
Where U.S. Brainpower Tends to Cluster - smollett
http://www.citylab.com/work/2015/12/where-us-brainpower-tends-to-cluster/420102/
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mturmon
"When you factor in medium and small metros too, Ithaca comes in first, with
nearly 30 percent (28.9 percent) of adults holding a graduate or professional
degree."

This is not necessarily a good thing. While living in the home town of Cornell
U., I met a lot of underemployed people -- e.g., a holder of an MA degree,
working as a staff assistant in the French Department, while their spouse
finished up grad school. The amount of surplus intellect was staggering.

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xiaoma
> _just 11 percent of adults 25 and over have a graduate or professional
> degree. > >But where exactly are these super-brains located?_

The entire premise is flawed. Having a graduate degree is no guarantee having
a "super-brain".

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adenadel
You're right that having a graduate degree isn't a guarantee of having a
"super-brain", but having a graduate or professional degree is probably a good
proxy for the type of socioeconomic inferences they are trying to make.

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hackuser
Very interesting. I sometimes wonder why Detroit, with all that available,
inexpensive facilities and infrastructure, doesn't advertise itself as a
center for engineering talent. Why aren't people who need such things doing it
in Detroit, where it's cheap?

> engineering, the key to tech- and knowledge-based industries.

To take one phrase and make a larger point: Engineering provides us with
information and the tools to use it. Using knowledge (from our goals to our
understanding of the world) generally is the province of the sciences, social
sciences, humanities and arts (to th extent an artist works with data).

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oscargrouch
I also wonder why a country that has such a high interest from foreigners
wanting to live in it, dont create a special immigration policy, where it
would accept highly educated workforce, as long as they are willing to live in
places like Detroit, so those sort of cities could be eventually recovered..

Something like grant citizenship, but only if they accept to not migrate to
anywhere else for lets say, 10 years. The government would then choose
particular spots that could possibly get back from the dead, like Detroit.

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sirkneeland
A nice idea, but in US politics, what should be two discrete issues
(attracting skilled labor and managing the inflow of unskilled labor) have
somehow become hopelessly intertwined. One is regularly held hostage to the
other whenever an attempt is made to resolve it.

(This is a gross oversimplification of course, but that's why this post is the
length of a paragraph and not a 300 page book)

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oscargrouch
Yes, im sure a idea like this this would need much more work, and research, to
see even if its reasonable, then if it would be considered to be possible, a
lot of little details would need to be solved, to make things really work out.

Im sure this is a very tricky issue.. But if the US government would be really
willing to do something like this, which i think is really unlikely in
reality, they might sophisticate ideas like this further down, and maybe get
experiments like this to work well, and solve some hard problems along the
way.

You would be basically, importing "human energy".. Also of course, maybe start
small, and try to attract locals from other regions first, making some things
easier, like credit.. anyway this is getting out of control here.. heh,
stopping now before is too late.

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sosuke
Would a map of college density line up to those maps pretty well?

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ch4s3
or population density

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AnimalMuppet
The data is as a percentage of population, so no, it would not map to
population density. (Unless you assert that college attendance is nonlinear in
population density, which is probably true to some degree.)

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dboreham
Asserted. It is true to a very large degree. If you live in Montana for
example and need some sort of relatively non-trivial medical intervention,
you're getting on a plane to Seattle or Salt Lake. The people providing those
medical services can't exist in low population density areas. Same goes for
many many other types of service and profession.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
So Montana doesn't get the medical specialists, so Montana has fewer MDs per
capita than Salt Lake? That seems plausible.

I'll go one step further, though: I suspect that people in Montana visit even
a primary doctor less often than people in Salt Lake. I think this is partly
because the per capita income is lower, so that it becomes a higher bar to
decide to spend the money to see a doctor. But also I think that people in
Montana are just more independent. They'll try their Aunt Sally's home remedy,
or just ride out the illness or injury (not just because of money, but because
they'll take care of themselves, thank you). If that doesn't work, _then_
they'll see the doctor.

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dboreham
I'm not sure about that. We have plenty of general practitioners here, and low
income people often have subsidized or free medical care available. We just
don't have neurosurgeons, big-time cardiologists, oncologists who specialize
in one cancer field. Those folks need the throughput you can only find in a
big urban area, so that's where they are. They are often also associated with
teaching hospitals, and there are none of those in low population density
areas either (due to lack of volume). In fact there has been a heated debate
here in Bozeman about a proposal to build a (for profit) medical college here,
with various members of the medical community pointing out in letters to the
newspaper that we don't have the patient volume necessary for teaching.

