The No-collar Workplace

Those are the words of Bill Bishop, a Texas newspaper reporter and former Herald-Leader editorial columnist, as seen in a new book called The Rise of the Creative Class, written by Carnegie Mellon University regional economist Richard Florida.

Bishop's remarks sum up one of Florida's key findings: communities where gay people congregate have an economic advantage. Not because gays are smarter or earn more money, but because creativity thrives in places that are tolerant, open and diverse.

Florida's book outlines the fascinating, and at times disturbing, consequences of America's shift to an economy fueled by creativity. The ramifications are far-ranging, affecting where we work, play and live.

Florida will outline his argument in Lexington this week as one of a dozen cutting-edge authors speaking at the 2002 ideaFestival. His speech kicks off the festival at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday at the Radisson Plaza Hotel. Tickets are $20. For more information, call (859) 233-3502 ext. 223 or visit www.ideafestival.com.

The 38 million members of Florida's creative class -- painters, software developers, researchers, musicians -- have flocked to a handful of regions around the country, leaving Louisville and much of the Midwest to wither.

In his quest to measure this new creative economy, Florida devised a scale called the creativity index. Designed to rank the creative capacity and creative potential of a city, the index is an amalgamation of several measurements, including the percentage of people who create things for a living, the rate of patent production, the percentage of gay households; and an already widely used calculation of a city's high-tech capabilities.

Of the 50 largest metropolitan areas in the nation, Louisville placed an unimpressive 45th. Not surprisingly, San Francisco, Austin, San Diego, Boston and Seattle took the top five spots.

Lexington, thanks to the University of Kentucky and patent-producing Lexmark International Inc., does pretty well. Of regions with a population between 250,000 and 500,000 people, Lexington ranked 9th, below Madison, Wis., Des Moines, Iowa, and Huntsville, Ala.

To reverse this reshifting of America's population, Florida suggests cities stop financing old-school economic-development projects, such as baseball stadiums and convention centers, and start plowing money into research universities and "street-level" cultural opportunities.

Herald-Leader reporter John Stamper spoke with Florida last week about the ins and outs of the creative class.

Question: You make a pretty compelling case that a new social class has emerged. So who are all these people in this creative class?

Answer: I first just want to clarify what is sometimes the biggest misunderstanding among some of my supporters and some of my critics, and in the debate over the book. In the book I say pretty clearly that every human being is creative, whether that is an artist or a musician, a technologist, a research and developer, a factory worker like my dad, somebody who works in a hair salon or a kid who is in a low-income neighborhood doing his or her hip-hop poetry.

I do say there are 38 million of us who have the great good fortune to be paid principally to utilize that creativity. The core of that group being the super creatives: the artists, musicians, poets, technology people, scientists and research-and-developers. And then, the creative professionals who surround that super-creative core.

And of course, I also say that the class as a whole, if you just look in relative terms, has grown astronomically over the course of the past century, from less than 5 percent of the work force in the early years of the century to probably around 10 percent at the middle of the century to more than 30 percent today.

The great challenge in front of our society, rather than behind it, is to expand the membership of the creative class and to make sure that the creativity of all people is tapped and harnessed and nurtured.

A: I think the most important thing to say is that creative people are meritocratic (focused on individual skills and creativity). My focus groups and interviews certainly picked this up, but the more systematic research of Ron Inglehart, who has studied culture and political values for more than four decades now across the world, has picked this up.

Ron just sent me an e-mail, and he said to me that he believes that openness toward homosexuality is the single most important indicator of cultural progressiveness, cultural development and cultural openness, because gays remain the most discriminated group in many societies. Much more so even than foreigners.

Members of the creative class, people who are principally being paid to be creative, have strong meritocratic values, and that's where the emphasis on diversity comes from.

Q: Define this no-collar workplace that you say most creative-class workers prefer. You also suggest in your book that money oftentimes isn't the main factor in whether a creative person is happy in his or her job.

A: Absolutely. Creative people, regardless of discipline or field, all share one thing in common that virtually every study of creativity shows: we're intrinsically motivated, not extrinsically motivated. Money is important, but it is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition to motivate.

The kinds of things that are very important to creative workers are intrinsic desires: challenge, responsibility, working on great technology, being the best, making a difference, being able to work with great people.

