Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Richard Florida argues that unless America turns its cities into gay-friendly, hip creativity hubs like San Francisco, the best and brightest will opt for foreign climes.
Apr 21, 2005 | "The United States of America is on the verge of losing its competitive advantage," economist Richard Florida wrote last fall in a Harvard Business Review article based on his new book, "The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent." "It is facing perhaps its greatest economic challenge since the dawn of the industrial revolution." Even more provocatively, he later declared that "Terrorism is less a threat to the U.S. than the possibility that creative and talented people will stop wanting to live within its borders."
This might sound like the sort of breathless hyperbole regularly used to prop up glaring deficiencies in otherwise flimsy policy papers. Yet there's more than a little menace to Florida's proclamations when you consider that the professor of public policy at George Mason University published "The Rise of the Creative Class" only three years earlier. In that book, he described with earnest, unabashed exuberance the prominence of the very same class in what he calls the new "Creative Age."
In fact, the ideas in Florida's 2002 book have come into vogue and gained a certain amount of status over the past few years, with dog-eared paperbacks of "Rise of the Creative Class" landing on the desks of a disparate (and sometimes desperate) range of professionals: urban planners, community redevelopers, economists, gay activists, financers, curators, developers, musicians and so on. And don't forget the local and regional politicians, especially if said politician lords over a small- or medium-size inland city that makes up one of the postindustrial rustlands spread all too generously between the two coasts.
That book, Florida's first, highlighted an energetic, mobile, economically productive "creative class" that emerged in force after the bubble economy of the '90s -- a class whose members range from idea-creating professionals such as scientists, designers and entertainers to knowledge workers in business, law and healthcare who use their creative capacity to solve complex problems. According to Florida, this new class includes 38 million Americans, and the creative sector makes up more than 30 percent of the overall labor force.
"The Flight of the Creative Class"
By Richard Florida
HarperBusiness
336 pages
Nonfiction
For cities to remain strong, or to rebound from postindustrial neglect, Florida prescribed artistic and cultural development; this would attract members of the new flourishing, prospering class. His emphasis on a thriving, music-filled nightlife and a populace of artists and scenesters ignited the imaginations of developers and planners around the country. His book provided tables that ranked cities on the key components that, according to Florida, make up the trinity of successful development: technology, talent and tolerance. "The Rise of the Creative Class" quickly became ammunition for thinkers whose similar ideas had been steamrolled by machine politicians already bought and paid for by traditional businesses and developers, whose orgiastic fantasies of castle-like sports stadiums and big-box retailers have taken over the horizon.
Florida also runs a thriving consultancy and has traveled the world preaching the gospel of the creative class to rapt government officials desperate to resurrect their sputtering economies. But while Florida has found his share of enthusiastic devotees, it hasn't been all lattes and laptops. Writers such as Karrie Jacobs questioned Florida's popularity in an April 2005 article in Metropolis Magazine titled "Why I Don't Love Richard Florida": "I don't think Florida is wrong. It's just that his distillation of creativity into the kind of prescription routinely proffered by management consultants makes me fairly sure that what he's selling is not the virtues of creativity but rather the ingredients of a formula."
And countless Republicans and conservatives have taken umbrage at the suggestion that economic vibrancy no longer resided in traditional development strategies or that the road to economic recovery did not involve reopening a steel plant but soliciting young people with tattoos and piercings. Those even further to the right blanched at Florida's notion that successful resurgence was predicated and even helped by concentrations of gay and ethnic populations. Clearly, the thought that queers and people of color were anything but talking points to scare the populace into reelection on an gay-marriage-cum-anti-immigrant platform was completely beyond the pale.
Florida recently took time to talk with Salon about "The Flight of the Creative Class," which reconceives his urban diagnosis to fit a global scale. The competition for talent, writes Florida, is no longer between U.S. cities but between cities around the world. Not only that, but the long-standing advantages the U.S. has traditionally had in attracting such talent is slipping away due to reactionary government obstacles and, perhaps most important, the ongoing and increasingly divisive culture war in the country.
Your first book, "The Rise of the Creative Class," was so optimistic about the potential of what you termed the "creative economy," but this new book is almost alarmist in nature. You argue that the U.S. is facing a potentially crippling economic crisis if it doesn't improve the ways in which it attracts and retains creative workers.
I've studied competitiveness for 25 years and the current economic threat is by far the gravest competitive threat to ever face the United States. It's far more significant than the challenge posed by Japanese or Asian competition in the '90s because it's aimed at the crux of our advantage, which is our ability to attract the best and brightest talent. Everyone is frightened of letting terrorists into the country when it's actually more likely that they're keeping out the next Einstein. Look at the amount of attention given to Social Security, look at the attention given to building football stadiums -- and you can't even get a conversation going about attracting and retaining talent!
