Whatever workers' reasons for going, Nissan's 42% employee retention rate sends a message to businesses in California: The Golden State's charms aren't what they used to be....

"There is a bit of that attitude, especially at the state level, that California is just so great that no one would ever want to leave — that its natural features, creative services and the quality of its higher education system are so good they're enough to get the job done," said Greg Whitney, vice president of business development for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.

Nissan's experience argues against that conceit, he said. Typically, a company moving its headquarters 2,000 miles, especially from a major urban center to a smaller, more rural region, is fortunate to hang on to 25% to 30% of its workforce.

These days, though, California's schools are no longer among the nation's best, its infrastructure is deteriorating from a lack of funds for upkeep, and an ever-increasing population is crowding its cities and jamming its highways.

Companies usually decide to move for one reason — to save money — whereas employees have individual, often complex reasons, Whitney said.

"But the world is becoming more homogenized," he said, "and the fact that Starbucks are everywhere helps make moving a lot easier these days." ...

California employees who chose to make the move are relocating to an area that has an international airport and 19 colleges, including Vanderbilt University. It is within 700 miles of 60% of the U.S. population and is closer to Nissan operations in Canada and Mexico than is the Gardena site. ...

For single mother Johnston and her three daughters, ages 11 to 17, the move was a chance to start a new life in vastly improved surroundings.

In Torrance, her family was squeezed into a 1,064-square-foot home she rented from her mother, who has moved to Tennessee as well.

In Franklin, the family was able to trade up to a 4,000-square-foot, two-story, all-brick home with five bedrooms, four bathrooms and a quarter-acre lot. Instead of power lines and neighbors' fences, the views are of tree-covered hillsides.

And at $449,000, Johnston said, the house cost $217,000 less than what her mom received for selling the Torrance place. ...

What made the case for Hedrick, the product manager, was turning off Interstate 65 and onto the Cool Springs offramp "and realizing that you could really be anywhere USA."

"There's a great, big regional shopping mall, and most of the stores and restaurants are the same ones we see in California," he said. "Yet a few miles away you're in downtown and there's lots of local color too."

Hedrick said several visits during the winter also helped him and life partner Kevin Rogers make the decision to move to Franklin--as it turns out, to the same development as Johnston--from the Fairfax Avenue area of Los Angeles.

"We're giving up dim sum and first-run independent films, 24-hour grocery stores. There'll be no more morning coffee at the Newsroom with Robert Downey Jr. sitting at the next table, and we'll miss sunset walks along the strand in Manhattan Beach," Hedrick said.

"But we're going to a place with spectacular scenery, rivers that don't have concrete banks, much more affordable housing, a lot less traffic and pretty close proximity to a lot of major cities, like Atlanta and Chicago, that are just a few hours away by car or an hour by plane."

As I wrote in chapter two of The Future and Its Enemies:

Urban intellectuals, accustomed to an environment full of boutiques and family-owned ethnic restaurants, frequently and reflexively denounce the spread of chain restaurants and stores. While the chains may seem trivial in and of themselves, in much public discussion they have come to represent the evils of commercial evolution and, by implication, of dynamism in general. "America’s the most boring country to tour already because everywhere looks like everywhere else," says New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman on the PBS Charlie Rose Show. "And what’s sad to me, Charlie, is that the world is starting to look that way, you know, in the big cities now and even outside them, you know, with the Pizza Hut and the McDonald's and the Burger King on every corner.” "

But for the people in less-developed areas, whether in the developing nations today or most of America until recently, the coming of chains has increased rather than decreased both the variety and quality of restaurant food. "When I was growing up" in 1950s Little Rock, recalls the economist Michael Cox, "whenever we went out to eat, we'd eat at a place called Franke's Cafeteria. You'd get your tray, go down the line, and get your food. It wasn't much different from the food at home, and there was certainly no atmosphere. But Mom didn’t have to cook." A progression of burger joints, then steakhouses, then fried chicken and pizza, then Chinese food gradually increased the choices. "If you look in the [Dallas] phone book," marvels Cox, "in 1970 there wasn’t even any pizza delivery.: It is this sense of history--of what actually existed before the "homogeneous" chains arrived--that is missing from the snide stasist dismissal of what the political scientist Benjamin Barber calls "McWorld."

