Writing from brain gain #4 - Ithaca NY - I can attest to the many reasons educated people would choose to live here, but one thing that cannot be left unsaid is that our economy is dominated by Cornell and Ithaca College, and most of the rest is the service industry for employees of the two. Our success didn't just appear out of nowhere. Aside from that, however, Ithaca has all the makings of a great place for professionals to live.
There are more restaurants per person here than NYC; the traffic is never bad except during 30-minute rush hour intervals; there is enough middle/upper-middle income here to support high-end retail and services (ex: even if there is only one very good spa and steakhouse, it is still a very good spa and steakhouse); the cost of living is...well it's ok. Housing is expensive in the City and the surrounding Town, but if you go a mere 5 minutes out of the Town of Ithaca in any direction you practically pay peanuts. Still, food and other necessities are Upstate-cheap if you don't shop at Wegmans.
But most importantly, Ithaca is a pleasant place filled with pleasant people. The average person on the street is friendly and helpful. Nobody is "too important." Maybe it's because we have a top public high school where rich and poor alike receive a quality education, but there isn't an economic "us vs them" one often finds in decrepit Rust Belt cities with wealthy suburbs or revitalized metro areas that sag professionals with "gentrifier guilt."
The point I'm trying to make is that if you want professionals (and thereby, businesses) to come and stay, you have to make your city a nice place to live. Tax breaks don't fix a lousy commute. Fancy new mixed-use high-rises don't diminish the sneers you get from service workers who see you as a disruptive yuppie who is destroying their hometown without even realizing it.
I know it's not terribly helpful to suggest "if you want to make your city attractive to professionals, it just has to have that spark," but I see it as akin to a doctor recommending the extremely difficult tasks of regular exercise and a healthy diet instead solving every problem with a pill.
>The point I'm trying to make is that if you want professionals (and thereby, businesses) to come and stay, you have to make your city a nice place to live. Tax breaks don't fix a lousy commute.
Moving is easier and cheaper than ever before (mostly also because of the cheap communication technologies that allow us to stay connected to whatever or whoever we might leave behind.)
Therefore the competition of cities for talent rises to a complete new level.
Sites like https://teleport.org make it super easy to compare cities worldwide for life-quality data, costs of living, salary levels whatnot...
Algorithms could help you to optimise your life regarding on one of the most important life decisions: "Where should I live?"
I haven't been to Ithaca in 20 years but I used to visit twice a month for a few years. I always thought it was a cool little town. I have great memories from there and agree that people were cool there. I still have a soft spot in my heart when I think of my time there. It also had a great little music scene, decent bars, coffee shops, and housing was reasonable. It's got the lake right there and easy access to hiking and biking trails. Ithaca College really balances out Cornell's presence well and creates a good mix of people. Not sure what it's like now but I can see how the quality of life would be high there.
I moved away from Ithaca about 2 years ago and lived there for a year. It's still pretty cool. My main reason for leaving had less to do with the vibe and more to do with the job market and the fact that all of my college / high school friends and some of my family were in NYC. It has very limited opportunities, but I feel like it's a good place to move to if you're further along in your career. Also seems like a good place to raise kids. Not sure if I'd go back but it's definitely up there on the best places I've lived list.
CBORD, Glyph and Wegman's are the only other major players in town to wit. There's a small number of start-ups too but nothing that would sustain an economy like the colleges do.
This could be a valid metric if your goal is to find a place where restaurants are less likely to be crowded. The more restaurants per person, the less likely a given restaurant will be overcrowded or have a long waitlist.
In case anyone is curious, that blue county in New Mexico is Santa Fe county, which just happens to be adjacent to Los Alamos county.
Besides the Los Alamos connection, there is a research institute that studies complexity in the county itself, and three private liberal arts colleges.
People also like to move here for the culture alone. Last I checked the arts economy is somewhere in the top 5 in the country. Combined with the well-forested mountains, cooler weather, and a history that predates European exploration of the Americas (roughly where the central plaza currently stands was an old Pueblo village built in 900 AD), it makes for an interesting place.
Not that I'm particularly trying to convince anyone to move there. Downside of its long history is that the awkward road network is less a result of smart urban planning and more the fact that they were old stagecoach routes that became legitimized by sheer virtue of being old. Also, you likely won't have any choice but to live in a house made out of adobe (dried mud), because tourism, which might be why the housing market there is relatively crazy compared to the rest of poor old New Mexico.
