Practical Goals for a Growing City
The article is rather long and deep analytically. It goes into some rather intricate details about the fact that cities with skilled people grow and concentrates on what to do to keep or attract skilled people. It is also clear that valuable skills are a dynamic thing and that creating positive change is the real key to maintaining skills. Here are some excerpts. I encourage anyone who really wants to understand how to make Evansville a skilled city and thus a relevant city to digest the entire article several times.
“Cities grow when people want to be near other people in that city or to something else that’s near that city.”
“In 1900, it was important to be near the coal mine, near the Great Lakes; in 2000, it was irrelevant.”
“In 2000, increasingly, cities are located around places where smart people want to live rather than around places where businesses have some inborn transportation cost advantage.”
“There is no reason to think that the decline of manufacturing firms or the exodus of manufacturing from cities is inefficient or bad. It is a big mistake to think that we’re going to reinvent cities around nineteenth-century solutions.”
“Moving ideas and skilled people has been what made cities work. It’s no longer about the port; it’s about the people. Entrepreneurship is part of the equation.”
“The policy vision that this will tend to push is that if we have skilled workers, the employers will follow. We should have an employee-based view of public policy.”
“Schools predict population growth, employment growth, income growth, and housing growth. Schools are a reliable predictor of which cities do well and which cities do poorly. ”
“The crucial thing, obviously, is that you have smart people and that they want to stay there—and that they don’t immediately respond to a negative shock by moving on to the next city.”
“The key to reinvention is to keep skilled people from leaving. That brings us to the actual policy issue: How do you make cities skilled? If skilled people are so important, how do you keep skilled people in your city?”
“being good at manufacturing meant that they were less-skilled places, so cities such as Philadelphia and Detroit tended to attract huge numbers of unskilled people, which can be a real difficulty for the city later on. The fact that a city was good at doing something for less-skilled people—though it was great in 1950—was terrible in 2000”
“The bad news is that in the best-case scenarios, the top bureaucrats of governments still choose losers.”
“Cities often focus on growing industries in which they have no conceivable comparative advantage. How are cities with incredibly low skill levels and no major universities going to be serious centers of biotech?”
“Why would you think that by focusing on low-skilled, nineteenth-century industries that you are going to reinvent your city for the twenty-first century? The hallmark of the modern economy is unpredictability and innovation”
“There’s no way with the data to reject the view that the number of college graduates, or some reasonable proxy for skills, is everything. Nothing else appears to predict anything about urban success.”
“What else do skilled people like? They live in places with lower murder rates, and they don’t like crime. …Skilled people scoot to the sides of boundaries, where they are able to send their kids to good public schools rather than to bad public schools.”
“As much as we may want to take care of our poorest residents locally, it’s a very hard thing to do because of the mobility of skilled people. We often make things worse because the skilled people emigrate.”
“But if you think that you’re going to save a city by quick fixes such as creating a funky downtown, it’s hard to imagine it working. All the available evidence suggests that most skilled people—for example, a thirty-eight-year-old married couple or a twenty-seven-year-old single person—want good, cheap schools, fast commutes, and safe streets. These things do not come cheap or easy.”
Here is the link to the entire study.
