What is so special about Boulder and Corvallis? Martin Prosperity Institute
DCL
Richard Florida of the Martin Prosperity Institute explains that college towns that are home to large research-intensive universities have the highest percentage of PhDs, masters or professional degrees. That makes sense, but how does it make a difference? Florida and his associates crunched the numbers, asking:
What extent is metro
Credit: Creative Class
Perhaps not surprisingly, the brainiest places had higher incomes, more stable real estate prices, and even higher degrees of happiness and wellbeing. Florida notes in the Daily Beast that cities should learn from this:
Though luring new factories and building new stadiums lend themselves to outsize media attention and ostentatious ribbon-cutting ceremonies, the less glamorous work of building up local knowledge assets and leveraging existing university campuses yields far greater and lasting economic gains.Unlike incentive packages and new stadiums, which, despite their price tags of hundreds of millions of dollars, too often turn out to provide benefits that are scant or fleeting, knowledge assets like research universities can
And if you want to be happy and perhaps a bit richer, move to Ithaca like our President Ken is doing, or Corvallis as our editor Collin has, and I would like to move to Boulder.
