Richard Florida The Rise Of The Creative Class, Revisited [619467]

Licență

Richard Florida The Rise Of The Creative Class, Revisited [619467]

Byadmin ianuarie 1, 2024

THE
RISE
OF THE
CREATIVE
CLASS10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
RICHARD FLORIDARevisited

THE RISE OF
THE CREATIVE CLASS,
REVISITED

THE RISE OF THE
CREATIVE CLASS,
REVISITED
RICHARD FLORIDA
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York

Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Richard Florida
Published in 2012 by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Previous edition published in 2002 by Basic BooksAll rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of briefquotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016-8810.
Books published by Basic Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the
United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information,please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 ChestnutStreet, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or [anonimizat].
Designed by Pauline BrownTypeset in 12 point Minion Pro by the Perseus Books GroupLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available for this book.
LCCN 2012936719
ISBN (hardcover): 978-0-465-02993-8ISBN (e-book): 978-0-465-02995-2
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS
Preface to The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited vii
Preface to the Original Edition xxi
INTRODUCTION
1: The Transformation of Everyday Life 1
PART ONE: THE CREATIVE AGE
2: The Creative Economy 15
3: The Creative Class 35
PART TWO: WORK
4: The Machine Shop and the Hair Salon 65
5: Brave New Workplace 84
6: No-Collar 100
PART THREE: LIFE
7: Time Warp 125
8: The Experiential Life 133
9: The Big Morph 157
v

vi
PART FOUR: COMMUNITY
10: Place Matters 183
11: The Geography of Class 203
12: The 3T’s of Economic Development 228
13: Global Reach 266
14: Quality of Place 280
15: Building the Creative Community 304
PART FIVE: CONTRADICTIONS
16: The Geography of Inequality 353
17: The Inclining Signiﬁcance of Class 366
CONCLUSION
18: Every Single Human Being Is Creative 383
Appendix 401
Notes 437
Acknowledgments 467
Index 469CONTENTS

PREFACE TO
THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS,
REVISITED
This book was—and is—my attempt to explain the key underlying
forces that have been transforming our economy and culture overthe past several decades. When I ﬁrst started writing it in late 1999and early 2000, I was struck by how much attention was being paidto surface-level changes; I wanted to focus on the long-lasting andtruly tectonic forces that were altering the way we work and live.Our world, it seemed to me, was changing as dramatically as it hadsince the early days of the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t just theInternet, or the rise of new technologies, or even globalization thatwere upending our jobs, lives, and communities, though all thosethings were important. Beneath the surface, unnoticed by many,
an even deeper force was at work—the rise of creativity as a fun-damental economic driver, and the rise of a new social class, theCreative Class.
Spanning science and technology, arts, media, and culture, tra-
ditional knowledge workers, and the professions, this new classmade up nearly one-third of the workforce across the United Statesand considerably more than that in many individual communities.The rise of this new class and of creativity as an economic forcewere the underlying factors powering so many of the seeminglyunrelated and epiphenomenal trends we had been witnessing, from
vii

the ascent of new industries and businesses, to changes in the way
we live and work, extending even into the rhythms, patterns, de-sires, and expectations that structure our daily lives.
In the decade since this book ﬁrst appeared, a whole series of
world-shattering events occurred—from the collapse of the techbubble and 9/11, to the economic and ﬁnancial meltdown of 2008—any one of which might have been suﬃcient to derail or reverse thetrends it described. Instead, they have only become more deeply en-sconced. By late 2011, the social media site LinkedIn reported
1that
the word most used by its members to describe themselves was—you guessed it—“creative.” As TechCrunch put it: “In a time of high
unemployment, when traditional skills can be outsourced or auto-mated, creative skills remain highly sought after and highly valuable.We all want to be part of the Creative Class of programmers, de-signers, and information workers. The term used to mean artistsand writers. Today, it means job stability.”
2At a time when the US
unemployment rate topped 10 percent, the rate of unemploymentfor the Creative Class did not even hit 5 percent. The Creative Classhas become truly global, numbering between one-third to nearlyone-half of the workforce in the advanced nations of North America,Europe, Asia, and around the world.
I could go on. But so many of the things that seemed shockingly
new and outlandish when I first wrote about them—and that sentmy critics into such a lather—are now seen as the norm. My ideasthat the talented were beginning to favor cities over suburbs, thaturban centers were challenging suburban industrial park nerdi -stans as locations for talent and high-tech industry, that oldercities were starting to regain some of the ground they’d lost toSun Belt boomtowns—were widely derided as ludicrous when Ifirst began to write about them. Ten years later, they aren’t evencontroversial.
A decade ago, many critics dismissed as a precious aﬀectation my
notion that a vibrant music scene can be a signal that a location hasviii PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