The no-collar workplace is the beginning of a revolutionary adaptation to try to figure out a way to make creative people act on these intrinsic motivations.

It's in its earliest infancy, and we still haven't figured out how to do this, but basically what we're trying to do is evolve away from the machine, hierarchical organizations, bureaucratic structures of the past.

We're trying to evolve new structures and strategies and mechanisms to try to harness the intrinsic goals and desires of creative people, but we're still a long, long way off. We're only in the beginning of evolving these strategies.

Q: You describe this class of people as experience seekers. What motivates that and what do you mean by that?

A: Creative people have always sought after experiences. I often use the example of my eyeglasses, which you buy for the style, for the fashion, for the experiential and creative content, no longer for the utilitarian concept of being able to see better.

Experiences are important to creativity. That's why people took sabbaticals and went on safaris and went to exotic places, whether they were Picasso or a great scientist, to kind of get the mind working and open up the synapses.

So the more and more people are called upon to be creative in their job, the more and more we need these creative experiences. And creative people don't just want to spectate and kind of indulge in those experiences, they want to participate. So you see this shift from watching to doing quite visibly and viscerally across our society.

One of the things that they want is to be in a community or place that can give them this kind of stimulation that they require. In a sense, the importance of place is that it becomes a place that provides them a stimulating, creative, supportive environment.

A community, neighborhood and region provides a thick labor market for people, lots of economic opportunity, and it provides a very thick labor pool for companies to draw on. So place has a social rationale and an economic rationale. It is a really important variable in our new economy and society.

Q: Now that whole idea sort of goes against what was considered almost gospel during the tech boom, that place didn't matter anymore.

A: Boy, was that a wrong-headed view. That's all I can say. Obviously, those people were smoking some good stuff. Place has become even more critical in this creative age, and for all the reasons I just said. It's really a critical economic and social variable.

Q: You mention three T's of economic development in the book -- technology, talent and tolerance -- but how do you become more competitive in attracting creative-class people?

A: The way you do that is by increasing and making investments in your technology, your higher education.

It seems to me that you have to do all three things, but you have to be open to diversity and make sure that anyone can fit in.

Q: That is something very different for Kentucky. What we seem to be really good at in Kentucky is investing in new highways and new industrial parks. We're also pretty good at using tax incentives to lure branch plant manufacturers, but investing in creativity seems different altogether.

A: City after city around the country continues to waste money building these incredible stadium complexes and convention centers, and we know that is not the kind of thing that attracts people.

We've shown in various studies that these things don't pay off. We also know through my research that they don't attract creative-class people.

The things people want are very day-to-day: great parks, great places to recreate, nice art galleries, good music scene, good schools, safe neighborhoods. So cities in their zeal to do economic development are basically throwing a lot of money away.

Q: One thing that's in the works here is that the city of Lexington and the University of Kentucky are working on a plan to revitalize a multi-block area that sits directly between UK and downtown. What should be there to attract a creative lot of people?

A: All the things that make a great neighborhood. It has to be real. It has to be authentic. It has to be diverse. It can't look like an antiseptic planned environment. It's got to be exciting. There has to be stuff to do. It can't just be a bunch of houses or even just places to shop. There's got to be galleries and music venues and all the things that we've known for 40 years make a great neighborhood.

Q: Some of your critics have questioned whether turning a city into a playland for 20-somethings is really a formula for long-term economic development.

A: I think that's exactly the critics who haven't read my book. That's not the argument of my book.

My book does say that having a large concentration of bohemians and gays signals an ecosystem and habitat that is attractive to creative people of all stripes.

It also does say in one little section that young people are an increasingly important part of the economic demographic, and that companies like Microsoft and Goldman Sachs put a large emphasis on these people. But not just young people; several types of people.

In point of fact, only 23.5 percent of all Americans live in a nuclear family. Only 7 percent live in a Leave it to Beaver family. So we have to address the issues of singles, young singles and gays.

The same critics say Florida wants to make cities gay friendly; that he has a gay agenda. I happen to be heterosexual. I don't know why I would have a gay agenda.

The cities that get it laugh at these things and say, 'we're a gay Mecca, we're San Francisco.' 'We know how to do bohemians, we're Seattle.' The cities that are having trouble culturally and attitudinally adjusting to this new age try to dismiss this stuff, bury their head in the sand, throw up boundaries and say, 'we can still be in the 1950s and compete.' Guess what? -- you're not.