In case you're wondering, I live 50 miles south in Albuquerque and once briefly lived in Santa Fe before the high rent got to me.
Ha ha, Santa Fe, the city of enchantment, though last time I was there there were plenty of broken liquor bottles at the bus stops. To each their own though.
Data is nice, but this makes sense. There's objectively not much in Cumberland, Goldsboro, Valdosta... meanwhile, large metro areas that aren't too far are attracting educated workers.
Their definition seems a bit strange, however. I understand "brain drain" as a different phenomenon from the lack of a highly-educated workforce, and their study does not account for movement of people, which analyses of brain drain typically do. This just seems like certain metros are lacking highly educated workers, which should be expected as particular employers decline or relocate.
I agree, this isn't really a measure of "brain drain." Brain drain is when educated people leave an area (usually a country) en masse. For example, one of my professors is from Sri Lanka, and she used her graduating class as an example of brain drain— more than half of them left Sri Lanka upon receiving their undergraduate degree.
When that happens, ratio of educated workforce goes down.
If we assume initial conditions for education are approximately equal, then outcome ratios do measure (the result of) brain drain.
Hey! I actually live in Cumberland! It is as bad as written. Extreme loss of white-collar opportunities. We do have a navy-sea command base where IBM has a data-center. They've had the same jobs advertised for over 2 years now. Very hard to attract white-collar workers. The cost of living isn't so bad though, and the nature is wonderful!
I drove past Cumberland on a weekend trip from DC to Ohio last year. This will sound like an underhanded compliment, but it is genuine: it looked very pretty from the highway! The mountains were beautiful and it seemed like every building in the whole town was made of brick. I plan to make it a point to actually visit there someday. I really wish it were possible to live in a quaint, small city like that.
I totally understand why Ann Arbor is on the list. But more than a little surprised not to see Detroit. Lots of my younger engineering friends from out state Michigan are finding jobs and settling into the downtown area. Just heard yesterday that Snapchat is opening an office downtown.
I'm from Michigan, and there's no way you could pay me enough to live in Detroit. I could bear to live in Ann Arbor for the right amount of money, but forget Detroit.
I'm also from Michigan, and living in Detroit is actually pretty cool.[1] It has great beer, good food, a low cost-of-living, great bikability, and a thriving scene of 20/30-somethings (both yuppies and not). Granted, it is a spiky place: you either love it (hit that peak) or hate it (land in those valleys). The phrase "to each their own" certainly applies.
[1]: I don't live in Michigan any more, but I do visit Detroit regularly.
I went to the University of Michigan hackathon (MHacks) back in October of this year which was, for some reason, hosted in Detroit (absolutely _terribly_ done hackathon, btw).
I was shocked at how bad Detroit actually was. In my opinion, it's actually worse than what people say. A story I heard from one of the people that live in the area is that people leave their cars unlocked and devoid of valuable belongs so crackheads won't break their windows to search for money. They're still going to search, but they won't break the windows.
Maybe it's changed. But, I worked in Ann Arbor in software from the late 90s to the mid 2000s, and Detroit was way cooler than Ann Arbor. If you want to wear polo shirts, sweaters around the neck, eat pâté and cheese, drink wine, and look beautiful, then A^2 is your place. But, if you want anything interesting, you go into Detroit.
Everyone eventually leaves their 20s and many will want to raise a family in safe place with good schools. This can definitely be done in urban areas but definitely not in Detroit (city proper). Not only that but people want to live in places with good, reliable governments and institutions. E.g., Minneapolis over Detroit for cold midwest cities that aren't Chicago.
I think a lot of it is class dynamics, as well as geography. Detroit is very spread out and most white collar workers who work in the city live in the suburbs - Royal Oak, Bloomfield, Clarkston, etc.
The areas being gentrified by young professionals that would be considered "Detroit" are concentrated in the Downtown and Midtown districts. Hamtramck is in the gentrification process as well, but it's considered a separate city.
Basically the fact that the newly-relocated white collar workers are all spread out and are offset by the mostly blue-collar old guard likely explains why it wouldn't make the top of the "Brain concentration" index.
