The Rise of the Slacker Strata

"The key to economic growth lies not just in the ability to attract the creative class, but to translate that underlying advantage into creative economic outcomes in the form of new ideas, new high-tech businesses and regional growth."--The Rise of the Creative Class, p. 244

We suspect that many of our readers are familiar with Richard Florida’s argument about the creative class and its connection to economic development. His very provocative and controversial ideas about how cities and regions can strategize for home-grown innovation and economic growth offer a welcome relief to many from stadium building boondoggles in urban areas across the world.

But of course, given the streak of contrariness (or sideways thinking) that epitomizes the FloatingSheep collective, we began wondering what the opposite of the creative class might be: The Boring Bourgeoisie? The Insipid Intelligentsia? The Lackluster Lineage? The Dull Derivation? The Mundane Moiety? Apologies, but once you get started it is hard to stop.

Even more fun, is thinking about the kind of public policy initiatives that could be put in place to attract these populations. Although we admit we’re at a bit of a loss as to why it would be in cities’ interest to do so.

Then it occurred to us that our two most popular maps – the Price of Weed and the Beer Belly of America – contained within them the means to provide a metric of sorts for the anti-creative class. Or at least places where the ability to be usefully creative would be severely compromised, i.e., where the price of marijuana is low and the available of bars is high [1].

In other words, we're looking for the Slacker Strata of America, the list that no city wants to be on.

Given the short attention span of our target audience for this map (the Slacker Strata) we kept our analysis simple and just “smushed” the Beer Belly map together with the Price of Weed map and added some more appropriate symbology.

The Slacker Strata

(please click for a larger version of this map)

Given the decidedly flippant approach to this map, interpret with care. One thing that does jump out is that many places that have a relatively high level of geotagged information about bars, also have relatively high prices for marijuana. Wisconsin and Minnesota (with the high concentration of PBR cans in the map) consistently show up as high price locations according to the Price of Weed data. Likewise, the places with the lowest marijuana prices generally do not have high numbers of bars, with the possible exception of Northern California and Taylor’s hometown of Louisville, KY.

Nonetheless, this visualizes an intriguing relationship, leading us to make an initial hypothesis that these two goods largely act as substitutes to one another, at least when considered at the macro-scale. This idea, of course, still needs testing so hold off on any public policy decisions!

btw, this map is now available in t-shirt form!

Stay tuned for our next post when we map hipsters!

[1] We’re sure that some readers are bound to argue that they are at their most creative when partaking. We have our doubts and request that said readers review the documentary evidence provided here, here, and here.

Flows, borders and complexity

This post is a bit eclectic, but represents a series of recent publications that do a great job of capturing what we find so fascinating about how information and materiality are in constantly shifting and mutual constitutive flux.

First, visualizations based on satellite images. They are some wonderful representations of both the mobility (roads, air traffic) and information flows (undersea cables) of the 21st century. These images show a vision of the world that is borderless and strongly interconnected, albeit with some clear hubs and hinterlands emerging.

Satellite images showing roads, air traffic, cities at night and internet cables
Source: Felix Pharand-Deschenes (thanks to Jeremy Crampton for alerting us about these)

In contrast, although not in contradiction, to this vision is Frank Jacobs' essay, "In Praise of Borders", which strikes a chord with our own work (see here or here), on the extent to which borders in the material world are replicated in the geoweb. Jacobs writes, "...we find enclaves and exclaves, disputed and neutral zones, improbably straight and impossibly jagged borders, deadly borders born in war and old ones almost faded into irrelevance. Borders reflect humanity’s need for obstacles, for a line in the sand between Them and Us. And even if they coincide with rivers or mountain ranges, they remain entirely human constructs. They are there because we expect them to be, because the map says that they are. They can be as wondrous, frightening and magical..." The argument that borders matter even in a hyperlinked world resonates deeply with us.

Finally, a post by Richard Flordia in the Atlantic Cities which plays with some of the data that we pulled together for the Price of Weed Analysis highlights both the spatial complexity of human activity and the potential insight that thinking through usual questions can bring.

All in all, lots of food for thought.

Taking a Closer Look at Pot Prices in the Northeast

Map interpolation is kind of like eating potato chips, once you start it is hard to stop. So today we offer a closer look at pot pricing in the Northeastern United States but be warned, there is actually intellectual content ahead as well. Also, with tongue firmly in cheek, we thought that the identification of less expensive marijuana could be our contribution to those hardest hit by Hurricane Irene, including Monica's home state of Vermont.

More seriously -- and here comes the intellectual point -- is the variance between different map interpolations based on thresholds and assumptions. Using all cities where more than one user uploaded how much they paid for weed, we interpolated the following map (using kriging based the 12-nearest points). This demonstrates the highly nuanced topography of marijuana pricing but as some cities are only represented by a single report the reliability of this nuance is more suspect. (Note: we did eliminate all price reports that were two standard deviations above and below the national average.)

For example, the strip of low prices to the East of Syracuse in upstate New York is sparsely populated and contains very few price reports.

Cost surface based on cities with at least one price report, n=>2

(click on map for a larger image)

Using only the cities where 10 or more people uploaded price reports results in the interpolated map below (also using kriging based the 12-nearest points). This provides a more smooth surface for the variance in prices as price as there are fewer points and the prices between cities are estimated. In this map the low price region east of Syracuse, NY drops out....But interestingly other patterns in the previous interpolation such as the lower prices in central south Pennsylvania around Harrisburg remain. Moreover the lower prices west of the Appalachian mountains is consistent across both maps.