the underlying preconditions associated with technological innova-
tion and economic growth. What possible pertinence, they sniﬀed,could such rariﬁed matters have for economic development?
I caught a lot of ﬂak for proposing that diversity—an openness
to all kinds of people, no matter their gender, race, nationality, sex-ual orientation, or just plain geekiness—was not a private virtuebut an economic necessity. I earned a certain measure of notorietyfor suggesting that a visible gay presence in a city can be seen as aleading indicator for rising housing values and high tech. Somewere outraged at the very suggestion and accused me of everythingfrom putting the proverbial cart before the horse to trying to un-dermine the conventional family, even Judeo-Christian civilizationas we have come to know it. Popular opinion now favors gay mar-riage, and a growing body of research notes the connection betweendiversity, innovation, and economic growth.
Rereading all the pages I wrote back then about the disappear-
ance of dress codes and the advent of flexible hours, the respectfor diversity and the meritocratic values that creative people bringto the workplace and society, I find myself wondering what all ofthe fuss was about. All of those things are taken for granted, they’reso much a part of the cultural moment that it’s easy to forget hownew and daring they once seemed—and how many pundits wereready to stake their reputations on the certainty that they were onlypassing trends, that after the next dip in the NASDAQ, peoplewould get their suits out of mothballs and return to business as usual.
I was accused of confusing chickens and eggs when I said that
the secret to building better, more vibrant locations was not justattracting companies with handouts and tax breaks, but ratherbuilding a “people climate” that could attract the diverse humantalents that drive true prosperity. I was roundly derided when I cri-tiqued the conventional menu of downtown renewal through sta-dium complexes and generic retail districts and malls and counteredix PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

instead that a simpler, less expensive path to revival was to improve
neighborhood conditions with smaller investments in everythingfrom parks and bike paths to street-level culture that would makepeople’s everyday lives better, improve the underlying quality ofplace, and signal a community that is open, energized, and diverse.The conventional wisdom insisted that such “frills and frivolities”come about as products of economic development, not that they
are a way to spur it. Ten years later, forward-looking communities,large and small alike, are busily reclaiming their disused waterfrontsand industrial areas and transforming them into parks and greenspaces; at the same time, suburbs are seeking to remake themselvesinto better, more livable communities by adding transit, shoringup their arts and culture scenes, and developing pedestrian-friendlytown centers that are ﬁlled with the best features of real cities.
Hand in hand with the revival of cities and the densiﬁcation
of suburbia, the dawning of the Creative Age has ushered in anewfound respect for livability and sustainability. This, too, is partand parcel of the deeper shift. The quest for clean and green ispowered by the same underlying ethos that drives the CreativeEconomy. Where the green agenda is driven by the need to conservenatural assets, the Creative Economy is driven by the logic thatseeks to fully harness—and no longer waste—human resources andtalent. The old Fordist industrial system was premised on theexploitation of workers and nature. Workers performed the sameboring, exhausting tasks until they burned out. The environmentwas treated as a source for resources that were scoured out of theground and as a bottomless receptacle for waste. As humancapabilities and potential became greater factors of production inthe knowledge-based industries that began to emerge in the 1960s,manufacturing also evolved along a parallel continuum, from zeroinventory to zero defects and, ultimately, to zero emissions. Wastebecame the enemy. The creative ethos demands that we cultivateand utilize all of our natural and human resources.x PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

Whereas some have dubbed the very concept of the Creative
Class as elitist and accused me of privileging it over other classes,
or derided me as a “neo-liberal” with a naively optimistic faith inthe power of markets, I assure you that neither is the case. The keythesis of my argument is as simple as it is basic: every human beingis creative. That the Creative Class enjoys vast privileges is true, butto acknowledge that fact is not to endorse it. The essential task be-fore us is to unleash the creative energies, talent, and potential ofeveryone—to build a society that acknowledges and nurtures thecreativity of each and every human being. Creativity is truly a lim-itless resource; it is something we all share. Scientists like to saythat they “stand on the shoulders of giants.” So do we all. As aspecies, we build on the collective creativity not just of those in ourown time but of those who have come before us. Marx long agosaid that what made the proletariat a universal class was the col-laborative nature of physical labor. But what sets us apart from allother species is our collective creativity, something that is innatein each of us and shared by every one of us.
From that underlying point of view, it’s not just that diversity and
inclusion are moral imperatives, which of course they are. They areeconomic necessities. Creativity requires diversity: it is the great
leveler, annihilating the social categories we have imposed onourselves, from gender to race and sexual orientation. This is whythe places that are the most open-minded gain the deepest economicadvantages. The key is not to limit or reverse the gains that theCreative Class has made but to extend them across the board, to builda more open, more diverse, more inclusive Creative Society that canmore fully harness its members’—all of its members’—capacities.
Yet as I write these words, all is far from well: the great promise
of the Creative Age is not being met.
Just six or so years after the original edition of this book was pub-
lished, the economy came crashing down. The economic meltdownof 2008 was not just a crisis of Wall Street, of risk-taking by banks,xi PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

