If true ( not saying it is), at least it's miles better than the '9-11 rationilizes everything' mantra so en vogue for the past while, which is simply full of ______.
You really are full of yourself arn't you? Interesting, but irrelevent. I'm still waiting for your explanation of how 7 years into the Clinton administration, we were in a recession, along with your subsequent denial of saying that exact thing. If you want to engage in a debate, I would hope you would at least be honest enough to use real facts instead of simply making stuff up to argue your point. If your 7-years statement has any solid basis, I would be interested to see it. If not, at least we know to consider that when you make future statements.
That is the second time in two responses that you have completley distored my statement. I never said anything of the sort?
The British burned the White House during Madison's term. There was that little thing back in the 1860's... what was that? Oh yeah, THE CIVIL WAR. And let's just forget about the 1930's when there was over 30% unemployment... that wasn't as big a hit as 9-11 was it? Were not there also 2 World Wars during the last century as well? The second starting for us with a decimation of our Pacific defenses and leading to concerns about an invasion on the Pacific Coast. But it's not like Americans had to give up stuff like gasoline and food. When I was a baby, there was little deal going down in Cuba that could have led to the obliteration of the planet, but that was really no big deal and Kennedy's stress wasn't anything close to Bush's. As bad as 9-11 was, it is not close to the worst thing to happen to this country (even though the current administration would like us to think that) and if you accept that premise it shows me you're intentionally ignorant so that your world view will not be challenged. Educate yourself and don't bring that weak stuff into this forum.
Now I don't want to mangle what you said but ... You previously wrote the following: GWB is also the first President ever to deal with a plane flying into a 2 skyscrapers and the pentagon. This is quite a feat which can not be overstated. Your remark above was in response to my "first President since Hoover to have negative job growth" overstatement remark. Was I wrong to assume that you were implying that the economic impact of 9/11 was the source of the negative job growth for GWB's Presidency? I do not dispute that 9/11 has serious negative impact on the US economy. I mentioned Pearl Habor and all of the devasting impact on the American people that that implies. A better example would be The Great Depression. FDR managed to have positive job growth through both. This leads me to my above point that 9/11 can not be the end all excuse for the negative job growth during GWB's Presidency. Other Presidents have been dealt bad hands and still managed to grow the job base.
I cannot believe I'm saying this, but guys, Bush really got dealt a tough hand on 9/11 when he had only been in office a short time. I don't excuse any of the horrible things his administration has done on a million issues (including the now wasted currency of world support we could have garnered and kept) but you can't just look at the World Trade Center being firebombed to the ground and just write it off because worse things have happened. NY, the financial capital of this hemisphere, was hit really damn hard, and I'm still seeing "going out of business" sales too often. (But at least our republican mayor knows he has to cut spending and raise taxes. Sorry, had to say it.)
Political discussions tend quickly to be black and white. I do not have any trouble cutting GWB some slack on the economy die to 9/11 but ... I think in the average year 1 million jobs (or thereabouts) are created. For the first three years of GWB's Presidency 2.5 million jobs were lost. This puts us at about 5.5 million jobs behind the norm. Obviously 9/11 played a part in this. Since other presidents had to deal with worse economic situations and still maintained positive job growth, we need to consider that perchance GWB has dropped the ball with his economic policies. For example. prior Presidents and Congresses have passed short term stimulus packages to jump start the economy. GWB has opted for permanent tax cuts targeted mostly at the super rich. This supply side approach did not prove itself during Reagan's Presidency. But GWB went ahead and relied on supply side stimulus exclusively. Here I think GWB is to blame. Something else to consider is that the Fed is giving money away essentially for free (no interest) and has being doing so since 9/11. This monetary policy should have a lit a fire in the economy for the last two years. And it has emphatically not. I for one will not be surprised if GWB starts pushing a short term stimulus package in the spring, especially if the economy continues on its lack luster way. Since GWB is unconcerned about the deficit, I would further not be suprised if the said stimulus package was on the large side.
http://money.cnn.com/2004/01/17/news/companies/bc.tech.ibm.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes There are your damn jobs ... And note that it is due to the recovering economy. Watch for more companies to follow IBM's lead ... Even though IBM is a leader in outsourcing and hurting the jobs here. I think we need to do something to prevent this
Not really. The IBM guy is too ashamed to admit how many jobs they are offshoring. Only that the number of new hires magically the same as the layoffs due to offshoring according to documents found by the Wall Street Journal. . . . http://www.indystar.com/articles/1/105903-3021-021.html . . . Thousands of IBM employees can relate. They headed into the holiday period holding tightly to their wallets after a company memo was leaked to The Wall Street Journal earlier this month that it would soon shift about 4,700 skilled software jobs to China and India to save money. . . .
