The liveliest economies, he finds, are in regions characterized by the 3 T's -- talent, technology, and tolerance. The implications are profound, to wit:

1. Conventional wisdom holds that, to boost an area's economy, it's necessary to attract large companies and thus create jobs. In fact, companies locate where the talent is; all the tax breaks in the world won't bring a large company to your area if they can't find the quality of employees they want there. Often, too, the talent itself will generate new companies and create jobs that way.

2. Urban planners assume that, to attract talent/jobs, what's important is to provide infrastructure: sports stadiums, freeways, shopping centers, etc. In fact, creative people prefer authenticity -- so making your city just like everyplace else is a sure way to kill its attractiveness.

3. The often-misunderstood "gay index" doesn't mean that gay people are more creative, or that attracting gays to a community will ipso facto boost its economy. Creative people tend to prefer gay-friendly communities because they're perceived as tolerant of anyone who isn't "mainstream"; a city that's run by a conservative good-ole-boys network isn't a good place to try to start a business unless you're one of the good ole boys.

The book is primarily descriptive and analytical, rather than prescriptive. But I feel it's immensely valuable for pointing out that much of the conventional wisdom about economic development and community planning is just plain wrong, and suggesting alternative approaches that have a greater chance of succeeding. And I'm amused (and bemused) by the reviewers who sneered that this book propounds an elitist, liberal, contempt-for-the-working-masses view of American society. To me, the book is almost TOO descriptive: didn't these reviewers read the many statistical tables and the lengthy analyses that the author provides? Fact: The most economically successful cities and regions have these characteristics. That isn't propaganda; it's the way things work.


The Cognitive Elite: Now you see it; now you don't   January 25, 2004
 90 out of 114 found this review helpful

Possibly anyone who wrote a book on the yCreative Classy just before 2003 should be exempt from critical review y just like anyone who wrote an investment guide in 1928, or a colonial government primer in 1775. But yThe Rise of the Creative Classy 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 Floridays 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 todayys 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 ycreativey 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 authorys 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 Pittsburghys poorer neighborhoods would surely have elicited a more sensible and substantive response than that such jobs were yinsufficiently creativey.

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 ycreative worky 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 bookys thesis is that ycreative workersy deliberately move to ydiverse, open, toleranty regions and that ycreative companiesy follow them there y 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 ynon-whitesy and ycreative classy 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 isnyt enough to define a new class?

Dr Florida assumes y as did most of us y that 2002 represented the nadir of the US economy and that we were rapidly returning to a more ynormaly job situation. In retrospect, we were all wrong, but what can one say about the yCreative Classy thesis with the benefit of hindsight? Letys quote, as the book does, Hewlett-Packard CEO, Carly Fiorina, the quintessential ycreative classy leader of the time:

yKeep your tax incentives and highway interchanges; we will go where the highly skilled people are.y

Most recently, this same CEO has angrily declared her yrighty to move those same jobs to a tax-shelter in funky, artistic y. Bangalore. If a million jobs can be re-categorized overnight from yCreative Classy to commodity yService Sectory, were they ever really part of a yCreative Classy 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 .


Nice idea but ivory tower view   June 26, 2002
 51 out of 73 found this review helpful

This book is basically a bloated, out of touch, academic thesis with a good premise all of us alienated corporate blocked creative types would love to believe. If you look closely at Florida's prose, anyone who has a random penchant for a "new thought" is consolidated into this new creative class which seems to me to include too many security conscious treacly liberals who think building an opera house in the overly controlled town square is an expression of social consciousness and creativity. There is no distinction regarding sustainable, honestly intelligent creative ideas and middlebrow attempts to jump on the creative bandwagon. This book seems to be attempting to mainstream creativity in the broadest spectrum possible to grate a theme. Also, he needs to do more research: his paragraph on the demographics of brooklyn/nyc neighborhoods is a decade out of date. He stated young people gravitate to Park Slope, Williamsburg, East Village, etc. and once they get more upwardly mobile, move to the Upper West Side to raise their young. Park Slope is a mecca (since '95) for families and upper incomes. Park Slope has gotten quite suburban and it is expensive to live here. It is not, any longer, a place where you see green hair and just out of college displays of bohemian angst. I think Mr. Florida's book makes for an intersting discussion, but I feel he is writing it from an ivory tower and hasn't done his investigative street journalism work. The charts are ridiculous, and I have lived in at least a few of the cities he's mentioned, and his descriptions seem coerced to fit his thesis to me.


Ambivalently relevant   November 12, 2004
 40 out of 62 found this review helpful

After receiving some insightful comments I decided to revise my review for better clarity and focus since this book seems (inexplicably to me) to continue to be taken seriously.

This book can be, and has been, read in various ways. Some people seem to think it is simply 'descriptive' (the 'way things actually are'); Florida's continuing project, however, is one that is more 'prescriptive' in the sense he wants to give people practical advice to 'revitalize' economies. Now, this book is certainly descriptive. But the question becomes: is it a good or bad description? What this book is not, however, is 'theoretical' or 'analytic'. As I claimed in my prior review, any undergraduate student of sociology could easily call into question the merits of this book as an 'analytical' piece of argumentation.

