Creativity is now the driving force in economic growth and a new creative class has become the dominant class in American society, as the industrial economy is fading away and the creative economy is taking its place. According to Richard Florida, the creative class is a disparate selection of occupations. Because most members of this class do not see themselves as part of it, its members need to develop their class consciousness. The economist argued against the widespread belief that sunshine, cheap land, and low taxes would determine which regions of the USA would prosper over the next few decades.[1]
What Richard Florida notices is that there is a tendency of creative people of different sorts to move to cities with particular characteristics, particularly technology (high-tech industry), talent (highly-educated workforce) and tolerance (population diverse enough).[2] Cities that score highly on an index of these characteristics (like Boston, San Francisco and Austin) are the places most likely to see a real creative community grow with many promised economic and social benefits.[3]
However, in the newly published “The Flight of the Creative Class”, the Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution states that the USA cannot count on being the mecca for the highly-educated forever. In his opinion, places like Massachusetts display a form of exclusivity that seems to be the problem about many creative cities: the cost of living there. Places like Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Massachusetts and even New York used to be places where young creative, new immigrant families, social and economic outcasts, and intrepid entrepreneurs could go to get a start. But these places now number among the nation’s least affordable housing markets.[4] For the first time in modern memory, top scientists and intellectuals from elsewhere are choosing not to come to the U.S. Florida says. The altered flow of talent – aided by more stringent security measures is already beginning to show signs of crimping the scientific process.[5]
[1] SULLIVAN, Robert David, Globe Newspaper, July 17, 2005, http://www.creativeclass.org/
[2] FLORIDA, Richard, “The Rise of the Creative Class”, Basic Books, New York, 2002
[3] SCHUSSMAN, Alan and HEALY,Kieran, “Culture, Creativity and the Economy: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Sources”, University of Arizona, 2002, p. 3
[4] SULLIVAN, Robert David, Globe Newspaper, July 17, 2005, http://www.creativeclass.org/
[5] Research Technology Management, fin 2004, Richard Florida
