Economist Richard Florida sees something more than a good flick
when watching the wildly popular Lord of the Rings films.
Specifically, he sees the economic demise of the United States.
“In the industry most symbolic of America’s international
economic and cultural might, film, the greatest single project in
recent cinematic history was internationally funded and crafted by
the best filmmakers around the world, but not in Hollywood,”
Florida writes in the latest Washington
Monthly. Rings director Peter Jackson, you see, chose
to make the trilogy in New Zealand rather than in Hollywood.
Of course, many films have been made outside the United
States, the local scenery was ideal for the movie, and Jackson is a
New Zealand native, but never mind all that. Florida is convinced
that the movie’s production represents a crisis of epic proportions
— rather like the battle for Gondor.
Likewise, when musician Youssou N’Dour canceled his U.S. tour
last spring to protest the invasion of Iraq, it signaled the end of
the American music industry. “For American artists and fans,”
Florida explained, “not being able to see touring bands is the
equivalent of the computer industry not getting access to the
latest chips: It dulls the competitive edge.” (When the Rolling
Stones became tax exiles, that pretty much did it for the UK music
scene, right?)
FLORIDA HAS A REAL MOTIVE to make mountains out of these ridiculous
molehills. The Carnegie Mellon professor of economic development
became a hero to gays, dirty hippies, and extreme sports types
everywhere a few years ago when he declared that the “creative class”
was the real engine of the American economy, not those stodgy
“older sectors,” a catch-all term to describe the blue collar
manufacturing industries.
He set out this thesis in his best-selling 2003 book The
Rise of the Creative Class. Florida created a series of
non-traditional “economic indicators,” including the “Bohemian” and
“Gay” indexes, that are relevant to that by now well-worn phrase,
the “new economy.”
Instead of sifting economic trends, Florida used the acres of
print to answer such age old questions as: “Why cities without gays
and rock bands are losing the economic development race.” The
Rise of the Creative Class ranked locales on “coolness” as
measured by the vitality of the backbone of the new economy:
artists and homosexuals.
The somewhat ham-fisted thesis of his book was that “knowledge
workers” only settle in countries and cities that are “tolerant,
diverse and open to creativity.” Thus, tax cuts don’t create jobs,
or not the kind of jobs that matter. The super-cool creative
workforce doesn’t care about income taxes. So the path to economic
prosperity is simple. The federal government should subsidize “fun”
— i.e., bike paths, indie rock bands, coffee shops, and art
galleries.
MEDIA AND COMMUNITY ACTIVIST types cottoned onto Florida’s
findings. Groups popped up in cities across America demanding that
local governments institute hip reforms. Last year, Denver Mayor
John Hickenlooper committed $80,000 a year to help market the city
as “cool” to potential creative workers, and bought a copy of the
book for everyone on his staff. Cincinnati now has a 42-page
“Creative City Plan” stressing Florida’s “three Ts”: technology,
talent, and tolerance.
The emphasis falls most heavily on the final T. Florida
describes the normalization of gay marriage as one of the “great
talent attraction packages of the last hundred years.” He created a
website and started giving seminars around the world on his
discovery, for $10,000 a pop. At this writing, his book sold
through ten hardcover printings, and has just been released in soft
cover.
Of course, economics isn’t called the dismal science for
nothing. When Florida’s colleagues finally got around to looking at
the numbers, they found him to be wrong on virtually every
particular.
In a sledgehammer of an article in the American Enterprise, Joel
Kotkin demolished the case against the creative class thesis.
Historically, the economies of Florida’s vaunted top ten “creative”
cities have struggled behind the national economy by several
percentage points. More to the point, those cities dismissed as
“least creative,” have grown 60 percent faster than the “most
creative” ones over the last 20 years.
GIVEN THE THRASHING he took, a lesser man might have gone back to
the drawing board, or at least done some serious rethinking. But
Florida, with a reputation and a lot of money riding on the
acceptance of his thesis, decided to change the subject by going on
the attack.
Thus his savage attack upon that all-purpose lefty bogeyman
George W. Bush. In the current Monthly, Florida vents his
anger and frustration with Bush and the whole red state way of
life. America’s creative class, he charges, is being driven into
the more cultured arms of the European in a “creative class
war.”
This he paints as a departure from the previous regime. Bill
Clinton, Florida explains, was the “midwife of the new creative
economy” who “personally symbolized the creative class archetype —
its libertine character, its cleverness, its global-mindedness. For
this he drew the lasting enmity of many millions of those in the
‘other’ America.”
But those days are long gone and the barbarians are at the
gates. While the Arkansas son’s “whole life is a testimony to the
power of education to change class,” the current tenant of the Oval
office spurns his Yalie past.
This anti-intellectualism, coupled with Bush’s “aggressively
unilateralist” foreign policy is driving off “high-end immigrants”
needed to run the most powerful nation on earth. Florida quotes one
unnamed scientist who complains that working in America “is like
trying to research and do business in the 21st century in a culture
that wants to live in the 19th century, empires, Bibles, and
all.”
Worse, in the aftermath of the GOP gains in 2002, the
“economically lagging parts of the country now wield ultimate
political power, while the creative centers — source of most of
America’s economic growth — have virtually none.”
It’s a nice story, really, but it has very little to do with the
economic reality on the ground in the United States today. We might
say that Florida’s definition of “economically lagging” is rather
too, well, creative.
