1/OK, I should really write another thread about university-centric regional development, because I think people often make some (very understandable) mistakes when thinking about this issue.

2/The biggest myth, I think, is that universities help regions by educating locals as undergraduates.

Skeptics of universities say: "But most of the people who graduate end up leaving."
3/In fact, most of what a university does for a regional economy is NOT about educating local kids.

Educating local kids is good for the nation, but doesn't help a region much.

The way a university helps a region is through RESEARCH.

https://t.co/zud8wNQDTh
4/Undergraduates usually leave town after graduation.

But university RESEARCH pulls in OTHER smart people from other regions, and they stay there.

Here's a paper showing that this is the main way universities increase a region's human capital: https://t.co/ofu256tsFi
5/Research also pulls in business investment.

Companies want to partner with university labs, so they can commercialize the technologies the labs produce. So they invest in the labs, and sometimes they even put their offices in the town.
6/So should we be worried that college enrollment is dropping?
https://t.co/NiVzQVgn5I

Answer: A little bit. But mainly because this means less tuition money that can be used to fund university research labs.
7/Yes, it would be great if universities were allowed to admit more foreign students (who pay high tuition that can be used to fund research labs that draw in smart workers and business investment).

BUT, the most important thing is to fund research more!!
8/Myth #2 is the idea that a university only helps a region if it creates a new technology cluster - a "next Silicon Valley".

Critics of university-centric development like to point out that the probability of succeeding at this is very low.

But this doesn't really matter.
9/Universities help regions even when they don't become the "next Silicon Valley".

My hometown of College Station is no Silicon Valley. But College Station, and its surrounding region, are thriving thanks to a university.

https://t.co/2GduLv9SL5
10/Even a humble, non-prestigious university can help a declining region in real, important ways.

Beyond the research-and-investment thing I discussed earlier, universities also draw in residents from small towns, creating pleasant small cities.
https://t.co/2xqpKdMZUs
11/And even if a town doesn't become a tech cluster, universities can help local business, government, and nonprofit leaders plan local industrial development.

https://t.co/hYSbEKxeV8
12/Finally, Myth #3 is the idea that university-centric development needs prestigious universities like Harvard to build new branch campuses.

In fact, this is unlikely to be a useful approach. https://t.co/uxUcLHzmON
13/We already HAVE tons of universities and colleges in almost all regions of America.

What we have to do is UPGRADE the RESEARCH CAPABILITIES of the second- and third-tier universities.
14/How do we upgrade existing 2nd- and 3rd-tier universities?

1. By spending more research dollars there

2. By encouraging companies to partner with the labs there

3. By letting these universities admit more high-paying foreign students

4. A new land grant program?
15/To sum up, the three big myths of university-centric development are:

1. The myth that education is the main thing universities do for a town

2. The myth that universities need to create the "next Silicon Valley"

3. The myth that new branch campuses are the answer
16/University-centric regional development is about research. It's about drawing in businesses. It's about drawing in people and creating a pleasant, efficient city in a declining region. It's about coordinating leadership to boost local growth.

And it works.

(end)

More from Noah Smith

When Republicans started to believe in racial bloc voting - when they stopped believing that nonwhite people could ever be persuaded to vote Republican - they started to see immigration as an invasion.

This explains why immigration is now at the center of partisan conflict.


Of course, the belief in ethnic bloc voting becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When a slight Dem tilt among Hispanics and Asians caused the GOP to turn against them, Hispanics and Asians shifted more toward the Dems. Etc. etc. A self-reinforcing cycle.

Bush's 2006 amnesty attempt, and the 2013 intra-GOP fight over immigration reform, were two moments when the GOP could have turned back to the approach of Reagan, and courted Hispanics and Asians.

But they decided against this, and...here we are.

What will disrupt this bad equilibrium, and save American politics from being an eternal race war?

Either:
A) More white voters will grow disgusted with the GOP approach and defect, or
B) The GOP will find some non-immigration-related issues to attract more Hispanics and Asians.

As long as both parties see elections in terms of racial bloc voting - where the only way to win is to increase turnout among your own racial blocs or suppress turnout by the other party's racial blocs - American politics will not improve, and the country will decline.

(end)
1/Lots of tech companies and workers are making noises about leaving San Francisco, LA, NYC, and other "superstar" cities.

Some are predicting a shift to remote work and distributed companies.

Let's take a hard look at what that would actually

2/We're all familiar with the trend of tech companies and other knowledge industries (finance, biotech, etc.) piling into a few tech hubs, raising rents and house prices.

Now some think the advent of Zoom, Slack, etc. might reverse this trend.

https://t.co/nQVCJrKvrB


3/But escaping the superstar cities is going to be tough.

The forces keeping tech companies in places like SF are so strong that these regions have essentially become prisons for these companies.


4/In order to escape the prison of the superstar cities, tech companies and other knowledge industries will have to overcome the Four Jailers of Industrial Clustering:

1. In-person office productivity

2. Thick market effects

3. Knowledge spillovers

4. City life amenities

5/I'm actually pretty optimistic that companies can find ways to make remote work productive.

Studies show that working from home *some* of the time actually tends to raise

More from Society

global health policy in 2020 has centered around NPI's (non-pharmaceutical interventions) like distancing, masks, school closures

these have been sold as a way to stop infection as though this were science.

this was never true and that fact was known and knowable.

let's look.


above is the plot of social restriction and NPI vs total death per million. there is 0 R2. this means that the variables play no role in explaining one another.

we can see this same relationship between NPI and all cause deaths.

this is devastating to the case for NPI.


clearly, correlation is not proof of causality, but a total lack of correlation IS proof that there was no material causality.

barring massive and implausible coincidence, it's essentially impossible to cause something and not correlate to it, especially 51 times.

this would seem to pose some very serious questions for those claiming that lockdowns work, those basing policy upon them, and those claiming this is the side of science.

there is no science here nor any data. this is the febrile imaginings of discredited modelers.

this has been clear and obvious from all over the world since the beginning and had been proven so clearly by may that it's hard to imagine anyone who is actually conversant with the data still believing in these responses.

everyone got the same R

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