Economic Engines

An Old Idea for the New App-Based Economy

With Uber and Airbnb, money flows out of a community. Co-ops could counter that.

Propelled by the idea of “the Uber of everything,” many people are predicting that ever-proliferating “network companies” will radically change the older ways of doing business in all sorts of new fields. READ MORE

What Is the Real American Dream?

‘How we see the present depends a lot on how we see the past.” This observation from Dane Stangler, the nonprofit Kauffman Foundation’s vice president for research and policy, was one of his summary points at a recent discussion on how to boost declining rates of entrepreneurship in America and, more broadly, the engine of broad-based socioeconomic mobility and job creation.

The key question, as Stangler suggests, is this: What is the baseline we should be comparing today to? Many people look back with nostalgia at a golden postwar era from 1945 to 1965, when the modern American middle class was built, and suggest that those kinds of economic conditions are what we should be trying to reproduce. READ MORE

Of Eyesores and Assets

If you look at a map of Terrassa, a medium-sized city about 20 miles from Barcelona in the Catalonia region of Spain, you’ll see a jagged green gash, about two miles long, running down the middle of the city. Until recently, this was a dark, imposing ravine that, despite cliffs studded with a historic castle, an ancient church and 19th-century brick mill buildings, was a place where few locals -- much less outsiders -- ventured. “It was a dirty, dangerous place where people were scared to walk,” a local taxi driver told me.

Today the ravine is a verdant canyon filled with walkways, bridges, small restaurants, playgrounds, lawns, trees and a pool at one end that you could practically float an aircraft carrier in. Parc de Vallparadis is clearly a well-loved and well-used space. Even on a late summer afternoon in the middle of a heat wave, it was filled with people. “My husband and I go there all the time,” said my taxi driver. “It’s the lungs of the city.” READ MORE

The New Unemployables

Job creation is up. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the associated decline in the unemployment rate has been driven more by people dropping out of the labor force than by those finding work. There are still millions of long-term unemployed people, and the disability rolls, partially seen as a form of shadow unemployment, have also soared. In the meantime, many employers say they can’t find qualified workers or that there are skill shortages.

This puzzling disconnect -- workers can’t find jobs while jobs can’t be filled -- has been attributed to many factors, such as mismatches between skills or geography. But while those may account for part of the problem, the issue is more fundamental -- one of baseline unemployability. READ MORE

Why the Word ‘Infrastructure’ Replaced 'Public Works'

I teach a course on infrastructure at the New Jersey School of Architecture in Newark, which offers a master’s degree in infrastructure planning. Harvard’s Graduate School of Design has the Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure. Meanwhile, planners and architects talk about “green infrastructure,” and presidential candidates debate the merits of an “infrastructure bank.”

But this word “infrastructure,” which I just managed to use five times in one paragraph without explanation, was not in common discourse 35 years ago in the U.S. and was just about unknown 50 years ago. Where did it come from, and what does its rise mean? READ MORE