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Boston's Talent Pool
For nearly 400 years, Bostonians have thumbed their noses at New England’s harsh climate, its rocky soil and its relative lack of natural resources.
Through Yankee ingenuity, they’ve managed to reinvent this city as it’s dominated one industry, then lost it, then rebuilt another.
The constant in these four centuries has been that thanks to its excellent academic institutions, Boston has attracted first the nation’s, then the world’s best and brightest, many of whom have stayed to generate the next wave of prosperity.
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Harvard Economics Professor Edward Glaeser. (Photo: Phoebe Sexton.) |
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“You know, it’s a crazy Puritan legacy, right?” says Harvard economist Ed Glaeser. “Reading the Bible was considered to be absolutely critical for the Congregationalist fold. Education was emphasized here in a way that was truly exceptional, and as a result, we have this great tradition of education.”
Boston’s tradition of relying on its educational institutions to fuel its growth is now at a crossroads, however.
Every Thursday afternoon, Howard Anderson teaches a class on New Enterprises at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
“The only real asset Boston has is the Yankee brain,” Anderson says. “It gets up at six o’clock in the morning, and works all day long. The climate’s not too good. The soil is not too good. Not a lot of natural resources here. This is our only talent, and we bring talent in here.”
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| Professor Howard Anderson. (Photo: Phoebe Sexton.) |
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In a recent class, Anderson brought up an old Boston enterprise.
“We would cut ice,” Anderson told his students, “ and ship ice from Boston to China, South America, New Orleans. We put it on Clipper Ships, and ice was about the third leading export for Boston.”
Anderson founded the Yankee Group, a technology research firm, and two venture capital firms. His students are from all over the world.
Ryan Hudson is from Detroit. He says he wants to stay here in Boston to grow his startup company, youshoot.com, which rents digital cameras.
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Ryan Hudson. (Photo: Phoebe Sexton.) |
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“Starting a company involving technology is something I always wanted to do,” Hudson says. “Couldn’t find a better place than Boston for that.”
Across the river, many of Boston’s medical residents stay on as doctors, treating patients from around the world, teaching the next generation of doctors. Dr Stef Parpos, at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, stayed.
“I actually looked, after I finished residency,” Parpos says. “ I did look nationally. I was going to move to the West Coast for a while, and I was maybe going to go to Texas. There’s a lot more money elsewhere, and I’ll be frank about it: it’s an enormous pay cut to stay at Harvard, and I guess in the end, it really didn’t matter. It’s finding what it is you enjoy about this job.”
Parpos says he likes the stimulating environment. He says his colleagues challenge him to be a better teacher.
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2005 Median Price of an Existing
Single-family Home |
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San Jose metropolitan area |
$744,500 |
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San Francisco metropolitan area |
$715,700 |
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New York metropolitan area |
$446,500 |
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Washington metropolitan area |
$424,700 |
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Boston metropolitan area |
$414,000 |
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Seattle metropolitan area |
$316,800 |
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Chicago metropolitan area |
$263,700 |
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Charlotte metropolitan area |
$180,900 |
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Austin metropolitan area |
$163,800 |
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Detroit metropolitan area |
$134,500 |
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Pittsburgh metropolitan area |
$116,100 |
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(Source: National Association of Realtors)
See more quality of life statistics. |
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That stimulation is the single most important reason that people are drawn to Boston.
“The most important reason is that other skilled people are here,” says Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard. “Increasingly, cities are located in places that consumers want to live rather than in places where producers want to produce. I think as we think about Boston at the crossroads, the important thing is making sure that you have houses that skilled people want to live in that are affordable, and to compete on the national field for cities, if you’re about attracting skilled workers, it means attracting people by being a consumer city, to make it a place where those skilled people want to live. Think about making sure that the tremendous improvements in crime that occurred over the nineties that those improvements stay permanent and we don’t have a permanent up-tick in homicides. That’s a big deal.”
Glaeser and economist Richard Florida, at George Mason University, have found that skilled, talented, creative people are willing to pay a premium to live in places such as Boston, in large part because they want to be with other people like them. They’re willing to endure a lower net income if they find the work and the environment stimulating.
Florida says it’s what makes these places so expensive to live in.
“In that there’s such a high demand to be there,” Florida says, “and you know it can’t sprawl in all directions, and it can build up and add density, but there are public policy constraints against that, so what happens is the cost of housing goes up, and it’s gone up astronomically in the Boston area, as it has in San Francisco, and Washington, and New York, and Chicago, and Seattle.”
The big, sunlit, round bays of architect Frank Gehry’s Stata Center, which houses the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, are one place to find some very creative smart people.
In one of the bays, PhD candidate Aaron Edsinger is teaching his robot, Domo, to recognize faces and hand movements.
“Heya!” Domo says as Edsinger gets it to recognize that a human being is in front of the robot, both by the color of the face, and by the movement of a hand in front of its camera eyes.
Under a grant from Toyota, Edsinger is trying to develop the first humanoid domestic robot. He hopes the robot will also have applications in manufacturing tasks that require subtle handling.
“Over here, over here,” Edsinger tells the robot. “Now, it’s looking at you,” he tells a reporter. “It’s confused by too much going on in this world. It sees me now.”
Edsinger moves one of the robot’s arms.
“You can see when I interact with the arm,” he says, “it can actually respond, sense that force, and move appropriately.”
Edsinger grew up on a farm outside Seattle. He studied at Stanford, then decided to go to graduate school.
“MIT had the most impressive robotics program that I knew of,” he says, “and my current advisor, Rodney Brooks, was here, and I knew of his work, and I wanted to work with him.”
Edsinger says he could just as easily do his work at Stanford. Keeping people like him here doing their research is one of the challenges that Boston faces.
Related Links:
Ed Glaeser: To find out more about Ed Glaeser’s ideas on the history of Boston and on what makes for thriving cities, go to his web site, which has all his all his papers.
Aaron Edsinger and Domo: To find out more about Aaron Edsinger and Domo, go to Aaron’s web site.
iRobot: To find out more about iRobot, go to their web site.
Terrafugia: to find out more about Terrafugia, go to their web site.
Creative Class: For more on Richard Florida’s ideas, go to his web site.
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