Milwaukee Desperately Seeking Talent Dividend

Talent is a hot topic. Today, Aaron Renn takes another look at talent attraction. Regions should actively court both business and human capital. The latter is new to the economic development policy discussion. There is growing interest in educational attainment data as well as tracking talent migration. Milwaukee is sizing up its competition and looking for ways to get better:

Michael Lovell thinks it's possible, and he's in good position to judge. He grew up in western Pennsylvania and until two years ago was associate dean for research at the University of Pittsburgh's engineering school. Now he's dean of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's College of Engineering and Applied Science, where he's helping push for a research center and technology-based business park in Wauwatosa.

"I often say that Milwaukee is today where Pittsburgh was about 10 years ago," Lovell said. ...

... It's not that the city isn't adding college graduates. That's happening almost everywhere. Where less than 15% of Milwaukee adults held degrees in 1990, just over 20% did in 2006-'08 - a gain of 5.5 percentage points.

But Atlanta and Seattle tacked on 16 points during the same period. Portland, Ore., added nearly 14. Minneapolis added 12. Boston and Charlotte, about 11.

Pittsburgh - which doesn't quite make the 50-largest-cities list - jumped 12.3 points, more than twice Milwaukee's gain.

The odd duck in that cohort is Pittsburgh. The darlings of educational attainment are cities that attract a lot of talent. That's not how Pittsburgh does it (however, that's beginning to change). Few regions (perhaps none) can match Pittsburgh's ability to produce talent.

In terms of talent production, the Rust Belt is king. That's the point Bruce Katz is evangelizing. That fact is beginning to pay dividends in places such as Pittsburgh (Skilled Anchors). Critics tend to misunderstand this positive indicator. Remarks about a still declining population are irrelevant, a relic of the industrial era. Regardless, the demographics are slow to change.

Watching Pittsburgh engineer a reversal of fortune is like reversing redirecting a supertanker. The pilot starts the turn long before actually making it. The naysayers keep remarking that the boat is going the wrong way. Once the new course is achieved, the cynical claim it is all smoke and mirrors.

Successful urban transformation seems rapid because most people weren't paying attention or clung to outdated perceptions. We know that migration is a lagging indicator. Relocation decisions aren't as dynamic as Richard Florida makes them out to be. Michigan's Cool Cities initiative might work if we gave it enough time. It might already be working, but we too often look at the wrong numbers.

Third World Rust Belt

To label a place "Third World" carries the weight of negative connotations. It is a powerful geographic abstraction. Those trying to defeat the stereotype are misguided. Being Third World can be a good thing. That's the case the Economist makes and I see many parallels with the Rust Belt:

In one sense Mr Zoellick is right to say the third world is finished—if 20 years late. The poor world is usually thought of as coming “third” after the first, capitalist West, and the second, communist East. Since the second one imploded in 1989, it seems past time to put to rest the nebulous and sometimes toxic third-world concept.

But the term third world did not originally refer to geopolitics. The first to use it in its modern sense was Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer who drew a parallel with the “third estate” (the people) during the French revolution. In 1952 Sauvy wrote that “this ignored, exploited, scorned Third World, like the Third Estate, wants to become something, too.” He was paraphrasing a remark by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, a delegate to the Estates-General of 1789, who said the third estate is everything, has nothing but wants to be something. The salient feature of the third world was that it wanted economic and political clout.

It is getting both. Cold-war terminology implied that third-world countries had limited room for independent manoeuvre. They aligned themselves with one side, or got ground between millstones. That is changing. Walter Russell Mead, an American foreign-policy analyst, argues that Brazil and Turkey are both countries once within America’s circle of influence where new leaders have challenged longstanding domestic elites and are trying to shake off their reliance upon America. In both cases their ambitions are global.

Shrinking cities (as well as rural towns) in the United States are "ignored, exploited, and scorned". They are also ascendant in the wake of the Great Recession. We haven't noticed because such a turnaround shouldn't be possible in the Rust Belt. Few likely believe that Pittsburgh is a model for urban redevelopment. How could a city losing population be doing well economically?

One of the most prominent Rust Belt clichés is brain drain. People are supposed to be fleeing the cold and high unemployment for the sunny boomtowns dotting the South. Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley relate a different story:

But in a recent report on older industrial cities for the Brookings Institution and the London School of Economics, researchers Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley describe a new spirit of rebirth in Detroit.

“The city is attracting social entrepreneurs who are excited by the challenge of fundamentally remaking a city,” the co-authors write. “Philanthropies are pouring in money and imagination – the rail system on the Woodward Corridor is partially funded by tens of millions of dollars from two major foundations, and other philanthropies are trying to develop a comprehensive educational plan.”

There’s a saying that urban planners have for comeback towns: “The industry might leave, but the talent doesn’t.” Detroit is the oldest of the world’s mass-production vehicle-making centres. Detroit’s tycoon philanthropists left a legacy of world-class colleges and medical institutions, and an art gallery and symphony ranked among the nation’s best. And Detroit is still home to three Fortune 500 manufacturing enterprises. (Philadelphia has none.)

I circled back to that quote from a few weeks ago thanks to an article in yesterday's Detroit Free Press. In March, Katz was a panelist at a London School of Economics event speaking to the film "Requiem for Detroit". You can watch the entire movie and discussion at the above website. It is over two hours and, in my opinion, not all that interesting. Katz does make a pitch at the end, appealing to the members of Generation Y in the audience to seek out the Rust Belt for its unique opportunities. Katz is selling the urban frontier.

I am more intrigued by the described talent legacies found in cities such as Detroit. The talent that made the Midwest "the Silicon Valley of the industrial revolution" is still there. At least, much of the Creative Class graduates from Rust Belt universities and colleges, the engines driving the redevelopment of cities such as Akron and Rochester. Akron is where Joe Cortright rather clumsily tried to paint a picture of the talent landscape, falling back on the negative stereotypes of the region. The Third World-like brain drain is yesterday's news.

There is a dramatic contrast between the images in "Requiem for Detroit" and the complex reality on the ground. In general, economic development experts embrace the former, not the latter. Katz is trying to deconstruct the geographic propaganda (e.g. ruin porn). For the most part, the facts are on his side. But the myths dominate the policy narrative.

Today, our most troubled cities had the biggest real estate bubbles. Our most stable cities have restructured their economic portfolios away from an over-reliance on manufacturing. Just as the Third World will lead the next round of globalization, so the Rust Belt will be the hearth of America's Great Reset.

Best Talent Escapes Gravity

In economic development circles, there is significant interest in educational attainment. The percentage of workers with a college degree is a good proxy for measuring the available talent. I think we could do better.

Not all regional brain boosters are the same. I'm confident this is the case because of all the research about how migrants tend to be more entrepreneurial than the rest of the population. A region is better off attracting talent than producing it locally. Furthermore, not all inmigration is of the same quality. The greater the relocation risk, the more likely that person is a job creator.

A good proxy for a difficult migration is distance. Other indicators are gender (women would be of greater value) and social networks (how many people overcome the proximity problem). Escaping the gravity of familiar terrain demonstrates the same kind or risk taking required to start a business:

CEPII has compiled data (dist_cepii.xls found here) on distances between countries among other geographic measures. To incorporate this data into our measure of competitiveness, we multiplied the population-adjusted migration balance between each pair of countries by the square-root of the distance between the two countries. Basically, we wanted migration between two countries that are close together to count less than migration between two countries that are far apart. Further, using the square-root of the distance reflects our belief that distance traveled would likely be related to competition in a diminishing manner. Put another way, it might be difficult to move 100 miles, but once you’ve moved that first 100 miles, it becomes less difficult to move another 100 miles and so on. Therefore, while the distance travelled likely matters, we think it matters in a non-linear, diminishing way.

The gravity model is a basic tool for geographers. One can explain a lot of migration in terms of proximity. A small number of inmigrants from far away can make up for an overall lack in numbers. The easy way is to go after immigrants. Odds are strong that your region will attract an entrepreneur. Domestically, where there are almost no legal barriers, distance is key. Pulling in a female living 2000 miles away with no ties to your town is quite a coup, regardless of her educational attainment.