The reason Silicon Valley is near San Francisco is because San Francisco is a wide-open, culturally free, exciting place that supports all kinds of risk taking, eccentrics, strange and weird people, some of whom do technological innovation, some of whom do artistic and cultural creativity and innovation.

But to think that you're going to get San Francisco by investing in a business incubator and a venture-capital fund is so far from reality, it's worse than ludicrous.

If you're afraid to look at how you get there, then you're saying, 'I'd much rather stay in the past with the economy of the past and I'm happy to decline slowly, but I'm certainly not going to be a creative or innovative Mecca.' That's the point of the book.

Q: Let's step back for just a second. How did you go about measuring creativity and measuring these sub-categories of technology, talent and tolerance?

A: I don't just make things up from scratch. I went out and did interviews. I did case studies. I went to cities and talked to people, talked to businesses, talked to community leaders.

After doing that for a couple of years ... it was pretty clear that people's location decisions really matter. It's not just corporate location strategy and firm behavior, but it's personal location strategy and why people choose places to live and work that are real important.

Well, then I had to figure out how to measure that. We began to look at measures of amenities and lifestyle and exciting stimulating places. We were using measures of climate and recreation and outdoor amenities and night life. At one point we said, why don't we develop an indicator of bohemians?

And so we invented the bohemian index, which is a much better measure than night life and culture and ballets, because it measures the people who are directly involved in producing creative culture.

And then I met Gary Gates, and Gary had invented the gay index. The gay index was both thought of as a measure of amenities and diversity. We came to conclude that it was a signaling device for the kind of habitat or ecosystem that creative people might want to live in, just like the bohemian index.

We did a whole bunch of statistical analysis comparing those indicators against more traditional indicators of economic assets: human capital and levels of education.

They looked like they worked very well. And then we built up the indicators of the creative class by identifying creative occupations and distilling that over a period of over 100 years and across 260 regions.

Then lastly, we decided to build an overall creativity index, which combined the three T's: technology, talent and tolerance. There are two indicators of technology. First, high-tech company concentration, which is a good indicator of the commercial aspect of creativity. Second, rates of patents for innovations, which is a good sense of technological creativity.

Then there's the creative-class measure, which is a measure of talent. And then the measure of diversity, the gay index.

The reason we picked the gay index is that openness to homosexuality is the single most important indicator that a place is open and tolerant. But also we picked it because it was the only indicator of diversity that at the time was available as a result of the census.

So we put those four things together and built the creativity index to try to rank cities on their creative capacity and creative potential.

Q: Lexington ranked fairly high in the mid-sized city category. At the same time, Louisville was among the worst-performing larger cities. As far as Kentucky and this entire region of the U.S., it doesn't seem to be a great picture.

A: Well, Lexington has the capacity. It has great assets. The university. It can be a lifestyle destination. It has a high quality of life. But only if the leadership of Lexington want to make it so.

So Lexington has to figure out, does it want to be part of the creative age? Does it want to invest in its higher education base further? Does it want to become more like the economy of an Austin, Texas, or does it want to be a place built around manufacturing industry? That is Lexington's choice.

I don't suppose it ever ocurred to this joker that gays are prosperous because they don't have children to support? Sheesh! What a load.

"Answer: I first just want to clarify what is sometimes the biggest misunderstanding among some of my supporters and some of my critics, and in the debate over the book. In the book I say pretty clearly that every human being is creative, whether that is an artist or a musician, a technologist, a research and developer, a factory worker like my dad, somebody who works in a hair salon or a kid who is in a low-income neighborhood doing his or her hip-hop poetry.
"I do say there are 38 million of us who have the great good fortune to be paid principally to utilize that creativity. The core of that group being the super creatives: the artists, musicians, poets, technology people, scientists and research-and-developers. And then, the creative professionals who surround that super-creative core.
"And of course, I also say that the class as a whole, if you just look in relative terms, has grown astronomically over the course of the past century, from less than 5 percent of the work force in the early years of the century to probably around 10 percent at the middle of the century to more than 30 percent today.
"The great challenge in front of our society, rather than behind it, is to expand the membership of the creative class and to make sure that the creativity of all people is tapped and harnessed and nurtured."

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.