We may talk a good game about talent, but it’s time that at the top of our leaders’ priorities is to make Memphis a city of choice for college students.
We may tend to lean on the ropes and take punch after punch from study after study, but it’s time to realize that we may no longer even be in the fight.
We may pretend that Atlanta and Nashville are our peer cities, but there are growing indications that it’s a civic exercise in wishful thinking.
These are conclusions that we’ve reached after reading reports released in recent days that should jolt all of us into action. It’s just no longer possible to pretend that somehow things aren’t dire and that we’re competing powerfully in today’s economy.
The Deficit
We’ve written often about Memphis’s talent deficit and how it dramatically limits our economic potential. At a time when about 60% of a city’s economic success is tied to the presence of college-educated people, we seem to be bleeding out when it comes to keeping young talent. We’re losing an average of five a day, which sets the bar even higher as we try to add 8,000 college graduates a year to achieve the “Memphis Talent Dividend,” the 1% increase in college-educated students that produces $1 billion in new economic impact.
In other words, when we talk about Memphis becoming a “city of choice,” it has to become the place where students with choice go to college. It won’t be easy, because we’re in a deep hole, and also, because we talk a much better game than we play. For example, we talk a lot about the need for more talent and childhood intervention, but when it’s time to prepare state and federal legislative agendas, they are overlooked.
It reflects a trait we’ve mastered. When new defining issues appear that are shaping the future of cities – from regionalism to the creative economy to tax breaks to talent – our leadership does a great job of learning the language and co-opting the vocabulary, but rarely do their behaviors change. As a result, while using the right words, we do little to change our strategies or to reward the groups that are innovatively dealing with them.
We’ll spend millions chasing traditional economic development ideas while programs outside of the mainstream to create entrepreneurs or to attract more talent languish for lack of a fraction of the money. We’ll send legislative agendas to Nashville year after year that chase tougher sentences and more prosecutors while ignoring interventions to remove juveniles from the criminal justice system that often sets the arc of their lives.
Bottom of the List
But to get back to the subject at hand, we need to have programs and investments that establish Memphis as a college destination city. We have a ways to go.
The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) publishes a yearly ranking of the best cities in which college students should live. Factors include student concentration per 1,000 residents; student diversity; research capacity, per cent of 25-34 year-olds with college degrees; cost of living; arts and leisure; commuting by foot, bike or public transit; presence of creative class; entrepreneurial activity, and brain gain/drain.
We’ve written often about most of these data points, so it should be no surprise that of the 31 mid-sized cities (1-2.5 million population), Memphis is ranked #30 as a college destination city. Only New Orleans is lower. In the three broad categories that create the overall rate, Memphis finishes next to last (#30) in academic environment, last (#31) in quality of life, and next to last (#30) in professional opportunity.
The top 10 rankings for mid-size metros in order are San Jose, Austin, Raleigh, Hartford, Portland OR, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Rochester, Buffalo, and Nashville.
More Density Needed
There’s no argument that the concentration of college-educated and highly-skilled workers is a key determinant in economic growth. It’s also well-accepted that density of talent matters.
The map above shows college degree holders per square kilometer, and it’s pretty easy to see the connection between higher density and economic success of cities. Interestingly, especially for the people who are always talking about how the tax rate here drives away jobs and why we need more tax freezes, many of the most successful cities have high taxes. It’s not so much how much someone has to pay in taxes, but whether those people feel that they receive value for them.
To complicate things, besides our low talent density that we have in Memphis, we also underperform for a city of our size.
It’s Not Comforting
Further insight comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in its “Knowledge in Cities” report, since it looked beyond college degreed residents to think about the type of knowledge used in the workforce. The “clusters” range from Making Regions, characterized by knowledge about manufacturing, to Thinking Regions, noted for knowledge about the arts, humanities, information technology, and commerce.
The report said: “In addition these knowledge-based clusters help explain the types of regions that have levels of economic development that exceed, or fall short of, other places with similar amounts of college attainment. Regression results show that Engineering, Enterprising, and Building Regions are associated with higher levels of productivity and earnings per capita, while Teaching, Understanding, Working, and Comforting Regions have lower levels of economic development.”