This is not, however, a critique of Florida's statistics--they are not at issue. As far as I know, those statistics are robust. What is at issue is whether Florida is justified in drawing the conclusions he does from them. While I am sympathetic to what he is trying to say, I don't feel that, in the end, he is justified for saying them on the basis of any cogent or sound arguments in his book.

My main objection is that Florida doesn't have a rigorous, analytically useful definition of 'creativity', which he seems to confuse with 'innovation'. If we start by thinking of artistic creativity, technological innovation, and theoretical science all under some monolithic thing called 'creativity', we ignore the vast literature in psychology that has dealt with the nature of creativity since Margaret Boden's classic work through (what is more interesting) Csikszentmihalyi (who, I think, has more interesting practical suggestions than Florida).

Because Florida's thesis is one that specifically wants to link creativity with the economy, something in the way of a theory telling us how the two things are linked seems to be a conditio sine qua non. (Incidentally, a similar problem befalls Joas' own theoretical 'The Creativity of Action', so I'm not saying that social theorists are automatically immune from the kinds of problems Florida faces.)

Statistical correlations in themselves reveal nothing. Statistics require interpretation. The question then becomes: are Florida's interpreations either justified or plausible?

But Florida himself says that "in retrospect, I could probably have written this book using no statistics at all. ... Many of my arguments could have been made as convincingly just by telling stories from my field notes and letting my human subjects and observations speak for themselves". This is perhaps the baldest statement of Florida's philosophical immaturity and/or irresponsibility.

As far as I can tell, Florida basically superimposes his notion of 'creativity' (or 'innovation') onto a modern liberal ideology of the Emersonian 'self-reliant' individual who, as Thoreau famously said, 'marches to the beat of his own drum'. This is the ethical point that Florida is trying to drive home, which is neither unique nor particularly interesting in itself. Of course there are people who 'go against the trend' and want to 'set trends' instead of 'follow' them. This drive for individuality might certainly mean that these people are 'creative' in a sense, but that sense is so vacuous and general as to be analytically useless (or, in other words, not everyone who wants to 'be an individual' is 'creative' in any interesting or analytically useful sense).

From this idea of 'creative people', Florida proceeds to make claims like 'creative people want to live in diverse, open, and tolerant communities'. Of course these kinds of communities not only attract individualistic people, but also foster an outpouring of creativity. Locke knew this in the 17th century; more famously, Mill knew it in the 19th century; and the Catholic Church has known it since the time of St. Augustine's polemics against the Donatists. As far as this point goes, what Florida says is banal.

So suggestions like 'creative people like tolerant communities' aren't particularly stunning. Whether it is from a genuine ignorance of the history of political and social thought or from an attempt to disguise what is commonplace under new vocabulary as a 'new discovery' I do not know. It is also for this reason that one might have reason to be suspicious of the various ways in which people are trying to 'verify' Florida's characterization of the 'creative class'.

In the natural sciences, it was Heisenberg who showed that one and the same observation can be 'correctly' described by one or more (possibly contradictory) theories. This is even obviously more true in the so-called social and psycholgical sciences. When one looks at a social or psychological phenomenon from within one set of terms and vocabulary, what gets observed (the object) gets channeled into those terms. This is not the same as saying that one sees what one chooses to see. Obviously, I can believe that my neighbors are monkeys, but that doesn't mean that they will actually be monkeys when I look at them. But if I decide in advance that they are antisocial people, I can interpret the fact I never see them during the day as being characteristic of their antisociality. Of course, they may be people who work at night and sleep during the day. Neither explanation excludes the other. My neighbors might both sleep during the day and also be antisocial. Of course, further 'research' would help me to discover all this about them, but that is not the point of this example. The point is that 'empirical verification' of the kind of thing Florida is trying to say is one that is not unique to his own work, but he shows no real concern either for dispelling some people's (such as myself) qualms about it nor, for that matter, any awareness that the problem exists in the first place if he believes that you can prove a point by telling ancedotal stories and reflecting, musing, and hum-hawing about things and expecting others to believe your thoughts deserve serious attention because of the letters "Ph.D."

This is not the place to engage in a questioning of what it means to have a social science, and my point is not to do so. Note again (in the quotation above) that Florida thinks he could have 'argued' (in scare quotes) his point without numbers. That point is to define a new social 'class'. Neither is it the place for me to argue in detail about why I think Florida's definition of his 'creative class' fails as a useful analytic category (anyone who has read Weber would, I think, agree with me even if we don't agree with Weber). Now, one must either have a high estimation of one's own genius and originality (Wittgenstein could get away with this) or a great deal of naivete to attempt such a thing without acknowledging the prior history involved in the very notion of a social 'class'. (I will say, however, that it is entirely one thing to talk about the ways in which some people behave and describe social trends on the one hand and then, on the other, to form on the basis of these descriptions, the notion of a social *class*. People keep saying that interviews with so-called 'creative people', etc, are 'verifying' what Florida says about the 'creative class'. It is one thing to find characteristics of creativity in people and quite another to say that there is something that can (therefore) be called a 'creative class'.)

