Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Sander van der Leeuw: Okay. There’s two things I’d like to do. First, I’d like to explain a little bit, because this particular lecture and Kevin’s stay here, which began yesterday, and which we hope will be for another couple of weeks are actually part of a larger initiative that we are beginning to launch here in the university. I want to say a few words about that, and then I want to introduce Kevin here to all of you.

The initiative is the following: About nine months ago I started looking around at what had been happening over the past ten years or twelve years ever since ASU grabbed the headlines in beginning to sync about urban ecology, which in those days was a brand new sort of topic. I looked at sort of what the many efforts are that are being done in the urban arena. That included DCDC. That includes CAP LTR, but it includes a slew of other pieces of work that have been done about heat islands, urban planning. Now, what struck me at that occasion is two things. On the one hand, that a lot of those initiatives were going in all kinds of different directions, and then I felt that there wasn’t enough interaction among the people who are part of that initiative to sort of get the kind of fruitful discussions that I think are part of what our task in this place actually is.

The other thing that struck me simply because of my own earlier interests in urban dynamics even before I came to ASU is the fact that there is right now on a very different scale in a number of different places a rethink going on of what actually urban dynamics is all about. That rethink has come in part, actually, from a project that I led in Europe quite a long time ago which stimulated people at the Santa Fe Institute to start thinking about urban systems in a different way. It’s also come from people like Richard Florida and Kevin at the University of Toronto who have been thinking about the role of innovation and creativity in urban systems. It is right now actually spreading to a number of other institutions.

What I sort of made as my not New Year’s but August resolution for this academic year was to try and begin a process of building an intellectual platform much like Nalini Shetty did for the Climate’s Impact and Adaptations Center among those people interested in urban dynamics. This term we will have quite a series of people coming through ASU for sometimes a day or two, sometimes a longer period, to actually discuss aspects of that. Now, of course, I can limit that to sustainability, but that is not quite really I think what the purpose of this is.

I want to announce, among others, one lecture which will happen next week which is not on the ones that have been advertised here on the screen a moment ago. We will have on the 25th of February at 3:30 in SHESC a lecture about the emergence of low density cities in the Maya area that is based on a very interesting complex systems modeling approach to that particular thing. There will be other events. We will announce them.

I’ll leave it at that for the moment, but I simply wanted to sort of plant this idea that I think getting people together around urban systems, urban dynamics, urban sustainability right now is an appropriate thing to do. With that, we can kick this off with Kevin’s being here. Now, I should apologize to Kevin but I didn’t write this introduction. You’ll understand why I apologize, because it was written by Jose I suspect. It has all the signs of Jose’s all over. I will just read.

Dubbed the official statistician of the creative class, Kevin combined a depth of knowledge with an appreciation of the importance of finding and sharing the knowledge or pearls of wisdom gained from his comprehensive understanding of the great creative class and the creative economy. I very much agree. I should also say that, but it’s not exactly the way I would’ve worded it. That’s really what I was driving at. He has held faculty positions at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and for over a decade worked with technology in the insurance industry as a manager of strategic projects. He holds a PhD in business administration and an MBA from the Tepper School of Management at Carnegie Mellon, and a BS in honors—with honors I think probably—

Kevin Stolarick: No, honors [cross talk].

Sander van der Leeuw: Oh, that’s interesting.

Kevin Stolarick: We officially said.

Sander van der Leeuw: I didn’t know that. That’s totally new to me—in applied computer science from Illinois State University. One of the few statistically analysts who has the complete works of Edward Tufte and Donald Norman on his shelves, Kevin presents informative, accessible, and entertaining insights into the creative economy and the role of the creative class in increasing regional growth and prosperity. I have been fascinated by his work. We have been in touch over the last three or four years on a number of occasions. With that, over to you, Kevin. Thank you very much for coming and for doing this for us. [Clapping]

Kevin Stolarick: Well, am I on? Yeah, I’m on. Thank you very much, Sander. Actually, not Jose—I think you have to blame my mom for that one. [Laughter] I always say it’s terrible to have to live up to your biography when you’re speaking. I am—and also what it didn’t talk about—actually, that does not talk about currently I am the research director at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. I also teach there and at the Urban Studies Program at Innis College at the U of T. I’m also doing research in teaching, obviously continuing now at the U of T. As Sandra said, I’m gonna be here for a couple of weeks and then go back to chilly Toronto. I’m enjoying it while I’m here. You guys can complain about how cold it is all you want. I’m telling you, it’s not cold.

I can’t remember how it was officially advertised in terms of the talk I wanted to do, but I wanted to talk a little bit today about some of what we’ve been doing, and I want to always kind of in a little bit of tone kind of talking about the creative economy, and the creative class, and exactly what that is, and what that means, and where kind of that came from. I think it’s important for people to understand that. Not everybody—amazingly enough, not everybody has read Richard Florida’s book yet. I don’t understand. I know he assumes everybody has read it—but to talk a little bit about that, and then to talk about how that and those ideas and what’s going on in some of the relationships between green, clean, smart, sustainable, etcetera, right—these kinds of ideas and some of what’s been going on. This is very much a work in progress, but something that we’re very interested in and are gonna continue to work on, both part of—also part of why I’m here for these few weeks, and we’ll continue to work with Sandra, and the S.O.S., and other things that are going on. Just to kind of help kind of give that some context.

I have to start with two disclaimers. Disclaimer number one I’ve already given you, which is that this is still a work in progress. This is something that I’m doing actually working with Jose Lobo, also a few other people on, that we’re trying to kind of pull together the kind of information we need, so this is still kind of early days with what’s going on with that. It will not be complete. It will not have kind of tons of detailed analysis behind it. It’s more thinking through the ideas of where we are. My plan is to spend kind of the next 40 to 50 minutes kind of going through and talking about stuff and still leaving time for questions, cuz I know we have until 1:30.

That was disclaimer number one that it’s still a work in progress. Disclaimer number two is I got here yesterday and decided when I arrived at the hotel that I kind of wanted to just lie down for a minute and kind of relax. Although I went from the east coast to the west coast, about 4:30 last night I lied down and at about midnight I woke up. At about 7:00 this morning I got up. This morning at about 7:30 when I’m checking my email I realize that the presentation was in fact today and not next week. It always starts to get the audience on your side, so feel bad for me. Nevertheless, I had a lot of it ready so it wasn’t like I was frantically—but then of course the internet at the hotel kept dropping on me this morning, so that made it even more fun. I’m fairly comfortable with my slides and what I have, but over time I think this is work that will develop. Probably even over the course of the next couple of weeks it will probably develop some more, as well.

What I want to talk about as I said a little bit of the kind of the creative economy, and the ideas, and what this is, and where it comes from. I think it’s important for people to understand that, both because I think it’s an incredibly important way of thinking about what’s happening to the economy in general in the developed world, and also because it does help to really explain and link back to this idea of cities and why cities matter so much, so helping to understand that. Then I have some more kind of detailed analysis that I’ve done looking specifically at kind of the creative class, and the creative economy, and the green economy as defined by the Brookings Institution. Brookings did a whole bunch of work, and we got their data, so we were able to kind of do the detailed comparisons across the U.S. of clean tech, and green economy jobs, and what was going on, and using that information along with the data that we had to be able to really look at that in some depth to see what the relationships were.

Then beyond that, and where we really want to take this is to start saying, “Well okay, that’s nice if you’re gonna get creativity and the creative class and what that means, and the green economy, and these things, but what about some of these other ideas? What about smart cities? What about clean cities? What about, you know—what about other measures of green? What about sustainability? What about resilience? What about all these other things?” Starting to get a sense of those—so, I will—this is the part that’s not as developed yet, but I’ll show you some things that I think are exactly what I expected to see even before I got the results. That is the cities that are at the top of one of these lists tend to be at the top of all of these lists. They’re not all measuring the same thing. They’re not all doing the same thing, but you still see the same places over, and over, and over, and over again.

