Should You Watch The News

This post was inspired by a conversation with some church members last night while we were at a function to cook dinner for a children's charity.  I don't mean to call anyone out, the conversation just surprised me.  I go to a fairly small Methodist church that has an incredibly active membership.  They do a lot of good work on many fronts to help people in our region and in other parts of the world.  Last night, while standing around watching one of our members grill burgers at this event, several of us were talking about a variety of things.  The subject of watching the news came up.  I think what spurred it was talk about a horrible truck crash that happened last week in our area.  One of the people said he doesn't watch the news... at all... because, "there's nothing good on the news."  To my surprise, most of the people standing there agreed.  Most of them, it seems, don't watch the news.

Now I understand how people can be turned off by all the negativity on both local and national TV news.  I understand how the persistent negativity actually stresses some people out because they feel overwhelmed, and sometimes really fearful, about all the bad things happening in this world.  But we are in a period of time where the world is changing rapidly and dramatically on virtually every level.  If you want to be functional in today's world, you have to have some sense of what's going on.  One thing that really bugs me about North Carolina is that the local, regional, and state leaders seem to still be operating from a 20th century, industrial age, point of view.  They seem to make decisions based on the way things worked 40 or 50 years ago.  Because of this, they are spending millions of dollars to try and get a major auto manufacturing plant to locate somewhere in NC to put people a few thousand people back to work.  But they're not spending a similar amount of money to encourage 21st century entrepreneurship, which has an even greater chance of creating a large number of good jobs here.  Teacher pay in NC is 42nd in the nation, according to a ranking I heard the other day, so education is not a major priority here.  The energy lobbies here are fighting solar and wind farms.  The list of old ideas goes on and on.  To top it off, a recent news report said unemployment is starting to edge higher in the state, which seemed to baffle everyone.

Could this reluctance to embrace today's world and today's technology be happening in part because so many people here simply don't watch the news?  I, personally, watch several TV news programs each day, and am always reading books and listening to online speeches and talks about the future of business, technology, communication, and society in general.  Few, if any, of the people I talk to day to day, do the same.  They are simply not aware that there is a brain drain in this country, where the smartest people coming out of college are heading to the U.S.'s mega-cities.  No one I know here is aware of the growth of mega-regions around this country and the world, which are simultaneously killing off many former industrial small cities and towns, including the region where I now live.  In effect, most of the communities in this U.S. are being run by the intellectual "2nd and 3rd string," as the smartest people migrate to the best jobs in big cities.  No one I deal with daily is familiar with professor Richard Florida's concept of "the Creative Class," the documented theory that today's best tech people and entrepreneurs are clustering in areas of "Technology, Talent, and Tolerance," as Florida puts it.  It's no news flash that the American South is not the most tolerant place, as the recent rebel flag controversy points out.  But these days, tolerance of fringe groups of people is not just a cultural issue, it's an economic development issue with huge ramifications. 

I keep my mouth shut most of the time with the people I interact with day to day, because they just don't spend the time I do learning about future trends.  But these trends to affect all of our daily lives.  Maybe watching and clicking on, and reading, and listening to various news sources is one of the ways people everywhere can begin to improve their own regions.  How much do you pay attention to what's happening in the world today?  Does an avoidance of news affect your life in a negative way?  I'll let you ponder that idea today. 

Where Have All The Jobs Gone part 2

This is a quick clip of professor Richard Florida, who has been promoting his findings about the "creative class" for about 13 years now.  As he mentions in this clip, this is where the real job growth is these days.

The region of North Carolina where I now live was once thriving thanks mostly to three industries:  tobacco, textiles, and furniture manufacturing.  It's no coincidence that the city of Winston-Salem is the name of two brands of cigarettes, and that the city's nickname, "Camel City," refers to yet another brand of cigs.  You know what's happened to the tobacco industry over the the last 20 years as the dangers of smoking were finally brought to the forefront.  For other reasons, the furniture and textile industry jobs have taken similar hits.  As I mentioned in the last post, we've lost thousands of jobs in this area, and millions nationwide to automation (robots) and out sourcing of jobs to lower wage countries.  Now this area is one of the worst in the nation in childhood hunger.  There are thousands of people looking for jobs that no longer exist.  The same is happening in the smaller cities and towns all over this country.  It's not just industrial age cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland that have taken the hit, but thousands of small towns and cities as well.  This is where Richard Florida's Creative Class idea comes in.

I first heard of the Creative Class concept in the local entertainment weekly paper about five years ago.  It made mention of the cities here trying to attract the creative class.  I was intrigued, and went on to read three of Richard Florida's books.  He was a professor at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, which had a great hi tech program.  Florida's area of expertise was economic development, something the struggling city of Pittsburgh sorely needed in the 90's.  But Florida noticed that the top IT students were leaving, going to the Silicon Valley in California, Boston, Austin, Texas, and other cities.  So he began looking into what was happening.  He learned that today's tech companies don't wait for smart people to come to them, the companies go to where the highly skilled people are in abundance.  This trend is a factor in why the majority of hi tech is clustered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, Seattle, L.A., Raleigh/Durham, Washinton D.C., and Austin, Texas.  That's where the big groups of highly talented people are.  In addition to the businesses moving to where the quality people are, the talented and creative people tend to move to cities that are tolerant of all kinds of people, have lots of jobs, and afford a good quality of life.  In short, highly creative people like to live around other highly creative people.  This has created a brain drain that is attracting the best and brightest people coming out of college to a hand full of urban areas.  Meanwhile, most of the rest of the country is falling further and further behind.  I happen to live in one of those areas that's way behind the times and is not attracting much in the way of tech companies at the moment. 

As I mentioned in my last post, Winston-Salem has spent a lot of money to develop a biotech research area.  They are actually remodeling the old R.J. Reynolds cigarette factory into a center for biotech research and start ups.  Time will tell if they are able to attract a significant portion of the biotech industry.  But they're trying, which is good.  Many other small cities and towns are trying similar tactics to bring hi tech businesses and the Creative Class people to their areas.  But we're still in a weird middle area where there are lots of people still looking for traditional industrial age jobs.  The majority of civic leaders in this area are still trying to bring industrial jobs back.  So we have a disconnect.  There are thousands of people locally, and millions nationwide, looking for jobs that are long gone and won't come back. 

After my last post about jobs, my friend Mike left me a link to Mike Rowe's Facebook page.  As you probably know, Mike Rowe hosted the Dirty Jobs TV show, and now hosts Sombebody's Got To Do It.  Through his shows, Mike has shined a spotlight on all the people working hard at jobs that aren't the most pleasant.  He's given props to the hardworking Americans who were never in the spotlight before.  But Mike Rowe is part of the Creative Class, he found his niche in the entertainment industry by being willing to do really physically demanding jobs... for one day each.  He makes a good living precisely because he is a creative guy.  The job growth in the future won't be in the jobs Mike does on his show, but in creative work like Mike Rowe himself does as a host and producer.  Isn't it ironic, don'tcha think?

The question remains:  what do we do with the millions of people who have the wrong skills for the highly creative jobs that are being produced in abundance these days?  What do we do with an education system that was designed to produce factory workers when there are few factories left?  How do we get the city leaders across the country to focus on inspiring the people in their area to create more new businesses and more jobs?  We are in a big, long, tough period of major change right now.  It's going to be really hard on lots of people.  At the same time, there are all kinds of opportunities for people using new technology and new ideas.  I don't know how this will all shake out, but we need a lot more people working on this issue than we have right now.