Legacy Economy

Is Pittsburgh's economic glass half full or half empty? Harold Miller serves up some measured optimism in the Post-Gazette. Pittsburgh continues to out-perform many other regions during the current recession. But Joel Kotkin thinks we are bearing witness to a false positive:

In large part, Pittsburgh's "success," such as it is, has been based on what may be called a "legacy economy," essentially funded by the residues of its rich entrepreneurial past. This includes the hospitals, universities and nonprofits whose endowments have underwritten the expansion of medical services and education, which have emerged as among the region's few growth sectors.

John Morris has already pinpointed old money as the major reason for Pittsburgh's current success. And Daniel Drezner relates the bad news about the state of endowments. From this vantage point, the foundation of the regional economy looks rather shallow.

If the legacy economy is indeed underwriting the recent growth, then I would expect other endowment rich Rust Belt communities to be similarly thriving. They would also be facing the same short-term risks. Regardless, I'm still bullish on Pittsburgh. Whatever the reason for the relatively rosy numbers, Pittsburgh is doing well without the benefit of strong immigration. A concerted effort to attract more foreign born to the area will fuel more growth. The strong legacy economy can help bring this about. A major talent initiative is require and Pittsburgh has the money to do it.

Mega Skeptics in the New North

Blogs, not universities, make up the Marketplace of Ideas. To wit, journalist Steve Prestegard challenges Richard Longworth's idea that the Midwest should engage in mega-regional cooperation in order to tackle the destructive effects of globalization:

Longworth believes the Midwest must work together as a region to market itself and deal with globalization’s negative effects. Working together is laudable, but the problem with that approach is that the rewards of growing businesses don’t go to a region as a whole, only to whatever state is the home of a growing business. Unlike a regional in-state approach such as the New North, where growing, profitable businesses and their employees pay various state taxes that benefit the state as a whole and thus everyone in that region, if A Corp. decides on Wisconsin instead of Minnesota, Minnesota doesn’t get very many benefits unless A Corp. is located on near the Minnesota state line and some of its employees live in Minnesota. (That is the case for some Chicago-area, Twin Cities-area and Dubuque, Iowa, businesses.) The fact that only two governors in (Longworth’s definition of) the Midwest are Republican makes no difference — until Wisconsin voters vote for Illinois’ governor, Illinois’ governor will see every business that moves into Wisconsin (particularly those who choose Wisconsin over Illinois) as a loss for Illinois.

Longworth responds:

You say a regional Midwestern marketing and development strategy won’t work, because the only benefits go to the state or locality that actually gets the investment, not to the Midwest as a whole. Narrowly conceived, that’s true. But it assumes that individual states and localities can thrive in a rusting, dying region. Granted, economic lightning might strike a region like New North, while the rest of Wisconsin or the rest of the Midwest crumbles. But don’t bet on it. Regions do rise and fall together. Look at New England: boomtime in shoes, textiles and other industries, busttime when those industries went south, renewed boom (except for the far reaches, like Maine) when New England recovered on the basis of high tech. Or look at the South: a bad century, somewhat like the Cubs, from the Civil War to the 1960s, when air conditioning was invented and the Old South became the Sun Belt. Some places, like Atlanta, have done better than others, like the Delta. But overall, the South has drawn in industry, investment, people and money as a region. Or look at the Midwest: we’ve been living for the past century on the explosion of innovation and entrepreneurialism that burst from the region as a whole, with one good idea (the invention of the car, for instance) spawning tons of other ideas (ignitions, tires, ball bearings, etc.) and creating industries, like steel, across the Midwest to feed these entrepreneurial businesses. Steel mills in Chicago, in turn, created demand for iron and coal throughout the Midwest and, in time, spawned the farm equipment businesses in Wisconsin and elsewhere. In other words, the Midwest rose as a region, thrived as a region and, alas, is now declining as a region. My point: economic development seldom happens in isolation. So what if Minnesota gets that factory? Wisconsin will get the next one. Better for the two states to work together.

