and I have benefited from the opportunity to read the books and articles they have produced. In no particular order, I would like to single out Christopher Leinberger and William Frey of the Brookings Institution, Richard Florida of the University of Toronto, Witold Rybczynski of the University of Pennsylvania, and Edward Glaeser of Harvard University. While none of these authors would agree with everything I say in this book, each has been a source of new ideas and provocative arguments. It is customary at the end of acknowledgment pages to thank the members of one’s family, and I would be delinquent in not doing so now.


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The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Urban Relocations Three hundred years ago: UN Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects, the 2001 Revision (New York, 2002). 11 million Americans: David Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, The American Pageant: A History of the American People, 15th (AP) edition (Cengage Learning, 2013), pp. 539–540. The rest of the world wasn’t far behind: Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (Verso, 2006). “hyper-city,” a locale with a population above 20 million: Ibid, p. 5. By 2050: UN Population Division, World Urbanization. professor Richard Florida: Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis (Basic Books, 2017). See also: Richard Florida, “The Roots of the New Urban Crisis,” Citylab, April 9, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/the-roots-of-the-new-urban-crisis/521028/. In 2016, the Brookings Institute: Jesus Leal Trijullo and Joseph Parilla, “Redefining Global Cities: The Seven Types of Global Metro Economies,” Global Cities Initiative, 2016.

Africa just explodes. From Cairo through the Congo, the continent’s urban population grows 90 percent by 2050. By century’s end, Lagos, Nigeria, could be home to 100 million. Add it all together, every week from now until 2050, a million people move downtown. University of Toronto urban studies professor Richard Florida calls this the “central crisis of our time.” Like any crisis, this one brings both opportunity and danger. First the upside. From an economic perspective, cities are good for business. In 2016, the Brookings Institute examined the 123 largest metro economies in the world. While housing only 13 percent of the planet’s population, they produced almost one-third of its economic output.

there were a hundred plus automotive brands: You can find an aggregated list of car brands, both in service and retired, at this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_car_brands. the average car owner: Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking (Routledge, 2011), p. 624. America has almost half-a-million parking spaces: Richard Florida, “Parking Has Eaten American Cities,” CityLab, July 24, 2018. MIT professor of urban planning: Eran Ben-Joseph, ReThinking a Lot (MIT Press, 2012), pp. xi–xix. Hyperloop is the brainchild: For the original whitepaper: https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf. Robert Goddard: Malcolm Browne, “New Funds Fuel Magnet Power for Trains,” New York Times, March 3, 1992.


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Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

This leaves the burgeoning and pivotal cities of the South categorized as a mere Other, outside of Western culture, a status which makes it all but impossible for theorists to grasp how both sets of cities mutually constitute each other within imperial, neo-colonial or postcolonial geographies.27 The field of urban studies has been particularly slow to address the central role of cities within the new imperialism – the resurgence of aggressive, colonial militarism focusing on the violent appropriation of land and resources in the South.28 Indeed, the prosperous cities of the North are today often idealized by liberal commentators and theorists as centres of migration and laboratories of cosmopolitan integration, characteristics construed as vital to their high-tech economic futures as the key nodes of the ‘global knowledge economy’. Such integration is deemed by influential urban policy gurus, such as Richard Florida, to be a key engine of economic creativity within technologically advanced capitalism.29 These perspectives, however, systematically ignore the way the North’s global cities often act as economic or ecological parasites, preying on the South, violently appropriating energy, water, land and mineral resources, relying on exploitative labour conditions in offshore manufacturing, driving damaging processes of climate change, and generating an often highly damaging flow of tourism and waste.

See Kaplan, ‘The Coming Anarchy,’ Atlantic Monthly, February 1994; Kaplan The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post–Cold War World, New York: Random House, 2000. 26 Fredric Jameson, ‘The End of Temporality’, Critical Inquiry, 29(4), 2003, 700, cited in Kipfer and Goonewardena ‘Colonization and the New Imperialism’. 27 Jenny Robinson, ‘Cities Between Modernity and Development’, paper presented to the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers, 2003, New Orleans, unpublished paper. See also her Ordinary Cities, London: Routledge, 2006. 28 See Kanishka Goonewardena and Stefan Kipfer, ‘Postcolonial Urbicide: New Imperialism, Global Cities and the Damned of the Earth’, New Formations, 59, Autumn 2006, 23–33. 29 See Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, New York: Basic Books, 2002. 30 See, for example, Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton: Princeton University Press, (2nd Edition) 2002; Peter Taylor, World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis, London: Routledge, 2003. 31 For an excellent discussion of this, see Kipfer and Goonewardena ‘Colonization and the New Imperialism’; and Goonewardena and Kipfer, ‘Postcolonial Urbicide’.

Indeed, the burgeoning industrial complex within which the industries of security, technology, biotechnology, corrections, prison, torture, electronics, military, entertainment and surveillance are melding yields large chunks of the lucrative core economies of cities like London and New York. Yet the centrality of war and imperial power to the economic dynamics of contemporary world cities is continually obscured by the suggestion that such cities, in these post-colonial times, are defined by their cosmopolitan and ‘hybrid’ mixing – a mixing viewed by such policy gurus as Richard Florida as a key competitive feature of the creative hubs, the ‘foundries’, of the ‘knowledge-based economy.’67 To define cities ‘generically and one-sidedly as endogenous “engines of growth” and laboratories of cosmopolitanism’, write Stefan Kipfer and Kanishka Goonewardena, ‘is to ignore other formative aspects of urban history: economic and ecological parasitism, forms of socio-political exclusion (against non-city-zens as well as residents) and a dependence of commercial exchange on militarism, imperial expansion, and other forms of primitive accumulation’.68 COSMOPOLITANISM AND HOMELAND Are fear and urbanism at war?


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Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims

Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, TED Talk, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E

Societal level: Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Harvard University Press (1994) by AnnaLee Saxnian, a University of California, Berkeley professor, describes her fascinating research, which argues that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are innovative because they interact with more diverse types of people than those working around Boston’s Route 128. The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida, Basic Books (2002), lays out research and an argument for how diverse cultures are more innovative than homogenous ones. For a good synopsis, see “The Rise of the Creative Class” by Richard Florida, Washington Monthly, May 2002, which can be found at: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html. Tim Russert secondary sources: “In the Hot Seat: Tim Russert on His Ego, His Bias, His Father Worship and What He Really Thinks about Tax Cuts,” by Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post, May 23, 2004.

Professor Keith Sawyer of Washington University summarized the topic well in his book Group Genius. Meanwhile, Frans Johansson’s book, The Medici Effect, builds on major pillars of psychology research to demonstrate how diverse teams are more likely to be innovative. University of California Berkeley Professor AnnaLee Saxnian and author Richard Florida have produced compelling analyses about how cities and regions with diverse workforces (from a functional standpoint) and frequent interpersonal interactions are more innovative. Here I want to focus on the very specific, yet oft-neglected, value of learning from people who have different perspectives.


pages: 169 words: 56,250

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld

barriers to entry, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, deal flow, fail fast, G4S, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, minimum viable product, Network effects, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, place-making, pre–internet, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, text mining, vertical integration, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In theory, expanding access to resources and information from anywhere might decouple the relationship between place and innovation. Economic geographers, however, observe the opposite effect. Evidence suggests that location, rather than being irrelevant, is more important than ever. Innovation tilts heavily toward certain locations and, as scholar Richard Florida (professor at Rotman School of Management, at the University of Toronto and author of The Rise of the Creative Class (2002)) says, is “spiky” with great concentration of creative, innovative people in tightly clustered geographies. Location clearly matters. Three prominent frameworks explain why some locales are hotbeds of entrepreneurship whereas others are the innovation equivalent of a twenty-first century economic mirage.

Meanwhile, vertical integration and closed systems disadvantaged many Route 128 companies during periods of technological upheaval. Saxenian highlights the role of a densely networked culture in explaining Silicon Valley’s successful industrial adaptation as compared to Route 128. Finally, the third explanation of startup communities, the notion of the creative class, comes from geography. Richard Florida describes the tie between innovation and creative-class individuals. The creative class is composed of individuals such as entrepreneurs, engineers, professors, and artists who create “meaningful new forms.” Creative-class individuals, Florida argues, want to live in nice places, enjoy a culture with a tolerance for new ideas and weirdness, and—most of all—want to be around other creative-class individuals.

In the 1960s when the hippies were driving to the Bay Area from the East Coast, some of them ran out of gas near Boulder. They looked around, liked the mountains, and decided to stay. Boulder’s reputation of 25 square miles surrounded by reality is well earned. In his book The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida talks about weirdness as a key attribute of innovative communities. He’s gone on to state, “You cannot get a technologically innovative place unless it’s open to weirdness, eccentricity and difference” (New York Times, June 1, 2002). The Boulder startup community embraces weirdness. You don’t have to look a certain way, dress a certain way, or act a certain way.


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Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

“Industrial and warehouse workers rarely demand specialty retail, high-end services, cloth-napkin restaurants, hotels, and bookstores,” he wrote. The ascendency of distribution has sparked a philosophical debate in Memphis: Is the city content to be a hub where goods are moved and sorted instead of created or invented? Kasarda and his allies say yes; local members of the “creative class” say no. Their champion is Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, whose prescription for economic growth boils down to the “three Ts” of technology, talent, and tolerance. If Memphis can attract the designers, musicians, and biomedi-cal researchers who crave Whole Foods and gentrified juke joints, he argues, then companies desirous of their talents will soon follow.

Edge cities like Las Colinas sprouted the moment work shifted to the office, when most of us began trafficking in ideas and didn’t mind living closer to our workplace. Our Instant Age is the product of the Jet Age and the Net Age, of global reach and always-on connectivity, of aggregation and dispersal. As Richard Florida and others have asserted, we need both velocity and density in our daily lives, for the production and transmission of ideas as well as goods. Postrecession, we need a new spatial fix that is locally dense and globally connected. Kasarda believes he holds the blueprints to a fix that is beautiful, efficient, and ultimately sustainable—a far cry from the hideous, haphaz-ard, and polluted messes most cities have inherited.

Business centers strewn throughout the community—all within a short walk or electric-cart ride—will offer rent-by-the-hour support staff plus state-of-the-art meeting rooms and seamless video-conference hookups to China and India. With the Albuquerque airport only six minutes and one stoplight away, a former regular of the big-city airport crush can leave for meetings in other cities after breakfast and still be home for dinner. Mesa del Sol is an aerotropolis in the mold of the “no-collar workplace” imagined by Richard Florida: the twilight zone of multitasking knowledge workers drifting between home, cafés, the airport, and clients’ conferences and back. Like Florida—who once switched academic posts to be closer to Dulles—the Ratner clan believes the future of work belongs to those of us who do it wherever we want, whenever we want, so long as we do it longer and harder than anyone else.


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When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency by Roger L. Martin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, banking crisis, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, call centre, cloud computing, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, High speed trading, income inequality, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, open economy, Phillips curve, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The future is already here, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, uber lyft, very high income, Vilfredo Pareto, zero-sum game

In contrast, the latter are found in every region of the country, because their goods and services are needed everywhere but it is difficult if not impossible to sell outside their region. For example, with few exceptions, a hair salon will serve only its local market. About a third of US jobs are in the former, clustered industries, and the rest are in the latter, dispersed industries. From the job-type perspective, another scholar, Richard Florida, in The Rise of the Creative Class, demonstrated that the content of an American worker’s job really matters.12 In particular, it matters whether the content of the job is creativity-intensive or routine-intensive. In a creativity-intensive job, the worker needs to exercise meaningful, independent judgment and decision making in order to fulfill the requirements of the job.

(Author’s calculations based on the 2019 Forbes 400.) 10. Christopher Ingraham. “The Richest 1 Percent Now Owns More of the Country’s Wealth Than at Any Time in the Past 50 Years,” The Washington Post, December 6, 2017. 11. Michael E. Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989). 12. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 13. Kathleen M. Kahle and René M. Stulz, “Is the US Public Corporation in Trouble?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 31, no. 3 (2017): 67. 14. The Almond Board of California, “California Almond Industry Facts,” June 2016, http://www.almonds.com/sites/default/files/2016_almond_industry_factsheet.pdf. 15.

Finally, our terrific designer, Michelle Hopgood, made our work more readily understood and beautiful at the same time; she is responsible for all the graphics in the book. Our work was aided by a fantastic group of MPI Fellows. Leading thinkers across a wide variety of relevant fields, they gave us ideas, critiqued our work, and provided unceasing encouragement. We couldn’t have gotten to this point without Richard Florida, Adam Grant, Jonathan Haidt, Lauren Jones, Mariana Mazzucato, Nilofer Merchant, Mark Stabile, and Zeynep Ton. We also received great guidance and support from the MPI board: Geoff Beattie (chair), Bill Downe, Arianna Huffington, Nina Mažar, Nandan Nilekani, Will Strange, and Tim Sullivan. I want to give a special thanks to publishing whiz Tim Sullivan, who gave me lots of patient and helpful feedback on multiple drafts of the book.


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Exceptional People: How Migration Shaped Our World and Will Define Our Future by Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron, Meera Balarajan

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, conceptual framework, creative destruction, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, endogenous growth, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, labour mobility, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, life extension, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine readable, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, old age dependency ratio, open borders, out of africa, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, Richard Florida, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, spice trade, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

In 2006, foreign nationals living in the United States were inventors or coinventors in 40 percent of all international patent applications filed by the U.S. government.34 Migrants file the majority of patents by leading science firms: 72 percent of the total at Qualcomm, 65 percent at Merck, 64 percent at General Electric, and 60 percent at Cisco.35 Higher rates of immigration also have second-order effects on innovation. Ethnic diversity plays a key role in attracting and retaining creative and talented people to cities. Economic geographer Richard Florida argues that diversity increases a region or city's ability to compete for talent: To support high-technology industries or a wide range of economic activity in general, regions compete for a variety of talent across a variety of fields and disciplines. Regions that are open to diversity are thus able to attract a wider range of talent by nationality, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation than are those that are relatively closed.36 Diversity becomes a stimulant to further innovation and growth.

Integration requires policies that extend settlement services, assistance with labor market access, language training, and the removal of barriers that prevent the involvement of migrants in society.76 Expanding opportunities for migrants to fully participate in their host societies in the short run is a valuable investment, given the long-run benefits of social diversity. Citing a study by Pascal Zachary, Richard Florida notes that “the United States' economic competitiveness in high-technology fields is directly linked to its openness to outsiders, while the relative stagnation of Japan and Germany is tied to “closedness” and relative homogeneity.”77 Openness to migrants pays dividends in the long run. At a local or group level, Scott E.

“Migration Policies toward Highly Skilled Foreign Workers,” Report to the UK Home Office, March 2002, p. 4. 13. Lindsay Lowell. 2008. “Highly Skilled Migration,” in World Migration 2008: Managing Labour Mobility in the Evolving Global Economy. Geneva: International Organization for Migration, p. 52. 14. Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick. 2008. “Inside the Black Box of Regional Development—Human Capital, the Creative Class and Tolerance,” Journal of Economic Geography 8(5): 615–649. 15. Lowell, 2008: 53. 16. Demetrios Papademetriou. 2003. “Managing Rapid and Deep Change in the Newest Age of Migration,” Political Quarterly 74(1): 39–58. 17.


pages: 291 words: 81,703

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation by Tyler Cowen

Amazon Mechanical Turk, behavioural economics, Black Swan, brain emulation, Brownian motion, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, choice architecture, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deliberate practice, driverless car, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, Flynn Effect, Freestyle chess, full employment, future of work, game design, Higgs boson, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, Loebner Prize, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microcredit, Myron Scholes, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, P = NP, P vs NP, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, reshoring, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

On the vulnerability of women, see Gregory Acs, “Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking up from the American Dream,” Pew Charitable Trusts, Economic Mobility Project, 2011. That is also the source for the insights about individuals falling out of the middle class. The Richard Florida quotation is from Richard Florida, “The Conservative States of America,” The Atlantic, March 29, 2011. Acknowledgments For useful discussions and comments I wish to thank Nelson Hernandez, Anson Williams, Kenneth Regan, Jason Fichtner, Erik Brynolfsson, Andrew McGee, Don Peck, Derek Thompson, Michelle Dawson, Peter Snow, Veronique de Rugy, Garett Jones, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Alex Tabarrok, Natasha Cowen, Garry Kasparov, Vasik Rajlich, Stephen Morrow, David Brooks, Peter Thiel, Michael Mandel, and Larry Kaufman, with apologies to anyone I may have left out.

Political conservatism is strongest in the least well-off, least educated, most blue collar, and most economically hard-hit states. If you doubt it, know that as of 2011, the most politically conservative states are, as measured by self-identification, Mississippi, Idaho, Alabama, Wyoming, Utah, Arkansas, South Carolina, North Dakota, Louisiana, and South Dakota. As Richard Florida puts it, “Conservatism, more and more, is the ideology of the economically left behind.” Those states have become outposts of Tea Party support. Their electorates are not out there leading the charge for higher rates of progressive taxation or trying to revive the memory of George McGovern.


pages: 296 words: 82,501

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

By 2030, 6 out of every 10 people will live in a city, and by 2050, this proportion will increase to 7 out of 10 people.” Source: World Health Organization Also, Ariel Schwartz, “We Are Approaching Peak Car Use”, Fast Company, 5 July 2011, and Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (New York: HarperBusiness, 2011). For a quick introduction, read Richard Florida, “The Fading Differentiation between City and Suburb”, Urban Land Magazine (urbanland.uli.org), January 2013. For Ruth Milkman’s view on why people are disillusioned with capitalism, see Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce and Penny Lewis, Changing the Subject: A Bottom-up Account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City (City University of New York).

, The Atlantic, 25 March 2012; and John Arlidge, “Baby, you can share my car”, Sunday Times, 10 March 2013, which states that: in 2008, only 30% of 16-year-old Americans held driving licences, down from 50% a generation ago, that 80% of under-25s in Tokyo do not have a car, and that in Germany, the share of young households without cars rose from 20% to 28% from 1998 to 2008. Millennials choosing to live in small, city-centre apartments See Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (New York: HarperBusiness, 2011). For a rigorous analysis of the millennials’ housing aspirations, read Nathan Morris, “Why Generation Y is Causing the Great Migration of the 21st Century”, on the website of a design firm called Placemakers (www.placemakers.com), 9 April 2012.


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The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The other, which I will call the supply side approach, tries to attract workers with the hope that employers will follow. It involves improving a city’s local amenities to lure talented workers. In essence, the first strategy is about bribing businesses, while the second is about bribing people. Ten years ago, the idea of revitalization through amenities suddenly became very fashionable. Richard Florida’s influential books publicized the notion that the “creative class” is particularly sensitive to the quality of life and that local economic growth hinges on making a city interesting and exciting for its members. He writes, “Seattle was the home of Jimi Hendrix and later Nirvana and Pearl Jam as well as Microsoft and Amazon.

