This year’s survey of the best cities for jobs contains one particularly promising piece of news: the revival of the country’s long distressed industrial sector and those regions most dependent on it. Manufacturing has grown consistently over the past 21 months, and now, for the first time in years, according to data mined by Pepperdine University’s Michael Shires, manufacturing regions are beginning to move up on our list of best cities for jobs. Read more
/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.png00Joel Kotkin/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.pngJoel Kotkin2011-05-09 20:07:192017-02-24 17:01:36Manufacturing Stages A Comeback
These may be far from the best of times, but they are no longer the worst. Last year’s annual “Best Cities for Jobs” list was by far the most dismal since we began compiling our rankings almost five years ago. Between 2009 and 2010, only 13 of 397 metropolitan areas experienced any growth at all. For this year’s list, which measured job growth in the period between January 2010 and January 2011, most of the best-performing areas experienced actual employment increases — even if they were modest.
For Forbes’ list of the best cities for jobs, we ranked all 398 current metropolitan statistical areas, based on employment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported from November 1999 to January 2011. Rankings are based on recent growth trends, mid-term growth and long-term growth and momentum. We also broke down rankings by size — small, medium and large — since regional economies differ markedly due to their scale.
/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.png00Joel Kotkin/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.pngJoel Kotkin2011-05-02 18:15:572017-02-24 17:04:49The Best Cities for Jobs
The triumphalism surrounding the slums and megacities frankly disturbs me. It is, of course, right to celebrate the amazing resilience of residents living in these cities’ massive slums. But many of the megacity boosters miss a more important point: that the proliferation of these sorts of communities may not be desirable or even necessary.
Cities may be getting larger, particularly in the developing world, but that does not make them better. Megacities such Kolkata (in India), Mumbai, Manila, Sao Paolo, Lagos and Mexico City — all among the top 10 most populous cities in the world — present a great opportunity for large corporate development firms who pledge to fix their problems with ultra-expensive hardware. They also provide thrilling features for journalists and a rich trove for academic researchers.
But essentially megacities in developing countries should be seen for what they are: a tragic replaying of the worst aspects of the mass urbanization that occurred previously in the West. They play to the nostalgic tendency among urbanists to look back with fondness on the crowded cities of early 20th Century North America and Europe. Urban boosters like the Philadelphia Inquirer’s John Timpane speak fondly about going back to the “the way we were” — when our parents or grandparents lived stacked in small apartments, rode the subway to work and maintained a relatively small carbon footprint.
/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.png00Joel Kotkin/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.pngJoel Kotkin2011-04-04 19:46:552017-02-24 17:06:35The Problem With Megacities
Along the pitted elegance of Pho Ngo Quyen, a bustling street in Hanoi, Vietnam, you will, predictably, find uniformed men in Soviet-style uniforms, banners with Communist Party slogans, and grandfatherly pictures of Ho Chi Minh. Yet, capitalism thrives everywhere else in this community — in the tiny food stalls, countless mobile phone stores and clothing shops offering everything from faux European fashion to reduced-price children’s wear, sandals and sneakers.
Outside a ministry office, someone is cutting hair on the street. Nearby a woman is drying squid to sell to customers. Internet cafes proliferate, filled with young people. Virtually every nook and cranny has a small shop or workplace for making consumer goods.
The two largest crises today — the Japanese nuclear disaster and the widening unrest in the Middle East — prove it’s time to de-fetishize energy policy. These serious problems also demonstrate why we must expand the nation’s ample oil and gas supplies — urgently.
The worsening Japanese nuclear crisis means, for all intents and purposes, that atomic power is, if not dead, certainly on a respirator. Read more
Living on the harsh, wind-swept northern Great Plains, North Dakotans lean towards the practical in economic development. Finding themselves sitting on prodigious pools of oil—estimated by the state’s Department of Mineral Resources at least 4.3 billion barrels—they are out drilling like mad. And the state is booming.
Unemployment is 3.8%, and according to a Gallup survey last month, North Dakota has the best job market in the country. Its economy “sticks out like a diamond in a bowl of cherry pits,” says Ron Wirtz, editor of the Minneapolis Fed’s newspaper, fedgazette. The state’s population, slightly more than 672,000, is up nearly 5% since 2000. Read more
/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.png00Joel Kotkin/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.pngJoel Kotkin2011-03-15 05:19:142017-02-24 17:07:45Why North Dakota Is Booming
Oh my name it is nothing My age it is less The country I come from Is called the Midwest
–Bob Dylan, “With God on Our Side,” 1964
For nearly a half century since the Minnesota-raised Robert Zimmerman wrote those lines, the American Midwest has widely been seen as a “loser” region–a place from which talented people have fled for better opportunities. Those Midwesterners seeking greater, glitzier futures historically have headed to the great coastal cities of Miami, New York, San Diego or Seattle, leaving behind the flat expanses of the nation’s mid-section for the slower-witted, or at least less imaginative.
In the next two years, America’s large cities will face the greatest existential crisis in a generation. Municipal bonds are in the tank, having just suffered the worst quarterly performance in more than 16 years, a sign of flagging interest in urban debt.
Things may get worse. The website Business Insider calculates that as many as 16 major cities — including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco — could face bankruptcy in the next year without major revenue increases or drastic budget cuts. JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon notes that there have already been six municipal bankruptcies and predicts that we “will see more.”
When Chinese President Hu Jintao comes to Washington this week, there aren’t likely to be many surprises: Hu and Barack Obama will probably keep their conversation to a fairly regulated script, focusing on trade and North Korea and offering the expected viewpoints on both. But seen from a different angle, everything in that conversation could be predicted, not from current events but from longstanding tribal patterns.
With China’s new prominence in global affairs, the Han race, which constitutes 90 percent of the Chinese population, is suddenly the most dominant cohesive ethnic group in the world — and it is seeking to remain that way through strategic alliances, aggressive trade policy, and attacks on racial minorities within the country’s boundaries. The less tribally cohesive, more fragmented West is, meanwhile, losing out. Read more
/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.png00Joel Kotkin/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.pngJoel Kotkin2011-01-17 21:26:022017-02-24 16:59:59Rise of the Hans
The last 10 years have been the worst for Western civilization since the 1930s. At the onset of the new millennium North America, Europe and Oceania stood at the cutting edge of the future, with new technologies and a lion’s share of the world’s GDP. At its end, most of these economies limped, while economic power – and all the influence it can buy politically – had shifted to China, India and other developing countries.
This past decade China’s economic growth rate, at 10% per annum, grew to five times that U.S.; the gap was even more disparate between China and the slower-growing E.U., Yet periods of slow economic growth occur throughout history — recall the 1970s — and economies recover. The bigger problem facing Western countries, then, is a metaphysical one — a malady that the British writer Austin Williams has dubbed “the poverty of ambition.”
/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.png00Mark Schill/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/jkotkin_logo.pngMark Schill2010-12-31 00:43:442017-02-24 16:50:23The Poverty Of Ambition: Why The West Is Losing To China And India – The New World Order
