Over the past two months, we have been engaged in a conversation about the future of jobs with economic development practitioners at the TEDC and IEDC conferences.

Now, we’d like to create an open forum to continue this dialogue beyond the conference setting. In the comments section of this post, you’re invited to respond to the following questions, or pose additional questions for your peers.

How will the “future of jobs” change how you approach economic development?

What mechanisms have you created to support corporations and freelance workers in your community?

Below you’ll find a video of Jon’s recent IGNITE presentation from IEDC’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio. The IGNITE structure allows speakers 5 minutes total to present in the form of 20 slides, with 15 seconds per slide. A brief overview of the presentation follows the slide show.

The Future of Jobs from GIS Planning on Vimeo.

This is a discussion about the future of jobs. The idea of what a job is has changed throughout history (and continues to change). Farmers and craftsmen have always had trades, or livelihoods. Since the industrial revolution, a fundamental shift in the nature of jobs has occurred; individuals are employed by entities (corporations) and in return for their labor (9-5), they are compensated (wages) and receive benefits (healthcare, etc.). When unemployment is high, as it has been in the aftermath of the recent recession, we must ask ourselves who should create jobs: the public sector? the private sector? Can the economy continue to grow, even if jobs are not being created? (answer: yes).

The economy grows when value is created. Corporations can create value by increasing productivity (but not necessarily increasing employment), and independent contractors can create value outside of a traditional employee-employer relationship. If we take this thought experiment to its logical extreme, could there be corporations without people on the horizon? Will trade guilds become an organizing structure for independent contractors in a variety of professions?

If jobs are no longer the most useful or accurate measure of economic development success, how can practitioners best promote economic vitality in their communities? Are there mechanisms by which cities, regions, and states can offer resources to corporations and freelancers that will support their ability to create value, regardless of hiring trends or employment status?

We invite you to participate in this conversation in the comments section below.

By Helen Coster
via forbes.com

In June 50 recent college graduates, from some of the best schools in the U.S., will join start-ups in struggling cities as part of Venture for America, a new program designed to help young companies, promote entrepreneurship and generate job growth. As VFA fellows, the graduates will receive five weeks of training at Brown University—where they’ll learn Excel and other consulting and banking-type skills—before moving to Detroit, New Orleans, Cincinnati and Providence for two years. Fifty companies— like The Brandery, in Cincinnati, and Detroit Venture Partners— will pay the fellows up to $38,000 a year, plus health benefits, to do everything from buying office supplies to making sales calls— whatever the small, fast-growing companies need.

“It’s true that a challenge is to put a fellow in a position where he or she can contribute and develop,” says VFA founder Andrew Yang, 37. “These companies have to have a genuine need for someone. It’s very difficult for a start-up to compete alongside big consulting firms and banks when they’re only looking to hire one or two people.”

Yang developed the idea for VFA in 2008, while speaking on an alumni panel at Brown University. Yang, then the head of Manhattan GMAT, had taken a circuitous and expensive path to entrepreneurship. After graduating from Brown in 1996, he felt directionless and, lured by prestige and security, applied to law school. After a stint at a big firm, and swimming in law school debt, Yang realized that he didn’t want to be a lawyer and launched a short-lived dot-com. Although he later became the chief executive of a successful start-up, he wanted to prevent other young graduates from making the same mistakes.

Back at Brown, Yang met fellow alum Charlie Kroll, who had started an 85-person software firm in Providence, a city that struggles to retain recent college graduates. Yang wondered whether a program, modeled after Teach for America, would help draw young talent to Providence and other cities. Start-ups would benefit from talented, hungry, inexpensive labor. Student entrepreneurs would have an alternative to banking and consulting jobs, and the opportunity to continue their entrepreneurial growth. To sweeten the deal, at the end of two years Yang’s program would award $100,000 in seed funding to the most high-performing fellow.

In 2009 Kaplan acquired Yang’s company, and he pursued his plan in earnest, reaching out to entrepreneurs in four cities where clusters of entrepreneurial activity already existed. Charlie Kroll in Providence organized a meeting of 25 local start-ups. Another contact helped him network in New Orleans. Yang raised $500,000 from private donors, hired a skeletal full-time staff, and in the fall of 2011 began visiting over 30 college campuses, promoting the program.

Over 1,000 students have begun the application process, and VFA recently selected the first seven of 50 fellows. They include a mechanical engineer from Yale, a Boston College senior who built a social networking app that he sells on iTunes, and a University of Pennsylvania finance major. Yang eventually wants to run a recruitment database and charge start-ups for access.

Yang says that cities have been eager to work with him. The City of Detroit is providing fellows with free housing, and Newark mayor Cory Booker and others have inquired about the program. Yang’s goal is to create 100,000 U.S. jobs by 2025—ideally because VFA fellows will start their own firms and hire people, or help existing firms scale. “If you’re an entrepreneur in Detroit you’re going to get so much more support from the community than if you lived in San Francisco or New York,” says Yang. “The community cares about your success.”