., which over the past twenty years has created a deep and self-sustaining high-tech cluster of private companies over and above its public institutions. It is hard to think of a better place than Berlin to test the notion that innovation hubs can be grown simply by catering to the creative class. Richard Florida’s argument is that increasing amenities for the creative class leads to an increase in the supply of labor, and this ultimately lifts a city’s economy. But after twenty years of Berlin coolness, the supply of well-educated creatives vastly exceeds the demand. According to one study, 30 percent of social scientists and 40 percent of artists are jobless.

See Zucker and Darby, “Movement of Star Scientists and Engineers and High-Tech Firm Entry.” [>] In 1913, the year before World War I began: All the figures are from Scott, “Origins and Growth of the Hollywood Motion-Picture Industry.” [>] In 2006, the UCLA geographer Allen Scott proposed: Ibid. [>] “Seattle was the home”: Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, p.206. [>] “The arts have become”: Jacobs, “Made in Brooklyn.” [>] According to one study: See “The Cost of Cool,” Economist, September 17, 2011. [>] “Our location has helped us”: Jon Swartz, “San Francisco’s Charm Lures High-Tech Workers,” USA Today, December 6, 2010. [>] “We’re able to attract”: Ibid. [>] “I try to find partners”: “The Revolution on Batteries,” Boston Globe, May 22, 2011. [>] A study by Adam Jaffe: Jaffe, “Real Effects of Academic Research.” [>] Between 1933 and 1958: The $30 billion are measured in 2010 dollars. [>] “in practice, they work miserably”: Jacobs, “Why TVA Failed.” [>] My colleague Pat Kline and I: Kline and Moretti, “Local Economic Development, Agglomeration Economies and the Big Push.” [>] Consider Portland: These three cases are described in detail in Mayer, “Bootstrapping High-Tech.” [>] As pointed out in a recent Brookings Institution study: Ibid.


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Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

Here’s Why That’s Bad for Everyone,” Washington Post, October 5, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/05/white-parents-teach-their-children-be-colorblind-heres-why-thats-bad-everyone; on colorblind racism, see also: Meghan Burke, Colorblind Racism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019). On the creative class and openness: Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002), chap. 14. Quote from his video course: Richard Florida, “Technology, Talent, and Tolerance in the Creative City,” Coursera, accessed November 9, 2020, https://www.coursera.org/lecture/city-and-you-find-best-place/technology-talent-and-tolerance-in-the-creative-city-instructor-video-uVp5h.

Throughout history, hubs of fresh, dynamic thinking have regularly cropped up, from Athens and Rome to innovative clusters like seventeenth-century Cremona for violins. Paris’s Latin Quarter got its name because it was a crossroads for scholars from all over Europe who spoke Latin to communicate. What makes mobility and migration so important is the openness that it presupposes. In the early 2000s Richard Florida, an urban theorist, considered the factors that undergird the economic success or failure of regions and urban areas. He trumpeted his findings in a book, The Rise of the Creative Class, where he examined a vast set of metrics to tease out what was behind the success. Three elements stood out: technology, talent, and tolerance.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

We will also still want to know whether our collective existence is anything more than a cosmic accident. Like Joyce Vincent, alone in her London apartment, we will still want to love and be loved. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Update I was reading The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida again recently. In the opening pages he makes the point that people living between 1900 and 1950 witnessed greater technological change than those living between 1950 and 2000. He then goes on to explain that in terms of societal values, the reverse was the case. I would argue that something similar, albeit on a much smaller scale, has happened over the last couple of years.

There are some future-proof jobs that cannot be done by a machine or outsourced to Asia. These include what I’d call hightouch jobs such as nursing and teaching, which involve a high level of emotional intelligence. They also include occupations that involve the application of creativity and imagination. But, as Richard Florida points out in The Rise of the Creative Class, these types of jobs don’t work just anywhere. Cities become attractive to right-brained entrepreneurs and innovators when they score highly on the Three Ts: technology, talent and tolerance. Technology refers to the proximity of world-class research facilities; talent is the clustering of bright, like-minded people from varied backgrounds; and tolerance is an open, progressive culture that embraces “outsiders” and difference.

Whatever happens, the world of work will not be the same in the future. 292 FUTURE FILES Update In the original edition of Future Files, I quoted Thomas Friedman saying that the world was becoming flat, in the sense that there was now a level playing field where everyone competed with everyone else. Everyone was now a potential player. This is still somewhat true, but as Richard Florida (in The Rise of the Creative Class) has pointed out, the world is actually rather spiky. What he means by this, I think, is that only a handful of regions or cities are driving the global economy; if you do not live in one of these places, life can be very difficult indeed. This sounds somewhat illogical.


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Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy by Daniel Gross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset-backed security, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, congestion pricing, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, demand response, Donald Trump, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, index fund, intangible asset, intermodal, inventory management, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, LNG terminal, low interest rates, low skilled workers, man camp, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, plutocrats, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk tolerance, risk/return, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, the High Line, transit-oriented development, Wall-E, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game, Zipcar

In Better, Stronger, Faster, Daniel Gross rebuts the declinists and documents the enduring strengths that power America’s ability to transform and reset itself in dynamic ways. The United States is poised to emerge from the crisis in better shape than any of its commonly touted old and new competitors.” —Richard Florida, author of The Great Reset and The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited, and director of the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute “Daniel Gross is an author and journalist who is not afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom. His latest book does this with tremendous style, by directly attacking the ‘America is doomed’ camp, to paint a portrait of America that is far more vibrant than critics usually acknowledge.

CHAPTER 3 Faster: Policy After an economic downturn and financial crisis that were the worst in at least three generations, the United States avoided tough, swift decisions. Instead of dealing with reality and confronting problems head-on, policymakers, companies, and consumers kicked the can down the road. Faced with a glaring need for what the sociologist Richard Florida called a “Great Reset,” America chose to hit the pause button. When the policy efforts came, they were too little (or too much, depending on where you sit ideologically), too late, too slow, and too ineffective. The bailouts and stimulus efforts were expensive, poorly designed failures. Economic setbacks may be nothing new in American history.

Zynga, the social gaming business founded in 2007, was created essentially to exist within Facebook; in late 2011 its initial public offering endowed it with a $7 billion market value. Creating entirely new ecosystems is another discipline at which the United States has excelled. “In a reset, we get great individual innovation,” notes the sociologist Richard Florida, the author of The Great Reset. “More importantly, we get the rise of systems innovation,” like Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse turning electricity from a science experiment into a utility. “That leads to new models of infrastructure and new kinds of consumption.” The United States has demonstrated a unique ability to develop such working models.


pages: 518 words: 147,036

The Fissured Workplace by David Weil

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, Corrections Corporation of America, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, employer provided health coverage, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intermodal, inventory management, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Rogoff, law of one price, long term incentive plan, loss aversion, low skilled workers, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, occupational segregation, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, pre–internet, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, yield management

“Legal Protections for Atypical Employees: Employment Law for Workers without Workplaces and Employees without Employers.” Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 27, no. 2: 251–281. Sturgeon, Timothy, and Richard Florida. 2004. “Globalization, Deverticalization, and Employment in the Motor Vehicle Industry.” In Locating Global Advantage: Industry Dynamics in the International Economy, edited by Martin Kenney and Richard Florida. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 52–81. Sum, Andrew, and Joseph McLaughlin. 2011. “Who Has Benefited from the Post–Great Recession Recovery?” Working paper, Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University (July).

“Hiding behind the Corporate Veil: Employer Abuse of the Corporate Form to Avoid or Deny Workers’ Collectively Bargained and Statutory Rights.” West Virginia Law Review 100: 537–599. Curry, James, and Martin Kenney. 2004. “The Organizational and Geographic Configuration of the Personal Computer Value Chain.” In Locating Global Advantage: Industry Dynamics in the International Economy, edited by Martin Kenney and Richard Florida. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 113–141. Dalzell, Robert. 1987. Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davidov, Guy. 2004. “Joint Employer Status in Triangular Employment Relationships.” British Journal of Industrial Relations 42: 727–746. ______. 2006.

Kelling, George, and Catherine Coles. 1996. Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities. New York: Martin Kessler Books / The Free Press. Kelling, George, and James Q. Wilson. 1982. “The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” The Atlantic, March, 29–38. Kenney, Martin, and Richard Florida. 2004. Locating Global Advantage: Industry Dynamics in the International Economy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kerr, Clark. 1977. Labor Markets and Wage Determination: The Balkanization of Labor Markets and Other Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, Institute of Industrial Relations.


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The New Snobbery by David Skelton

assortative mating, banking crisis, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, David Brooks, defund the police, deindustrialization, Etonian, Extinction Rebellion, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, glass ceiling, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, microaggression, new economy, Northern Rock, open borders, postindustrial economy, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, shareholder value, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, TED Talk, TikTok, wealth creators, women in the workforce

Williamson, ‘Chaos in the family, chaos in the state: the white working class’s dysfunction’, National Review, 17 March 2016. 31 Alec MacGillis, ‘The Original Underclass’, The Atlantic, 16 September 2016. 32 Phillips, ‘The march of wokeism’. 33 ‘Bari Weiss’s New York Times resignation letter in full’, The Times, 14 July 2020. 34 ‘A letter on justice and open debate’, Harper’s, 7 July 2020. 35 Michael Lind, ‘The Revenge of the Yankees’, Tablet, 16 November 2020. CHAPTER FOUR A CULTURE OF SNOBBERY? ‘The creative class anticipates the future, while the working class tends to seek protection from it.’ Richard Florida ‘Working-class kids aren’t represented. Working-class life is not referred to. It’s really sad. I think it means we’re going to get loads more middle-class drama. It will be middle-class people playing working-class people, like it used to be.’ Julie Walters1 In the multiple lockdowns that impacted the UK during the Covid pandemic, there was one internet meme that went from strength to strength, becoming more ‘viral’ with each iteration.

He reportedly chanted ‘f**k the Tories’ at the Glastonbury Festival, though he later said he had ‘no recollection’ of this. The head of Channel 4 News described the Prime Minister as a ‘known liar’. Cathy Newman saw her interview with Jordan Peterson go ‘viral’ after her attempt to suggest that the best-selling author was sexist and bigoted backfired.24 These examples are merely indicative that in the UK what Richard Florida has described as the ‘creative class’ have values that are very different to much of the rest of the country – and with it they have a pulpit from which to broadcast these values. Florida was clear that his creative class should feel superior to the rest of the population, representing, as he argues they do, ‘today’s ascending social and economic force’.25 Much of the creative and media class have a deeply monist worldview and find it incomprehensible that all of their fellow citizens don’t share this, meaning that any deviation is put down to stupidity rather than a genuine difference of opinion.


pages: 565 words: 122,605

The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us by Joel Kotkin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, birth tourism , blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, citizen journalism, colonial rule, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic winter, Deng Xiaoping, Downton Abbey, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, financial independence, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Gini coefficient, Google bus, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, labor-force participation, land reform, Lewis Mumford, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, pensions crisis, Peter Calthorpe, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seaside, Florida, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, starchitect, Stewart Brand, streetcar suburb, Ted Nelson, the built environment, trade route, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, young professional

The Corbusian vision of a “city of skyscrapers” would allow society to make sufficient economic progress to enhance further the grandeur of the city. 11 Today’s density advocates are rarely as audacious as Le Corbusier, but they also claim numerous benefits from their sense of a highly centralized urban “order”; some organizations, such as the Urban Land Institute (ULI), have been fighting decentralization and suburbanization since the late 1930s.12 There is a widespread notion that higher density will increase productivity, calm the climate, and lower living costs, albeit at the price of homeownership.13 In the following pages, I outline the retro-urbanist argument for each of these purported benefits. THE ECONOMIC EQUATION Some retro-urbanists, such as Richard Florida, point to studies such as those from the Santa Fe Institute that show the great productivity of large cities, claiming that “bigger, denser cities literally speed up the metabolism of daily life.” The notion that innovation needs to take place in dense urban settings is now widely accepted. Yet in reality, as the study’s authors note, their findings were about the population of an area, not the density, and had little to do with the urban form.14 After all, many of the nation’s most innovative firms are located not in downtown cores but in sprawling regions, whether that’s in Silicon Valley, the north Dallas suburbs, or the “energy corridor” west of central Houston.

Even in New York City, the red-hot center of American ultra-density, eight of Manhattan’s 10 community boards45 opposed former Mayor Bloomberg’s attempts to further densify already congested Midtown.46 The Midtown project prompted Yale architect Robert Stern, a devoted advocate for dense cities and no opponent of density, to warn that too much high-rise development creates a dehumanized aesthetic that chases away creative businesses and tourists, while preserving older districts attracts them.47 Retro-urbanist Richard Florida, usually a reliable supporter of density, also expresses concern that high-rise density does not appeal much to the “creative class,” who prefer more human-scaled neighborhoods.48 Similarly, in Los Angeles, neighborhood councils, notably in Hollywood, have rallied against attempts to build denser buildings, which generate more congestion and erode both the area’s livability and its distinct urban identity.49 In London, too, attempts to build what the Independent describes as “the tall, the ostentatious, the showy and ‘iconic’” have been widely criticized for undermining the human-scaled character of London.

The Great Recession, which saw millions of homes foreclosed upon, many in suburbia, suggested to some that the mass movement to the periphery was ending.63 As homeownership rates dropped from historical highs during the Great Recession, some, like American economist Paul Krugman, envisioned a historical shift from an age of owning a home to an age of renting an apartment, which was more likely to occur close to the city core.64 Urban pundit Richard Florida saw the emergence of a new paradigm that would toss out not only the “suburban myth” of homeownership itself but also its “long-privileged place” at the center of the US economy.65 To be sure, homeownership dropped during the recession, as it had during the Great Depression. Yet the home values in suburbs around the country were not the only victims of the bubble; condo projects, including those in major cities such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, Atlanta, Miami, and Vancouver, also suffered major declines, with many residents forced into rentals.66 These reversals did not mean the rebound of the urban core was over any more than it suggested the death of suburbs, but the latter notion gained great currency in the media.


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Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists by Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Easter island, facts on the ground, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, insecure affluence, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, knowledge economy, land reform, loss aversion, market fundamentalism, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, new economy, oil shock, postindustrial economy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, science of happiness, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade liberalization, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Whatever the future may hold for social organization and affiliation in America, one thing is almost certain: Americans are not going back to the bowling leagues of Milwaukee and Pittsburgh. 5. In documenting the decline of social capital, Putnam directed our attention to something important, but he also missed something equally profound, and that was the rise of new kinds of social capital, networks, and social ties. In The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida documented the increasing numbers of Americans working in the new knowledge and service economies who “share a common creative ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit.”13 These Americans, Florida found, have fewer of the strong social ties that Putnam valorizes. But they also have many more “weak ties,” which are precisely what the creative class wants and needs to break free of more traditional, stifling forms of community.

When the Protestant ethic was sundered from bourgeois society only the hedonism remained, and the capitalist system lost its transcendental ethics . . . [A] society that fails to provide some set of “ultimate meanings” in its character structure, work, and culture, becomes unsettling to a system.15 Or, rather, it became unsettling to Bell and other conservatives. The truth is, as Richard Florida points out in The Rise of the Creative Class, the traditional Protestant work ethic has been replaced by a more flexible and more creative relationship to work, employment, and one’s identity as a laborer. It was the melding of the more hedonistic bohemianism with the Protestant work ethic that was behind the rise of the highly productive creative class.

[back] 11. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). [back] 12. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears, “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,” American Sociological Review, June 2006, 353–73. [back] 13. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Perseus, 2002) , 8. [back] 14. Ibid., 269. [back] 15. Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of sociology, May 1973, 1360–80. Also see discussion in Florida, Rise, 276. [back] 16. Florida, Rise, 277. [back] 17. Ibid., 281.


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

While adopting the standard themes of the genre, Castells grounds his argument on a great amount of empirical data and treats his subject more critically than his peers. He acknowledges the continued existence of social conflicts in the network society but disputes the relevance of class-based struggle.3 The latest, though hardly the last, outgrowth of this tradition is Richard Florida’s announcement of the rise of the creative class. He proposes that monotonous work assignments are about to be replaced with stimulating jobs, not because of workers’ resistance, but since creativity is more profitable to capital.4 A common trait of this literature is the assurance that the downsides of old capitalism will be solved by a more advanced capitalism.

These sentiments in the workforce are readily taken advantage of by capital to undermine pay levels and working conditions previously secured by unionised labour. No-one can then be surprised that the ideal of self-fulfilment through work is trumpeted in popular culture, job training courses, and management literature. Richard Florida’s notion of the ‘creative class’ is the latest addition. His claim is that work in capitalism is being changed for the better due to the rise of creative professionals. People demand more fulfilling jobs and employers are happy to comply since it increases profits. Florida acknowledges the existence of a dual labour market and admits that the comforts of the creative class owes to the toil of a service class.

Ralf Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 1959). 2. Daniel Bell, The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 3. For a collection of essays critical of Castell’s work, ed. Frank Webster and Basil Dimitriou, Manuel Castells—From the Informational City to the Information Age, vol. III (London: Sage, 2004). 4. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class—And How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community & Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 5. Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx—Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 37. 6. For an influential criticism of historical materialism by a non-Marxist, Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (London: Macmillan Press ltd, 1995).


pages: 242 words: 68,019

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

Redding, “The Empirics of the New Economic Geography,” Journal of Regional Science 50, no. 1 [2010]: 297–311). Another approach that hinges on individuals, albeit differently from the approach followed by the new economic geographers, is the work of urban theorist Richard Florida. Florida has argued forcefully that the competitiveness of urban agglomerations hinges largely on their ability to attract creative individuals (Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002]). Other approaches focus not on the role of individuals but on the properties of regions or of the networks of firms that locate in these regions.


pages: 397 words: 121,211

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 by Charles Murray

affirmative action, assortative mating, blue-collar work, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, David Brooks, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, gentrification, George Gilder, Haight Ashbury, happiness index / gross national happiness, helicopter parent, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, new economy, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, sparse data, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Tipper Gore, Unsafe at Any Speed, War on Poverty, working-age population, young professional

Meanwhile, the bohemians were the free spirits who flouted convention.” But by the 1990s, everything had gotten mixed up. “It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker,”3 Brooks wrote. Bobos belonged to what Brooks labeled “the educated class.” In 2002, Richard Florida, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, identified “the creative class,” telling his readers, “If you are a scientist or engineer, an architect or designer, a writer, artist, or musician, or if you use your creativity as a key factor in your work in business, education, health care, law or some other profession, you are a member.”4 He celebrated the changes in the workplace, lifestyle, and social capital that accompanied the ascendancy of the creative class.