Ann Arbor, on the other hand, makes more sense because its geography is so much more centralized, and is only supported by a few bedroom communities (Dexter, Selene, and Chelsea)
Bloomberg measured the per capita concentration of people working in jobs or with degrees related to STEM; that is the number of people in STEM fields divided over each metro areas' entire population.
Small metro areas that are dominated by a single employer, such as a college (e.g. Ann Arbor, MI; and Ithaca, NY), can be expected to score higher than larger, more diverse metros.
Pittsburgh is a strange place. I was thinking of buying a 2nd home in Shadyside about 4 years ago. I recently visited, and the homes that I was looking at have appreciated 3x! I spent some time talking to a lot of the locals, and they've not seen much change in the past 10 years. Pittsburgh has recently been ranked as one of the cities in the US with the highest inequality. I love Pittsburgh, but it's uneven.
I've never been to Columbus, but I went to college in Ohio and it seems people tended to move to Columbus and Pittsburgh, but obviously anecdotes aren't really data.
I went to college in Cleveland and have been all over PA and Ohio. Cleveland seemed much more dynamic that Columbus to me. And Pittsburgh was more dynamic than Cleveland.
I have parents in Bloomington, Indiana. It's a surprisingly vibrant town with restaurants and culture, arguably on equal footing with the more populous Indianapolis, and much much greater than surrounding communitites.
Oh, right, and it has a Big Ten university in it noncoincidentally.
I'm surprised these shitty / declining areas don't take advantage of the incredibly expensive college in other areas by setting up new colleges in their areas and subsidizing the tuition, and investing in them to make them great.
Granted that takes a while to accomplish, but the positive feedback of major schools is undeniable... and it ain't just the football team.
That also requires an appetite for public education. Which had to be tax funded (yuck) and can't be Christian (double yuck) and requires equal race and gender access (triple yuck.)
Old America hasn't done that, for a reason. That's why it's old.
Data visualization is nice but I feel compensation also plays a major role in this. Pay-scale of an engineer in silicon valley is much higher compared any other state. Another important factor is also due to globalization lot of jobs disappeared out of the rust belt states and that is why you see lot of brain drain on Eastern facing US states.
> that is why you see lot of brain drain on Eastern facing US states
Where do you see this? I see Greater Boston, Albany, Ithaca, State College (Penn State), Greater DC, Charlottesville (UVA), Raleigh-Durham, Ann Arbor (UMich), Urbana-Champaign, Madison (UWisc) in the 'brain gain' category, all anchored by one or more strong universities, while a few smaller metros in Rust Belt states that are missing these amenities and are on the rural periphery are showing in 'brain drain'.
And I'm pretty sure that random blue spot in Florida is Gainesville, home of University of Florida. There's certainly no major urban center there; the population just about doubles during football weekends. But the university serves as an anchor for startup activity.
As an inhabitant of Raleigh-Durham, I can testify that its "brain gain" goes beyond the three major universities in the area (NC State, UNC, and Duke). The "Research Triangle Park" which sits snugly on the border between Raleigh and Durham has offices for a great deal of major companies (typically R&D offices), but Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary, and Morrisville proper all have plenty of businesses to offer, too (e.g., Epic Games and SAS in Cary, RedHat in downtown Raleigh, Cognitect (of Clojure and Datomic fame) in Durham, etc.).
The culture in the area is great, and there's no better place for a craft beer enthusiast to live. Couple the excellent job market with the low cost of living, and it's a hell of a nice place to live. Of all the places I've lived, it's by far my favorite.
The places you mention are doing great which is fine but Pennsylvanian, Maryland, Ohio, Georgia & Virginia look at the map there are so many pink section. Also I have friends in this areas who ended up moving since their industry closed down.
Unless you have large, fixed expenses like student loans. Then, the larger absolute salary wins in spite of things like housing (the primary driver of regional differences in COL) being more expensive.
Or cars, or even Apple products. People love defending Austin, Boston, etc. Cost of living only applies to food and housing, more of less. After that $20-50K is paid, cost of living does not apply to anything you spend past $50K.
That is a very good point. When businesses close down or leave town, the professional service industry follows. All of those doctors, accountants, lawyers, psychologists, physical therapists, and so on need people with good jobs to support their income, so for them there's no sense in sticking around when theirs are the kinds of industries that reliably expand and contract with the economy as a whole.