By: Richard Florida
Via: The Atlantic Cities

The venture capital industry bounced back considerably in 2011, according a report released last week by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Investments totaled $28.4 billion, an increase of 22 percent over 2010 and a whopping 44 percent from 2009. They are almost back to their 2007 pre-crisis high of $30.8 billion.

The map above, by the Martin Prosperity Institute’s Zara Matheson, shows the regional breakdown. (The PWC MoneyTree data is only available for this set of regions). Silicon Valley remains the leading center for venture capital investment with $11.6 billion, 40 percent of the total. New England (mainly the greater Boston area) was second with $3.2 billion in capital, 11 percent of the total. Greater New York was not far behind, with $2.7 billion or almost 10 percent. It also bested New England in the third quarter of 2011.


The graph above tracks venture capital investments since 1995 for the five biggest regional centers for investment. While much has been made recently of New York’s rise in venture capital and high-technology, the graph shows a pretty stable baseline over the past decade with a modest uptick over the past couple of years. If anything, Silicon Valley’s overall lead, and the gap between it and New York, New England and other leading regions, appears to be increasing.

Venture capital investment can and does flow widely across regions and is attracted to areas with the best deals and strongest ecosystems for innovation and entrepreneurship. It is largely a myth that a lack of venture capital funds in certain places holds back innovation there. Generally speaking, efforts to publicly provide or subsidize venture capital in and to certain locations have been fraught with difficulty.

via Morning Edition, NPR

As the Mayor’s Conference takes place in Washington D.C., city governments are dealing with severe problems at home — from high unemployment to funding cuts. Steve Inskeep talks to Mick Cornett, the Mayor of Oklahoma City, about how his city has managed to avoid some of these problems.

via NPR Planet Money


In his latest New York Times Magazine column, Adam Davidson writes, “mobility has reached its lowest level in recorded history…This suggests, among other things, that people aren’t packing up for new economic opportunities the way they used to.”

To continue the discussion, we asked two demographic experts on different sides of the debate – Joseph P. Ferrie of Northwestern University and William H. Frey of the Brookings Institution – to answer the following question:

Have Americans lost the economic incentive to move?

William Frey’s response:

In a recent campaign stump speech, Presidential candidate Mitt Romney testified, “I believe in freedom. I believe in liberty. I believe in an opportunity society.” I was waiting for him to next say, “and I believe in the right for Americans to move any place, anytime to achieve their goals.” He didn’t say that, but high migration levels surely have done much to keep our economic engine humming – compared with the more stagnant levels in Europe and Japan.

Of course, migration, both short distance and long, hit historic low points in the last four years (I summarized the trends here and here).

Does this mean that we are on our way to economic stagnation, which will keep large numbers of our work force perpetually stuck in place? I don’t think so.

Migration rates have certainly declined since the 1950′s, when we had a younger (and thus more mobile) population, and renters were buying GI-Bill financed homes. Since then, the population has became older, more settled into owned homes, and dual earner couples proliferated. The nation’s shifting demography made us a little more sedentary. But this does not mean that opportunities became less available to young people or that they were less likely to migrate to take them.

As late as 2005, a healthy 29 percent of twenty-somethings changed residences annually. Migration driven population booms occurred in dozens of Sunbelt metropolitan areas, attracting workers of all skill levels.

What happened next was the triple tsunami of a bursting housing market bubble, a financial crisis, and the Great Recession. Potential movers, especially young people, were unable to finance a new home, sell their old one, or obtain a job. Many young adults are stuck in place, living with their parents, putting off marriage, and remaining underemployed.

We are certainly in an economic mess, which may keep part of a generation from moving on with their lives. But when the economy does pick up, there will be a pent-up demand for migration among these young people and the next generation. It’s in our national DNA. And it won’t necessarily follow an education-based mover stayer divide. Hispanics and Asians of all skill levels will contribute mightily to our labor force, as they disperse around the country.

Still, it’s probably true that Mitt Romney’s unfettered capitalism will need some assistance from the government toward training this next generation for the jobs they move to take.

Have Americans lost the economic incentive to move?

Joseph Ferrie’s response:

In the 1830s, the extraordinary mobility of the U.S. population was noted by Alexis De Tocqueville: “[M]illions of men are marching at once toward the same horizon…Fortune has been promised to them somewhere in the west, and to the west they go to find it.” How did we get from there – a nation perpetually in motion – to here – a nation seemingly stuck in place?

The population’s movement peaked in the late nineteenth century. Why? The simple answer is the movement of the western frontier. It left in its wake nascent urban centers, sites that could process and ship farm products to the east and import manufactured goods back to the west. These communities ranged from small towns to great cities that sprang up almost overnight. Chicago is the most dramatic example: its population grew from 4,500 in 1840 to more than 500,000 in 1880. Population growth this rapid provided enormous opportunities for potential migrants. They easily obtained jobs in factories, warehouses, and city offices. At the same time, the U.S. was a place with substantial differences across regions in the products and industries, providing migrants a range of choices in destinations that modern movers no longer see before them.

