The gay/hipster indexRichard 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.
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By Christopher Dreher
April 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.
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.
More:
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2005/04/21/florida/
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