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78 of 101 people found the following review helpful:
The Cognitive Elite: Now you see it; now you don't, January 25, 2004
By | Celia Redmore "Celia Redmore"
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Possibly anyone who wrote a book on the Creative Class just before 2003 should be exempt from critical review just like anyone who wrote an investment guide in 1928, or a colonial government primer in 1775. But The Rise of the Creative Class has recently been reissued in paperback, is frequently quoted by ambitious politicians, and is still being touted by its author. Therefore, it matters that we re-examine its contents carefully.Richard Floridas thesis is that there is a niche group of society, which over the past century has grown to become a separately identifiable class in its own right, distinguishable from the Working Class or the Service Sector Class or the almost-disappeared class of agricultural workers. This is different from saying that todays better-educated workers need less direct supervision, or that many jobs vary more in content from day to day than used to be the case. The author struggles mightily to define the nearly one-third of the population that he calls creative as a valid class. He proposes definitions, backs up a couple of pages later, corrects his proposal, and starts off down another path. The result is more of an out loud conversation with himself than a clearly delineated model. There are no neat conclusions here. The book uses both published sources and the authors own research to identify the characteristics of his new class: who they are and what motivates them. Sometimes the sources are of doubtful value. One has to wonder why he would turn to his public policy students at prestigious Carnegie Mellon University to find out why highly-paid manufacturing jobs are no longer attractive to young blue-collar workers. A stroll through any of Pittsburghs poorer neighborhoods would surely have elicited a more sensible and substantive response than that such jobs were insufficiently creative. Similarly, the book quotes an Information Week magazine survey of high-tech workers on what mattered to them. Florida reads the low rating of stock options as a motivator to mean that respondents valued creative work more than money. As one of those respondents, I can tell you that we were simply saying that the declining stock market had rendered all our options worthless. We were tired of being paid in funny money. A core point in the books thesis is that creative workers deliberately move to diverse, open, tolerant regions and that creative companies follow them there a reverse of the earlier pattern of workers going to where the jobs were. This is one of the many patterns Florida tries to pin down, but which squirm under his microscope. San Francisco follows the pattern, but pleasantly homogenous, middle-class Austin, TX is a high-tech Mecca, while funky, artistic, open, tolerant, diverse New Orleans lags. Tolerant of whom, by whom? Florida points out that there is a negative correlation between non-whites and creative class companies. The best leading indicator is the presence of a gay community. But is it surprising or meaningful, that the most affluent areas of the country are frequently home to double-male-income, no-kids households? Surely, this datum isnt enough to define a new class? Dr Florida assumes as did most of us that 2002 represented the nadir of the US economy and that we were rapidly returning to a more normal job situation. In retrospect, we were all wrong, but what can one say about the Creative Class thesis with the benefit of hindsight? Lets quote, as the book does, Hewlett-Packard CEO, Carly Fiorina, the quintessential creative class leader of the time: Keep your tax incentives and highway interchanges; we will go where the highly skilled people are. Most recently, this same CEO has angrily declared her right to move those same jobs to a tax-shelter in funky, artistic . Bangalore. If a million jobs can be re-categorized overnight from Creative Class to commodity Service Sector, were they ever really part of a Creative Class at all? ** Dr Florida has created a web site that can legitimately be regarded as an informal addendum to the book: http://www.creativeclass.org .
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