Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well
bloomberg.com
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But the rise in global supply chains - the shipping container in particular - meant that it makes more sense to build just about everything in a few massive hubs (Shenzhen as the prime example), and then ship things all around the world, at a much cheaper rate than if the widget or smartphone were made at home. Likewise for services, like IT and finance, it makes much more sense for all of these professionals to work together in the same places, which is why a handful of cities are crushing the Information Age while hundreds of other towns and cities are either dying slowly or are on life support (higher education economy, tax-break-driven manufacturing, etc)
Will we see the same resurgence of sprawl as followed the petrochemical revolution? I'm not sure. Remote work has its niches but I couldn't imagine a serious major company like Google or IBM existing without a lot of corporate real estate and proximate workers. And as I've argued elsewhere on HN, today's professionals have professional needs: doctors, lawyers, teachers, all things they expect to have within their area. Rural areas and even small to medium sized cities have trouble competing for the best-in-class services that the upper echelons of professionals demand (and given that this class is both responsible for and generally the beneficiary of globalization, that makes it very hard to say that, say, Rochester, NY could become the next great tech hub (a decent tech hub perhaps, but no Silicon Valley) without a LOT more to attract the highest end professional class.
Maybe self-driving cars (personally I predict RVs) will be able to make sprawl great again, but even then it would still be a concentration around a (albeit larger) major metropolitan area.
Urban/rural was the most important divide of the 19th-20th centuries. It looks like it will continue throughout the 21st.
It's the same problem with kicking out artists in a dilapidated warehouse area, and moving in boring professionals to live in lofts built on the same foundations: your renewed neighborhood loses all the reasons it was appealing. In Boulder already you cannot really afford living in town with a service industry job, but people who want to work in Google also want to go out and have a beer after work. Those service industry workers need to commute into town, which is time-consuming, adds expense, worsens traffic, and lowers their quality of life.
So artists are wonderful, interesting people, and professionals are boring and unappealing? Wow.
I'd rather have lunch with the mathematician. In fact, Feynman is at the top of the list of people I'd like to have lunch with, and it's not about his bongo drum playing.
(P.S. I learned to play the trumpet in my youth.)
It sounds like you know some pretty terrible artists, though. I mean, seashells on a model house?
PS. Feynman is Feynman for a reason.
I was always baffled by what that was supposed to mean.
And all art has a wide expanse between commercially available and popular, and the avant garde, and within that range is another range between simplicity and complexity.
Art also encompasses film, fiction, the visual arts, music. All of which have a massive range of intellectual importance and depth.
No offense, but I feel as though you're showing your ignorance much more than proving your point.
Of course they do. I'm merely challenging your claim "Great art is heavy on intellectual complexity." There's no doubt at all that "She Loves You" is a great song. Personally, I prefer the earlier Beatles tunes rather than Sgt Pepper. Perhaps you could quote from the latter some lyrics that have deep meaning to you?
I also greatly enjoy Led Zeppelin, have every album, even cover albums, but am under no illusions about the intellectual complexity of "squeeze my lemon".
Nobody celebrates Led Zeppelin for their lyricism, but I think you knew that already.
And they also work with people who don't take an intellectual approach to their production but rather follow intuition.
One thing is certain: it's a more heterogenous environment. I find that to be extremely stimulating.
Deciding to become an artist doesn't make one profound or conceptually interesting. Rather few artists achieve that. The starving artist community generally has not, which is why they are starving.
After all, how many TV shows you watch are "pretty intellectually profound"? And those artists are good enough to get paid for their work, most aren't.
Wouldn't agree on the 'wonderful' or 'unappealing' value judgments though; I think you added them for rhetorical emphasis.
There's only so much after-work talk I can tolerate about app servers. I want to go to the theater, watch plays, and see bands. The people who have those interests are not particularly enchanted by traditional professional careers.
Well, this fine article is partly about Richard Florida, and that's basically what he's saying: keep the creative class around, because they are the ones that add value to a city. Boring professionals flock to neighborhoods put on the map because creative people making them destinations.
