The October edition of The Atlantic Monthly features an article by Richard Florida showing that American's growing mass of college grads are all meeting up in big cities. Title: "Where the Brains Are." Subtitle: "America's educated elite is clustering in a few cities - and leaving the rest of the country behind."
Atlantic subscribers can read the full article here. Here are a few interesting facts and quotes:
America went from 11% of the population with college degrees in 1970 to 27% in 2004, but some cities are being affected more than others. "America' s social fabric has been regularly reshaped by great migrations - of pioneers westward, of immigrants and farmers to rising industrial cities, of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, of families outward from cities to suburbs to exurbs. Today, a demographic realignment that may prove just as significant in underway: the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions...I call it the 'means migration.'"
What's driving this? "Increasingly, the most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value. The physical proximity of talented, highly educated people has a powerful effect on innovation and economic growth..."
What is the culture like in the means metros? "They are socially tolerant and open to new ways of thinking. Job switching is common, as is periodic unemployment, and free agents find plenty of common spaces in which to work and meet. The soup is continuously stirred, and newcomers are assimilated easily."
Florida shows that the cost of living is being driven up in these urban cores, which might eventually displace many middle class workers. But, this doesn't keep young grads out: "Significantly, young graduates are flocking in even-greater numbers to the 'means metros' where they often live in penury until either making it or being forced out by the high cost of living."
Some of the most concentrated means metros (see chart below): San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Denver, and Atlanta.
Later: I'll reflect on what this means for American church planting and mission. But I probably won't do better than what Tim Keller has already done here and here and here.
Thanks for alerting me to this brother-- I took the bus downtown today just to pick this magazine up-- and they still had the September issue on the stands every place I went.
On a related note? Have you read The Rise of the Creative Class?
Posted by: Kevin Cawley | September 25, 2006 at 12:06 AM
I read an excerpt from that book that ran in Atlantic around the time it was released, but I haven't picked up the actual book.
Posted by: Hunter Beaumont | September 25, 2006 at 08:14 AM