Austin, ....but Houston and Dallas also. The actual list went 1. Frisco 2. Austin 3. San Diego and Boston (tie) 5. Seattle 6. Raleigh-Durham 7. Houston 8. Washington-Baltimore 9. New York 10. Dallas and Minneapolis-St. Paul
'Creative class' set stage for economic prosperity
Professor says open-minded, diverse communities attract people who
produce ideas, technology.
June 4, 2002
By EMILY EAKIN
The New York Times
Should Pittsburgh recruit gay people to jump-start its economy? Should Buffalo - another
fiscally flat-lining city - give tax breaks to bohemians? As policy prescriptions go, these sound
absurd. But according to a new theory devised by Richard Florida, a professor of regional
economic development at Carnegie Mellon University, towns that have lots of gays and
bohemians (by which he means authors, painters, musicians and other "artistically creative
people") are likely to thrive.
To understand why gays and bohemians are linked to prosperity, Florida explains, you must
first understand something else: the role of an emerging economic force that he dubs the
"creative class" and that civic leaders in dozens of communities regularly fork over $10,000 to
hear him discuss.
Comprising doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs and computer programmers -
almost everyone, in short, who is paid to think for a living - the creative class now accounts for
nearly 30 percent of the workforce, Florida writes in his new book, "The Rise of the Creative
Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life" (Basic
Books).
That's double what it was 20 years ago and 10 times what it was at the turn of the last century.
Already the dominant economic group, he argues, the creative class is likely only to grow as
what it produces - ideas, information and technology - becomes an ever larger part of the
national economy.
"Creativity has come to be valued," Florida writes, "because new technologies, new industries,
new wealth and all other good economic things flow from it."
Florida, 44, is hardly the first person to stress the importance of this new group of creative
types.
Where Florida adds a new twist, however, is to argue that while the creative class is
unquestionably a blessing to the economy as a whole, at the regional level the picture is hardly
so rosy.
Heralding a "pattern of geographic and class segmentation far worse than any we've ever had,"
he says, the creative class may mean boom times for one city and obsolescence for another. The
reason, he contends, is that this tattooed and espresso-sipping set is unusually finicky.
According to conventional economic theory, workers settle in those cities that offer them the
highest-paying jobs in their fields. But creative- class workers, Florida says, are more
particular: They choose cities for their tolerant environments and diverse populations as well as
good jobs.
This is where gays and bohemians come in. Towns that have lots of them, Florida argues, are
more likely to have creative-class workers, high- tech industry and, as a result, strong economic
growth. Not because there are disproportionate numbers of gays and bohemians in high-tech
jobs, he explains, but because their presence signals an open- minded and varied community of
the sort that appeals to software engineers and entrepreneurs. (Race, he says, turns out to be
less useful as a marker of tolerance because cities with great racial diversity overall are often
highly segregated.)
This, in essence, is Florida's "creative capital theory." As he put it during a recent interview in
Manhattan, "You cannot get a technologically innovative place unless it's open to weirdness,
eccentricity and difference."
To make his case, Florida draws on data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of
Labor Statistics as well as a dizzying array of evocatively titled lists. His book includes a
creative-class index (ranking cities by the percentage of creative workers in their labor force); a
high-tech index (ranking cities by the size of their software, electronics and engineering
sectors); an inno vation index (ranking cities by the number of patents per capita); a talent index
(ranking cities by the percentage of college-educated people in their populations); a gay index
(ranking cities by the concentration of gay couples in the population) and a bohemian index (a
similar ranking of "artistically creative people"). Like Olympic decathletes, some cities tend to
perform well by nearly every measure. Florida says the "most successful places" are the ones
that combine all "three T's" - tolerance, talent and technology.
Take San Francisco. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it ranks first on the high-tech index and the gay
index, comes in fifth on the bohemian index and the innovation index and 12th on the
creative-class index. It was no accident, Florida contends, that Silicon Valley took root just a
few miles away: "Silicon Valley was near San Francisco, where the geeky engineer with hair
down to his waist and no shoes walks into a bar and no one blinks."
And given these scores, it's no wonder that San Francisco takes the top spot on the most
important list of all: the creativity index, which ranks cities according to their overall
performance and which Florida calls "a barometer of a region's longer run economic potential."
Other cities on the creativity index are more surprising. Texas is not a state generally thought of
as a bastion of tolerance or technological innovation. But three Texas cities - Austin, Dallas and
Houston - rank among the list's top 10. (New York City placed a respectable ninth.)
Florida said even he was shocked by Texas' robust showing. "It's very impressive," he said.
"My indicators are very strongly associated with employment growth, technological growth and
population growth. Each of these cities has grown substantially. Austin is a growth miracle. It
has a great university and has long been a lifestyle mecca for gays and bohemians. But 10 to 20
years ago, if anyone said 'Austin,' you would have said, 'Huh?' "
Most economists would agree, but that doesn't mean they buy Florida's creative capital theory
as the explanation. "My view is that the best thing in terms of economic development is to
invest in your centers of higher education," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com,
a company in West Chester, Pa., that tracks regional growth. "It's no surprise that Austin came
up in the last 10 to 15 years. The University of Texas got all that oil money and invested it in
technology."
Moreover, he points out, Florida's theory fails to account for the extraordinary success of some
non-high- tech centers like Las Vegas. More popular with gamblers and tourists than computer
geeks, Las Vegas ranks a dismal 47th out of the 49 cities on the creativity index. Yet it had the
fastest job and population growth of any major American city in the 1990s.
Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard, said that high numbers of skilled,
creative people are clearly good for urban economies. But he was skeptical about tolerance. "I
don't know that anyone has shown that tolerance is or isn't detrimental to city growth," he said.
Despite such caveats, however, civic groups in several cities - including Providence, R.I.;
Memphis; Indianapolis; Phoenix; and Bellevue, Wash. - have found Florida's ideas compelling
enough to hire him as a consultant.
And this spring, The Austin American-Statesman gave his theory an informal boost.
Determined to find the best explanation for why the city's population doubled in the last 10
years, the newspaper asked Robert Cushing, a retired sociologist at the University of Texas in
Austin, to test several academic theories: the "social capital theory" developed by the Harvard
political scientist Robert D. Putnam, which says economic growth is tied to the amount of civic
participation and social cohesion in a community; the "human capital theory" associated with
Glaeser and the University of Chicago economist Robert E. Lucas, which says economic
growth is driven by concentrations of educated people; and Florida's creative-capital theory.
Cushing began with the social-capital theory. But using Putnam's own surveys, supplemented
by census data, Cushing could find no positive connection between rates of civic participation
and economic growth.
"We came away with nothing," he said. "That doesn't mean there's nothing to the social-capital
theory, but in terms of linking it to economic prosperity or urban growth, it was not the least bit
helpful."
Cushing went on to test the human-capital theory. But though he found an impressive
correlation between a city's percentage of college- educated people and growth, he was not
completely satisfied.
"There are more than 100 university communities, and only 20 cities stand out as places in
which it would appear that high-tech development is quite outstanding," Cushing said. "How do
we explain Austin?"
Finally, and with a good deal of doubt, he turned to Florida's theory. "When you hear about
these cities that have gays or bohos, it doesn't sound scientific," he said. "It sounds gimmicky."
To his surprise, the creative-capital theory turned out - at least after preliminary testing - to
provide the best explanation for Austin's high-tech transformation. |
