1. Austin is hot. I know it because @iamstevenpedigo moved there and he's barometer. But Austin is anything but a new emerging tech hub. It has been a leading tech hub since I started doing research on tech hubs & innovation clusters in the late 1980s. Some data points.
2. When I started writing what became Rise of the Creative Class in the late 1990s. Get what place was a top destination for @CarnegieMellon comp sci & engineering grads - Austin. I features prominently in that book published in 2002, nearly two decades ago.
3. Check out these data from the book, as published in an excerpt in @monthly. Austin is up there with San Francisco on virtually every tech hub, innovation & creative class metric (wish I could find a better version of that article & its tables): thefreelibrary.com/The+rise+of+th…
4. Every analysis my team has done of talent, innovation hubs, high wage job growth over the past two decades, Austin has been at or near the very top.
5. Austin is no new kid on the block. It has worked hard for more than a generation to leverage its assets - a great university, research spending, quality of place, outdoor amenities, world class music scene, openness to diversity & new ideas ...
6. Austins do not just happen. And they do not just happen overnight. They are few and far between. And require a lot of work and intentionality.
7. The issue for Austin right now is not how does it capitalize on being an "overnight" tech sensation. But how does it deal with the thorny problems of rising inequality, increasing segregation & growing housing affordability - the New Urban Crisis ...
8. Here is a link to the original @monthly article. Of large metros, Austin circa 2000 ranked 2nd (to San Fran) on our overall Creativity/Innovation Index, 1st in High Tech, 2nd on Innovation, 1st in Diversity, 5th on Talent/Creative Class ... creativeclass.com/articles/14%20…
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1. 100%. And not just these places. Becoming a tech hub is at least a generational process. Think of Boston's transformation. It began right WW2 with MIT and ARD. @margaretomara lays out the process for Silicon Valley...
2. Pittsburgh. It's efforts began way before I moved there in 1987 ... And now 40 years later we see "the effect."
3. The Research Triangle, Seattle ... I could go on. And you can't just wish and hope to become a tech hub. You need massive investment & massive freedom at a major research university or universities ...
2. @CharlottadcM was able to get very fine-grained and unique data on the geographic spread & variation of COVID-19 across Swedish cities (municipalities) and neighborhoods (34 of them in Sweden's 3 largest cities).
3. Sweden makes a useful case study because it did not implement a lockdown or have regional variations in public health policies that might impact the geographic spread of COVID-19 in some locations versus others.
2. The paper by an LSE team looks at the outbreak & spread of COVID-19 across 1197 US counties which comprise 82% of US counties.
3. It uses several measures of density, including simple density and population-weighted density, and adds an instrumental variable based on geological conditions.
1. On these end of city takes that seem to endlessly proliferate: several things strike me. I’ll just state them out here.
2. The first is how they always center around just to cities New York City and San Francisco, even as places like LA or Miami or Houston have been very hard hit by COVID-19.
3. The second is how particularly American they are. There is virtually no conversation or sense that Toronto is at dearth’s door.