Cost surface based on cities with at least one price report, n=>10

(click on map for a larger image)

Data Shadows of an Underground Economy

Following on from our "Price of Weed" maps featured in the September issue of Wired, we would like to make available the draft report that the maps came from. The full title of the paper is "Data Shadows of an Underground Economy: Volunteered Geographic Information and the Economic Geographies of Marijuana."

Please note that we are still working on the paper (so excuse any lack of polish), but would certainly appreciate any comments and critiques on the draft before we submit it for peer-review.

The Price of Weed

We’re very happy to report that a new FloatingSheep map is featured in the September issue of WIRED magazine under the title of "Infoporn: O Say, Can You THC?" [1]. Our map shows the differences in the retail price of marijuana based on user generated reports from the PriceofWeed website. According to WIRED, it offers "a look at the sprawling gray market that gets some high and others heated."

Retail Price of Marijuana Cost Surface
Interpolated from points where n > 2

Green = lower prices; Yellow = higher prices.

One of the things that jumps out clearly is the low prices associated with the marijuana production sites associated with Mendocino, Trinity and Humboldt County in California as well as Kentucky and Tennessee. See this National Drug Intelligence Center report on the distribution of marijuana production by state.

The map featured in WIRED is taken from a much more detailed research paper focused on the potential for user-generated data to shed light on underground economies such as marijuana use. The map relies upon thousands of user reports on marijuana purchases referenced to city locations from the Priceofweed website (see our earlier posting). After cleaning the data to get rid of the outliers, we created a continuous surface using a statistical interpolation technique known as kriging to identify the average variance among price differences through a spherical semivariogram model. To obtain a price for each location show in the map above, an interpolated value was estimated as a weighted average of prices from its twelve neighboring points.

One of the issues in generating these maps is how many observations we would require at each point (or city) before including it in interpolation. Increasing the number of observations (e.g., n > 10) helps control error in the average price at each point but limits the number of points. Lowering the sample size requirement (e.g., > 2) results in more points upon which to base the interpolation but increases price variance. In order to visualize these differences compare the map above (n > 2) with the map below (n > 10). While the first map shows a finer resolution of price variation (albeit with a decrease in the accuracy of the pricing data) it is consistent with the patterns resulting from the rougher resolution in the second map.

Retail Price of Marijuana Cost Surface
Interpolated from points where n >10

We’re in the process of finalizing a paper analyzing this data including a state and city-level multivariate analysis of price. Key explanatory variables in the models include the legality of medical marijuana, level of production and an intriguing distance decay effect as one moves away from Northern California. You can download the draft paper at this link. As always we welcome questions and critiques.

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[1] You know that someone had a lot of fun coming up with this title.

Crowdsourcing the price of Weed

In the last few years, we've seen how crowdsourcing has been employed for a range of important tasks including disaster relief in Haiti, monitoring the recent Kenyan elections, and now mapping the price of weed. This is a great example of how crowdsourcing can produce information that is simply unavailable otherwise. After all, there are no official price data on marijuana markets given its illegality.

Map from the PriceOfWeed.com Website
(Green = < $300 per oz; Yellow = $3oo-400 per oz; Red = > $400 per oz

Quite an interesting distribution with cost rising as one moves west from the Pacific coast (with Oregon being the cheapest). Florida shows up as a low spot as well. Both patterns are consistent with what is known about the geographies of production and distribution. Of course given the overall much lower reported prices for weed in Canada (is it subsidized?), one has to wonder if this site will only serve to further increase the US trade deficit.

We have previously done some analysis on the geographies of marijuana, if anyone wants to compare.

Google Ganja or Mapping Marijuana

We're sure that many were disappointed that the comparison between tobacco, alcohol and caffeine did not also include other possible vices. So these folks should be happy with the next series of posts when we begin to get into some of the geography of drugs.

We're going to start with a gateway posting to this topic with a quick comparison between user generated placemark references to tobacco and marijuana. Starting with North America one see that while the majority of locations have more references to tobacco there are plenty of places with more references to marijuana. California stands out as do Washington, Oregon, Florida and Ontario.

U.S. Map of Marijuana and Tobacco

Given the illegal nature of marijuana production in most of the U.S., production statistics are less reliable than those coming from the census. Still according to an article published in the Bulletin of Cannabis Reform (we have to admit this is the first time we've cited this particular journal), the top marijuana growing states are California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon and Florida. This corresponds well with our findings.

Moving up to the global level, tobacco again reigns supreme. There are pockets of marijuana production with Mexico (an important supplier to the U.S.) some interesting clusters in the Himalaya region of Northern India and Nepal as well as Morocco which supplies into Europe.

Global Map of Marijuana and Tobacco

The lack of any marijuana-preferring cluster around Amsterdam is a bit perplexing, to say the least, given its reputation as a site of pilgrimage for the weed obsessed.

Similarly, given that Kentucky is reported to be a major center of marijuana production in the U.S. (and the North American home of Floatingsheep.org), we were surprised to see that it did not show up very strongly in this map of the largest clusters of references to marijuana in user generated placemarks.
Perhaps marijuana growers are NOT documenting their production sites in Google Maps? Come to think of it, this makes quite a bit of sense...