But it was a significantly different time in 1999. I mean, some of the survey respondents might have ranked amenities higher on the list back then when there was an overabundance of jobs, but in 2001 it's a different economy.

I think there's even one thing that's much more powerful than the focus groups and interviews, which are great grist for the mill, but they're very much exploratory and not confirmatory -- the Information Week surveys. We looked at the Information Week surveys, which survey over 20,000 IT workers in the years 2000, 2001 and again in the year 2002.

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life

By Richard Florida

Basic Books

416 pages

Nonfiction

Buy this book

The top four factors that IT workers wanted in a job were challenge and responsibility, flexibility, job stability, and then base pay. Stock options, even at the height of the new-economy boom, ranked about 30th. Those first four factors have held constant at the zenith of the new economy and at the nadir of the new economy. So people value pay, but they value challenge and responsibility, the ability to have a flexible work environment, to be able to set their own schedules and set their own terms of work, to have a job that adapts to their needs as well as the needs of the employer, and to have stability in a job higher than base pay and much higher than stock options.

One of the great myths of the new economy was that people were working for money and stock options. In nearly all our interviews and focus groups, people told us they were going to these new-economy companies because of the flexibility, the challenge and the culture they offered. So I think there was this hugely mistaken idea, and I think what happened as a result of the rise and fall of the new economy is that it reset employers' expectations across the board.

Even large companies that were evolving toward more flexible policies and more human-centered, individually oriented workplaces said, "Oh my God, we don't have to have a Foosball table and have "bring your dog to work day," and we don't have to have all this craziness -- you know, Jolt Cola and Red Bull in the refrigerator. But if we let our employees be flexible and challenge them and do certain things like maybe have an on-site cafeteria or have a place where people can work out and recharge for the 'second' workday, there are a lot of things that are actually enhancing productivity."

A lot of the other stuff was pure-on bullshit, but I think the rise and fall of the new economy forced us to face up to which of these things were B.S. and which really were working to increase the performance and productivity of creative people. I think we find now that people want the same things, and that's what creative people have wanted for a long time.

What's the difference between the classic human capital measure and your "creative capital" theory?

There are several theories of economic development. The classic one is that companies do it. Firm location drives economic development, and where the jobs are people will go. Well, we know that doesn't work. The second theory that came in contradiction to that, which Robert Putnam forwarded in his book "Bowling Alone" (he's a gifted and famous professor at Harvard), initially said there are no more bowling leagues, no more VFW halls, no more Elks lodges.

He said this predicts everything from a decline in health to rising income inequality to a slowdown in growth -- that what really creates a good, thriving society is these tight networks, where people are in voluntary associations. They're in real neighborhoods where they know their neighbors, they're in bowling leagues, Elks leagues, Little Leagues, Pop Warner football. But then, when I started to ask people, they're like, "No, that's not what we want. We want to be quasi-anonymous, we want a community in which we can be ourselves, we want a community which we can define ourselves, we can create our own identities."

The other alternative theory is the human capital theory, which is a darn good theory. Jane Jacobs lays a lot of this out in her 1961 book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," by just observing her neighborhood on Hudson Street [in New York City]. The economist Robert Lucas, in one of his addresses after winning the Nobel prize, called "On the Mechanics of Economic Development," said basically, How do we have a theory of growth, how do we have a theory of cities? The only way you can understand growth or cities is that productive people want to come together, and they generate externalities to human capital.

A city is productive people coming together and leveraging and enhancing each other's productivity. Then Edward Glaeser, a young economist at Harvard who revolutionized the field of urban and regional economics, said, "OK, we can use this basic idea of human capital to predict regional growth." So over the past 10 years scholars have pretty much shown that the key driving force behind regional growth is endowments of human capital. And Glaeser and his student Spencer Glenden in a paper suggest that you can predict regional growth over the course of the 20th century by looking at a region's endowment of human capital in the year 1900. That's a really powerful theory and it's really good.

All my theory says is two things: One, there are specific kinds of human capital that matter more than others. Two, and I think the much more important aspect of my theory, these concentrations of human capital or creative capital aren't natural endowments. Creative class people are fickle, finicky. We can move where we want to move. Therefore, understanding the factors associated with why these creative types of people root in a certain place is critical, and that's what nobody else has ever looked at. That's where my theory opens up some new ground because it says that the important thing in regional or national development or economic development per se is, What are the factors that attract high-quality human capital or creative capital? For a city, you need to have them, because if you don't have them, then people won't come to your city.

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