of wanton ﬁnancial speculation, and of an economy that had been
debt-bingeing on housing and consumer goods, though all of thosethings were implicated. It was a deeper crisis that ran to the rootsof the old Fordist order and the very way of life it engendered. Atbottom, the crisis signaled the end of the old order and the begin-nings of the new. Here’s how the Nobel Prize–winning economistJoseph Stiglitz put it in 2011:
The trauma we’re experiencing right now resembles the trauma we
experienced 80 years ago, during the Great Depression, and it has beenbrought on by an analogous set of circumstances. Then, as now, we faceda breakdown of the banking system. But then, as now, the breakdown ofthe banking system was in part a consequence of deeper problems. Even ifwe correctly respond to the trauma—the failures of the ﬁnancial sector—it will take a decade or more to achieve full recovery. Under the best ofconditions, we will endure a Long Slump. If we respond incorrectly, as wehave been, the Long Slump will last even longer, and the parallel with theDepression will take on a tragic new dimension.
3
We are in that strange interregnum when the old order has
collapsed and the new order is not yet born. As steep as the levies
that the economic crisis exacts, as unfairly incommensurate as thereturns to mental as compared to physical labor may be, we can’tturn back the clock. The old order has failed. Attempts to bail itout, to breathe new life into it or to somehow prop it back up aredoomed to history’s dustbin. A new global economic order is takingshape, but it is still conﬁned within the brittle carapace of the old,with all of the outmoded, wasteful, oil-dependent, sprawling,unsustainable ways of life that went along with it.
Like other such epochal transformations, this one is fraught with
challenges and diﬃculties, with winners and losers. In fact, it hasintensiﬁed and magniﬁed the economic, social, cultural, andxii PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

geographic cleavages that already divide the classes—between
nations, across regions, and within our cities and metro areas.
Such large-scale transformations occur across long time scales,
at least a decade or more, as the economists Kenneth Rogoﬀ andCarmen Reinhart noted in their book This Time Is Diﬀerent: Eight
Centuries of Financial Folly. My assessment is that the crisis we are
living through is fully comparable to the Panic and Long Depressionof the 1870s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, which took thebetter part of a generation to fully resolve.
4
If such economic resets are generational events, building more
robust, fully articulated social and economic systems takes evenlonger. Although many focus on the social compact that emergedafter the New Deal and World War II, they forget that it was morethan a century in the making—and the product of sustainedstruggle. It can take on the order of seventy, eighty, even a hundredyears before social change catches up to economic change and newand more robust institutions are built to undergird more widelyshared prosperity. Viewed in retrospect, history always seems likea more linear process than it really was. We forget the detours andfalse starts and dead ends—the collapse of the Paris Commune in1871; how Weimar Germany was upended by Hitler’s rise; howTrotsky’s revolutionary state devolved to Stalin’s gulags.
The rise of a new economic and social order is a double-edged
sword. It unleashes incredible energies, pointing the way towardnew paths for unprecedented growth and prosperity, but it alsocauses tremendous hardships and inequality along the way. We arein the midst of a painful and dangerous process, and one that isfull of unknowns. We tend to forget what a fraught and dangerousbusiness childbirth is. My hope is that by understanding this neworder, we can speed the transformation this time around.
Still, that new order will not simply or automatically assert itself
into existence. It will require new institutions, a new social compact,xiii PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

and a new way of life to bring it into being. We must turn our
attention from housing starts, automobile sales, energy consump-tion, and other crass material measures to new measurements thatreﬂect a shared and sustainable prosperity that improves humanwell-being and happiness and restores meaning and purpose tolife. We must shift from a way of life that valorizes consumption,in which we take our identities from the branded characteristics ofthe goods we purchase, to one that enables us to develop our talentsand our individuality, to realize our truest selves through our workand other activities. Our ﬂedgling Creative Economy needs to giveway to a fully Creative Society, one that is more just, more equitable,more sustainable, and more prosperous: our economic future de-pends on it.
This time, perhaps for the ﬁrst time in human history, economic
logic is on our side. Prosperity in the Creative Age turns on humanpotential. It can only be fully realized when each and every workeris recognized and empowered as a source of creativity—whentheir talents are nurtured, their passions harnessed, and they are
appropriately rewarded for their contributions.
A great stumbling block in the United States has been the huge
rise in inequality, the bifurcation of the labor market betweenhigher-skilled, higher-wage Creative Class jobs and lower-skilled,lower-pay Service Class jobs in ﬁelds like food preparation, homehealth care, and retail sales, where more than 60 million Americanswork, 45 percent of the labor force. This stark divide in economicprospects has been exacerbated by the demise of so many oncehigh-paying Working Class jobs. The only way forward is to makeall jobs creative jobs, infusing service work, manufacturing work,farming, and every other form of human endeavor with creativityand human potential. We forget that manufacturing jobs weren’talways good jobs. William Blake dubbed England’s factories “satanicmills” and Marx bemoaned the tremendous exploitation of thexiv PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