That kind of then leads into what I’ve lovingly called random thoughts, some things, ideas, just some things have kind of helped to structure this. One of the things that I learned at Carnegie Mellon both when I was a student there and when I was teaching there—we always talked about kind of bringing structure to an unstructured problem. It was the legacy of Herb Simon and Dick Siert, for those of you who kind of knew them and their work, and a large part of what they did then kind of has infused—what has happened at Carnegie Mellon was very much this idea of kind of thinking about complex systems, and understanding that they were complex, and all these things that are going on, but then also trying to say, as Herb kind of talks about so beautifully in Sciences of the Artificial, it’s about still putting some structure to it even if it’s not real structure. It’s your own structure, and it helps you—if it helps you advance meaning, helps take you further along, then you’re probably doing something helpful.

Really, I think the kind of last piece is to try to start at that, right, to start talking through this idea of well, how do you start thinking about these questions, and what do they really mean, and how do they interrelate to each other, which is still the overall question. I was trying to understand how do these kind of different ideas which are all out there, what are they really doing, and what do they have in common, and what’s going on.

As I said, I’ll talk a little bit about the creative economy. I just liked the image. He’s holding a laptop, which I know is hard to see. Oh, now it stopped. Come on. There we go. Too far. There we go. Twelve years ago, I met Richard Florida. We were both at Carnegie Mellon. I was starting my first teaching position. He was a faculty member at the Heinz School of Public Policy that had just become the Heinz School of Public Policy. Before that it had been the school or urban and public affairs. The Heinz Family, Senator John Heinz especially, Theresa Heinz who was then John Heinz’s wife, now John Kerry’s wife—Theresa Heinz was a big benefactor of the school. The senator had been killed in an airplane crash unexpectedly—I guess all airplane crashes are unexpected—but died rather young, and probably had a very promising career in front of him, which was cut short by that airplane crash. The Heinz family [fading voice 14:45], which it is the ketchup people. It is that same Heinz. They came to the school and they said okay, well we want to, you know, in John’s honor, you know, we’ll find we’ll name the public policy school in his name, and that happened.

Then one of the other things that—Theresa was actually—was then and actually still is very interested in is kind of regional economics, and even very early on a lot of questions and issues around resilience, and sustainability, and what makes regions successful, and why do some work and others don’t, and all the rest. They put up all the money up that said okay well, we will create the Heinz chair in regional economics at the new school. Who would be the appropriate person for this? They were like, “Well, we don’t have anybody who does regional economics. We have a few economists who look at finance, and other things, government, and we have people who look at—a lot of IT people.” Well, we’ve got this Richard Florida guy. He has a degree in planning. He’s mostly, if you look at his earlier work, he was doing a lot of work on innovation, and venture capital, but he was doing a little bit of regional stuff and how innovation kind of is distributed across regions.

They said, well we’ll make Richard the Heinz chair in regional economics. Richard had just become the Heinz chair in regional economics and didn’t know what economics really was, still doesn’t. Then as part of being the Heinz chair in regional economics, he signed a book deal with Basic Books that said, “I’m gonna write a book about regional economics because I’m the Heinz chair in regional economics now.” He signed the contract and got an advance from them, a very small one I will say, a very small advance, but he cashed his advance check, and then realized he actually had to write a book. That was when I met him.

It was to the point where I said, he actually was like, “Oh, I have to write this book, and it has to be about regional economics, and I don’t really know what I’m gonna do.” I am actually not a regional economics. Like Sandra said, my undergrad’s in business administration—or my PhD’s in business administration. My undergrad was in computer science. My dissertation was looking at the impact on firms of investment in IT. I was specifically looking at kind of investments in technology, and in innovation, and management skill, and how that was related to overall firm performance. I was using incredibly detailed U.S. census data. I have special sworn status with the U.S. Census Bureau, so I can actually access the raw data if I have an approved project. I actually have the same access now in Canada, so I can dig into data and really do stuff with it.

I’ve been doing all this stuff on IT, and Richard had been doing some stuff with Information Week Magazine, an occasional column with them kind of talking about workplace issues and things. They do an annual salary survey. Every year, everybody who’s gonna be in the IT industry, their readership is about half of it management, IT managers, and half kind of IT professionals, networking, programming, all kinds of different things. They have about—the year we got it was about 38,000 people fill out this survey, most of them in the U.S., and talk about their jobs, and what they do, and what they like about their job, and what they don’t like, and who they work for, and where they work, and all this stuff. Richard got the raw data and said, “Hey, I have data on 38,000 IT workers, and what they like about their jobs, and what they’re doing, and also where they live, right, or at least the zip code of where they work. I’d love to be able to do something with it.” The one thing I said is if you ever want to really see Richard suffer, ask him to add two numbers together and just kind of see what happens. Then if you really want to, ask him the same thing two minutes later and give him the same two numbers and you’ll get a different answer. Not that bad, but I always do like to say I’m the left brain of Richard Florida.

He’s like, “I need somebody who can help me with this stuff.” I’d been doing all this data with census work. I got some email, you know, kind of random email from this, you know, other professor. Yeah, this is interesting. We met and we kind of started talking about it. Over the course of that summer, I spent a lot of time, most of it in his kitchen—he hates his office—so, most of it in his kitchen at his house going through, and talking about, and trying to figure out well, what are we talking about, what do we really say? When we’re talking about regions, what’s going on? All the rest of this. Quite honestly, right? I mean, it’s Richard’s book and they’re Richard’s ideas, right. I mean, I played a small role and I crunched a lot of numbers, but I do not in any way feel—a lot of people say, “Well, you should be listed as co-author.” I’m like, no it’s not. It’s his book. It really is his book.

I mean, we did spend a lot of time kind of going through this stuff and talking about it. The whole thing where we started and what we really wanted to do was we wanted to figure out where innovation was coming from. Then it was like, well okay, innovation doesn’t actually come—it doesn’t spring like Athena off the lab bench rightfully formed, right. All of a sudden, there’s an innovation. You know, there are people who—that kind of talk about innovation as if the innovation is like a little gold nugget that’s just sitting there waiting to be discovered, and all somebody has to do it find it, and then it’s there, but it’s fully formed and just waiting for you. In fact, innovation comes from people. Innovation comes from the brains, and knowledge, and wisdom, right, and the hard work of people, right. As Thomas Edison said, right, “It’s one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” That’s innovation.

An innovation, right—I mean, and clearly the one thing a regional economist will tell you innovation drives economies. Regional economies get driven by, right—it’s all about innovation leads to growth not just population growth, but wealth, and prosperity, and overall well-being, and income, right, and productivity growth. All of these things are driven by innovation. What we said was, well you know, what we want is yes, we want to go after innovation, but we want the innovators. We don’t just want the innovation. We want the innovators. How can we find the people who are actually creating these ideas? How can we figure out where they are? It was like okay, well, Peter Drucker did this. He did it a long time ago, right. He said they’re knowledge workers. Drucker was fabulous, brilliant, right, smart man. Said, “Here you go, knowledge workers.”

