The gay/hipster index

In your first book you state that diversity and especially the presence of a large gay community in a city indicates a level of tolerance that is a prerequisite for urban redevelopment in the creative era. In this book focused on the global creative economy you write that the concentration of foreign students is a leading indicator.

I call students the canaries of the global talent flow. The United States has the largest single number of foreign students, and we actually are very, very, very significantly concentrated among Indian students and Chinese-speaking students. But, for example, only 4 percent of our total student population is made up of foreign students, while in Australia 22 percent of the student population is composed of foreign students.

And in particular, the recent U.S. restrictions have hit hard at foreign students who compose the critical backbone of our high-tech industries. We couldn't have high-tech industries in the United States -- no matter how much we want to say we would -- without foreign-born engineers and computer scientists. We just wouldn't have them. We couldn't run them because we don't produce enough talent of our own. Fifty percent of the computer scientists in the United States are foreign-born, which is a huge number. But it makes sense. If you have a billion kids in India and China and a billion kids are trying to learn engineering and math and computer science, there are going to be a lot of really talented and smart kids, even if they're distributed at the same ratios as U.S. kids. And in the past that gave the U.S. a great advantage because we were able to attract the lion's share of the brightest, most technically sophisticated, entrepreneurial, motivated kids in the world.

So are you saying that a country like China or India might supplant the U.S. in terms of attracting talent sometime in the future? I told a friend about your Peter Jackson moment and he laughed and said, "It's not like a few hive workers from the film industry leaving for New Zealand is going to impair the U.S. economy."

No, it's not that any one country is going to emerge as the next great superpower and attract all the best talent. It's not like "It's going to be the EU" or "It's going to be China." That's silly. But if these increasingly competitive countries take 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 percent of the talent that used to come here, when you add that up over 10 to 20 countries, that's a huge loss.

And what's happening, of course, is that India and China and the Chinese-speaking countries are focusing on retaining their kids and attracting back their expatriates. And at the same time, Canada and Australia, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Sydney, Stockholm, Melbourne, London and Dublin are all trying to get a toehold on attracting really talented people from all over the world. So the global competition for talent is escalating just as the global competition in automobiles or electronics escalated two decades ago.

We've never seen labor markets on this scale that are so strongly global. And the United States is at a tipping point where we might lose our historical advantage. This book sounds the alarm. We better wake up because we can no longer take this for granted.

So how do current issues with regional and urban development fit into all this? In the book you call this one of the most potentially dangerous unrecognized or unaddressed factors.

Cities are the places that attract talent. I mean, consider that 90 percent of GDP comes out of metropolitan areas. And yet somehow some people think that we don't need cities. Not only do we have to open our borders, we have to strengthen our cities massively because they're the cornerstones of our ability to compete for talent. But for the past four years the Bush administration has done everything to prevent that, from huge decreases in infrastructure spending to drastic cuts in block grants.

And now most cities aren't equipped to compete anymore. The only policy we seem to have to revive our cities is to build another stadium. What does that have to do with attracting foreign talent? Who cares? No one cares. I've never met one foreign-born person that said "a new stadium" was an important factor when deciding where to live and work. The national government is clueless and our cities would rather be distracted by sports mania instead of paying attention to more serious issues.

My anecdotal evidence suggests that this is already starting to have a big impact. In terms of conversations and interviews I've had all over the world, it's quite clear that the competition for talent isn't just U.S. cities against other U.S. cities, it's the world. When I talk to people around the world, they might say, "Oh, New York is my favorite city." Or maybe they have one or two other U.S. cities -- "Ah, I like Chicago a lot, I like San Francisco a lot," or "I like Boston a lot and I like D.C. a lot." And then you start to hear a bunch of foreign cities. And now when you talk to young Americans graduating college, when you ask them where they want to move, after they get through their four or five top U.S. cities, it's quickly "I'll move to London or I'll move to Dublin or I'll move to Sydney or I'll move to Melbourne."

Next Page: "The big issue is not the Bush administration. It's the class divide"

• 
• Be the first to post a letter about this story
• View blog reactions