18 ms·

Rise of the Creative Class Worked a Little Too Well

76 points by petethomas 9y ago

dougbright 9y ago
The author raises good points which are hard to disagree with. I'm troubled by the decision to choose the odd and seemingly arbitrary "95-20 ratio" though, instead of a more typical 80-20. Does anybody know what these graphs look like at 80-20?
- s17n 9y ago
  Wouldn't gini be better than either of those?
  - arcanus 9y ago
    Or a straight up power-law curve fit, which is what those are both (implicitly) based upon.
    - s17n 9y ago
      Really? I thought that Gini is equally applicable to any type of underlying curve.
ChuckMcM 9y ago
Does anyone have the book? I noticed in the chart they measured 'San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward' which would be the northern half of the bay area that does not include the Santa Clara valley (aka Silicon Valley). I'm wondering if there was a measurement for the 'Redwood City - San Jose - Fremont' southern half of the bay area.
- chinstorff 9y ago
  The San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward MSA[0] contains San Mateo and Alameda Counties, so Redwood City and Fremont are included. Santa Clara County is not included, however. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose-San_Francisco-Oakland,_CA_Combined_Statistical_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose-San_Francisco-Oakland...
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    That is awesome, it lead me eventually to discover the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara MSA (which is the 'other' side of the Bay) and this comparison site (https://datausa.io/profile/geo/san-jose-sunnyvale-santa-clara-ca-metro-area/?compare=san-francisco-oakland-fremont-ca-metro-area https://datausa.io/profile/geo/san-jose-sunnyvale-santa-clar...)
rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
Before industrialization, land that mattered was farmland. Then as industrialization took hold, urban land became more important as the grouping of people together allowed for economies of scale in manufacturing. But then the petrochemical revolution put things in reverse, as people could live anywhere and travel by car. Suddenly, open space was economically desirable, as it made more sense to build a factory in super-cheap Nowheresville, Arkansas than crowded, expensive Philadelphia. But the rise in global supply chains - the shipping container in particular - meant that it makes more sense to build just about everything in a few massive hubs (Shenzhen as the prime example), and then ship things all around the world, at a much cheaper rate than if the widget or smartphone were made at home. Likewise for services, like IT and finance, it makes much more sense for all of these professionals to work together in the same places, which is why a handful of cities are crushing the Information Age while hundreds of other towns and cities are either dying slowly or are on life support (higher education economy, tax-break-driven manufacturing, etc) Will we see the same resurgence of sprawl as followed the petrochemical revolution? I'm not sure. Remote work has its niches but I couldn't imagine a serious major company like Google or IBM existing without a lot of corporate real estate and proximate workers. And as I've argued elsewhere on HN, today's professionals have professional needs: doctors, lawyers, teachers, all things they expect to have within their area. Rural areas and even small to medium sized cities have trouble competing for the best-in-class services that the upper echelons of professionals demand (and given that this class is both responsible for and generally the beneficiary of globalization, that makes it very hard to say that, say, Rochester, NY could become the next great tech hub (a decent tech hub perhaps, but no Silicon Valley) without a LOT more to attract the highest end professional class. Maybe self-driving cars (personally I predict RVs) will be able to make sprawl great again, but even then it would still be a concentration around a (albeit larger) major metropolitan area. Urban/rural was the most important divide of the 19th-20th centuries. It looks like it will continue throughout the 21st.
- justinator 9y ago
  Google, Amazon (for example), are building large work centers in desirable places to work, which are raising the cost of living of everyone else in the town that may not have a six figure income. Google is moving to Boulder, CO as we speak; Denver was on the shortlist for Amazon. It's the same problem with kicking out artists in a dilapidated warehouse area, and moving in boring professionals to live in lofts built on the same foundations: your renewed neighborhood loses all the reasons it was appealing. In Boulder already you cannot really afford living in town with a service industry job, but people who want to work in Google also want to go out and have a beer after work. Those service industry workers need to commute into town, which is time-consuming, adds expense, worsens traffic, and lowers their quality of life.
Animats 9y ago
Don't worry. Programming is becoming a blue collar job. Being an "electrician" in 1880 was a big deal, the high technology job of its day. By 1920 it was a union blue collar job. That's programming.
- falcor84 9y ago
  I don't see that happening; there's no sense for large companies to hire lots of blue-collar programmers, when they could just automate any of the routine repetitive work.