And there they go... _________ Huge bank merger in works MORGAN-BANK ONE TO RIVAL CITIGROUP By Andrew Ross Sorkin New York Times NEW YORK - J.P. Morgan Chase agreed Wednesday to acquire Bank One for $58 billion in stock in a deal that would realign the competitive landscape for banks and create a true rival to Citigroup. The transaction would unite the investment and commercial banking strength of J.P. Morgan Chase, the product of a merger of Chase Manhattan and J.P Morgan in 2001, with Bank One's large consumer banking operations, giving the combined company 2,300 branches in 17 states. With the addition of Bank One, based in Chicago, J.P. Morgan, the nation's second-largest bank, would also become an even bigger issuer of credit cards. The deal is a Wall Street homecoming of sorts -- and possibly a form of redemption -- for Bank One's chief executive, James Dimon, who was at one time the heir apparent to Citigroup's chairman, Sanford I. Weill. Dimon, 47, who is known as Jamie, was ousted as president of Citigroup in 1998 after an internal battle but will now become J.P. Morgan's president and chief operating officer. He will take over as chief executive in two years from the bank's longtime leader, William B. Harrison, settling the longstanding question of succession at the company. J.P. Morgan said it expected to eliminate about 10,000 jobs as part of an effort to save $2.2 billion over three years. The cuts will be concentrated in retail banking, and the greatest number may be in the New York area because the retail banking operation, which includes the consumer banking, small-business banking, and consumer lending activities, is going to be run from Bank One's operations in Chicago. J.P. Morgan's headquarters will remain in New York, where the bank has laid off hundreds of investment bankers over the past several years. Both brand names For retail customers, there will be few immediate changes. The banks' branches do not overlap, and the banks said they would continue to maintain both brand names pending a review. Bank One has 1,800 branches, mostly in the Midwest, while J.P. Morgan has 530 branches, which operate under the Chase name, mostly in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Texas. The transaction is contingent on approval from both the Justice Department and the Federal Reserve, though legal experts did not anticipate any difficulties. The deal is the latest in a recent wave of mergers in an industry that has been gradually consolidating for years, and some analysts suggest it will presage more. In October, Bank of America, the nation's third-largest bank, agreed to acquire FleetBoston Financial, the seventh-largest, for about $48 billion. Both deals appear to be a bet on the continuing strength of the consumer banking business. The merger comes as J.P. Morgan is facing increasing competition for its retail branches in the New York City area, said Richard Bove, an independent bank analyst with Hoefer & Arnett, and faced a downturn in its mortgage operations, two areas that had contributed to J.P. Morgan's profits in recent quarters. ``We didn't have the right mix,'' Harrison said in an interview on Wednesday. ``There was way too much volatility in earnings. We were so heavily weighted on the wholesale side,'' referring to the bank's corporate customers. ``This makes us a more balanced firm.'' The merger is not long after J.P. Morgan's earnings and stock price recovered from a downturn in its investment banking business that only recently made it worth less than Bank One. Harrison, who referred to the past several years as ``choppy,'' said he wanted to take advantage of the bank's stability to expand in an effort to better compete. Getting like Citi ``J.P. Morgan wanted to be more like Citi, and this helps get them there,'' said Steven Wharton, an analyst at Loomis Sayles & Co. and an owner of J.P. Morgan shares. Still, Wharton said he was frustrated that Harrison did not give J.P. Morgan longer to benefit from the recovery in its corporate banking operations. Harrison defended doing another deal just as his own business was recovering. ``Both of us have been through a lot of mergers before. Mergers are hard. But we know how to do them.'' Brock Vandervliet, an analyst at Lehman Brothers who predicted the deal last week after rumors began to surface, applauded the deal. ``I think Bill Harrison did the right thing.''