Of course, I’m not gonna define them for you. You know them when you see them, right. Oh don’t worry about it. You’ll know, oh that’s a knowledge worker, right. Well, that’s not a knowledge worker, right. So, not everybody who works in offices is a knowledge worker. You don’t have to work in an office to be a knowledge worker. It was great. You had Drucker’s ideas, but you had no way of measuring it. We said, well no, what we really want is we want a way to talk about who are the innovators and where are they at a regional level. Can I figure out—because clearly some regions do better than others no matter what, no matter how I look at it, right. How do you want to take it apart, regions do not grow evenly and uniformly. We are in many ways—I can bring in astrophysics, but in many ways it is like the galaxy, right, it’s uneven. I’ve got places where there are things, and then places where there’s nothing, right.

You see that in fact growth across the U.S., around the world, you see it happening in very different ways in different places. How do you do that? If I want to understand it, I want to understand it regionally. That was really what we were trying to do is find the people who were generating the innovations and the ideas. We ended up calling it the creative class. We said, the or perhaps a creative class, right, maybe not even the only one, but its’ a creative class, a way of identifying it. We said it’s people who are being paid to think. The key thing is, right, what are they doing—what kind of work are people doing, and if they’re being paid to think that’s really what our yardstick was. That’s what we were going after.

It turns out there is this phenomenal survey that the Bureau of Labor and Statistics produces results for every single year that covers all the occupations in the country and reports them at a metropolitan level. It’s called the Occupation and Employment Survey. You know, governments are very unique on their names. So, the OES, the Occupation and Employment Survey comes out about every May, June. It varies, but the survey comes out every year. It talks about occupations at the metropolitan levels. For basically 380 metro areas across the U.S., for 800 different occupations, here is how many people are doing that occupation and their average wage for every single one of those metros.

Once we found that we realized, right, cuz we were interested in what people were doing. We didn’t care—cuz there is, right—the other thing on top of that kind of knowledge worker. The knowledge worker implies work that people are actually doing, as opposed to the kind of traditional measure of human capital, which is who has a degree. Do you have an advanced degree? Do you have a bachelor’s degree? Do you have an advanced degree? That’s the only measure, right. That would be the standard measure. The other thing, while regional economists say innovation drives economies, they also said human capital is what does that, right. Human capital is what makes this possible. It’s like, well yeah, but you know, Bill Gates was a college dropout, you know, so was Steve Jobs. Gee, it turns out entrepreneurs in general, successful entrepreneurs at least, most of them have dropped out of college. They found it incredibly frustrating. That’s why they become entrepreneurs.

Maybe not the best thing to only look at people that have degrees, right. There are also a lot of under-employed individuals, right. They have the degree and it’s very nice that you have a PhD in middle English literature. How is that job at Starbucks working out for you? This is what happens, right? Education wasn’t always the way to look at it. By looking at occupations, we were able to get a better sense of what really is going on and the jobs that people are actually dong.

The final thing for why occupations was so interesting was that it wasn’t industries. The other thing that’s kind of standard for economists was to look at industries, and in fact say oh, well you just, you know—Michael Porter did this. You break down regions by the industry clusters, and you look for certain industries. The problem is, and as I’ll show you in a little bit, as you get further and further away from having lots of people doing manufacturing work, industry isn’t necessarily as tied to the kind of work people do anymore. It still is for some people, but for a lot of people it’s not. This is a fabulous example. I said my background was in IT, so I started looking at IT, and we were doing work looking at IT workers, and what you find is—so my overall pool here is everybody who works either in an IT job, so they have a job that is IT related, or they work in the IT industry. That’s my everybody. Everybody who has either they’re in an IT company or they’re doing an IT job—now you obviously have some people that do both. It turns out of that total, nearly half the people, a little over half the people are actually people who do IT work but not in the IT industry.

There are, in fact, places like universities that have IT workers. Hospitals, insurance companies, banks, manufacturing firms, all kinds of places have IT workers, but they’re not in the IT industry. The same token, if I then look within the IT industry it turns out that only about half of the people who work in the IT industry are actually doing IT work. If I worry about bringing IT industry in, only about half the people there are actually doing IT stuff. There are programmers, and hardware engineers, and other people that are doing IT work, and are doing it within the IT industry, but over half the workers in the IT industry are in fact people who are doing things like secretarial work, janitorial work, landscaping, right. Okay, if you’re the landscaper for Microsoft, are you an IT worker? You work for an IT company. People who only look at industry would could you as an IT worker.

Understanding the occupation gave us the ability to actually look at what people were doing and what they were being paid to do independent of where they were doing it in terms of the industry they were in. We were just looking at occupations. That was our way of being able to say we can get at—here’s a way to measure now Drucker’s knowledge workers. Here’s a way to get at, right, this group of people who are driving the innovation, who are creating these things, that these are really the ones we want.

We are not saying that everybody that is in the creative class is automatically innovative. It’s not true, but the innovators are in there. We’re capturing, we’re overcasting our nets, but we are in fact capturing. For the most part we should be capturing innovators. We also capture self-employed individuals, so people who are entrepreneurial, starting their own businesses, working, all that kind of stuff. They’re included as well, right.

We’re able to kind of get at that information by looking at it in this way. If we look at it, what do we start to see? Well, I’m sorry who’s in it? I would say, okay, so we’re looking at what people do. The easiest thing is to remember the acronym TAPE. When I say creative class, everybody automatically assumes, oh you’re talking about artists, aren’t you? I know you. They’re just trying to sneak artists in here, or you’re trying to make artists important again, alright. Museums love us, by the way, right. Art galleries and artists, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. As we’re talking, as I said, people who are being paid to think, so it’s not just artists. Artists are there.

The acronym TAPE always works well, because the T is technology workers, so people who are doing—this included programming, people working in R and D, people working in labs, people doing tech work, right, the kind of high tech workers, alright. They’re creative workers. They are the arts and culture, so artists, musicians, other designers, right, people doing the kinds of arts and culture jobs where their work is specifically tied to arts and culture. It’s artists, yes, ushers at theaters, no, alright.

It’s about people who actually are producing things. Again, are they being paid to think? The people in the professional classes, business, financial, medical, legal, almost all of them have a lot of education. Notice not everybody in all these groups all have to have a lot of education. These do, but your professional workers, the kind of typical core of what you would think of knowledge workers for sure, right, and then your educators, so people working in education, probably everybody in this room at some level, are also, right, but that’s the core group. We said, okay, these are the people if we’re looking for—again, thinking about trying to find where innovation’s coming from, it’s coming from within here, and it’s these people kind of working together and with each other, and interacting—actually the interactions are huge—that help make this possible.

What does it mean? I know you can’t read it. That’s okay. This is actually the first census of the United States in 1793. There are four lines on this, and I’ll show you a slightly better version of it, but the green line down here—and this is just total number of people, so number of people employed. The green line down here are people who are working in farming, fishing, and forestry, the natural extraction, natural resources, right, those jobs, total size of the workforce.

The purple line, which is the next one here, are the creative workers. Again, going back to that TAPE, people who are being paid to think, how many of them are there. The red line are service class jobs. Again, service class is not just service industry, because a lot of the service industries have a lot of creative workers in them. Alright, so it’s actually people with low wage service jobs. These are people who are—basically I described these as the kind of job that you need three full-time positions, or the equivalent of three full-time positions to support a family of four. If you have a mother, and father, and two teenage kids who are working part-time, and they’re all working full-time in service class jobs, you can have a reasonable quality of life. On the other hand, if you’re a single woman with three kids, and you’re in the service class, you’re in a lot of trouble.

Those jobs, right, they tend to be very low wage, mostly hourly, they’re growing like crazy, and have become nearly at this point, nearly 60 million people in the workforce of the U.S. Out of the 110 million or so people in the U.S. workforce, over half are actually service workers, and these are low wage service workers. It’s not saying, oh there’s a bunch of, you know, bankers, and doctors, and nurses and stuff in there. They’re not. They’re in the creative class.

