Florida Exodus: Where Will They Go?

I'm breaking with my November theme because I couldn't sit on this until December:

Rick Desrochers is leaving. And he's not coming back.

He and his wife are moving in with her parents in Michigan after the couple lost their jobs, their Hunter's Creek home to foreclosure, and everything else to bankruptcy. The trauma of going broke in the Sunshine State has convinced them that when the good times return to Orlando, they won't.

"I've talked to a lot of people who say they aren't coming back," said Desrochers, 39, who moved to Orlando nine years ago from Hilton Head, S.C.

Later this month, Rick and Connie Desrochers will join a migration out of Florida that began before the housing market collapsed and the recession kicked in. In 2009, more than 500,000 people like them will leave. And for the first time since World War II, Florida's population will actually shrink -- by about 60,000 residents, state demographers estimate.

Florida (a tax darling state for libertarians) is shrinking. The situation is so dire that some are moving to Michigan. Actually, the article isn't all doom and gloom. Experts predict that the trend will soon reverse itself.

I'm not so sure. Reading what the optimists are claiming, the state seems ready to repeat many of the mistakes made in the Rust Belt. A better quality of life in Florida, compared to Michigan, isn't a given. Prepare yourself for the return of the carpetbagger.

Brain Drain Report: Global Talent Wars

Late Friday afternoon, I was on the phone with fellow "Youngstown" blogger Janko. He points me towards a lot of useful content and one of his suggestions during our conversation was a Charlie Rose interview with Lee Kuan Yew. The former Prime Minister of Singapore comes across as one of the foremost experts on the subject of globalization. Among other things, Yew spoke about China's boomerang migration initiative. You can read more about this talent search in a Newsweek article:

For nearly 15 years, china has been trying to engineer a "brain gain" by luring top scientific and technical talent home from the United States, and it's working. One major success story is the National Institute for Biological Sciences, created in 2003 with several advantages. Freed from the fundraising pressures of the U.S.—and from the often mindless red tape of traditional state-run Chinese institutions—researchers there say their lab environment, financed by the Chinese government, trumps what they could expect in America. They know from experience, since all 23 were educated in the U.S. In 2005 Dr. Feng Shao, 37, left Harvard Medical School to return to China after receiving a more generous deal from NIBS, where he now studies bacterial pathogens in a top-class lab, with a $300,000 annual budget. He says that in the U.S., "I might have a lab with just a few students and technicians. Here I have 16 or 17." The bottom line, says Shao, is that while his team has published six scientific papers since 2005, "elsewhere I might have done just two."

If you believe Yew, the jury is still out on whether or not China is successful in its call for brains to return home. In fact, Yew is skeptical that it will work at all. He does offer a few recommendations, but the prognosis is that this program is insufficient and unsustainable. China, like Japan, must eventually turn to immigration if it wants to compete globally in terms of GDP per capita.

Concerning the United States, Yew contends that this country's primary advantage is its ability to attract the world's most "adventurous minds". Richard Herman recently sent to me a link to an article that should be cause for considerable concern in light of Yew's analysis:

America’s best friend and oldest trading partner—that’s Canada. Happy member of the world’s largest free trading zone? Sure. But when it comes to the global competition for talent, well, friendship only goes so far. When immigration managers at Canada’s consulate in Los Angeles were asked last year to provide a snapshot of the immigration situation in their region, their tone sounded downright predatory. “Significant numbers of high quality economic class immigrants are being gleaned from this territory,” they wrote in a report obtained by Maclean’s. Most of the workers have been educated at U.S. universities, the document went on, obtaining degrees in valued fields like biomedical research or software engineering. With such talent in short supply in Canada, the pencil pushers in L.A. boasted, “this office regularly engages in promotion and recruitment efforts to exploit this talent.”

In terms of domestic migration, this should shed some light on how to best address brain drain. Attempts to keep people from leaving are useless. Boomerang initiatives are better, but don't provide a substitution for attracting outsiders. Few are looking at the benefits from the intentional export of talent, but I doubt the economic development community is ready to entertain that prospect. I still think that's the policy leap shrinking cities (such as Pittsburgh) should make.

As Yew might say, the Rust Belt is failing to surf the geopolitical waves and make itself useful to the world. How might we change that? Look at what Canada is doing.

Free Lunch Problem

I have more than a passing interest in critical media theory. Of course, I take the geographic perspective and think mostly about the boundaries of community. So, this map of contemporary public spheres stood out in the historical review of media technologies:

Click on the image for a larger version.

The lecture makes an important point. There is no easy answer to the current woes. I don't intend my critique (forthcoming) to be a "silver bullet". We're in the midst of a major technological transition and the future couldn't be more opaque. I respect the analysis. I don't know which business model might work.

That said, more geographers should join the conversation. The nested scales (local, national, global, etc ...) misrepresents the publics in play. In other words, the map is inaccurate.

The issued-based public might capture the diaspora communities I study. It doesn't address how the boundaries of local, national and even global are changing. The location variable is a given. Static. Frozen in time. Thus, the suggestion to "get your local community to fund local reporting" is troublesome.