Working Class. We made them the good jobs that they became
through collective eﬀort and by building new institutions, notablythe postwar social compacts that aﬀorded workers better pay andestablished social safety nets for the less fortunate—eﬀorts thatwere roundly resisted at the time by entrenched interests.
As these pages will show, the United States (along with a few
other nations) is actually an outlier when it comes to inequality.Across most of the advanced nations, greater innovation andcreativity tend to go hand in hand with lessinequality. This book’s
last chapter will argue that a new social compact—a CreativeCompact—is needed to turn our Creative Economy into a justand Creative Society, in which prosperity is widely shared.
While driven and molded by economic logic, the key institu-
tions and initiatives of the future will be shaped, as they alwayshave, by human agency. They will be the products of politicalchoices, which turn on political power. And the mobilizing forcetoday—the leading force at the beachhead of social, cultural, andeconomic change—is the Creative Class. The problem until now,as I noted in the original edition, had been that the Creative Classwas lacking in class consciousness. In contrast to the industrialWorking Class, which was forged around strong ties and hoardedinto factories and dense city neighborhoods, the Creative Classis a highly individualized and even atomized social stratum. Thusfar, its members have been content with personal betterment,staying fit, developing themselves, renovating their houses andapartments, questing after new experiences. Although CreativeClass people are generally liberal-minded, solidarity has not beentheir strong suit.
Still, the Creative Class stands at the forefront of what the po-
litical scientist Ronald Inglehart has termed the transition to apost-materialist politics—a shift from values that accord priorityto meeting immediate material needs to ones that stress belonging,xv PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

self-expression, opportunity, environmental quality, diversity, com-
munity, and quality of life.5Although there are certainly divisions
within this new class and its members do not ﬁt neatly into the oldleft–right spectrum, its values are staunchly meritocratic. Many areoﬀended by inequality of opportunity and repelled by a system thatis rigged against so many—and that is so wasteful of natural andhuman resources. These attitudes and inclinations are politicalveins that can—and are—being tapped.
The protracted economic crisis and outrageous inequality of
our time has stirred up some of these dormant political energies,as witnessed by the uprisings across the Arab world in the springand summer of 2011 and the incredible resonance of the globalOccupy Movement. It’s ironic to remember how “transgressive”some proponents of the New Economy once considered themselvesto be. If their grandiose pronouncements about remakingcapitalism were mostly fantasies, the insurrectionary forces thatthe rise of the Creative Class are unleashing are potentiallyvolcanic. As the distinguished historian Eric Hobs bawm noted,those uprisings have more to do with the Creative Class than theydo with traditional Working Class movements. “The traditionalleft was geared to a kind of society that is no longer in existenceor is going out of business,” he remarked. “It believed very largelyin the mass labour movement as the carrier of the future. Well,we’ve been de-industrialised, so that’s no longer possible. Themost effective mass mobilisations today are those which startfrom a new modernised middle class, and particularly theenormously swollen body of students.”
6
Of course, traditional Working Class movements still have con-
siderable life in them and must be part of any more general move-ment for social change. But the driving force of change is theCreative Class—artists and cultural creatives, students, profession-als. Although these movements have been propelled by the Internet,by Facebook, Twitter, and other forms of social media, it’s impor-xvi PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

tant to note that they take shape in space—in real physical places—
from Tahir Square to Zucotti Park.
In the original edition of this book, I argued that place would
continue to become a more central factor in our economy and ouridentity, and that it would likely supplant the factory and industrialorganizations as the rallying point of class struggle, forming thekey axis of cleavage and mobilization in our time. What I couldnot have predicted is how far-ﬂung and synchronous this new ageof mobilization would become. Whether these speciﬁc movementsultimately succeed or fail is not the real question. The consortia ofplace, social media, and the Creative Class will be the fulcrums forfuture social movements that can provide the energy and forceneeded for economic and social transformation.
Our time, like all periods of great change and transition, is one
that is fraught with diﬃculty, disruption, and challenge. But ulti-mately, I am optimistic. Not to be overly deterministic, but the basiclogic of economic and social progress is on our side. Human cre-ativity is the most spectacularly transformative force ever unleashed,and it is something that all of us can draw on to one degree or an-other. If the rise of this new order and new social class poses tremen-dous challenges, it carries the seeds of their resolution as well.
Overview of the Revised Edition
With all this in mind and a ten-year anniversary looming, BasicBooks asked me to revisit the original edition of The Rise of the Cre-
ative Class and bring it up to date. The Rise of the Creative Class,
Revisited is not a tweak, but a wholesale revision. My team and I
went through every chapter thoroughly and rewrote virtually everyword. I have pored over the dozens of academic studies we con-ducted and the three major books I’ve written over the interveningdecade —The Flight of the Creative Class, Who’s Your City? and Thexvii PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