You can also apply this model to expatriates. How far and why did they move? That's an easy algorithm to help target your talent attraction efforts.

Census Stories

Null Space has more Good News Pittsburgh. Take note of the Census blurb at the end of the post. Allegheny County has stopped shrinking. If you want to find out more about the Pittsburgh miracle, then head to St. Louis to hear former Mayor Tom Murphy explain how he did it. And if you link through, you'll find a rebuttal of sorts from Mike Madison. To play the role of unabashed civic booster, some glowing words from Michigan:

Metropolitan Pittsburgh provides evidence that there is a way back to prosperity after the loss of a high-wage manufacturing industry. Since the collapse of steel more than 25 years ago, metro Pittsburgh has regained prosperity. In 2008 it returned to its previous peak in per capita income, at 104 percent of the national average. That is despite employment earnings from primary metals (the industry that includes steel) falling from 14 percent to under 2 percent of the region’s income.

There's more in the full report, but I can't resist pasting here one more sentence just for fun:

Of the 55 metropolitan areas with populations of a million or more, [Pittsburgh] ranked 16th and was more prosperous than Dallas, Raleigh/Durham, Austin, Portland and Atlanta.

Enough gushing about Pittsburgh. There are a bunch of Census stories in newspapers today. Somewhat similar to Pittsburgh, Rochester is experiencing its own turnaround:

Monroe County's estimated population on July 1, 2009, was 733,703, an increase of 2,160 from a year earlier, according to the new data. The county's population hasn't gone up that much since 2000, when the increase was 3,704.

In five of 10 years from 2000 through 2009, the county's population showed annual declines, according to Census estimates. And Monroe County's population is about 1,600 less than in 2000 and about 2,000 below what it was in 2004.

But a positive trend may be developing. The Census Bureau also estimated increases of 171 in 2007 and 914 in 2008.

A bit more up and down than Allegheny County, but the trend is encouraging. The numbers provide another data point concerning the Brookings break up of the Rust Belt. Some cities are, indeed, making a comeback. As per usual, the economic development is geographically uneven. Now more than ever, speaking in regional terms makes little sense.

Burgh Energy Report: Confused Blogger

I haven't given up on trying to noodle how Pittsburgh's energy portfolio might influence talent migration. But I am overwhelmed trying to learn about energy markets and the associated labor economics. Your guess is still as good as mine. Null Space is tracking such things and I recommend reading what Chris Briem has to say on the subject. Consume the following at your own risk.

I continue to encounter job creation hype as a result of the Marcellus Play. I've yet to see any compelling evidence about an energy employment boom in Western Pennsylvania. The local press is less skeptical:

The natural gas boom is expected to create 200,000 jobs in the region during the next 10 years, according to a Penn State study and reports from Consol Energy.

It has already created 40 within the last two years at the site in Green Tree, and another 100 will be created there within six months, according to Patrick Cozzens, president of Modern Transportation, a 23-year-old, Sewickley-based company that works out of the Rook terminal and hauls industrial materials to Fortune 500 companies across the country.

"We are currently looking for 20 more [truck] drivers," Mr. Cozzens said.

The anecdotes aren't bad news. There is a positive economic impact. Anyone question the 200,000 number? Anyone at all?

Properly taking stock of the Penn State report is beyond my expertise. I do note a great deal of uncertainty about the impact of shale gas:

BP's massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico should be a reminder of the risks that come with America's over-reliance on crude oil and the start of a shift toward making natural gas a bigger part of the nation's energy mix, the CEO of the nation's second-largest natural gas producer said Thursday.

"Hopefully, it will be the birthplace of a transition in our economy from an oil-centric economy to a gas-centric economy," just as the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara gave rise to the American environmental movement, said Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Oklahoma City-based Chesapeake Energy Corp.

But he acknowledged that while pro-natural gas legislation enjoyed strong backing in Congress before the Gulf disaster, "the whole landscape has changed with the BP deal."

The Penn State jobs projection doesn't consider political or geopolitical shifts. Given the impact of the BP disaster, I'd throw out the report. For every piece of promising news, there seems to be an equally compelling counternarrative:

Last week US company Cheniere Energy announced plans to build an LNG export terminal at Sabine Pass, on the Texas-Louisiana border. The company already operates an LNG import terminal there. It’s still early days; the company is talking to potential customers about contracts, but says it could be liquifying and exporting LNG by 2015.

So why the about-turn? Shale gas, naturally, is the obvious reason; US gas production has risen dramatically thanks to the Marcellus and Haynesville plays.

But does this mean a new era for US natural gas? Does net exporter status beckon? It’s not quite as clear-cut as that, yet.

Bottom line, everyone is hedging their bets and the risk of shale gas is considerable. I find all of it too fascinating for my own good. There are a bunch of game-changing factors in play right now. I think the result will be a boon for Pittsburgh, but I'm guessing like everyone else (including Penn State).

Anatomy Of Irish Brain Drain

The narrative is all too familiar. Opportunities in the homeland dry up and young talent hits the road. That's not really what happens. We are trained to think that we are pushed out instead of being pulled in another direction. Most talent migration adheres to the rules of attraction. If you aren't aware of other choices, then you will stay.

Molly Muldoon tells the classic story of economic calamity in Ireland forcing recent graduates abroad. As she weaves her tale, she reveals some of the secrets of brain drain:

Growing up in Ireland amidst the success of the Celtic Tiger, the future seemed like a secure place filled with hope and opportunity. Business was thriving as our indigenous, highly educated workforce attracted large scale foreign investment.

Hotels, industrial estates, shopping centers, and housing estates sprung up in towns and villages overnight where supply far outreached demand. Immigration increased with an influx of our fellow Europeans eager to fill gaps in the labor market.

Ostentatious mansions adorned the country, and families were no longer limited to mere one or two holidays a year. Excessiveness exploded.

Meanwhile, Ireland’s educational institutions continued to churn out highly motivated and professional young people. My classmates and I were satisfied that our hard work would pay dividends. ...

... Mainly due to Ireland’s economic disarray, I have enough college friends around the globe to keep me couch surfing for a year. Eoin in Winnipeg; Sinead in Vancouver; Alan in Hong Kong; Victoria in Melbourne; Yvonne in South Korea; Sophia in Barcelona; Antoinette in Frankfurt; David in London. ...

... For many of us ex-pats the prospect of returning home to become another statistic in the dole queue is not very appealing.

Eimear graduated with a degree in journalism from Dublin City University and spent the last year living in New York City. She interned with a publishing house while in New York, and admits that the job market here in New York is also very competitive.

“There's fierce competition for internships in New York, but there's also so many opportunities that it's hard to get disheartened -- there's always something else to apply for,” she feels.

“And there's so much variety that you can really specialize and do what you love. The flipside to the thriving internship culture is that paid jobs are really hard to come by.”

The cycle starts with massive investment in local human capital. As educational attainment rises, so does geographic mobility. College students graduate with a global network, talent connected through social media technologies. This opens up nontraditional destinations such as Winnipeg, putting flyover cities on the mental maps of the Irish entering the workforce. This is a ticking brain drain time bomb set to go off during the next (inevitable) economic downturn.

Off Molly goes to New York City where she works as a waitress. Her friend Eimear would return to Ireland, likely discouraged by numerous attempts just to land an internship. Imagine if these expatriates worked as hard to make a go of it in their native country. It's a skill that the road teaches to you. You are better for the failure.

Most people never get that far. The talent pool becomes stagnant unless there is a fresh inflow of people from other places. The retention of graduates is a form of brain drain, stifling innovation.

Talent churn or circulation is an indicator of economic vitality. That so many Irish emigrate is a testament to successful investment in native human capital. Like most places, Ireland hasn't learned how to handle that flow. A suggestion from Canada:

We need to build a human bridge to and from Asia. Brain gain is better than brain drain, but policy must adjust to the fact of a life-long brain chain. We recommend measures to make Vancouver the Asian business capital of North America.

Ireland should build a human bridge to its Diaspora. My recommendation to Pittsburgh and other Rust Belt cities is to do the same. A Great Recession is a terrible thing to waste.

