Driving Votes: Kate's Blog - Archived Entry

I just finished reading a couple of papers for a class I am taking in Urban Economics...(A guy named Richard Florida if you are interested.)

To summarize:
The articles analyze a variety of factors to measure why it is that some of our cities have experienced an economic surge in high tech- as opposed to others.... To do this, they measured the geographic concentrations of among other things, bohemian, foriegn born and gay populations as indicators of high tech & knowledge based industry's location and growth. After many a regression, the author finds that the number one correlating index within our 50 largest metropolitan areas is the GAY index.**

What this means:
Economic theorists can look to the number of gay people living within a metropolitan region to predict both the concentration and growth of high tech industry. Tolerance and diversity in lifestyles actually positively effects where innovation takes place.

How cool is that?...What an interesting connection. Affirmation from the economists for what many of us believe anyways! Or as my prof. says, its something you can take to the bank.

What I think is: local politicians would benefit from reading more economic theory to pass policy measures allowing civil unions/gay marriage (ok its a little bit of a stretch but conservatives might actually like to have an economic rational to back them up-)

**I apologize for the geeking out, but I'm a grad student. I spend all day with this stuff.