I read Prestegard as understanding economic development as a zero-sum game. If The New North does well, it will be at the expense of someplace else. To him, whether a factory moves from Wisconsin to Minnesota or India makes no difference. The end result is bad for Wisconsin. However, Prestegard does allow for some proximity spillover if the growth occurs near a state border.

Longworth plays geographer, pointing out the historical links between certain states. Good times and bad are regional. The rising tide in Minnesota should lift the boats in Wisconsin. I think Longworth has suggested how that commencial benefit could be enhanced and is striving to do exactly that.

I take a piece of each perspective in constructing my own take. Both journalists overplay the political geography. If a big business moves from Atlanta to Pittsburgh, then Philadelphia doesn't really benefit. There is considerable economic variance within states. State level data are not all that useful. Longworth himself describes how uneven Chicago's rebirth has been, benefitting mostly the central business district. And Chicago's alpha global city status doesn't do much for Carbondale. On a mega-regional level, Atlanta's boom did not scrape the rust off of relatively near by Chattanooga.

Longworth's Midwest is untenable. I don't think we could build enough connectivity infrastructure to make it viable. The same goes for state-centric thinking. Pittsburgh looking to Youngstown and Cleveland instead of Philadelphia is much more practical.

Case for Cleveburgh

Short and to the point, the Cleveland Plain Dealer gets behind the Tech Belt initiative:

Cleveland and Pittsburgh have similar histories and now face similar challenges. Both need to attract investment and immigrants, to rebuild aging infrastructure and to revamp balkanized governments. On the plus side, both cities have priceless assets on which to build: world-renowned medical centers, research universities and cultural institutions.

This postindustrial corridor will be the heart of any Rust Belt revitalization. Congressman Tim Ryan is the champion of the mega-region. Cleveburgh should rally around his efforts and devise a coordinated economic development strategy to take full advantage of Obama's first year.

Talent Shortage: Central PA

Government agencies and the business community are scouring the hillsides of Central Pennsylvania in search of the underemployed:

For many business executives, these efforts are about maintaining daily operations. For the region, this may be about something more: long-term competitiveness. The York County military contractor Gichner Shelter Systems is preparing to reach out to Hispanic York residents to solve a workforce problem that could otherwise force the company to shift some operations elsewhere.

"We'd have to outsource ... whole functions and whole departments," said Tom Mills, Gichner's president and chief executive officer.

Reaching out to The Invisible Workforce - the legions of underemployed city residents in Central Pennsylvania - is not the only solution to the region's chronic shortage of skilled labor. But business leaders increasingly see it as an important component.

A "chronic shortage of skilled labor" is a phrase I wouldn't expect to read during a severe recession. But comparisons to the major economic downturns of the past ignore today's demography. The sharp rise in unemployment is real enough, but some sectors of enterprise continue to struggle to find bodies (more appropriately, minds).

Instead of "job creation", "workforce retraining" is the mantra. Indian tech companies dealt with their labor crunch without much (if any) government assistance. The outsourcing of workforce training to public schools and institutions of higher learning is increasingly inefficient. Of course, smaller businesses cannot afford to take on such costs. But more innovation in the area of labor mobility might present a solution even in that case.

The Great Brain Boomerang

The greater geographic mobility of talent is beginning to benefit the developing world. Pink slips in alpha global cities such as London and New York are turning into airplane tickets for high-skilled immigrants:

The reversal is particularly dramatic in India, where human resource managers for finance firms are reporting hundreds of résumés from New York and London arriving on their desks each week.

Mr. Dinodia has found himself at the centre of this phenomenon. After he arrived in India, he set up an online community for Indian-born graduates of the Wharton School - the acclaimed University of Pennsylvania business college where he'd earned his degree - to help them find positions in India's thriving financial sector if they wanted to move back.

He thought he would end up helping out maybe a couple of dozen people. Then the markets collapsed. In the past six weeks, his network has helped 350 Wharton grads move back to India, using its circle of 50 India-based mentors and "industry captains" to place them in high-level positions in an economy that looks more promising, if a lot smaller, to many of them.

