Places Rated Almanacs and ‘roll Out’ Neoliberalism: 25 Years of Guiding Where to Live in the Us

For a quarter of a century, comparative rankings produced in the Places Rated Almanac have offered to help people find their ‘best’ place to live, spawned a mini industry, and provided a benchmark for the evolution of rankings of modern communities in North America and around the world. This paper examines the context of their emergence, their success, and also their limitations in the prediction of patterns of migration within the United States. In particular the paper addresses whether as an entrepreneurial product created in the spaces arising from the roll back of the national state and the foregrounding of the local, competitive marketplace it continues to have relevance in the new era of neoliberalisation. We argue that with greater but different emphasis on quality of life in the embedding communities through deeper forms of neoliberalisation there is continuing utility of such place ratings. 1 Correspondence concerning this article should be referred to: Remy Tremblay Address: Canada Research Chair on Knowledge Cities Télé-université Université du Québec à Montréal 100, rue Sherbrooke ouest Montréal (Québec) H2X 3P2 CANADA Tel: 1 (800) 463-4728 x.2889 Fax: (514) 843-2160 Email: [email protected] PLACES RATED ALMANACS AND ‘ROLL OUT’ NEOLIBERALISM: 25 YEARS OF GUIDING WHERE TO LIVE IN THE US MEETING A NEED: ITS NEOLIBERAL CREDENTIALS A quarter of a century ago the Places Rated Almanac (PRA) was in many respects a birthchild of the neoliberal heyday of the early 1980s. Although it was founded on a long-established traditional of social indicators research and quality of life studies (Andrews & Withey, 1976; Gerhmann, 1978; Rogerson et al, 1989), Boyer and Savageau’s creation owed its success to the eliding of circumstances and opportunities which arose in the era of roll-back neoliberalism and its associated wave of entrepreneurialism in America. First, the publication of the first edition of PRA in 1981 coincided with growing awareness of the rise of place-based competition which was encouraging flows of human as well as financial capital. Many accounts have been written about this shift (Aglietta, 1979; Harvey, 1989a; Storper and Scott, 1992) and there is no requirement to reiterate these here. In essence, within the US, the switch from nationally, centrally driven Fordist-Keynesian regulatory management of uneven development, policies towards more market-oriented, neoliberal economic policies radically and vigorously targeted the movements of private capital as the primary tool of economic development. The result was considerable attention being directed towards the ways in which sub-national or meso-level places could begin to compete with each other. Rather than being the product of political negotiation and public largesse, this new economic development regime opened the door for cities and their associated new forms of growth coalitions, to begin exploiting their differential characteristics in order to compete for private sector investment (Harvey, 1989b; Cox and Mair, 1988) and within a high level of national and federal fiscal stringency compete for the (limited) state revenues. Through this shift to more locally determined neoliberal economic era, a more meaningful geographical unit of analysis had to be deployed in the analysis of competitiveness (Levine et al, 1989; Wish, 1986); one that recognised that “without the [local] extra-firm infrastructure, enterprises seeking to become entrepreneurial firms will likely pursue a ‘go it alone’ strategy and be at a competitive disadvantage in the international arena” (Best, 1990: 21). Second, the PRA exploited the expanding provision of much richer geographical data at more localised scales, opening up possibilities for more sophisticated analysis of living conditions below state level than had previously been undertaken in social indicators research. The 1970 US National Census had offered much richer data at the standard metropolitan statistical areas (SMSA) scale and as Liu’s (1976) pioneering statistical analysis of the ‘quality of living conditions in metropolitan areas’ showed, pointed to strong differences existing between the (then) 243 SMSAs. Boyer and Savageau took the data analysis to a new level, drawing on the expanding sets of local data – on factors as diverse as the number of libraries, to education attainment levels, and crime reports which were being published often by national agencies to augment the demographic and econometric measures of the Census. Further, in the PRA they not only listed such locally derived data on each of the separate dimensions of a place’s attractiveness but derived a cumulative index of what they termed ‘quality of life’.