No the issue is that IBM is creating 4,500 more jobs in the U.S. due to the economic surge. Jobs being sent offshore was going to happen whether the economy was good or bad. Thus the improvement of the economy equals more jobs than if the economy was bad. Thus the economic stimulus DID create jobs. As for the merger and jobs lost there ... That is true ... but that also is something that is going to happen in a bad economy or a good one so that has nothing to do with what we are talking about. You guys said that the tax cuts that were stimulating the economy did not create any jobs. Bottom line is that it did, and it will continue to do so.
You guys said that the tax cuts that were stimulating the economy did not create any jobs. Bottom line is that it did, and it will continue to do so. First off, this is debatable. There are very few jobs created - the entire 6 months of job creation totals about 300,000. During the Clinton administration - without tax cuts - the US economy created an average of 250,000+ each month. Crediting tax cuts with the tiny number of jobs created is dubious, at best. Second, let's hypothesize all 300,000 created jobs are a result of the tax cuts. The tax cuts are, on average, $200 billion per year. If you simply gave people money as "jobs" instead of the tax cuts, you could give $40,000 to 5 million people each year. So, your tax cuts created 300,000 jobs. A free giveaway would have created the equivalent of 5 million jobs - and higher paying than the jobs being created. Very efficient use of funds there.
I know you are too stubborn to realize that the economy under Clinton was totally different than the economy under Bush. Lets see ... Clinton recieved an economy at the start of an economic Boom, and Bush got an economy on the verge of a recession, 9/11, Enron, etc. etc. etc. I know you won't admit it but you are comparing apples to oranges my friend.
I know you are too stubborn to realize that the economy under Clinton was totally different than the economy under Bush. Lets see ... Clinton recieved an economy at the start of an economic Boom, and Bush got an economy on the verge of a recession, 9/11, Enron, etc. etc. etc. What does any of this have to do with showing that the taxcuts, as opposed to any number of other factors, are responsible for the new jobs? You're the one making the leap that the tax cuts are directly responsible for the new jobs. That may or may not be true. Even if it is, it's a woefully inefficient way of creating 300,000 jobs, as pointed out in the remainder of my post that you conveniently ignored.
Sorry I didn't even respond to the second part of your post because it is so weak. Give people jobs for 40,000 a year ... Sorry that does NOTHING to stimulate the economy and the job cuts would have continued as before. With the tax cuts, the economy is stimulated, allowing everyone with investments to also reap the benefits .. and it will create jobs in time. Besides, the tax cuts are also part of what was owed to the people for overpaying in previous years.
Or rather people overpaid because during the 80's our govt. over spent. So over paying was recquired to pay back some of what we owed. Now we are getting into that same territory again which means that in the future more people will have to 'overpay.'
There is a growth industry in jobs that are being created: service industry jobs. We get to work for those guys who get the most benefit from the Bush tax cuts. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-jobs22jan22,1,6130442.story?coll=la-home-headlines THE NATION Low-Pay Sectors Dominate U.S. and State Job Growth In California, industries that are hiring pay 40% less than those that are shrinking, a study finds. By Nancy Cleeland, Times Staff Writer California is being hit hard by a recent nationwide shift of jobs from high-paying industries to lower-paying sectors such as retail sales and tourism, a trend that doesn't bode well for the economy, according to a report released Wednesday. The report by the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute paints a picture of a state and national economy in which employment growth is being driven largely by low-skilled service jobs. In Los Angeles, according to the preliminary results of another study, the shift is particularly pronounced because so many new jobs are in the "underground" cash economy of laborers who aren't counted in government statistics. These very low-wage workers — people who do yardwork or clean houses or wash dishes — might account for as much as 15% of all jobs in the metropolitan area, said Dan Flaming of the Economic Round Table, which is conducting its study for the city. "It's really scary," Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., said of the long-term implications. An economy increasingly dependent on lower-wage jobs will have a smaller tax base and see less consumer spending, checking economic growth and reducing the quality of public services and infrastructure, Kyser said. Statewide, since the national recession officially ended in November 2001, the jobs that have been created are in industries that pay an average of 40% less than do those in which jobs have disappeared, the Economic Policy Institute said. The institute describes itself as focusing on "the economic condition of low- and middle-income Americans and their families" and has been critical of the Bush administration's depiction of the economy. By the institute's measure, only three other states — Delaware, Massachusetts and Wyoming — fared as badly or worse than California. Only two states, Nevada and Nebraska, saw wages in industries with job growth exceeding wages in sectors with job losses. . . .