The final one is the blue one, which is working class, so manufacturing, constructions and trades, transportation, then kind of standard, working class, blue collared jobs. Even in terms of total numbers of people, you see that the total numbers have been in decline since around the 70’s or so. That was actually when the total number of people. It’s fairly—overall, the numbers are fairly level. Even in terms of just number of people working in manufacturing working class jobs you see it as on the decline.

The other way to look at this is the shares. If I look at share of the total workforce, same time period, now share of the total workforce, and what share of the workforce is in each of these groups, you see very similar but yet very different trends. The interesting thing—I mean the agricultural stuff, no one is surprised by, right, although as a share of the workforce, or even if they go back, right, the total number of workers, right, we’re still feeding all these people. We’re obviously incredibly productive, right? I mean, arguably there’s some of the same things with productivity in manufacturing as well, or increases in manufacturing. Total manufacturing output has remained level over time, but in fact the number of people working in it—I’m sorry, total manufacturing output continues to climb, but the number of people has remained level. You actually see that we’re producing as much as we always have, but with fewer people, or we’re taking the same number of people and producing even more. Productivity increases, right. Again, back to where does innovation come? Innovation drives productivity. You’ve seen some of that effect in manufacturing, as well.

Anyway, so yes, the steep drop in agriculture. The other thing is, right, so color’s the same, so creative here, service, working—so working class in the United States peaked as a share of the workforce right after the war, although I know you can’t read the bottom, the Civil War, not World War II. As a share of the workforce, working class peaked at about 60 percent in 1880, over 60 percent of the workforce. The Industrial Revolution truly was the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the late 19th century. We had more people working in manufacturing and working class jobs than as a share of the total workforce at that point then we have ever since. It fell down, came back up a little bit again around World War II, but has been declining as a share of the workforce ever since.

The service and creative, obviously right, farming has been on—you know, you see here, right, as this one goes down. In fact, these also go down as working goes up. Then as working starts to go down, these two start to go up. It’s hard to see from this, but if you actually run the numbers you see that on a year every year basis, at least for the past 50 years or so, this is actually a steeper line than this one is. The creative class is actually growing faster than the service class is. They are both growing and growing pretty extensively, but the creative class is growing faster.

Audience: In your farming class, does that include all agriculture [fading voice]?

Kevin Stolarick: It’s—no, they’re manufacturing. The food processing people are in the manufacturing side. It’s farm—and farm managers are actually creative workers cuz they’re managers. Owners, individual farmers, independent farmers are considered self-employed, so they’re creative workers. Farm managers would be creative workers. It’s farm laborers, forestry workers, fisherman, I think something like that. There’s the series of codes for it, but not all food production, the food processing work is all counted more as manufacturing.

You see what’s been changing, right? As I said, so understanding what’s going on with the creative work and the creative class, and why this idea of the rise of the creative class, is at least I think somewhat interesting and fairly valuable. You’re gonna say, well wait a minute. This is the kind of thing that is happening, right. This is what has been happening, but it’s actually been happening, right, since about 1890. It’s not a real recent phenomenon. It’s just more recently identified. It’s something that’s actually been going on for a long time.

I’m taking way too long on these slides, but hey. This is just the total numbers currently, how they break down in the U.S. There they are. I can make the slides available to anybody who wants them. Then this just shows the breakdown for the creative workers, again, where they fall in terms of total number of people by the tech workers, artists, professionals, educators, kind of how many fall into each of those groups, how many are there, and total salary being paid to the people in that group. If you calculate out, right, the average salaries, you will see some of these people are among the most highly paid in the country. Some of them are among the most lowest paid, alright. You’ve got artists and educators. It’s not only about—it’s not all high wage work, but a lot of them—on average, the wages are very high. You’ve got some are very high wage, and some are more low wage. It’s got it all over.

The other thing, right, in addition—the other thing I’d like to say for the greater class is just remember 30, 40, 50 as a kind of rule of thumb. It is 30 percent of the workforce. It’s 40 million people. They make about 50 percent of the total wages. They also control about 70 percent of discretionary income, which is also interesting, especially if you’re a marketing firm. In many other ways, as well, it’s also telling you, right—and this comes back to—we’ll come back to this, but this idea of saying okay, now wait a minute, right. I imagine a lot of you are doing this already in your minds, cuz I’m like wait, aren’t you supposed to be talking about clean, and green, and sustainable, right.

In fact, a lot of these questions and issues tie back to these kinds of thing, right, understanding who actually has that discretionary income. If you’re having to pay more for a sustainable alternative, that woman with the three kids at home who’s just got a service class job is not gonna have a whole lot of money in her pocket to be able to pay more for anything. Understanding, right, where some of the—and also a lot of it you’ll see, as well, is you start saying these are people who are actually very interested in those kinds of questions.

Again, understanding there was a group out there who are being paid for their creativity, who are being paid, right, for their thinking, and are driven by, or the kinds of thing that they’re interested and want to do in terms of their jobs, and their careers, and the way they look at things. They are not—if it’s 40 million people, they are not monolithic. They don’t all want exactly the same thing. In fact, they didn’t even all vote for Barack Obama, amazingly enough, although more of them did than not. There are some things you start to see especially in workforce, and lifestyle, and other things. You start to see things that—kind of your patterns that repeat themselves over and over among this group.

Okay, so now that I’ve baffled you with numbers, now I can dazzle you with maps. As I said, the whole thing is regional. For us it still is about understanding what we—we went through all this stuff on creative workers and all the rest. It was so that we could understand what was going on regionally. It’s talking about regional economics, right. What we start to see—and it’s very difficult to see on this other thing that I don’t have in the slide deck that would show, as well, but it very much tends to be an urban phenomenon. In fact, the share—not only the number, the share of the work force that’s the creative workers increases as the size of the city increases. The larger your city, the greater the share of your work force that are creative workers.

Cities are a huge deal. They make a big difference in how—again, because the creative workers, again, they’re the ones that are fastest growing. They have higher wages on average. They also are the ones generating the innovation and the new ideas, right. Having creative workers is pretty valuable, right. In fact, the analysis we do, we go back in. We look at all the metro regions, and we break this all down, right. What we start seeing is over and over again places that are doing well have more creative workers than other places.

This was just using counties for the 3,150 counties or 45 counties across the U.S., and it showing the darker the purple the more—the greater the share of creative workers, so not just the total numbers, the actual share. Again, you can still see, right. You can still see, and I mean there’s Chicago, right. Here’s Washington D.C. Even though you even see the cities, the metros themselves—I’m just using counties here—but the metros themselves still appear because of the most part, right, where you have these greater concentrations—Santa Fe, Los Alamos, highest share for a county anywhere in Los Alamos, in Santa Fe, and in Nevada.

Anyway, so what it shows, right—so the cities are really important. The cities are mattering a lot to these individuals and the way they’re making their decisions. This just shows service class. You know, since I had the one, working class, and then farming and fishing, right. Those are the highest. It’s harder to see patterns, and the service class one especially tends to be more evenly distributed. You do see down here, down here, some of that Myrtle Beach, right. Tourist destinations are very high in service class more so. There’s kind of a light—notice in here, right—and not as many services available to people. They don’t have the workers. They don’t have the work force.

Working class actually tends to be—it’s harder to see, but if you start looking for specific cities you will see that cities themselves tend to be on the lighter end of the scale. More working class jobs tend to be in smaller communities, and in more non-metropolitan and rural locations. You have a few that are still kind of concentrated, but for the most part working class share is more associated with non-metropolitan, right, non-urbanized areas. The cost of land, all kinds of other reasons, but where there is still a stronger working class. Still fairly even patchwork across the country and then this is the farming one.

