Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class was published in 2002. Since then, in between speaking engagements, he has written two more books. The second book, Cities and the Creative Class (call it 2005a), provides the antecedent work for his first, a rejoinder to his critics – delightfully labelled as squelchers – and a disarming account of his personal journey of intellectual discovery from regional economic development to the mysterious world of creativity.
This book is short and crisp, and is highly recommended for anyone wanting the kernel of what Florida is saying in much more prolix form in his other two books. Florida’s third and latest book – The Flight of the Creative Class or version 2005b – has just hit the shelves. I have just finished reading it. Irritatingly for anyone who has bought the second book earlier in 2005, this latest book is bulked out by regurgitating the new material from the second, and only then proceeds to elaborate upon the theme of the global competition for talent, and his fears that America may be shooting itself in the foot in this new game. For the short version, retrieve his February 2004 article from the archive of Washington Monthly.
Florida’s thesis goes something like this. The growing “creative class” – the smart half of our services economy – has become the central factor in determining global competitiveness. What matters for regional economies – within and between nation states – is how they fare in the world wide race to attract and retain these talented people. America’s tougher visa administration after 9/11 and the rise of monochrome fundamentalism could see the United States lose out to cities and regions more attractive to the creative class. Net migration therefore becomes a leading indicator of future trade flows and next generation competitiveness.
Florida makes the interesting observation that this question of net migration is really important in the Western countries with rapidly aging populations because they cannot breed enough home grown talent. Even if they could, they would still lack the “hybrid vigour” which comes from the influx of migrants. The metaphor of the melting pot pervades Florida’s descriptions of the alchemy of innovation. In the case of Asian countries, the flux is provided by their émigrés returning home. That said, I find Florida’s treatment of North Asia rather superficial which suggests that one should be fairly cautious about rushing too quickly to proclaim this as the new general theory of innovation and competitiveness. In Book Two Florida explicitly warns us against being too pre-occupied with China and India. In Book Three he starts citing Asian talent pools, but does not address the question of whether or how his “3T” theorem fits the trade and development realities in these countries which represent the bulk of the world’s population – and its youth.
Two things about Florida’s work are starting to frustrate me. First, I become frustrated by the lack of reference to “prior art” and parallel lines of inquiry. Like most of us, Florida is not a polymath. It is only in this latest book that we find passing reference to the pioneering work of Peter Drucker and Robert Reich. Perhaps this is because Florida finds the phraseology around knowledge workers too elitist. Many of his critics say the same about the “creative class” and find that his rejoinder, that creativity is for all, just a little too glib. I would love to see Florida locate his thinking within a broader intellectual landscape and conceptual framework. For example, the themes about tolerance and diversity cry out for positioning within the rich literature of political philosophy and the thinking of people like Karl Popper and Hannah Arndt, whose discussion of open and closed societies is now echoed in the work of people like Hank Chesborough on “open innovation”. It is also worth questioning whether competition theory, and the analysis of imperfect markets, do not account for much of what Florida is arguing. Finally, I find myself wanting to cross-reference Florida with work in development economics, and particularly the seminal writings of Amartya Sen. The study of book indexes and footnotes can tell you a lot about the intellectual origins of an argument.
Florida does nonetheless highlight a few important observations about human capital from some Canadian economists who have been putting the spotlight on people’s actual occupations rather than their educational qualifications. This is an important underpinning to Florida’s thesis about the role of a special group of occupations within the economy (the creative class), but maddeningly Florida does not push forward with any hard analysis of structural changes in the workplace. As one blogger put it, Florida tends to kick off with qualitative insights and then trawl for supporting data.
Some work I have been doing with Queensland University of Technology on mapping the creative industries is showing the value of looking at trends in occupational categories rather than relying on traditional industry classifications. Such analysis starts to help us better understand the contribution of “creative” occupations across industry sectors and in different types of enterprise. One key trend which Florida does not pursue is the untying of creative occupations and careers from traditional corporate structures, with the rise of “self managed careers” and temporary coalitions of people in project teams. This “individualisation” of large sections of the workforce – people who see themselves as primarily self-employed or who anticipate volatile and unpredictable career progressions – produces a deep reliance on social and creative networks. I suspect this is what makes the choice of location so important, and why people intuitively feel that Florida is pushing the right buttons. I also suspect it is the reason people subscribe to services like Arts Hub!
My second frustration with Florida probably arises from the first. This is the “so what” question. Where do we go next in terms of action agendas? What are the implications for this and that? – which would bring home to us why this creativity discussion is so important. One puts down Florida’s three books thinking his task, if his mission it be, is far from accomplished. To be fair, both his 2005 books open up the question of the “negative externalities” which arise from the growth of the creative class and talk in very broad terms about the need to remix our policy and political agendas for a new era. The focus, however, remains firmly on the question of how to compete for talent. The more fundamental question, which he posed so eloquently in his first book, is simply restated in his third: how might we “cultivate and harness the full creative capabilities” of this foot-loose human talent? In an era where intellectual capital is king, this is the big question. And perhaps history teaches us that it is not a matter of how much we have, but what we do and achieve with what we have. In cold economic jargon, the policy challenge posed – but not yet answered by Florida – is how we optimise the productivity and impact of our creative talents. How we stoke and tap the creative furnace.
Hopefully someone out there will pick up the baton from Florida and start serious work on addressing the questions Florida continues to pose.