  - ng12 9y ago
    What happens when we eventually train AI to write code for us? Then "programming" would be a lot more like data entry than creative work.
    - rossdavidh 9y ago
      You'll notice that the more real-world experience people have with AI, the less likely they think this is any time in our lifetimes.
    - jpindar 9y ago
      That's what the people who created Fortran thought. Instead, the types of programs people wrote became more complex once they didn't have to write them in assembler.
- bigmario 9y ago
  Lots of people make this claim with no evidence. It's understandable to feel insecure about future career prospects in our fast-changing industry, but honestly I'll believe it when I see it.
  - Animats 9y ago
    Apply for a job as a PHP programmer and see what you're offered.
indubitable 9y ago
This article made me curious about something, statistic wise, with inequality. Imagine we have a kingdom of a million workers and one king. Inequality would be mostly invisible. Unless you compare yourself to the king (and who would dare do such a thing..), you're doing pretty well - or at least as well as average. But now let's imagine the king wants to modernize his land. So he starts developing and training people. And now we have 1 king, 50,000 skilled experts, and 950,000 workers. Well there's not that many of those skilled workers, so they must still be pretty special. It seems kind of unfair, but things are still pretty decent. And now imagine the king trains another 50,000 experts and grants 10,000 of the already existing experts vast tracts of land. Now we have 900,000 workers, 90,000 experts, and 10,000 lords. Now inequality is starting to feel very real. There are lots of these guys and they don't seem to be anything special. How is it that they're doing so well, while the majority struggles? I think we can say that the king's actions have greatly benefited society. Yet there's a strange paradox. As benefit, and privilege, comes to more and more people - it seems ever more unfair for those yet to benefit themselves. And now imagine by the time our hypothetical skilled individuals start to become the majority. It would begin to seem something beyond fair. As we start to see things like there being only 200,000 workers left, they would start to see their situation as more and more desperate. Indeed they would start to seem to be a sort of slave caste. A quick search for information to try to see if this is indeed what is happening yielded this [1] study which seems to lend some credence to this possibility. In particular they examined the percent of individuals in each income group, based on real incomes. These showed that the middle class has been substantially chiseled out (shrinking from 38.8% to 32% of the population) but that alone is disingenuous. What's happening to every class's population? Here are their data for this specific question: - Change in share of each class as a percent of US population. 1979 -> 2014 ----- - Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8% - Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4% - Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32% - Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1% - Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8% ----- This seems incredibly positive at a glance, but this change in demographics has indeed resulted in very large measurable changes in inequality. In particular in 1979 the bottom 3 economic classes controlled 70% of all income, with the upper class and rich controlling the remaining 30%. Today those numbers have practically swapped. The lower 3 classes control 37% of all income to 63% for the rich and upper middle class. Though, on the other hand, the top groups have also more than doubled in size. One other issue I noticed is that the study (at least at a somewhat intensive glance) did not seem to meaningfully consider that many things critical to the growth and health of the lower classes, such as education and housing, have inflated in price far beyond nominal inflation rates. So real income measurements can be quite misleading. Nonetheless, I'm not sure why but I had not strongly considered this before. This article emphasizing the inequality as more of a changing of demographics than an existing demographic making themselves even richer was what brought it to mind. [1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-...
dontlikeitupem 9y ago
Parts of East London were always there, but remained in the shadows, underdeveloped and relatively cheaply priced compared to the west and central areas. Everyone waited for others to make the area trendy, they needed someone else to socially validate and approve the area before they then came en-masse. They demanded new expensive bakeries, tweeted their delight with the distressed decor coffee shop, and simply purred about the expensive butcher. Then at some point later, those some people went on to complain the area had become gentrified. One day even the hipsters and shiny people will be priced out, and maybe the area will change again, but the original locals, who had business and family for generations there, were never asked about any of this, and the remaining few still don't have a voice.
gt_ 9y ago
My ex-girlfriend bought this book for me and it was one of the red flags that led me to break up with her. I still love her very much, but this gesture made it so evident she could not understand me. Forgive me father/HN.