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0401.florida.html Creative Class War How the GOP's anti-elitism could ruin America's economy. By Richard Florida Last March, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his film complex in lush, green, otherworldly-looking Wellington, New Zealand. Jackson has done something unlikely in Wellington, an exciting, cosmopolitan city of 900,000, but not one previously considered a world cultural capital. He has built a permanent facility there, perhaps the world's most sophisticated filmmaking complex. He did it in New Zealand concertedly and by design. Jackson, a Wellington native, realized what many American cities discovered during the '90s: Paradigm-busting creative industries could single-handedly change the ways cities flourish and drive dynamic, widespread economic change. It took Jackson and his partners a while to raise the resources, but they purchased an abandoned paint factory that, in a singular example of adaptive reuse, emerged as the studio responsible for the most breathtaking trilogy of films ever made. He realized, he told me, that with the allure of the Rings trilogy, he could attract a diversely creative array of talent from all over the world to New Zealand; the best cinematographers, costume designers, sound technicians, computer graphic artists, model builders, editors, and animators. When I visited, I met dozens of Americans from places like Berkeley and MIT working alongside talented filmmakers from Europe and Asia, the Americans asserting that they were ready to relinquish their citizenship. Many had begun the process of establishing residency in New Zealand. Think about this. In the industry most symbolic of America's international economic and cultural might, film, the greatest single project in recent cinematic history was internationally funded and crafted by the best filmmakers from around the world, but not in Hollywood. When Hollywood produces movies of this magnitude, it creates jobs for directors, actors, and key grips in California. Because of the astounding level of technical innovation which a project of this size requires, in such areas as computer graphics, sound design, and animation, it can also germinate whole new companies and even new industries nationwide, just as George Lucas's Star Wars films fed the development of everything from video games to product tie-in marketing. But the lion's share of benefits from The Lord of the Rings is likely to accrue not to the United States but to New Zealand. Next, with a rather devastating symbolism, Jackson will remake King Kong in Wellington, with a budget running upwards of $150 million. Peter Jackson's power play hasn't been mentioned by any of the current candidates running for president. Yet the loss of U.S. jobs to overseas competitors is shaping up to be one of the defining issues of the 2004 campaign. And for good reason. Voters are seeing not just a decline in manufacturing jobs, but also the outsourcing of hundreds of thousands of white-collar brain jobs--everything from software coders to financial analysts for investment banks. These were supposed to be the "safe" jobs, for which high school guidance counselors steered the children of blue-collar workers into college to avoid their parents' fate. But the loss of some of these jobs is only the most obvious--and not even the most worrying--aspect of a much bigger problem. Other countries are now encroaching more directly and successfully on what has been, for almost two decades, the heartland of our economic success -- the creative economy. Better than any other country in recent years, America has developed new technologies and ideas that spawn new industries and modernize old ones, from the Internet to big-box stores to innovative product designs. And these have proved the principal force behind the U.S. economy's creation of more than 20 million jobs in the creative sector during the 1990s, even as it continued to shed manufacturing, agricultural, and other jobs. We came up with these new technologies and ideas largely because we were able to energize and attract the best and the brightest, not just from our country but also from around the world. Talented, educated immigrants and smart, ambitious young Americans congregated, during the 1980s and 1990s, in and around a dozen U.S. city-regions. These areas became hothouses of innovation, the modern-day equivalents of Renaissance city-states, where scientists, artists, designers, engineers, financiers, marketers, and sundry entrepreneurs fed off each other's knowledge, energy, and capital to make new products, new services, and whole new industries: cutting-edge entertainment in southern California, new financial instruments in New York, computer products in northern California and Austin, satellites and telecommunications in Washington, D.C., software and innovative retail in Seattle, biotechnology in Boston. The economic benefits of these advances soon spread to much of the rest of the country, as Ohio-born MBAs in Raleigh-Durham built credit-card call centers in Iowa, and Indian computer whizzes in Chicago devised inventory software that brought new profitability to car factories in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. But now the rest of the world has taken notice of our success and is trying to copy it. The present surge of outsourcing is the first step--or if you will, the first pincer of the claw. The more routinizable aspects of what we consider brainwork--writing computer code, analyzing X-rays--are being lured away by countries like India and Romania, which have lower labor costs and educated workforces large enough to do the job. Though alarming and disruptive, such outsourcing might be manageable if we could substitute a new tier of jobs derived from the new technologies and ideas coming out of our creative centers. But so far in this economic recovery, that hasn't happened. What should really alarm us is that our capacity to so adapt is being eroded by a different kind of competition--the other pincer of the claw--as cities in other developed countries transform themselves into magnets for higher value-added industries. Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. They're doing it through a variety of means--from government-subsidized labs to partnerships between top local universities and industry. Most of all, they're luring foreign creative talent, including our own. The result is that the sort of high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States' province and a crucial source of our prosperity have begun to move overseas. The most advanced cell phones are being made in Salo, Finland, not Chicago. The world's leading airplanes are being designed and built in Toulouse and Hamburg, not Seattle. As other nations become more attractive to mobile immigrant talent, America is becoming less so. A recent study by the National Science Board found that the U.S. government issued 74,000 visas for immigrants to work in science and technology in 2002, down from 166,000 in 2001--an astonishing drop of 55 percent. This is matched by similar, though smaller-scale, declines in other categories of talented immigrants, from finance experts to entertainers. Part of this contraction is derived from what we hope are short-term security concerns--as federal agencies have restricted visas from certain countries after September 11. More disturbingly, we find indications that fewer educated foreigners are choosing to come to the United States. For instance, most of the decline in science and technology immigrants in the National Science Board study was due to a drop in applications. Why would talented foreigners avoid us? In part, because other countries are simply doing a better, more aggressive job of recruiting them. The technology bust also plays a role. There are fewer jobs for computer engineers, and even top foreign scientists who might still have their pick of great cutting-edge research positions are less likely than they were a few years ago to make millions through tech-industry partnerships. But having talked to hundreds of talented professionals in a half dozen countries over the past year, I'm convinced that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the federal government focused on expanding America's human capital and interconnectedness to the world--crafting international trade agreements, investing in cutting edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration. But in the last three years, the government's attention and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy, with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries. Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across the world with its disregard for consensus scientific views when those views conflict with the interests of favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world, especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our history, we're saying to highly mobile and very finicky global talent, "You don't belong here." Obviously, this shift has come about with the changing of the political guard in Washington, from the internationalist Bill Clinton to the aggressively unilateralist George W. Bush. But its roots go much deeper, to a tectonic change in the country's political-economic demographics. As many have noted, America is becoming more geographically polarized, with the culturally more traditionalist, rural, small-town, and exurban "red" parts of the country increasingly voting Republican, and the culturally more progressive urban and suburban "blue" areas going ever more Democratic. Less noted is the degree to which these lines demarcate a growing economic divide, with "blue" patches representing the talent-laden, immigrant-rich creative centers that have largely propelled economic growth, and the "red" parts representing the economically lagging hinterlands. The migrations that feed creative-center economies are also exacerbating the contrasts. As talented individuals, eager for better career opportunities and more adventurous, diverse lifestyles, move to the innovative cities, the hinterlands become even more culturally conservative. Now, the demographic dynamic which propelled America's creative economy has produced a political dynamic that could choke that economy off. Though none of the candidates for president has quite framed it that way, it's what's really at stake in the 2004 elections. Yankees doodle Roger Pederson is one of the leading researchers in the field of stem cells. But in 2001, he left his position at the University of California, San Francisco, to take up residency at the Centre for Stem Cell Biology Medicine at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. His departure illustrates how the creative economy is being reshaped--by our competitors growing savvy and by our own cluelessness. Pederson bolted because the British government aggressively recruited him, but also because the Bush administration put heavy restrictions on stem-cell research. "I have a soft spot in my heart for America," he recently told Wired magazine. "But the U.K. is much better for this research.... more working capital." And, he continued, "they haven't made such a political football out of stem cells." Stem cells are vital to the body because of their ability to develop any kind of tissue. Scientists play a similar role in the economy; their discoveries (silicon circuitry, gene splicing) are the source of most big new industries (personal computers, biotechnology). Unfortunately, Roger Pederson's departure may be among the first of many. "Over the last few years, as the conservative