The best I can do is use the DDB Life Style data that were provided to Robert Putnam in the research for Bowling Alone and are now available to other scholars.11 That database does not permit us to isolate the top few centiles—the highest income code is $100,000—but it does give a quantitative measure of the relationship between income, education, and a wide variety of tastes and preferences. I also continue to draw heavily on the work of David Brooks and Richard Florida. Both Bobos in Paradise and The Rise of the Creative Class, along with their other books, have extensive documentation, some quantitative and some qualitative, for the generalizations they draw about the tastes and preferences of their Bobos and Creative Class, respectively, and my endnotes contain references to their discussions.

I spent a paragraph on new-upper-class vacations, while David Brooks devotes eight pages of Bobos in Paradise to them. I didn’t even mention sex; Brooks has another eight pages about that. I didn’t mention religion; see all thirty-seven pages of his chapter 6. I gave a few pages to changes in the world of work; Richard Florida devotes the better part of an entire book to them. But the lacuna that is likely to be at the top of your mind is politics. The new upper class tends to be liberal, right? There’s no getting around it: Every way of answering that question produces a yes. In chapter 3, I give politics a longer discussion, because it relates to the isolation of the new upper class.


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

The gentrifying twenty-somethings who eagerly sought out the shikumen as cool places to be wanted to live in the symbolic aura, but not in the presence of its former gritty, ‘real people’ residents. The familiar, twinned sins of gentrification and expulsion have been laid at the door of the urbanist Richard Florida, whose book on the creative classes became, twenty or so years ago, the bible for a new idea of the city. In a dynamic city, the young, the entrepreneurial, the organically minded should rule, and the old, the tired and the dutiful should fade away. The creative economy is meant to be both collective and informal in character, the shared table rather than the closed office – which translates urbanistically into the ‘innovation zone’, the ‘creative hub’ in Florida’s words.

This Googleplex formula derives from the classic company towns of the industrial era like Pullman, Illinois, in the US or Port Sunlight in Britain, both built in the 1880s; like them, the Googleplex ties a tight time-knot between working and dwelling. The Googlistas are poster-children for the ‘creative classes’. This term, invented by Richard Florida, is now defined by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics as people who mostly work in advertising, media services and tech start-ups outside universities; the number of independent artists, musicians and poets is relatively minute: the creative classes are more distributors, middlemen and branders than actual Homo fabers.

Wilson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), pp. 359–79. 30. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1982). 31. Sharon Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 32. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 33. Patti Waldmeir, ‘Shanghai Starts Search for Its Heritage’, Financial Times, 22 February 2013, p. 8. 34. James Salter, Light Years (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 69. 35.


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Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow

3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, attribution theory, augmented reality, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Google X / Alphabet X, hive mind, index card, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, popular electronics, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, social bookmarking, Steve Jobs, superconnector, vertical integration

Is it any wonder that nearly two-thirds of the patents filed over the last three decades came from twenty metropolitan areas with only one-third of the US population? More innovation, creativity, and art per person happens in large metro areas than other places; what Jonah Lehrer calls “urban friction” and Richard Florida calls the “creative class” turns cities into higher platforms for success-seekers.* Platforms are why so many aspiring actors migrate to Los Angeles and why budding fashion bloggers move to New York. Platforms are why Harvard Law graduates have easier times finding jobs than those from other schools.

This means that in Finland, students’ learning in school is less affected by their family backgrounds than in most other countries.” 95 coined the term “lateral thinking” in 1967: Edward de Bono expounds on this and other terminology on his official website: “Lateral Thinking,” http://edwdebono.com/lateral.htm (accessed February 16, 2014). 98 Is it any wonder: Big cities are epicenters for invention, according to patent filings as collected and reported by Jonathan Rothwell, José Lobo, Deborah Strumsky, and Mark Muro, “Patenting Prosperity: Invention and Economic Performance in the United States and Its Metropolitan Areas,” Brookings, 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/reports/2013/02/patenting prosperity rothwell/patenting prosperity rothwell.pdf (accessed February 15, 2014). The authors write that “Sixty-three percent of U.S. patents are developed by people living in just 20 metro areas, which are home to 34 percent of the U.S. population.” Richard Florida writes about the benefits of city living for creative people in The Rise of the Creative Class—Revisited: 10th Anniversary Edition—Revised and Expanded, 2nd edition (Basic Books, 2012) and argues that creative people may actually boost the economics of cities, though many have debated whether this is causation or correlation.


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The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, those without college degrees are more likely to abuse drugs and frequently use federal disability insurance as their only economic lifeline.4 We should concern ourselves with these inequalities in outcomes not merely for the benefit of those on the bottom, but because of the relationship between this inequality and the perpetuation of the system that creates it—a dynamic that should make progressives very uncomfortable. It’s a bitter irony of contemporary American life: it is in our most progressive spaces that we see the most social inequality. As the urban sociologist Richard Florida has demonstrated, those cities that are the most liberal—New York, San Francisco, Austin—also are home to the greatest income inequality and wealth segregation.5 It’s in these places where the soaring egalitarian ideals of the contemporary left clash with the reality of who is winning the great twenty-first-century meritocratic race.

Scott Jaschik, “College Selectivity and Income,” Inside Higher Ed, August 22, 2016. 4. See Pinka Chatterji, “Illicit Drug Use and Educational Attainment,” Health Economics 15, no. 5 (2006): 489–511; Chana Joffe-Walt, “Unfit for Work: The Startling Rise of Disability in America,” Planet Money, 2013, https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/. 5. Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 112. 6. Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), 40. 7. Richard V. Reeves, Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2017), 7. 8.


pages: 479 words: 140,421

Vanishing New York by Jeremiah Moss

activist lawyer, back-to-the-city movement, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Broken windows theory, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, East Village, food desert, gentrification, global pandemic, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, plutocrats, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Skype, starchitect, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, young professional

, citing Leo Goldberg, “Game of Zones: Neighborhood Rezonings and Uneven Urban Growth in Bloomberg’s New York City” (M.C.P. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015). 301Cynthia Cornell, quoted in Brendan Bartholomew, “Gentrification Evictions Could Amount to Elder Abuse,” San Francisco Examiner, March 10, 2016. 302Robin Middleton, quoted by Harlem historian and activist Michael Henry Adams on his Facebook page. 314On chains and “bourgeoisie aestheticism,” see Daniel Akst, “On the Contrary; Why Chain Stores Aren’t the Big Bad Wolf,” New York Times, June 3, 2001. 22 GENTRIFIERS AND THE NEW MANIFEST DESTINY 322“Artists: NYC Is Not for Sale,” discussion, part of the Decolonize This Place project, October 29, 2016. 323Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 324Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 4 (2005). 324Bloomberg’s transportation commissioner knew well: Samuel Stein, “Bike Lanes and Gentrification: New York City’s Shades of Green,” Progressive Planning, no. 188 (Summer 2011). 323–325Richard Florida, “The Creative Class and Economic Development,” Economic Development Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2014); Richard Florida, “More Losers Than Winners in America’s New Economic Geography,” CityLab, January 30, 2013. On the dark side: Lydia De-Pillis, “The Re-education of Richard Florida,” Houston Chronicle, October 24, 2016. 23 BROOKLYN 331Truman Capote, “Brooklyn Heights: A Personal Memoir,” Holiday, February 1959. 335–336Mark Greif, What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation (New York: n+1 Foundation, 2010), and “What Was the Hipster,” New York, October 24, 2010. 338On Williamsburg racial shift of population, see Philip DePaolo and Sylvia Morse, “Williamsburg: Zoning Out Latinos,” in Angotti and Morse, eds., Zoned Out!

In the past, they might have had a decade or more before hyper-gentrification found them, exploited their cultural capital, and pushed them out—along with their neighbors. Today it happens overnight. For the development-friendly cachet of artists and gays, some blame—or credit—urban studies theorist Richard Florida for his influential work on the “creative class.” In 2002, the same year that Bloomberg became mayor of New York, Florida published The Rise of the Creative Class and became an economic development guru. He laid out the “Gay Index” and “Bohemian Index” of cities, explaining how these groups would drive economic growth by attracting high-earning professionals into “talent clustering.”


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More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Not all of these processes are mutually exclusive. 8 Per Bak, How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996), 1-3. 9 Robert Axtell, “The Emergence of Firms in a Population of Agents: Local Increasing Returns, Unstable Nash Equilibria, and Power Law Size Distributions,” Brookings Institution, Center on Social and Economics Working Paper 3, June 1999. Also see Robert L. Axtell and Richard Florida, “Emergent Cities: A Microeconomic Explanation of Zipf’s Law,” Brookings Institution and Carnegie Mellon University Working Paper, September 2000. 10 Michael Batty, “Rank Clocks,” Nature, vol. 444, November 30, 2006, 592-596. 11 Albert-László Barabási, Linked: The New Science of Networks (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2002), 69-72; Bernardo A.

Science 293 (September 2001): 1818-20. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol293/issue5536/index.shtml. ——. “Zipf’s Law of City Sizes: A Microeconomic Explanation Far from Equilibrium.” Presentation at a RAND workshop, Complex Systems and Policy Analysis: New Tools for a New Millennium, September 27-28, 2000, Arlington, Va. Axtell, Robert L., and Richard Florida. “Emergent Cities: A Microeconomic Explanation of Zipf’s Law.” Brookings Institution and Carnegie Mellon University Working Paper, September 2000. Baer, Gregory, and Gary Gensler. The Great Mutual Fund Trap. New York: Broadway Books, 2002. Bak, Per. How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality.


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The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

And indeed, exactly at the same time as our economic system was suffering such a profound economic shock, we have witnessed a wave of technological innovation, which seems to have few comparisons in its scope and rapidity. Although these trends may appear to be at each other loggerheads, they are not. In fact, economic crises have also often been moments of rapid technological innovation. Richard Florida, for example, highlights that during the Long Depression that started in 1873 there was a peak in patents, and the same may be said about the stagflation of the 1970s that led to the development of industrial robots.98 Furthermore, we know from Joseph Schumpeter that capitalism is characterised by a tendency towards creative destruction,99 in which incumbents in various industries are constantly threatened by the rise of new products and services, and we most clearly see this phenomenon in the so-called ‘disruption’100 posed by new companies, such as Airbnb, Amazon, Uber and Deliveroo, to existing companies.

Moreno, ‘Banks’ new competitors: Starbucks, Google, and Alibaba’, Harvard Business Review 2 (2014): 1–3. 96. Swedish Pirate Party Declaration of Principles, 4.0 version, May 2012, retrieved from https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pirate_Party_Declaration_of_Principles/4.0. 97. Evgeny Morozov, To save everything, click here: the folly of technological solutionism (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013). 98. Richard Florida, The great reset: how new ways of living and working drive post-crash prosperity (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2010). 99. Schumpeter, Capitalism, socialism and democracy, pp.81–83. 100. Clayton M. Christensen, ‘The ongoing process of building a theory of disruption’, Journal of Product Innovation Management 23, no.1 (2006): 39–55. 101.


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Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time by Jeff Speck

A Pattern Language, active transport: walking or cycling, benefit corporation, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion charging, congestion pricing, David Brooks, Donald Shoup, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Enrique Peñalosa, food miles, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, if you build it, they will come, Induced demand, intermodal, invisible hand, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, parking minimums, peak oil, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, skinny streets, smart cities, starchitect, Stewart Brand, tech worker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

This trend began well before the recession of 2008 and subsequent fuel spikes, and is seen as cultural, not economic. Market researchers J. D. Power—hardly part of the anticar lobby—report that “online discussions by teens indicate shifts in perceptions regarding the necessity of and desire to have cars.”2 In “The Great Car Reset,” Richard Florida observes: “Younger people today … no longer see the car as a necessary expense or a source of personal freedom. In fact, it is increasingly just the opposite: not owning a car and not owning a house are seen by more and more as a path to greater flexibility, choice, and personal autonomy.”3 These driving trends are only a small part of a larger picture that has less to do with cars and more to do with cities, and specifically with how young professionals today view themselves in relation to the city, especially in comparison to previous generations.

Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, The Smart Growth Manual, Point 10.7. I: WHY WALKABILITY? 1. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation, 217. WALKING, THE URBAN ADVANTAGE 1. Jack Neff, “Is Digital Revolution Driving Decline in U.S. Car Culture?” 2. J. D. Power press release, October 8, 2009. 3. Richard Florida, “The Great Car Reset.” 4. The Segmentation Company, “Attracting College-Educated, Young Adults to Cities,” 7. 5. Patrick C. Doherty and Christopher B. Leinberger, “The Next Real Estate Boom.” 6. Ibid. 7. Christopher B. Leinberger, The Option of Urbanism, 89. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 90. 10.


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The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Wei Pan, Gourab Ghoshal, Coco Krumme, Manuel Cebrian, and Alex Pentland, “Urban Characteristics Attributable to Density-Driven Tie Formation” Nature Communications, June 4, 2013, https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms2961 (accessed June 26, 2019); Brian Knudsen, Richard Florida, Gary Gates, and Kevin Stolarick, “Urban Density, Creativity, and Innovation,” Creative Class, May 2007, http://creativeclass.com/rfcgdb/articles/Urban_Density_Creativity_and_Innovation.pdf (accessed June 26, 2019); Richard Florida, “The Density of Innovation,” The Atlantic, September 21, 2010, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/09/the-density-of-innovation/62576/ (accessed June 26, 2019); and Gerald Carlino, Satyajit Chatterjee, and Robert Hunt, “Urban Density and the Rate of Invention,” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, August 2006 draft, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?


pages: 322 words: 84,580

The Economics of Belonging: A Radical Plan to Win Back the Left Behind and Achieve Prosperity for All by Martin Sandbu

air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, debt deflation, deindustrialization, deskilling, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, green new deal, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, mini-job, Money creation, mortgage debt, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, pink-collar, precariat, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, social intelligence, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, universal basic income, very high income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Anand Menon, “Uniting the United Kingdom,” Foreign Affairs, 6 July 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-kingdom/2016-07-06/uniting-united-kingdom. 2. Elisa Giannone, “Skilled-Biased Technical Change and Regional Convergence” (2017 Meeting Papers 190, Society for Economic Dynamics, January 2017), https://economicdynamics.org/meetpapers/2017/paper_190.pdf; Richard Florida, “Welcome to the ‘Great Divergence,’ ” CityLab, 14 February 2017, https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/02/welcome-to-the-great-divergence/513548/; Peter Ganong and Daniel Shoag, “Why Has Regional Income Convergence in the U.S. Declined?,” Journal of Urban Economics 102 (November 2017): 76–90, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jue.2017.07.002; Timothy Taylor, “Why Has US Regional Convergence Declined?

An intriguing proposal to prevent this, outlined in Hendrickson, Muro, and Galston, Countering the Geography of Discontent, is to impose a 100 per cent federal tax on any incentives offered to specific companies by local authorities. In Europe, one can see the European Union’s state aid rules as serving a similar function: preventing local or national governments, especially poorer ones, from bidding away development resources in the quest for investment. 16. Richard Florida, “The Hypocrisy of Amazon’s HQ2 Process,” CityLab, 10 May 2018, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/the-hypocrisy-of-amazons-hq2-process/560072/; Edward Luce, “Beauty Contest to Host New Amazon Base Reveals Ugly Truths,” Financial Times, 6 June 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/f9f2b3bc-5eaa-11e8-9334-2218e7146b04.


pages: 101 words: 24,949

The London Problem: What Britain Gets Wrong About Its Capital City by Jack Brown

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Etonian, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, knowledge economy, lockdown, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, post-war consensus, quantitative easing, remote working, Richard Florida, sceptred isle, superstar cities, working-age population, zero-sum game

Other world cities also punch way above their economic weight and generate resentment at home.57 Greg Clark and Tim Moonen observe that some of these accusations – that such cities get more than their fair share of national resources, that they cause domestic ‘brain drain’ and exert too much influence on national governments – are often hotly disputed, but ‘what is clear is that these concerns pose a major challenge to the viability of the world city model.’58 The urbanist Richard Florida connects this situation directly to major political events in the mid-2010s: The divides separating global superstar cities from the rest of their own countries are exactly what resulted in the voting swings towards Brexit and Trump. Superstar cities, in effect, form a league of their own, often having more in common with each other than they do with cities across their own nations.59 Clark and Moonen pick up a similar theme.


pages: 332 words: 91,780

Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity by Currid

barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, Donald Trump, income inequality, index card, industrial cluster, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, place-making, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, prediction markets, public intellectual, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, rolodex, search costs, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Fry, the long tail, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, winner-take-all economy

Along with her help as a researcher, she toiled away on last-minute work for the book, from reformatting notes (a task I wouldn’t give my worst enemy) to looking up references. Vivian is a doctoral student at USC, and her attention to detail, intelligence, and ability to work under pressure are impressive and bode well for her own future career as a scholar. My scholarly colleagues and mentors Harvey Molotch, Susan Fainstein, Richard Florida, Lance Freeman, David Galenson, Tyler Cowen, Michael Storper, Allen Scott, and Dalton Conley were thoughtful and generous in the time they gave me to talk about my ideas for this book. I am fortunate to have Leo Braudy as my colleague at USC. His The Frenzy of Renown is the original treatise on the topic of fame, and his insights into my own work have been essential.

Additionally, because so many entertainers are “freelance” and essentially work on contract rather than on retainer, their employment numbers are not often picked up in firm employee numbers. 4. As not all workers within the broadly defined support and prepping industries (e.g., fitness trainers, nutritionists, hairstylists, and so-forth) are working strictly for celebrities, I took a percentage of the overall prep and support industries. I computed this number by incorporating Richard Florida’s methodology for approximating the “creative class,” or those members of the workforce who “generate meaningful new forms.” Florida makes the point that members of the creative class depend on multiple service workers to support them. I extend this argument to include the identified “support” industries and occupations more generally that work within the celebrity economy.


pages: 346 words: 89,180

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, book value, Brexit referendum, business climate, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, dark matter, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, financial innovation, full employment, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gentrification, gigafactory, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mother of all demos, Network effects, new economy, Ocado, open economy, patent troll, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, place-making, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, quantitative hedge fund, rent-seeking, revision control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Vanguard fund, walkable city, X Prize, zero-sum game

Cluster policy can also be politically convenient: governments that for ideological reasons are anxious about seeming too interventionist can point out that they are only helping out clusters that are already there, not trying to create clusters from scratch; governments unable or unwilling to spend much money will find that when it comes to cluster policy, moral suasion and cost-effective networking events go a long way. It is no surprise that the writings of commentators like Michael Porter and Richard Florida, both of whom have stressed the importance of aspects of clusters in economic growth, have been very popular with policymakers over the last thirty years. The flipside of cheap, light-touch cluster policies is that it is difficult to show whether they have been effective. There are relatively rigorous ways of evaluating the economic effect of grants, tax breaks, or infrastructure investments.