76 points by petethomas 9y ago

The author raises good points which are hard to disagree with. I'm troubled by the decision to choose the odd and seemingly arbitrary "95-20 ratio" though, instead of a more typical 80-20. Does anybody know what these graphs look like at 80-20?

s17n 9y ago
Wouldn't gini be better than either of those?
- arcanus 9y ago
  Or a straight up power-law curve fit, which is what those are both (implicitly) based upon.
  - s17n 9y ago
    Really? I thought that Gini is equally applicable to any type of underlying curve.

ChuckMcM 9y ago

Does anyone have the book? I noticed in the chart they measured 'San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward' which would be the northern half of the bay area that does not include the Santa Clara valley (aka Silicon Valley). I'm wondering if there was a measurement for the 'Redwood City - San Jose - Fremont' southern half of the bay area.

chinstorff 9y ago
The San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward MSA[0] contains San Mateo and Alameda Counties, so Redwood City and Fremont are included. Santa Clara County is not included, however. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose-San_Francisco-Oakland,_CA_Combined_Statistical_Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose-San_Francisco-Oakland...
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  That is awesome, it lead me eventually to discover the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara MSA (which is the 'other' side of the Bay) and this comparison site (https://datausa.io/profile/geo/san-jose-sunnyvale-santa-clara-ca-metro-area/?compare=san-francisco-oakland-fremont-ca-metro-area https://datausa.io/profile/geo/san-jose-sunnyvale-santa-clar...)

rm_-rf_slash 9y ago

Before industrialization, land that mattered was farmland. Then as industrialization took hold, urban land became more important as the grouping of people together allowed for economies of scale in manufacturing. But then the petrochemical revolution put things in reverse, as people could live anywhere and travel by car. Suddenly, open space was economically desirable, as it made more sense to build a factory in super-cheap Nowheresville, Arkansas than crowded, expensive Philadelphia. But the rise in global supply chains - the shipping container in particular - meant that it makes more sense to build just about everything in a few massive hubs (Shenzhen as the prime example), and then ship things all around the world, at a much cheaper rate than if the widget or smartphone were made at home. Likewise for services, like IT and finance, it makes much more sense for all of these professionals to work together in the same places, which is why a handful of cities are crushing the Information Age while hundreds of other towns and cities are either dying slowly or are on life support (higher education economy, tax-break-driven manufacturing, etc) Will we see the same resurgence of sprawl as followed the petrochemical revolution? I'm not sure. Remote work has its niches but I couldn't imagine a serious major company like Google or IBM existing without a lot of corporate real estate and proximate workers. And as I've argued elsewhere on HN, today's professionals have professional needs: doctors, lawyers, teachers, all things they expect to have within their area. Rural areas and even small to medium sized cities have trouble competing for the best-in-class services that the upper echelons of professionals demand (and given that this class is both responsible for and generally the beneficiary of globalization, that makes it very hard to say that, say, Rochester, NY could become the next great tech hub (a decent tech hub perhaps, but no Silicon Valley) without a LOT more to attract the highest end professional class. Maybe self-driving cars (personally I predict RVs) will be able to make sprawl great again, but even then it would still be a concentration around a (albeit larger) major metropolitan area. Urban/rural was the most important divide of the 19th-20th centuries. It looks like it will continue throughout the 21st.

justinator 9y ago
Google, Amazon (for example), are building large work centers in desirable places to work, which are raising the cost of living of everyone else in the town that may not have a six figure income. Google is moving to Boulder, CO as we speak; Denver was on the shortlist for Amazon. It's the same problem with kicking out artists in a dilapidated warehouse area, and moving in boring professionals to live in lofts built on the same foundations: your renewed neighborhood loses all the reasons it was appealing. In Boulder already you cannot really afford living in town with a service industry job, but people who want to work in Google also want to go out and have a beer after work. Those service industry workers need to commute into town, which is time-consuming, adds expense, worsens traffic, and lowers their quality of life.

