Forum for Innovation

What’s the most popular team in the NFL?  If you’re a fan of the 49ers or the Ravens, what team are your friends most likely to root for?  What’s the geographic distribution of NFL fandom?  All these questions and more that you didn’t even think to ask are now answered thanks to Facebook’s Social Graph.  Check out this link and the amazing charts below.

Richard Florida believes that the clustering of talent in America’s cities is a great thing—if you’re a skilled worker. If you’re not as highly skilled, Florida’s data in a piece for The Atlantic Cities seems to point to a large and sustained boost to median home prices that crowds out the less-skilled and lower wage workers in a given city:

“The benefits of highly skilled regions accrue mainly to knowledge, professional, and creative workers. While less-skilled blue-collar and service workers also earn more in these places, more expensive housing costs eat away those gains.”

Since this finding is in disagreement with Enrico Moretti’s finding that an influx of high-skilled labor into a city benefits everyone, it’ll be fascinating to see who gains the upper hand in this. One likely critique will be directed at Florida’s use of median house prices, since some markets have housing that clusters around multiple price points. At stake in this debate is the degree to which economic growth will be both broad-based and sustainable in America.

--

In today’s fight, we have in the ring Washington pundits vs. ivory tower economists, in a fight to see whether we really should be worrying about debts and deficits in America. In the end, Neil Irwin believes that the best blow deficit cutters can deliver is the “risk management” argument. That is, “We don’t really know what the future holds and if our debt levels remain in the trillions, we may have less capacity to deal with unexpected contingencies.”

--

According to Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan in Slate, “Management consultants can save the world.” As Reihan Salam points out, the key finding for this argument comes courtesy of Stanford’s Nick Bloom and other bright lights who’ve shown that management quality has a profound and lasting effect on productivity. The authors conclude, “Better management stands a far greater likelihood of making the world wealthier and healthier.”

--

Ryan Streeter asks, “Who’s richer—Durham, NC, or Abu Dhabi?” Thanks to data from The Brookings Institution’s Global Metro Monitor report, the answer may surprise you.