Where U.S. Brainpower Tends to Cluster | Hacker News Reader

Where U.S. Brainpower Tends to Cluster

citylab.com

29 pointssmollett29 comments

"When you factor in medium and small metros too, Ithaca comes in first, with nearly 30 percent (28.9 percent) of adults holding a graduate or professional degree."

This is not necessarily a good thing. While living in the home town of Cornell U., I met a lot of underemployed people -- e.g., a holder of an MA degree, working as a staff assistant in the French Department, while their spouse finished up grad school. The amount of surplus intellect was staggering.

>just 11 percent of adults 25 and over have a graduate or professional degree. > >But where exactly are these super-brains located?

The entire premise is flawed. Having a graduate degree is no guarantee having a "super-brain".

You're right that having a graduate degree isn't a guarantee of having a "super-brain", but having a graduate or professional degree is probably a good proxy for the type of socioeconomic inferences they are trying to make.

It's an informal and humorous phrase the writer used to make the article less dry. They don't appear to be seriously claiming that people with advanced degrees are actually "super-brains".

I have a advanced degree and am not a super-brain. I'm just a 62 year old that wants to program something fun when I grow up.

Very interesting. I sometimes wonder why Detroit, with all that available, inexpensive facilities and infrastructure, doesn't advertise itself as a center for engineering talent. Why aren't people who need such things doing it in Detroit, where it's cheap?

> engineering, the key to tech- and knowledge-based industries.

To take one phrase and make a larger point: Engineering provides us with information and the tools to use it. Using knowledge (from our goals to our understanding of the world) generally is the province of the sciences, social sciences, humanities and arts (to th extent an artist works with data).

> Very interesting. I sometimes wonder why Detroit, with all that available, inexpensive facilities and infrastructure, doesn't advertise itself as a center for engineering talent. Why aren't people who need such things doing it in Detroit, where it's cheap?

What is cheap? Isn't personnel the main cost is tech/engineering companies? This is about convincing folks to live in Detroit

There used to be a fair number of engineers in Detroit, they can't all have moved away.

> This is about convincing folks to live in Detroit

The engineers are already there. Per the article, Detroit has the third highest concentration of engineers.

But are their engineers that are un-/under-employed, and specialized in currently in-demand fields ("engineers" not being interchangeable widgets) there? Because, if not, talent that firms need isn't going to be cheap locally. So, what's the draw?

Because you'll have a hell of a time convincing people to move to Detroit?

If you're not going to be shackled to the Bay area, why not pick... Pretty much anywhere else? If you want cheap, why not Pittsburgh? Or Portland? Engineering wages in both are quite low.

Detroit has a higher concentration of engineers, per the article.

As I understand it the main reason is:

AFAIK, what's cheap in Detroit is labor, particularly unskilled labor, and disused facilities that may require substantial remediation to serve their original purpose, and may be more expensive to turn to new purposes than building fresh somewhere else.

What's not cheap in Detroit is the things that firms that need engineering talent need, including engineering talent.

I also wonder why a country that has such a high interest from foreigners wanting to live in it, dont create a special immigration policy, where it would accept highly educated workforce, as long as they are willing to live in places like Detroit, so those sort of cities could be eventually recovered..

Something like grant citizenship, but only if they accept to not migrate to anywhere else for lets say, 10 years. The government would then choose particular spots that could possibly get back from the dead, like Detroit.

A nice idea, but in US politics, what should be two discrete issues (attracting skilled labor and managing the inflow of unskilled labor) have somehow become hopelessly intertwined. One is regularly held hostage to the other whenever an attempt is made to resolve it.

(This is a gross oversimplification of course, but that's why this post is the length of a paragraph and not a 300 page book)

Yes, im sure a idea like this this would need much more work, and research, to see even if its reasonable, then if it would be considered to be possible, a lot of little details would need to be solved, to make things really work out.

Im sure this is a very tricky issue.. But if the US government would be really willing to do something like this, which i think is really unlikely in reality, they might sophisticate ideas like this further down, and maybe get experiments like this to work well, and solve some hard problems along the way.

You would be basically, importing "human energy".. Also of course, maybe start small, and try to attract locals from other regions first, making some things easier, like credit.. anyway this is getting out of control here.. heh, stopping now before is too late.

because the people who live in those kinds of areas are the least likely to want a bunch of foreigners around.

We sort of do that -- if you make a business investment in certain enterprise zones (poor, usually black, areas), it counts "more" for immigration/green card than if you make other kinds of investment. These programs change over time, though.

> I sometimes wonder why Detroit, with all that available, inexpensive facilities and infrastructure, doesn't advertise itself as a center for engineering talent.

They are trying. http://opportunitydetroit.com/

But so is almost every other small / medium / large city in the Midwest. It's hard to stand out by trying to use a "me too" branding.

Detroit has advantages that the others don't: A higher concentration of engineers, cheaper land and facilities, more available infrastructure (a city built for millions has (750,000?) residents), low cost of living, etc.

It's Detroit the City which is fucked. The suburbs are fine, and where the engineers live.

Would a map of college density line up to those maps pretty well?

or population density

The data is as a percentage of population, so no, it would not map to population density. (Unless you assert that college attendance is nonlinear in population density, which is probably true to some degree.)

Asserted. It is true to a very large degree. If you live in Montana for example and need some sort of relatively non-trivial medical intervention, you're getting on a plane to Seattle or Salt Lake. The people providing those medical services can't exist in low population density areas. Same goes for many many other types of service and profession.

So Montana doesn't get the medical specialists, so Montana has fewer MDs per capita than Salt Lake? That seems plausible.

I'll go one step further, though: I suspect that people in Montana visit even a primary doctor less often than people in Salt Lake. I think this is partly because the per capita income is lower, so that it becomes a higher bar to decide to spend the money to see a doctor. But also I think that people in Montana are just more independent. They'll try their Aunt Sally's home remedy, or just ride out the illness or injury (not just because of money, but because they'll take care of themselves, thank you). If that doesn't work, then they'll see the doctor.

I'm not sure about that. We have plenty of general practitioners here, and low income people often have subsidized or free medical care available. We just don't have neurosurgeons, big-time cardiologists, oncologists who specialize in one cancer field. Those folks need the throughput you can only find in a big urban area, so that's where they are. They are often also associated with teaching hospitals, and there are none of those in low population density areas either (due to lack of volume). In fact there has been a heated debate here in Bozeman about a proposal to build a (for profit) medical college here, with various members of the medical community pointing out in letters to the newspaper that we don't have the patient volume necessary for teaching.

Visually, it seems to very closely mirror population density [0], though there are a very few peaks that don't correspond to equally-strong population density peaks (these seem to correspond pretty well to major research or educational institutions that are outside of major population centers.)

(Because its measuring the share of the population of an area with a degree, the fact that it generally mirrors population density is still interesting.)

[0] http://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/maps/thematic/us_p...

XKCD had a good one on this: https://xkcd.com/1138/

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