Great Reset—and incorporated their most important insights. I’ve
added citations to countless colleagues whose work complementsmine, and I’ve sought to answer my critics.
With the help of Kevin Stolarick, Charlotta Mellander, and other
members of my research team, I have updated all data on the Cre-ative Class and the other classes in Chapter 3, bringing these dataforward to 2010 and extending the historical time series back to1800. Chapter 3 also summarizes a range of new research on the de-mography of the Creative Class, on speciﬁc Creative Class occupa-tions, and other new research that has occurred since the originaledition. I have updated all the data on the Creative Class and 3T’sof economic development—technology, talent, and tolerance—forall US metros. This material is found in Chapters 11 and 12, whichalso report a whole range of ﬁndings from new empirical studies.
All of the original chapters have been revised and updated, and
several have been combined. The original edition’s Chapters 2and 3—The Creative Ethos and The Creative Economy—have been
combined into a single Chapter 2; and the original edition’s Chapters7 and 8—The No-Collar Workplace and Managing Creativity—have also been combined into a single chapter, titled simply No-Collar. Several other chapters have new titles.
Five chapters are completely new. Chapter 13, Global Reach,
summarizes my own and others’ research on the spread of the Cre-ative Class around the world. It provides data on the Creative Classand the 3T’s for eighty-two nations and examines the global eﬀectsof the Creative Class on innovation, economic competitiveness,inequality, and happiness. The experience of nations, notably thosein Scandinavia and Northern Europe, that combine high levels ofthe Creative Class with low levels of inequality show that a high-road path to prosperity is indeed possible. Chapter 14 draws on amajor survey I undertook with Gallup, as well as other qualitativeinformation from case studies and ethnographic research, to deepenxviii PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

our understanding of the key features and factors that shape “quality
of place.”
I devote two new chapters to the persistent and deepening eco-
nomic, social, and geographic divides that continue to vex our so-ciety. Chapter 16 examines The Geography of Inequality across UScities and metros, clarifying the roles technology, class, race, andpoverty play in shaping it. Chapter 17, The Inclining Signiﬁcanceof Class, shows that despite predictions of a more ﬂuid and classlesssociety, class continues to constitute an undeniably powerful force,shaping everything from our economic opportunities and politicalchoices to our health, ﬁtness, and happiness.
Chapter 18, which concludes this book, is new as well. I title it
Every Single Human Being Is Creative to signal the fundamentalimportance I place on this core construct. It argues that new in-stitutions are required to rebuild our economy and society, out-lining six key principles of a new social compact for our time. Ifthe logic of economic development—which seeks out creativityin its many and varied forms—is on our side, the ongoing socialand political mobilization of the Creative Class and other segmentsof society provides the pragmatic impetus for it.
When all is said and done, a new era of broadly shared prosperity
turns on stoking the creative furnaces that lies deep within each
and every one of us. Only when we unleash that great reservoir ofoverlooked and under utilized human potential, will we truly enjoynot just sustained economic progress but a better, more meaning-ful, and more fulﬁlling way of life.xix PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED

PREFACE TO
THE ORIGINAL EDITION
This book describes the emergence of a new social class. If you are
a scientist or engineer, an architect or designer, a writer, artist, ormusician, or if your creativity is a key factor in your work in busi-ness, education, health care, law, or some other profession, you area member. With 38 million members, more than 30 percent of thenation’s workforce, the Creative Class has shaped and will continueto shape deep and profound shifts in the ways we work, in our val-ues and desires, and in the very fabric of our everyday lives.
As with other classes, the deﬁning basis of this new class is eco-
nomic. Just as the feudal aristocracy derived its power and identityfrom its hereditary control of land and people, and the bourgeoisiefrom its members’ roles as merchants and factory owners, the Cre-ative Class derives its identity from its members’ roles as purveyorsof creativity. Because creativity is the driving force of economicgrowth, the Creative Class has become the dominant class in societyin terms of its inﬂuence. Only by understanding the rise of this newclass and its values can we begin to understand the sweeping andseemingly disjointed changes in our society and begin to shape ourfuture more intelligently.
Like most books, this one did not spring to life fully formed.
Rather, my ideas evolved gradually from things I saw and heardthat seemed to be at odds with conventional wisdom. In my workon regional economic development, I try to identify the factors thatmake some cities and regions grow and prosper, while others lag
xxi