Rust Belt Chic: Freegans Ho!

Trendy cities defy expectations. The next cool boomtown makes perfect sense in hindsight. How might we divine the next Austin? I look for the same cultural rumblings that I saw in Seattle, Boulder or Minneapolis before those places emerged as hot spots. (Via Urbanophile Twitter) Buffalo is the latest in a long line of American utopian geographies for disaffected youth (e.g. Slackers):

The mansion is situated near the Niagara River, whose shores are lined with old warehouses and factories. This part of Buffalo was once home to working-class Italian-Americans, who worked in small factories, on the docks and in railroad yards. The homes, with notable exceptions, tend to be modest. In recent years, there has been an influx of new immigrants from Burma, Somalia and Sudan. Like the freegans, many of these immigrants came to take advantage of the city’s overlooked housing stock, though they acquired their homes in the more traditional way.

The freegans’ mansion is populated by a small number of residents who live there year-round. They ride out the winters in a single room equipped with a wood-burning stove, and when necessary, they use an auger to drill through the ice that forms in the toilets. In the summer, though, the mansion’s population swells, as drifters, backpackers from as far away as Europe and traveling musicians arrive almost daily. A few harder cases pass through, too. One visitor I met was a former drug addict who had tried to kill himself more than once; another was an anemic-looking young woman who had been living under a bridge for four months. The majority, however, seemed to be iconoclastic young people from middle-class backgrounds living some version of the freegan dream. They Dumpster-dive for food, mend their clothing with dental floss and brew dandelion wine. Postcards from former guests adorn the walls. One is signed by a visitor from Plymouth, England, who writes: “How’s the house and how’s the whole project working out? I hope a lot of guys are taking advantage of the situation you have.”

Cosmopolitan twenty-somethings are rescuing Rust Belt cities from the dumpster. This is gentrification on a grander scale. The vibrant squatter scene most reminds me of Seattle just beginning to recover from the economic apocalypse of the 1970s (something that was still evident in Tacoma). Whatever the case, people from around the world are showing up for an ad hoc residential stint in Buffalo.

Given the insatiable interest in struggling Detroit, I've suspected for a while that Rust Belt Chic had gone global. The crumbling domiciles of robber barons make for a poetic target while we meander in the shadow on the Great Recession. More vitally, shrinking cities such as Buffalo have a wealth of desirable anarchic spaces. Feral neighborhoods are the lifeblood of creativity.

Outsiders are discovering unique Rust Belt opportunities and the stories are starting to surface in the press:

At first we failed. We started and abandoned business ventures that didn’t work. After having a thriving career in Colorado, I worked as a waitress at a sports bar where I played the roll of old, objectified hag (I was in my early 20s). My husband was unemployed for several months. We failed again and again and so has Michigan. But it’s not that we have failed; it’s what we’ve done with those failures. I own a company and have more opportunities, I believe, than I would have had in Colorado. There’s less of a market to penetrate and in an environment where journalism jobs are as contagious as polio, I’m a successful working freelance journalist. My husband has created a niche within his own industry that he likely wouldn’t have been able to create in Colorado.

There's a buzz about Lansing, Michigan. You might be better playing entrepreneur there than in Ann Arbor. Is that enough to make it the next Austin? I don't think so. Perhaps if one could move all that innovation to the urban frontier of Flint ...

Somehow Buffalo got on the hipster map. I'd love to figure out how the city did it. Let's go curling!

Megaregional Brain Drain

Concerning brain drain, the apple rarely falls far from the tree. A great deal of Rust Belt talent churns within the megaregion. The story that we read and hear laments how everyone is seeking more sunshine. There is a lot of truth to that hype, though not in the way most people expect. The dominant patterns of talent migration inform a distinct megaregional identity.

The Midwest, largely synonymous with the Rust Belt, is best defined in terms of the academic conference the Big 10. The news of a major realignment of college athletics is stoking the fires of nostalgia:

There are few things that create a sense of common cause in this part of the country. From Manhattan or Malibu, it may look like an unvarying mass of stolid, overall-wearing meatloaf eaters, but underneath our placid exterior, deep differences abound.

The inhabitants of Madison, Wis., don't vote like the citizens of Terra Haute, Ind. The accents in northern Minnesota bear no resemblance to those heard in southern Illinois. Parts of Michigan get 20 feet of snow in a typical winter, while Cincinnati is lucky to get two.

You will not find many parents in Council Bluffs, Iowa, sending their children to receive a higher education in Columbus, Ohio. But on a fall afternoon, a lot of them can tell you whether Ohio State won or lost.

The above is as good delineation of the Midwest as any. Pennsylvania was late to the party and the state doesn't quite fit with the others. A better megaregional construct is the economic gravity of Chicago. Like it or not, it's the center of the Big 10 universe as far as graduates are concerned. I doubt the same could be said for schools in the Pac 10, Big 12, SEC, ACC, or even the Big East. The Rose Bowl is Los Angeles against Chicago. One could easily name the dominant city for every major conference. Only the Big 10 claims Chicago.

What does that have to do with brain drain and talent migration? Everything. (Via Chris Briem @ Null Space) Introducing megaregional talent retention:

Keeping college grads

The city also needs to be attractive to Chicago's college students, who tend to leave the Midwest.

"Chicago has a unique and a wonderful opportunity to be a destination for people coming out of our great colleges and universities throughout the region," she said.

It was a destination for her. The native of Washington, Pa., about 35 miles south of Pittsburgh, and a graduate of Duke University, credits her older sister, former Kraft Foods CEO Betsy Holden, with introducing her to Chicago. Holden was in graduate school at Northwestern, and DeHaas found herself impressed with Chicago's business vibrancy.

Ignore the first sentence in the passage. The journalist is confusing local retention with megaregional attraction. Chicago is a magnet for Big 10 brains. Bigger than Atlanta. Bigger than Los Angeles. Bigger than Dallas or Houston. Bigger than New York. The drain supposedly handicapping economic development in Iowa doesn't lead to the Sun Belt.

Also notice the network migration. Thanks to a trusted family member, Chicago was on the radar. It isn't a random destination. Attracting talent is far from a needle in a haystack.

Chris Briem reiterates the point:

Which again brings us back to Jim R's Burgh Diaspora blog which is indeed all about tracking the neogeography of talent and thinking differently about what it means for regions, especially but not limited to, ours. Jim's blog has what I don't mean dimimutively a cult following across the nation if not farther as best I can tell. As Aaron alludes and others know it is about rethinking how we understand talent in the economy. In a lot of ways what he is talking about is the opposite of virtually all we actually implement here. It is about making connections to the Pittsburgh diasporan now heading Chicago's meta Chamber of Commerce. It would be the antithesis of things like Project 84 which I myself have poked at in the past. Project 84 being our version of talent policy, whereby we were going to kidnap (my words not theirs) young talent and whisk them to Pittsburgh.. wine and dine them and try and convince them Pittsburgh was a great place. I tell that story and people just don't believe me.

The challenge for John Austin and Richard Longworth is to figure out how to catalyze economic development for the towns and cities that send their brains to Chicago. Forget the other global urban adventures outside of the Midwest. Those places distract us from the opportunity right in front of us. Forget the graduates from the colleges and universities of Chicago. The inmigrants more than make up for the loss. That said, other Rust Belt cities should make hay out of Chicago's brain drain problem.

That one way to think about the talent migration pattern. For the other, I head to Big 12 country:

[Traci Hancock (executive director of Innovation Accelerator)], who was born and raised in Omaha and holds a masters in Medieval History from Cambridge University, pointed out she is “passionate” about the organization, which receives some federal funding, but also works in the private sector. The group has hired similarly talented individuals to address grant recipients’ needs and grow innovation in the Omaha area.

“People always complain about brain drain,” Hancock said. “One thing people need to recognize is we need to encourage people to go and bring back new ideas from other places. We can’t live in a bubble. Omaha is a great place. Omaha is a community. Stepping away and returning with new experiences will improve the community.”

