Book Review - The Rise of the Creative Class

But what about the rise of the coercive state?

The Rise of the Creative Class
Dr. Richard Florida
New York: Basic Books, 2002
326 pages

Very optimistic work, and brimming with insights into what makes creative people gravitate toward one community vs. another.  Dr. Florida is a social scientist associated with the A classic work on the creative process precedes the subject book by decades.  Arthur Koestler, in The Act of Creation(1), explores the subject of creativity from the perspective of psychology.  Koestler’s book makes a good companion to Florida’s work, because The Act gives us an idea of what creativity is and how to cultivate it in ourselves.

Florida is all about encouraging creativity in communities.  A creative community has to have the three Ts: talent, technology, and tolerance.  The back of the book is full of tables showing indices of creativity for various US cities.  You can look at your own city’s numbers and see the work that needs doin’.  With regard to tolerance, interestingly, the most livable and creative cities also tend to have higher percentages of gay population.

It isn’t that gaydom is encouraged, rather that people disposed toward being different—creative people are universally individualistic—feel safe to live their lives as they choose.  The moral of the story is homophobia, as well as alternative-life-style phobia, is expensive.  Another word for tolerance is freedom.  Denying freedom costs us, big time.

So what are the top creative cities?

1. Austin
2. San Francisco
3. Seattle
4. Burlington, VT. (<250K)
5. Boston
6. Raleigh-Durham
7. Portland, Oregon
8. Madison, WI (250K<x<500K)
9. Boise City, ID (250K<x<500K)
10. Minneapolis

Note, unless otherwise noted, the cities listed have greater than one million people in the region.  A correspondence between creative index and fitness index, how physically fit people are in the city, also exists.

In reading the work, and considering Florida’s arguments, I remember Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities(2), to which Dr. Florida pays frequent homage.  Jacobs’ work, a libertarian classic, argues that the cities didn’t die; they were murdered by city planners who did not understand the "spontaneous order" of the neighborhoods they were destroying.

Florida develops a theory of creative capital: "Regional economic growth is driven by the location choices of creative people—the holders of creative capital—who prefer places that are diverse, tolerant, and open to new ideas."  A friend of mine, who recommended the book to me, is from the Detroit area.  He noted that lack of creative capital drives the majority of young people to leave Detroit and Michigan when they mature.

Note  -  All is not glum for cities like Detroit, Newark, or Pittsburgh, where Dr. Florida makes his home.  Local political and business leaders have become increasingly aware of the need of creative capital, and are familiar with The Rise of the Creative Class.

The thrust of Creative Class is the future depends on them, so treat them well in work and community.  I’m glad for the book, especially because it points out who is truly "in charge" of the economy; the apparent trend is for the political class to crush the productive middle class with downsizing by toxic companies.  It’s nice to know our species, homo creativus, is in fact ascending.

The main reservation I have about Creative Class is it doesn’t tackle the main obstacle to the flourishing of our kind: the coercive state.

Missing is identification of the coercion of government as a serious impediment to productive life.  My favorite creative-class cause (in the name of tolerance) is biochemical freedom.  Repeal all laws on consensual acts among adults, particularly for recreational chemistry, and free up $1 trillion in wealth almost immediately.(3)  Plus, an additional tens of thousands of peaceful, harmless people will be let go from jail to create more wealth.

Probably it will soon dawn on Richard Florida that political freedom is an indispensable corollary to the success of the creative class.  When liberty combines with creativity, the forces holding us back from greatness will finally yield the field.

Richard Florida just recently has published the Flight of the Creative Class.  In this new book he "...argues that 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."(4)