Irving Wladawsky-Berger

Hot Spots: Benchmarking Global City Competitiveness

A new report, Hot Spots: Benchmarking global city competitiveness, was just released by the Economist Intelligence Unit.  Hot Spots is the result of a comprehensive study that analyzed the competitiveness of 120 of the world’s major cities.  The study evaluated their performance along eight distinct categories, from which it developed an overall Competitiveness Index for each city.  The study was commissioned by Citigroup as part of its Citi for Cities initiative.

 Hot Spots observes that over half of the world’s population now lives in cities, generating over 80% of global GDP.  As a result, companies are planning their global business strategies from a city, rather than from a country perspective.  The 120 urban centers ranked in Hot Spots have a combined population of about 750 million and collectively account for almost 30 percent of the global economy.  They are fiercely competing with each other to attract business investment and top talent that will enable them to grow their economies, create jobs and improve their overall standard of living and quality of life.

What determines a city’s competitiveness and growth potential?  Hot Spots defines competitiveness as a city’s ability to attract capital, business, talents and visitors.  Competitiveness, according to the report, “. . . is a holistic concept.  While economic size and growth are important and necessary, several other factors determine a city’s overall competitiveness, including its business and regulatory environment, the quality of human capital and indeed the quality of life.  These factors not only help a city sustain a high economic growth rate, but also create a stable and harmonious business and social environment.”

The research team assessed each of the 120 cities benchmarked using 31 different indicators.  Working with a number of experts, it then grouped these indicators into eight major categories, assigning a weight to each toward the final overall ranking: economic strength (30%), human capital (15%), institutional effectiveness (15%), financial maturity (10%), global appeal (10%), physical capital (10%), environment and natural hazards (5%), and social and cultural character (5%).

The Economic and Cultural Polarization of America

Coming Apart: the State of White America 1960-2010, a recently published book by scholar and author Charles Murray, has generated some very interesting and important discussions about America’s increasingly polarizated society.  In a January NY Times Op-Ed, David Brooks wrote that Coming Apart will prove to be one of the most important books of 2012 because it “so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.”

The key premise of the book, as described by Murray in this Wall Street Journal column, is that “America is coming apart. For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world - for whites, anyway.”  For most of its history, a major hallmark of American democracy has been the comfortable mingling of the social classes.  “Americans love to see themselves this way,” writes Murray.  “But there's a problem: It's not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.”

Fifty years ago, there were large income gaps between rich and poor, but the differences are much bigger today.  More important, those income gaps did not lead to differences in behavior.  There was a common civic culture, - the American way of life, - “that swept an extremely large proportion of Americans of all classes into its embrace.  It was a culture encompassing shared experiences of daily life and shared assumptions about central American values involving marriage, honesty, hard work and religiosity.”

Blogging and Personal Feelings

In November of 2008, Andrew Sullivan published an excellent article in The Atlantic, - Why I Blog, - in which he discussed the unique characteristics of a blog by reminding us what a web log shares in common with its namesake, the ship log.

“In journeys at sea that took place before radio or radar or satellites or sonar, these [ship] logs were an indispensable source for recording what actually happened.  They helped navigators surmise where they were and how far they had traveled and how much longer they had to stay at sea. . .  A log provided as accurate an account as could be gleaned in real time.”

“As you read a log, you have the curious sense of moving backward in time as you move forward in pages - the opposite of a book.  As you piece together a narrative that was never intended as one, it seems - and is - more truthful.  Logs, in this sense, were a form of human self-correction.  They amended for hindsight, for the ways in which human beings order and tidy and construct the story of their lives as they look back on them.  Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending.  So they have plot as well as dramatic irony - the reader will know the ending before the writer did.”

“Anyone who has blogged his thoughts for an extended time will recognize this world.  We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges.  We blog now - as news reaches us, as facts emerge.  A reporter can wait - must wait - until every source has confirmed.  A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world.  For bloggers, the deadline is always now.  Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive.  It is, in many ways, writing out loud.”

I have now been blogging since May of 2005.  As Andrew Sullivan observes about blogs in general, my blog is a record of my changing interests over that time span, of the key items that were catching my attention, and how I felt about them at the time.  Looking back at the many blogs I have posted, I am reminded of some of the major events of the past seven years.

Politics, Women and the Talmud

A couple of months ago a story out of Israel caught my attention.  It concerned an incident that, while extreme, illustrates the tensions between groups with very strong religious beliefs and the larger, much less religious society that does not embrace these views.  As we know, such discussions are now taking place in the US as part of the 2012 Presidential Campaign.  But I prefer to comment on the situation in Israel because it concerns my own religion - Judaism.  In something as personal as religion, you should be sensitive about directly commenting on religions other than your own.

An 8 year old girl, the daughter of observant but modern Orthodox Jews, was harassed by ultra-Orthodox Jewish men as she walked on her way to school.  The men felt that her modest dress did not adhere to their more rigorous dress code for girls and women.  They spit on the girl, insulted her and called her a prostitute.

“The country was outraged,” said the article.  “For many Israelis, this is not a fight over one little girl’s walk to school.  It is a struggle that could shape the future character and soul of the country, against ultra-Orthodox zealots who have been increasingly encroaching on the public sphere with their strict interpretation of modesty rules, enforcing gender segregation and the exclusion of women.”