The article references the research of Vivek Wadhwa. Once again, shortsighted US immigration policy is scapegoated. But that's not the blog story.

Over the last month or so, I've seen similar boomerang activity at IntoPittsburgh. More and more Burgh expatriates are joining the group and making inquiries about employment opportunities in the homeland. Too bad there isn't any sort of "Return to Pittsburgh" services available with at least some useful information about best practices.

Sony Pittsburgh

Chris Briem's last paragraph in his latest Null Space blog post really got the wheels turning in my head:

Lots more to say on the history of the Sony Plant here, especially its initial decision to locate here and the history of Volkswagen and even Chrysler before it on that one site. Maybe more later on. But as Sony's hardware biz looks as shaky as most manufacturing, they are also announcing new pushes into more ethereal software businesses and their new 3-D social networking site. Is the future of any Sony-Pittsburgh nexus focused more on that part of their business?

Pittsburgh would be the ideal place for the social networking venture. What says the grapevine?

Labor Shortage Pittsburgh: Energy

I don't when or even if the credit crunch and falling oil prices will put a dent into Pittsburgh's labor shortage:

On a given night, workers from outside the area who are employed at Range projects occupy 400 to 500 hotel rooms just in Washington County, as there aren't enough local job seekers to satisfy demand. The average annual wage, including benefits, for jobs ranging from administrative to senior petroleum engineers, is $80,000, said Range's Pitzarella.

"The ability to build energy infrastructure is pretty limited in this country," said Michael Corradini, chairman of the Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It's not just a shortage of nuclear engineers, but of all the trades involved in building, because coal plants, nuclear plants, all need pipefitters, carpenters, civil engineers." ...

... Range's Pitzarella said his company is talking with universities in the region that don't offer petroleum engineering degrees. Only Penn State and West Virginia now offer such degrees.

"We're also in discussion with a number of parties to put together a public-private cooperative partnership to provide more workers, because if we don't develop the work force here, the potential won't be recognized."

The local focus for labor development is necessary because places such as Alberta are not going to let go the talent they've worked so hard to attract. The time it takes to train enough bodies to man these projects should put graduates on the other side of the downturn. I have half a mind to enroll at the Colorado School of Mines and pave the way for my return to Pittsburgh.

A great boomerang project would be to solicit recruits for training programs in the energy sector. Westinghouse and its ilk get the necessary talent while homesick Yinzers get to return. My wife and I are both college educated and we would love to raise our two children in Pittsburgh. But the relocation logistics range from daunting to prohibitive. Just how serious is the labor shortage?

The Great Brain Gain

The last global economic contraction pushed a generation of talent out of the City of Pittsburgh. Not only did the people leave the region en masse in search of work, the local population diffused outward:

The 1980s and 1990s was the era of the great dispersal. Forty-three million people moved every year, and basically they moved outward -- from inner-ring suburbs to far-flung exurbs on the metro fringe. For example, the population of metropolitan Pittsburgh declined by 8 percent in those years, but the developed land area of the Pittsburgh area sprawled outward by 43 percent.

What will be the dominant domestic migration pattern of this economic downturn? Density is back in vogue and retiring Boomers will strain the ability of enterprise to cobble together a critical mass of brains. But instead of a big move back to the city, we might see the transformation of the bedroom community into a place where people also work and play.

The more perplexing mystery is figuring out where the population will relocate. Recent boomtown such as Austin should continue to draw talent, but the aging infrastructure of the Rust Belt is in much better position to benefit from the density trend. Chattanooga, Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Indianapolis all look to be winners in this go-round.

Urban Revitalization Diaspora

The London School of Economics (LSE) has issued a report detailing how 7 European cities "survived the destruction of manufacturing and the 1980s recessions to reinvent themselves as centres of innovation and inspiration." As you might imagine, Rust Belt boosters are interested:

That success has drawn international admirers. Parlaying the benefits of innovation and research clusters into cleaning up inner city areas is "smart economically, and sustainably, since densely built cities use less energy and generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions," says Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. "The revival of older industrial cities in Europe has much to teach their counterparts in the U.S."