behind. One of the oldest pieces of conventional wisdom in this
ﬁeld says the key to economic growth is attracting and retainingcompanies—the bigger the company, the better—because compa-nies create jobs and people go where the jobs are. During the 1980sand 1990s, many cities in the United States and around the worldtried to turn themselves into the next “Silicon Somewhere” by build-ing high-tech oﬃce parks or starting up venture capital funds. Thegame plan was to nourish high-tech start-up companies or, in itscruder variants, to lure them from other cities. But it quickly becameclear that this wasn’t working.
I saw this ﬁrsthand in the mid-1990s with Lycos, a Carnegie Mel-
lon spin-oﬀ company. Lycos’s Internet search technology was de-veloped in Pittsburgh. But the company eventually moved itsoperations to Boston to gain access to a deep pool of skilled man-agers, technologists, and businesspeople. These departures werehappening repeatedly, in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. All too oftenthe technologies, the companies, and even the venture capital dollarsﬂowed out of town to places that had bigger and better stocks oftalented and creative people. In a curious reversal, instead of peoplemoving to jobs, I was ﬁnding that companies were moving to orforming in places that had the skilled people.
Why was this happening? This was the basic puzzle that ultimately
led to this book. Frustrated by the limits of the conventional wisdomand even more by how economic development was actually beingpracticed, I began asking people how they chose where to live andwork. It quickly became clear to me that people were not slavishlyfollowing jobs to places. Their location choices were based to a largedegree on their lifestyle interests and these, I found, went well be-yond the standard quality-of-life amenities that most expertsthought were important.
Then came the real stunner. In 1998 I met Gary Gates, then a
doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon. While I had been studyingxxii PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

the location decisions of high-tech industries and talented people,
Gates had been exploring the location patterns of gay people. Mylist of the country’s high-tech hotspots looked an awful lot like hislist of the places with the highest concentrations of gay people.When we compared the two lists with greater statistical rigor, hisGay Index turned out to correlate very strongly with my measuresof high-tech growth. Other measures I came up with, like the Bo-hemian Index—a measure of the density of artists, writers, and per-formers in a region—produced similar results. My conclusion wasthat rather than being driven exclusively by companies, economicgrowth was occurring in places that were tolerant, diverse, andopen to creativity—because these were places where creative peopleof all types wanted to live. While some in academe were taken aback
by my ﬁndings, I was amazed by how quickly city and regionalleaders began to use my measures and indicators to shape their de-velopment strategies.
As I delved more deeply into the research, I came to realize that
something even bigger was going on. Though most experts con-tinued to point to technology as the driving force of broad socialchange, I became convinced that the truly fundamental changes ofour time had to do with subtler alterations in the way we live andwork—gradually accumulating shifts in our workplaces, leisure ac-tivities, communities, and everyday lives. Everything from the kindsof lifestyles we seek to the ways in which we schedule our time andrelate to others was changing. And yes, there was a common thread:the role of creativity as the fundamental source of economic growthand the rise of the new Creative Class.
Despite the giddy economic euphoria so prevalent in the late
1990s, it became increasingly evident to me that the emerging Cre-ative Economy was a dynamic and turbulent system—exciting andliberating in some ways, divisive and stressful in others. My thinkingwas reinforced by earth-shaking events that occurred while I wasxxiii PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

writing this book. First came the bursting of the stock-market bub-
ble, the rapid fall of technology stocks, and the subsequent recessionof 2000. This put an end to the naive optimism of the so-called NewEconomy and to the always unfounded notion that new technologyis a magic elixir that will make us rich, eliminate our economicproblems, and cure pressing social ills. The NASDAQ’s plummetwas an early signal that it was time for people to get serious.
Then came the tragic events of September 11, 2001. For me and
for many others, the stunning attack on the United States was apotent wake-up call. In addition to showing us how vulnerable weare, it brought home the message that too many of us, particularlythe members of the Creative Class, had been living in a world ofour own concerns—selﬁshly pursuing narrow goals with little re-gard for others or for broader social issues. We had grown com-placent, even aimless, but also discontent at having become so.
Here I found myself confronting a great paradox. Even as I was
chronicling their rise and impact, it struck me that the membersof the Creative Class do not see themselves as a class—a coherent
group of people with common traits and concerns. Emerging classesin previous times of great transition had pulled together to forgenew social mechanisms and steer their societies. But not this group.We thus ﬁnd ourselves in the puzzling situation of having the dom-inant class in America—whose members occupy the power centersof industry, media, and government, as well as the arts and popularculture—virtually unaware of its own existence and thus unable toconsciously inﬂuence the course of the society it largely leads.
The Creative Class has the power, talent, and numbers to play a big
role in reshaping our world. Its members—in fact, all of society—now have the opportunity to turn their introspection and soulsearching into real energy for broader renewal and transformation.History shows that enduring social change occurs not during eco-nomic boom times, like the 1920s or 1990s, but in periods of crisisxxiv PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