In Denver, see the River North neighborhood. What once was a very vibrant place to see DIY shows, gallerys, etc, is now just a brewery neighborhood. Some underground venues were closed by the city and the one-year anniversary of this is coming up. The city shows no interest in providing an alternative. I guess this isn't very important to most, but these spaces were a safe place for many people to go: homeless teenagers, trans-folk, etc.
http://www.westword.com/music/rhinoceropolis-diy-venue-shut-...
Disclaimer: I work at Google, in Boulder.
For a city that's not so into building new housing, and most especially affordable housing, the writing is on the wall about what's going to happen to current housing prices, not to mention the general cost of living, in Boulder.
The elephant in the room when it comes to any housing boom (like in Denver) in the west is water: the current supply is already strained. Do remember we pump water through massive tunnels under mountains from the western slope to feed the current demand. We need more people on the front range? I dunno.
In Boulder at least, I'm not there to drink at a cool bar, work at a cool bar, or own a cool bar. I'm there because it's a livable city. Or was a livable city.
kicking out artists in a dilapidated warehouse area, and moving in boring professionals
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Oakland_warehouse_fire
Now, as you point out, the barriers to consolidating industry into mega-hubs like Shenzhen are dissolving.
The only reasons to start or keep a business somewhere now are 3: 1. Physical resource dependence (ex. mining operations need to be where the mine is), 2. Regulatory (ex. tax policies), and 3. Talent.
Small towns used to rely on #1, which is now a losing strategy since global markets have dramatically driven down the costs of extracting and moving physical resources.
Now they're trying to do more of #2, which works for a little while but there's always another government somewhere willing to cut a better deal.
The only way small towns can compete is to focus on #3: Talent. They have to develop highly skilled workforces. That's literally all they can do.
Developing talent does no good if you can't stop the brain drain.
Santa Clara County is not included, however.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose-San_Francisco-Oakland...
Being an "electrician" in 1880 was a big deal, the high technology job of its day. By 1920 it was a union blue collar job. That's programming.
Nothing you make will be particularly interesting, but you will make an excellent living for yourself.
Maybe more of a light blue collar.
Yes, software developers will always be in demand. The profession stays but the people in it get quickly marked as obsolete and replaced by new people.
It's called Adobe Muse.
Demand is still high as ever.
Design guidelines change too, and accommodating existing software to new designs is not automatable either.
And for data science? Simple correlations are trivial, but doing useful data science requires domain understanding of the business and products and factors such as seasonality, markets and so on.
Obligatory plug: Check out https://anvil.works - it is exactly that! Drag and drop UI, Python front-end and back-end, database integration...the whole deal.
An electrical engineer, on the other hand, does design work.
Its not AI but it turns even complex projects into things that anyone can learn to do in months . I can't imagine this remaining so well paying in such circumstances.
Smart programmers move up the value chain as needed so that they're still doing work that can't be done easily with an existing product.
So that begs the question , what are some of the things that are right now higher up the value chain ?
Of course, the day comes when the high level abstractions of your youth are referred to as "low level". And while that may seem silly to people who write machine code, there is something low level-ish about managing your own database connections and/or writing your own resource pool.
Almost everything we do is routinely turned into, well, routine work. Rails automated a lot, but not all, of what I did. I'm tiptoeing close to a "no true scotsman" argument here, but I'd almost define "programming" as writing code that hasn't been automated yet - which is why the job of being a programmer won't be automated.
Here's why I think my argument is almost, but not quite, a "no true scotsman" fallacy. I have a lot of trouble seeing how anything could replace human programmers, but that's the rub - the way it happens, should it happen, will surprise me. The analogy I have in my head is someone who is trying to create a mechanical turk to replace a symphony orchestra. A wind up doll to play a violin, trumpet, piano. There are a few successes, with self playing pianos, but overall, it appears to be distant.
And then... an unanticipated concept, one that blows your mind: it turns out that you can actually capture music, exactly as it was played, with a device that will project that sound back just as it was made the first time. You can play the symphony once, and listen to it an unlimited number of times. And just like that, live music played by a human goes from 99% of all music heard to well below 1%.
We could very well be replaced, but not as we are. I think it'll be something different, that provides what we provided, in a way that makes us largely unnecessary.
To a degree. I get the contrast you're drawing and don't really disagree. But an electrician (like plumbers/contractors/etc.), especially working in an older building, has to deal with a lot of unexpected circumstances that have to be dealt with. There's a lot of problem-solving involved.