Regions think of talent leaving as a policy failure. We throw a lot of money at increasing educational attainment and then spend more trying to torpedo a success story. I feel like I'm stuck in a Gogol novel. If an athlete or actor moves away and makes it big, the town doesn't turn its back on her. It erects a statue, emblematic of civic pride. As for all the other odysseys, the town is deeply ashamed. What are we doing wrong?

We hope Traci Hancock will come back home. We trot out one boondoggle after another to make sure she doesn't go to Cambridge. I would think that the misappropriation of funds is obvious. It isn't. That's the Pittsburgh Talent Failure.

Modeling Talent Migration

While every place complains about it, few regions suffer from brain drain. People leave all the time, but that doesn't mean that your hometown is dumber as a result. As for population decline, it could make your city smarter. From the perspective of economic development, what's the definition of brain drain? Ball State University economics professor Michael Hicks offers a model:

In counties that randomly got high skilled industries like manufacturing or finance there will not be enough workers. Those industries would like to go to places where there are enough skilled workers, but everywhere is exactly the same. So, the high skilled workers in other counties, who are dissatisfied with low skilled jobs at home, leave for high skilled industries elsewhere. Thus cities are born. Places with the bad luck to have low skill industries end up with lower level of human capital, the first indication of brain drain.

Imagine another scenario. Instead of randomly plopping industries into each county, we'll give each place an identical mix of industries with enough jobs for each worker. Then, we will randomly shock each county with different levels of unemployment at different times. Small and temporary differences in unemployment have no effect, but when one place has high or persistent unemployment people move elsewhere to find jobs. But here's the trick. We know from a long history, that the people who move for economic reasons have, on average, higher levels of human capital than those who stay. (Don't believe me? Look at Ireland in the 20th century).

In both cases, migration causes brain drain and exacerbates the human capital differences between regions. The effects are long lasting due to intergenerational persistence of human capital. So, what to do?

The first case is the pull of the city. The second case is the push of a broken regional economy. Both explain the bulk of talent migration. I'm interested in the relocations that are the exceptions, such as the sustained white flight from California (hat tip Aaron Renn). During the 1990s, California was a decreasingly attractive destination. During the 2000s, California pushed out human capital in droves and other cities in the West benefited. This is the trend of geographic arbitrage that I see transforming America's talent landscape.

The primary push-pull factors of migration should make obvious the misapplication of Richard Florida's Creative Class model. The economic geography described is the pull of the city. It doesn't speak to the push of economic collapse. However, I think it aptly applies to the residual migration of geographic arbitrage opportunities. That's a story for another post.

I have in mind the policy discussion concerning rural talent migration:

It wasn’t the full back-and-forth dialogue I wanted. If it had been, I would have cited some data about how rare it is for formerly rural kids to return and inspire real economic development. For example, in their book Hollowing Out the Middle, Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas examine the uneven outcomes of various efforts to lure the “creative class” back to rural states. And I would have added that something else is wanted along with the education we must provide.

I’m no policy wonk, but I do know that there is some empirical evidence that place-based approaches, which pair local curriculums with community development efforts, might help. Or that regional partnerships and school district cooperatives can be used to achieve economies of scale that allow rural communities and schools to develop and fund local solutions to the twinned issues of economic decline and outmigration.

But the lack of any policy suggestion was disheartening, especially from a local boy, someone who should know what the rural “brain drain” is doing to his home state. My purpose here is certainly not to bash Governor Wise. I do, however, want to point up what our exchange suggests—that we rural education activists probably need to do more education and to be more active.

The lack of a policy suggestion doesn't surprise me. The former governor of West Virginia, Bob Wise, first has to help state residents understand the problem. Place-based approaches can make your community more attractive (amenities migration). However, the policy won't make cities less attractive to graduates. And if the regional economy is pushing out people, then your cool rural town initiative won't keep talent from leaving.

In "Hollowing Out the Middle", Carr and Kefalas do not focus on outmigration. Instead, they suggest investing in those who stick around town. Governor Wise supports this approach but also realizes that doing so will fuel more outmigration. That leaves strategies to increase inmigration, which doesn't look all that promising. So, rural communities return to the tried and true failures of talent retention and recycle false hope.

Rust Belt Geographic Arbitrage: Buffalo

Migration patterns are slow to change. The Rust Belt is on the comeback trail, but few notice. Decades old headlines are recycled. Geographic stereotypes are reinforced. Buffalo turns a corner:

Many Americans, it can safely be said, would recoil at the thought of moving to Buffalo, New York State. Apart from Buffalo wings – chicken pieces slathered in a peppery sauce concocted at the Anchor Bar on Main Street – the gritty city on the south-eastern shore of Lake Erie seems to have few reasons for celebration. It has long been a poster-child for the decaying rust belt and all that entails – a dwindling population, boarded-up buildings and rampant crime. To make matters worse, its winters are among the harshest in the lower 48 states.

Yet Lura Hess Bechtel and her husband, Mitch, have no regrets about moving to Buffalo from New York City five years ago. “Everything is financially and geographically more accessible,” Bechtel says. In her job as an employment practices lawyer, she adds: “Everything in Buffalo functions with a higher degree of trust and respectfulness than in New York.”

Her husband has gone from working as a freelance software developer out of the couple’s Brooklyn apartment to owning a business with its own building and a dozen employees. “If you’re an entrepreneurial type of person, you can afford to get started here,” Bechtel says.

The couple paid just $123,000 for a Victorian workers’ cottage with an adjoining two-bedroom carriage house in Allentown, less than a mile north of downtown. As Bechtel’s friends in New York keep reminding her, their monthly condominium maintenance fees are higher than her mortgage payments.

The journey of the Betchels is a novel trend of gentrification. Instead of seeking cheap digs of a neglected neighborhood in the big city, talent is scouring the Rust Belt for geographic arbitrage opportunities. It's an entrepreneurial act and the risk averse need not apply. America's urban frontier isn't for just anyone.

I'm seeing the same kind of story in Pittsburgh:

Eager to give back to his newfound home, de la Cretaz is working on a series of videos "on things that are unique to Pittsburgh that people should know about." It's his attempt to rectify the many misconceptions about the city.

"Lots of people still see Pittsburgh as a steel city, and we still call ourselves the Steel City even though we've reinvented ourselves. When I go back to New Jersey, I swear people expect me to return with soot on my face! And my college friends still ask me 'how I like Philly' even though I'm living in Pittsburgh – they're not making the distinction. Nobody seems to talk about Pittsburgh outside of Pittsburgh, and we need to reach out to young people with that exploratory mentality who are willing to take a look at it."

Next steps for de la Cretaz, who currently shares a home in Lawrenceville with a friend, include finding an old brick house to restore. "Old city charm meets new city mentality in Pittsburgh," he says. "I love being here for Pittsburgh's renaissance and can't wait to see what it looks like in ten years. Pittsburgh is a cool place. You've just got to let it happen."

Rust Belt cities such as Buffalo and Pittsburgh are undervalued because of the megaregional reputation. The urban recycling is ubiquitous and is beginning to attract talent in growing numbers. If anything, journalists are late to the party.

The problems haven't disappeared and core vibrancy is still the exception, not the rule. You can't save all the neighborhoods. Economic triage is a result of limited resources. We could do a better job of linking entrepreneurship with urban redevelopment. Perhaps such an incubator already exists, but I haven't discovered it. There are more Betchels out there if your city is interested.

Getting Serious About Talent

Aaron Renn (The Urbanophile) just fired a shot across the bow of Pittsburgh and every other region pretending to be serious about attracting talent. My own blog journey serves as a metaphor for the feigned interest in brain gain. Also in the post is Aaron's own experience:

Through my writing and travels, I’ve met a lot of people, including many senior civic leaders. I’m always watching to see if they will pitch me on their city. Not that they would necessarily offer me a job, but at least try to sell their city to me as a place I might personally want to live in, as a place for me to make a home or build a career. Not one person has ever even tried. All they want is for me to write something nice about them. You can be very sure they pitch that idea aggressively – very aggressively. The contrast is stark.

There's definitely a lot of bluster about talent attraction, but little in the way of action. The bulk of the money almost always goes into retention, which is a shame. It speaks to the rationale driving policy.