Did it go or not? No, okay. This one takes the last—the three of them it ignores the farming. There’s nobody, actually, that in a county that’s highest in farming. Relative to the national average, I said the creative class is about 30 percent of the U.S. average, and service class is about 50 percent. Working class is about 20 percent. If I take the average for the county and subtract off the national average, and then look at which is the biggest. If I kind of demean each one, okay, what it says is what’s the most—the highest concentration relative to the national average for each of these things? Purple is creative, right. Red is service. Blue is working class. Again, what you start to see, right, you’ll see some of these same kinds of patterns. Cities, right, larger metropolitan areas tend to be concentrated with creative workers. More touristy focused places tend to be high in service work. Working class seems to be everywhere else, right, where there’s not either tourist destinations or necessarily a lot of cities.

You have others. College towns always pop out really strong, as well, for some of this. There’s a variety, right. It’s hard. The other thing, too, is kind of looking nationally you get a different—there is no particularly strong regional sense. There is, you know, the kind of division. There is a little bit this coast, right, especially the north east not counting Pennsylvania, so non-rust belt New York—although except for Buffalo—anyway, to kind of see where the kind of working class, you know, and some of the things that are going on.

This one will just mesmerize you. There you go. Be mesmerized. I did this one—I have this as a 33 meg. PDF so you can actually zoom in and really look. This actually shows census tract, and it shows what’s the highest share within that tract. The darker the color, it also relates it back to education, so how educated are they. The kind of thing is it’s hard to really see overall—the creative class, as I said, we were looking at what people were doing, right, the jobs that they were doing, the work that they were doing, not whether or not they had a degree. It was important because of, you know, the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates kind of idea, right. It wasn’t just about education. It was more than that. It was what people were actually doing. If you go back in, so once you understand that I can identify people by the work they do, I can then go back and use the detailed census data, and then look at well, what kind of education do they have, as well. I can then match them.

If I do that, what you find is that if somebody gets a university degree or higher, right, so if they get a B.A. or above, they have a B.A. or above, there is about a 70 percent chance that they will have a creative class job. For the most part, people who get degrees end up working in a creative occupation, or what I would call creative occupation, right. They end up getting in, ideally, hopefully, not always a degree that’s actually using their education. That’s a different issue, but at least if they have that degree they’re doing creative work. Some of them may have, you know, degrees and they’re working as visual artists. That’s fine. Then again, they’re working as a visual artist. They’re not just saying they’re a visual artist. They’re actually working. Anyway, so about 70 percent.

On the other hand, if I look at the creative class, so I look at all 40 million people, and I say, “Okay, how many of those people have a university degree?” It turns out that only about 60 percent of them have a university degree. Nearly 40 percent of the creative class are actually people who don’t have a university degree or higher, a B.A. or above. Almost all of them have some kind of post-secondary education. Very few of them are just high school graduates or are high school dropouts. They almost all have either some college, or an associate’s degree, or some kind of a certificate, or something, right. They almost all have some post-secondary. In fact, four in ten people that are in the creative class don’t have a B.A. It’s not just about education. It’s more than that. While educated people are there, not everybody who’s educated goes there. When you look at the creative class there are people there who are not.

The thing here was thinking okay well, looking at all these tracts, where are—now, one thing is, right, simply the overall—the darker the area is, simply the more educated it is. That’s the one thing, so areas—so for instance, you know, how educated is Colorado? How educated is Nevada? Just overall, right, then the colors tell you which of those classes are the predominant one. Again, with some of these with the cities it’s really, really hard to see because it’s census tract, so they don’t show up on this map at all. You can start to zoom in. We’re doing a bunch of stuff now where we’re actually looking at locations, and education, and workers within cities trying to understand what’s going on. Again, the idea being able to say well, education matters. It’s important, but not always, right. Education and creative classes don’t always go hand-in-hand, and this actually helps. You actually have places where you have, you know, a lot of service workers and they’re still very highly educated places. There’s other things going on. There are actually a few. These are harder to see, but especially in here and the few places in here you actually have places that are dominated by agriculture within census tracts. No county is, but by census tract they are.

Anyway, as I said, the whole thing in this was to look at regional economics. I’ve shown a whole lot of regions and all that, but what’s really going on? Having understood that we could look for creative workers, that we wanted to understand where they were and what was going on. Then the next thing was well, what’s driving regions? Because I can identify at the regional level how many creative people are there, how many creative workers are there, what’s going on, I can look at all kinds of other things at a regional level, as well, start taking apart and saying, “Well, what’s going on?” The standard approach always was it’s about industries. Growth comes from attracting businesses. This is, you know, smokestack chasing. I’ve gotta get the, you know, Eureka to come and open a new vacuum cleaner factory here, or I’ve gotta get Intel to come and open a chip fabrication plant. That’s gonna make everything better. It will solve all my problems if I can just get the right company to move here.

It’s based on the people follow jobs model. When the job is a working class kind of job, people follow the job. That’s what happens. The job is there. They don’t have a job where they are. They’ll figure out where there is a job and they’ll go there. When it’s creative workers it doesn’t work. Job, you need jobs. Jobs matter. Jobs are incredibly important. A job is no longer enough. If you want to attract creative workers you have to have other things. What are those things, and what matters?

Regional growth, the way we ended up describing it was that regional growth is really a combination of three things, what’s driving regions and what’s making regions successful is the fact that places that are doing well are places that have the talented skilled people. They have creative class, other educated people, right. You’ve got that going on. You have technology, but you still have some high tech. You have businesses. You have jobs for people. You have a level of inclusiveness. To make it three T’s, we called it tolerance. It’s bad. Tolerance is a bad word. Tolerance is not the same as inclusion. It really is about actively including people.

We started off talking about gays and lesbians, and got the right wing all in a tither. It was lots of fun. What you find is places that are opening and accepting of outsiders, be it gays and lesbians, foreign born individuals, visible minorities, people of color, Bohemians, just the kind of standard, typical artist Bohemian kinds of people, places that are open and inclusive that have more of those kinds of people, right, that actually have a visible minority presence, an active visible minority presence attract middle aged white guys. It turns out, right, gee, families want to be in places that are open and accepting for everybody. Foreigners, right, people with PhD’s coming here from India want to be in places that they see other people of color being successful.

The idea of inclusion become really important, and becomes something that got a lot of attention. Not only us, a lot of other people have looked at it since, and people are saying yeah it actually is pretty true. It also goes back to—I’m pretty good. I’ve gone 15 minutes without mentioning Jane Jacobs. Now that time is up. Jane Jacobs actually talked about this, as well, when she talked about the value of diversity and how important diversity was to cities and making cities popular. It’s not like this is particularly new. Actually kind of putting it in context and giving it something on which to hang is something that is fairly new. Really, it’s these three things coming together that help drive regions.

As I said, people are not attracted to only because of a job. They also care about at some level the quality of life in the region itself. In order to kind of make it really fit, if you thought tolerance was a bad one, we called it territory assets to make it the fourth T. It’s about regional amenities. When I say regional amenities—and this is where I’ll again come back to, right, the idea of clean, green, sustainable communities really matter because people look at that and say this is important to me. This is part of why I want to be there.