Getting this right involves striking a balance; it takes a combination of Jane Jacobs–style liberalism, tolerating messy and diverse areas rather than building multilane highways through them, and of some benign planning, providing enough infrastructure for people to get around and places for them to meet. The kinds of cities that attract what Richard Florida called the “creative class,” or the “innovation districts” that Bruce Katz observed emerging across the United States, involve a mixture of judicious planning and organic growth. There are inevitably tensions in this kind of policy. In intangible-intensive cities like New York and London, liberalizing planning rules to allow more housing to be built is criticized for causing the destruction of important public spaces and cultural venues where people congregate.


pages: 327 words: 88,121

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community by Marc J. Dunkelman

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, Broken windows theory, business cycle, call centre, clean water, company town, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, David Brooks, delayed gratification, different worldview, double helix, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Edward Jenner, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, helicopter parent, if you build it, they will come, impulse control, income inequality, invention of movable type, Jane Jacobs, Khyber Pass, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Nate Silver, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Richard Florida, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, the strength of weak ties, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban decay, urban planning, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Believing that distinct social environments shaped disparate social outcomes, they worried that the depravity of urban life might breed generations of social misfits.11 They feared that absent the warmth and comity of small-town America, the children of urban factory workers would mature without the decency required to sustain a modern, civilized society. The American Dream might eventually be extinguished amid the crime-ridden and poverty-stricken streets of America’s overcrowded cities. By the end of the 1900s, with cities awash in the affluent crowd Richard Florida termed the “creative class” seeming safer and more prosperous, a look back might have concluded that the Chicago School’s concerns were absurd.12 But a snapshot of life back then reveals the roots of their worry. America’s big turn-of-the-century metropolises were nasty places. The nation’s new mills and factories polluted the surrounding areas.

That’s not the model at work in the Bay Area, where engineers and programmers have congregated because of their similar interests. It’s not that one model is better than the other—but they’re different, and the shift marks a new model of growth, both for good and for bad. It’s worth noting that there’s movement afoot to return to the model of innovation through diversity, as evidenced by the pull of what Richard Florida has termed the “creative class.”33 The big suburban campuses that defined the exodus of businesses from urban areas—the sprawling, isolated facilities that were in vogue during the 1970s and 1980s in particular—are being abandoned by firms eager to capture the vitality of urban America. The so-called Platinum Mile in Westchester County, a stretch of highway north of Manhattan that was once dotted with big corporate office parks, has seen its vacancy rate rise to nearly 20 percent as firms have migrated back into New York City.34 And UBS, the financial giant that moved its offices out of Manhattan for Stamford, Connecticut, in 1996 has since considered a move back.35 It seems clear that two central tensions define the way American community life bears on economic innovation.


pages: 250 words: 88,762

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World by Tim Harford

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, colonial rule, company town, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, European colonialism, experimental economics, experimental subject, George Akerlof, income per capita, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, John von Neumann, Larry Ellison, law of one price, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, New Economic Geography, new economy, Patri Friedman, plutocrats, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Fact about people in high-rises is from an op-ed by the British geographer Daniel Dorling, published in the Observer, September 25, 2005. The original unedited version is at sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/publications/2005/ Ghettos_observer_25_9_05.pdf. Many of the eager consumers: For an exploration of the gays-as-pioneers thesis, see Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander, “There Goes the Neighborhood,” working paper, March 2007, creativeclass.typepad.com/thecreativityexchange/files/Florida_Mellander_Housing_Values_1.pdf. Hammond’s computer creates: Ross Hammond, “Endogenous Transition Dynamics in Corruption: An Agent-Based Computer Model,” CSED Working Paper 19, December 2000, www.brookings.edu/es/dynamics/ papers/ross/ross.htm.

The sociologist Mark Granovetter: Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6(May 1973): 1360–80, www.stanford.edu/dept/soc/people/faculty/granovetter/documents/TheStrengthof WeakTies.pdf. 7. THE WORLD IS SPIKY The World is Spiky: I stole this delightful title from Richard Florida’s article with Tim Gulden in The Atlantic, October 2005. “Our dollar looks the same”: Daniel Gross, “The Value of a New York Dollar,” New York, November 6, 2006. The bottom line: Gross, “The Value of a New York Dollar.” Ed Glaeser, the Harvard-based economist: Edward Glaeser, “Are Cities Dying?”


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

Here Southeastern Michigan Council of Governments and Courtney Flynn, Wayne State University Center for Urban Studies. Here Lawrence Mishel, “The Wedges Between Productivity and Median Compensation Growth,” Economic Policy Institute, Issue Brief no. 330 (April 26, 2012). Here Blockchain Luxembourg SA, api.blockchain.info/charts/preview /market-price.png?timespan=all&lang=en. Here Richard Florida and Karen M. King, “Spiky Venture Capital: The Geography of Venture Capital Investment by Metro and Zip Code,” Martin Prosperity Institute (February 22, 2016). Here Rural Electrification Administration, A Guide for Members of REA Cooperatives (US Department of Agriculture, 1939), 20–21. Here Concept from Peter Turchin, “The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America,” Cliodynamica (blog) (June 21, 2013), peterturchin.com/cliodynamica/strange-disappearance.

On housing, see Laura Gottesdiener, “The Empire Strikes Back,” TomDispatch (November 26, 2013); on employment, see Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011); on citizenship, see Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen (Columbia Global Reports, 2015); on clouds, see John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (University of Chicago Press, 2015). 8. Richard Florida, Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (Basic Books, 2008), argued for a tripartite distinction among the “mobile,” the “stuck,” and the “rooted”; for a more recent policy analysis, see David Schleicher, “Stuck! The Law and Economics of Residential Stability,” Yale Law Journal 127 (2017). 9.


The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Sugrue, Thomas J.

affirmative action, business climate, classic study, collective bargaining, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Ford paid five dollars a day, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, job automation, jobless men, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, oil shock, pink-collar, postindustrial economy, Quicken Loans, rent control, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, technological determinism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

Even with incentives and, even somehow, if Detroit could expand its highly educated, highly skilled workforce, there are simply too many forces pulling capital away from the city in search of low costs.26 If Detroit is unlikely to rise again as the Motor City, some planners envision its reinvention as a haven for artists, cultural producers, and hipsters. Urbanist Richard Florida, who made his reputation by arguing that the key to urban revitalization is a city’s ability to attract and retain a “creative class,” has been particularly influential in Detroit. The city’s boosters point to the revival of the once-bleak Midtown neighborhood, the rise of a thriving arts and cultural scene in the city, the gentrification of Corktown and a few blocks of Michigan Avenue near the abandoned Michigan Central Station, and the conversion of long-abandoned downtown skyscrapers into lofts.

For a useful overview of urban farming in the city, see John Gallagher, Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), ch. 3. 26. Bill Vlasic, “Last Auto Plant Brings Detroit Hope and Cash,”New York Times, July 15, 2013. 27. Richard Florida,The Rise of Creative Class Revisited(New York: Basic Books, 2012). For a compelling description of hipsters and the appeal of Detroit, see Binelli, Detroit City is the Place to Be. 28. Andrew Moore, Detroit Disassembled (Akron: Damiani/Akron Art Museum, 2010); Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, The Ruins of Detroit (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2011); for a critique, see Jerry Herron, “The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit,” Places: The Design Observer Group, January 9, 2012, http://places​.design​observer​.com​/feature​/the​-forgetting​-machine​-a​-history​-of​-detroit​/31848/. 29.

., The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 137–57; June Manning Thomas, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 17. Eugenie Ladner Birch, “Having a Longer View on Downtown Living,” Journal of the American Planning Association 68 (1): 5–21 offers an excellent survey of population trends and growth patterns in new downtowns. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002) has been an influential guide for urban planners and policymakers. 18. On the importance of “meds and eds,” see especially Daniel Gitterman, Joanne Spetz, and Matthew Fellowes, “The Other Side of the Ledger: Federal Health Spending in Metropolitan Economies” (discussion paper, Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, September 2004, http://www.brook.edu/metro/pubs/20040917_gitterman.htm).


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The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics by David Goodhart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, assortative mating, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, central bank independence, centre right, coherent worldview, corporate governance, credit crunch, Crossrail, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, first-past-the-post, gender pay gap, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, low skilled workers, market friction, mass immigration, meritocracy, mittelstand, Neil Kinnock, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, obamacare, old-boy network, open borders, open immigration, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, shareholder value, Skype, Sloane Ranger, stem cell, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

As Hames implies this is not a positive state of affairs for Britain or even for most people in the capital itself: ‘It makes London an incredibly expensive city in which to live and work, with the property market utterly distorted by its status as an international enclave … Moreover, it can make the rest of the country feel inconsequential. This despite the fact that cities like Aberdeen, Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle and Oxford are world leaders in certain fields.’44 London has a high proportion of what Richard Florida calls the Creative Class—highly educated, mobile people for whom rootedness is not a high priority.45 And it has a relatively small proportion of the middle income/middle status people who form the core of any country. Some of those people, especially those on modest incomes from the white British majority, have in recent years felt themselves squeezed out both financially and culturally between affluent professionals and the growing ethnic minority presence.

.), 2014. 36.Ipsos MORI Generations, ‘Integration in Schools’, www.ipsos-mori-generations.com/integration 37.YouGov, ‘The Challenge Survey results’, October 2016, https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/qkp8raq0wu/TheChallenge_Results_161004_Integration_W.pdf 38.Trevor Phillips, ‘Race and Faith: The Deafening Silence’, Civitas, June 2016. 39.Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, London: Penguin, 2012. 40.Michael Lind, ‘The Open-Borders “Liberaltarianism” of the New Urban Elite’, National Review, 15 September 2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440055/open-borders-ideology-americas-urban-elite-threat-nationalism 41.www.ukpopulation2016.com 42.Peter Mandler, ‘Britain’s EU Problem is a London Problem’, Dissent, 24 June 2016. 43.Jon Kelly, ‘London-centric’, www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-248d9ac7–9784–4769–936a-8d3b435857a8 44.Tim Hames, ‘Britain’s capital punishment’, Progress, 7 November 2013. 45.Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Life, Community and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books, 2002. 46.Simon Parker, ‘Interview: Ken Livingstone’, Prospect, 29 April 2007. 47.Eric Kaufmann and Gareth Harris, ‘Changing Places: Mapping the white British response to ethnic change…’, Demos, 2014. 48.Sarah Bell and James Paskins (eds), Imagining the Future City: London 2062, London: Ubiquity Press, 2013. 49.Ian Gordon, ‘Displacement and Densification: Tracing Spatial Impacts of Migration Inflows to London’, LSE London/RUPS MSc seminar series, 17 February 2014. 50.Migration Watch UK, ‘MW286—Who is getting local authority housing in London?


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Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity by Lawrence Lessig

Brewster Kahle, Cass Sunstein, content marketing, creative destruction, digital divide, Free Software Foundation, future of journalism, George Akerlof, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the printing press, Joi Ito, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Louis Daguerre, machine readable, new economy, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, software patent, synthetic biology, transaction costs

Thus, as we'll see more clearly in the chapters below, the law's role is less and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect certain industries against competition. Just at the time digital technology could unleash an extraordinary range of commercial and noncommercial creativity, the law burdens this creativity with insanely complex and vague rules and with the threat of obscenely severe penalties. We may be seeing, as Richard Florida writes, the "Rise of the Creative Class."[18] Unfortunately, we are also seeing an extraordinary rise of regulation of this creative class. These burdens make no sense in our tradition. We should begin by understanding that tradition a bit more and by placing in their proper context the current battles about behavior labeled "piracy."

[17] Lisa Bannon, "The Birds May Sing, but Campers Can't Unless They Pay Up," Wall Street Journal, 21 August 1996, available at link #3; Jonathan Zittrain, "Calling Off the Copyright War: In Battle of Property vs. Free Speech, No One Wins," Boston Globe, 24 November 2002. [18] In The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002), Richard Florida documents a shift in the nature of labor toward a labor of creativity. His work, however, doesn't directly address the legal conditions under which that creativity is enabled or stifled. I certainly agree with him about the importance and significance of this change, but I also believe the conditions under which it will be enabled are much more tenuous


pages: 336 words: 95,773

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, centre right, corporate raider, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, independent contractor, job satisfaction, job-hopping, labor-force participation, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, payday loans, pension reform, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, stop buying avocado toast, TaskRabbit, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, unpaid internship, women in the workforce

Surrender, Dorothy And what’s remarkable is that we Millennials have been told for years that we shouldn’t think this is all that remarkable. Instead, we’ve been told since we were in college to expect that fewer and fewer of us will genuinely be able to succeed. Boomers and Gen Xers usually try to put a more positive spin on it, of course, but that’s really the message. Richard Florida’s 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class was published just as the oldest Millennials were entering the work force or picking their college majors. Its first sentence said it all: “This book describes the emergence of a new social class.” The creative class of the title, which Florida estimated comprised more than 30 percent of America’s workforce at that time, derived its identity from its members’ “roles as purveyors of creativity.”31 This highly skilled, highly creative class’s attitudes to work, leisure, society, and so much more would reshape America’s economy and its culture.

Kahn, “The Long-Term Labor Market Consequences of Graduating From College in a Bad Economy,” Labour Economics 17, no. 2 (April 2010). 30. Philip Oreopoulos, Till von Wachter, and Andrew Heisz, “The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 4, no. 1 (2012). 31. Richard Florida, “Preface to the Original Edition,” in The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 32. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (New York: Norton, 2014). 33. Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Plume, 2013). 34.


pages: 332 words: 97,325

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups by Randall Stross

affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, always be closing, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Elon Musk, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, index fund, inventory management, John Markoff, Justin.tv, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, medical residency, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Morris worm, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, transaction costs, Y Combinator

PG, “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas,” April 2005, www.paulgraham.com/bronze.html. 15. Perhaps I, a Silicon Valley resident, am inclined to view the South as more isolated from tech centers as a matter of reflex. Richard Florida argues that the South does not receive due credit for attracting venture capital and shows other evidence that it too has become a hospitable host of “Startup Nation.” Richard Florida, “The Spread of Start-Up America and the Rise of the High-Tech South,” The Atlantic, October 2011, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/the-spread-of-start-up-america-and-the-rise-of-the-high-tech-south/246916/. 16.


The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, blood diamond, citizen journalism, creative destruction, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, future of work, glass ceiling, global village, Hacker Ethic, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, patent troll, peer-to-peer, prisoner's dilemma, public intellectual, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, SETI@home, side hustle, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog

Apparently even money isn’t doing it for us as much as it used to, either. In 1989, 58 percent of the U.K. population claimed they were happy, but this figure had fallen to 45 percent by 2003, despite a 60 percent increase in average incomes. Punk Capitalism | 27 In his book The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida argues that across the West, we are being driven by creativity above all else. “We strive to work more independently and find it much harder to cope with incompetent managers and bullying bosses. . . . Whereas the lifestyle of the previous organizational age emphasized conformity, the new lifestyle favors individuality, self-statement, acceptance of difference and the desire for rich multidimensional experiences.”

Panis, The 21st Century at Work (Monograph, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, 2004). Page 27 Tamara Schweitzer, “U.S. Workers Hate Their Jobs More Than Ever,” Inc.com, March 6, 2007. www.inc.com/criticalnews/articles/200703/work_Printer_Friendly .html. 248 | Notes For a great overview of why we are being driven by creativity above all else, see Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Page 27 Lulu.com, The Life Expectancy of Bestsellers Plummets, Finds Study, May 19, 2006. www.lulu.com/static/pr/05_19_06.php. Page 28 Adrian Bowyer, interview by author, June 10, 2006 (all quotes from Bowyer used in this chapter are from this interview).


pages: 98 words: 30,109

Remote: Office Not Required by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

Broken windows theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Google Hangouts, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, remote working, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, The future is already here

If your organization entrusts you with the responsibility to get things done, this is a must-read.” —David Allen, internationally bestselling author of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity “Remote is the way I work and live. Now I know why. If you work in an office, you need to read this remarkable book, and change your life.” —Richard Florida, author of the national bestseller The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life “In the near future, everyone will work remotely, including those sitting across from you. You’ll need this farsighted book to prepare for this inversion.”


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

Communities in Ohio, Kentucky, and Michigan were suddenly mired in their own foreclosure crises, compounded by another deep slide in the auto industry as General Motors and Chrysler wobbled on the precipice of bankruptcy. There was broad agreement that the postrecession economy needed to be very different from the real estate– and consumption-driven economy that had run aground. The United States needed, as Richard Florida calls his book about life after the crash, a “great reset.” There was also general consensus on the key elements of that reset or new strategy: innovation in science and technology, exports, and sustainability and new energy. For example, Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman 02-2151-2 ch2.indd 19 5/20/13 6:48 PM 20 NYC: INNOVATION AND THE NEXT ECONOMY and CEO of General Electric, told an audience in Detroit in June 2009 that the United States should have three priorities: “become a country that is good at manufacturing and exports,” “win where it counts in clean energy,” and “invest in new technology.”6 Lawrence Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, said one month later, “The rebuilt American Economy must be more export-oriented and less consumption-oriented, more environmentally-oriented and less fossilenergy-oriented, more bio- and software-engineering-oriented and less financial-engineering-oriented.”7 In its meetings with business, civic, and academic leaders, the NYCEDC gleaned more than 100 ideas about how to move the city’s economy forward, covering everything from generating electricity from subway turnstiles to immigration reform to better waterfront access.

