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A terrifyingly important article about the gig / freelance economy...
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For Gioia himself, it’s made being a freelance man of letters – like his heroes from mid-century – much tougher. “I don’t think that’s possible anymore,” he says, as writing becomes unpaid volunteer work. “There are fewer gigs.” The number of papers with real book or ideas sections is down substantially; serious magazines are half the size they used to be. “If I’d quit my job this year, I don’t think I could have made it as a literary freelancer. The problem isn’t the decline of the economy, though that doesn’t help. The problem is the collapse of culture.”
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Half hour podcast / interview with Richard Florida talking about the Great Reset, which exerts certain pressures or forces:
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Among these forces will be:
* new patterns of consumption, and new attitudes toward ownership that are less centered on houses and cars
* the transformation of millions of service jobs into middle class careers that engage workers as a source of innovation
* new forms of infrastructure that speed the movement of people, goods, and ideas
* a radically altered and much denser economic landscape organized around
* "megaregions" that will drive the development of new industries, new jobs, and a whole new way of life
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Op-ed by Richard Florida, written for the Toronto Star (republished on Florida's Creative Class site). Conclusions apply to most urban areas:
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Toronto and its extended region need to grow. Our mega-region, which spans Montreal to Waterloo and across the border to Buffalo and Rochester, is home to 22 million people and generates $530 billion in economic output. But we are dwarfed by the truly gargantuan mega-regions surrounding New York and Chicago, which each produce roughly $2 trillion in economic output annually. Bigger cities and bigger mega-regions have faster metabolisms and bigger markets, and they are more innovative. Greater Toronto has to increase its size and scale fast. But adding more people — even 2 million people by 2031, as the Greater Toronto Marketing Alliance anticipates — will not be enough. We have to borrow size by expanding our borders..
But we have to grow differently. Over the past several decades we have grown bigger but not better, by throwing up cheap condo buildings downtown and creating the worst kinds of suburban sprawl with car-dependent, un-walkable and some would say almost unlivable over-sized housing and related developments, while destroying some of the very best farmland on the planet. We need to grow smarter and greener as we grow bigger. That means increasing density and remaking our suburbs around transit and as mixed use, walkable and livable communities.
We’ll need new infrastructure that can connect the far-flung pieces of our mega-region and make it more of an economically integrated whole. That means investing now in high-speed rail, which would cut travel time from Toronto to Montreal to just over two hours. It would make Waterloo, with its world-class high-tech cluster, a veritable suburb with an easy commute of under a half-hour. High-speed rail could even help reposition ailing Windsor as part of the Greater Toronto economy by cutting travel time to just 90 minutes.
Could it be that our stable housing market might blind us to the bigger housing reset going
An event in Seattle I'd love to have attended:
"From Vacancy to Vibrancy - the Creative Use of Space"
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What can the cultural sector do to benefit the long term economic picture of our community? Is there a way to bring space to artists and new life and capital to existing space? While the recession is on its way out, the construction boom that came before it left us with an overabundance of space. How are the development and business sectors coming together with individual artists and arts organizations to get creative and make lemonade? Are we creating the foundation for long term, mutually beneficial partnerships? Bring your own questions and ideas and join us!
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Jonah Lehrer discusses Ed Glaeser's recent post in the NYT blog on NYC and why it's "America's most resilient city." Lots of great points, interesting comments thread, too. Closing line by Lehrer nails it.
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Add Sticky NoteThis is why I smirk when I read about cities like Orlando, Florida trying to jump start innovation with a bevy of tax credits for high-tech businesses. These places don't need more tax credits - they need more coffee houses and crowded sidewalks.
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Yule Heibel on 2009-01-01well said!
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Richard Florida makes the argument that Fordism -- or Fordist thinking -- lies behind some of our economic woes at present, and that we have to get past that paradigm. I left a comment re. this article ( http://www.wsoctv.com/automotive/17945476/detail.html#- ), "Falling Gas Prices Jump-Start GM SUV Sales; Automaker Puts Texas Plant On Overtime Amid Other Closures," published a week ago (11/10/08). The automobile industry shouldn't be bailed out without significant guarantees from the industry that it will embrace environmentally progressive goals.
Fascinating (possibly scary?) piece by Florida on how Obama's win could still fan the flames of an ugly backlash from the right that may be more convulsive and destructive than the current economic / financial meltdown. Florida factors in some data around demographic changes due to the creative economy (linked to democratic/ Obama politics), to paint a picture of a potentially very divided country.
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When people like Colin Powell say Mr. Obama is a “transformational figure,” they’re suggesting that an Obama administration can somehow heal the deep divisions within the American electorate and move the country forward, the way Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression. And certainly projected Democratic majorities in Congress make that kind of transformation appear plausible.