and questioning such as the 1930s—and today. The task before us
is to build new forms of social cohesion appropriate to the newCreative Age—the old forms don’t work, because they no longerﬁt the people we’ve become—and from there, to pursue a collectivevision of a better and more prosperous future for all.
This is easier said than done. To build true social cohesion, the
members of the Creative Class will need to oﬀer those in otherclasses a tangible vision of ways to improve their own lives, eitherby becoming part of the Creative Economy or, at the very least, byreaping some of its rewards. If the Creative Class does not commititself to this eﬀort, the growing social and economic divides in oursociety will only worsen, and I fear that we will ﬁnd ourselves livingperpetually uneasy lives at the top of an unhappy heap.
It’s time for the Creative Class to grow up and take responsibility.
But ﬁrst, we must understand who we are.xxv PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1
The Transformation
of Everyday Life
Something’s happening here but you
don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
—Bob Dylan
Here’s a thought experiment. Take a typical man on the street
from the year 1900 and drop him into the 1950s. Then take
someone from the 1950s and move him Austin Powers–style
into the present day. Who would experience the greater change?
At ﬁrst glance the answer seems obvious. Thrust forward into
the 1950s, a person from the turn of the twentieth century wouldbe awestruck by a world ﬁlled with baﬄing technological wonders.In place of horse-drawn carriages, he would see streets and highwaysjammed with cars, trucks, and buses. In the cities, immense sky-scrapers would line the horizon, and mammoth bridges would spanrivers and inlets where once only ferries could cross. Flying ma-chines would soar overhead, carrying people across continents andoceans in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks. At home,our 1900-to-1950s time-traveler would grope his way through a
1

strange new environment ﬁlled with appliances powered by elec-
tricity: radios and televisions emanating musical sounds and mov-ing images, refrigerators to keep things cold, washing machines toclean his clothes automatically, and much more. A massive newsupermarket would replace daily trips to foodmongers, oﬀering anarray of technologically enhanced foods, such as instant coﬀee andfrozen vegetables that come overcooked and oversauced in a box.Life itself would be dramatically extended. Many once-fatal ailmentscould be prevented with an injection or cured with a pill. The new-ness of this time-traveler’s physical surroundings—the speed andpower of everyday machines—would be profoundly disorienting.
On the other hand, someone from the 1950s would have little
trouble navigating the physical landscape of today. Although welike to think that ours is the age of boundless technological wonders,our second time-traveler would ﬁnd himself in a world not all thatdiﬀerent from the one he came from. He would still drive a car towork. If he took the train, it would likely be on the same line leavingfrom the same station. He could probably board an airplane at thesame airport. He might still live in a suburban house, though a biggerone. Television would have more channels, color pictures, and big-ger, ﬂatter screens, but it would basically be the same, and he couldstill catch some of his favorite 1950s shows on reruns. He wouldknow how, or quickly learn how, to operate most household appliances—even the personal computer, with its familiar QWERTYkeyboard. In fact with just a few exceptions, such as the Internet,CD and DVD players, the cash machine, and wireless phones, com-puters, and entertainment systems that slip into his pocket, he wouldbe familiar with almost all current-day technology. Perhaps disap-pointed by the pace of progress, he might ask: “Why haven’t we con-quered outer space?” or “Where are all the robots?”
On the basis of big, obvious technological changes alone, surely
the 1900-to-1950s traveler would experience the greater shift,2 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

whereas the other might easily conclude that we’d spent the second
half of the twentieth century doing little more than tweaking thegreat innovations that had so transformed its ﬁrst half.
1
But the longer they stayed in their new homes, the more each
time-traveler would become aware of subtler dimensions of change.Once the glare of technology had dimmed, each would begin tonotice their respective society’s changed norms and values, the dif-ferent ways in which everyday people live and work. And here thetables would be turned. In terms of adjusting to the social structuresand the rhythms and patterns of daily life, our second time-travelerwould be much more disoriented.
Someone from the early 1900s would ﬁnd the social world of the
1950s remarkably similar to his own. If he worked in a factory, hemight ﬁnd much the same divisions of labor, the same hierarchicalsystems of control. If he worked in an oﬃce, he would be immersedin the same bureaucracy, the same climb up the corporate ladder.He would come to work at 8:00 or 9:00
AMand leave promptly at
5:00, his life neatly segmented into compartments of home andwork. He would wear a suit and tie. Most of his business associateswould be white and male. Their values and oﬃce politics wouldhardly have changed. He would seldom see women in the workplaceexcept as secretaries, and almost never interact professionally withsomeone of another race. He would marry young, have childrenquickly thereafter, stay married to the same person and probablywork for the same company for the rest of his life. In his leisuretime, he’d ﬁnd that movies and TV had largely superseded live stageshows, but otherwise his recreational activities would be much thesame as they were in 1900: taking in a baseball game or a boxingmatch, maybe playing a round of golf. He would join the clubs andcivic groups beﬁtting his socioeconomic class, observe the samesocial distinctions, and fully expect his children to do likewise. Thetempo of his life would be structured by the values and norms of3 THE TRANSFORMATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

