I was trading emails with a CEO on the East Coast about the best time to shut-down a website for the move to a new data-center. He reminded me how his business really "lights up" at night when West Coast customers stop working (in their late afternoon) and begin signing on to his service.
Similarly, it’s now become a tradition for East Coasters to gripe when an NBA final or World Series game starts at 9 p.m. ET, forgetting that the folks in Napa have barely had time to uncork their first bottle of Cabernet. It’s hard to believe that it was only a century ago that movie directors began placing studios in sunny Hollywood specifically to escape oversight by their New York bosses; at that time, California was like a foreign country to New Yorkers. (And maybe still is, but not because of distance.)
Things have changed considerably over the last century—indeed, just the last generation. And the tug of the West on the East gets stronger every year. Likewise, the tug of the South has accelerated as millions of Northerners, tired of snow and broken industries, have migrated to sunnier technologies.
Another way to express this is to say that the country’s “center of gravity” has shifted substantially in the last generation or two, part of a much longer-term trend. By “center of gravity” I’m really talking about the mean center of population. To quote the U.S. Census Bureau, the mean center of population is determined by taking the "point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless, and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if weights of identical value were placed on it so that each weight represented the location of one person on the date of the census."
Yikes. This sounds like a nightmare final math exam. I would struggle for the entire exam period and not even begin to calculate the surface area of Florida and then write: “This question is a trick and cannot be answered.” Or maybe I’d use the last page of the exam booklet to tell the statistician and deer joke and conclude that the statisticians shot the deer in its “mean center of population.” (Professor: B- for humor. F for content.)
Anyway, in 1790, the center of gravity of the United States was in Kent County, MD, about 23 miles east of Baltimore. The country was then essentially a thin ribbon of East Coast population.
By 1890, when Frederick Jackson Turner informed Americans that the frontier was gone, the center of gravity of the U.S. had shifted to Decatur County, Indiana, about 20 miles east of Columbus, Indiana.
Care to guess the center of gravity in 2000? It had shifted from Indiana to Phelps County, Missouri, about three miles east of Edgar Springs. For those of you without a mental map of Missouri in your head, Edgar Springs is about 125 miles southwest of St. Louis. In 2000, there were 190 people living in Edgar Springs, which is a good reminder—like the deer’s center of gravity—that sometimes the center of gravity is the emptiest place of all.
I wonder if someone living in Los Angeles, stuck in a 3-hour commute, would be surprised that the center of gravity was still 500 miles from even reaching the center of the country (which is right around Lebanon, Kansas)?
Here’s a great map showing change in "center of gravity" through the year 2000.
Note the sprint westward from 1840 to 1880, and particularly the decade of the 1850s. All in all, there’s been a steady migration west and south, and a marked acceleration south since the start of the twentieth century (with a tip to Willis Carrier--and his invention of air conditioning).
It got me wondering about the “center of gravity” for different industries, and even different populations in the U.S. For example, if you had to pick the center of gravity for “American medicine,” what would you guess? Boston, Baltimore, Minnesota, and West Coast would be the heavy areas. . .indicating a location about the same as the center of population? (I’m sure I’ve just insulted folks in Atlanta and Texas who, no doubt, have superb medical care. Sorry.)
How about software? Whoosh—somewhere in Denver maybe, with Silicon Valley being a giant gravitational sun offset somewhat by NY, NE, the Research Triangle and Texas.
How about porn? Well, maybe three miles east of the San Fernando Valley (those three miles to account for 5 films made in Miami every year)? (As I understand it, most of the industry is contained in about 50 blocks in the San Fernando Valley. Don’t ask how I know this; it’s all a purely academic pursuit.)
How about U.S. farming? Probably a balance between California and the Midwest, maybe near Denver again.
And how about the center of gravity for the Hispanic population? For Mormons, or Baptists, or Catholics? How about for Nobel prize winners? How about for patents? How about for veterans, fly fishermen and ballerinas?
To me, knowing key national “centers of gravity” would be like creating a giant national dashboard, with areas of excellence visibly denser, and the pull of success shifting the center of gravity from decade to decade. We’d say things like “The US needs to shift its center of gravity for innovation east by a thousand miles to be truly competitive again.” Or, “When the center of gravity for youth soccer players approximates that of Little League baseball players, we’ll be truly competitive globally.”
Just remember, like our deer, that the actual center of gravity is often a pretty barren place with not much going on, at least not much related to what you are actually measuring.
It’s probably a good reminder that it’s generally more fun—if a little riskier—to be out on the fringes. That’s where the really good action tends to be anyway.
Unless, of course, you’re about to make a porno movie.
0 Response to "Center of Gravity"
Post a Comment