Month: May 2009

A wax figure of US President Barack Obama is seen at The Wax Museum at Fisherman's Wharf May 21, 2009 in San Francisco, California. The wax figure of President Obama traveled across the San Francisco Bay to the wax museum aboard the USS Potomac, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidential yacht. (By Justin Sullivan/Getty)

by Richard Florida

The American Lung Association's State of the Air report on America's most polluted cities is out. Here's  a summary (pointer via Planetizen).

Six out of ten Americans live in urban areas where air pollution can cause major health problems … Despite America's growing "green" movement, the air in many cities became dirtier during the past 12 months. The research names Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Bakersfield as the most polluted US cities. The report finds that air pollution hovers at unhealthy levels in almost every major city, threatening people's ability to breathe and placing lives at risk …

Many cities, like Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Washington, DC and Baltimore have made considerable improvements in their air quality over the past decade. People living in some of these cities however, are breathing even dirtier air than what was reported in the Lung Association's previous report. Only one city, Fargo, North Dakota, ranked among the cleanest in all three air pollution categories covered by the research.

Maps of the most polluted cities are here; the cleanest cities here.

by Patrick Appel
Spencer Ackerman fisks Cheney:

by Richard Florida

Felix Salmon points to Julia Ioffe's TNR story on Nouriel Roubini, zeroing in on the long journey back to recovery.

Given the right changes, perhaps the United States can develop with the productive long view in mind, and maybe its human talent can be spread more equitably. "When you have more financial engineers than computer engineers, you know that the brightest minds have gone into something where, probably, the margin was excessive," he had told me earlier. "Maybe some of these bright people are going to do something entrepreneurial, more creative, or go into government. I think that's actually a good change. The transition is painful, but the result may be good."

Salmon's comment is spot on.

[O]ver the long term, I'm optimistic that the redeployment of US human resources away from finance and into the real economy is bound to be a good thing. But in the medium term, the process of "scaling back and turning inwards" around the globe is going to be extremely painful — and is far from over. Or, to put it a more familiar way, things are going to get worse before they get worse. Only very slowly and very painfully might they start to get better — and it's not going to happen any time soon.

The thing that strikes me most is how very long it takes for economies to reset themselves during crises. Recovery from both the Long Depression of the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s took the better part of two or three decades. Both required not just a new wave of technological innovation, the creative destruction of various industries, and new modes of government economic intervention, but were premised upon a whole new "spatial fix" – the rise of the "modern" industrial city after the Long Depression and suburbia's rise after the Great Depression – to set in motion broad new patterns of consumer spending and demand which could power longer-run growth. My own father was just eight in 1929, my mother three, when the stock market crashed. They left Newark for a close-in working class New Jersey suburb in 1960 – three full decades after the onset of the crash.

Governments and central banks certainly have better monetary and fiscal policy tools at their disposal now and are more adept at managing economic downturns. Still, I fear it will be a much longer road to full recovery and a new normal than most people expect.

But the enormity of the creative destruction sweeping the industry goes far beyond the iPod killing off the CD. The Gang of Four's Dave Allen argues that we are seeing the "end of the album" – a construct initially created by the limitation of vinyl technology in 1930 – as the organizing principle of musical production. He sees this as potentially liberating for musicians – or those musicians that can adapt. Industry veteran Bob Lefsetz predicts a return to the pre-LP era, when artists constantly pumped out singles and toured. He even draws a comparison to the way that Toyota has succeeded by building a reputation for reliability gradually through word of mouth.

Technology is also changing the way we experience music. Strange as it may seem to vinyl purists out there, many of the net generation increasingly prefer the "sizzle" of compressed MP3s to the sound of higher-quality files. Some musicians now check their final mixdowns on cell phones.

But not all the results are positive. Mark Fisher counters that the ubiquity of digital recording is again changing the way we experience music. As more and more people produce their own music, and with more music to consume online and elsewhere, we have less time to actually experience music. We now take our music in small bits, seldom listen to anything "whole," and have precious little time left over for live events. Like a digital-age Walter Benjamin, Fisher argues that such instantaneous exposure deprives cultures of the time and space they need to germinate and grow.

Technology and music have long interacted as economist Peter Tschmuck has shown. On the one hand, new technologies like the long play (LP) record, the synthesizer, and now the iPod have changed the music industry and led to the rise of whole new music genres. But, on the other hand, music has also powerfully affected the rise and dissemination of new technology. Without music and some ingenious entrepreneurs in the music industry, the phonograph would still be used as Edison intended: to dictate letters and store phone calls. Radio was seen as a "wireless telegraph" until one of Thomas Edison's researchers broadcast himself playing O Holy Night on the violin on Christmas Eve 1906. And we're all familiar with the way the MP3 popularized peer-to-peer file-sharing and broadband internet connections. But, It's about more than just technology, actually.

The way I see it, that music is a "fruit-fly industry" – one that can tell us a lot about the nature of technology, new business models, and the economy in general. Music is a highly competitive business – a hyper-competitive market in miniature, where competition for sonic, technological, and talent advantage spurs rapid evolution and change. New recording and network technology means that barriers to entry are lower than ever. Music is often the first sector to experience the full force of disruptive technology. It was the first industry to face the file-sharing crisis, and other industries like film and publishing are now learning from its experience. Musicians are quintessential examples of free-agent workers, mixing income and seeking out affordable, creative places to do their work. And the concentration of musical talent and firms into clusters and scenes – in an industry which requires little in the way of capital infrastructure and fixed costs – can help us better understand geographic clustering across a wide variety of fields.

by Andrew

Another would-be Hannity gets waterboarded for a few seconds. And he sees what it is, and what this country did.

by Patrick Appel

Jim Manzi responds to Ryan Avent. In my humble opinion, Jim has the upperhand –partially because Ryan is forced to argue beyond the legislation in question and consider how W-M will impact future climate bills and international negotiations on climate change. That line of attack inherentaly has more variables and uncertainties. But you won't find a better, or more civil, pro and con debate on the Waxman bill. I encourage you to read both posts.

by Chris Bodenner

A great segue to a Friday night:

Passion Pit – The Reeling from phantomcolor on Vimeo.

 by Richard Florida

Here's the real map from the Social Science Research Council's American Human Development Project.

MapScroll and Economix clear up any remaining confusion about an earlier, problematic map. Check out the project's website and terrific interactive maps.