When big cities no longer have a monopoly on amenities and niche retailing, whether because of chains or the Internet, they have to worry about quality of life issues they've previously ignored. Los Angeles discourages new housing and road construction, while the rest of the Sunbelt generally encourages both. People will move. The weather is great in L.A., but Nashville and Dallas aren't Buffalo.

UPDATE: Problem solved. Thanks to readers Nathan Bowers and Yaron Davidson for the help. The RSS feed is here.

Another trend, unmentioned by Kolata and her sources because it's a bit off the main one, is that medicine can now effectively treat chronic problems like migraines that were once not even worth mentioning to the doctor. Of course, effective treatments also lead us to acknowledge--or complain about--diseases that were once ignored or considered just part of getting older. The frequent complaints about "stress" and the "medicalization of life" are thus signs of progress.

In response to questioning from WWD, Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz issued a statement Monday afternoon, calling female Journal readers "the most affluent and most influential, style-setting women, and we're delighted now to be able to serve them even better with our expanded coverage." He added that the Journal readership purchases "more women's fashion items than do all the readers of the women's magazines — combined."

But maybe that's just the WWD spin. Still, I have to wonder about the feasibilty of selling ads that appeal to, at best, half the newspaper's audience--especially since even a well-produced newspaper like the Journal is not a good a medium for luxurious, full-color ads as a glossy magazine. There's a good economic reason that fashion advertisers put their ads in magazines where a) all the readers are potential buyers b) those readers are thinking about fashion when they're reading c) the periodical looks and feels good.

So before denouncing the Met’s new policy, it’s worth considering what the alternatives are. There is no such thing, after all, as a free museum. No matter what the price on the ticket reads, somebody is paying to buy, preserve, protect and display all those van Goghs and Giacomettis. One option is for taxpayers to pick up the bill, in the form of government subsidies. New York City already covers about 13 percent of the Met’s $180 million in annual operating expenses, and it — or the state or federal government — could theoretically pay the rest as well.

This plan, however, seems about as wise as it is likely to happen. If those of us who visit the Met aren’t willing to pay for its operation, why should people who don’t visit it be asked to pay? Schools, hospitals and roads, all of which could use the money, certainly seem like they should have first claim on the population’s collected earnings....

Those who don’t feel comfortable with it can simply pay the old one, or whatever they would like. There will surely be some well-to-do freeloaders, visitors who pay $1 when they could easily pay $20, but if there were too many of them, the Met’s policy never would have survived this long.

“It’s an imperfect system,” said Judith Chevalier, a Yale economist who studies pricing, “but I’m not exactly sure what a better one is.”

The easiest way to see the virtues of variable prices is sometimes to think about what would happen in their absence. Last week the nearby Neue Galerie said it would charge $50, up from the usual $15, to patrons who wanted to view five Klimt paintings on Wednesdays, a day the gallery is usually closed. A few days later, it abandoned the plan in the face of a public outcry.

So think about what happens now. People who would have paid the $50 and gone on a Wednesday will instead go on other, more crowded days, causing everyone to have less space to enjoy the Klimts. The museum, meanwhile, will bring in less money. Precisely nobody benefits from the cancellation of the $50 tickets.

The last time I was in New York, I witnessed one disadvantage of the "recommended" price policy--not at the Met but at the Museum of the City of New York, which has a "suggested" admission price of $9. A couple of Polish tourists, following a guidebook in their native tongue, were trying to convince the ticket seller that the museum didn't charge. She wouldn't budge and kept pointing to the $9 sign. They kept pointing to their guidebook. The language barrier made communication impossible, but I suspect that nobody has let the ticket seller in on the idea that you can pay what you want. In fact, you can't.

Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philly has an enlightened policy that encourages such matches (unlike some places). From the NBC 10 report:

"With a live donor, we don't preserve the organs for a long time and that is the main reason why the organ lives longer. It's been demonstrated that the survival of the patient and the organ is about 10 percent higher than the patient that receives a cadaver organ," said Dr. Cataldo Doria, a transplant surgeon.

Transplanted David Glueck theorized that liberal movies do well in Plano because of "the kids."

That's possible but I've seen An Inconvenient Truth at the Angelika at Legacy twice; no kids at either screening. The youngest attendees I saw were MAYBE a few couples in their 20s. The audience consisted primarily older (40+) gray-haired types (like myself); no judging a book by its cover but it sure did strike me as a liberal crowd, based on tenor and appearance. (But dang, no Birkenstocks.)

My experience with that theater-entertainment complex is that it draws people from all over the far-northern suburbs - middle-aged daters from up and down the tollway, seeking a wine-drinking, movie-going one-stop destination night.

