Intelligence Density and the Creative Class 185
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Soulskill
from the iq-per-cubic-meter dept.
from the iq-per-cubic-meter dept.
Doofus writes "The Atlantic has an interesting review of some open-sourced work by Rob Pitingolo about the comparative educational attainment levels of various metropolitan areas. While people are now capable of being far more mobile than in generations past, many people remain within 100 miles or so of where they were born. For the technology-partition of the creative class, this is less likely to be the case, in my personal experience. Do we technical people put interesting work and the concentration of human educational capital ahead of other considerations when deciding on a move? Or is it more complicated? Is it more about the fact that the creative jobs are where the creative people are?"
Why would you have to move? This isn't 1910. (Score:4, Insightful)
So why would you have to move to create a concentration of "human educational capital"? We've got this think called the Internet ... you don't see all those jobs that were outsourced to India requiring that their workers move to North America or Europe.
Most of us... (Score:5, Insightful)
Creative class? Please join the real world (Score:5, Insightful)
Having a college degree makes you statistically more likely to have a job, and to be more highly compensated, but it's not at all clear to me that having a degree makes you part of a "creative class", whatever the fuck that is. Having a college degree also means you are statistically more likely to be white and to come from an affluent family. The transition from "educational attainment" to "smarter people" to "creative class" sounds great while sipping an $8 coffee and listening to indie rock, but in the real world it's pretty fucking condescending.
Carpenters are creative. ...
Mechanics are creative.
Landscapers are creative.
Welders are creative.
Stonemasons are creative.
Not all. Maybe not most. But probably not a great deal more or less than are coders, analysts, lawyers, doctors, accountants (maybe I'll give you that one!), and economists.
the point apparently (Score:3, Insightful)
is to riff upon the concepts of intelligence, education, creativity, mobility, and technology
basically, you can say just about anything within that huge scattershot area... and signify absolutely no thought of any value whatsoever
His analysis of the "density of smart people" is.. (Score:5, Insightful)
...not very smart. First off, it's silly to equate "smart" to "educated." Smart children of illegal immigrants who pick strawberries don't tend to go to college. Dumb children of business executives tend to go to college and get a degree in something, e.g., education, that doesn't require mastering any speficic, difficult body of knowledge. A college education is a middle-class entitlement in the U.S., like Social Security and Medicare.
The other silly thing about it is that first he tabulates the density of degree holders and finds out that degree holders are more dense where people are more dense. Wow, blinding insight. Then he tries to eliminate the effect of population density using a linear regression, which isn't the right tool for the job. If he wants to eliminate the effect of population density, he should just start with the percentage of the population that has a degree. His linear regression method produces results that obviously don't make much sense, e.g., that Oklahoma City has 544% more people with degrees than you'd expect. (See the note at the bottom of the chart.) Presumably this indicates that not only does every adult in Oklahoma City have a degree, but so do all their children, as do their dogs, cats, and major household appliances.
Well Said! (Score:4, Insightful)
I humbly disagree. We is not smart or creative. (Score:4, Insightful)
I cantankerously but humbly disagree with every conclusion of this article. I don't agree that college-trained people are generally smarter. I readily agree that college educated people are better at manipulating and understanding symbols and words than the general population. But they are not better at using the vast amount of stored knowledge and experience stored in those words and books to make their lives better. They are marginally better but not greatly so.
I live in Portland Oregon USA and hear constantly about the movement of smart and creative people into smart and creative cities, of which Portland is proclaimed to be. It is simply not true. People move here because life is easy here. We are a thousand miles from any urban center of global consequence.
For example, we have a company called Wieden+Kennedy, who are a world-renowned employer of creative people. They make advertising. Everybody loathes advertising, and everyone does as much as possible to minimize their exposure to it. If a person is really creative, then why would they be wasting their creativity on advertising? Hense they are not creative: they're just people who have the annoying talent of recycling cliches to sell things that no one would buy if they weren't persuaded to do so by 'creative' people.
Real creative people make useful things and solve real problems. In Portland, 'creative' people make nothing and create real problems.
As for the relationship between technical abilities and creativity: there is very little. Look at the vast majority of postings here on Slashdot that follow every story. Dim, moronic, childish, dull, embarrassing. Not creative. If there were any intrinsic connection between creativity and technical/scientific/engineering ability, we would see it here. We don't.
Creativity is what creativity does. You can't measure it. It's not a fashion and real creativity is rarely noticed for what it is.
There's something called "rest of the world", clod (Score:3, Insightful)
But then I realised this study was limited to a single country.
Re:it's more complicated (Score:5, Insightful)
I look for low density and a lack of diversity in restaurants. I am quite happy that you, and many other people, want something different than me, as it makes it easier to find what I am looking for.