But there are differences. American cities are typified by much greater urban sprawl than that seen in Europe. "If you take population loss and job losses, the American cities have gone through very dramatic shrinkage and vastly greater suburban expansion," says Anne Power, professor of social policy at the LSE, and one of the guide's authors. With public funding for redevelopment is often less available in the U.S., "the result," says Katz, is "weaker city cores [and] the rise of an exit ramp economy. We need a 180-degree turn in federal and state policies in the U.S."

That's not to say there aren't bright spots. Industrial jobs and residents disappeared from the Tennessee city of Chattanooga in the 1980s, but thanks to a local task force, its downtown stands revitalized, with newly created hospitality and leisure sector jobs boosting employment and income levels far more quickly than in comparable cities through the '90s. Elsewhere in the U.S. old industrial towns seem keen to learn, at least. Greater Ohio, a network of groups working to revitalize cities in the state, recently ordered 60 copies of the LSE's guide to distribute to local city mayors "as a way of giving them inspiration and aspirations," says Lavea Brachman, Greater Ohio's co-director and a senior fellow at Brookings. "We here in Ohio, need inspiration." As the U.S. heads deeper into a recession you can bet they aren't the only ones.

Given the different geographic contexts of Europe and the United States, a closer look at the Chattanoogas might be more useful for Greater Ohio. Heck, commission the LSE to study America's own Postindustrial Magnificent Seven. But the University of Akron would do in a pinch.

Death of the American Town

Forbes published another ranking, this time the top-10 "Fastest-Dying Towns." I'm not concerned with which places made the infamous list. Lost in the booster publicity storm that inevitably follows is the great content presented in the narrative:

Incomes have dropped in all the places on the list since 2000. Even before adjusting for inflation, workers in places like Asheboro, N.C., or Spanish Lake, Mo., saw median incomes decline over the last seven years. In the former, this is a result of job losses in the manufacturing and heavy industry sectors; in the latter, an inability to attract highly skilled workers has hampered annual salaries.

Median incomes can drop if young workers or immigrants are moving to an area and taking newly formed jobs at lower salaries, which isn't necessarily a sign that times are tough. However, if the number of folks under the poverty line surges while incomes drop, it's a sign of economic decline instead of transition. This is what's happening in places like Middletown, Ohio, which saw the seven-year poverty rate jump from 12% to 22%.

Incomes have dropped in all the places on the list since 2000. Even before adjusting for inflation, workers in places like Asheboro, N.C., or Spanish Lake, Mo., saw median incomes decline over the last seven years. In the former, this is a result of job losses in the manufacturing and heavy industry sectors; in the latter, an inability to attract highly skilled workers has hampered annual salaries.

The problem, across the board, is the inability to attract people. Out-migration rates won't tell you much about the economic health of a place. On the other hand, in-migration rates are robust predictors. Yet time and again, the sophisticated analysis is ignored and policies to keep people from leaving are rolled out. Perception informs reality.

As an aside, Pittsburgh merits mention:

Though gloomy, this news is not necessarily a nail in these places' coffins. That's because turnarounds are possible, though without new industry it's difficult to know how long many of these spots can stay on life support.

"Until or unless other industries see this as a low-cost viable place to do business, turning into a Gary or Youngstown would be the worst-case scenario." says Cornell. "Pittsburgh is a good case in the sense that medical and biotech firms took the place of steel mills. That didn't help the steel workers, who don't have the necessary skills, but it helped their kids."

If there is an American post-industrial city sporting a better recovery than Pittsburgh, I'd like to know about it.

Startup Weekend: Vote for Cleveland

From Brewed Fresh Daily:

Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, start-up enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.

Founded in 2007 by Andrew Hyde, the weekend is a concept of a conference focusing on learning by creating. It is known for its quick decisions, ‘out of the box’ thinking, unique facilitation technique and letting the founders show what they can do. The program has already met with success in Boulder, Toronto, New York, Hamburg, Houston, West Lafayette, Boston, DC and more.