<!-- end #inTP -->I wish that would happen. But I doubt it will, and the reason is simple: The divisions run too deep. The realignment that propelled and kept FDR in office is not happening today. American politics is distinguished today by shifting electoral coalitions, candidate-centered elections, and what some political scientists call de-alignment. America isn’t just suffering from political polarization, but a burgeoning economic divide and class war.
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Since then, 20 million jobs in the creative sector have been created, and the ranks of what I call the creative class have grown to 40 million - nearly a third of the work force. That group has become powerful in American politics, and it is squarely behind Mr. Obama. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently reported that Republicans have all but lost creative professionals working in law, medicine, and high technology.
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A sobering assessment of current bail-out strategies and why they could well fail, by Martin Kenney.
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when the Treasury/Fed say they will bail out banks, they only mean a few key banks and leave the rest to their own devices (there is evidence for this suspicion as the large regional banks such as Sun Trust and Zion did not participate in the huge rally on Monday). So, which banks will be bailed out? My guess is Goldman Sachs (Paulson and Robert Rubin’s ex-employer), Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and a few others (did Wells Fargo buy Wachovia so that it could enter this charmed circle?). P.S. - We now have confirmation of which firms are being bailed out: JPMorgan, Goldman, Citi, BoA, Wells Fargo, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, State Street Bank [thank you Barney Frank], Bank of NY Mellon [thank you Hillary and Schumer].
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The forces of globalization are still underway and, as many of have been saying, they are putting downward pressure on incomes in the developed nations, which, of course, are the consumers of the products of the developing nations. A small telltale of this, IBM announced dramatically increased profits on only slightly higher sales. My guess is that these profits were made by substituting low-cost developing world service providers for their high-cost developing nation employees. This dynamic will continue putting pressure on wages in the developed nations and contributing to a deflationary dynamic.
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AURP (Association of University Research Parks) "offers a series of urgent recommendations for the U.S. Government, so that it can more precisely support American innovation and American innovators with both economic and policy-based changes." (See article for proposal targets.)
Does this apply to university research parks in Canada, too?
Interesting references to the importance of place and the creative class.
See this PDF for "The Power of Place": http://www.aurpcanada.ca/pdf/AURP%20The%20Power%20of%20Place_Final.pdf (via www.aurpcanada.ca)
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From establishing the first research park in the world, to building world-class research universities and federal laboratories while pioneering technology transfer and patent reform for public-private research partnerships, the U.S. has led the world in attracting research talent, funding scientific advances, and commercializing new discoveries.
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The United States is losing ground competitively. The ambitious entrepreneurs and scientists who are willing to invest time and money into an idea are being lost at a staggering pace to other countries. These foreign governments provide incentives for this U.S. human capital to uproot and move. These individuals find that the challenge of surviving in a foreign country is outweighed by the tremendous economic benefit these foreign communities provide.
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Great entry by Richard Florida, which underscores the connection between suburbanization, reliance on cheap gasoline, consumption, and using housing/ real estate as a "piggy bank" that one could always raid to get money to buy more stuff. See entry, and annotations/ highlights.
I added a comment, in response to an existing comment by Wendy Waters, and then a second one in response to Kwende Kefentse.
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Most experts agree this is the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. The stock market is down almost 25 percent so far this year. Housing prices in the United States are off more than 20 per cent since their peak in 2006. Manufacturing output is falling and consumer confidence has slipped.
<!-- /Summary -->Martin Feldstein, former head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, past chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and a Harvard economics professor - usually a voice of calming reassurance - wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Sliding into recession, monetary policy already at maximum easing, and fiscal transfers impotent … an unenviable situation, to say the least, for any incoming president.”
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Where did this financial mess come from? And what does it mean?
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Why does one too often get the impression that publications like The Tyee are fighting a rear-guard and even anachronistic battle? That somehow, somewhere different patterns are emerging, which its journalists just don't see, preferring instead the familiar world of what they knew "back in the day"?
Everything is more intense in NYC, including the geek or nerd "party" scene (meet ups, tweet ups, "ignite" events, etc.). More people = more capital, in terms of creative energy and innovation. (And perhaps headaches... but that's another story...!)
Of course I'd love to figure out how to sustain a mini-version of this right here (Victoria). Vancouver works very hard at it -- but even in Vancouver (I'm told), it's the same people reappearing at the different events (i.e., nowhere near the critical mass of larger US metros). Part of the problem is enticing people to come out -- it's so easy to stay home, after all...
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IgniteNYC was just one of 12 tech events listed that evening
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Now, young Internet entrepreneurs, some holdouts from the old days and a few members of the city’s creative class (and underclass) are engaged in a new type of party, which mashes together Silicon Alley 1.0’s camaraderie and optimism, meetup.com’s spontaneity and informality, Burning Man’s home-brewed creativity, and a technology conference’s devotion to unveiling ideas.
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