Rise of the Creative Class

Richard Florida, a Carnegie Mellon professor, caused quite a stir a few years ago when he published The Rise of the Creative Class in which he argued that the key to economic development was creative types to your city. That meant you had to be cool, tolerant, decidedly non-suburban and non-bourgeois. The thesis seemed plausible during the dot-com boom/bubble. Hip urban centers like San Francisco, Manhattan, and Denver were filled with prosperous young singles who worked for start-ups.

This article by Joel Kotkin disputes Florida's theory. Obviously the bursting of the bubble helps kotkin's case. But he also shows that even in 1999 Florida misinterpreted critical data. For example, San Francisco is liberal and bohemian and near Silicon Valley. But San Francisco was never the "heart" of the technology industry and it is not clear that the social climate of the city had much to do with the business success of companies headquartered far down the road in San Jose.

Florida's hypothesis is a perfect example of of the infantile utopianism that helped fuel the dot-com bubble. Such writing (Fast Company used to be filled with this dreck) takes a quick snapshot of a company or industry. Then it points to a couple of interesting phenomena, pronounces them key trends, utters the magic words-- "transformation, technology, revolution, digital"-- and proclaims a beautiful future. Serious history and critical analysis are ignored.

A constant undercurrent of business journalism in the late 90s was the belief that digital technology would somehow upset the social-economic status quo. The future belonged to the pierced, tattooed web designer with his shaved head and Rage Against the Machine t-shirt. Somehow, the old guard would be swept aside by 27 year old CEOs running start-ups that were cool and socially responsible.

Randall Rothenberg of Ad Age pointed out as the bubble burst in 2000 that a lot of the net-hype owed a debt to the Port Huron Statement of 1962. The chip and browser would help Gen X do what the boomers failed to do with marches and manifestoes. That is why journalists devote so much attention to Steve Jobs when there are a dozen CEOs in Silicon Valley who have accomplished more. Jobs is hip, liberal, and a self-proclaimed revolutionary. How can Andy Grove compete? All he did was beat the world in a tough industry-- he never dated Joan Baez. And who cares if Apple is really nothing more than an also-ran in PCs. Steve Jobs knows Bill Clinton.

In the 1960s America put a man on the moon. The people responsible were not tie-died hippies or socially engaged Ivy Leaguers. It was a bunch of guys in white short-sleeved shirts who carried slide rules instead of protest signs. As someone said at Mission Control when Neil Armstrong took his first lunar steps--"this is the triumph of the squares."

If Richard Flordia could have been bothered to do research before generalizing he might have read some of the works of Michael Malone on Silicon Valley. Malone is a native of the Valley and knows its history. And in his work the same point comes through-- the technology industry was fueled by engineers who were more Midwestern than bohemian. The most important company-- Hewlett Packard-- was anything but hip.