An interactive graphic developed by the American Human Development Project and the United Way allow you to see, by county, a dashboard of indicators of health, educational attainment, income, and civic participation. What makes this visualization particularly informative is that the user can manipulate educational attainment levels and see how changing that variable affects the other metrics.

For example, here is the first screen when Bastrop County, Texas, is selected.

Then, a pre-set scenario from the menu in the bottom left corner to “All up one educational category” was selected. Note the changes in median personal earnings, poverty rate, and unemployment rate. Users can also manipulate the orange bars under each educational attainment level on the left manually rather than selecting a pre-set scenario.

via The Wall Street Journal

By Conor Dougherty

AUSTIN, Texas—As the nation grapples with stubbornly high unemployment, Texas’s political and high-tech capital shows one way to create good jobs for people who didn’t go to college: Attract highly skilled entrepreneurs, and watch the companies they start hire lower-skilled workers.

Praxis Strategy Group, an economic-development consultancy, estimates Austin added 50,000 “middle-skill” positions in the past decade. These are jobs that require a two-year associate’s degree or the equivalent work experience, and pay a median wage of $17.30 an hour, or $38,000 a year. That pace of growth is roughly four times faster than the nation’s as a whole, three times that of New York and Portland, Ore., and twice that of Phoenix.

Austin’s success in creating middle-class jobs runs against the grain of national trends. As America’s shift from manufacturing to the service sector has accelerated, economists have noted a hollowing out of such jobs.

In recent decades, a select number of brain hubs like Austin have attracted a higher percentage of well-educated workers and a lopsided share of new investment and young companies. In 1970, the top 10 most-educated metropolitan areas among the nation’s 100 largest had an average of 23% of workers holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 10% in the bottom 10, according to an analysis of Census data by Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser. The 13-percentage-point gap has widened every decade since, and had doubled by 2010.



Click on the interactive graphic to see the growth in middle-skill jobs from 2001 in Austin and other regions.

Beyond creating new middle-skill jobs, such brain hubs have generally higher incomes and for the most part have performed better through the recession. In Austin, the 7.1% average unemployment rate in 2010 was well below the nation’s during the same period.

Of course, Austin also has a fast-growing population, which helps create jobs in any economic environment. And it’s not as if other cities can create a more-educated populace overnight.

Still, Austin’s success in creating middle-level jobs shows how a well-educated work force can raise the fortunes of lesser-educated workers as well. Raleigh, N.C., has benefited from the same dynamic.

One consequence of the economy’s shift away from production toward brain work is that companies are constantly seeking new ways to break down high-value intellectual tasks into smaller, cheaper bits. Much the same way that assembly lines created millions of new jobs by reducing mass production to a sum of tasks, employers in Austin and elsewhere are constantly breaking down higher-skill jobs to “create new middle-skill, middle-income specialties,” according to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute.

Take Homeaway Inc., a vacation-rental service founded here in 2005 that went public this year. Its rapid growth allows entry-level employees to substantially raise their income, said Brent Bellm, the company’s chief operating officer.

Mr. Bellm points to customer-service representatives, who earn from $25,000 to the low-$30,000s range and field phone calls and e-mails from people using the company’s website. About one-third of them are promoted annually to areas such as a security team that monitors the site for fraudulent listings and removes shoddy properties. “In a few years, you can go from the high 20s to the 50s,” he said.

Simply put, rapid growth boosts the value even of workers who have a limited education but possess knowledge of a company’s systems.

Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that highly educated cities see faster wage growth for less-educated citizens as well as the high fliers. One reason is that that many lower-level employees use the most productive technologies and act as complements to more-expensive and highly-educated workers, making it much easier for companies to raise their wages faster than overall inflation.

Another force, Mr. Moretti notes, is called “human capital spillovers,” a fancy way of saying that many “middle skill” workers begin to acquire skills that are much more valuable than their overall education level might suggest.

That’s how Douglas Kanneman went from a bored retail clerk feeling grim about his prospects to a computer-equipment technician with a four-bedroom house and the chance to let his wife work part-time while looking after their two children.

Mr. Kanneman, 37 years old, began his working life like a lot of people who didn’t go to college—at a retail store with low pay. Looking to better his prospects at 25, he went to community college for computer training and eventually landed a customer-service job at SolarWinds in Tulsa, Okla., which makes software that controls companies’ information infrastructure like computers and phone systems.

Later, when SolarWinds moved to the tech hub of Austin, Mr. Kanneman went with it. As the company grew, he worked his way into the better-paying information-technology department. A year ago, he did something that he said validated the worth of his new skills: He quit for a higher-paying job elsewhere in Austin, and with overtime can now earn more than $90,000 a year.

“It proved that I was worth as much as I thought I was,” Mr. Kanneman said.

Write to Conor Dougherty at conor.dougherty@wsj.com

Harvard has released an interesting new index of “economic complexity” which is the productive knowledge of the economy, based on analysis of its output composition.