Hellooooo…………Cleveland!

a mere 31 votes will put us in the top 5
doubling our current votes will put us ahead of Zincinnatti

Cast your vote for the CLV!!

Cleveland has shot up to #1. Get the vote out, Cleveburgh.

Pittsburgh Social Media Goes Global

Here is one reason why I think Pittsburgh will help transform the distance-trust economy:

It used to be, for example, that an information vendor might charge big bucks for access to a database of content aggregated from newspaper publishers around the world. Now you can do that for free on Google. In the field of scholarly scientific, technical and medical research, the push for so-called open access to peer-review research is also challenging the status quo.

Now comes the new focus, on the research side, on how to add social networking into enterprise search – let’s call it social searching.

Vivisimo offered a compelling, practical case for what can be done. It demonstrated its enterprise/social search service that allows users to enrich their retrieved materials by category tagging, free-text annotating, bookkeeping and sharing. Others in the organization, down the hall or a few time zones away, can access and track their colleagues’ work through dashboard-type functionality. That new, user-generated layer itself becomes an asset by allowing individuals – again, in the same building or half way around the world – to quickly identify pockets of expertise within an organization. And that can be a catalyst for sharing knowledge quickly and avoiding unnecessary duplication of effort. But that horizontal collaboration can skip over organizational boundaries, and that can be a threat to unenlightened management.

As Stacy Monarko, a Pittsburgh-based Vivisimo product manager said, “The next best idea may not come from the board room.”

Now imagine the next big idea not coming from within Pittsburgh but from its Diaspora. I understand blogging as a very efficient form of knowledge production. The TECHburgher blog post about Vivisimo's big splash also offers a few anecdotes about putting blogs to work. Whether anyone realizes it or not, the Podcamp Pittsburgh community is a strong regional economic asset. If you don't believe me, then ask the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

Uncosmopolitan Pittsburgh

Leaving Pittsburgh in order to discover your Polish heritage:

"It actually gave me goose bumps," student Hilary Lesnoski, 17, said. She charted her family's journey from Poland to the United States, tracing back to her great-grandparents. She said she had not thought much about immigration until she moved to Herndon from Pittsburgh two years ago.

When you live in Pittsburgh, the world is a very small place. I'm surprised how far removed today's teenagers are removed from Pittsburgh's immigrant experience. Pittsburgh is already beyond the apathy of third generation immigrants. More than anything else I've read about, this speaks to the entrenched risk aversion.

Brain Gain India and Cleveburgh

Indian expatriates are discovering a world of opportunity in their homeland. As Silicon Valley matures, Bangalore soars:

If Bangalore is losing some of its luster, it remains the world’s fourth largest technology hub and claims to have the fastest-growing wealth base in the Asia-Pacific basin. And for many Americans, this means Bangalore is both a threat and opportunity: A threat because it now boasts at least 160,000 technology workers compared with about 175,000 in Silicon Valley. Moreover, much of this talent, especially at the middle and top levels, has been transplanted from the San Francisco Bay area to India. Bangalore also represents an opportunity for US companies to tap into India's prodigious brainpower and entrepreneurial spirit. From Bangalore, Americans and citizens of other developed countries are having their tax returns prepared, CAT scans and MRIs read, mortgages analyzed, lawsuits researched, airline reservations confirmed and computer glitches unsnarled – all at the speed of light, thanks to broadband internet connections that make the city as close as the shop or hospital next door.

One of the factors facilitating this boomerang migration is US immigration policy. Green card limbo is making life difficult for foreign born talent trained at American universities. Some analysts expect that to change once Barack Obama assumes the Office of the President of the United States. Rust Belt cities should prepare to take advantage of this opportunity.

However, US immigration law is somewhat besides the point. Silicon Valley, more than anywhere else, stands to benefit from the brain drain to Bangalore. Sand Hill Road venture capital will welcome this growth market. The Indian talent leading the Bangalore boom is Silicon Valley connected, a pathway of trust and financial capital flow.