I always love to tell the story of Portland, Oregon, who many years ago decided the one thing they didn’t want to do was sprawl. They said, okay I know how we prevent sprawl. We won’t grow. Portland tried really hard to be forward thinking, great, wonderful leading place that didn’t want to sprawl, that didn’t want to grow. As a result, what happened? Everybody wanted to live there. People like crazy. Portland’s been growing like crazy. It still is growing. It’s growing very smart, right. They still are managing that growth very, very carefully, right, but the more Portland said, “We don’t want to grow,” the more people wanted to live in Portland, the more it grew. Right, they were a victim of their own success, because people really liked—they said, wait no, this is great. This is a forward thinking community. This is the kind of place I want to be. Portlandia, there’s some truth to it, right. There’s something going on there, and it’s not just about that, right.

The thing about territory assets and why I always talk about it as the fourth T is that technology, talent, and tolerance you have to have. If you want to be a successful region you’re gonna need those three. The territory asset stuff, you don’t need the same things as everybody else. You have to understand your unique combination. You have to understand your region and what does your region do, and what does your region offer people, and how do you do that. It’s not that everybody needs to be Portland. If everybody was Portland it would not succeed. People look for different things. People don’t all want the same things in their regions.

It’s understanding that the way that amenities work out, and things like sustainability, and clean, and green, and green energy, and all these other things become part of that mix of things that are going on, right. You may not call it an amenity, but it’s part of the quality of that region. It’s part of what people are gonna be really looking for, which is why finally after 50 minutes I can say this is what—but this piece is what really motivates the kind of looking at and understanding why we’re so interested in understanding these relationships between creative workers and green, clean, sustainable communities.

Final thing on this is that it’s not only about growth. It’s about prosperity. As I said, I’m the regional instructor at the Prosperity Institute. We started six years ago, and when we first started the first thing we thought we would do was let’s create a prosperity index, because people love indexes, or indices. They get you all kinds of media, all kinds of press. If I can rank things, boy I’ll get attention. Let’s figure out how to rank the prosperity of cities. The more we looked at it, the more I realized we couldn’t do it. The reason we couldn’t do it was because prosperity doesn’t mean the same thing to a given set of cities. What makes Phoenix prosperous, or what would make Phoenix prosperous—I think we use a future perfect tense—but what could make Phoenix prosperous, but it’s up to Phoenix to decide. What would make Phoenix prosperous will not make Portland prosperous. If Phoenix copied absolutely everything Portland has ever done, the best you could be is a second rate Portland, Oregon, and you need to be a first rate Phoenix.

It’s understanding that in fact regions themselves have to figure out what their own prosperity is, and then they have to figure out how to achieve it. Money is important. Income, tax base, productivity, wages, all of these things matter, and they are important. They’re not the only ones. Sustainability, healthcare, education levels, all kinds of other things are also part of what make regions prosperous. Unless you understand that, you understand that regions themselves have to be picking and deciding what’s important to them or what do they want to do. Once you know what you want to do, it’s how you leverage these things that help you get there. The overall idea is that these pieces all come together to really help you get where you want to go. The key thing is first you have to know where you want to go. The prosperity is context sensitive. Every region has to define its own prosperity and that’s really how you get success.

With all of that I said, right, so we started with cities and talking about cities. We said, you know, the interesting thing is—and this is still something that the major parties both in the U.S. and in Canada have yet to figure out. They’ll get there. Urban policy is not just social policy. Urban policy is economic. You’re talking about the things you now talk about, tolerance, and inclusion, and amenities, and sustainability, and all these things, cuz all of that’s just social policy, right. Urban issues, those are all social things. No, they’re not. They’re driving your economy. The issues, these things that you think about, the urban issues, what makes cities, work, what doesn’t. Transportation, energy, all these things, right, you think of them as urban issues.

In the past people have always thought urban just meant social, but in fact no, it’s economic, but they’re linked. It’s not just that it’s independent, that urban policy is not economic policy. It’s urban policy. It’s still social policy, right. It’s just that it’s also economic. Really understanding regions and what drives regions without understanding what’s going on in cities, and how cities work, and how they’re formed, and the things that are happening within them, and how people come together within cities to make things happen. All of that, and now green economy. I’ve got time. I’ve got half an hour yet, so I’m good. I’ll go fast.

I wanted to make sure, I think along the way to help make the linkage. The green economy stuff—so, Anne Geddes by the way, of course, just the photo. I have to give it—her pictures are always so incredible. The creative green economy—there’s this—from Brookings’ report, right, where Brookings looked at clean economy and clean jobs. They looked from 2000 to 2010, we got all their data. This just looks at—now the areas that are highlighted in the various shades of green are the metro areas. These are U.S. metro areas. Again, right, our focus is really on metro areas. About 85 percent of U.S. economic activity, total economic activity happens in those areas. This is where it’s about 65 percent, 70 percent of the population, but it is 85 percent of the economic activity. It’s also over 90 percent of patents and innovations happen in cities. It’s not to say that they’re only thing, but they are a pretty important chunk of what’s going on.

This is Brookings looking at a share of the workforce, right, that are green jobs. Where there are more green jobs you see a bit of kind of some clustering going on here in California up in the north east a little bit. In some places, Wisconsin, actually does some interesting things—a few places, but kind of scattered around where there are green jobs. This is similarly only using data from the BLS. The occupation employment network database also defines green jobs. Their definition, which is a little bit smaller than Brookings’, but using their definition of again, where are green jobs, you still see some fairly similar patterns. There’s a lot of the O*NET stuff, and Brookings—BLS and Brookings work very closely together on their data, on their categorizations, and what they were doing. Not a surprise that you would find some similar kind of results. A slightly different way, but still you’re looking at the same thing. How many of the workers are doing what would be considered green jobs? What makes for green is a whole ‘nother question. What they call, based on their categorization, these are green jobs.

As I said, this is a creative one. I could’ve done the creative by metros, right, to see again show, but you start to see you have a little bit, right, some of the same places between here, here, here the same kinds of places, places that don’t have a lot of creative workers. Looks like, at least on the map, visually, right, okay yeah there’s something there. Well, is there really something there? Of course. I wouldn’t go through that whole exercise if there wasn’t. Hard to see because this is—now this is total number of green jobs. This is total number of creative workers. Obviously, bigger places simply have more workers anyway, so they’re gonna have more green workers. At a high level, overall, the correlation here is 0.94, which for those of you who follow along with statistics at home is incredibly high, right. It’s these two things are obviously very closely related to each other. It’s not perfect.

You see things that, you know—here I have more green jobs than I do creative workers. Things above the line I have a few more creative workers than I do green jobs given the size that it is, but they’re pretty close. If I look and I say, right, one of the things so much of this is driven—it looks like, right, is it being driven by just the largest metros. Is New York causing all my problems here? Alright, is it that? Is everything kind of going, or is there something else going on? If you just take cities that are under 200,000 in total workforce size and look at them again—again, metro areas across the U.S. under 200,000, how many of them are green jobs? How many of them area creative? The correlation here is 0.62, 0.61, still very strong. Again, not perfect, right. I have some places where I have kind of more creative workers than green workers, and other places where I tend to have more green workers than creative workers, but on the whole they move together.

What does it really look like? Well, if I look at green jobs—alright, so this is the Brookings’ green job definition. It actually correlates perfectly with the O*NET definitions because of the way that things work. It’s just a correlation. They’re not exactly the same numbers, but it’s a tie for obviously a perfect correlation, but almost perfect. It rounds out to one. If I look at it, also BEA define green jobs, as well, so if I look at theirs I actually see with—so Brookings’ green jobs correlates to 0.9697. With BEA’s definition for total—this is total jobs, total number of workers very high, total number of creative is very high. Alright, so obviously the graphs were not a fluke. The numbers in fact highly correlated with each other, and there I throw numbers at you to prove it. They’re very strongly related.