It's funny that Plano is such a firestarter for debate.

Funny, indeed.

Huh? Kaus responds to you by saying:

"Yes! And I cling to that prejudice, especially if you add "and works in a high-tech industry where you wind up hiring a lot of gay college grads." I don't think, in those circumstances, you can afford to get as wildly exercised about sodomy and sin "

Is he from New York or something? He seems to totally misunderstand the dynamic. Plano-ites aren't "wildly exercised about sodomy" -- but most anti-gay people aren't. They are wildly concerned with making sure their kids never hear the word "sodomy," never ask them "mommy, what's a drag queen?" and never have to deal with anything even remotely related to sex. Ever. Period. Until they are eighteen. If then.

He really needs to go to a megachurch and meet up with the mid-level corporate managers, dentists, successful insurance agents and other educated professionals within. Who did he think was funding all those megachurches? The Clampetts?

He seems to think that anti-gay = ignorant. That's part of it, but a bigger chunk are the people who see a real problem in America with sexuality (teen pregnancy, STD's, idiots who shouldn't have children breeding like feral cats). They lump gays in with all sorts of failed "alternative" families -- so they generally disapprove of "gay rights" as part of a sexual liberation movement they see sending the country down Satan's toilet. The gay rights movement and the left has (generally) helped to fuel this by refusing to suggest any sort of reasonable sexual morality to replace the traditional sexual morality we seek to tear down.

The net result -- Plano -- where parents rationally fear their teenage daughters getting knocked up and irrationally fear their sons wearing dresses.

And reader David Glueck, who now lives in San Jose, California, writes:

I saw your post about Plano and thought I would give you my inside perspective as someone who grew up there. People there are not confronted with poverty, warfare, or other social ills (except on CNN). In addition, it is a very mobile community. At one point when I was growing up there in the 90's, 20% of the houses were on the market at any time. So, politics are less about civic duty and concern for the direction of the country, and more about personal identity and a sense of belonging to a community.

The mega churches are a common way for the stay-at-home/soccer mom type to connect with anyone other than her husband and kids. I think people who would otherwise be politically apathetic pick up the politics of that crowd because it feeds their sense of belonging. The husbands go along to church to make the wives happy, but when they vote they vote on tax policy (mainly who will cut them the most).

As far as the mystery of why liberal movies do so well, that's easy, it's the kids (going to the movies is the only thing you can do after 9:00). The kids feel the same lack of community and identity as their parents. Plano is made up entirely of houses, restaurants and shops, leaving little for those seeking cultural and intellectual stimulus. Their sense of identity and purpose comes from rejecting what their parents believe in. Whether it's hip hop culture, heroin use (as was the fad in the late 90's), or anti-war and anti-Bush politics, anything that is at odds with the parents will do. As they get older, their passion for politics will probably fade. For those who do think of politics as more than a popular fad, they will get the hell out of Plano as fast as they can (like I did). So, they won't be around to make a difference at the voting booths.

I think you're right about a Plano being big enough to have a large minority, but don't expect to see it show up in the poll results because they're not registered to vote.

I'll also note that Mickey Kaus attributes to me a quote about Brokeback Mountain that comes in fact from Mark Davis, a conservative columnist and talk show host. I haven't seen the movie.

#3- Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0 – As the blogosphere matures, the number of new readers and bloggers will decrease and loyal readers are going to matter more. I have heard many bloggers tell me that they will lose reader loyalty if these readers come back daily and do not see any new posts. This perception is still very strong although irrelevant. Loyal readers subscribe to your blog via RSS feeds and have new content pushed to them. They will remain loyal because they have subscribed, not because you post frequently.

#4 - Frequent posting is actually starting to have a negative impact on loyalty: Seth Godin (a frequent blogger) has a very interesting theory. According to him, RSS fatigue is already setting in. With too many posts, you run the risk of losing loyal readers, overwhelmed by the clutter you generate. Readers will start to tune off if your blog takes up too much of their time

#5: Frequent posting keeps key senior executives and thought leaders out of the blogosphere – My colleagues and industry peers cite bandwidth constraints as the number one reason for not blogging. They are absolutely right: frequent posting is not very compatible with a high pressure job. As an example, not one single blog is authored by a senior corporate marketing blogger in the top 25 marketing blogs listed by Mack. Not only does the blogosphere lose valuable thought leadership, it runs the risk of being overlooked by these very same marketers.