Animats 9y ago

Don't worry. Programming is becoming a blue collar job. Being an "electrician" in 1880 was a big deal, the high technology job of its day. By 1920 it was a union blue collar job. That's programming.

falcor84 9y ago
I don't see that happening; there's no sense for large companies to hire lots of blue-collar programmers, when they could just automate any of the routine repetitive work.
- ng12 9y ago
  What happens when we eventually train AI to write code for us? Then "programming" would be a lot more like data entry than creative work.
  - rossdavidh 9y ago
    You'll notice that the more real-world experience people have with AI, the less likely they think this is any time in our lifetimes.
  - jpindar 9y ago
    That's what the people who created Fortran thought. Instead, the types of programs people wrote became more complex once they didn't have to write them in assembler.
bigmario 9y ago
Lots of people make this claim with no evidence. It's understandable to feel insecure about future career prospects in our fast-changing industry, but honestly I'll believe it when I see it.
- Animats 9y ago
  Apply for a job as a PHP programmer and see what you're offered.

indubitable 9y ago

This article made me curious about something, statistic wise, with inequality. Imagine we have a kingdom of a million workers and one king. Inequality would be mostly invisible. Unless you compare yourself to the king (and who would dare do such a thing..), you're doing pretty well - or at least as well as average. But now let's imagine the king wants to modernize his land. So he starts developing and training people. And now we have 1 king, 50,000 skilled experts, and 950,000 workers. Well there's not that many of those skilled workers, so they must still be pretty special. It seems kind of unfair, but things are still pretty decent. And now imagine the king trains another 50,000 experts and grants 10,000 of the already existing experts vast tracts of land. Now we have 900,000 workers, 90,000 experts, and 10,000 lords. Now inequality is starting to feel very real. There are lots of these guys and they don't seem to be anything special. How is it that they're doing so well, while the majority struggles? I think we can say that the king's actions have greatly benefited society. Yet there's a strange paradox. As benefit, and privilege, comes to more and more people - it seems ever more unfair for those yet to benefit themselves. And now imagine by the time our hypothetical skilled individuals start to become the majority. It would begin to seem something beyond fair. As we start to see things like there being only 200,000 workers left, they would start to see their situation as more and more desperate. Indeed they would start to seem to be a sort of slave caste. A quick search for information to try to see if this is indeed what is happening yielded this [1] study which seems to lend some credence to this possibility. In particular they examined the percent of individuals in each income group, based on real incomes. These showed that the middle class has been substantially chiseled out (shrinking from 38.8% to 32% of the population) but that alone is disingenuous. What's happening to every class's population? Here are their data for this specific question: - Change in share of each class as a percent of US population. 1979 -> 2014 ----- - Rich: 0.1% -> 1.8% - Upper Middle Class: 12.9% -> 29.4% - Middle Class: 38.8% -> 32% - Lower Middle Class: 23.9% -> 17.1% - Poor or Near-Poor: 24.3% -> 19.8% ----- This seems incredibly positive at a glance, but this change in demographics has indeed resulted in very large measurable changes in inequality. In particular in 1979 the bottom 3 economic classes controlled 70% of all income, with the upper class and rich controlling the remaining 30%. Today those numbers have practically swapped. The lower 3 classes control 37% of all income to 63% for the rich and upper middle class. Though, on the other hand, the top groups have also more than doubled in size. One other issue I noticed is that the study (at least at a somewhat intensive glance) did not seem to meaningfully consider that many things critical to the growth and health of the lower classes, such as education and housing, have inflated in price far beyond nominal inflation rates. So real income measurements can be quite misleading. Nonetheless, I'm not sure why but I had not strongly considered this before. This article emphasizing the inequality as more of a changing of demographics than an existing demographic making themselves even richer was what brought it to mind. [1] - https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-incomes-upper-middle-class https://www.urban.org/research/publication/growing-size-and-...

dontlikeitupem 9y ago

Parts of East London were always there, but remained in the shadows, underdeveloped and relatively cheaply priced compared to the west and central areas. Everyone waited for others to make the area trendy, they needed someone else to socially validate and approve the area before they then came en-masse. They demanded new expensive bakeries, tweeted their delight with the distressed decor coffee shop, and simply purred about the expensive butcher. Then at some point later, those some people went on to complain the area had become gentrified. One day even the hipsters and shiny people will be priced out, and maybe the area will change again, but the original locals, who had business and family for generations there, were never asked about any of this, and the remaining few still don't have a voice.

gt_ 9y ago

My ex-girlfriend bought this book for me and it was one of the red flags that led me to break up with her. I still love her very much, but this gesture made it so evident she could not understand me. Forgive me father/HN.