Go forward. Yeah, but you just took total numbers. Of course they’re strongly related, right. Population and number of crimes would be strongly related because it’s, you know, whatever, two numbers. Bigger cities have more of stuff. Alright, we’ll log everything. Still, bigger cities have more but it helps eliminate some of what’s going on. Even when things are logged you get very strong, right, very strong relationships between them. It does seem like, at least at some level, places that have more creative workers also tend to have more green jobs. Again, Brookings’ definition is a little fast and loose as far as I’m concerned. As far as what makes a green job, I don’t happen to necessarily all garbage collectors should be counted as green employees. They do. This is what they do. Because you’re in waste management, so therefore anybody working in waste management is doing a green job. I suppose if you didn’t have garbage collectors your city would not be as green. By that argument, maybe it’s good. I don’t know.

Still, it is as I said. My goal with this is not—like I said, I’ve taken on kind of Brookings’ definitions. I did it with them here, actually, a while back. When Jonathan Weber was here we went through this. It’s their definition. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s defensible. They worked very closely and very hard on it. They worked with BLS. They worked with I think it was Standard and Poor, a bunch of places to try to come up with a reasoned definition of what makes for a green job. They have that. You know, is everyone gonna agree with it? No, but at least they have something, right. With what they have, you can stand behind someone. Here’s what it is. Assuming their definition is marginally correct, at least in the ballpark of where it should be, there’s something going on here, right, that in fact, for the most part, places that tend to be more creative have more green workers. There’s a relationship here, I’m seeing, at least using the Brookings’ data.

Again, using the log data I get very high, wonderful correlations. Most people in social sciences would kill for correlations that good. I’m just telling you right now, generally if you’re at 0.3 you’re really, really happy in social science, right. To see 0.8 is like something’s wrong, right. You’ve done something wrong. It’s just they’re very highly—they’re at least related to each other. It is not—again, I’m not saying that creative workers cause green jobs or the green jobs necessarily attract creative workers, but there’s a relationship between them. We see them moving together.

From the Brookings’ stuff, as I said, the one kind of piece where I had a lot of really good detailed information, I see yes, in fact, as expected, that creative workers and where there’s a large creative workforce, and we see why a creative workforce is helpful and valuable to a community. In fact, places that have more of a creative workforce also tend to have more green jobs, at least. What about some of these other kinds of things? What about more clean, or other kinds of green, or sustainable, or—I mean, there’s even the whole kind of smart cities. What does that mean? Resilient, start picking all your favorite phrases. What about for some of these other measures?

What we’re doing right now is we’re in the process of identifying as many of these kinds of things as we can. As I said, everybody loves indices, especially if your city is number one. It doesn’t matter what it is. As long as you can say you’re number one you’ll make the front page of the local paper. It doesn’t matter, you know. Even if it’s a bad thing sometimes, they’ll still make it. Oh, we’re not that bad. Anyway, so rankings, right, and city rankings are all over the place, and everybody has them, and everybody does them, and they all get a lot of attention. They’re very easy to find. The idea is at least—they’re all looking at—I mean, they all have—you know, they’re well thought-out. People are thinking about well, what really makes for a green city? What makes for a livable green city? What makes for a—and they go through, and they come up with the seven measures, and they look at them, and they try to figure them all out. They come up with their rankings.

As I said, we’ve been collecting them all. At this point, I’ve just got the rankings. I’m gonna spend—it won’t be too long, but just to kind of go through—oh yeah, okay. These are ours. If I do the creativity index, which combines the technology, talent, and tolerance scores for a reason, so it looks at creative class, it looks at high tech, it looks at tolerance and diversity. If I take all those measures and combine them, and then rank—these are all metro regions in the U.S.—and rank them, what happens? I get this list of 15. I have three of them here that are tied for fourth. The number over here is simply the share of the workforce in the creative class, so what share of the workforce are creative workers. This is our list.

This is our list of—you know, this is the top 15 creative metros in the U.S. The data here are from 2010, so we’re fairly accurate, fairly recent. I’ve got a little bit now from post the census, but for the most part—and these numbers, we actually see—we did them originally in 2000. I think about eight or so of the places on this list, nine of the places on this list would’ve been on the top 15 list ten years earlier. There’s some stability in these rankings, although they do change. The numbers have changed. Ithaca was not a MSA ten years ago, so it couldn’t have been on the list and a few other things. Durham, actually, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, that separated out into separate metros, so a few things changed. You see, right, so Boulder’s our number one, but then San Francisco, Boston, Ann Arbor, right. You just kind of go through and look at the list. I don’t think anybody’s surprised. There’s Portland for me. Wooster, right, Burlington, oh maybe, but probably places that have a lot of creative workers, that has the creativity index, which combines all this creative economy stuff together, places that tend to do well in that.

We describe the creativity index as a leading indicator. It kind of says these are a few places that are positioned to continue to do well, and continue to do well in the future. It’s not just—it’s not a retrospective measure just looking back. It really is designed to say do you have all the pieces in place for kind of success going forward. That’s really what this list does.

The other thing is if I look at creative class, so if I just—now, in this case I sorted all of them by share of the workforce in the creative class. This is the overall ranking for them then. Oh, and again, took the top 15. Again, many of the places are the same but not all. We have some places that are fairly strong in the creative class. Let’s see, Huntsville here. I love Huntsville. I will not talk about Huntsville now. I have many great stories about Huntsville, Alabama and the rocket scientists of Huntsville. Very high on the creative class. Not so high on some of the other measures, right. You see the same thing here with Tallahassee, right, and some of these other places, fairly high creative workers. A lot of them are college towns, but not all. You do see that element, as well.

Again, a lot of the same cities show up on this list as were on this list. Not all, but an awful lot. What about these? So far is that we found eight and one I’ve generated other kinds of measures of looking at how people have ranked cities. Brookings has their clean economy stuff. I talked about that, but I’ll show you their rankings. Siemens has done their green city measure. They have a European version, a world version, North American version, so right now just looking at the North American one. “Popular Science” has done the greenest cities. Corporate Knights has their greenest cities. There’s a website actually just called “Our Greenest Cities,” and they maintain their own ranking in the stuff that they have. “The Daily Beast” has done it. Thumb Tack is eco-friendliest, “Scientific American,” “Mother Nature,” and then my own, the sustainability index which I’ll talk about very briefly, some stuff that I’ve done using the Vulcan CO2 data.

These are the ones that we are able to kind of quickly find. You start looking at these. Again, kind of where possible the top 15. Some of them are only top 10. You start looking at these cities, and you’re gonna start seeing the same names over, and over, and over again, the same cities. I mean, San Francisco’s the obvious one, then San Jose. I mean, Charlotte, Chicago shows up a lot. Boston shows up a lot. You’ll start seeing—there’s the Brookings one. Here’s the Siemens for North America, so it’s got some Canadian cities in there, actually three that do really well. Again, so for Siemens rankings, “Popular Science,” and again they’re all using different measures. They’re all doing all this different stuff. They’re not even all—generally they’re all current. These are all the current ones that are available, but some of them use data from earlier years, right, other places. Every once in a while you get some things that do pop up that you might not see. You know, like Honolulu you might not see again. For the most part, there’s a handful of cities that are the same cities that show up over, and over, and over again on these lists.

For some reason—and this list, not only—so, there’s some of them are green, some are sustainable. The Brookings one isn’t really about how green is the city or the city’s policies or anything. The Brookings one is about jobs and economy. A lot of these others have to do more with energy policy, and waste collection policies, and street lights, and other things, right. Even the way that they’re ranking and the data they’re using is all very, very different, but it’s the same places. I keep seeing—even “The Daily Beast”—okay, Vegas now I don’t understand. I think that was just an advertising thing. I don’t know.