Workforce development is local. Residents and business invest in schools and training programs. The goal is to deepen the available talent pool. Naturally, people are defensive about the taxes they pay or donations made. That your region would need to import brains is a relatively new concept and a political third rail.

The bias against outside talent does have an upside. If someone wants to live in your city, then she or he will find a way to stick. In this respect, the fact that I still live in Denver as opposed to Pittsburgh is my own fault. As immigrants demonstrate every day, enough guts and guile will land you in your dream location.

That's all well and good if you are Portland or Austin. Talent is beating down the door and some will create their own jobs if none are available. No doubt, Pittsburgh and other struggling cities could use these entrepreneurs. Civic boosters hope bloggers will say something nice about their hometown and aid the branding campaign.

More realistically, regions must be more aggressive in courting talent. Failing to do so will push out businesses starving for skilled labor. They will go to where the workers are and will incur significant costs in doing so. Places will have to fight for an increasingly scarce commodity.

Beyond the obvious local orientation to workforce development (plugging the brain drain), talent migration is a policy frontier and a mystery. Lou Glazer (Michigan Future) aptly describes the paradox:

Finally in this season of college graduation a couple of articles that challenge the conventional wisdom that college students leave Michigan because there are no jobs. Both were written during the current downturn. One from the Times on Iowa, which at that point had labor shortages. Employers having trouble filling jobs that require a four-year degree. The other from the Wall Street Journal on Portland, Oregon with the opposite characteristic. High unemployment and yet a magnet for young professionals. The evidence is clear quality of place is an important consideration for graduates as they choose where to live and work after college. If jobs mattered most, college grads would be flocking to Iowa, not Portland. They aren’t!

Jobs matter. I'd bet they matter most if we modeled national talent flows of recent graduates. But that doesn't explain what is going on in Iowa and Oregon. I think economic geographers could reasonably trot out migration as a lagging indicator and eat up some of that error. Eventually, labor will get wise to where the jobs are (or, in Portland's case, where they aren't).

However, there is more to talent migration than rational choice. Graduates who grew up in the same state as their institution of higher education are more likely to stick around than those graduates from out-of-state. You go where you know and muddle along concerning the job. How could a region in Iowa influence this talent to go off the beaten path?

Sorsele, Sweden might have an answer:

The municipality has suffered from depopulation and an ageing labour force for some time and is currently home to only 2,800 people, the second lowest in Sweden.

Last week a delegation from Sorsele visited the Russian municipality of Apatity on the Kola Peninsula as part of a campaign to attract well-educated families with children.

"Within ten years we need to recruit more than 100 people to various qualified professions: doctors, nurses, teachers, economists, technicians and so on," Tovetjärn said.

Sorsele has chosen to focus part of its campaign on Apatity as it already holds friendship links and aims to attract people used to living in the countryside.

"We have well established links with the area and it is easier to 'sow seeds in fertile land than to break new ground'," he said.

Both Aaron and I have noticed that such initiative is lacking across the United States. I've concluded that places such as Pittsburgh aren't that desperate for people. If they were, then we'd see more innovative approaches like the one in Sweden. Instead, almost every city is content to obsess the natives who leave. The data don't matter. No one seems interested in mapping the migration and thinking outside of the box. They aren't serious about talent.

Urban Policy Geography

My read on the policy geography described in the Brookings "State of Metropolitan America" has found a second wind. First, Innovation America founder Richard Bendis noticed "The Rust Belt is Dead" in his Innovation Daily. I don't know what in the post piqued his interest, but the Kauffman Foundation-backed Entrepreneurship initiative passed along Innovation America's link referral. Now, Brookings itself is addressing my analysis:

The portion of the blogosphere inclined to noodle over Brookings State of Metro America report, included some who now ask, “whither the Rust Belt?” and “whither the Brookings Great Lakes Economic Initiative?”.

I’m pleased to say all are alive and in forward-looking form. The Great Lakes Economic Initiative developed several years ago, not out of a DC-based “mega-region” overlay, but as I traded notes from my years as an elected official and public policy-shaper in Michigan and teamed up with similarly situated political, business and civic leaders from Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and elsewhere around the region. We basically said, “Don’t we have a similar economic and cultural story? Aren’t we trying to treat the same problems; and leverage the same assets? Isn’t there more we can do working together to accelerate our economic transition?"

Yes, I am inclined to noodle. No, I'm neither part of the policy in crowd nor a "Pulitzer prize-winning former journalist". You might call my tracking of various political geographies a hobby. However, I think the tension between the two Brookings urban policy geographies is obvious. Can they co-exist? Do we need to reconcile them? Does my noodling at all matter?

I rather liked Alan Berube's answers to the above three questions:

As the poet Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself.” Poetry aside, it is important to understand both demographic and geographic similarities among our metros if we are going to respond effectively to the many challenges they face.

Depending on the issue, there is a proper geographic match for the policy solution. We won't solve very many environmental problems without international cooperation. Nor can we fix US cities through state-centric politics.

Berube uses the arid Interior West as an example of a megaregional challenge. Water scarcity limits urban growth and quality of life. I would suggest that there is more policy variance concerning water within the Interior West than Berube allows. The climate "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian" makes for a neat regional demarcation, but your watershed within that area matters more. But I think Berube would agree that the current situation is a jurisdictional nightmare. Acute scarcity is more often than not the result of bad politics.

I do acknowledge that there is a rhyme and a reason to the Great Lakes megaregion. But we should still ask if the geography matches the challenge. Does a network (e.g. shrinking cities) or contiguous area make more sense? Concerning the latter, smaller is better.

John Austin suggested I look at the initiatives addressing struggling auto communities. My knee-jerk reaction is to think that a network of such places is more appropriate. Here is a recent example of the megaregional framework in action:

America needs to transform its energy system, and the Great Lakes region (including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania and western New York) possesses many of the needed innovation assets. For that reason, the federal government should leverage this troubled region’s research and engineering strengths by launching a region-wide network of collaborative, high intensity energy research and innovation centers.

I wouldn't paint the "troubled region" with such a broad brush. There's more political leverage in such a big coalition, but it's a poor geography for innovation. Urban corridors are much more promising:

Congress has funded three "energy innovation hubs" through the U.S. Department of Energy, drawing applications from across the country.

Business and civic leaders in Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Morgantown, W.Va., hope to land one of the three. They recently applied for up to $130 million in federal money for a three-state "TechBelt" hub focused on bringing energy-efficient building technologies to market.

Last week, the U.S. House passed an "America Competes" bill that would fund even more energy-related hubs. The Senate will deliberate soon.

The Great Lakes deserves a good chunk of whatever federal funding emerges, Brookings believes.

"Populating auto country with an array of breakthrough-seeking, high-intensity research centers" could help "lead the region -- and the nation -- toward a more prosperous future," the think-tank's brief said.

Rebecca Bagley, president of NorTech, said Brookings is backing a strategy that could enhance energy-related opportunities across Northeast Ohio, including polymer development in Akron and research at Case Western Reserve's energy institute.

"It could potentially build our capacity to translate research from our institutions to companies and products on the market," Bagley said.

The above isn't a Great Lakes research network. It's an innovation cluster. The DOE will oversee three of these hubs. If the Great Lakes gets one (or even all three), I don't see how it will benefit the entire megaregion. And if Northeast Ohio wants to land the funding, then that region better get into bed with Greater Pittsburgh. But I don't see any rhyme or reason to reach out to Detroit, Minneapolis, or St. Louis. However, fostering a relationship with Greater Denver makes a world of sense.

In this case, the megaregional construct doesn't serve any purpose. I'm sure the TechBelt communities appreciate the attention from Brookings. But as far as landing one of the three innovation hubs is concerned, GLEI doesn't matter.

City of Asylum/Pittsburgh

Occasionally, I get requests to post links on my blog. I received one today from Sampsonia Way magazine. I decided to oblige and take the opportunity to explain my theoretical framework. The links listed under IntoPittsburgh demonstrate my commitment to the region. If you are involved in making Greater Pittsburgh a better place, then I would happily add your website. The blogroll (right below IntoPittsburgh) is an actively updated account of conversations I think I am having through the Burgh Diaspora. It's a bibliography of sorts, ideas that influence my own.