Alan Berube and others, “State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation” (Brookings, 2010), p. 93. 23. According to Chris Nelson, “Between 2010 and 2030, households with children will account for about 13 percent of the total change in households; households without children will represent the rest.” Arthur C. Nelson, Reshaping Metropolitan America, p. 27. 24. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 25. Joseph Cortright, “Young and Restless 2011” (Washington: CEOs for Cities, 2011). 26. Robert Puentes, “Have Americans Hit Peak Travel? A Discussion of the Changes in U.S.


pages: 133 words: 36,528

Peak Car: The Future of Travel by David Metz

autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, bike sharing, Clayton Christensen, congestion charging, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, disruptive innovation, driverless car, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Ford Model T, gentrification, high-speed rail, Just-in-time delivery, low cost airline, megaproject, Network effects, Ocado, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez canal 1869, The future is already here, urban sprawl, yield management, young professional

There is growing recognition of the economic and cultural importance of cities, even in a world in which digital technologies allow us to be dispersed geographically yet interact continuously. It is in cities that we attain critical mass. Persuasive arguments, both economic and cultural, in favour of cities are articulated by two prominent US academics. Richard Florida maintains that metropolitan regions with high concentrations of technology workers, artists and musicians exhibit a higher level of economic development. This well‑educated ‘creative class’ fosters an environment that attracts more creative people and the businesses where they work. Edward Glaeser emphasises ‘agglomeration economics’, which refers to increases in productivity associated with urban proximity: larger pools of skilled staff to draw upon, suppliers and customers close to hand, and spillovers of technical know‑how so that ideas diffuse rapidly—both through organised discussion amongst those with similar expertise and in gossip.


pages: 425 words: 117,334

City on the Verge by Mark Pendergrast

big-box store, bike sharing, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, desegregation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, gentrification, global village, high-speed rail, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, jitney, land bank, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, power law, Richard Florida, streetcar suburb, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transatlantic slave trade, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, young professional

Toro and his wife, empty nesters, moved from suburban Cobb County to Midtown Atlanta, the area around the thriving Peachtree Street corridor between downtown and Buckhead. North American Properties bought, improved, and sold Atlanta’s Atlantic Station, then in 2016 purchased Colony Square at 14th Street and Peachtree, planning to refurbish that venerable mixed-use development. Citing Richard Florida’s The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (2011), Toro agreed that in the coming decades, cities will reurbanize dramatically. Home ownership rates will decline as more people seek flexible, convenient living in condos, townhouses, and apartments. “This sea-change is underway,” he said.

., Making Healthy Places: Designing and Building for Health, Well-Being, and Sustainability (2011); Michael Dobbins, Urban Design and People (2009); Andres Duany et al., Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (2000); Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (2009); Alan Ehrenhalt, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (2012); Richard Florida’s three books: The Great Reset: How the Post-crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work (2011), The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited (2012), and Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life (2008); Leigh Gallagher, The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving (2013); Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (2011); Ryan Gravel, Where We Want to Live: Reclaiming Infrastructure for a New Generation of Cities (2016); Richard J.


pages: 521 words: 110,286

Them and Us: How Immigrants and Locals Can Thrive Together by Philippe Legrain

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, centre right, Chelsea Manning, clean tech, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, digital divide, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, future of work, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, job automation, Jony Ive, labour market flexibility, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, moral hazard, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open borders, open immigration, postnationalism / post nation state, purchasing power parity, remote working, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, WeWork, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working-age population

Wherever the demand for innovation comes from, it tends to be supplied in cities, as Jane Jacobs, a great American urbanist, first pointed out in the 1960s.6 More recently, Harvard economist Ed Glaeser documented in Triumph of the City how most innovation takes place in diverse, densely populated cities, where people are forever interacting with each other and experiencing new things. ‘We are a social species and we learn by being around clever people,’ he observes.7 ‘Cities have long sped this flow of ideas.’ Such diverse cities also act as a magnet for the innovative, entrepreneurial talents of what Richard Florida calls the ‘creative class’. ‘A great city has two hallmarks: tolerance for strangers and intolerance for mediocrity. These are precisely the qualities that appeal to members of the creative class – and they also happen to be qualities conducive to innovation, risk-taking and the formation of new businesses.’8 Denser cities tend to be more inventive.9 Moreover, single-industry towns are much less creative than a metropolis where lots of different people jostle together.

id=4472&plang=EN 5 Quoted in Daniel Finkelstein, ‘How to bring brains together – at top speed’, The Times, 11 September 2013. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/danielfinkelstein/article3865753.ece 6 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, 1961. 7 Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, Macmillan, 2011. 8 Richard Florida, The Rise of The Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community And Everyday Life, Basic Books, 2002. 9 ‘Mayors and mammon’, The Economist, 13 July 2013. http://www.economist.com/news/business/21581695-city-leaders-are-increasingly-adopting-business-methods-and-promoting-business-mayors-and-mammon 10 Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, Harvard Business School, 2004. 11 Donald Campbell, ‘Blind Variation and Selective Retention in Creative Thought as in Other Knowledge Processes’, Psychological Review, 67:6, 1960, pp. 380–400. 12 Dean Simonton, Origins of Genius, Oxford, 1999. 13 Scott Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, Princeton, 2007. 14 Ibid. 15 Chiara Franzoni, Giuseppe Scellato and Paula Stephan, ‘The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists’, Economics Letters, 122:1, January 2014, pp. 89–93. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176513004874 16 Jennifer Hunt and Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle, ‘How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?’


pages: 435 words: 120,574

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collective bargaining, Deep Water Horizon, desegregation, Donald Trump, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, equal pay for equal work, Exxon Valdez, feminist movement, full employment, greed is good, guest worker program, invisible hand, knowledge economy, man camp, McMansion, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, payday loans, precautionary principle, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, urban sprawl, working poor, Yogi Berra

Paradoxically, politicians on the right appeal to this sense of victimhood, even when policies such as those of former governor Jindal exacerbate the problem. In the meantime, left and right need one another, just as the blue coastal and inland cities need red state energy and rich community. The rural Midwest and South need the cosmopolitan outreach to a diverse wider world. As sociologist Richard Florida notes, “Blue state knowledge economies run on red state energy. Red state energy economies, in their turn, depend on dense coastal cities and metro areas, not just as markets and sources of migrants, but for the technology and talent they supply.” In my travels, I was humbled by the complexity and height of the empathy wall.

Riechen, and Stanley Schachter in When Prophecy Fails (London: Pinter and Martin, 2008 [1956]). 16: “They Say There Are Beautiful Trees” 231their names on waiting lists with thousands of others Chico Harlan, “Battered by Drop in Oil Prices and Jindal’s Fiscal Policies, Louisiana Falls into Budget Crisis,” Washington Post, March 4, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/the-debilitating-economic-disaster-louisianas-governor-left-behind. Also see Campbell Robertson, “In Louisiana, the Poor Lack Legal Defense,” New York Times, March 20, 2016. 233“but for the technology and talent they supply” Richard Florida, “Is Life Better in America’s Red States?” New York Times Sunday Review, January 3, 2015. 233Young conservatives are far more likely than their elders to care about the environment Amanda Little, “Will Conservatives Finally Embrace Clean Energy?” New Yorker, October 29, 2015. 2331969 Union Oil spill in the waters outside Santa Barbara, California Dan Fagin, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation (New York: Bantam Books, 2013). 233since 2009 rates of air, water, and land pollution have been rising again across the nation Despite earlier progress, pollution trends in the nation as a whole have recently begun to rise.


pages: 490 words: 153,455

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

The term “creative class” entered our vocabulary as an argument, as filmmaker and author Astra Taylor wrote, “that individual ingenuity can fill the void left by declining institutions.” Capitalism has taken the members of the so-called creative class, in the terms of its most famous advocate, Richard Florida, from outsider status, as “bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe,” and placed them “at the very heart of the process of innovation and economic growth.” In Florida’s framework, the Protestant work ethic has now fused with the “bohemian ethic,” and the bohemians suddenly had the power; it was no longer necessary for workers to struggle over control of the means of production, because those means were all in their heads anyway.

Those same young people go on to work incredibly hard for years in the hope of maybe becoming a professional artist one day, both Fox and Lucia Love said, shaping their lives around this desire only to find out that the art world doesn’t love them back. Those art schools, noted longtime arts industry worker Natasha Bunten, often turn out graduates with no idea how to make a career in their field, how to gain funding, or where there might be jobs that would pay. Artists are still likely to be held to the fringes, despite Richard Florida’s cheery framework: the flipside of the Koons Factory is the hollowed-out industrial spaces that artists claim for themselves. After the 2016 fire at Ghost Ship, an artists’ collective in an old warehouse in rapidly gentrifying Oakland, California, which killed thirty-six people, Alexander Billet and Adam Turl of Red Wedge Magazine wrote, “America hates its artists.


pages: 372 words: 152

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

In recent years, Japanese manufacturers have combined the new lean-management techniques with increasingly sophisticated computer and other information technologies to create the "factory of the future" -automated production facilities with few workers, which more nearly resemble a laboratory than a factory. Social scientists Martin Kenney and Richard Florida talk of the new lean factories that are more cerebral than physical in appearance: "Under past forms of industrial production, including mass-production Fordism, much of work was physical.... The emergence of digitization increases the importance of abstract intelligence in production and thus requires that workers actively undertake what were previously thought of as intellectual activities.

America enjoyed pre-eminence in steel production by dint of its superior technologies and organizational methods and its access to cheap raw materials and continent-wide markets. Today, that competitive edge has been seriously eroded, in large part because of the failure of U.S. companies to keep up with the new technologies of the information revolution that have remade the steel industry. Authors Martin Kenney and Richard Florida contrast two very different steel factories located within an hour of each other in America's rust belt. The first is a sprawling complex of old rusted buildings and sheds housing hundreds of workers toiling in near-Dickensian Hanging Up the Blue Collar 133 conditions. Caked with grease and grime, they tend aged steel furnaces, transforming molten metal into steel slabs.


pages: 172 words: 48,747

The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America by Sarah Kendzior

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American ideology, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate personhood, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Graeber, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, gentrification, George Santayana, glass ceiling, income inequality, independent contractor, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, payday loans, pink-collar, post-work, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, the medium is the message, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Creativity—as an expression of originality, experimentation, innovation—is not a viable product. It has been priced out into irrelevance—both by the professionalization of the industries that claim it, and the soaring cost of entry to those professions. The “creative class” is a frozen archetype—one that does not boost the economy of global cities, as urban studies theorist Richard Florida argues, but is a product of their takeover by elites. The creative class plays by the rules of the rich, because those are the only rules left. Adaptation is a form of survival. But adaptation is a form of abandonment as well. Bias Against Creativity In an article for Slate, Jessica Olien debunks the myth that originality and inventiveness are valued in U.S. society: “This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it.”


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

Back in the day, my friends and I at the Baffler loved to mock, analyze, and deride money’s cultivation of the cool. Just think of all the permutations of urban hipness that have flickered by since we first undertook that mission: Rollerblading near water. “Potemkin bohemias” like Chicago’s Wicker Park. Richard Florida’s “creative class.” And while each of these fads came and went, here is what also happened: utilities were privatized to disastrous effect, the real estate bubble grew and burst, the banks got ever bigger, state governments declared war on public workers, and the economy went off a cliff. It is time to acknowledge the truth: that our leaders have nothing to say, really, about any of this.


The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite by Michael Lind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, anti-communist, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate governance, cotton gin, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, disinformation, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, export processing zone, fake news, future of work, gentrification, global supply chain, guest worker program, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal world order, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Michael Milken, moral panic, Nate Silver, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, trade liberalization, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Wolfgang Streeck, working poor

Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Saskia Sassen, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept,” Brown Journal of World Affairs 11, no. 2 (Winter/Spring, 2005). 3. Greg Rosalsky, “What the Future of Work Means for Cities,” NPR, Planet Money, January 15, 2019; David Autor, “Work of the Past, Work of the Future,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 25588, February 2019. 4. Richard Florida, “The High Inequality of U.S. Metro Areas Compared to Countries,” CityLab.com, October 9, 2012. 5. William H. Frey, “The Suburbs: Not Just for White People Anymore,” New Republic, November 24, 2014. 6. Richard Alba, “The Likely Persistence of a White Majority,” The American Prospect, January 11, 2016; Stephen J.


pages: 497 words: 150,205

European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics Are in a Mess - and How to Put Them Right by Philippe Legrain

3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, Crossrail, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, debt deflation, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, eurozone crisis, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, forward guidance, full employment, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Irish property bubble, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, liquidity trap, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mittelstand, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, peer-to-peer rental, price stability, private sector deleveraging, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, Richard Florida, rising living standards, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, savings glut, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, working-age population, Zipcar

Such a person is more prone to question traditions, rules, and boundaries – and to search for answers where others may not think to.”614 People who are fluent in several languages also tend to be more creative. “Languages codify concepts differently, and the ability to draw upon these varied perspectives during a creative process generates a wider range of associations,” Johansson notes. Diversity can also act as a magnet for the innovative, entrepreneurial talents of what Richard Florida calls the “creative class”. “A great city has two hallmarks: tolerance for strangers and intolerance for mediocrity. These are precisely the qualities that appeal to members of the creative class – and they also happen to be qualities conducive to innovation, risk-taking, and the formation of new businesses.”615 The boost to innovation from diversity in general and immigration in particular is potentially huge.

Quoted in http://www.economist.com/node/21564536. 605 Edward Glaeser and Matthew Resseger, "The complementarity between cities and skills", National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #15103, June 2009 606 James Manyika, Jaana Remes, Richard Dobbs, Javier Orellana and Fabian Schaer, "Urban America: US cities in the global economy", McKinsey Global Institute, April 2012 607 Paul Cheshire and Christian Hilber, "Office space supply restrictions in Britain: The political economy of market revenge", Economic Journal, 2008 608 Frans Johansson, The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, Harvard Business School: 2004 609 Jonah Lehrer, Imagine: How Creativity Works, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2012 610 http://www.economist.com/node/21550235 611 http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/22/20-percent-time-here-to-stay 612 Scott Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies, Princeton: 2007 613 Donald Campbell, “Blind Variation and Selective Retention in Creative Thought as in Other Knowledge Processes”, Psychological Review 67, no. 6 (1960): 380–400. 614 Dean Simonton, Origins of Genius, Oxford: 1999 615 Richard Florida, The Rise Of The Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community And Everyday Life, Basic Books: 2002 616 Richard B. Freeman and Wei Huang, "Collaborating with People Like Me: Ethnic co-authorship within the US", NBER working paper #19905, February 2014 http://www.nber.org/papers/w19905 617 Chiara Franzonia, Giuseppe Scellatob and Paula Stephand, “The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists”, Economics Letters, Volume 122, Issue 1, January 2014, Pages 89–93 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165176513004874 618 http://www.renewoureconomy.org/research/patent-pending-how-immigrants-are-reinventing-the-american-economy-2/ 76 per cent of patents, to be precise. 619 54 per cent of all patents, to be exact. 620 A 10 per cent increase in international graduate students would raise patent applications by 3.3 per cent, university patent grants by 6.0 per cent and non-university patent grants by 4.0 per cent.


pages: 215 words: 55,212

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bike sharing, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, diversification, Firefox, fixed income, Google Earth, impact investing, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, planned obsolescence, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social web, software as a service, TaskRabbit, the built environment, the long tail, vertical integration, walkable city, yield management, young professional, Zipcar

Many of us grew up with the aspiration to own our homes. We hoped that when we retired we would have a place to live without having to pay housing costs. In recent years, home equity was also a lucrative place to invest. As home prices increased, so too did the equity. But the continued recession, or “reset,” as author Richard Florida calls it, has forced us to revisit childhood assumptions. Why is home ownership desirable? Does it ensure a less stressful, happier old age? Does the increased stress and high cost of buying, insuring, and maintaining a home for decades justify the anticipated stress reduction later in life? Perhaps we are moving into an era when feeling secure and happy will be uncoupled from what we individually own.


pages: 219 words: 63,495

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

Thus, migration has significant implications for innovation policy because the close proximity of likeminded individuals tends to create a multiplier effect. In other words, what drives economic value and productivity is not where most people live, but where most bright, ambitious and energetic people live, and this tends to be in large global cities. Creative cities According to Professor Richard Florida (author of The Rise of the Creative Class), economic progress is primarily driven by ideas, and ideas tend to cluster in large cities that are open and tolerant of diversity. If cities want to become economic powerhouses, they must therefore attract artists, writers, sculptors, musicians, immigrants and assorted oddballs, eccentrics and misfits from other places.


pages: 222 words: 50,318

The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream by Christopher B. Leinberger

addicted to oil, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, asset allocation, big-box store, centre right, commoditize, credit crunch, David Brooks, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, Ford Model T, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Savings and loan crisis, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, transit-oriented development, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, walkable city, white flight

This is a repeat of the earlier trend of increased productivity in agriculture, leading to plummeting numbers of jobs over the past century (agricultural jobs were down to less than two percent of all jobs in 2000 from, as mentioned in chapter 1, forty percent in 1900 and twenty-seven percent in 1920). The agricultural economy transitioned to the industrial economy, and now the industrial is transitioning to the knowledge economy. The economic driver of how the American Dream is implemented on the ground is changing once again. Dr. Richard Florida’s assertion in his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, that future economic growth depends on the retention and attraction of the highly educated has become accepted wisdom of many economic development officials in cities throughout the country. The breeding and attraction of young, highly educated people to start new companies, attract similar entrepreneurs, build the local tax base, and become more “hip” is driving many urban and suburban economic development strategies in the 2000s.


Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

Diamond, “Trump: I Could Shoot Somebody and Not Lose Voters” CNN Politics (2016). Published online January 24, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/​2016/​01/​23/​politics/​donald-trump-shoot-somebody-support/. 94. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 2016). 95. Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class, and What We Can Do About It (UK: Hachette, 2017). 96. R.T.T. Forman, “The Urban Region: Natural Systems in Our Place, Our Nourishment, Our Home Range, Our Future,” Landscape Ecology 23 (2008), 251–53. 97.


pages: 237 words: 69,985

The Longing for Less: Living With Minimalism by Kyle Chayka

Airbnb, Blue Bottle Coffee, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, Mason jar, offshore financial centre, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, undersea cable, Whole Earth Catalog

Without the full context, the light, space, and architecture that the loft or the desert provided, the works weren’t as meaningful. I had to agree; Judd’s work never looks as good as when it’s in his own spaces and part of a total work of art. Over the decades art itself has become a commercializing force in the wider economy. Richard Florida’s Creative Class theory, circa 2002, made it common knowledge that artists are on the front lines of reviving urban spaces—a process also known as gentrification. SoHo was the classic example. Judd and so many other artists demonstrated how factory loft living could be cool, giving postindustrial space a veneer of cultural capital that later made it possible for developers.


pages: 274 words: 63,679

Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America by Angie Schmitt

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, car-free, congestion pricing, COVID-19, crossover SUV, desegregation, Donald Trump, Elaine Herzberg, gentrification, global pandemic, high-speed rail, invention of air conditioning, Lyft, megacity, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, wikimedia commons

World Health Organization, “Global Status Report on Road Safety 2018,” June 17, 2018, https://www.who.int/publications-detail/global-status-report-on-road-safety-2018. 2. World Health Organization, “Global Status Report.” 3. World Health Organization, “Global Status Report.” 4. Soames Job and Julie Babinard, telephone interview, June 14, 2019. 5. Richard Florida, “The Great Divide in How Americans Commute to Work,” Citylab, January 22, 2019, https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/01/commuting-to-work-data-car-public-transit-bike/580507/. 6. Job and Babinard, telephone interview. 7. Clare Cummings and Beatrice Obwocha, “At the Crossroads: The Politics of Road Safety in Nairobi,” World Resources Institute Case Study, March 2018. 8.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

… since 1970 the difference between the most and least educated U.S. cities has doubled…: Tyler Cowen, Average Is Over: Powering America beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), pp. 172–173. Fifty-nine percent of American counties saw more businesses close than open…: “Dynamism in Retreat: Consequences for Regions, Markets and Workers,” Economic Innovation Group, February 2017. California, New York, and Massachusetts accounted for 75 percent of venture capital in 2016…: Richard Florida, “A Closer Look at the Geography of Venture Capital in the U.S.” CityLab, February 23, 2016. A series of studies by the economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren…: Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility: Childhood Exposure Effects and County-Level Estimates,” Equality of Opportunity, May 2015.


pages: 300 words: 78,475

Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream by Arianna Huffington

Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 13, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, call centre, carried interest, citizen journalism, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, David Brooks, do what you love, extreme commuting, Exxon Valdez, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, invisible hand, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, late fees, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Savings and loan crisis, single-payer health, smart grid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Works Progress Administration

May 2007, www.economicmobility.org. 32 Since the recession began: Darlene Superville, “Obama: Jobs Bill Will Help Small Business Owners,” 13 Mar. 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com. 33 Over 2 million of those: Christopher Rugaber, “Millions of Jobs That Were Cut Won’t Likely Return,” 13 May 2010, www.bostonglobe.com. 34 We lost 1.2 million: Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Irwin Stelzer, and John Weicher, “Hudson Institute Economic Report,” 8 Jan. 2010, www.hudson.org. 35 In 1950, manufacturing accounted: Richard Florida, “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” Mar. 2009, www.theatlantic.com. 36 Indeed, one-third of all: Richard McCormack, “The Plight of American Manufacturing,” 21 Dec. 2009, www.prospect.org. 37 According to Thomas Philippon: Thomas Philippon, “The Future of the Financial Industry,” 16 Oct. 2008, www.sternfinance.blogspot.com. 38 As MIT professor Simon Johnson recounted: Simon Johnson, “The Quiet Coup,” May 2009, www.theatlantic.com. 39 That’s right—over 40: Ibid. 40 James Kwak, coauthor of: James Kwak, “ ‘13 Bankers’ in 4 Pictures: Why Wall Street Profits Are Out of Whack,” 15 Apr. 2010, www.huffingtonpost.com. 41 According to New York Times columnist Paul Krugman: Paul Krugman, “Don’t Cry for Wall Street,” 22 Apr. 2010, www.nytimes.com. 42 But the data points: Sandra Pianalto, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, “Forecasting in Uncertain Times,” 18 May 2010, www.clevelandfed.org. 43 Her conclusion: “Many people …”: Ibid. 44 At a D.C. jobs fair: Laura Bassett, “D.C.


pages: 260 words: 76,223

Ctrl Alt Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It. by Mitch Joel

3D printing, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, behavioural economics, call centre, clockwatching, cloud computing, content marketing, digital nomad, do what you love, Firefox, future of work, gamification, ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, place-making, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, vertical integration, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Nobody is there trying to shuttle you to a room and there is no hustling from the wait staff to buy drinks or food. People come to the hotel (the majority of them are not guests, but native New Yorkers) to plug in, connect to the Internet, and run their businesses. This is one hotel that is encouraging people to come, squat, and work. And it’s cool. You can feel the energy. This is what Richard Florida was describing in 2004 when he released his bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class. Creativity in our economy has not only become one of the key growth areas (as Florida predicted), but it is increasingly becoming the core unique selling proposition to everything. The challenge with creativity is that it does not align with how our work spaces have been planned and urbanized to date.


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Cities that had been pining away for some of Silicon Valley’s magic thrilled at the opportunities the new era presented, sponsoring makerspaces and demo days and holding seminars on how to lure in more venture investment. While the list of places with viable high-tech clusters expanded, however, high-tech investors remained firmly concentrated in the same places they had been in the 1980s. Urban theorist Richard Florida, whose widely read work on the “creative class” fueled cities’ high-tech hopes, found that San Francisco and Silicon Valley firms together accounted for over 40 percent of the VC investments and over 30 percent of the deals made nationally in 2013. Seattle came in at a feeble seventh place. Start-ups were blossoming in the home of Gates and Bezos, but it was too easy to fly down to Sand Hill Road to raise money.

Schonberger, “Inside the Market,” The Los Angeles Times, November 2, 1969, L1. 7. Arthur Rock, interviews by Sally Smith Hughes, 2008 and 2009, “Early Bay Area Venture Capitalists: Shaping the Economic and Business Landscape,” Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, California, 20–21. Also see Martin Kenney and Richard Florida, “Venture Capital in Silicon Valley: Fueling New Firm Formation,” in Martin Kenney, ed., Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 98–123. 8. Leslie Berlin, “The First Venture Capital Firm in Silicon Valley: Draper, Gaither & Anderson,” in Making the American Century: Essays on the Political Culture of Twentieth Century America, ed.


pages: 281 words: 83,505

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life by Eric Klinenberg

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, assortative mating, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, Filter Bubble, food desert, gentrification, ghettoisation, helicopter parent, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, megaproject, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart grid, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the High Line, universal basic income, urban planning, young professional

flood protection, adaptation, and climate security: City of New Orleans, Plan for the 21st Century: New Orleans 2030, 2010, https://www.nola.gov/​city-planning/​master-plan/. its bike-share program: See Shannon Sims, “Building a Social Scene Around a Bike Path,” CityLab, August 1, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/​life/​2017/​08/​lafitte-greenway-new-orleans/​534735/, and Richard Florida, “Mapping America’s Bike Commuters,” CityLab, May 19, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/​transportation/​2017/​05/​mapping-americas-bike-commuters/​526923/. CONCLUSION: BEFORE WE LIFT THE NEXT SHOVEL “Are we building the world we all want?”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Global Community,” Facebook, February 16, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/​notes/​mark-zuckerberg/​building-global-community/​10154544292806634/.


pages: 290 words: 85,847

A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next by Tom Standage

accelerated depreciation, active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-city movement, bike sharing, car-free, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Chris Urmson, City Beautiful movement, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, Ida Tarbell, Induced demand, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, peak oil, prompt engineering, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, safety bicycle, self-driving car, social distancing, Steve Jobs, streetcar suburb, tech bro, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbiased observer, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city, white flight, wikimedia commons, Yom Kippur War, Zipcar

I am grateful to the historians, urbanists, and technologists who have helped me along the way by sharing their expertise and knowledge so generously; any errors are of course entirely my fault. Thank you to Richard Bulliet, Eric Morris, Joel Tarr, Kassia St. Clair, Stephen Davies, Tom Wheeler, Tony Hadland, Peter Norton, and Brian Ladd; to Joel Kotkin, Donald Shoup, Shlomo Angel, Alan Berger, Jarrett Walker, William Riggs, Richard Florida, and Chenoe Hart; and to Sebastian Thrun, Elon Musk, Chris Urmson, Sterling Anderson, Oliver Cameron, Stan Boland, and Karl Iagnemma. Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to my parents for indulging my obsession with cars from a young age, to my son, Miles, for all the car hunts in the automotive jungles of Knightsbridge and Goodwood, to my daughter, Tate, for her classical expertise and sharp eye as an editor, and finally, for putting up with all the horse manure stories, to my wife, Kirstin, to whom this book is dedicated.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

The entrepreneurial trends described by Harvey only deepened with time. As the tech economy was entering a new stage after the dot-com bubble had burst, cities tried to attract a particular class of worker in the hope that industries wanting to employ them would follow. The “creative class” theory, as outlined by urbanist and consultant Richard Florida, asserted that governments needed to create urban amenities and pass laws that would specifically appeal to this segment of high-demand “knowledge” workers with above-average incomes, further sidelining the residents who had already been hit by the shift to urban entrepreneurialism. In the process of importing affluent workers, cities embraced further gentrification, causing house prices to soar and urban inequality to deepen.


pages: 606 words: 87,358

The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization by Richard Baldwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Branko Milanovic, buy low sell high, call centre, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, commodity super cycle, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, domestication of the camel, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, financial intermediation, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Henri Poincaré, imperial preference, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invention of the telegraph, investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Dyson, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, low skilled workers, market fragmentation, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, New Economic Geography, out of africa, paper trading, Paul Samuelson, Pax Mongolica, profit motive, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, Simon Kuznets, Skype, Snapchat, Stephen Hawking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus

In other words, the knowledge sluice-gate is wide open and know-how is flowing abundantly to a handful of devel oping nations. As a result of high technology from G7 firms fusing with low wages in developing nations, almost a fifth of world manufacturing value added has shifted from North to South. Yet despite the relaxation of the goods and ideas constraints, “the world is spiky,” as Richard Florida argued in his eponymous 2005 article in the Atlantic. Most international production networks and value chains are regional not global. They are inside Factory Asia, Factory Europe, or Factory North America. Moreover, as far as people-clustering is concerned, ongoing urbanization suggests distance is getting more important, not less.


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

., p. 14. 84.ILO, Global Employment Trends 2014, pp. 11–12; Bureau of Labor Statistics, ‘Of Total Unemployed, Percent Unemployed 27 Weeks and Over’, Federal Reserve Economic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis, 1 January 1948; Eurostat, ‘Long-Term Unemployment Rate’, Eurostat, 2015, at ec.europa.eu. 85.Alan Krueger, Judd Cramer and David Cho, ‘Are the Long-Term Unemployed on the Margins of the Labor Market?’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Spring 2014. 86.Loïc Wacquant, ‘The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on Its Nature and Implications’, Acta Sociologica 39: 2 (1996), p. 125; Richard Florida, Zara Matheson, Patrick Adler and Taylor Brydges, The Divided City and the Shape of the New Metropolis, Martin Prosperity Institute, 2014, at martinprosperity.org. 87.William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 15. 88.Loïc Wacquant, ‘Class, Race and Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America’, Socialism and Democracy 28: 3 (2014), p. 46. 89.Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 191. 90.Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: New Press, 2012), p. 218. 91.The number of black males working in manufacturing was nearly cut in half between 1973 and 1987.


pages: 313 words: 92,053

Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life by Colin Ellard

Apollo 11, augmented reality, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, carbon footprint, classic study, cognitive load, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, Dunbar number, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, Howard Rheingold, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Lewis Mumford, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, megastructure, mirror neurons, Mondo 2000, more computing power than Apollo, Oculus Rift, overview effect, Peter Eisenman, RFID, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, sentiment analysis, Skinner box, smart cities, starchitect, TED Talk, the built environment, theory of mind, time dilation, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen

In part, their theory was based on earlier work by Philip Zimbardo in an article titled “The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos,” in the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (1969, Volume 17, pages 237–307). 13A report on the Eurobarometer analysis of the fear of crime, produced by the European Commission, titled “Analysis of Public Attitudes to Insecurity, Fear of Crime and Crime Prevention,” can be found at: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_181_sum_en.pdf 14A digest of results from a 2010 Gallup poll assessing fear of crime in the United States, titled “Nearly 4 in 10 Americans Still Fear Walking Alone at Night,” can be found at: http://www.gallup.com/poll/144272/nearly-americans-fear-walking-alone-night.aspx 15This Robert Ornstein quote comes from his 1992 book The Evolution of Consciousness: The Origins of the Way We Think (Simon and Schuster, New York, page 262). 16The official Viennese government description of gender mainstreaming may be found here: https://www.wien.gv.at/english/administration/gendermainstreaming/ A good discussion by Clare Foran of the Viennese policies titled “How to Design a City for Women,” can be found in the Atlantic City Lab blog at: http://www.citylab.com/commute/2013/09/how-design-city-women/6739/ 17The proportion of unmarried adults in U.S. rose to more than 50 percent according to a widely reported survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2014. The Martin Prosperity Institute published a regional analysis of the trend in an article written by Richard Florida on September 15, 2014 in the CityLab online magazine, titled “Singles Now Make Up More Than Half the U.S. Adult Population. Here’s Where They All Live.” Available at: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2014/09/singles-now-make-up-more-than-half-the-us-adult-population-heres-where-they-all-live/380137/ 18Statistics from Britain’s Office of National Statistics can be found at http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/households-and-household-composition-in-england-and-wales-2001-2011/households-and-household-composition-in-england-and-wales-2001-11.html 19Statistics on changes in discussion networks in the United States were reported in an article by Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew Brashears in an article titled “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks Over Two Decades,” in the journal American Sociological Review (2006, Volume 71, pages 353–375). 20Findings on loneliness and engagement in Vancouver were reported by the Vancouver Foundation in a 2012 study titled Connections and Engagement.


pages: 346 words: 90,371

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, Laurie Macfarlane

agricultural Revolution, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, deindustrialization, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, full employment, garden city movement, George Akerlof, ghettoisation, Gini coefficient, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, place-making, Post-Keynesian economics, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, working poor, working-age population

Journal of Peasant Studies 41 (5): 777–95. Falk, Nicholas. 2014. Funding Housing and Local Growth. London: The Smith Institute. http://media.urbed.coop.ccc.cdn.faelix.net/sites/default/files/Funding%20Housing%20and%20Local%20Growth%2C%20The%20Smith%20Institute.pdf. Feldman, Maryann P., and Richard Florida. 1994. ‘The Geographic Sources of Innovation: Technological Infrastructure and Product Innovation in the United States’. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84 (2): 210–29. Feldstein, Martin. 2008. ‘How to Help People Whose Home Values Are Underwater’. The Wall Street Journal, 18 November, A21.


pages: 295 words: 89,430

Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends by Martin Lindstrom

autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, big-box store, correlation does not imply causation, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, Richard Florida, rolodex, self-driving car, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, too big to fail, urban sprawl

In no particular order I’d like to thank: Tony Tsieh, Jeff Weiner, Ryan Holmes, Deepak Chopra, Danny Sullivan, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vanyerchuk, Martin Shervington, Sarah Hill, Michelle Killebrew, Muhammad Yunus, David Edelman, Meg Whitman, Denis Labelle, Dr. Jane Goodall, Dharmesh Shah, Beth Comstock, Thomas Friedman, David Sable, Chris Brogan, Michael Hyatt, Jeff Bullas, Don Peppers, Charlene Li, Rand Fishkin, Pam Moore, Nicolas Bordas, Peter Shankman, Steven Pinker, Richard Florida, Mike Allton, Jay Baer, Brian Solis, Steve Rubel, Neil Patel, Mark Schaefer, Jonah Berger, Chad Dickerson, Josh Leibowitz, Erica Hill, Niall Ferguson, Lee Odden, Jonathan Becher, John Jantsch, Yifat Cohen, Robert Cialdini, Andrew Hunt, Matt Heinz, Joe Pulizzi, Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Brenner, Michael Gold, John Rampton, Shawn Collins, Chris Ducker, David Skok, John Lee Dumas, Lee Odden, Jonathan Salem Baskin, Brent Csutoras, Heidi Cohen, Bill Tancer, Anita Newton, Matthew Barby, Craig Rosenberg, Brian Massey, Jon Haidt, Tom Fishburne, Roger Dooley, Pamela Wilson.


pages: 291 words: 88,879

Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

big-box store, carbon footprint, classic study, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, employer provided health coverage, equal pay for equal work, estate planning, fear of failure, financial independence, fixed income, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, New Urbanism, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, young professional

That’s why Manhattan, the capital of America’s singleton society, is also the nation’s greenest city.16 Manhattan is not the only urban center that’s begun adapting to the new social environment. Planners and developers in cities across the United States are starting to build better accommodations and amenities for the unprecedented number of singletons who live in them. Some urban officials have made special efforts to attract the coveted demographic of professional singles that Richard Florida calls “the creative class,” in hope that they will stimulate the local culture and economy. Cities in Europe, Japan, and Australia have made even more progress. In Stockholm, where 60 percent of all households have just one occupant, a generous supply of publicly subsidized housing in urban centers and a rich, locally based neighborhood life make living alone an affordable and often quite social experience.


pages: 292 words: 92,588

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World by Jeff Goodell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Anthropocene, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, creative destruction, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, failed state, fixed income, Frank Gehry, global pandemic, Google Earth, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Large Hadron Collider, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, negative emissions, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Hurricane Sandy: Storm damage statistics from personal communication with Office of Mayor Bill de Blasio. 2. East Side Coastal Resiliency Project: “OneNYC: 2016 Progress Report.” The City of New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio. May 2016, 160. 3. budgeted at $760 million: Personal communication with Dan Zarrilli. 4. 10 percent of the US gross domestic product: Richard Florida. “Sorry, London: New York Is the World’s Most Economically Powerful City.” TheAtlantic.com, March 3, 2015. Accessed March 1, 2017. http://www.citylab.com/work/2015/03/sorry-london-new-york-is-the-worlds-most-economically-powerful-city/386315/ 5. Manhattan in 1650: Snejana Farberov. “How Hurricane Sandy Flooded New York Back to Its Seventeenth-Century Shape as It Inundated 400 Years of Reclaimed Land.”


pages: 344 words: 94,332

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity by Lynda Gratton, Andrew Scott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, asset light, assortative mating, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, diversification, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial independence, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Glasses, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Economic Geography, old age dependency ratio, pattern recognition, pension reform, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Future of Employment, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, young professional