Audience: They paid for the survey.

Kevin Stolarick: They paid for the survey. Yeah, the Las Vegas sponsored “Daily Beast” survey. Actually, “The Daily Beast,” they generally recreate somewhere else.

Audience: In L.A.

Kevin Stolarick: What? L.A., yeah. I know. This is better. Even there, right, still—there are some things about Vegas. You know, water—there are parts of Vegas that are—ignore the strip and other parts of Vegas. Anyway, “Scientific American,” they have L.A. as fifth. That’s “Scientific American.” I don’t know. “Green City,” oh no this is “Green City Living.” They only do top ten. Top ten cities to live in if you want to live green, where should you live. “Mother Nature,” theirs was a top ten, as well. Again, why does everybody want to move to Portland? Because “Mother Nature” says so. I don’t understand. Again, Chicago, Austin, I bet they’ve been on almost every single list I’ve had up here. Somehow the ideas of what makes for a green city, or what makes for a clean city, what makes for a green economy, what makes for a creative economy, there’s a lot of stuff going on there that’s all interlinked. There are pieces that are coming together. There are things about these.

This one is mine. I took the Vulcan CO2 data, and did CO2 per capita, and gross metropolitan product per capita, and then predicted how much CO2 you would produce given your gross metropolitan produce, and then how much variation was there from what you would have using the overall average versus what you actually had. Basically, these are places that produce way less CO2 than their gross metropolitan product would predict. The greater the variance, the higher they scores. San Jose produces GMP like crazy and hardly produces any CO2. Even so, Monroe I don’t know why I’m in there. New York actually does really well. There’s a thing about big cities, too. Part of this is clearly a big city story. You know, the top five cities in the U.S. show up on these lists an awful lot. I mean, many of them they’re ranking 300, 400 different metros. It’s not that they’re only picking, you know, the 50 largest metros and ranking them. A lot of them have ranked everything.

This one ranks—I did it, so I know. I ranked all 360 some metros across the U.S. on this, which is why some of these smaller places show up, but you may not have seen them on other lists. Still, I mean, I’ve got Dallas, Seattle, Washington, Houston, San Francisco, New York, San Jose, right. I mean, there’s bigger cities clearly have something going on, as well.

As I said, right, that’s as far as we’ve gotten. It’s trying to start taking these individual rankings, finding more of them, as well, start really digging into the correlations. It’s tricky to do the correlations cuz they all rank kind of different cities, so you don’t always have comparability in terms of the city definition they use, and how they use it and all the rest, but really trying to dig more into the finding other ones, and digging more into them, but to really get more into this understanding how these things kind of link together.

As I said, my few kind of key points in closing—I got ten minutes. I will give you a little bit of time for questions. That urbanism thing that I talked about, clearly bigger cities there’s something about, right, sustainability at least being possible, not necessarily always there, but being more possible with bigger cities. I think also in part of our research is going, and more of the work that we’re starting to do is saying, “Yeah, what’s going on in North America is wonderful, but what the hell about China and India?” Understanding this and what’s going on here helps to really enable this. I’ve gotten now—I was telling Sandra this morning. I said, I don’t want to call it resilience or sustainability anymore. I want to call it effectiveness, or something beyond that. I want it to be more—it’s not just about can you survive, but can you make your citizens prosper. Are you creating prosperity? It’s not just about being a resilient city or a sustainable city, it’s about being a successful city. What did that mean, and how do you do that, and how do we help India understand what they have to do to create successful cities that are sustainable, and resilient, and all these other things?

There’s this tying of social and economic policy. I would say right now any kind of environmental green policy already sits between the junction of these two right now. You were already there. You were there before we got there, as Sandra said, right, over ten years ago, thinking about urban ecologies, and what that means, and what’s going on. It’s exactly sitting between this juncture of these two points. That’s a key kind of sweet spot. While understanding that the juncture itself was important, it’s also understanding the link that it creates between these two pieces, that they’re not just, right, that you’re doing both. The whole stuff on creative class and green, right, green went large, about how they’re tied together, what’s going on and what’s happening.

A large part of that is the fourth T, not just amenities but quality of life. We’ve done work looking at cities around the world. One of the things that we found very strong relationships between was the number of creative workers living in a city, and the way that residents of the city ranked the city on beauty. In fact, creative workers love to live in places that they consider beautiful. It makes sense. A lot of people would like that, right? A lot of people want to have fabulous views out their windows or whatever. Exactly what beauty is I don’t know, because it was some data we worked with Gallup to collect, and they just said, “I live in a beautiful city.” Again, very subjective rankings, but that subjective idea of beauty that in fact people value that, and that places that more people consider beautiful, more people live in, more creative workers live in. Those ideas, right, of it’s not just amenities. It is quality of life, and the ability to attract, right, creative workers again. That’s what’s driving the economy to be able to pull all them together. That’s what’s really gonna help with that.

The whole smart cities thing, we don’t have a lot on smart city rankings. Nobody’s really ranked the smartest cities yet other than to do education, which I kind of have done and could do more of, but the kind of smart cities in the way IBM and Cisco are talking about them. There’s kind of massive data issues and all the things that are going on with that. A lot of opportunity there to start thinking more about what that means, what some of this kind of data stuff can do and drive, and how does it help drive some of these other understandings. If green is clean is sustainable, right, is creative, if those things—if that’s true, then if I’m not green, am I not clean? If I’m not green, am I not creative, right? I can kind of see at least on the one side that seems to be pretty true, but doesn’t mean that the flip side is also true. Alright, I’ve got the one, but it doesn’t mean I actually have the other.

There’s also this thinking about what about—so in terms of if this is—again, I spent a lot of time on the creative. How do you attract creative workers to your region? That’s what everybody wants to do. I can tell you it’s more than gays, Starbucks, and bike paths. You need more than that, although many mayors seem to think that’s all they need. We’re just gonna put in a Starbucks and a bike path, and we’ll attract some gays, and it’s gonna solve all of our problems. How you do that, right, and why you do it, and what your motivation is, and understanding how you’re doing those things because—build an assumption where—the flip side, right, so understanding that relationship more so.

The final thing is—and it kind of goes back to some of the Brookings stuff and some of the other things, is is this really a distinction without a difference, and does it really matter? Does it matter what I define it or how I define it? Does it matter more that I’ve defined it, or that I’ve said, right? It goes back to my whole point about regions have to define their own prosperity. What does that mean, and how do I do it? If they define it themselves then they can define it for themselves what it means to be sustainable, what it means to be green, what it means to be clean. Does it have to be defined externally, or is there value from that? There may be value to that, right, but it’s really understanding that is there a distinction or not, or does it really matter.

Finally, there are way too many chickens and way too many eggs. The issue always with any of this stuff is oh well, you have a chicken and egg problem. Which comes first? Do you become clean and green and then you attract creative workers, or do you attract creative workers and then you become clean and green? To which my answer is yes. It’s not an either or proposition. You have to understand they’re interacting with each other and they’re supporting each other, right, and so you really have to think about both. In order to try to figure out what’s going on here beyond doing some nice correlations, and some nice scatter plots, and a few pretty maps, I can’t do any real detailed analysis with this stuff because it’s just not statistically possible. I would have to theorize some kind of causality that everybody would immediately argue with. In terms of thinking this forward it really was about saying well no, it’s about understanding these relationships and simply saying these relationships are out there, and how they’re out there, and how they work together is really what’s gonna help cities drive, and allow them to become more successful, more prosperous, more sustainable, more clean, more green, and more creative. There. It is about the framing. [Clapping]