The Rise of the Creative Class … and how it’s transforming
work, leisure, community, & everyday life
by Richard Florida
Basic Books. 416 pages, $15.95 (paper)
ACCORDING TO Richard Florida, there are three conditions that encourage economic growth in the postindustrial economy: technology, talent, and tolerance. These elements are embodied in a new configuration of workers that comprise what Florida calls the “creative class.” These are the scientists, engineers, architects, educators, writers, artists, and entertainers whose function it is to generate new ideas, technologies, and creative content. They constitute some thirty percent of the U.S. workforce.
Florida’s method is to start with the economic growth rate for a large number of U.S. regions and to correlate this with a variety of economic, demographic, and cultural factors. Among his many interesting findings is that places having a large gay population tend to have more robust economic growth than less gay places. The explanation for this relationship lies in the fact that gay people tend to live in places that encourage tolerance and self-expression. For their part, creative types tend to prefer a living environment where they can not only sustain themselves financially, but feel safe to be themselves and pursue their interests outside of a traditional nine-to-five work week and heavy social or familial obligations. Florida points out that creative people look for the kind of diversity and tolerance that’s typically marked by the presence of openly gay neighborhoods as well as ethnically diverse ones. A place that successfully attracts more talented and creative people, in turn, feeds its culture of innovation and stimulates economic growth. The idea that the presence of gay people is a factor in the economic growth of cities raises interesting possibilities in the context of current events. Will there be a rise in the attraction of creative people to places like Boston, Portland (Oregon), San Francisco, and New Paltz, New York, now that these places are on the forefront of the GLBT civil rights struggle? In a new preface, the author reveals that after the publication of the first edition, “social conservatives have gone apoplectic over my findings that places with high concentrations of gays and bohemians tend to have higher rates of innovation and economic growth.” While this book got the attention of a lot of city planners on its first publication, not all business leaders embraced Florida’s ideas. Inc. magazine gleefully reported in its March 2004 issue that the worst areas for business—due to high cost of living, single industrial base, and lack of discretionary income in the middle class—include San Jose/Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Boston, Portland, and Raleigh-Durham. Yet these five locations are all ranked in the top ten of Florida’s Creativity Index, a set of variables associated with predictors for the areas with the most potential creative economic growth. Actually, Florida’s approach can account for at least part of this anomaly, since he’s talking not about the quantity of jobs in a city but about the quality of the jobs—and about the people who hold them. He cites a University of Texas study which found that in some cities the creative class was expanding even while the overall population was declining. A troubling aspect of this book is that gays, “bohemian types,” and nonwhite ethnic groups are treated essentially as desirable scenery for a new, economically powerful class that may or may not include these groups. We learn, for example, that non-gay creative workers, in order to determine how tolerant or open to diversity a company is, sometimes ask whether company policies include domestic partner provisions. But does it matter to these applicants how many actual gay men and lesbians are working there? I was surprised by a tiny acknowledgment in Appendix B (“Information on Updates”) mentioning that the Gay Index now included gay male and lesbian populations. Some time between 1999 and 2004, it seems, lesbians became important enough to make it into this Index, which may be not so much a fault of the author as of the systematic lack of national data-gathering on women in general and lesbians in particular. This is a fascinating book on the emerging awareness of a link between people’s cultural commitments and economic growth. It could be an especially useful tool for urban planners and civic policy developers who live in areas that have not yet acknowledged the merits of building a diverse community that welcomes GLBT people. Kris Scott Marti is a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at UC, San Francisco.
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