"Even with this dedication, the city’s population dropped 3.4 percent to 20,130 from April 1, 2010, to July 1, 2015, according to the Census Bureau."
UK: Twenty thousand people isn't even a town here, let alone a city. Am I being harsh in suggesting that this is basically rounding error? Isn't the dynamic towards urban (N*10^6 people with 1 < N < 10) concentration?
Although that quote refers to the jurisdiction of Cumberland itself, the ranking is ostensibly about the Cumberland, MD-WV Metropolitan Statistical Area, with a population [1] of almost 100k.
The definitions of jurisdictions do not translate well across countries. The definition of city / county / town etc are not even consistent across United States. You can not compare a UK city to those used in USA.
For reference, the British definitions did stick around in India, and being an Indian, I can relate to what you are saying :)
Note the strong correlation between gain areas and the strongly blue counties from the election: http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president. Interesting that economic and social force bring the educated together into dense communities, where they are then under-represented given the way political power is currently apportioned.
It's not surprising that the "educated" skew blue. The institutions in this country preach ideology in addition to teaching practical skills. We all know which direction the majority ideology follows...
I spent ten+ years in a private Christian school in the US. We had special Christian-version science textbooks, daily Bible class along with all the regular staple courses, etc.
My take is that the conservative right has been taken over by an extreme religious element that has actively withdrawn from engaging with education, science, and non-religiously-affiliated institutions. Everything is extremely filtered and anything mainstream is to be avoided at all costs. So where are people from other ideologies supposed to come from if they're brought up to withdraw to their own parallel no-differing-views world?
I wouldn't say "these days" given the current situation. The arguably most extremist form of the mainstream right, the alt-right, is quite intellectual and fairly secular.
If critical thinking is considered as "preaching ideologies", I'm all for it!
Seriously, engineers and (hardish) scientists often go through universities with little exposure to preachy liberal art professors, and they still mostly come out as liberals.
>For Frank, the central defining tendency of the modern Democratic Party is its domination by “professionals,” the highly-credentialed, data-driven Best and Brightest that Obama stuffed his cabinet with.
Wouldn't you /want/ the best and brightest setting the direction and making sure that course is followed?
I can understand having a different criteria for selection, but that doesn't seem to be the message. They can't really want willfully ignorant, under-performing, yet popular.
> Wouldn't you /want/ the best and brightest setting the direction and making sure that course is followed?
Please read the book. You want the best and brightest writing the policies, but you need them working on behalf of the working-class in general, through an exercise of broadly-based working-class power inside the party. Otherwise, you just get what we have, which is the best and brightest writing policies that favor the best and brightest above everyone else.
More connections means more opportunity. The real cost of being rural is being even more disconnected; the divide between people still exists, but adding distance can make it insurmountable.
There are more restaurants per person here than NYC; the traffic is never bad except during 30-minute rush hour intervals; there is enough middle/upper-middle income here to support high-end retail and services (ex: even if there is only one very good spa and steakhouse, it is still a very good spa and steakhouse); the cost of living is...well it's ok. Housing is expensive in the City and the surrounding Town, but if you go a mere 5 minutes out of the Town of Ithaca in any direction you practically pay peanuts. Still, food and other necessities are Upstate-cheap if you don't shop at Wegmans.
But most importantly, Ithaca is a pleasant place filled with pleasant people. The average person on the street is friendly and helpful. Nobody is "too important." Maybe it's because we have a top public high school where rich and poor alike receive a quality education, but there isn't an economic "us vs them" one often finds in decrepit Rust Belt cities with wealthy suburbs or revitalized metro areas that sag professionals with "gentrifier guilt."
The point I'm trying to make is that if you want professionals (and thereby, businesses) to come and stay, you have to make your city a nice place to live. Tax breaks don't fix a lousy commute. Fancy new mixed-use high-rises don't diminish the sneers you get from service workers who see you as a disruptive yuppie who is destroying their hometown without even realizing it.
I know it's not terribly helpful to suggest "if you want to make your city attractive to professionals, it just has to have that spark," but I see it as akin to a doctor recommending the extremely difficult tasks of regular exercise and a healthy diet instead solving every problem with a pill.