Re:it's more complicated (Score:4, Insightful)
Since every other social study says that people with degrees flock together, living even in the same neighborhoods. Usually these studies decry how "terribly unfair" this is. Still it explains perfectly well what's happening here.
Ironically, this means that, as a university graduate, you're probably better of in one of the lesser density cities.
And frankly I resent the direct correlation made : "smart" != "university graduate". One does not imply the other, in any direction.
Re:Why would you have to move? This isn't 1910. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's about your priorities in life (Score:2, Insightful)
I totally agree with you, I have a master in CS from a good school and I turn down an offer to work at some megacorp in some megacity because I was happy in my hometown, and I was depressive as hell in the megacity.
Re:it's more complicated (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you're confusing 'smarter' with 'more prone to compulsive grade and approval seeking.'
It's pretty dumb to suck up with someone, merely because you've been trained to believe that their 'credentials' make them superior to you.
In case you didn't know, Universities are where wallpaper enthusiasts naturally congregate. There are a lot of slope-heads everywhere, including the halls of 'intellect.'
Now, go conform.
Re:it's more complicated (Score:2, Insightful)
The mass of jobs, not a job, attracts us... (Score:1, Insightful)
Most of us are not itinerant workers. We don't literally go where the next job is, with no locality. But at certain transition points in our lives, we examine the potential employment opportunities while judging where to transfer. I try to "go where the jobs are" which is not the same thing as to "go where the job is".
Someone like me would decline a job in Nashville unless it was stupendously high paying, to the point where it would offset my belief that I would not be happy there and I would not find a continued career after the job is over. A place like the S.F. Bay Area, while expensive to live, offers a hope of continued employment in many different jobs that would suit me. So the jobs in the Bay Area can attract me even before I've interviewed or been given an offer with any specific employer, while a fully committed job offer with one employer in Nashville would not attract me, because Nashville doesn't have that promise of many other relevant employers. Even now, when the Bay Area is said to have above average unemployment, it holds more promise for a specialized techie than some other podunk place.
Chicken and egg, sure, but not my problem as I'm not part of the Nashville leadership... this is where I agree with the comment about universities. They serve a big role in allowing the critical mass of employers to flourish in the same area, and hence to become attractive at this collective level.
Techical people are not the most mobile (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree with the thesis of this post. In my experience, technical people are not the most mobile people in the work force. People involved in high level business positions, airline pilots, diplomats, or people into artsy careers (music, acting) are way more mobile than tech people when it comes to moving far away from where they were born. Stop thinking you are special just because you know how to use computers.
Re:Geeks (Score:5, Insightful)
But less social also means it's harder to find friends in the new area, making moving much harder.
Re:There's something called "rest of the world", c (Score:1, Insightful)
If you want to compare the "intelligence densities" of Oxford and Paris, this isn't the study you want, because it only compares metropolitan areas in the United States.
Oh, it seems you've already realized that.
Wait, what was the point of your comment again? Because I can't discern anything but "flamebait".
Re:it's more complicated (Score:0, Insightful)
I hereby confirm that Pudge is a script.
Re:Creative class? Please join the real world (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a whole set of blue collar jobs that require quite a bit of creativity and intelligence.
There are just as many, if not more blue collar jobs requiring high levels of creativity and intelligence.
For example, a mechanic. Most mechanics are useless precisely because modern cars are more complicated and more difficult to understand for people who are not too good at visualing how complicated electronic systems work (i.e. most people.)
How about a machinist? That's another common blue collar job full of smart people.
Satellite communications technicians. Ever repaired a multi million dollar satellite terminal, the kind with a 20 foot dish and climate controlled shelter with racks of modems, multiplexers, signal converters, routers, amplifiers, etc? No degree required, only a lot of smarts.
Are you REALLY trying to say there's no correlation between educational attainment, and smarts?
There might be a correlation, but it's nowhere near as strong as you think. There are a TON of very smart people out there with little or no college education, and there are a TON of idiots with college degrees.
Re:it's more complicated (Score:2, Insightful)
And I feel smugly superior to you because I believe that my preferences for a wider variety of food reflects a more cosmopolitan attitude, which I view as having a more "sophisticated" quality.
Maybe GP is a supertaster. I know a couple of people who are supertasters. They stick to steak and potatoes, hamburgers with only ketchup, etc. One food at a time. Most vegetables and any foods with more than one or two ingredients make them gag. It's not as though they decided they wanted to only eat a few bland foods for the rest of their life; their taste buds are just really sensitive. The supertasters I know are jealous of people who can eat vegetables.