Month: June 2014

5 ways the world will change in five years: Non-Obvious Dinner

How will the world change in the next 5 years? That is the prompt for the annual ‘Non-Obvious Dinner’ organized by Jeff Rollins and Ben duPont, two entrepreneurship leaders whom I’ve come to meet in launching Technical.ly Delaware.

I was among 100 guests invited by the pair to the historic Wilmington Club earlier this month asked to arrive with an answer to that question. First, over dinner, we shared at tables of 10, and we chose the best at our table to present to the entire group, and one was chosen as the most interesting and believable way the world would change in the next five years. (here is another idea from someone who attended last year)

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Where is the land of opportunity?

What role can entrepreneurship and tech jobs play in helping more people earn more than their parents? And is the answer different by the region?

A team of Harvard and Berkeley economists led by Raj Chetty just released new research on the “geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States.” Using anonymized tax records of more than 40 million parents and children, they tracked where in the U.S. the American Dream—earning more than your parents—has the best chance of coming true.

The results are striking. Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Boston and Silicon Valley (San Jose and San Francisco) topped the list of large regions with the highest rates of upward mobility. At the other end: Detroit, Indianapolis, Atlanta and Charlotte. New York City and Washington D.C. both cracked the top 15. Philadelphia landed right in the middle of the pack—above Austin, Phoenix and Chicago. Baltimore placed in the bottom third, but still above Nashville.

So what is “upward mobility” in this context? Chetty’s team measured the odds that a child born to parents in the bottom fifth of income makes it to the top fifth. In Charlotte, the chance was just 4.4%. In San Jose, it was nearly 13%. That’s the difference between being one of the least mobile developed countries in the world and matching Denmark, often cited as the most mobile.

The researchers found five community factors most associated with higher mobility: less residential segregation (people with different incomes lived near each other), lower inequality (less income stratification), better schools (that let kids from different backgrounds access them), stronger social capital (more friendships across incomes) and greater family stability (kids do better with consistent households).

Those findings suggest that local policy and community choices matter—a lot—for shaping opportunity. That’s what got me thinking about what kinds of jobs a place has, and who has access to them. I also think about Technical.ly’s work: Can information, programs and events bring people together from different backgrounds?

Penn’s Fels Institute summarized the research like this: improving mobility isn’t just about fairness; it also boosts overall economic growth.

For cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore, which want to grow innovation economies, the question is how entrepreneurship, tech jobs and civic investment can work together to create environments where talent has a real shot at rising.

Founders aren’t scalable

Founders aren’t scalable. You can grow an organization only so far with a founder and her emotion, personality and drive.

So you shouldn’t build an organization around them. They’re great in the beginning. They’re the ultimate generalists, as a good founder will do anything to get the job done. But it won’t last. It can’t last. Even if a founder stays a lifetime, eventually that life will end.

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The difference between a beat reporter and a features writer

Producing acts of journalism to inform a community can get done with different approaches. There are those who follow one community closely and those who offer the broader narrative to a wider audience.

In news parlance, it’s the beat reporter and the features writer, and it’s tied to the idea of choosing deeper impact or larger scale. I’ve developed a better understanding of the differences in these specialties over the last few years, in both hiring, following and familiarizing myself with the work of my peers.

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I don’t believe the estimates for how many people attended your event

I go to a lot of events. I cover them. I organize them. I speak at the em. I attend them. For any given event, easily the most common question is how many people attend. It’s how we get a sense of how popular (which is a clumsy shorthand for how valuable something is) the event was. But it’s the wrong question and, I’ve found, almost always a lie.

Because it’s so damn hard. Think about the challenge of estimating attendance at large-scale public events. We always have our reporters estimate attendee counts and often have organizers challenge us. Once an event stretches beyond even just a few dozen people, there’s no sure thing that anyone there will have a good sense of the attendee count. People will have a perceived sense of the crowd — was the event well attended or not — but that has very little to do with actual account and more to do with how full an event location is, among other biases and perspectives. Give me the right number of chairs, and I’ll make your 20-person event crowded.

It’s become second nature for me to hand count attendance at smaller events and do batch counting for larger ones (gauge what a group of 100 looks like and then estimate from there). So I read other event estimates with heavy skepticism.

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Art with tradition is objective, that without one is subjective

Appreciation for art is meant to be, by today’s focus on accessibility, wholly subjective. Whatever your view of something can be defended as your experience with it.

Over drinks at a Gayborhood bar last month, a primatologist-turned-choreographer shared his view on trying to interject objective reality into art — incorporating technology, data and fact into ‘timed performance art.’ With no art history background or deep cultural experience, I deserve no voice in the conversation, but our chatter did result in me sharing with him something I’ve been mulling since.

My knowledge of the debate on whether art is subjective or objective seems incomplete. As I understand it, there are two very different types of art: that which aims to inspire through an existing tradition and that which aims to explore something new.

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