The above is the Silicon Valley Diaspora (see Google Diaspora). Exporting talent can yield substantial returns. This dynamic is why I think Cleveburgh should engineer its out-migration. I'm not recommending the increase of people leaving the region. I'm talking about the value of channeling the inevitable talent exit to strategically advantageous destinations (e.g. ideal export markets). The focus on decreasing brain drain is misplaced. A better approach is to target brain drain.

Talent Demand Forecast

During the onset of the economic storm, articles about talent shortages were hard to find. Looming layoffs put unemployment on the front page. But the gloomy labor forecasts were an aberration:

After spending the past three years dangling carrots and scouring the globe to lure employees, energy companies may now find themselves in the sticky position of having to potentially lay off employees in coming months, according to recruitment experts who are seeing a rise in the number of out-of-work clients.

"If the capital expenditures for facilities or those plans are curtailed by the oil and gas companies, then they will not need the support of the (engineering, procurement and construction) firms, the (information technology) firms and the individual consultants, so it will have a direct impact in the first quarter (of 2009)," says Bruce Green, a managing partner with business advisory and career services firm Cenera in Calgary.

"But companies will do their very best to reassign the talent because it took them so long to find (workers)," he adds.

Dealing with the boom-bust cycle of resource commodities is tough. The demand for labor can crash just as suddenly as it spiked. However, attracting talent is expensive. But demographics, not the return of high oil prices, are driving the efforts to retain the human capital currently toiling in places such as Alberta:

The good news is that the downturn in demand could be somewhat offset by the aging population, which led to the labour shortage of recent years. Highly qualified and experienced people are still in strong demand overall, [Green] says.

Concerns about looming talent shortages has returned to the news stream. Boomers retiring, not a possible depression, remains the dominant labor narrative. Regions that can weather the downturn relatively well should cultivate a strong edge in attracting skilled labor.

Rust Belt Chic: Youngstown Equipment Company

Janko sent me a link to the Youngstown Equipment Company based in California. My curiosity piqued, I did a little digging and found the following:

Max Hackett, director of sales, had this to say: “Yes, we were inspired by Youngstown, Ohio. We wanted a name that to us represents hard work, toughness, America and Midwestern values.

“I am one of the founders with a few other guys. None of us have ties to Youngstown. We kicked around a number of names and knew we wanted to be named after a city. We liked the name Youngstown, Ohio. Then we did a lot of research on your town and we were very impressed.

“We loved the building history and the steel which went on to build our railroads and sky-rise buildings. It truly came across as the backbone of America.”

Among boosters of the Postindustrial Heartland, there is a debate about the mega-regional brand. No one objects to the ethos of hard work or the image of America's backbone. But the glove maker is invoking the Youngstown of yesterday. Doesn't this reinforce the negative Rust Belt stereotype? Isn't the brand an anachronism?

There are two sides to the industrial legacy. One is the risk averse culture unable to move forward and embrace the latest economic paradigm. The other is a wonder like Mill Creek Park, a world class urban asset right in the heart of Youngstown. The beauty and traditions of the city inspire passion. They also sell work gloves.

Wrong Kind of Innovation

Perhaps the creative economy in Pittsburgh is all wrong. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) produces plenty of brain power. What Pittsburgh lacks is the ability to market all the toys invented in CMU labs:

While others bemoan the state of American education, Mr. Bhidé, who graduated from the elite Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai before he earned advanced degrees at Harvard, is impressed with the general level of creativity and practical skills across the nation’s work force.

Every day, for example, millions of workers are using spreadsheets to do simple what-if calculations to improve some process or operation in their businesses, he said. “In the end, it comes down to individuals, and you don’t need to be a trained scientist or engineer for this broad swath of creatively productive work,” he observed. “You need a somewhat more open mind, a willingness to experiment and to innovate in the use of technology, not create it.”

So instead of tilting policy toward the apex of the education system, Mr. Bhidé suggests, it may make more sense to invest scarce government resources further down — say, in upgrading community college programs. “The modern information technology economy is going to need a lot of foot soldiers,” he said.