Steering this post back to Sampsonia Way, the 411:

In the summer of 2004, Huang Xiang became the first writer in City of Asylum/Pittsburgh’s exiled writer-residency program. He immediately made his mark on the city, figuratively and literally, by covering the façade of his residency house on Sampsonia Way with calligraphies of his poetry. This remarkable artwork, called “House Poem,” became an instant landmark celebrating the freedom to write. Since then, it has attracted thousands of visitors and inspired many poets.

Huang Xiang’s “House Poem” motivated City of Asylum/Pittsburgh to create additional writer-residencies on Sampsonia Way, each a rehabbed single-family home with text-based artworks on the facade. Sampsonia Way (in reality, a long, narrow, hodge-podge of an alley) is now a “public library” of “house publications” that you can read any time just by walking down the street.

Sampsonia Way, the web magazine, is intended to provide the same shelter for writers and writing as Sampsonia Way, the street lined with writer residences. Each defends free speech by protecting the people who actually do the writing and speaking. The homes provide shelter for writers; the magazine provides shelter for their work.

I appreciate why both Sampsonia Way the magazine and Sampsonia Way the street are in italics. Each is understood as a publication medium. To further the metaphor, landscape is a form of language. Every definable region has its own rhetoric.

I feel connected to City of Asylum/Pittsburgh in many ways. I blog about Pittsburgh in exile. I'm not a political refugee like the Endangered Writers, but an economic one. There are also social refugees. You can learn about that experience from authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri. All of the above help to define the diaspora experience. I'm also an advocate for international human rights. I champion geographic mobility, but support other causes.

I'm proud that Pittsburgh is home to Sampsonia Way. I imagine the city as the locus of interstitial meditations. Exile is dreaming about one place and living another, caught between two geographies. Belonging nowhere.

Expatriate Citizenship

I've been searching for a good subject for my 1600th post commemorating my upcoming 4th anniversary of blogging (June 1st). I have a few appropriate ideas I could explore, but I was hoping serendipity would strike. A little over two hours ago, the Buffalo Expatriate Network (BEN) came through:

And, BEN needs YOU, particularly if you are an expat urban planner/preservationist. BEN has been invited to participate in a dialogue with City Hall on the new land use/re-zoning laws, which will change for the first time since 1971! Help shape Buffalo’s future and contact us today!

The Buffalo government is soliciting input from nonresidents. People who might move back home already have a stake in how the city will evolve. That's a cutting edge polity even in the international diaspora arena:

It’s my understanding that the EU takes no interest in the expat voting policies of individual nations. It seems to me that when you have a parliamentary body representing citizens of an entity such as the EU, however, there should be equal access among citizens of that entity to representation as a matter of fairness. I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes a larger issue in the years to come, particularly set against the current global context of increasing diaspora engagement and the rising number of nations allowing their emigrants to vote.

Ireland is particularly anxious to punish citizens who leave the country. Given the Irish access to the entire EU labor market, this policy is insane. Why disenfranchise your wayward talent? Fortunately, some natives are not so myopic:

At that meeting, [Minister for Foreign Affairs Micheál Martin] has announced funding of €135,000 towards a new Farmleigh Fellowship Programme, which provides 25 Irish participants the opportunity to work in Asia for four months, and to participate in a joint MSc degree in Asian Business Management from UCC and Nanyang Business School in Singapore. The project was developed by a number of Singapore-based businesspeople who were present at the Global Irish Economic Forum, and was a response to the focus placed at that meeting on the need for Irish businesses to increase their access to Asian markets It will begin in October 2010. An overseas graduate placement programme, a separate initiative, is also being planned.

Expatriates make excellent foot soldiers for opening up foreign markets. They also possess a wealth of contacts and expertise. Alienating them is bad for the domestic economy. Export talent and as a result, export more goods.

I think Buffalo is demonstrating how such a diaspora initiative might operate on the regional scale. The city cares what its expatriates think. That's just as valuable as enfranchising local young adults and high school students. All of them have more of an interest in Buffalo's future.

Instead, most regions turn their backs on this return on investment. As soon as you leave, residents and policymakers give up on you. Universities don't act this way towards alumni. That would be suicide. Ironically, even institutions of higher education have a poor understanding talent geography:

As important as football has been to the fabric of life in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan, the sport is not immune to the economic pandemic that has stripped those states of so many well-paid, middle-class jobs over a generation. The term "Rust Belt," coined to describe once-bustling factories that have gone dormant, is some 25 years old. In that same period of time, the power in college football put down roots in the Sun Belt.

Big Ten coaches and players have defended their brand of football time and again from charges that the league is not athletic enough, that the Southeastern Conference or USC or Texas -- or all of the above -- has passed the league by.

That the Big Ten can flex its muscle as a business is a tribute to tradition, to Delany's acumen and to the 4.4 million living alumni from the league's 11 schools. However, if the loss of jobs and population have affected the conference at the business table, it's worth a fresh look to see the effects the economic downturn has had on the field.

I emphasized the part of the passage that jumps out at me. But the article is about the football talent drain from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt. But that's not the problem facing Big 10 schools. The parochial recruiting strategy is the handicap.

If you don't cultivate enough football stars locally, then you recruit talent from elsewhere. Many universities in the Interior West have done so successfully for years. More importantly, no other conference has the geographic reach that the Big 10 does thanks to its alumni. Wherever you find ultra-competitive high school football, you'll run into a Big 10 graduate. That the Mahoning Valley doesn't produce as many collegiate stars as it used to do, doesn't matter.

Instead, the diaspora works in reverse. The head coach at the University of Oklahoma, Bob Stoops, is from Youngstown, Ohio. Not only can he attract talent from traditional Big 12 pools (e.g. Texas), but he can scour the Rust Belt and cherry pick the best players there. Stoops can easily relate to the young men living in Western Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio. He can offer them a ticket to the big time. I also wouldn't be surprised to find out that Stoops leverages a Rust Belt refugee network in the most competitive recruiting grounds.

The Rust Belt doesn't suffer from brain drain. The lack of brain gain is the drag on the economy. The Big 10 could learn a lot from Buffalo.

How Reason Doomed Cleveland

Perhaps you have heard. Cleveland's City Council has invited libertarian evangelists Drew Carey and Nick Gillespie to come make a pitch about economically revitalizing the region. An honest outsider's look at Rust Belt troubles should be welcome. But Gillespie doesn't understand why former manufacturing giants are now struggling:

From 1990 to 1993, I lived in Buffalo, a city eerily similar to Cleveland, differing chiefly in scale. (It’s about half the size.) As I packed up to leave Buffalo for Los Angeles, there was a mayoral debate in which a Republican candidate, a Democratic candidate, and an independent candidate outlined their plans for revitalization. The first respondent (I forget which, but it hardly matters) said he would go to the state capital and fight for the city’s fair share of tax money. The second one said he would go to Albany and also Washington, D.C., and fight for the city’s fair share of tax money. The third candidate, the eventual winner, upped the ante by saying he’d go to Albany and Washington and fight for more than the city’s fair share of tax money. Is it any wonder that during the 1990s, a decade in which many cities turned around years of population declines, Buffalo was one of only two entire major metropolitan areas that lost people? (The other was Pittsburgh, a long-slumping town inaccurately but repeatedly praised for a comeback that is suspiciously devoid of economic or population growth.)

I'll admit that the jab at the Pittsburgh hype got my attention. One shouldn't dismiss praise because the population numbers look bad. However, I will concede the point about sluggish economic growth and add that Gillespie should put that observation in its proper context. The bone I have to pick concerns the suggested cause of population decline.

Analysts make too much of population numbers. Does Gillespie really think suckling at the public teat has anything to do with demographic replacement rates? Even if he does observe a link, policy changes will take a long time to show results.

The point of contention is migration. Immigration is a red herring. Plenty of unReasonable places attract a lot of immigrants:

The foreign-born share of Michigan’s population rose from 3.8 percent in 1990 to 5.3 percent in 2000, to 6.1 percent in 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2007, Michigan was home to more than 600,000 immigrants. And roughly 47 percent of them are naturalized U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote, notes the Immigration Policy Center in its September 2009 report, “New Immigrants in the Great Lakes State.”