movement in the U.S. has become more entrenched, many people I know are looking for better lives in Canada, Europe, and Australia," a noted entymologist at the University of Illinois emailed me recently. "From bloggers and programmers to members of the National Academy I have spoken with, all find the Zeitgeist alien and even threatening. My friend says it is like trying to research and do business in the 21st century in a culture that wants to live in the 19th, empires, bibles and all. There is an E.U. fellowship through the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Amsterdam that everyone and their mother is trying to get." But the bigger problem isn't that Americans are going elsewhere. It's that for the first time in modern memory, top scientists and intellectuals from elsewhere are choosing not to come here. We are so used to thinking that the world's leading creative minds, like the world's best basketball and baseball players, always want to come to the States, while our people go overseas only if they are second-rate or washed up, that it's hard to imagine it could ever be otherwise. And it's still true that because of our country's size, its dynamism, its many great universities, and large government research budgets, we're the Yankees of science. But like the Yankees, we've been losing some of our best players. And even great teams can go into slumps. The altered flow of talent is already beginning to show signs of crimping the scientific process. "We can't hold scientific meetings here [in the United States] anymore because foreign scientists can't get visas," a top oceanographer at the University of California at San Diego recently told me. The same is true of graduate students, the people who do the legwork of scientific research and are the source of many powerful ideas. The graduate students I have taught at several major universities -- Ohio State, Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon -- have always been among the first to point out the benefits of studying and doing research in the United States. But their impressions have changed dramatically over the past year. They now complain of being hounded by the immigration agencies as potential threats to security, and that America is abandoning its standing as an open society. Many are thinking of leaving for foreign schools, and they tell me that their friends and colleagues back home are no longer interested in coming to the United States for their education but are actively seeking out universities in Canada, Europe, and elsewhere. It would be comforting to think that keeping out the foreigners would mean more places for home-grown talent in our top graduate programs and research faculties. Alas, it doesn't work that way: We have many brilliant young people, but not nearly enough to fill all the crucial slots. Last year, for instance, a vast, critical artificial intelligence project at MIT had to be jettisoned because the university couldn't find enough graduate students who weren't foreigners and who could thus clear new security regulations. Nor is this phenomenon limited to science; other sectors are beginning to suffer. The pop-music magazine Tracks, for instance, recently reported that a growing number of leading world musicians, from South African singer and guitarist Vusi Mahlasela to the Bogota-based electronica collective Sidestepper, have had to cancel their American tours because they were refused visas, while Youssou N'Dour, perhaps the globe's most famous music artist, cancelled his largest-ever U.S. tour last spring to protest the invasion of Iraq. These may seem small signs, but they're not. America's music industry has been, for decades, the world's standard setter. The songs of American artists are heard on radio stations from Caracas to Istanbul; their soundtracks are an integral part of the worldwide appeal of American movies. The profits earned from American music exports help keep America's balance-of-payments deficits from getting too far into the red zone. Yet part of what makes American music so vital is its ability to absorb and incorporate the sounds of other countries--from American hip-hop picking up Caribbean Reggae and Indian Bhangra beats, to hard rock musicians using industrial instrumentation from Germany. For American artists and fans, not being able to see touring foreign bands is the equivalent of the computer industry not getting access to the latest chips: It dulls the competitive edge. Our loss of access to high-level foreign talent hasn't drawn much attention from political leaders and the media, for understandable reasons: We seem to have bigger, more immediate problems, from the war on terrorism to the loss of jobs in the manufacturing, service, and creative sectors to China, India, and Mexico. But just as our obsession with the Soviet Union in the last years of the Cold War caused us to miss the emerging economic challenge of Japan, our eyes may not be on the biggest threat to our economic well-being. For several years now, my colleagues and I have been measuring the underlying factors common to those American cities and regions with the highest level of creative economic growth. The chief factors we've found are: large numbers of talented individuals, a high degree of technological innovation, and a tolerance of diverse lifestyles. Recently my colleague Irene Tinagli of Carnegie Mellon and I have applied the same analysis to northern Europe, and the findings are startling. The playing field is much more level than you might think. Sweden tops the United States on this measure, with Finland, the Netherlands, and Denmark close behind. The United Kingdom and Belgium are also doing well. And most of these countries, especially Ireland, are becoming more creatively competitive at a faster rate than the United States.