“And our supply of high-level science and ideas in most fields far exceeds our capacity to use it.”

Richard Florida has made much out of Lycos leaving Pittsburgh for Boston. Supposedly, Pittsburgh didn't have enough talent to keep the start-up in town. Turns out that's not why Lycos got out of Dodge. Pittsburgh was (is) missing sufficient entrepreneurial know how and venture capital. I've written on many occasions that venture capital doesn't travel too far from the funding source. Ideas and gizmos are much more mobile.

Pittsburgh is like a minor league franchise. Talent is nutured until it matures enough to be of value to the regions that specialize in technological utility. That's a problem because India and China can also produce loads of STEM workers. The value add is figuring out a viable business model or actual application for a new device.

Richard Florida has also made much of the world's surprisingly spiky geography. Not only has the Flat World of the internets failed to emerge, just the opposite is happening. There is no substitute for face-to-face creativity and we should expect people to continue to crowd into cities to take advantage of proximity. But Spiky World isn't a failure of technology. It is a shortcoming of utility. I've suggested, perhaps ad nauseum at this juncture, that Pittsburgh's niche isn't the development of social software. The special sauce is the innovative application of existing social software.

Labor Shortage North Dakota

A reminder that economic downturns are just as geographically uneven as upturns:

As it happens, one of the state’s biggest worries right now is precisely the reverse of most other states: North Dakota has about 13,000 unfilled jobs and is struggling to find people to take them.

“We could use more people with skills for some of these jobs,” Marty Aas, who leads the Fargo branch of the state’s Job Service North Dakota, said as his offices — where the unemployed might come for help — sat quiet and nearly empty. State employees outnumbered the six clients on a recent afternoon. (Mr. Aas insisted that such a slow afternoon was rare.)

State officials and private companies have begun looking elsewhere to recruit workers, including traveling in October to Michigan, where tens of thousands of workers have been laid off, and, this month, holding an “online job fair,” anything to lure people to a place that is, at least for now, removed from the deep financial dismay — if also just plain removed.

“Our problem is that everybody thinks that it’s a cold, miserable place to live,” said Bob Stenehjem, a Republican and the State Senate’s majority leader. “They’re wrong, of course. But North Dakota is a pretty well-kept secret.”

With 635,867 residents, North Dakota is among the least populous states, and, in the past few years, more people have moved away, census figures show, than have moved here.

Katie Hasbargen, a spokeswoman for Microsoft’s Fargo campus, which is in the middle of a $70 million or so building expansion and is, even now, looking for a few additions to its work force (of more than 1,500), said false perceptions of the state are the problem when it comes to recruiting workers. “The movie,” Ms. Hasbargen said, referring to the 1996 Coen brothers’ film that bears this city’s name, “didn’t do us a lot of favors.”

On a recent evening, as the night shift arrived at DMI Industries, where 383 workers (an all-time high) weld gigantic towers for wind turbines and where a $20 million expansion is under way, Phillip Christiansen, the general manager, wandered the plant, noting those who had been recruited from elsewhere — three from Michigan not long ago, another from Louisiana. “It’s very competitive around here trying to find people,” he said. “In this environment, it’s a little hard.”

I quoted a lengthy passage in order to demonstrate the proximity problem as it relates to sense of place. Information is easy to impart. Anyone can crunch the rankings: Climate data, unemployment rate, job creation, average salary, and tax regime. Numbers abound. But do they drive migration?

The North Dakota story (see Atlantic Canada for another example) suggests otherwise. Unemployed in Flint reads the NYT article, but the movie "Fargo" is what is playing in her head. Intimate knowledge is extremely difficult to communicate. Thus workers tough it out in Michigan instead of heading to opportunity in North Dakota. Even the young and most geographically mobile follow this pattern. Relocation is often to the next city or state over from where they grew up. As for the long distance treks to the latest boomtown, that is more mythology than reality. If you can make it here, then you can make it anywhere: The American Dream.

