Escape From Florida
What is the Creative Class? Is Richard Florida right? Is the future of our economy really in the hands of the Right-Brained (read: gays and hipsters)? Are bohemians and their "creative" work habits really the cash cow of the 21st century? Is higher education in the arts the new key to success in what is confusingly referred to as the "globalized" economy?
From what I have witnessed: No.
In my brief and admittedly narrow experience in business management, I have learned the following things:
- 80% of Big New Ideas from staff members range from mediocre to potentially ruinous. When you look exclusively at ideas from "right-brained" staff members, who suffer from disproportionate faith in their own instincts, that figure goes up to about 90%. OK, I'm making up stats. The point is, people who are not directly responsible for the effects of change on a company's earnings will tend to favor change for its own sake (particularly when that change might lead to more flexible office hours, or less rigorous work demands). When a prospective employee talks about wanting to work in a "creative environment," my finger moves toward the eject button.
- The most valuable workers are not the ones who regularly flout convention, but those who approach their work like they do their health: avoid harm, identify problems as they arise, attempt sensible remedy, if all else fails, consult higher authorities, and pass resulting wisdom on to colleagues and superiors. Creativity plays a role, but not in the literalist sense that Florida seems to mean it. What matters is creative problem-solving, using a combination of reason and imagination in equal measure. As far as I can tell, creativity is a far more valuable trait among accountants than it is among graphic designers. The most productively creative people are those who operate well within constraints.
-I've noticed very little correlation between the BA as an actual course of education and the performance of an employee in an office. Far more important is the employee's family background and/or self-image (and natural intellectual abilities, of course) - things that often lead a high school grad to go to university, but can't be instilled by a university. This may sound classist. It's not. People who are either raised to or who choose to value independent thought and self-reliance make good employees (not to mention good leaders). Those raised to follow rules, wait for rewards, and blame the power structure when things go wrong do not. A deadbeat with a BA is still a deadbeat. I assume that Americans do well economically because independence of thought and self-reliance are prized values here, instilled in us from a young age.
The smartest debunking I've read lately of Florida's econofantasy is from an MIT economics professor named Frank Levy. Especially this section on outsourcing and creativity.
Defined this way, creativity has very little to do with being in a punk band or living in the gay village or getting a degree in cultural studies. It has to do with an analytical and a quick-adapting mind. There is clearly a whole sector of the economy trying to translate jobs into "rules-based" tasks that can be outsourced to robots or to the developed world. Everyone managing a business now thinks in those terms. This brings to mind a Californian I buy ad space from- the owner of one of the web's largest alternative content networks- who has basically broken the job of 'ad sales' down into creative/negotiation stuff (maybe 10% of the work) and busywork/followup (the remaining 90%), and outsourced all of the latter to an office in the Philippines. Jobs once considered comprehensively will soon be separated into wheat and chaff, with only the parts requiring dynamic intelligence kept at home (assuming we retain our cultural/educational edge). That means that increasingly, skilled workers will spend more time thinking, negotiating and inventing, and much less time learning systems and rules. People with the mental energy to stay focused on the "wheat" will do best.Until fairly recently, the U.S. labor market had many jobs that paid good money for people who could carefully follow instructions—what cognitive psychologists call “rules-based” tasks. With the advent of computerized work and offshoring, these rules-based tasks are fast disappearing. If a job can be fully expressed in rules—withdrawing money from a bank account or issuing an airline boarding pass—it can and will be programmed for a computer. If most of a job can be expressed in rules, the rules can be explained to someone in the Philippines who will do the job for much lower wages and so the job will move offshore.
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Viewed from this rules-based perspective, creativity is knowing what to do when the rules run out or there are no rules in the first place. It is what a good auto mechanic does after his computerized test equipment says the car’s transmission is fine but the transmission continues to shift at the wrong engine speed. It is what a good supermarket manager does when she chooses words and body language to convince her staff to treat customers as important people rather than annoying nuisances.
One thing that Florida, sadly, gets right is the allure of low-paid jobs in seemingly creative fields. In the above-cited piece, he uses the example that most of his students would prefer to work in a hair salon than in a factory, even if the factory paid more. A fellow I know was recently trying to hire a programmer to help build and manage web sites for law firms. Though he was offering a very competitive salary and a pleasant work environment, he was turned down by a couple of prospective hires on the grounds that the work was insufficiently (you guessed it) creative, and that this mattered more to them than salary. And of course, many of the elite artistic professions- media, art, music- manage to attract college graduates to work for free, or below subsistence wages, sometimes for prolonged periods of time. I suppose it can safely be said that companies that find ways of portraying themselves as doing "creative" or avant-garde work will be able to attract a better grade of assistant, receptionist, office manager, data entry personnel, and so on for less money than companies that seem to be in stodgy or linear fields. That is not to say that the creative wannabes doing these jobs are contributing more to the economy than their humble opposite numbers in tool and die factories. But it's probably true that a city that can attract superficially creative industries, like film, will wind up with a better-looking, university-educated population (not to mention a population that will consistently vote for more subsidies for superficially creative industries.)
But when you're talking about real economic growth- profitably innovative industries- this creative stuff is a red herring. Should the state subsidize job creation in artsy fields, even if most of it is low-paying, because economically illiterate youth think those jobs are cooler than blue collar alternatives? What good would it do for our global competitiveness to fill our cities with an ever-increasing number of economically illiterate hipsters from around the globe? The idea that bohemianism, which once spurned work and "The Man" altogether, is somehow becoming an economic driver strikes me as idiotic. My bet is that the New, New Economy will be largely driven by the same types who drove the old: egotistical, devious, and fundamentally conservative.