Although Mickey and some of his readers find it hard to believe, Plano is, in fact, a good representative of Red America. Its residents are educated and affluent, and they are also solidly conservative. They vote Republican the way Westside Angelenos vote Democratic--because it's the normal thing to do. Many of them also go to big megachurches that preach conservative doctrines in a contemporary style because that, too, is normal. (Plano is where megachurches go when they need 100 acres for their complexes.) That someone has a lot of money, a professional education, and a fancy car does not mean that person isn't a quasi-fundamentalist Christian with socially conservative views. I don't have poll numbers, but I doubt that a lot of those soccer moms driving SUVs while talking on their cell phones accept Darwinian evolution--not that it comes up all that often. (If you think that's intellectually backward, so do I. But I also think the equally unexamined economic assumptions of a lot of Westside Democrats are just as unscientific.)

So, on one level, Mickey is wrong, and his critics are right. Plano is conservative in all the ways that matter to contemporary politics. Plano is also not where local gays qua gays go to the movies. That would be Uptown Dallas, the area where I live. That Plano is not poor and ignorant does not mean it isn't representative of Red America. But people in Plano aren't spending a lot of their mental energy thinking about hot-button political issues. They're more concerned about their kids' education.

Most important, Plano, like the Dallas area more generally, is a big enough place that even a small minority represents a lot of buying power. If every left-of-center Planoite bought a ticket to An Inconvenient Truth, the Gore film would sell out at the art houses. (Don't forget, also, that local boy Mark Cuban had a hand in producing it.) Since the movie is also a high-brow horror film--entertainment, in other words--ticket sales don't necessarily imply political agreement, just a willingness to listen to Al Gore for a couple of hours. And, of course, the Bible says nothing about the internal combustion engine.

As for Brokeback Mountain, the same large-minority point applies. More important, I suspect, is that Brokeback Mountain was a chick flick, and Dallas area women often socialize in large, single-sex groups who want to stay up on whatever's in fashion. Besides, as conservative columnist and radio host Mark Davis wrote in the Dallas Morning News, that movie was a human story, not a political screed: "What you see a lot of is the living hell they go through as a result of their plight. You see them betray their wives and kids. You see them miserable. There are no cartoonish villains designed to prod you to their side. You simply see a story of great complexity, which you may admire as a film or not." How a viewer interprets that story depends, in part, on what beliefs the viewer brings to the film.

As an aside, I'd note that when you drive around L.A. you see cars with Christian fish symbols on them. That doesn't mean you're in the Bible belt. It means there are all sorts of people in any big city.

That's Richard Rodriguez in Days of Obligation, a beautifully written book of linked essays that I reviewed when it was published in 1993. I use the quote to open the catalog essay for an amazing retrospective exhibit of Hollywood photographs by George Hurrell, the quintessential Hollywood glamour photographer. I met Lou D'Elia, the collector and curator who commissioned the essay, when I wrote a Slate slide show on an earlier Hurrell exhibit.

The new exhibit, which includes more than 100 photos, opens Thursday at the Queen Mary in Long Beach. It's an unusual setting for an art display but an appropriately Art Deco setting for Hurrell's 1930s glamour.

It's a terrific column, combining scholarship and personal stories, but I can't help thinking that they're a bit too willing to treat Alvin Roth's clever but incredibly complex barter scheme as a viable second-best solution. I've also said nice things about it on my blog, but, seriously, it's ridiculous for people to have to go through such machinations just because uninvolved third parties don't like the idea of paying organ donors. This taboo beautifully illustrates what Zelizer calls the false idea of "hostile worlds," which assumes that commerce inevitably taints all personal relations. I wrote about Zelizer in my Boston Globe article on economic sociology.

For more background links, see the Freakonomics website.

But Ryan Sager's article in The Atlantic proves an exception to the usual unsophisticated spin. He focuses specifically on the intermountain West, a culturally libertarian region with changing demographics, and builds a poltically savvy case that Republicans are beginning to be hurt by turning their back on the Goldwater tradition. In a new posting on Real Clear Politics, Ryan recaps the argument for those too cheap to get an Atlantic subscription and responds to some of his critics.