Certainly, this does not stop this book from being useful to, e.g., local and regional economic planners. I never wanted to say this book is not useful. But as Florida himself notes, anything can be useful, depending on the attitude and end one has in mind.

In short, I would say that the book is certainly 'provocative' in that it raises interesting questions to be thought out and perhaps researched farther. Certainly some of what Florida says is true. But one can have true premises and reason to a false conclusion; one can also have a true conclusion but reason invalidly from false premises. Florida does both of these.

As other reviewers have noted, the data Florida presents is interesting in itself. But reading this book for the data would confine you to the appendices. For that reason I'm somewhat at a loss as to whom this book might be relevant. It doesn't really merit serious attention as a social theory; I'm not aware of any really earthshattering statistical analysis that might be of interest to quantitative sociologists; and the lack of sound reasoning makes this book inappropriate for general readers who are not already predisposed to believe anything they see in print merely for the fact that someone decided to publish this book (in other words, you'll be thoroughly convinced that Florida is right if you already agree with him, but if you're skeptical, there's nothing in the way of sound argumentation to convince you that he's right).


An Economic Developer's Perspective   October 27, 2002
 38 out of 52 found this review helpful

I can relate to many of the ideas expressed in Rich Florida's book, The Rise of the Creative Class. The book challenges us to think; that in itself makes it worthwhile.

Overall, I agree that creativity looms large as an influence on our economy. The marketplace has nearly an insatiable appetite for new, more creative and different goods and services. The ability of people and organizations to adapt to their changing world requires both to become more creative. Most industries and businesses are in hot pursuit of creativity to gain a competitive edge. It is also true that communities are working harder at cultivating and using their creative talents and resources to gain a competitive edge for economic development opportunities.

It is easy to get hung-up on particular components of Florida's framework, such as the gay variable. My research tells me that "sexual orientation/identity" is a powerful descriptor of social, cultural and economic life. Research shows us that "men" and "women" often see many issues differently in life.

I see the necessity for all of us to look at the "whole" as well as the "parts" in looking at Florida's book. The "whole" is that creativity and social and cultural dynamics are major influences on the behavior and structure of economic systems, including local economies. Several earlier researchers also point out that creativity is very much a social phenomenon; that is individuals are can only be judged to be "creative" within a social and cultural context. Outside this context, we would be hard pressed to discern a "crazy" idea from a truly "creative" one. Read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's wonderful book, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, which challenges earlier notions that creativity is solely (or primarily) a function of individual personality.

We are literally at the starting blocks in understanding the complex relationship that economic development has with larger society, and how creative people will shape that future relationship. Available research, at best, depicts "correlation" and not "causation" in understanding how economic development processes (including creativity) relate to society's economic progress. Florida is trying to help us understand the correlations and hypotheses that he sees between our "social and cultural world" and our "economic and business world." Social scientists, including economists, have said for years that economic life is inseparable from social and cultural life. I think Florida is trying to remind us of this basic tie and help us think more precisely about these fundamental relationships.

Political values, philosophies and policies, which reflect and represent the social and cultural interests of a community, have an indelible influence on the economic development agenda of cities, regions and states. This is true everywhere. The Creative Class reminds us of how social and cultural interests use the political process to influence wealth formation and distribution in society. That too is a lesson one could take from the book.

As one who as been immersed in understanding the role of values and beliefs in shaping work, business and economic life, I can say that there is a need for research on these complex and vitally important issues. I believe that we need to expand our "consciousness" about these matters, including how our spiritual beliefs shape our thinking about economic development, people, organizations and society.

We should always exercise caution in the "names" that we use to describe the world that we see through our values and beliefs. Assigning names is no simple matter. It is a basic strategy that is used by everyone to find and assign meaning in our daily lives. In this sense, what's in a name? Everything. Does such a thing as the "creative class" really exist? Is creativity really a "class" issue? I would guess that a large number of researchers focused on understanding creativity would argue that creative people exist in a wide variety of cultures and social classes, and that no single sociological class has a lock on creativity. Does the desire to be creative give rise to class formation? These are important questions that we should be asking as we explore the underlying issues in Rich Florida's work.

Does the Creative Class provide a 100% bulletproof template that you can go home and apply to your community? No, probably not. Does it move us along the understanding curve, enable us to ask better questions and remind us of the close ties between social and cultural dynamics and the economy we have? Yes, I believe that it does.

In closing, I am reminded of an earlier book, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, edited by Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington. This important book says that economic development never really exists outside culture; no matter how hard we try to pretend to the contrary. This suggests that many of Florida's observations may be pointing us in the right direction.