The macroeconomic effects of ageing and falling birth rates are significant: upward pressure on wages, downward pressure on rates of return, falls in savings and investment and changes in current account deficits. See Magnus, G., The Age of Aging: How Demographics are Changing the Global Economy and Our World (Wiley, 2008). 2Gratton, L., The Key: How Corporations Succeed by Solving the World’s Toughest Problems (Collins Business, 2015). 3See for example Richard Florida’s view of the rise of the city, Who is your City? How the creative economy is making where you live the most important decision in your life and The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic Books, 2002). 4Deloitte, London Futures: London crowned business capital of Europe (UK Futures, 2015). 5Moretti, E., The New Geography of Jobs (Mariner Books, 2013). 6Costa, D. and Kahn, M.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Some of the others that were especially notable and/or frequent were with Bhavish Aggarwal, Alisha Ali, Douglas Atkin, Michel Avital, Emily Badger, Mara Balestrini, Yochai Benkler, Rachel Botsman, danah boyd, Nathan Blecharczyk, Jennifer Bradley, Erik Brynjolfsson, Valentina Carbone, Emily Castor, David Chiu, Marc-David Chokrun, Sonal Choksi, Peter Coles, Chip Conley, Ariane Conrad, Arnab Das, Cristian Fleming (and his team at the Public Society), Richard Florida, Natalie Foster, Justin Fox, Liz Gannes, Lisa Gansky, Marina Gorbis, Neal Gorenflo, Alison Griswold, Vijay Gurbaxani, Tanner Hackett, Aassia Haroon Haq, Scott Heiferman, Jeremy Heimans, Sara Horowitz, Sam Hodges, Milicent Johnson, Noah Karesh, Stephane Kasriel, Sarah Kessler, David Kirkpatrick, Marjo Koivisto, Karim Lakhani, Kevin Laws, Michael Luca, Benita Matofska, Andrew McAfee, Ryan McKillen, Lesa Mitchell, Amy Nelson, Jeff Nickerson, Melissa O’Young, Janelle Orsi, Jeremy Osborn, Jeremiah Owyang (to whom I owe a special debt of gratitude for his remarkably selfless sharing of ideas and data), Wrede Petersmeyer, Ai-Jen Poo, Andrew Rasiej, Simone Ross, Anita Roth, Chelsea Rustrum, Carolyn Said, Marcela Sapone, Marie Schneegans, Trebor Scholz, Swati Sharma, Clay Shirky, Dane Stangler, Alex Stephany, James Surowiecki, Jason Tanz, Marie Ternes, Henry Timms, Viv Wang, Cheng Wei, Adam Werbach, Jamie Wong, Caroline Woolard, and numerous members of the OuiShare collective (including Flore Berlingen, Julie Braka, Albert Cañigueral, Simone Cicero, Javier Creus, Arthur De Grave, Elena Denaro, Diana Fillipova, Marguerite Grandjean, Asmaa Guedira, Ana Manzanedo, Bernie Mitchell, Edwin Mootoosamy, Ruhi Shamim, Maeva Tordo and especially Francesca Pick).


pages: 309 words: 96,434

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty First Century City by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Broken windows theory, call centre, crack epidemic, credit crunch, deindustrialization, East Village, energy security, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, race to the bottom, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban renewal, white flight, white picket fence, World Values Survey, young professional

Manchester seemed the perfect example of a city which symbolized the trajectory of progress proclaimed by the government, from urban decay to urban renaissance, and it was soon anointed New Labour’s favourite city. The love affair reached new heights when the party broke with ninety years of political tradition, abandoning failing Blackpool in favour of the upbeat image of Manchester as a more suitable venue for its annual conference in 2006. The icing on the cake was when Richard Florida, the American economist who coined the term ‘the creative class’, declared Manchester the UK’s most creative and enterprising city.2 Today the property, shopping and financial services economy in the city has gone through the same boom and bust cycle described in the last chapter. Accompanying that, however, is another far less publicized story, which is not directly about decay and renaissance, growth or recession, but about the decline of local democracy and the rise of private government.


pages: 278 words: 91,332

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It by Daniel Knowles

active transport: walking or cycling, autonomous vehicles, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, bank run, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, ghettoisation, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyperloop, Induced demand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Lyft, megacity, megastructure, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, parking minimums, Piers Corbyn, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, white picket fence, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Bankside Power Station, now the site of the Tate Modern, was a working generator until 1981, creating noise and pollution right across from St. Paul’s. Cars were not quite as numerous, but they did produce enormous amounts of pollution from leaded gasoline. Of course people wanted to leave, to live in quieter, more spacious suburbs, and that meant buying cars. Nowadays, cities are more glamorous—they are where what the sociologist Richard Florida calls the “creative class” congregates. People want access to restaurants, bars, and culture. They want to be near other people who they can date. It is much less common for women in cities to give up work when they get married or have children, and it is far more likely for both partners in a couple to be able to find good jobs within a reasonable commuting distance in a city center than it is in a village an hour away by car.


pages: 301 words: 90,276

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

., The Rise of the Corporate Landlord: The Institutionalization of the Single-Family Rental Market and Potential Impacts on Renters (Homes for All and Right to the City Alliance, July 2014), https://homesforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/corp-landlord-report-web.pdf; Sarah Edelman with Julia Gordon and David Sanchez, “When Wall Street Buys Main Street: The Implications of Single-Family Rental Bonds for Tenants and Housing Markets,” Center for American Progress, February 27, 2014, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2014/02/27/84750/when-wall-street-buys-main-street-2/; and Rob Call with Denechia Powell and Sarah Heck, “Blackstone: Atlanta’s Newest Landlord; The New Face of the Rental Market” (Occupy Our Homes, April 2014), https://homesforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/BlackstoneReportFinal0407141.pdf.   6.  Richard Florida, “How Housing Wealth Transferred from Families to Corporations,” Bloomberg CityLab, October 4, 2019, https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/10/single-family-house-rental-recession-homeowner-management/599371/.   7.  Andrea Eisfeldt and Andrew Demers, “Total Returns to Single Family Rentals,” Working Paper 21804 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, December 2018), https://www.nber.org/papers/w21804.pdf.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

You go for the sound. The things that made our cities come back to life were timeless: people, culture, diversity, novelty, and the vibrant energy that pervades them all. “This clustering of people together in cities to achieve progress is a far better force than pandemics, pestilence, or endemic disease,” said Richard Florida, urban studies academic and best-selling author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis, who lives here in Toronto. In forty years of studying cities, Florida told me, he never once encountered an instance of pandemics or other biological disasters significantly slowing their arc of growth.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

.,” Washington Post, November 17, 2013, accessed July 23, 2018, www.washingtonpost.com/national/capital-gains-spending-on-contracts-and-lobbying-propels-a-wave-of-new-wealth-in-d-c/2013/11/17/6bd938aa-3c25-11e3-a94f-b58017bfee6c_story.html?utm_term=.44ae6632d430. Hereafter cited as Jaffey and Tankersley, “Capital Gains.” Washington is now among: See Jaffe and Tankersley, “Capital Gains.” See also Richard Florida, “Venture Capital Remains Highly Concentrated in Just a Few Cities,” City Lab, October 3, 2017, accessed July 23, 2018, www.citylab.com/life/2017/10/venture-capital-concentration/539775/. any other major metro area: See Jaffe and Tankersley, “Capital Gains.” $200 per person, before wine: See Jaffe and Tankersley, “Capital Gains.”

have college degrees: “Educational Attainment of Population Ages 25 to 34,” Kids Count Data Center, last modified October 2017, https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/6294-educational-attainment-of-population-ages-25-to-34#detailed/3/10,55-56,58-61,64-77,79-84,86,88-94,96-109,9428-9429/false/870,573,869,36,868,867,133,38,35,18/5924,1265,1309,1304,1311/13091,13090. all average nearly 50 percent: See Paul A. Jargowsky, “Take the Money and Run: Economic Segregation in U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” American Sociology Review 61, no. 6 (1996): 984–98. Hereafter cited as Jargowsky, “Take the Money and Run.” Bishop, The Big Sort, 131. Richard Florida, “More Losers Than Winners in America’s New Economic Geography,” CityLab, January 30, 2013, accessed November 19, 2018, http://www.citylab.com/work/2013/01/more-losers-winners-americas-new-economic-geograpy/4465/. fell by 15 percent: See Catherine Rampell, “Who Says New York Is Not Affordable?


pages: 550 words: 89,316

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

The labor market elites responsible for the greatest profit-making were found in professional sectors—accountancy, finance, law, and medicine, or what Sassen calls “high level producer services.” Another account of this economic restructuring offers a similar but simpler explanation: The global economy had moved from producing widgets to producing ideas—those who were responsible for generating those ideas, what Robert Reich has called “symbolic analysts”37 or Richard Florida has termed the “creative class”—are the winners in the new economy.38 While a college degree is not an explicit measure of membership to Sassen’s, Reich’s, or Florida’s categorization, it certainly helps and most members do possess one. Thus the rise of an economy dependent on innovation and knowledge is also one dependent on professional skills, many of which are acquired through education.


pages: 359 words: 97,415

Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together by Andrew Selee

Berlin Wall, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Day of the Dead, Donald Trump, electricity market, energy security, Gini coefficient, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, job automation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, public intellectual, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Wozniak, work culture , Y Combinator

Pineau, The Integration of Immigrants into American Society (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2015); see, for example, 22. It’s a big part: For the most comprehensive discussion of the evidence, see National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2016). For another discussion of the evidence, see also Richard Florida, “Immigrants Boost Wages for Everyone,” Citylab, June 27, 2017, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/06/immigration-wages-economics/530301. They even tend to be: See the summary of the evidence on both health and incarceration in Waters and Pineau, The Integration of Immigrants into American Society.


pages: 385 words: 98,015

Einstein's Unfinished Revolution: The Search for What Lies Beyond the Quantum by Lee Smolin

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Brownian motion, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, Ernest Rutherford, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, Turing machine

Just as the same city viewed from different directions appears entirely different, and, as it were, multiplied perspectively, in just the same way it happens that, because of the infinite multitude of simple substances, there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which are, nevertheless, only perspectives on a single one.11 This is indeed a metaphor that Jane Jacobs would have appreciated, as it captures a notion of urban diversity championed by her and embraced by philosophers of the city, such as Richard Florida, since. This urban metaphor inspires a hypothesis about how space and locality break down. If you stand next to me and we both look out, by virtue of our proximity we have similar views of the rest of the universe. Our views cannot be identical, because we cannot coincide, by virtue of both the Pauli exclusion principle and the identity of indiscernibles.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Once more with feeling In the heady days of the 1990s, as the world economy started to hum and globalization became the basis of a free-market policy consensus, economic visionaries offered a new recipe for how individual cities and regions could prosper in this era of open borders. Pointing particularly to examples such as “Silicon Fen” around Cambridge University or North Carolina’s “Research Triangle,” gurus such as Richard Florida, Michael Porter, and Charles Leadbeater argued that the economic success stories of the future would be cities and business clusters that attracted highly educated, socially liberal workers, who were willing to mingle informally and circulate ideas. These centers of innovation would often emerge around universities.


Data and the City by Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

Willem van Winden, Erik Braun, Alexander Otgaar and Jan-Jelle Witte 71 Shrinking Cities A global perspective Edited by Harry W. Richardson and Chang Woon Nam 70 Cities, State and Globalization City-regional governance Tassilo Herrschel 69 The Creative Class Goes Global Edited by Charlotta Mellander, Richard Florida, Bjørn Asheim and Meric Gertler 68 Entrepreneurial Knowledge, Technology and the Transformation of Regions Edited by Charlie Karlsson, Börje Johansson and Roger Stough 67 The Economic Geography of the IT Industry in the Asia Pacific Region Edited by Philip Cooke, Glen Searle and Kevin O’Connor 66 Working Regions Reconnecting innovation and production in the knowledge economy Jennifer Clark 65 Europe’s Changing Geography The impact of inter-regional networks Edited by Nicola Bellini and Ulrich Hilpert 64 The Value of Arts and Culture for Regional Development A Scandinavian perspective Edited by Lisbeth Lindeborg and Lars Lindkvist 63 The University and the City John Goddard and Paul Vallance 62 Re-framing Regional Development Evolution, innovation and transition Edited by Philip Cooke 61 Networking Regionalised Innovative Labour Markets Edited by Ulrich Hilpert and Helen Lawton Smith 60 Leadership and Change in Sustainable Regional Development Edited by Markku Sotarauta, Ina Horlings and Joyce Liddle 59 Regional Development Agencies: The Next Generation?


pages: 331 words: 95,582

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty

Airbnb, bank run, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, commoditize, death of newspapers, desegregation, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Trump, edge city, Edward Glaeser, El Camino Real, emotional labour, fixed income, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Haight Ashbury, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, Joan Didion, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, passive income, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, working poor, Y Combinator, Yom Kippur War, young professional

,” Journal of Urban Economics 102 (November 2017): 76–90. tallied across all: “Obama Administration Releases Housing Development Toolkit,” National Low Income Housing Coalition, October 3, 2016, http://nlihc.org/resource/obama-administration-releases-housing-development-toolkit. These studies all: Richard Florida, “How Housing Supply Became the Most Controversial Issue in Urbanism,” City Lab, May 23, 2019, https://www.citylab.com/design/2019/05/residential-zoning-code-density-storper-rodriguez-pose-data/590050/; “Blanket Upzoning—A Blunt Instrument—Won’t Solve the Affordable Housing Crisis,” The Planning Report, March 15, 2019, https://www.planningreport.com/2019/03/15/blanket-upzoning-blunt-instrument-wont-solve-affordable-housing-crisis.


pages: 406 words: 105,602

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

Immigration Forty-four percent of Silicon Valley startups have immigrant founders.13 Fifty-one percent of startups worth a billion dollars were founded by immigrants.14 Many more of the most successful American startups have at least one immigrant founder. Openness to immigrants is one of the cultural values that predict future economic growth on a city-by-city basis (one of several data-based indexes that Silicon Valley routinely leads the pack in). As Richard Florida writes in The Flight of the Creative Class, the United States “doesn’t have some intrinsic advantage in the production of creative people, new ideas, or startup companies. Its real advantage lies in its ability to attract these economic drivers from around the world. Of critical importance to American success in this last century has been a tremendous influx of global talent.”15 Yet the United States has no category for a startup visa, and startup founders have traditionally found it quite difficult to come and stay in the States.


pages: 358 words: 106,729

Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy by Raghuram Rajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, diversification, Edward Glaeser, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, implied volatility, income inequality, index fund, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine readable, market bubble, Martin Wolf, medical malpractice, microcredit, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, proprietary trading, Real Time Gross Settlement, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, seminal paper, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, tail risk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

Anderson, “Wall Street Winners Get Billion-Dollar Paydays,” New York Times, April 16, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/business/16wall.html. 7 See Stacey Schreft, Aarti Singh, and Ashley Hodgson, “Jobless Recoveries and the Wait-and-See Hypothesis,” Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City (4th quarter, 2005): 81–99. 8 Ibid. Chapter One. Let Them Eat Credit 1 See, for example, Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 2 See Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 231. 3 Ibid., 330–31. 4 On educational attainment, see U.S.


pages: 459 words: 103,153

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure by Tim Harford

An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Wiles, banking crisis, Basel III, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Boeing 747, business logic, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, Deep Water Horizon, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fermat's Last Theorem, financial engineering, Firefox, food miles, Gerolamo Cardano, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Harrison: Longitude, knowledge worker, loose coupling, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Netflix Prize, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, PageRank, Piper Alpha, profit motive, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade route, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Virgin Galactic, web application, X Prize, zero-sum game

Officer, ‘Purchasing power of British pounds from 1264 to present’, MeasuringWorth, 2009, http://www.measuring-worth.com/ppoweruk/ 83 ‘Positive black swans’: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (New York: Random House, 2007). 85 We should now build: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 12. 86 He soon discovered some remarkable examples: Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth (London: Bantam, 2009), pp. 254–73. 87 Bright ideas emerge from the swirling mix of other ideas: See also Richard Florida, ‘The world is spiky’, The Atlantic Monthly, October 2005, my The Logic of Life (2008), Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist (2010) and Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From (2010). 87 A playboy politician most famous as a campaigner against lesbianism: McKinstry, Spitfire, pp.17–18. 88 ‘Bloody good cup of tea, Mitchell’: McKinstry, Spitfire, p. 20. 88 ‘It’s either him or me!’


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

This holds that, thanks to the cheapness and interconnectedness of modern technology, anyone with internet access can invent a service or product with potential global scale. At the other extreme is the view that the world is far from flat. In fact, it has at least a few large mountains. This is the view of Professor Richard Florida from Toronto University, who emphasizes the fact that innovation takes place in a select number of metropolitan areas, usually centered around a large, successful company and/or a leading university. Yet, although the world seems to be dominated by American tech firms, at the start-up and just past start-up stage, innovation has been globalized, with vibrant tech centers developing in China, India, and Europe.


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

There are many excellent books that deal with one or more of these issues. See, for example, Robert B. Reich, Saving Capitalism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015); David Cay Johnston, Free Lunch (London: Penguin, 2007); Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2015); Richard Florida, The New Urban Crisis (New York: Basic Books/Hachette, 2017); Chris Arnade, Dignity (New York: Sentinel, 2019); Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All (New York: Vintage, 2019); and David Dayen, Chain of Title (New York: New Press, 2016). 7. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “Policy Basics: Introduction to the Federal Budget Process,” updated July 8, 2019, www.cbpp.org/research/policy-basics-introduction-to-the-federal-budget-process. 8.


pages: 422 words: 113,525

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

Aid organizations go straight to the cities, where the need is; and multinational corporations go straight to where the workers and emerging markets are, in the cities. “The world’s forty largest megaregions, which are home to some 18 percent of the world’s population,” writes urban theorist Richard Florida, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.” Whereas nations are defined by their boundaries, cities are densely connected nodes, making every city a world city to some degree, with the accompanying multipliers of cultural diversity, financial flow, and population flow.


pages: 415 words: 119,277

Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places by Sharon Zukin

1960s counterculture, big-box store, blue-collar work, classic study, corporate social responsibility, crack epidemic, creative destruction, David Brooks, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, mass immigration, messenger bag, new economy, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, rent control, rent stabilization, Richard Florida, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“Social Preservationists and the Quest for Authentic Community,” City and Community 3, no. 2 (2004): 125–56. 14. The aesthetic and political complexity of gentrification in London in the 1970s is beautifully evoked by Patrick Wright in On Living in an Old Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 15. Other public sector administrators: notably, city planners Edward J. Logue in Boston, New Haven, and New York; Edmund Bacon in Philadelphia; and Austin Tobin, head of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, builder and owner of the World Trade Center.


The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Ascot racecourse, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, British Empire, clean water, computerized trading, congestion charging, Corn Laws, cross-subsidies, Crossrail, deindustrialization, estate planning, Frank Gehry, gentrification, housing crisis, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, light touch regulation, Louis Blériot, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, place-making, railway mania, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

It had fallen to a low of 6.6 million in 1985, but against expectations surged on the turn of the century, to reach the 9 million mark in 2019, topping its previous peak in 1939. The booming sectors were financial services at roughly 25 per cent of employment, but also domestic and overseas tourism at 15 per cent, and personal services such as private health and education. Most marked was the rise in the creative industries, identified by the American economist Richard Florida as the key drivers in twenty-first-century urban regeneration. A London that a century before had depended on money, manufacturing and distribution was now turning more towards design, marketing, the arts and the media. ‘Creatives’, however defined, were estimated to embrace as many workers as finance.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Social psychologists have actually measured this, researching what people say when close to death, and found that the regrets of the dying are overwhelmingly linked to our sense of belonging, to love and to family, and hardly at all to work or achievement in the public realm.63 A woman I know who runs a hospice told me that men in particular invariably ask for forgiveness from those close to them for not being a more loving or caring husband or father. I. The size, influence, and definition of the creative class is contested, but the connection with both liberal attitudes and economic inequality is not. Here is Richard Florida, the author of the concept, himself: “Across the United States, inequality is not just a little higher, but substantially higher, in liberal areas than in more conservative ones. All of the twenty-five congressional districts with the highest levels of income inequality were represented by Democrats, according to a 2014 analysis.”