The annual produce of the land and labour of England, for example, is certainly much greater than it was, a little more than a century ago, at the restoration of Charles II. Though, at present, few people, I believe, doubt of this, yet during this period, five years have seldom passed away in which some book or pamphlet has not been published, written, too, with such abilities as to gain some authority with the public, and pretending to demonstrate that the wealth of the nation was fast declining, that the country was depopulated, agriculture neglected, manufactures decaying, and trade undone. Nor have these publications been all party pamphlets, the wretched offspring of falsehood and venality. Many of them have been written by very candid and very intelligent people, who wrote nothing but what they believed, and for no other reason but because they believed it.

Some things never change. (Alas, this burst of clarity follows a terribly muddled section on "productive" versus "nonproductive" labor.)

Bob Morris, managing principal of Corgan Associates Inc., will tell you that business opportunities crop up in unexpected places.

Two years ago, he gave a small band of architects free rein to expand the firm's computerized media capabilities and drum up outside work.

They'd become proficient at animated 3-D videos of buildings "blossoming" from the ground up and virtual walking tours of interior spaces. And they could create digitized images of cars, gardens, furniture and buildings that were indistinguishable from actual photographs.

Mr. Morris figured other architectural firms might want to outsource their video production.

He was right.

But he had no idea that there was a lucrative market beyond that. He proudly admits his staff had more vision than he did.

This year, Corgan Media Lab, as the 12-person unit is called, will bring in just under $1 million in outside revenue. The bulk of that will be generated by game, feature film and in-store broadcast work.

"These young mavericks had the desire and passion to push an emerging technology into tools that we and other businesses can use," says the 52-year-old Mr. Morris. "They've turned a marketing and R&D cost into a profit center."

His team re-created European historic landmarks as backgrounds for a recently released video game and is offering its digital lighting expertise in an upcoming animated movie.

Images of Old English cottages and homey fireplace-lit interiors fill a corkboard wall of a workroom. These "oil paintings" are for an undisclosed software product being released for Christmas.

The division, reports Hall, not only adds to the firm's profits but helps attract and retain talent. It's a great example of leveraging existing capabilities to expand business potential.

Plenty of museum shops will sell you a photo of Donatello's David, but none of those pictures will give you a good look at his prehensile toes.

What they've done inside the new and refurbished buildings is better, recognizing, as the year-old flagship McDonald's along Ontario Street in Chicago does, that people come to McDonald's in different-size groups and with different expectations for their experience. So there are three kinds of seating areas: a "fast" zone, with a large communal table or smaller adjoining tables with stool seats; a "social" zone, where families and others can park in banquettes around big tables; and a more secluded "linger" zone with comfy, upholstered chairs.

This is real customization and it comes with real comfort (the banquettes are outfitted with imitation leather seats and backs versus the "measured comfort" of the double-mansard era, with its cushioned backs and plastic seats). There's also real choice (you actually can move some of the chairs around, unlike the old fixed ones that made you feel like you were eating in the high school gym).

For all the talk about "de-plasticizing" McDonald's, there is still plenty of plastic present in the faux wood tabletops, floors and walls, all of which can be easily cleaned. But the design cleverly de-emphasizes plastic, drawing the eye instead to warm brick walls, soft pendant lights (which replace the harsh lights inserted in acoustical tile) or the plasma TVs that indulge the modern habit of multitasked eating.

With this and other smart touches -- like the red Eames chair and a modern fireplace that adorn the linger zone in the new McDonald's in Westerville -- the result is attractive without being snooty, more a restaurant and less of a pit stop, responding to the rising expectations that people today bring to shopping and eating.

Alas, the Tribune site includes no photos of the new McDonald's.

Nature, in her sound and healthful state, seems never to prompt us to suicide. There is, indeed, a species of melancholy (a disease to which human nature, among its other calamities, is unhappily subject) which seems to be accompanied with, what one may call, an irresistible appetite for self-destruction. In circumstances often of the highest external prosperity, and sometimes too, in spite even of the most serious and deeply impressed sentiments of religion, this disease has frequently been known to drive its wretched victims to this fatal extremity. The unfortunate persons who perish in this miserable manner, are the proper objects, not of censure, but of commiseration. To attempt to punish them, when they are beyond the reach of all human punishment, is not more absurd than it is unjust.

I'm reading most of Smith's collected works in preparation for a week-long Liberty Fund seminar, affectionately known as Adam Smith Camp. For searchable, nicely formatted, full-text versions of works by Smith and other classic writers, see Liberty Fund's terrific Library of Economics and Liberty. The Econlib site also features Arnold Kling and Bryan Caplan's blog and other contemporary writings.