Rise of the Creative Class

written by: Cory Q

I don't usually read lengthy nonfiction. It rarely keeps my interest for 300 pages. Rise of the Creative Class managed to hold me enraptured over my lunch hours for 326 pages (The book itself is 427 pages, but the last 100 are all the nitty-gritty research numbers). In this book Florida, who is a Professor of Regional Economic Development at Carnegie Mellon University, shows how a new type of social group is fundamentally changing the way we work and live in America.

What really caught my attention in the radio broadcast I first heard was a question Florida posed to focus groups. He would ask his groups if they had to choose between only two jobs which would they choose. The choices were to work in a hair saloon or in a machine shop. Overwhelmingly the crowd, late teens to mid thirties I think, answered the hair salon. But why? The answer is that despite the fact that the hair salon pays less, it is a work place that involves interaction with people, allows for more freedom of scheduling, and most importantly of all allows the worker to express themselves in a creative way. This is described in Part Two of the book starting on page 85.

This drive to express oneself creatively, Florida argues, is what is now starting to drive the economy and creating a "Creative Class" of workers who make their way through their creative output such as "people in science, and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create ideas, new technology and/or new creative content."( p.8). On the same page he goes on to state that "The key difference between the Creative Class and other classes lies in what they are primarily paid to do. Those in the Working Class and the Service Class are primarily paid to execute according to plan, whole those in the Creative Class are primarily paid to create and have considerably more autonomy and flexibility than the other two classes to do so."

The book is laid out in four sections: The Creative Age, Work, Life and Leisure, and Community. Florida spends time in each of these sections going over how the rise of a creative class of workers is transforming each of these areas of life. He details the difference in work values from what he terms as the 'organizational age' of the 50's where conformity was the key to success in the work world to now, where the ability to produce through creative methods is the distinction if economic note. Florida spends substantial time detailing the process of city renewal in the Life and Leisure and Community sections of the book. He argues that regions that rank high in the Three T's (Technology, Talent, and Tolerance) draw in the Creative Class and therefore are better poised to take advantage of this economic shift and will be thriving areas while regions low on the Three T's stand to lose out. The Minneapolis/St. Paul region does pretty well on these scales, which makes me feel pretty good.

One of the other main ideas of the book is how a combination of classical world views have come to form a 'new ethos' when it comes to work and leisure. Florida explains how there has traditionally been a chasm between 'The Protestant Work Ethic' that has traditionally driven American workers and that of the 'Bohemian' lifestyle of artists. "The Protestant Work Ethic says meaning is to be found in hard work. And work in this ethic is essentially a duty. We are put here to serve others; we serve them by making ourselves productive and useful, and from this- inexorably, but almost as a side effect- come the personal rewards that mark us as worthy" where as "The bohemian ethic is more hedonistic. It says value is to be found in pleasure and happiness- not necessarily in gross indulgence or gluttonous excess, but in experiencing and appreciating what life has to offer" (p. 192). So, from a combination and synthesis of these two styles of work and leisure "Thus the tone of the Creative Economy was set. Bohemian values met the Protestant work ethic head on, and the two did more than survive the collision. They morphed into a new work ethic -the creative ethos" (p. 207).

Florida describes not only how the Creative Class is affecting the way we work, but also how we use our free time. Creative Class members look to move to regions that have parks, a thriving music and arts scene, and an authentic "street culture". This is an inversion of the long held belief that people will move to where the jobs are. Now people are starting to move where they want and then looking for job and companies follow. This rootless society of many weak social bonds and quasi-anonymous neighborhoods is examined as well. One of the most interesting things I got out of this leisure time section is the worthlessness of building new stadiums. "The ostensible economic goal of these facilities is one to which they are sublimely irrelevant. The most recent studies show that stadiums do not generate economic wealth and actually reduce local incomes [footnote 27]. And ponder, for a moment, the opportunity costs of these facilities. Imagine what could be accomplished if the hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on university research or other things that actually generate economic wealth- or even on more fine-grained neighborhood improvements and lifestyle amenities that attract and retain talented people" (p. 303).

There are a lot of ideas to cover in this book and I can not possibly review them all here. What I can do is say that Richard Florida has written a compelling book that is well researched, well thought out, and easy to follow that charts the changing course of economic growth in this nation as well as showing how a more diverse and tolerant society or region is the region that not only is going to survive in the new economy but is going to thrive by fostering creativity. "The real issue is how well we understand the driving forces at work in our society today and use them to build the more cohesive and equally open and tolerant communities we desire" (p. 282) and that "Human creativity is the ultimate economic resource" (xiii). Rise of The Creative Class was a compelling and interesting read that described accurately a lot of my work related experiences.

Richard Florida's book site.
Richard Florida's Carnegie Mellon site.

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