It's not enough to be smart, you have to be productive too

Today's Post has an article, "D.C. area ranks as the best-educated in the country:Study ranks D.C. area as the nation's best-educated," about how the Washington region has the most educated population in the United States. Too bad so many of the people with advanced degrees in the Washington region are lawyers...

It's not that lawyers aren't necessarily productive, but it does depend on the kind of law they practice. So much of government-related law is about manipulation or "rent seeking"-- it's not about rebuilding and extending "...the wellsprings of innovation and international competitiveness..."

As long as a preponderance of the region's best educated focus on rent-seeking, the country will not grow its way back to innovation.

When I go on vacation, part of my vacation is voraciously reading the locally available newspapers. (It also happens that Montreal has a large number of independent bookstores, and many many periodical stores, both of which are in serious decline in DC and in the U.S. more generally.)

That meant that while I was in Montreal, I read the Montreal Gazette, Toronto Globe & Mail (Canada's "national" newspaper with a role comparable to that of the New York Times in the U.S.), and the National Post (owned by a company which also owns local newspapers and a goodly amount of its stories may appear in the local papers), with occasional acquisition of the Toronto Star and the Ottawa Citizen (Ottawa is the national capital). (And I have clipped tons of stories that will lead, eventually, to a number of blog entries.)

In the Ottawa Citizen, there was an op-ed, "Why Canada needs a Great Reset" by Richard Florida, focusing specifically on Canada in terms of the five major points he made in his latest book.

I was most interested in point 3:

3) Speed up the velocity of people, goods and ideas. We need to connect our mega-regions with high-speed rail. The line connecting Windsor, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec City is an absolute priority. But high-tech solutions are only part of the answer. We need to rebuild our cities and mega-regions denser, with faster and less-stressful modes of transportation: mass transit, walking, and biking. Canada already has an advantage here. Eighty per cent of its people live in two per cent of its land area. And its top five city-regions produce 53 per cent of its total economic output, compared to just 23 per cent for the top five U.S. regions. While money is part of what's needed, we also need to do a lot of creative thinking about how people travel. If we do it right, there will also be less congestion for those who want and need to drive.

But for once, I was interested not in terms of the transportation aspect of "velocity" but in terms of the primacy and innovativeness and creativity of ideas and the willingness to challenge and supercede conventional wisdom and thinking, and mediocrity--to create knowledge, ideas, and products, not merely pass a law...

Rent seeking is about maintaining mediocrity and power, and that too often is what political "reform" is all about, making marginally incremental changes (sometimes improvements) while giving various well-connected sectors a free pass. E.g., a recent example is how car dealers--some of the worst offenders of manipulating the provision of credit to customers for business advantage--got exempted from being covered by a new consumer protection board.

The Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Karen Heller wrote a piece a couple weeks ago, "Pennsylvania, home of people who stay in Pennsylvania" about how people who stay in one place often are provincial or chauvanistic. From the article:

When your world is small, you tend to think small. You take for granted the bounties that you have while believing that what's inexorably wrong can never be fixed. You're not prone to adventure. You believe the broken way of our government is the way that all governments work, and you give up trying to change the system or your situation. You accept the inadequate leadership, the status quo.

With an enveloping love of home often comes a distaste for risk and a fear of innovation. And all of this comes at a price of stagnation.

Change, as someone once said, is good.

Now we can't claim there isn't a fair amount of "velocity" of population change in the DC region (although DC proper has a particularly high level of stasis in the African-American population), but maybe there is less mixing up of ideas and imagination and approaches regardless of where people come from.

A number of years ago, the heritage/economic development program Handmade in America (North Carolina) did a report on the creative economy in Asheville, Mapping Creative Communities: The Impact on Real Estate, with a definition of contributing professions slightly different from that employed by Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class.

Basically, I'd say that we need to drill down from the Census data and look at a much finer level of detail at the kinds of advanced degrees that typify the local population and determine whether or not the "best educated" are actually contributing to "innovation and international competitiveness."

The lobbyist lawyers are probably contributing a lot less to the economy than the lawyers whose practices focus on working with entrepreneurial firms in the software field, etc.

If we started looking at educational attainment data in this fashion, maybe we could start rethinking questions about the strength and viability and future of the American economy.

Here's a document I'll have to read...

Press release from the Washington DC Economic Partnership:

Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy Available for Public Review
District completes document as prerequisite for federal funding opportunities

The District of Columbia is pursuing an avenue of federal funding from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) through the development of a Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) which will bolster the City’s investment priorities. The EDA can provide funding for municipalities for economic development projects on an ongoing basis if a CEDS has been completed.

A Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) is designed to bring together the public and private sectors in the creation of an economic road map to diversify and strengthen local economies. The CEDS should analyze the local economy and serve as a guide for establishing goals and objectives, developing and implementing a plan of action, and identifying investment priorities and funding sources.

The drafting of a CEDS for Washington, DC took place over the course of the last year, and was jointly undertaken by the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development, the DC Office of Planning and the Washington, DC Economic Partnership. To view a draft of the Washington, DC Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy, please click HERE. The draft will be available for public review from July 1 to August 1. Public feedback should be submitted to ceds@wdcep.com by August 1, 2010.