Still needs to take on the 900-pound gorilla

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	• The Flight of the Creative Class: The new Global Competition for Talent.: An article from: Liberal Education Richard Florida Thomson Gale, 2006 - 10 pages average customer review:based on 25 reviews
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Building On His Thesis, But With A Warning

In the first portion of this book, Richard Florida recaps and defends the major ideas in his first book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. He addresses some of his critics and reasserts his thesis, which proposes that the ascendancy of a powerful class of creative, talented workers is making PLACES more important than companies. The Places that this new class will be attracted to display an abundance of what Florida calls the 3 T's: Technology, Talent, and Tolerance.

Florida expands this thesis to a wider canvas in this second book: In the Global economy, as the world becomes more "flat," American cities won't just be competing against other American cities for talent. They will be they will be competing against cities in Australia, India, Ireland, Sweden, etc. In other words, a city like Pittsburgh won't just be looking to keep talented grads from Carnegie Mellon from migrating to Austin; those grads may decide they want to go to Dublin, Ireland to live and work.

Florida outlines how important immigration has been to our nation's economic development and how two major factors with regards to immigration are beginning to make some erosive headway. The first is outsourcing, which is moving up the skill scale from customer service to application development. While certainly a difficulty, Florida thinks that outsourcing is a manageable problem, and that the jobs we lose from outsourcing can be replaced with new jobs created by innovative companies.

However, the second "pincer of the claw" is the increasing difficulty that the United States experiences in attracting and retaining the talented, super-educated knowledge workers who will be the innovators. If the erosion of that class of workers continues, eventually we will not be creating the new jobs to replace the outsourced ones.

Rather than a doomsday now scenario, Florida admits that the United States still holds a Technological edge and probably will hold that dominance for a little while yet. However, he shows that there is no doubt that other countries have made at least some headway with patents in certain areas where America held sway uncontested.

It is the other T's that Florida focuses on in the latter half of the book. Where is the Talent going? And how can we create a more diverse, open society? Using studies and statistics, his research tracks where people are moving globally, and he examines how our immigration policies and our increasing class divisions may be contributing to our difficulties in retaining talented innovators and entrepeneurs.

Flight of the Creative Class has more focus than Rise of the Creative Class, and the benefit is a more compelling read. There are still some issues I think holdover from the first book. For instance, it is very hard to pin down exactly who is the Creative Class, and Florida seems to avoid any significant discussion of how unions will play out in this mix.

Contrary to many criticisms I have seen here on Amazon and elsewhere, Florida does look at factors such as housing affordability, and he is extremely sensitive to the inequalities the Creative Class itself can create.

My paperback edition includes the essay, "The World is Spiky," which is Florida's Atlantic Monthly article responding to the growing acceptance of Thomas Friedman's idea that "The World Is Flat." Florida argues that the while globalization is helping to economically develop some areas, the peaks and valleys created by the "spikyness," of that world map are making it more treacherous for those in the lows than it has ever been.

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Still needs to take on the 900-pound gorilla

"If America continues to make it harder for some of the world's most talented students and workers to come here, they'll go to other countries eager to tap into their creative capabilities--as will American citizens fed up with what they view as an increasingly repressive environment."
-- Dr. Richard Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class

From this quote you can see immediately the sort of society Dr. Florida wants. Me, too. What's puzzling is he doesn't explicitly attach his shiny new cart of creativity to the thoroughbred of peace and political liberty.

In particular, you'd expect him to lambaste the Neocon Usurpers for launching expensive wars for isolated benefit of the Carlyle Group. Is he pulling his punches so Rush Bimbaugh won't accuse him of Bush-bashing? In general, why doesn't Florida boldly oppose the bonecrushing machinery of government per se?

That's my 900-pound-gorilla reservation about The Creative books. Otherwise, they provide a nice boost to the kinds of people we want to cultivate in society... or even want to be.

It appears many in public office, more semi-comatose Democrats than fully rabid Republicans, are interested in developing and retaining creative communities.

But are they willing to do what it takes?

The more political power they wield the less willing they are.

Rise shows that what Dr. Florida calls the three Ts of creative-class communities--Talent, Technology, and Tolerance--occur rarely. And when they do, it's more from the tolerance angle.

Austin, San Francisco, Seattle, Burlington (VT), Boston, the highest American cities on the creative-class list, achieve their vaunted status by spontaneous order. When governments catch up to what's going on and want to push people around, it's too late.

Tolerance is also another word for freedom. We can easily argue that liberty is fundamentally what the creative havenots have not. Talent and technology gravitate toward communities naturally when political leaders see their mission as preserving a natural order based on civil liberties.

They accomplish that mission mainly by removing government obstacles and keeping the infrastructure efficient.

Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. -- Thoreau

Libertarians need no writer from the halls of the Carnegie Mellon Institute to tell us this dear Hamlet. But it's nice that in Rise Dr. Florida makes such a good statistical case for what creativity is, where it lives, and how we can nurture it. He also makes us aware that we, too, are paid-up members of the CC.

Flight is about politicians not getting the point of Rise.

...

For my complete review of this book and for other book and movie
reviews, please visit my site [...]

Brian Wright
Copyright 2007

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

This digital document is an article class="textlinks">from Liberal Education, published by Thomson Gale on June 22, 2006. The length of the article is 2726 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Flight of the Creative Class: The new Global Competition for Talent.
Author: Richard Florida
Publication: Liberal Education (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 22, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 92 Issue: 3 Page: 22(8)

Distributed by Thomson Gale

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