Latinos, Asians and Arab Americans account for a large and growing share of the economy and electorate of Michigan. Census data reveal that 6.4 percent of Michiganders are Latino or Asian. The Latino share of Michigan’s population grew 4 percent in 2007. The Asian share grew 2.4 percent the same year.

Michigan also has the highest proportion of Arab Americans in the nation and is home to some of the world’s largest populations of Albanian, Macedonian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Yemeni immigrants.

Shrinking government and liberalizing tax regimes won't attract more immigrants. That's not to say that Cleveland shouldn't seek to grow the foreign-born population. Just the folks at Reason don't offer a way forward.

That leaves domestic migration and the "vote with your feet" narrative for Cleveland to consider. The population boom of the 1990s that Gillespie references is deceiving. Among the top-25 largest cities, the biggest losers during that decade in order:

1. New York City
2. Los Angeles
3. Chicago
4. Philadelphia
5. Detroit
6. San Francisco
7. Boston
8. San Diego
9. Washington, DC
10. Cleveland
11. Pittsburgh
12. St. Louis
13. Baltimore

More than half of the largest cities shrank in terms of domestic migration. People have "vamoosed" from many cities that Reason thinks are doing much better than Cleveland. Gillespie fails to distinguish net outmigration from population decline. He plays fast and loose with the facts and gains a forum with Cleveland City Council. It's both a sham and a shame. Thanks for nothing, Drew Carey. Cleveland doesn't need another brain drain boondoggle. However, local politicians will welcome the distraction.

Brain Gain Report: Women Of New Mexico

Today, I'll finish the troika of posts about new patterns of gender and migration. In Part I, I explore the phenomenon of urban nationalism. I provide some background about the relationship between gender and nationalism in Part II. Lastly, I look at the case of brain drain in New Mexico.

I learned about this panel discussion via a blog that references a similar brain drain problem in El Paso (Texas). Here is the synopsis of the show:

In the coming weeks, we’ll all get our fill of state budgets, tax proposals, and spending cuts. No doubt this will be one of the most stressful legislative sessions in recent memory. And, because it’s only a 30-day session, many other important issues may fall by the wayside this year. Let’s hope not, though. Brain drain is a serious problem for New Mexico. That’s not big news to most people in the state, but a new report from UNM’s Bureau of Business and Economic Development Committee illustrates just how big the problem has become. As we mentioned in the show, nearly 60-percent of people born in this state will leave after completing their schooling. And, only 2-percent will ever come back. A few other notes from the study:

*People with higher degrees are four times more likely to leave New Mexico than other folks born here.

*More than half of native-born New Mexicans are likely to live in poverty, compared to people who were born elsewhere and migrated to New Mexico, regardless of educational attainment.

*Native-born New Mexicans who leave the state tend to fare better economically than those who remain, regardless of age, ethnicity or education.

*New Mexico brings in more people with advanced degrees than the advanced degreed residents the state loses, indicating there are plenty of jobs for well educated, native-born New Mexicans.

Head to newmexicoinfocus.org to watch our interview with Senator Tim Keller, and Venture Capitalists Tom Stephenson and Kim Sanchez Rael. We ran out of time for our last question, which had to do with the potential impact of green jobs on the brain drain problem.

Turns out that all three panelists left New Mexico at some point but would later return. Senator Keller stresses how few come back, calling common perceptions of boomerang migration a "myth". The conversation is intelligent and an honest look at brain drain. However, there are more than a few misconceptions about talent migration and the overall picture is incomplete. Thus, the suggested policies aren't innovative. New Mexico is stuck in its own silo with little idea about what is going on in other states.

The video is worth watching just to see how smart and well-intentioned people can go down the wrong path. State-to-state comparisons are vital pieces to the puzzle, but are often absent from the debate. At about the 17-minute mark of the feed, the interview takes a surprising turn. Kim Sanchez Rael focuses on bringing more people back to New Mexico. She even mentions a successful case of luring talent home from Silicon Valley.

Rael is committed to replicating her own migration experience. She stated that the key to attracting expatriates is fostering better economic opportunity. Unwittingly, she described a boomerang entrepreneur incubator. Talent needs assurance that all the right elements for a successful venture exist in New Mexico. An incubator can provide that.

Women like Rael are the perfect targets for such an initiative. Traditional gender roles still matter. A married couple from different hometowns will more likely move back (if they do so at all) to the wife's native state. The links between gender, place and culture remain strong. Women are more closely identified with the land. While men are supposed to make like Odysseus, sowing their wild oats hither and yon. The prodigal daughters are a better bet to return. They shouldn't have left in the first place.

Senator Keller gets on the wrong side of the 2% who do move back to New Mexico. Boomerang migration is not a myth to be debunked. It is an opportunity to do better. As Rael outlines, the state could do much more to attract expatriates. Unfortunately, such a policy isn't on the table. Once again, all the focus is on plugging the brain drain.

NAFTA Geography

I promised to revisit the issue of gender and nationalism, particularly as it relates to the ascendancy of cities in the realm of political geography. In most cultures, women are more closely tied to the homeland. We can map this link by tracking geographic mobility. For both the journey to work and international migration, men travel further than women. I've approached understanding this pattern through hitchhiking folklore. The moral of those stories serve as a warning to women that they should not wander the world unless in the company of a man.

Global economic integration has undermined traditional gender roles. First the men left in search of work and better pay. Labor flows streamed around the world, adeptly finding the boomtowns. Women, too, relocated to faraway places. But the wives and mothers stayed behind, tending to the nation. Young maidens tended to be the ones seeking opportunity in another land. There is no sense in sticking around the village since all the men are gone. But even the matrons of the community eventually would seek opportunity elsewhere:

In addition to the gender of farming, the gender of out-migration from feeder states like Michoacan, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and more indigenous Chiapas and Oaxaca, has changed radically. Once upon a time only men headed for El Norte and the potentially mortal consequences of this dangerous migration but womens' numbers in the flow north have tripled in the last decade as neo-liberal agrarian policies imposed from Mexico City have devastated the "campo" and the bottom has fallen out of Mexican agriculture.

Under presidents Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo (1988-2000), the Constitution was mutilated to allow the privatization of communally-held land, grain distribution was handed over to transnationals like the Cargill Corporation, guaranteed prices were scrapped, and credit for poor farmers dried up. Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon (2000-2010), presidents chosen from the right-wing PAN party, have hastened the demise of the agricultural sector.

The coffin nail was the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Every year since, millions of tons of cheap U.S. and Canadian corn swamp Mexico forcing small-hold campesinos and campesinas out of business. A Carnegie Endowment investigation into the impacts of NAFTA on poor Mexican farmers published on the tenth anniversary of the trade treaty calculated that 1.8 million farmers had abandoned their milpas in NAFTA's first decade - since each farm family represents five Mexicans, the real number of expulsees comes in close to 10,000,000, at least half of them women.

Like manufacturing in the Rust Belt, family farming was the root of Mexican identity. NAFTA destroyed the foundation of this country's nationalism. The giant sucking sound that Ross Perot described during the 1992 US Presidential campaign ended up being the emptying of rural Mexico.

Understanding why this happened, you have to know something about economies of scale. Certain fixed costs such as farm machinery are more affordable if spread out over more land (and greater yields). We're talking orders of magnitude bigger. This allows for slimmer margins. $100 of profit per acre isn't so bad if you manage 1,000 acres.

NAFTA opened up the food markets in Mexico for American corporate farms. Mexican families in agricultural states couldn't compete with cheap US produce. What farming remains is more like the model in El Norte, which means that less people are needed to tend to the crops. Millions of Mexican workers were displaced and the national economy couldn't possibly absorb them. Again, a bit like what happened in the Rust Belt.

Missing in the above narrative is the role of educating girls. Various economic development agencies focused on the educational attainment gap between boys and girls. The success of these programs had the unintended consequence of geographically mobilizing the female workforce (e.g. nurses from the Philippines). The harbingers of culture were leaving the country en masse.

