Hunger Games and Murdertainment

I took a two week period to read all three books of the Hunger Games series this spring. And yes, they are fun, quick reads. However, they are a total rip off.

I’m certainly not the first to levy this charge. There are undeniable similarities between HG and the Japanese book/film series Battle Royale. Just do a Google search for Hunger Games vs. Battle Royale and you’ll find dozens of articles and blog posts from people who are either diming out the HG series as unoriginal, or trying to draw ridiculously fine lines between HG and BR to prove they are different.

At the end of the day, both are about selecting teens to go to a remote game arena for the express purpose of killing one another. Who cares if one does it for entertainment purposes, and the other does it in secret? Or if one gives the teens training before letting them loose in the murder arena? The premise is the same, and even though Suzanne Collins claims to never have read the books or seen the movie, it’s just a little hard to believe she didn’t get at least some inspiration from the Japanese precedessor. It’s just way, way too close.

But if we’re really going to call rip off, aren’t Battle Royale and Hunger Games both a just a repackaged mash up of The Running Man, which came out decades ago, and Lord of the Flies? Take the kids and the remote setting from LOTF, add the game element, weaponry and entertainment factor from The Running Man, shake and serve.

The whole murdertainment dystopian genre is, in short, really stale now. We’ve seen it explored in countless ways with a whole variety of different characters sentenced to play the modern, government-mandated gladiator games. We even have zombie versions of this theme now – both Land of the Dead and The Walking Dead had zombie fighting game/gambling arenas for survivor entertainment. Not only is it not original anymore, but given how close reality TV is coming to pushing this envelope, it’s not that inventive or futuristic, either.

It’s a painfully obvious and a well explored idea to link oppressive totalitarian governments and a complicit populace that is amused by blood sport. Which, I suppose, is why these books are aimed at kids – you don’t need much beyond a 6^th grade education to read and “get” the heavy handed symbolism here. But let’s not pretend that Hunger Games is exploring new turf.

Who’s Your City?

I have a baby on the way, which means I’m not keeping up very well with this blog. But it also means that I’m nesting and trying to find a new home that will be more family friendly. To help with some macro decision making around where to live and how to choose a new home, I read Who’s Your City by Richard Florida. 

Who’s Your City is intended to be a decision guide for those who become convinced that where you live is as important a decision in life as who you marry. I can get behind that thesis, but how to make the best decision about where to live? First is to go for an economic region where the creative jobs of the future will be. That makes sense, as everyone needs a job. However, there are just a handful of places where good jobs tend to cluster – the Northeast corridor from Boston to DC; the Southeast corridor from Charlotte to Atlanta; a Midwest corridor from Chicago to Pittsburgh; a Texas belt that includes Houston, Dallas and Austin; and two clusters in California, one around Silicon Valley and San Francisco in the North and a second one around Los Angeles and San Diego in the South. If you don’t live in one of these areas … well, you’re sort of screwed.

In essence, the book argues that anyone outside of these regions has an old economy job, like factory work or some other paint by numbers McJob that can be outsourced and probably will over the long term. Good jobs tend to cluster in regions where the best, most creative workers are, and good companies are attracted to areas where there are lots of elite college and post graduates looking for work. But there’s a specialization component to the regions as well. For instance, you really can’t be a financial house without a presence in New York. You can’t be in energy and not have some people in Texas. You can’t be a filmmaker outside of LA. And you can’t do federal lawmaking anywhere other than D.C. 

It’s an insular feedback loop where the best people go where their chosen field has set up camp, and the best companies go where the best people are – it all clusters in the same place. 

For me, that means half the battle has been won, as I live in the Northeast corridor, or the second largest global economy in the world. So, I can check the box for a good growth region with quality jobs.

Next, though, is how to manage being in one of those cluster locations – because while the jobs may be there, so are lots of other people all competing for scarce housing and space resources. And when demand outstrips supply, you end up with super high prices. So, how to choose a space where you get the most bang for your buck?

This wasn’t a surprise to me, but the best areas in any of the urban clusters tend to be those with the highest concentrations of gays and bohemians. Both these groups tend to “pioneer” up and coming neighborhoods, renovating homes, creating an open and tolerant vibe and improving the area’s beauty, safety, retail options, walkability and all the other things that people tend to value in urban neighborhoods. So, peruse the census data and find out where the gay households are, cross check that against affordability, pioneer with them and watch your home appreciate.

But there are other options for those that want to live out of the city center, such as the suburbs and the exurbs. In both, you can find more space and a more rural vibe, and sometimes lower prices. But there’s a hidden tax – the commute. According to Who’s Your City, commuting is the one thing that almost all people consistently rate as the most unpleasant thing they do every day. In fact, people hate commuting so much that it’s responsible for a lot of depression and unhappiness related to place. So, if you choose the burbs, best to do it only if you have a flexible work schedule that allows for a fair amount of working from home, or you find a place where the advantages are so amazing that it compensates you for the daily misery of driving in traffic.   

 All in all, Who’s Your City is pretty basic stuff. If you live in an urban area for long enough, you don’t need to read a book to tell you to follow the gay pioneers. That’s pretty obvious. But it was interesting to read why certain areas tend to be cluster hubs, and why they are so expensive. I’ve been bemoaning the District for a while, thinking there’s no way that home prices could continue to climb here. After all, there has to be an upper limit for incomes, and there’s no way appreciation can continue forever. And it can’t. But according to Richard Florida, D.C. still has a way to go before it reaches that upper limit – it’s decidedly not as expensive as New York, San Francisco or Silicon Valley, yet the area continues to grow and attract more and more people. And because of that, it’s actually rated as a best buy!

So, I guess I can feel somewhat better that while I will have to be house poor for a while, buying in DC, even at a high price, still makes sense.