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.

Map of Wikileaks list of facilities 'vital to US security'

One of the most interesting, and perhaps controversial, bits of information from the recent release of the Wikileaks US embassy cables has been the list of locations deemed vital to US security. Since this information is now in the public domain, we were interested in visualizing the data spatially.


The first step was to take the rather messy data and identify individual entries. In some cases it was no more specific than "Indonesia: Tin Mine and Plant". In other cases it named a pipeline, a port, or a city in which an undersea cable made landfall. Next, using the worldatlas.com geocoder (as well as some Wikipedia entries), we (along with the much appreciated help of Zach U. and Tim B.) located an approximate latitude and longitude for each of the locations mentioned in the cables.

We wish to emphasize that the locations in our mashup are only for the cities in which these critical facilities are located, and not the actual facilities themselves. In some cases, the location in the map is no more detailed than the country. Given this relative inaccuracy, this map does not present any security threat whatsoever. Moreover, all the data sets used for this geo-coding are openly available on the Internet and could easily be replicated by anyone.

Our purpose is to visualize the patterns exhibited by this particular data set, which are illustrated below. The categories in the legend are our own classifications based on the information provided by Wikileaks (you can view a larger, non-embedded version of our mashup here, or download a KMZ file of the mashup here that should automatically load into Google Earth. The KMZ version also allows you to turn on and off categories as you wish).

Map Legend

It is interesting to note that the vast majority of these facilities are not directly military-related. Even the ones that we mark as 'military' are related industrial facilities rather than actual bases. Instead, the list seems to focus on non-military topics such as telecommunications, energy and pharmaceuticals. Much of the list is also focused on supplies of important raw materials (Bauxite, Chromite, and Rare Earth Minerals), as well as the ability to move products through ports and shipping channels.

Share of Facilities by Type

Telecommunications	28%
Energy	18%
Pharmaceuticals	13%
Border_Crossing	11%
Raw_Material	10%
Port	7%
Military	5%
Industrial	4%
Shipping	3%
Dam	2%

These data offer a fascinating insight into the ways that the national security priorities of the United States span the entire globe. This global web of essential facilities goes a long way to explain the fact that the US Department of Defense has more military facilities around the world than all other nations combined. The globalization of the world economy means that facilities that are vital to the communication, health, and economic needs of the U.S. are scattered across the planet; and this ultimately means that the U.S. (as well as other developed and developing countries) have to contend with new and changing notions of what "security" means in the 21st century.

We are truly living in a network society.

See also:
A choropleth map depicting the number of facilities in each country, made by some folks at University College London.

A map of all the Wikileaks cables.

And, a user-generated effort to plot the cables.