Memphis is a “comforting region” and that’s bad news. We’re with a group of places we’d rather not be in company with: Abilene, Atlantic City, Buffalo, Columbus GA, Lubbock, Fayetteville, El Paso, Hattiesburg, Monroe, Shreveport, Spokane, Syracuse, Topeka, and Waco.
None of the cities that we regularly name as our peers are in this “comforting region.” Most of them are in “enterprising regions,” including Atlanta, Birmingham, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Louisville, Milwaukee, Nashville, Oklahoma City, Tampa, Richmond, and Minneapolis. Enterprising regions have high knowledge about commerce and IT while comforting regions like ours have lower engineering and production knowledge and high mental health knowledge.
Cold Water Facts
There’s nothing comforting in being called a “comforting region.” More to the point, “comforting regions” like ours have lower economic growth than the “enterprising regions” that we like to say we’re competing with.
All of this data should be the equivalent of a jolt of cold water on those who engage in happy talk about our city, who act as if we can just limp along with no ill effect until Superman rescues us and who try to convince us that it’s more important for them to be in power than for us to do something to turn things around.
We have to change the trajectory of Memphis. There’s no denying it any longer. Is there really any need for a wake-up call more convincing that the reality that our peer group is now Shreveport and Lubbock?
I don’t understand the 2 maps relative to your narrative. Is “Human Capital Density” (1st map) the same as population density? What is “Residual Human Capital Density” (2nd map)?
The first map is the number of college degreed people per kilometer. The second is how much we’re below what would be expected based on our density.
“It reflects a trait we’ve mastered. When new defining issues appear that are shaping the future of cities – from regionalism to the creative economy to tax breaks to talent – our leadership does a great job of learning the language and co-opting the vocabulary, but rarely do their behaviors change. As a result, while using the right words, we do little to change our strategies or to reward the groups that are innovatively dealing with them.”
Our EX Leadership, were definitely BS artists and Con men. There’s no missing that here.
Co-opting language and delivering nothing for it. Yep, hallmarks of a con man and BS artist.
Good call.
Maybe we should send each and every new leader through a training program so that all leadership in Memphis will be on the same page.
“Interestingly, (edit) many of the most successful cities have high taxes.
It’s not so much how much someone has to pay in taxes, but whether those people feel that they receive value for them.”
Actually, if those cities were compared to Memphis per capita on a ratio comparing services along tax per capita, there’s is where the difference would be seen.
I imagine it would be quite stark, it would probably really outline how Memphis’ government policies, and MCS rip off their citizens almost like a gang rape. I imagine that if people got wind of how much they are being ripped off they might take some inappropriately hasty action, like pulling people out of their offices by force and god knows what else. Not advocating it, but, it has happened when the stakes are dire, as they are here now.
Below is a long but interesting read, look for similarities.
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Nicolae Ceauşescu comes to mind:
Ceauşescu’s government was overthrown in a December 1989 revolution, and he and his wife were executed following a televised and hastily organised two-hour court session. One of the executioners later said: “it wasn’t a trial, it was a political assassination in the middle of a revolution.”
A new problem was created by child abandonment, which swelled the orphanage population (see Cighid). The transfusions of untested blood, led to Romania accounting for many of Europe’s paediatric HIV/AIDS cases at the turn of the century despite having a population that only makes up around 3% of Europe.
In the 1980s, Ceauşescu ordered the export of much of the country’s agricultural and industrial production in order to repay its debts. The resulting domestic shortages made the everyday life of Romanians a fight for survival as food rationing was introduced and heating, gas and electricity black-outs became the rule. During the 1980s, there was a steady decrease in the living standard, especially the availability and quality of food and general goods in stores. The official explanation was that the country was paying its debts and people accepted the suffering, believing it to be for a short time only and for the ultimate good.
The debt was fully paid in summer 1989, shortly before Ceauşescu was overthrown, but heavy exports continued until the revolution in December.
While the country was going through extremely difficult times with long bread queues in front of empty food shops, he was often shown on state TV entering stores filled with food supplies, visiting large food and arts festivals, while praising the “high living standard” achieved under his rule.
