Be creative -- or die

What are some of these things, what you refer to as "amenities"?

What I think it is, is what Lucas says, this "productive leveraging." Some people call it energy, as in, I feel the energy of the city, there's something in the air, in the atmosphere, that says this city gets it. I think all my measures of the amenities -- the music scene, outdoor recreation, gays, bohemians -- are all signaling mechanisms that that energy is there. But I think it's a latent construct. I don't know how to say it. You know, when you go to Chicago, when you go to Boston, when people even go to Austin, you feel it when you go there. What my indicators do is pick up on elements of that. Bohemians are an element, gays are an element, and they're signaling that energy in a community.

People in the creative class -- I don't care if you're 65 or 25 -- we're all increasingly heading for that energy, for that feeling, for that atmosphere, and we're willing to pay. So fewer people are willing to compromise. We're saying, "OK, we want to have a thriving career and a good life, but we want to be in a place that really gets it, that's really with it." I hear that over and over and over again. I think it is explaining a set of individual migration decisions, and what my theory is saying is that people are calling it energy, excitement, verve, the quality of life, but here are some things which point at it.

What different demands is the creative class making that are skewering the traditional theories of economic development?

If you read all the literature on creativity and if you look at surveys of what IT people or professional people want in their work, what's clear is that creative people are not extrinsically motivated, or not only extrinsically motivated. In other words, we want money, but money itself isn't a sufficient condition to motivate us.

Teresa Amabile, the most prescient theorist of creativity and the psychology of creativity, said that creative people are only motivated intrinsically. It is counterproductive, she says, to use extrinsic mechanisms to try to motivate creative people. Peter Drucker said this at the zenith of the so-called high technology new economy, that bribing the knowledge workers in these industries is a fundamental mistake; it will not work. He says you have to treat people as volunteers -- Peter Drucker was just brilliant -- you have to treat the people in your organization as if they were volunteers, with strong ties and intrinsic motivation.

So in order to understand what moves creative people, you have to first understand that, of course we want money, we're not going to live dirt poor. But in a post-scarcity, post-materialist society, we find ways to feed ourselves. Some of us are even waiters and waitresses and do our creative things secondhand. And, this is the best example, some of us are software programmers, bored shitless at our work, so we do open-source software at our desks, while IBM or Hewlett-Packard are paying us. That's the way we get our intrinsic jollies. I do the work that I have to do to feed myself, but then I write books like "The Creative Class." So you do the work that motivates you somehow.

Creative people are highly intrinsically motivated. Therefore in order to understand their location choices or their workplace choices or their lifestyle choices, we have to understand that they are choosing things based on intrinsic motivations. And our location choices are increasingly, What kind of location offers me a full bundle of lifestyle choices with the diversity, amenities and options that I desire?

You see it with young singles who want an active night life and an active mating market, but you also see it elsewhere, like a fellow I interviewed the other day who's in a biracial gay relationship with four adopted kids, and he's saying to himself, Can I live in a city like Pittsburgh with four adopted kids in a biracial relationship?

Only 23 percent of the creative class people are in nuclear families -- husband, wife, kids -- and only 7 percent are in "Leave It to Beaver" families with a stay-at-home mother and a working father and kids. That means that the rest of the households, between 93 and 75 percent, are very different configurations: a single mom with kids, or a single parent with kids, somebody who's adopted kids, someone who happens to be single or divorced or the kids happened to leave the household. So you have between 75 and 93 percent of the population requiring a very different amenities bundle.

What's happening is that cities can no longer offer just one bundle of amenities. They have to offer lifestyle options for the young single, the young gay, the early married, the married with children, the divorced mother with three kids. And those things change. A person changes.

Take three cities -- Austin, which ranks high in your indices, your adopted hometown Pittsburgh, which is in the middle, and Detroit, which was consistently last. All faced severe economic changes in previous decades, but what infrastructure did they already have or what actions did they take that either helped or hurt them?

First of all, in every economic measure, Detroit and Pittsburgh should be trouncing Austin. These are places that had probably two of the greatest technological powerhouses of their time -- they were the Silicon Valleys of their day. Detroit in automotive, Pittsburgh in steel and chemicals. And as a result, both of them developed powerhouse universities, Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Detroit with the University of Michigan.

What happened, however, was that both places fell victim to institutional and cultural sclerosis. They got trapped in the organizational age; they thought we really live in a patriarchal, white, corporate society and that the key to success was to strap on your tie, go to work 9 to 5, and behave yourself. There was no room for people with new ideas. People with new ideas in both Pittsburgh and Detroit were shunned. They were thought to be troublemakers, difficult, weirdos, wackos, eccentrics. Detroit is even more puzzling than Pittsburgh because of Detroit's tremendous legacy of a music scene, one of the true hotbeds of American music, at first African-American music, but now not just African-American music -- now it's a hotbed of electronic music.

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