The actions of the free market have made goods less expensive for Americans, but the free flow of labor and capital has also diminished the employment opportunities available in the United States and will, the authors warn, continue to do so at all levels of society. Spence and Hlatshwayo suggest that policymakers acknowledge the trade-off between the cost of goods and the availability of jobs, and they explore policies that may improve it.

While the authors acknowledge that there is no simple policy fix to improve the trade-off between inexpensive goods and diminished domestic job opportunities, they argue that given the political salience of the issues at stake, policymakers must work to tackle this enormous question of inequality and economic distribution.

Unsettling stuff, to say the least.  You can download their paper here.

“If you look at what people are doing in manufacturing today, they are running robots, designing tools, programming computers,” Judith Crocker, director of education at the Manufacturing Advocacy & Growth Network, or MAGNET, a manufacturing promoter in Cleveland, recently told a reporter from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

This is true across the board, in every kind of job. When my colleagues and I parsed the data on the hundreds and hundreds of jobs that make up the U.S. economy, we identified key skills that matter to wages.

The first is well-known – “analytical or cognitive skill,” of the sort most people associate with knowledge work. While it is certainly the case that doctors, computer scientists, and software engineers earn more money based on their cognitive skills, analytical skill has an even bigger effect on wages for both blue-collar and service workers.

But the skill with the biggest effect on wages is the “social intelligence skill.” Much more than being friendly or outgoing, it includes the ability to help develop people, to organize them around goals, to recruit and lead teams and mobilize the right people for a project  – the cornerstones of leadership and effective management that add to organizational productivity.

Even more than with analytical skill, social intelligence increases the wages of knowledge workers but of blue-collar and service workers as well.

You can read more on this interesting take on workforce here.  But remember, not everyone is convinced of Mr. Florida’s abilities as an economic prognosticator.

DIY urbanists respond to the scarcity of urban space by opening it up to culture, community and the grassroots economy. The primary homeless demonstrate the scarcity of housing, social services and community resources in urban space by appearing in that space and using it for shelter and other necessities. So, whilst DIY urbanists and the primary homeless are responding to scarcity in very different orders, they share a reliance on marginal urban space.

You can read the full post here.

Prices at the pump have risen sharply in recent weeks. The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline has jumped 13.5 cents to $3.518 in the past week, according to the auto club AAA. Some parts of the country have seen even bigger increases, with prices approaching $4 per gallon in parts of California.

The even bigger risk: Rising tensions with Iran have raised the threat of a major disruption in global oil supplies, which experts say could send the price of crude oil skyrocketing. On Tuesday, oil futures rose on reports that Iran would cut off sales to six European countries in response to the European Union’s newly imposed embargo against Iranian oil. Iran’s oil minister later denied the report.

You can read the latest here.

“America’s App Economy – which had zero jobs just 5 years ago before the iPhone was introduced – demonstrates that we can quickly create economic value and jobs through cutting-edge innovation,” said Rey Ramsey, President and CEO of TechNet [the study's sponsor]. “Today, the App Economy is creating jobs in every part of America, employing hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers today and even more in the years to come.”

“The App Economy, along with the broad communications sector, has been a leading source of hiring strength in an otherwise sluggish labor market,” said Dr. Michael Mandel, the report’s author and President of South Mountain Economics and former Chief Economist for BusinessWeek.

The full study, entitled “Where the Jobs Are,” is available [here].

The two biggest centers for these jobs?  the Bay Area and the Big Apple.  You can read the MarketWatch report here.

Many students adapted to the overhaul more easily than their teachers, some of whom resented having beloved tools — scripted lectures, printed textbooks and a predictable flow through the curriculum — vanish. The layoffs in 2009 and 2010, of about 10 percent of the district’s teachers, helped weed out the most reluctant, [school superintendent Mark Edwards] said; others he was able to convince that the technology would actually allow for more personal and enjoyable interaction with students.

“You have to trust kids more than you’ve ever trusted them,” he said. “Your teachers have to be willing to give up control.”

The full story is here.