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 190. 51.Zoé Samudzi, “White Witness and the Contemporary Lynching,” The New Republic, May 16, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/157734/white-witness-contemporary-lynching. 52.Abby Phillip, “White People in New Orleans Say They’re Better Off after Katrina. Black People Don’t,” Washington Post, August 24, 2015, www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/08/24/white-people-in-new-orleans-say-theyre-better-off-after-katrina-black-people-dont/; Richard Florida, “How Natural Disasters Can Spur Gentrification,” Citylab, February 12, 2019, www.citylab.com/environment/2019/02/gentrification-causes-new-orleans-natural-disasters-hurricane-katrina/582499/. 53.Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 135. 54.Black Alliance for Just Immigration, The State of Black Immigrants: Black Immigrants in the Mass Criminalization System, State of Black Immigrants, http://stateofblackimmigrants.com, 15. 55.Alex Anfruns, “1996–2016: 20 Years after the Harshest Immigration Laws Ever Approved in the US,” Investig’Action, June 22, 2016, www.investigaction.net/en/1996-2016-20-years-after-the-harshest-immigration-laws-ever-approved-in-the-us/. 56.Juliana Morgan-Trostle, Kexin Zheng, and Carl Lipscombe, The State of Black Immigrants, NYU Law School and Black Alliance for Just Immigration, January 22, 2016, www.stateofblackimmigrants.com/assets/sobi-fullreport-jan22.pdf. 57.Jamila Osman, “Do Black Lives Matter in the Immigrant Rights Movement?”


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

CHAPTER 6: THE WORLD IS SPIKY 1 Coco Liu and Shunsuke Tabeta, ‘China Car Startup Dodges Trump Tariffs with AI and 3D Printing’, Nikkei Asia, 27 September 2019 <https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Startups-in-Asia/China-car-startup-dodges-Trump-tariffs-with-AI-and-3D-printing> [accessed 4 September 2020]. 2 ‘Is Globalization an Engine of Economic Development?’, Our World in Data <https://ourworldindata.org/is-globalization-an-engine-of-economic-development> [accessed 9 October 2020]. 3 The phrase ‘the world is spiky’ was originally used by Richard Florida in his essay ‘The World Is Spiky’ in Atlantic Monthly, October 2005. Florida used it to describe the relative inequalities across and within countries and, in particular, the disproportionate importance of large cities in economic development. I use the term in a slightly different context, referring to the overall breakdown of the thesis that technology necessarily enables single large global markets, mediated by a set of common rules. 4 Philip Garnett, Bob Doherty, and Tony Heron, ‘Vulnerability of the United Kingdom’s Food Supply Chains Exposed by COVID-19’, Nature Food, 1(6), 2020, pp. 315–318 <https://doi.org/10.1038/s43016-020-0097-7>. 5 Alex Lee, ‘How the UK’s Just-in-Time Delivery Model Crumbled under Coronavirus’, Wired, 30 March 2020 <https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stockpiling-supermarkets-coronavirus> [accessed 11 September 2020]. 6 UBS, The Food Revolution, July 2019 <https://www.ubs.com/global/en/ubs-society/our-stories/2019/future-of-food/_jcr_content/mainpar/toplevelgrid_1749059381/col1/linklist/link.1695495471.file/bGluay9wYXRoPS9jb250ZW50L2RhbS91YnMvZ2xvYmFsL3Vicy1zb2NpZXR5LzIwMTkvZm9vZC1yZXZvbHV0aW9uLWp1bHkucGRm/food-revolution-july.pdf>. 7 ‘Growing Higher – New Ways to Make Vertical Farming Stack up’, The Economist, 31 August 2019 <https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/08/31/new-ways-to-make-vertical-farming-stack-up> [accessed 4 August 2020]. 8 ‘World’s Biggest Rooftop Greenhouse Opens in Montreal’, Phys.org, 26 August 2020 <https://phys.org/news/2020-08-world-biggest-rooftop-greenhouse-montreal.html> [accessed 5 September 2020]. 9 Elizabeth Curmi et al., ‘Feeding the Future’, Citi Global Perspectives and Solutions, November 2018 <https://www.citivelocity.com/citigps/feeding-the-future/> [accessed 18 March 2021]. 10 Joel Jean, Patrick Richard Brown and Institute of Physics (Great Britain), Emerging Photovoltaic Technologies (Bristol, UK: IOP Publishing, 2020), pp. 1–5 <https://iopscience.iop.org/book/978-0-7503-2152-5> [accessed 12 October 2020]. 11 Brendan Coyne, ‘Vehicle-to-Grid: Are We Nearly There Yet?’


pages: 494 words: 116,739

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology by Kentaro Toyama

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blood diamond, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, delayed gratification, digital divide, do well by doing good, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, end world poverty, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gamification, germ theory of disease, global village, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Khan Academy, Kibera, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, North Sea oil, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, Twitter Arab Spring, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, Y2K

The most ambitious IIT graduates are leaving large corporations to start their own companies. They’re aspiring for greater esteem, achievement, and self-actualization. Self-Actualizing Creative Class Inglehart’s analysis tapered off with the service sector, and that’s where the sociologist Richard Florida picked things up. He extended the analysis with investigations of what he popularized as the creative class.30 These are “scientists, engineers, artists, musicians, designers and knowledge-based professionals” who are “paid principally to do creative work for a living.”31 The rise of the creative class is an international phenomenon led by developed-world cities.


pages: 482 words: 122,497

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule by Thomas Frank

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, disinformation, edge city, financial deregulation, full employment, George Gilder, guest worker program, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, job satisfaction, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, P = NP, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the scientific method, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, War on Poverty

Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 351. Washington seems to exert a magnetic attraction on celebrators of suburbia. David Brooks’s rosy meditations on suburbia in his 2004 book, On Paradise Drive, instantly mark him as an inhabitant of the D.C. metro area. The latest priest of this faith is Richard Florida, a professor at a university located in the Virginia suburbs, who finds the city “a booming, far-flung region that’s a key node in what [he] call[s] the Creative Economy.” Florida, “A Creative Crossroads,” Washington Post, May 7, 2006. 6. Oliver McKee Jr., “Washington as a Boom Town,” North American Review, February 1935. 7.


World Cities and Nation States by Greg Clark, Tim Moonen

active transport: walking or cycling, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, business climate, clean tech, congestion charging, corporate governance, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, driverless car, financial independence, financial intermediation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gentrification, global supply chain, global value chain, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, managed futures, megacity, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open economy, Pearl River Delta, rent control, Richard Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stem cell, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Options include an enhanced property tax, as proposed by Mayor John Tory, vehicle registration taxes or a progressive income tax. In the longer term, some have even proposed that Toronto should have provincial powers over regional issues such as infrastructure, and a much more direct relationship with the federal government (Lu, 2010). Urbanist Richard Florida has argued that, “Toronto needs the resources of a province to become a truly global city” (Florida in Tapscott, 2014). 146 World Cities and Nation States Positive trade policy in order to increase productivity growth Toronto’s GDP and labour productivity growth has been modest over the past two decades, despite its sector strengths.


pages: 519 words: 136,708

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

See his ‘Figures of Destructuration: Terrorism, Architecture, Social Form’, November 2009, available at bratton.info. 67Ibid. 68Darton, ‘Janus Face of Architectural Terrorism’. 69It must be stressed here that there is no evidence that Atta and his colleagues had any way of predicting, let alone planning, the final collapse of the buildings once they had been struck by the two aircraft. 8. Housing: Luxified Skies 1Edward Glaeser, ‘How Skyscrapers Can Save the City’, Atlantic, March 2011. See also his Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier, New York: Penguin, 2012. 2Ibid. 3See Richard Florida, ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’, Washington Monthly 34:5, 2002, pp. 15–25. 4Jamie Peck, ‘Edward Glaeser’s City: A Triumph of Economism’, unpublished paper, 2014. 5Glaeser is affiliated with the neoconservative Manhattan Institute, which was a key intellectual player behind George W. Bush’s two presidential tenancies.


pages: 476 words: 132,042

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

In a relatively small footprint, a city not only provides living quarters and occupations in a minimum of space, but it also generates a maximum of ideas and inventions. Stewart Brand notes in the “City Planet” chapter of his book Whole Earth Discipline, “Cities are wealth creators; they have always been.” He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida, who claims that forty of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18 percent of the world’s population, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.” A Canadian demographer calculated that “80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities.” The raggedy new part of each city, its squats and encampments, often house the most productive citizens.


pages: 311 words: 130,761

Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America by Diana Elizabeth Kendall

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, declining real wages, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, ending welfare as we know it, fixed income, framing effect, gentrification, Georg Cantor, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, haute couture, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live, systems thinking, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, vertical integration, work culture , working poor

The kids have some domestic and educational advantages—all those tutors and developmental toys—but they still have to work through school and ace the SATs just to achieve the same social rank as their parents. Compared to past elites, little is guaranteed.13 In another best-selling book on this subject, The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida asserts that the United States has a creative class composed of two major occupational categories: the supercreative core, which consists of occupations in computer science; mathematics; architecture; engineering; the life, physical, and social sciences; education; the arts; and the media; and the creative professions, which are occupations in management, business, finance, law, health care, and high-end sales.


pages: 598 words: 140,612

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Edward L. Glaeser

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, declining real wages, desegregation, different worldview, diversified portfolio, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, endowment effect, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, global village, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, place-making, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, Seaside, Florida, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, strikebreaker, Thales and the olive presses, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Works Progress Administration, young professional

There is every reason to think that an increasingly prosperous world will continue to place more value on the innovative enjoyments that cities can provide. The bottom-up nature of urban innovation suggests that the best economic development strategy may be to attract smart people and get out of their way. But how can places become consumer cities and attract skilled residents? One vision, espoused by urbanist Richard Florida, emphasizes the arts, toleration for alternative lifestyles, and a fun, happening downtown. A second vision focuses on better providing the core public services that have always been the province of cities: safe streets, fast commutes, good schools. City leaders typically have scarce resources; they can’t do everything for everybody.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Chapter 8: PAS DE DEUX 72 Roughly one third: Artturi Tarjanne, “Why VC’s Seek 10x Returns,” Activist VC Blog (blog), Nexit Adventures, January 12, 2018, http://www.nexitventures.com/blog/vcs-seek-10x-returns/. 74 Kalanick frequently compared: Amir Efrati, “Uber Group’s Visit to Seoul Escort Bar Sparked HR Complaint,” The Information, March 24, 2017, https://www.theinformation.com/articles/uber-groups-visit-to-seoul-escort-bar-sparked-hr-complaint. 75 “Software is eating the world”: Andreessen Horowitz, Software Is Eating the World, https://a16z.com/. 75 deals increased by 73 percent: Richard Florida and Ian Hathaway, “How the Geography of Startups and Innovation Is Changing,” Harvard Business Review, November 27, 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/11/how-the-geography-of-startups-and-innovation-is-changing. 75 billions invested post-2010: Center for American Entrepreneurship, “Rise of the Global Startup City,” Startup Revolution, http://startupsusa.org/global-startup-cities/. 75 emerged as the world’s epicenter: Center for American Entrepreneurship, “Rise of the Global Startup City.” 76 “to organize the world’s information”: “From the Garage to the Googleplex,” About, Google, https://www.google.com/about/our-story/. 76 controversial financial instrument: “The Effects of Dual-Class Ownership on Ordinary Shareholders,” Knowledge@Wharton, June 30, 2004, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-effects-of-dual-class-ownership-on-ordinary-shareholders/. 77 “An Owner’s Manual For Google Investors”: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “2004 Founders’ IPO Letter,” Alphabet Investor Relations, https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2004/ipo-letter.html. 77 $3.5-billion acquisition: “Snapchat Spurned $3 Billion Acquisition Offer from Facebook,” Digits (blog), Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2013, https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/11/13/snapchat-spurned-3-billion-acquisition-offer-from-facebook/.


pages: 426 words: 136,925

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

“In tight housing markets”: Janna L. Matlack and Jacob L. Vigdor, “Do Rising Tides Lift All Prices? Income Inequality and Housing Affordability,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 12331, June 2006, https://nber.org/papers/w12331.pdf. what two British researchers found in 2019: Richard Florida, “The Benefits of High-Tech Job Growth Don’t Trickle Down,” Bloomberg CityLab, August 8, 2019. “Racial toleration is meaningless”: Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle’s Central District from 1870 Through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 239.


pages: 393 words: 127,847

Imagine a City: A Pilot's Journey Across the Urban World by Mark Vanhoenacker

Airbus A320, Boeing 747, British Empire, car-free, colonial rule, COVID-19, East Village, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, high-speed rail, Jane Jacobs, Johannes Kepler, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, megacity, Nelson Mandela, Pearl River Delta, period drama, Richard Florida, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

Cape Town’s reliance on long-haul tourism is clear to visitors; it’s also documented by reports such as the World Travel & Tourism Council’s “City Travel & Tourism Impact 2019.” The idea that city life is more environmentally friendly is perhaps counterintuitive, but it seems well supported. See, for example, Richard Florida’s article “Why Bigger Cities Are Greener,” published on Bloomberg’s website on April 19, 2012. Although, for an alternative perspective, see “The Myth of the Sustainable City,” published on Scientific American’s website on August 21, 2016. Some of Cape Town’s recent green-economy initiatives can be found at the website of GreenCape (greencape.co.za).


pages: 559 words: 169,094

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Jessica Livingston, “Max Levchin,” in Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (New York: Apress, 2008). Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook (New York: Anchor, 2010). David O. Sacks and Peter A. Thiel, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus (Oakland, CA: The Independent Institute, 1998). TAMPA Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity (New York: HarperCollins, 2010). Alyssa Katz, Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010). Robert J. Kerstein, Politics and Growth in Twentieth-Century Tampa (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

We live in the age of the Urbanocene, and globally the fate of the cities is the fate of the planet. Jane understood this truth more than fifty years ago, and only now are some of the experts beginning to recognize her extraordinary foresight. Many writers have picked up this theme, including the urban economists Edward Glaeser and Richard Florida, but none has been as forthright and bold as Benjamin Barber in his book with the provocative title If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities.5 These are indicative of a rising consciousness that cities are where the action is—where challenges have to be addressed in real time and where governance seems to work, at least relative to the increasing dysfunctionality of the nation-state. 3.


pages: 735 words: 165,375

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation by Edward Glaeser, David Cutler

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, defund the police, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of penicillin, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, future of work, Future Shock, gentrification, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global village, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Honoré de Balzac, income inequality, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, job automation, jobless men, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, knowledge worker, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, place-making, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Richard Florida, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, superstar cities, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech baron, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, union organizing, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

IBM’s famed supercomputer Watson was unable to improve on the diagnosing of cancer. But there are lesser creative tasks—such as producing an amusing song list for a birthday party—that should be well within the province of a properly trained machine. The creative economy, championed by economist Richard Florida at the University of Toronto and others, is likely to remain, but machine learning may make it smaller and focused only on those tasks that require the sort of quirkiness that is particularly human. Those creative jobs are safe from machines and they are probably safe from illness as well, at least if they don’t require too much face-to-face interaction.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

The next chapter will show just how counterproductive the left-wing revolt against the meritocracy proved to be. 15 The Corruption of the Meritocracy The egalitarianism of the 1960s and 1970s was followed by the festival of capitalism of the 1980s and 1990s. The pro-market revolution gave birth to a new elite that soon acquired a plethora of names: ‘the new class’ (Irving Kristol), the ‘creative class’ (Richard Florida), ‘bourgeois bohemians’ (David Brooks), the ‘anywheres’ (David Goodhart), the ‘Brahmins’ (Thomas Piketty), ‘Davos Man’ (Samuel Huntington) or the ‘cognitive elite’ (various). This new elite regarded itself as the meritocratic spirit made frequent-flying flesh. It was significantly bigger than the old meritocracy: high-IQ jobs expanded rapidly in these years, in both the public and the private sectors, and universities expanded even more rapidly in order to (over) supply the new market for academic talent.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Even countries that are not ethnically or religiously diverse—think Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and China—can enjoy the fruits of pluralism if they have a pluralistic outlook; that is, if they develop the habits of reaching out to the best ideas anywhere in the world to adapt and adopt them. As the social scientist Richard Florida observed in a December 12, 2011, essay on this subject on CityLab.com: Economic growth and development has long been seen to turn on natural resources, technological innovation and human capital. But a growing number of studies, including my own research, suggest that geographic proximity and cultural diversity—a place’s openness to different cultures, religions, sexual orientations—also play key roles in economic growth.


pages: 1,233 words: 239,800

Public Places, Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design by Matthew Carmona, Tim Heath, Steve Tiesdell, Taner Oc

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Arthur Eddington, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, cellular automata, City Beautiful movement, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, deindustrialization, disinformation, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, East Village, edge city, food miles, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, global supply chain, Guggenheim Bilbao, income inequality, invisible hand, iterative process, Jane Jacobs, land bank, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Masdar, Maslow's hierarchy, megaproject, megastructure, New Urbanism, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, place-making, post-oil, precautionary principle, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Florida, Seaside, Florida, starchitect, streetcar suburb, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, the market place, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, zero-sum game

(iv) An emerging tradition – sustainable urbanism The quest for more sustainable development is an increasingly explicit concern in urban design and place-making, perhaps even the focus of a new, emerging tradition of thought and practice in its own right. Brown et al (2009) identify four convergent lines of thinking moving the activity on in the 2000s: (i) the work of Richard Florida (2004) and the arguments he makes that vibrant, walkable neighbourhoods attract the creative classes; (ii) a parallel transformation in the fortunes of America’s downtowns as demand for urban living has increased; (iii) an awareness of the growing obesity crisis in the USA (and elsewhere), which has been linked to the spread of car-dependent urbanism; and (iv) a growing interest in the potential of urban form to reduce the carbon footprint of mankind.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

Stephen Cass, “Al Alcorn, Creator of Pong, Explains How Early Home Computers Owe Their Color Graphics to This One Cheap, Sleazy Trick,” IEEE Spectrum (blog), April 21, 2020, https://spectrum.ieee.org/al-alcorn-creator-of-pong-explains-how-early-home-computers-owe-their-color-to-this-one-cheap-sleazy-trick. 9. Richard Florida and Martin Kenney, “Venture Capital in Silicon Valley,” in Understanding Silicon Valley: The Anatomy of an Entrepreneurial Region, ed. Martin Kenney (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 113. 10. Leslie Berlin, Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 287. 11.