Talent exodus from Blue Model cities

From A Look At College Degree Migration by Aaron M. Renn.

Net migration of people to or from metro areas is reported annually by the Census Bureau and widely discussed. Less well known is that their American Community Survey (ACS) provides migration figures broken down by characteristics such as race, age, income, and educational attainment. This lets us drill into finer grained details about who is moving where.

Here is a map of net migration of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher, based on data from the 2007-2011 ACS, with blue indicating net migration gains and red net migration losses:

These patterns of migration have a lot of implications. Walter Russell Mead refers to the Blue Model versus the Red Model; unionized, high welfare, high regulation, significant social policy intrusion cities or states versus laissez faire, thin policy, low regulation, right-to-work states. What is striking to me in this map is the implicit rejection of the Blue Model and endorsement of the Red Model. I am sure no person moving cities is thinking of it in those terms but that is the revealed preference of the torrent of talent from Blue to Red.

It is interesting to speculate on another aspect implicit in the map. Where are all the major media organs located? Primarily in the coastal traditional Blue Model cities losing intellectual capital. Where are the many complaints about media distortion originating? I suspect mostly in the flyover country which this map shows to be gaining intellectual capital. That raises the question: is the media biased or are they simply seeing a different picture from everyone else? Probably a false dichotomy. The bias is well documented but it probably has to do both with self-selection AND the fact that being where they are, they are seeing things differently from everyone else.