How we consume local, national or global media is more akin to an issue-based public than it is defined by some contiguous territory. The political geographic legacy is still important (e.g. local spins on globalization) but there is little recognition of emerging geographies.

I'm sensitive to the displacement going on given the object of my blogging affection: Pittsburgh. I wasn't born there and I currently live in Colorado. How many Rust Belt bloggers don't live in the Rust Belt? There are communities slipping in between the media cracks. Our sense of geography hasn't caught up with our media technologies.

The building of a national community took many innovations that would allow a people to imagine themselves as sharing the same fate as a bunch of other people living far away, folks they would never meet. In a sense, this explains the troubles in Detroit. The geography of Greater Detroit doesn't exist. Yet local newspapers pretend that it does. More apropos is a world city understanding. One central business district looks like all the others. There are wealthy, cosmopolitan neighborhoods; and poor, isolated ones. We haven't even begun to think about how we might weave these disconnected places together.

Instead, we suggest the local is trending towards the hyperlocal or that the middle (national) scale between local and global is disappearing. Whatever your poison, most media innovation involves greater ties between information and place. The premium is on knowledge and utility.

I like to think of knowledge as information plus social capital (trust). It's the difference between a jobs listing aggregator and how to get the job posted that you want. The network has value, but the information is free. However, people won't value networks they don't trust.

Using today's social media for yesterday's geography is a blind alley. What new geographies are possible thanks to these innovations? The current line of inquiry seems to me to be way off the mark.

Greenfields Gone Wild

Picked up on this at Economix:

The Midwesterner: Blogging The Global Midwest

Via Rust Wire, I see that Richard Longworth is now blogging. If Longworth's name doesn't ring a bell, it should. I highly recommend two of his books on the subject of globalization. I haven't read "Global Chicago", but not out of indifference. (However, no excuse for not reading the report of the same name) Longworth helps his readers to understand globalization and how it impacts lives, particularly in the Midwest. I gather he will continue to bring this dynamic economic landscape to light. More importantly, Longworth aims to facilitate a dialog about the common problems we face:

But even this cooperation goes on in silos. Community colleges from around the Midwest have met here at the Chicago Council. Farm extension directors from the land grant colleges are meeting and thinking. The Midwest Governors Association, a notoriously drowsy outfit, has stirred itself recently to strike deals on the energy economy and high-speed rail. But nobody is putting this all together in ways that could generate an economic revival that will recharge the region.

For starters, we need to talk to each other. Midwestern newspapers, under huge economic pressures of their own, have become too small and too local to do this job. In their places, bloggers are seizing the new technology to set up virtual roundtables. There are rust belt blogs and rural blogs and urban blogs -- all manner of blogs, many of them listed on this site. I hope that they will see this addition to their ranks as a place where all these issues can be hashed out.

I've had a change of heart about the lack of communication. Parochial barriers still exist, but there are conversations crossing borders. At the grassroots level, bloggers are well aware of each other. The prolific ideation doesn't affect much change. There is a disconnect between the concerns raised in blogs and the articulation of economic policy. The intersection of vanguard and establishment is a rare occurrence.

In essence, there are two parallel initiatives dealing with the forces of globalization in the Midwest. How do we mashup? Perhaps that is what Longworth hopes to accomplish with his blog. I see an opportunity for the social media community to enter into the policy discussion. Bloggers are a frustrated lot. We need to re-imagine the civic sphere, which is a much tougher task than breaking down the silos.

Global Innovation Chain II

The Financial Times extends the theme:

Mr Vaswani said Wipro was finding that it could increase its utilisation rate – the proportion of staff busy on projects against those sitting idle waiting for new contracts – by better managing its global workforce. In the Egyptian case, the company had to provide a software package service to a client in India but found it did not have the resources available locally. So it flipped the job over to a few hundred Egyptian employees who were at that point under-utilised.

“Even if I had a high-cost resource sitting on the bench in the US, I might as well use him for executing the project in India rather than hiring someone in India because then I’d be paying for two people,” Mr Vaswani said, though he conceded this was an “extreme” example.

It doesn't get more Flat World than that. Time is running out on Richard Florida's Creative Class and Spiky World.

Global Innovation Chain

Instead of the breakdown of the global supply chain, what if we are witnessing the death of manufacturing? The supposed rise of localization might be missing the big picture. Enter the global innovation chain:

Research and development is increasingly going global, according to a new report by Duke's Offshoring Research Network [ORN]. More than half of U.S. companies now have corporatewide initiatives to outsource innovation activities, up from 22% in 2005, according to the ORN, which has been tracking the growth of outsourcing since 2004. And of those companies already offshoring development, 60% intend to do so more aggressively.

This helps me to see globalization in a different light and brings me back to thinking about distance-trust technologies. Sharing knowledge across international borders is difficult and various forces encourage the clustering of talent in dense city centers, where face-to-face interaction and serendipity can thrive. But there is a lot of money invested in the development of virtual global networks that can generate great value via knowledge production.

It could be the brave new world for journalism and new media. Conventional forms (e.g. newspapers) essentially serve a manufacturing economy, which is dying. The emerging knowledge economy would seem to be a good match for diaspora communities. The recent Global Irish Economic Forum strikes me as a good map of this shift in thinking.

It's a Flat World, after all.