… the Economic Complexity Index (ECI) is based on the number and the complexity of the products that a country exports with comparative advantage. Empirically, countries that do well in this index, given their income level, tend to achieve higher levels of economic growth. The ability to successfully export new products is a reflection of the fact that the country has acquired new productive knowledge that will then open up further opportunities for progress.

The index is then used to make detailed growth projections, and identify export opportunities on a country-by-country basis. There are also interactive versions of most of these visualizations that you can explore and filter.

Download PDFs:
Full version

Part 1: Why, What & How & Rankings

Part 2: Country Pages

Interactive Visualizations



via

via the Google Green Blog

Imagine a renewable energy resource capable of producing more than 10 times the energy of the installed capacity of coal in the US. That’s the potential for Geothermal Energy in the United States, according to a recently completed 3-year project supported by Google.org to update the Geothermal Map of North America.

The study conducted by SMU Geothermal Laboratory, led by Principal Investigator Dr. David Blackwell, incorporated tens of thousands of new thermal data points to create the most data rich perspective on US geothermal resources to date. The full results can be seen in the updated Google Earth layer on U.S. Geothermal Resources and in SMU’s paper to be presented at the Geothermal Resources Council Annual Meeting.

The project estimates that Technical Potential for the continental US exceeds 2,980,295 megawatts using Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) and other advanced geothermal technologies such as Low Temperature Hydrothermal.


2011 Geothermal Heat Flow Map of the US

The new estimates are compliant with the new global geothermal mapping protocol developed by SMU, Hot Dry Rocks PTY, GeoWatt Ag, and Google.org which is now recognized by the International Energy Agency and the International Geothermal Association. Under the protocol, Technical Potential is limited to depths of 3.5 to 6.5 km (6.5 to 10 km is considered “Theoretical Potential” under the protocol) and inaccessible zones such as national parks and protected lands are eliminated.

How’d they do it?

The SMU team has been developing entirely new pictures of the earth’s geothermal resources. They started by aggregating thousands of new Bottom Hole Temperature (BHT) readings from oil, gas, and water wells in previously under-sampled regions of the U.S. For example, The 2004 Geothermal Map of North America used only 5 heat flow points informing geothermal estimates for West Virginia, compared to the additional 1,455 BHT points in the updated version. In addition, the team has improved estimates of heat flow through the earth’s crust with better regional lithologic data.

The updated map is a testament to the incredible SMU team: Dr. David Blackwell, Maria Richards, Zachary Frone, Joseph Batir, Ryan Dingwall, Andrés Ruzo, and Mitchell Williams.

We’re excited that with improvements in EGS technology, all of these resources could one day be harnessed to provide clean, reliable, baseload power — energy that’s available every hour of every day.

via Forbes, by Jon Bruner
more about the map

Americans are enormously mobile: 37.5 million people moved from one house to another last year, with 4.3 million of them moving between states. This mobility makes us efficient seekers of economic improvement—moving into, and then leaving, cities like Phoenix as their fortunes rise and fall.

My interactive visualization, based on IRS data, illustrates these patterns by tracing inward and outward moves for every county in the country. Each move had its own motivations, but in aggregate they ­reflect the geographical marketplace during the boom and bust of the last decade: Migrants flock to Las Vegas in 2005 in search of cheap, luxurious housing, then flee in 2009 as the city’s economy collapses; Miami beckons retirees from the North but offers little to its working-age residents, who leave for the West. Even fast-growing boomtowns like Charlotte, N.C., lose residents to their outlying counties as the demand for exurban tract-housing pushes workers ever outward.Close to 40 million Americans move from one home to another every year. Click anywhere on the map below: blue counties send more migrants to the selected county than they take; red counties take more than they send.

via American Human Development Project


Click here to explore a set of interactive maps with data from 2008-2011. In the map above, I selected “High School Freshmen not Graduating after 4 Years” from the “dashboard of risks” menu, for all states, all ethnic groups, and the most recent data set. You can also view data by top 10 metropolitan areas, congressional districts, and so on.

Whites in Washington, DC, live, on average, twelve years longer than African Americans in the same city.

In the 2007–9 Great Recession, college graduates faced an un- and underemployment rate of 1 in 10; the rate for high school dropouts was greater than 1 in 3.

In no U.S. states do African Americans, Latinos, or Native Americans earn more than Asian Americans or whites.

These startling facts are just some of the issues covered in The Measure of America 2010-2011. With a foreword by Jeffrey D. Sachs, the second volume in The Measure of America series is an easy-to-understand guide to where different groups stand today, and why. The book contains American Human Development Index ranking for all 50 states, 435 congressional districts, major metropolitan areas, racial and ethnic groups, as well as men and women. It concludes with a set of recommendations for priority actions required to improve scores on the Index across the board and to close the stark gaps that separate groups.

The Measure of America 2010-2011 also shines a spotlight on risks to progress and opportunity, and identifies tested approaches to fostering resilience among different groups: Who is most at risk for obesity? How can workers secure better footholds in the job market? How important is early childhood education? This report provides the tools necessary to build upon past policy successes, protect the progress made over the last half century from emerging risks, and develop an infrastructure of opportunity that can serve a new generation of Americans.