{"id":1623,"date":"2011-08-18T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-08-18T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/08\/growing-talent-instead-of-population.html"},"modified":"2011-08-18T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-08-18T13:00:00","slug":"growing-talent-instead-of-population","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/08\/growing-talent-instead-of-population.html","title":{"rendered":"Growing talent instead of population"},"content":{"rendered":"What are some ideas for economic and cultural growth that don’t require huge population growth? Richard Florida has many ideas for large and mid-sized population areas in the article discussed below. Who’s the Richard Florida for places the size of Lowndes County?\n

\n\n<\/a>\nRichard Florida wrote in the Atlantic in December 2009,\n\nHow the Crash Will Reshape America<\/a>:\n

\nBig, talent-attracting places benefit from accelerated rates of \u201curban metabolism,\u201d\n<\/blockquote>\nThe question we need to address is how to be a small<\/em>\ntalent-attracting place, and even more a smallish place that grows its own\ntalent and jobs.\n

\nThis part is especially relevant:\n\n\n

\nBut when the Santa Fe team examined trends in innovation, patent activity,\nwages, and GDP, they found that successful cities, unlike biological\norganisms, actually get faster as they grow. In order to grow bigger\nand overcome diseconomies of scale like congestion and rising housing\nand business costs, cities must become more efficient, innovative, and\nproductive. The researchers dubbed the extraordinarily rapid metabolic\nrate that successful cities are able to achieve \u201csuper-linear\u201d\nscaling. \u201cBy almost any measure,\u201d they wrote, \u201cthe larger a city\u2019s\npopulation, the greater the innovation and wealth creation per person.\u201d\n<\/blockquote>\nI don’t know about you, but I don’t want our area\nto grow up to be Atlanta.\nGeorgia already has one of those, and one is more than enough.\nDitto Orlando, Jacksonville, and Tallahassee.\n

\nHow instead do we manage to produce a local economy that grows dollar-wise in a sustainable (hi Barbara!)\nfashion without massive population growth?\nSure, that’s a hard problem, but right now we aren’t seeing any growth\nin either population or the economy, so we might as well consider\nthis an opportunity.\n

\nOne relevant part of Richard Florida’s article is density.\nManhattan is a business, arts, and finance center because so many things\nare so close together you can walk to many of them.\nSilicon Valley is a high tech center because of Stanford, HP, venture firms,\netc., all clumped together, and San Francisco and Berkeley up the 280 for arts.\n

\nNow, VSU isn’t Stanford and never will be, but it is a regional\ncampus of the state university system and has so many students\nthat it is in the top 10% by size of all colleges nationwide.\nSurely there are some<\/em> aspects of VSU that are either relevant now\nto knowledge-based jobs or can be developed to be so.\n

\nAnd while Valdosta isn’t San Franciso, nor even Charlotte, as\ncertain local cynics are fond of reminding me, it does have many\npositive features including local arts, theater, music, parks\nand shopping. We can build on the existing strengths.\n

\nHahira, Dasher, Lake Park, Remerton, our smaller cities, each have\nspecialized attractions. They don’t need to be competing with Valdosta,\nnor with each other, but rather complimenting one another.\n

\n\n<\/a\nMany people around here have been thinking about this problem for longer\nthan I have, and some of them do this stuff for a living.\nWhat do they think?\nWhat have they got that's better than\n\nroad-building boondoggles?<\/a>\n

\nHow about find a way to build on forestry that doesn’t depend on burning trees?\nOr develop the local sports scene beyond TitleTown?\nOr build on the arts?\nOr….\n

\nOr we could get an Olive Garden.\nYes, that’s it!\nOh, right, we are, at exit 18.\nWell, maybe that will take care of everything.\n

\nOr maybe you have some other ideas.\n

\n-jsq\n

\nPS: Owed to Tim Carroll.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What are some ideas for economic and cultural growth that don’t require huge population growth? Richard Florida has many ideas for large and mid-sized population areas in the article discussed below. Who’s the Richard Florida for places the size of Lowndes County? Richard Florida wrote in the Atlantic in December 2009, How the Crash Will […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,202,40,14,15,264,265,16,266,21,22,23,24,3,449,780],"tags":[1728,3927,8711,3926,2117,3928],"class_list":["post-1623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-agriculture","category-community","category-economy","category-education","category-energy-conservation","category-energy-efficiency","category-environment","category-festivals","category-planning","category-politics","category-renewable-energy","category-solar","category-transparency","category-transportation","category-travel","tag-creative","tag-density","tag-planning","tag-richard-florida","tag-sustainable","tag-talent"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-qb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}