Some people, believing that Ceauşescu was not aware of what was going on in the country, attempted to hand him petitions and complaint letters during his many visits around the country. However, each time he got a letter, he would immediately pass it on to members of his security. Whether or not Ceauşescu ever read any of them will probably remain unknown.
Demonstrations in the city of Timişoara were triggered by the government-sponsored attempt to evict László Tőkés, an ethnic Hungarian pastor, accused by the government of inciting ethnic hatred. Members of his ethnic Hungarian congregation surrounded his apartment in a show of support.
Romanian students spontaneously joined the demonstration, which soon lost nearly all connection to its initial cause and became a more general anti-government demonstration. Regular military forces, police and Securitate fired on demonstrators on December 17, 1989. On December 18, 1989, Ceauşescu departed for a visit to Iran, leaving the duty of crushing the Timişoara revolt to his subordinates and his wife. Upon his return on the evening of December 20, the situation became even more tense, and he gave a televised speech from the TV studio inside Central Committee Building (CC Building), in which he spoke about the events at Timişoara in terms of an “interference of foreign forces in Romania’s internal affairs” and an “external aggression on Romania’s sovereignty”.
The country, which had no information of the Timişoara events from the national media, learned about the Timişoara revolt from western radio stations such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, and by word of mouth. On the next day, December 21, a mass meeting was staged. Official media presented it as a “spontaneous movement of support for Ceauşescu”, emulating the 1968 meeting in which Ceauşescu had spoken against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact forces.
[edit]Overthrow
The mass meeting of December 21, held in what is now Revolution Square, degenerated into chaos. The image of Ceauşescu’s uncomprehending expression as the crowd began to boo and heckle him remains one of the defining moments of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. The stunned couple (the dictator and his wife), failing to control the crowds, finally took cover inside the building, where they remained until the next day.
Ceauşescu and his wife Elena fled the capital with Emil Bobu and Manea Mănescu and headed, by helicopter, for Ceauşescu’s Snagov residence, from where they fled again, this time for Târgovişte. Near Târgovişte they abandoned the helicopter, having been ordered to land by the army, which by that time had restricted flying in Romania’s air space. The Ceauşescus were held by the police while the policemen listened to the radio. They were eventually turned over to the army. On Christmas Day, December 25, the two were sentenced to death by a military court on charges ranging from illegal gathering of wealth to genocide, and were executed in Târgovişte. The video of the trial shows that, after sentencing, they had their hands tied behind their backs and were led outside the building to be executed.
The Ceauşescus were executed by a firing squad consisting of elite paratroop regiment soldiers: Captain Ionel Boeru, Sergant-Major Georghin Octavian and Dorin-Marian Cirlan[13], while reportedly hundreds of others also volunteered. The firing squad began shooting as soon as they were in position.
Ceauşescu is the only recipient of the Danish Order of the Elephant ever to have it revoked.[dubious – discuss] This happened on December 23, 1989, when Queen Margrethe II ordered the insignia to be returned to Denmark, and for Ceauşescu’s name to be deleted from the official records.
Ceauşescu was likewise stripped of his honorary GCB (Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath) by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom on the day before his execution. Queen Elizabeth also returned the Romanian Order Ceauşescu had bestowed upon her.[25]
On his 70th birthday in 1988 Ceauşescu was decorated with the Karl-Marx-Orden by then Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) chief Erich Honecker; through this he was honoured for his rejection of Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.
See any similarities to what we’ve been through here?
I see plenty of them, too many. People are boiling here.
I have a few Hungarian friends and one who was there told me that what you won’t find is how they really died, they were bound by the hands and dragged through town by horses until dead, then dragged some more.
I bet that won’t appear on Wiki.
The point, people love the new mayor, but, they’re fed up with city council, county commission, and the school board’s antics.
Fed up.
Richard Florida makes clear that a well accepted and protected (legally) gay and lesbian community helps to foster a creative class. I think looking at the current local gay rights debate (and lack of leadership from the city Mayor) speaks volumes about the distance Memphis needs to travel.
There’s a LOT of things ha hallmark the gap between Memphis and the reality of the rest of the country.