Then there is path dependency. Social networks as a predictor of migration are growing in significance. You might call it a "mobility apprenticeship." You learn about a new place from someone you trust and then take the relocation risk. But places such as North Dakota or Pittsburgh aren't part of these talent circles, save when expatriates bump up against talent from somplace else in Big City. The result is anxiety about brain drain or "brain boomerang".

Social media can solve this problem. The technology already exists, along with the cultural sophistication to put it use. But if the economy gets bad enough, we won't need these tools:

When work was plentiful at home, it was often a tough sell to get lawyers to move halfway around the world. But since the financial unraveling in September, that’s all changed. In the last two months, recruiters in Hong Kong and Dubai say they’ve seen a record number of New York résumés from candidates looking for law-firm or in-house legal work overseas.

Times are tough and pioneers are finding work in new places, setting the stage for a new round of network migration. This slump is Pittsburgh's big chance. Pittsburgh represents the domestic economic frontier. What other cities could emerge as a surprise hotspot like Minneapolis and Austin did in the early 1990s?

Museum of the Rust Belt

New York City has a new museum. No, I'm not talking about the Big Apple's underhanded attempt to wrest the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame away from Cleveland. The Museum of Arts and Design opened earlier this fall. Normally, I wouldn't be aware of such fanfare. I learned about the museum in the last article of a series in the New York Times about the City's Landmarks Preservation Commission. Cities themselves are museums, including the isolated pockets of blight and decay:

In the late 1960s Smithson photographed the industrial ruins around his birthplace, Passaic, N.J., christening them as monuments. In the early 1970s Matta-Clark staged illegal “interventions” in some of the same Bronx neighborhoods that Mr. Mortenson was to visit, slicing whole sculpturelike sections from the floors and walls of abandoned tenements.

Mr. Mortenson’s first photographic explorations of this sort took him to the Meadowlands in New Jersey, where nature and industrial decay met in epic combat. Toward the end of the years he spent exploring the swamps he began taking the elevated subway lines through the Bronx and looking out at the rubble that many neighborhoods had been reduced to. As a child growing up in Delaware, he loved spending time alone walking through forests and fields, and he said he thought of the Meadowlands and then the Bronx in the same way.

“I could spend hours walking around some blocks without seeing anyone,” he said. He would wander around Charlotte Street, one of the South Bronx’s bleakest, which President Jimmy Carter had made infamous in a 1977 visit. (It is now in a suburblike neighborhood of neat single-family homes built not many years after Mr. Mortenson’s photographs were taken.)

Très Rust Belt Chic.

Sean Corcoran, the curator of prints and photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, said he was drawn to the images in part because of the tension in them between art and history. “The act of framing and capturing an image from the world is inherently transformative,” he wrote in the catalog for the show, which runs through March 8. “Yet the pictures also provide an important record of a moment in time.”

Mr. Corcoran writes that they insistently ask the question: “How could things get to this point? What political, economic and cultural shifts could lead to such a collapse?”

What is archive for New York City is today's Rust Belt landscape. There should be a museum where we house the tension "between art and history." I want one place where the world can explore the shrinking city and the postindustrial apocalypse. I want to be able to visit one city and learn all about urban failure and revitalization. I don't think that museum should be in New York City.

Where would you build the Rust Belt Museum?

Cleveburgh Innovation: TiE Ohio

Via Richard Herman, the Cleveland Plain Dealer celebrates Ohio's only TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) chapter:

"The TiE brand is a beacon for entrepreneurs," said Eddy Zai, a local entrepreneur who will co-chair the Cleveland TiE chapter with Baiju Shah, president and CEO of BioEnterprise.

They and other charter members, including Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, will launch the chapter in festive fashion Monday, Dec. 8, at the House of Blues in downtown Cleveland. All globally minded business people are invited to a reception from 4 to 8 p.m. Learn more at ohio.tie.org/.

Perhaps someone who reads the Plain Dealer on a daily basis can help answer my question: Is Robert Smith's "Global Village" column new? I don't see more than the most recent article in the 6-month archive. Regardless, an RSS feed would be nice.