So I told him I'd do the low voltage wiring myself. Those have to be separated from the A/C wires by a couple feet, and only cross them at 90 degree angles. No hum.
Inductive coupling is something a first year EE student would learn about.
Programming has not gotten easier really, I don't think it will ever be blue collar. Even though development will get easier as technology and tools improve, the bar for what good is is set by our peers. Knowing some html/css/Js was a totally acceptable skillset in 2000, but now you need to have some backend and networking or design/ui/ux skills to be relevant.
Does anybody know what these graphs look like at 80-20?
Imagine we have a kingdom of a million workers and one king. Inequality would be mostly invisible. Unless you compare yourself to the king (and who would dare do such a thing..), you're doing pretty well - or at least as well as average. But now let's imagine the king wants to modernize his land. So he starts developing and training people. And now we have 1 king, 50,000 skilled experts, and 950,000 workers. Well there's not that many of those skilled workers, so they must still be pretty special. It seems kind of unfair, but things are still pretty decent.
And now imagine the king trains another 50,000 experts and grants 10,000 of the already existing experts vast tracts of land. Now we have 900,000 workers, 90,000 experts, and 10,000 lords. Now inequality is starting to feel very real. There are lots of these guys and they don't seem to be anything special. How is it that they're doing so well, while the majority struggles?
I think we can say that the king's actions have greatly benefited society. Yet there's a strange paradox. As benefit, and privilege, comes to more and more people - it seems ever more unfair for those yet to benefit themselves. And now imagine by the time our hypothetical skilled individuals start to become the majority. It would begin to seem something beyond fair. As we start to see things like there being only 200,000 workers left, they would start to see their situation as more and more desperate. Indeed they would start to seem to be a sort of slave caste.
A quick search for information to try to see if this is indeed what is happening yielded this [1] study which seems to lend some credence to this possibility. In particular they examined the percent of individuals in each income group, based on real incomes. These showed that the middle class has been substantially chiseled out (shrinking from 38.8% to 32% of the population) but that alone is disingenuous. What's happening to every class's population? Here are their data for this specific question:
- Change in share of each class as a percent of US population. 1979 -> 2014
-----
- Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8%
- Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4%
- Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32%
- Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1%
- Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8%
-----
This seems incredibly positive at a glance, but this change in demographics has indeed resulted in very large measurable changes in inequality. In particular in 1979 the bottom 3 economic classes controlled 70% of all income, with the upper class and rich controlling the remaining 30%. Today those numbers have practically swapped. The lower 3 classes control 37% of all income to 63% for the rich and upper middle class. Though, on the other hand, the top groups have also more than doubled in size.
One other issue I noticed is that the study (at least at a somewhat intensive glance) did not seem to meaningfully consider that many things critical to the growth and health of the lower classes, such as education and housing, have inflated in price far beyond nominal inflation rates. So real income measurements can be quite misleading. Nonetheless, I'm not sure why but I had not strongly considered this before. This article emphasizing the inequality as more of a changing of demographics than an existing demographic making themselves even richer was what brought it to mind.
[1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-...
This is something that my typical SF tech peer does not seem to grasp. Relative compensation vs your economic competitors (other knowledge workers in the Bay) matters much more than your absolute pay when considering your ability to afford the good life in a supply constrained environment.
Meanwhile, government is the only meaningful access many have to healthcare and education.
Governments corrupt markets.
The price rises are due to this. See
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...
Note how prices for Lasik eye surgery, which has little government involvement, have trended down dramatically.
Either way, we need price transparency before people start acting rationally, and government regulation of irrational spending is going to be wasteful. Price transparency would make the promise of single payer (government) healthcare actually sustainable for a populace; without it, you’re just making the healthcare industry richer without actually providing a proportionate amount of care to the public.
See "Competition and Monopoly" by Frecht.
The supply of drugs is heavily restricted by patents and the FDA. See "Regulation of Pharmaceutical Innovation" by Peltzman.
Humans (and animals) value "fairness" even if they are objectively better off. There is a famous experiment where two monkeys are given a cucumber every day. They are both happy. Then one of them starts getting grapes (sweeter than cucumber). The monkey that doesn't get the grapes rejects the cucumber in protest.