One lesson that can be drawn from this look backward at past U.S. migration is that geographic mobility and economic mobility were closely linked for much of the nation’s history. The US had exceptionally high rates of economic mobility in the nineteenth century, compared to older European countries. The second is that going forward, geographic mobility will be less closely linked to economic mobility. The U.S. has become more economically homogenous. Americans now experience, if anything, somewhat less income mobility across generations than many Europeans.

This is unfortunate in at least one respect: it makes the route to economic mobility today considerably less forgiving than it was in the past. In the nineteenth century, an ambitious son or daughter could see their income rise simply through the act of changing location, an investment that could be made until well into their adult years. Today, by contrast, education is the route to advancement, but educational investments are already largely determined by the time individuals have reached their early twenties. Economic mobility and the “American Dream” of a better tomorrow are, if not dead, at least a great deal more elusive than they were in the past, when a train ticket to Chicago was virtually all it took to make a big step up the economic ladder.

via The Baltimore Sun


Baltimore Inner Harbor from Federal Hill – photo by ktylerconk on Flickr

Frustrated by Maryland’s high rate of health disparities, state leaders are proposing a new attack — one more commonly associated with economic development. Gov. Martin O’Malley’s 2012-2013 budget will include funding to create Health Enterprise Zones, where doctors and community groups in areas with large health disparities, such as Baltimore, could add medical and support services for minorities. Tax credits and other financial incentives would be available to spur interest.

The plan is designed to save lives and healthcare dollars, according to Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown, who last summer formed a work group on disparities led by Dr. E. Albert Reece, dean of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

“Maryland has world-class hospitals, top medical schools and one of the highest rates of primary-care physicians per capita, and yet we continue to see disparities in health care and outcomes among Maryland’s racial and ethnic communities. It’s clear that a lack of access to primary care in many communities is a significant factor driving these disparities,” Brown said, adding that funding is in the governor’s budget proposal, which has yet to be released.

According to state and national data, the disparities are many: In Maryland, the infant mortality rate among blacks is almost three times that for whites, the incidence of new HIV infections among blacks is almost 12 times that of whites, and Hispanics are more than four times as likely not to have health insurance as whites. Moreover, nearly twice as many African-Americans suffer from diabetes as whites, and hospital admission rates were three times higher for blacks with asthma and 41/2 times as high for blacks with hypertension. Treating such illnesses is costly, according to the work group, which cited data showing nearly $230 billion in direct medical costs could have been saved from 2003 to 2006 if there were no racial and ethnic health disparities.

The proposed program would work something like economic enterprise zones, where businesses receive subsidies to create jobs and activity in certain areas. The health zones program would be a pilot, available in two or three geographic areas. New and existing primary-care practitioners could receive loan assistance repayment; income, property or hiring tax credits; and assistance in installing health information and other technology. Subsidies would be capped, likely in the tens of thousands of dollars. Local health departments might get involved in recruiting participants.

Brown said he would push to expand the program statewide if it proves successful in a couple of years — not a given, considering the logistical and cultural complexity of the problems. For example, residents of some neighborhoods don’t have easy access to grocery stores that sell fresh fruit and vegetables, or don’t visit the doctor until there is an emergency. Reece said many groups have tackled disparities, but the work group wanted to focus its attention on chronic diseases responsible for 80 percent of health costs. They drilled down to a few key maladies that often have “ripple” effects. They include diabetes, hypertension and asthma.

“We decided to identify … areas where we thought we could make an effective impact within a reasonable time frame,” he said. The health enterprise zones approach is unique, he believes. Work group members got the idea from a similar program built around children’s needs in the community of Harlem in New York City. Program applicants are likely to come predominantly from rural and urban area where disparities are most pronounced.

In Baltimore, studies show a 20-year gap in life expectancy between upper-income, predominantly white neighborhoods and poorer, predominantly minority neighborhoods. Recently, city health department officials began working with community leaders in 55 neighborhoods to identify the most pressing health needs and develop plans to tackle them. The state’s zones would complement these efforts, Reece said. His work group also proposed other elements to promote health and track outcomes.

The group suggested Health Innovation Prizes with small financial rewards and public recognition for individuals and groups that improve health and well-being in their community. The group also recommended tracking disparity data for programs that already exist for primary care physicians and hospitals. Incentives and penalties assessed through these programs could eventually be linked to disparities.

Reece said the prize and the enterprise zones are two things Maryland can do now to help reduce disparities in a few key geographic and health areas. If legislation to create the zones is passed during the current legislative session, the details will be worked out by the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Already, Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, department secretary, supports the move: “The creation of Health Enterprise Zones will help communities target resources to have the most powerful impact.”

meredith.cohn@baltsun.com