Does the U.S. Constitution, and the migration of the educated, militate against growth of the knowledge society?

Three articles from The Atlantic taken together really worry me. These articles are all identified in the October 2006 edition of The Atlantic. To read The Atlantic online, a subscription is required.

1. "Where the Brains Are: America’s educated elite is clustering in a few cities— and leaving the rest of the country behind" by Richard Florida:

A merica’s social fabric has been regularly reshaped by great migrations—of pioneers westward, of immigrants and farmers to rising industrial cities, of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, of families outward from cities to suburbs to exurbs.

Today, a demographic realignment that may prove just as significant is under way: the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places. Such geographic sorting of people by economic potential, on this scale, is unprecedented. I call it the “means migration.”

In 1970, eleven percent of U.S. adults were college graduates; in 2004, 27 percent were college grads. Yet for the vast majority of counties in the United States, the portion of college graduates in the population has decreased.

about half of the residents of Washington, D.C., and San Francisco now have college degrees—versus 14 percent and 11 percent in Cleveland and Detroit respectively. The trends for graduate degrees show a similar pattern. In Washington, D.C., and Seattle, more than 20 percent of the adult population had an advanced degree in 2004, compared with 5 percent in Cleveland, 4 percent in Detroit, and 2 percent in Newark. In the downtown neighborhoods of high-powered cities, the concentration of well-educated people is even greater. In 2000, more than two-thirds of the residents of downtown Chicago and of Midtown Manhattan, for example, held college degrees.......

What’s behind this phenomenon? Some of the reasons for it are essentially aesthetic—many of the means metros are beautiful, energizing, and fun to live in. But there is another reason, rooted in economics: increasingly, the most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value.

The physical proximity of talented, highly educated people has a powerful effect on innovation and economic growth—in fact, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas declared the multiplier effects that stem from talent clustering to be the primary determinant of growth. That’s all the more true in a postindustrial economy dependent on creativity, intellectual property, and high-tech innovation.

Places that bring together diverse talent accelerate the local rate of economic evolution. When large numbers of entrepreneurs, financiers, engineers, designers, and other smart, creative people are constantly bumping into one another inside and outside of work, business ideas are more quickly formed, sharpened, executed, and—if successful—expanded. The more smart people, and the denser the connections between them, the faster it all goes.

Note that it is not only a city rural divide, but only a few cities are concentrating more and more of the educated citizens.

Great maps in the article indicate that these cities are in the NorthEast, the Central Atlantic States, the Rocky Mountain States, and the West Coast. Basically the politically red states are seeing their percentages of college graduates actually going down, while the politically blue states are concentrating more and more college grads.

2. "Primary Sources: A Hard Day’s Night":

For most of the twentieth century, the typical American workday grew shorter and shorter, and the proportion of American men working long hours dropped steadily. But since 1970, a recent paper points out, this trend has reversed itself: men are working longer hours overall, and the share of men who work more than fifty hours a week has been growing. This trend is most pronounced among highly skilled workers: in 1980, 22 percent of college-educated men routinely pulled fifty-hour workweeks; in 2001, 30.5 percent worked fifty hours or more. Meanwhile, low-paid workers are less likely to work long hours than in the past. The authors argue that this shift reflects a changing approach to compensation, in which companies give their salaried workers financial incentives to persuade them to work longer hours. The authors don’t attempt to explain why companies would be increasingly incentivizing fifty-hour workweeks, but they do note the information industries’ steady appetite for highly skilled workers as a potential source for this shift.

—“The Expanding Workweek? Understanding Trends in Long Work Hours Among U.S. Men, 1979–2004,” Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano, National Bureau of Economic Research

I conclude that the demand for knowledge workers, generally those with university degrees and advanced degrees is continuing to increase, while that for less educated workers is decreasing (or being supplied in excess by immigrant workers).

3. "Primary Sources: The Rich Are Different From You and Me"

What makes a red state red, and a blue state blue? It’s the voting habits of their wealthiest residents, according to a study from Columbia University. Although the GOP has traditionally been considered the party of the wealthy and the Democrats the party of the poor, lately Republicans have tended to win in the poorer states in the interior of the country, while Democratic victories have been concentrated in the wealthier states along the East and West Coasts. This trend has led pundits to argue that the Republicans have developed a common touch, while the Democrats have become elitist and alienated from the masses—but actually, the study’s authors argue, the red-blue gap is best explained by the fact that rich people in poor states are much more likely to vote Republican than rich people in well-off states. In Mississippi, for example, there is a strong relationship between income and voting patterns: the wealthier the Mississippian, the more likely he or she is to pull the lever for a Republican presidential candidate. But as a state’s average income rises, the correlation between being wealthy and voting Republican disappears. In Connecticut, for instance, there is almost no connection between income and voting behavior: both the poor and the rich tend to vote for Democratic candidates.

—“Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State: What’s the Matter With Connecticut?” A. Gelman, B. Shor, J. Bafumi, and D. Park, Columbia University

We know that there is a high correlation between the level of education and economic status. This is both because the well off can afford to send their kids to college, and because higher education, especially since World War II, has been a route to economic advancement in the United States.

So one group of the educated is increasingly moving to the big cities in the blue states and voting Democrat, while another group of the educated is staying in the red states, and voting Republican. I suspect this implies a very deep shift in the political landscape with important implications for the future of the United States.

One thing that really bothers me is that the Constitution of the United States gives voters in more rural states disproportionate political power. Each state gets two Senators, whether its population is big or small. So the many (red) states that are seeing their numbers of college grads go down get more Senatorial power per person than the large (blue) states that are the centers of innovation and economic growth for this country. Since there is one vote in the Electoral College for each Senator and one for each Congressman, the states that seem to be "educating down" also get more power per person in the presidential elections than the states that are "educating up". As the Bush-Gore election showed, this is not a distant threat.

If you believe the future of the United States depends on its becoming a knowledge economy, this is not a happy state of affairs. The red states, increasing left behind economically, with a smaller and smaller portion of the college educated peoples, are likely to use their excessive power to slow progress toward that knowledge economy. Indeed, the Bush administration approach to the knowledge seems to illustrate the concern -- it is a red state elected administration which appears antagonistic to scientific evidence when that evidence conflicts with its ideological positions.