The overall increases in migration as a result of globalization, as well as the rise of transnationalism thanks to innovations in transportation and communications, forced a rethinking of citizenship law. Many countries liberalized rules to encourage people to return. The common denominator is women. Matrilineal links can earn you a new passport in countries such as Israel and Ireland. With nation increasingly separated from state, women become even a more important locus of culture.

I argue that the same is true for domestic diasporas. In the United States, women are better educated than the previous generation and more geographically mobile. But the traditional stronger connection to home remains. Map the sales of Steelers baby clothes outside of Greater Pittsburgh and you'll get a great snapshot of the Burgh Diaspora. If you would like more expatriates to return, then seek out the best educated women. More about that strategy in my next post.

More Jobs In Pittsburgh Than Florida

The Sun Belt to Rust Belt rush continues:

From the Sunshine State to the erstwhile Rust Belt?

Pittsburgh as a potential destination is an interesting case. In the early ' '80s, after the steel industry collapsed, its economy was in more of a shambles than Florida's is now. Since then, though, the city has shifted from steel, steel and steel to education, finance and health care. Urbanists, economists and social scientists point to the place as a great example of how a city, state or region can work through calamity and create a more balanced, more diverse economy. Florida, many of them believe, could learn something from Pittsburgh.

Last year, iWork had a man move to Pittsburgh for a job. So did LaBelle.

McCafferty wanted to stay but made his decision by looking mainly at two factors:

1. Family. He's from there. His mother, who's 80, still lives there, and two sisters, too.

2. Desperation. "I'd been out of work for a year," he said, "and it was the only offer I had."

Sometimes, you have to move to where the jobs are located.

Urban Nationalism

I'll start this post out with a return to the geography described in the Brookings State of Metropolitan America report. The deconstruction of regions is vital to US urban policy. Cities within the same state require different assistance. Some metro regions functionally span two or more states. The state-centric political model is woefully inadequate to deal with many of the problems in this country.

Concerning that new lens, I want to emphasize the diaspora reference:

Metro areas are where the demographic meets the economic. Our traditional regional identities will probably persist, but like Red Sox Nation, we have much to learn and gain from affinities that stretch across the national map.

Given the geographic mobility and the demographic divergence of metro areas, I think we've entered an era of urban nationalism. Geographer Peter Taylor is trying to rigorously measure the cleavage between world cities and their host nation-states. Cultural landscapes don't lend themselves as easily to quantitative assessment. Instead, we rely upon case studies and anecdotes.

Via Aaron Renn's highly informative Twitter feed, the next phase in urban nationalism:

The number of domains required increases as the number of users increase and as the internet spreads - currently in excess of 15 per cent per year globally. The namespace for the German community under the top-level domain .de now includes over 13 million domains and has thus become somewhat "crowded", as each domain can only be issued once. This is no surprise, as everyone would like (as with personalized car number plates) to have a domain which is short, descriptive and easy to remember. However .com, by far the most popular top-level domain with over 84 million domains, also offers a global identity for hundreds of different languages and communities.

At the same time, with increasing emphasis on regional, local and personal aspects of the internet, a mega trend has developed which provides a natural counterbalance to the dreams of globalization from the internet's early years. Regional self-confidence and independent regional administration are growing in significance, both in developing countries and industrialized states. These trends are reflected in economic, cultural and socio-political aspects and encompass many business models and value creation chains. Local searches and location-based services are good examples of this “hyperlocal” development.

With this emphasis on cities and regions, a natural need arises for local addressing, which means local domains and namespaces. The extensions of the internet’s namespace, also called the Domain Name System (DNS), is in this context one of the major challenges presented to ICANN (the internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the administrative organization responsible for the management and approval of top-level internet domains.

The geographic ambition is just as breathtaking as the offering from Brookings. Instead of www.steelers.com, we would link to www.steelers.pgh. Civic branding will begin to delineate the world wide web. Both .us or .pa will matter less than .pgh.

Culturally, this is already the de facto case. I remember well the Pittsburgh-Philadelphia rivalry that divided the University Park Penn State campus when I was a student there in the late 1980s. More currently, I map domestic urban diasporas such as expatriate Buffalo:

New York City is filled with expatriate tribes. There are the Brits who pack Fiddlesticks for rugby games and Tea and Sympathy for scones, the diplomats in and around the United Nations, and French and Francophiles who play boules every July 14 on Macdougal Street.

But there is another group, perhaps a little bit less known, but no less passionate in their ties to home and their feelings for it. They came from a gritty city to the north and west, on the shore of a great body of water, in a place where it happens to snow a lot.

Of course, we’re speaking of Buffalonians.

They flock to places like Bar Italia on the Upper East Side (the chef/owner, Denis Franceschani, hails directly from Italy, but his wife, Colleen, is a Buffalonian) and Smith & Wollensky (the head bartender, Patty Ford, is a legend by way of Buffalo). Black Finn is for hockey games, and McFadden’s is for football games. On Thursday, the Buffalo Expat Network, known as the BEN, is even holding a mixer for Buffalo Expats at Bongo in the West Village.

Same state, radically different allegiances. I can see a website for a restaurant in New York City with the suffix .buf. Perhaps .ben would be more appropriate. But the idea doesn't work for all cities. Some places are still stuck in a proto-nationalist phase. Other metros are too far down in the urban hierarchy, more or less in the shadow of larger cities. I call it urban subnationalism. See Ann Arbor.

Rust Belt Refugees never really assimilate. As in most (every?) national cultures, the homeland is a womb:

Of course, having three children by a certain age does not scare everyone. And neither does moving back home.

Though her job as a television executive is keeping her in New York for now, Sarah Crabbe, 32, said, “One day I plan on getting married and starting a family, and I intend to do it in Buffalo, where I can give my children the same gifts my parents gave me.”

She continued thoughtfully: “All I have to do is find a guy I can convince to move to Buffalo with me. I’m going to look for someone from Jersey or Staten Island. I think they might have some idea of how I feel.”

I don't make the gender distinction lightly. Citizenship law is littered with such bias. The nation is typically characterized as female and blood is more easily traced through matrilineal lines. Paternity is inherently more controversial. But more on that in my next post.

Burgh Energy Report: Regional Economics

If the Marcellus Play is fueling a regional jobs boom, it's most evident in the steel industry. You might have heard that President Obama was in Youngstown celebrating the $650 million investment in the V&M Star expansion. This month, Site Selection Magazine has an informative feature on the steel pipe manufacturer and its proximity to the Marcellus Shale. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review recently investigated the surging demand for workers in Pennsylvania:

Dura-Bond has spent $1 million on new equipment. The 50-year-old company is looking to build an $8 million plant on a 55-acre site at City Center of Duquesne industrial office park, the site of the former Duquesne Works of U.S. Steel Corp. The plant, which will coat pipe to resist corrosion, will employ 55 to 65 people and should be in operation within a year.

"We just received a $30 million contract from Dominion Transmission for 45 miles of 30-inch pipe, and 65 miles of 24-inch pipe," Norris said. "We'll manufacture the pipe at our Steelton (Pa.) facility, then ship it here and store it on the new property until it's needed. We never would have gotten that contract had we not had the new site."

While I'm still skeptical that there will be a rush of migrants to Greater Pittsburgh, I can't ignore all the money being thrown around natural gas drilling. Apparently, this is a boon for banks:

Investors seeking long-term growth should consider community banks in southeastern and northeastern Pennsylvania poised to benefit from the development of the Marcellus Shale, a massive unconventional play discovered by Range Resources (NYSE: RRC).

Elliott discussed the region’s appealing economics in the April 28 installment of The Energy Letter, Why Some Natural Gas is Worth $7.28, and in numerous issues of The Energy Strategist This excerpt provides a quick recap ...

No one knows where the natural gas market is going and there are plenty of reasons why the Marcellus Play could be more bust than boom. But following the money, I reach a different conclusion. The investment is still pouring in despite the glut of natural gas and very low prices. Furthermore, Pittsburgh is much more than drilling. Energy is merely a part of the regional economic picture, which looks increasingly rosy.