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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
And now the Bush administration is doing everything it can to roll back the New Deal.
Right, that's their goal and that's why the U.S. is losing this competition for talent. Let's go back: The reason Bush can do that is because Clinton and the Democrats never extended the benefits of the creative economy the way they needed to. Because of the Democrats' failure to create some kind of mechanism for socializing the risk or ameliorating the risk and fear that people in Pennsylvania and Arkansas and Alabama and Tennessee and Montana feel. And because the Democrats were seen as the party of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, regular people said, "The hell with you!" and abandoned the Democratic Party and became a core constituency of Bush's support.
Now Bush has the mandate, at least in his eyes and the eyes of the Republicans, to dismantle the New Deal, which gives other countries a huge advantage. Because the creative economy downloads risk onto the individual, you need mechanisms to socialize that risk, to spread that risk.
What do you mean by socialize the risk? If you start talking like that and keep using the word "class," all the reactionaries are going to start calling you a creative communist.
"The Flight of the Creative Class"
By Richard Florida
HarperBusiness
336 pages
Nonfiction
I'm not talking about socialize as in socialistic. I mean develop mechanisms that say to an individual: When you pursue your career or a bunch of projects or a bunch of service jobs, when you're laid off, you're going to have some kind of wage insurance or unemployment insurance, some kind of health benefits. You'll have some sort of education benefits so you can go back to school and navigate this creative economy with some sense that you're not going to be absolutely abandoned.
The U.S. has become very Darwinistic. And the failure of the left to develop an alternative is our greatest dilemma, because the conservatives are doing exactly what they're supposed to do. I'm not saying it's right for our economy, it's disastrous to our economy, but you shouldn't expect the conservatives to build that platform.
What's happening in Canada, in Australia, in Scandinavia -- I went and met with the premiers of West Australia, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales. I met with labor governors and liberal party mayors. All of them are building platforms, and the one in South Australia was remarkable -- they invest in productivity and prosperity, invest in economic opportunity, use the market and make sure they're a creative society with ecological sustainability and social inclusion. So the dialogue in Australia and Canada and Scandinavia is about how to build a creative or innovation economy and how to build that kind of social safety net. Or, a better phrase than social safety net would be socially inclusive innovation. It's not so much a social safety net like the old industrial economy but it's a way of making sure people are included as a part of it. But that dialogue isn't happening in the United States and this is what abjectly terrifies me.
What no one really understands is that in the creative economy, what makes us different and yet the same is our creativity. Every single human being is creative. Every single human being has creative possibility. Whether it's a blue-collar worker or somebody who cuts your hair, or somebody who waxes your back, or somebody who works in a high-tech company, or somebody who writes poems. What we all have is our creativity. And we can actually organize people on that basis. We can say, "We're all different yet we're part of the same whole thing." Why can't the Democrats articulate that message? And why are they broken down into this intra-partisan fighting?
Why do you say the anti-elitism of George Bush & Co. is so harmful?
Here's a guy who went to a private prep school, to Yale and to Harvard. And he's developed a posture as an anti-elite to cultivate the support of the people who are terrified, legitimately terrified, about how they fit into the creative economy. He's appealing to the common man by saying, "You know what we're going to do, we're going to stop this. All these things you're afraid of, we're going to stop. We're going to stop this gay marriage thing and we're going to stop women's rights, we're going to make sure not as many immigrants will get into your country and we're going to make sure terrorists don't take over your cities!" It's the old "Know Nothing" platform.
But his anti-intellectualism is part of a political posture to appeal to this group, by playing on their fear, which allows them to pull a fast one on people, as Tom Frank rightly points out in his book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" They say, "Oh, we're going to give you back your moral values and your family values and the America you feel that you're losing and we're going to take away everything that gives you some sense of security." So they're going to dismantle the New Deal, they're going to make the tax cuts permanent. If you ask me, the debate over stem cell research alone -- that could destroy a whole emerging sector of the American economy and virtually anyone who works in that field will have to move.
The idea of promoting "socially inclusive innovation" might fly in Australia and Scandinavia, but I can't think of any politician out there who could weather the fury of rote partisan criticism supporting that sort of change would bring out.
Yes, what scares me is that that force is absent from present-day America. Instead of bemoaning low-wage service jobs and then just talking about restoring manufacturing and dealing with outsourcing, someone somewhere has to say that the real key to the future is to make these service jobs good jobs. I mean that's the real policy point -- the service economy, which represents 40 to 45 percent of the lowest paying jobs in our economy with the least protection, has to become part of the creative economy. We have to change those jobs in the way industrial jobs were once changed from being terrible jobs to being good jobs. We're in deep trouble if we can't focus on and address the externalities of the creative age -- income inequality, the class divide, housing unaffordability, traffic congestion, and the one also talked about in the book, the incredible amount of mental stress, which is the occupational health and safety issue of the 21st century.