The Greenest Building explores the environmental impacts associated with the decision to demolish and replace existing buildings – and especially the carbon dioxide savings that might be offered by reusing and retrofitting these places instead of demolishing them. With generous funding from The Summit Foundation, this effort brought together a team of leading thinkers with unparalleled expertise in building and life cycle science. The study team included Cascadia Green Building Council, Green Building Services, Quantis, and Skanska. . . .

Notable study findings include:

• Building reuse typically yields fewer environmental impacts than new construction when comparing buildings of similar size, functionality and energy efficiency. This result was found to be true irrespective of climate – though differences in climate can affect the extent of savings

• The absolute carbon-related impact reductions can be substantial when these results are scaled across the building stock of a city. Consider this example: In Portland, Oregon retrofitting just one percent of the city’s office buildings and single family homes that would otherwise be demolished and rebuilt over the next ten years would help to meet 15 percent of the entire county’s total CO2 reduction targets. . . .
  

You can download the full report as a PDF here.

Tony Hsieh, the soft-spoken chief executive officer of shoe and apparel site Zappos.com (a division of Amazon.com) (AMZN) wants to turn the often overlooked and economically depressed downtown area into a dense urban neighborhood teeming with artists, entrepreneurs, and Internet workers. It’s one of the most unconventional redevelopment efforts in any American city, ever. Instead of soliciting public funds, Hsieh is spending $350 million of his own money to buy empty lots, seed new businesses, and subsidize schools. Next year he’ll move his company’s 1,400 local employees from suburban offices into the 11-story former City Hall (complete with jail cells on the second floor that may become meeting rooms). “What started out as a campus relocation project has evolved into a project to revitalize downtown Vegas,” Hsieh says. . . . “We decided on an approach that was more like NYU [New York University], where the campus blends into the city and you don’t know where one begins and the other ends,” Hsieh says.

There’s some weird poetic justice in this: the city that most embodies the current spirit of the US economy is being reshaped single-handedly in a manner that would make John Galt proud.  You can read more about it here.

The prototype version of MITx is scheduled for launch in spring 2012. MITx is an outgrowth of MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), which began in 2002. Building upon the inventory of nearly 2,100 MIT courses, MITx will offer the online teaching of MIT courses worldwide and the opportunity for able learners to gain certification of mastery of MIT material.

The launch of MITx represents a milestone both in terms of access to higher education and higher education credentialing. The significance of this event is that this shift is coming from MIT, more often thought of as a premier global university than a radical institution.

Beginning with a portfolio of selected courses, MITx is expected to grow over time. It will offer a compendium of courses needed for demonstrated competence in a given subject, including lectures, syllabi, online tests, feedback, group discussions, labs and interaction with MIT faculty.

If this isn’t a wake-up call for public higher education, it sure should be.  In the not too distant future for roughly the same cost, students will have a choice of getting credentialed from a prestigious institution like MIT, or getting a degree from a public college without the same cachet. There’s also the possibility that new “course aggregators” will emerge to offer students a lower-cost opportunity to get a degree by choosing the best courses available on line, bypassing traditional colleges altogether.

Here’s the challenge:  public institutions cannot compete by delivering courses in the traditional manner.  MITx and others of that ilk will be able to provide the equivalent learning experience at a competitive price.

From a strategic standpoint, the mid-level publics have to re-engineer what they are doing so that they can provide an educational experience that is much more compelling than the standard lecture or the standard on-line course.  In the current competition for students, many schools have focused on upgrading noninstructional facilities like health centers and student service to enhance quality of life for students.  This may just drive up costs and provide no long-term benefit either educationally or in terms of career chances.  (Indeed, a recent  study suggests that parents and prospective students understand this.)  Nonetheless, there are some interesting efforts underway to keep traditional public higher education relevant (see here and here).  And these are just the beginning of what will be profound changes.

The bloat of the housing boom is over. We’re living in a different era now — an era of new economic realities — and the relevance of the planning and development trades depends on their — our — ability to get back to the basics of urban growth and development.

It’s happening. The torchbearers profiled here reflect something real and growing and I encourage you to become a part of it.

The post has a series of profiles of the punk rockers of new urbanism.  You can read the full post here.  (Need a better sense of what he means by a punk rock revival in planning?  Just compare this with this.)