Cushman & Wakefield’s recent Tech Cities 1.0 report is aptly titled – it’s an iterative effort, as the phraseology goes these days.

The subtitle emphasizes the point – “A FIRST LOOK AT METRICS TO WATCH,” the billing reads.

The first look by the Los Angeles Times led to a desultory picture, with a headline that declares, “Despite Silicon Beach, Los Angeles is merely America’s 18th top tech city.”

The report and its authors aim to present a more nuanced picture.

The authors note that cities – or counties, which are the actual areas being measured – with a greater reliance on tech for their economy are more likely to rank high.

“In these markets, tech plays a larger role in the city’s economic trajectory,” the report states. “It’s also a vibe. Certain cities have the tech feel in the air, on the signage, in conversations at the bars, in its population’s habit and preoccupations.”

That probably applies in Venice, Santa Monica and the rest of Silicon Beach, but they’re part of a much larger economy. That means tech doesn’t account for as much of the action here – we still make lots of movies, garments, satellites and tortillas, too.

None of that means tech’s role is small, though.

Consider an alternative view to one piece of information in the report – a breakdown of the populations of various markets based on the percentage involved in “knowledge occupations” – a broad category that ranges from jobs based in computers and math to certain jobs in education and health care.

Silicon Valley – which was represented by Santa Clara County by the researchers – tops the list with 36 percent of its population in “knowledge occupations.” Los Angeles – represented by all of Los Angeles County – is 25th in the same category, at about 18 percent.

Now consider that Santa Clara County has a civilian job base of about 1 million, which means that somewhere around 360,000 people work in “knowledge occupations.” Los Angeles County, with about 4.9 million civilian workers, has about 880,000 in the same category, despite the lower percentage.

Inside Numbers

Don’t look for any clear-cut data on tech workers in Los Angeles County in the monthly jobs reports from the state’s Employment Development Department.

The agency doesn’t list tech as a category – and it seems the folks at Cushman & Wakefield would agree that technology doesn’t belong in any single category.

“What company today doesn’t use the internet, cloud computing, social media, smartphones, or more advanced machinery and equipment?” the authors of Tech Cities 1.0. ask.

There are some clues to tech’s standing in the local economy when you consider some of the largest categories of employment listed by the EDD, including education and health services with 771,600 workers, professional and business services with 598,000, and manufacturing with 362,000.

Legacy’s Leap Forward

The James Webb Space Telescope is a prime example that “legacy” tech – a term often applied in blanket fashion to defense and aerospace outfits – isn’t necessarily old tech.

The satellite is in the works at Northrop Grumman Corp. in Redondo Beach. It will eventually set up shop a million miles from Earth and use infrared vision “to peer back in time and take the first ever images of the most distant stars and galaxies.”

High on Education

Northrop and other aerospace and defense companies have long benefited from a bountiful base of higher education in Los Angeles – which was flagged as a key factor in the recent Cushman & Wakefield report.

It wasn’t quite clear what criterion was used in the report – Elon University was among the institutions of higher learning credited as an asset in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, N.C., and the Virginia Military Institute counted for the Washington, D.C., market, but California State Polytechnic University, Pomona wasn’t listed to the credit of Los Angeles County.

And nowhere was it noted that Los Angeles was one of only two markets with three research universities – UCLA, USC and Caltech – in the prestigious Association of American Universities, which includes 62 “institutions that continually advance society through education, research and discovery.” The other market with three is Boston, with MIT, and Harvard and Boston universities.

Editor Jerry Sullivan contributed to this week’s Silicon Beach Report and can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 200.