Richard Florida: How the Crash Will Reshape America

The Atlantic Cover story by Richard Florida: "How the Crash Will Reshape America" is full of the authors' fascinating insights about economic geography and regional development patterns in the context of the current economic and financial crisis.

“No place in the United States is likely to escape a long and deep recession. Nonetheless, as the crisis continues to spread outward from New York, through industrial centers like Detroit, and into the Sun Belt, it will undoubtedly settle much more heavily on some places than on others. Some cities and regions will eventually spring back stronger than before. Others may never come back at all. As the crisis deepens, it will permanently and profoundly alter the country’s economic landscape. I believe it marks the end of a chapter in American economic history, and indeed, the end of a whole way of life.”

Florida does not deal specifically with the Denver Region in the text of the story, instead focusing more attention on places like New York, the Rust Belt and California, but many of his insights are very relevant for the Front Range.

"In fact, as I described in an earlier article for this magazine (“The World Is Spiky,” October 2005 [link opens PDF]), place still matters in the modern economy—and the competitive advantage of the world’s most successful city-regions seems to be growing, not shrinking. To understand how the current crisis is likely to affect different places in the United States, it’s important to understand the forces that have been slowly remaking our economic landscape for a generation or more....

The ability of different cities and regions to attract highly educated people—or human capital—has diverged, according to research by the Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and Christopher Berry, among others. Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented. "

The interactive maps showing different aspects of economic geography such as patent production, income and population are fascinating and worth exploring. They help reinforce two of the Denver Region's two key characteristics: its spatial isolation and economic vitality. Its particularly striking to see how potent, the Front Range's two college towns, Boulder and Fort Collins have been as patent generators. This clearly bodes well for the region's future economic health.