organizations. He would ﬁnd himself living the life of the “company
man” so aptly chronicled by writers from Sinclair Lewis and JohnKenneth Galbraith to William Whyte and C. Wright Mills.
2
Our second time-traveler, however, would be quite unnerved by
the dizzying social and cultural changes that had accumulated be-tween the 1950s and today. At work he would ﬁnd a new dress code,a new schedule, and new rules. He would see oﬃce workers dressedlike folks relaxing on the weekend, in jeans and open-necked shirts,and be shocked to learn that some of them occupy positions of au-thority. People at the oﬃce would seemingly come and go as theypleased. The younger ones might sport bizarre piercings and tattoos.Women and even nonwhites would be managers. Individuality andself-expression would be valued over conformity to organizationalnorms—and yet these people would seem strangely puritanical tothis time-traveler. His ethnic jokes would fall embarrassingly ﬂat.His smoking would get him banished to the parking lot, and histwo-martini lunches would raise genuine concern. Attitudes andexpressions he had never thought about would cause repeated of-fense. He would continually suﬀer the painful feeling of not know-ing how to behave.
Out on the street, this time-traveler would see diﬀerent ethnic
groups in greater numbers than he could ever have imagined—Asian, Indian, Afro and Latin Americans, and others—minglingin ways he found strange and perhaps inappropriate. There wouldbe mixed-race couples, and same-sex couples carrying the upbeat-sounding moniker “gay.” Although some of these people wouldbe acting in familiar ways—a woman shopping while pushing astroller, an oﬃce worker eating his lunch at a counter—others,such as grown men clad in form-ﬁtting gear, whizzing by on high-tech bicycles, or women on strange new roller skates with theirtorsos covered only by “brassieres,” would appear to be engagedin alien activities.4 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

People would seem to be always working and yet never working
when they were supposed to. They would strike him as lazy and yet
obsessed with exercise. They would seem career conscious yet ﬁckle—doesn’t anybody stay with a company more than three years?—andcaring yet antisocial: What happened to the ladies’ clubs, MooseLodges, and bowling leagues? Why doesn’t everybody go to church?Even though the physical surroundings would be relatively familiar,the feelof the place would be bewilderingly diﬀerent.
Although the ﬁrst time-traveler had to adjust to some drastic
technological changes, it is the second who experiences the deeper,more pervasive transformation. It is the second who has been thrustinto a time when lifestyles and worldviews are most assuredlychanging—a time when the old order has broken down, when ﬂuxand uncertainty themselves seem to be part of the everyday norm.
The Force Behind the Shift
What caused this transformation? What happened between the1950s and today that did not happen in the earlier interval? Scholarsand pundits have ﬂoated many theories, along with a range of opin-ions on whether the changes are good or bad. Some bemoan thepassing of traditional social and cultural forms; others herald a rosyfuture based largely on new technology.
The real driving force is the rise of human creativity as the key
factor in our economy and society. Both at work and in otherspheres of our lives, we value creativity more highly and cultivateit more intensely than we ever have before. The creative impulse—the attribute that distinguishes us, as humans, from other species—is now being unleashed on an unprecedented scale. The purpose ofthis book is to examine how and why this is so, and to trace its eﬀectsas they ripple through our world.5 THE TRANSFORMATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Many say that we now live in an information economy or a
knowledge economy. But what’s more fundamentally true is that
for the ﬁrst time, our economy is powered by creativity. Creativity—“the ability to create meaningful new forms,” as Webster’s dictionary
puts it—has become the decisive source of competitive advantage.In virtually every industry, from automobiles to fashion, food prod-ucts, and information technology itself, the long-run winners arethose who can create and keep creating. This has always been true,from the days of the Agricultural Revolution to the Industrial Rev-olution. But in the past few decades we’ve come to recognize itclearly and act upon it systematically.
Dean Keith Simonton, a leading scholar of the subject, describes
creativity as the act of bringing something useful, that works, andis non-obvious into the world, or as he succinctly puts it, that is the“conjunction of novelty, utility and surprise.”
3It is a mistake to
think, as many do, that creativity can be reduced to the creation ofnew blockbuster inventions, new products, and new ﬁrms. Intoday’s economy, creativity is pervasive and ongoing: it drives theincremental improvements in products and processes that keepthem viable just as much as it does their original invention. More-over, technological and economic creativity are nurtured by andinteract with artistic and cultural creativity. This kind of interplayis evident in the rise of whole new industries, from computer graph-ics to digital music and animation. Creativity also requires a socialand economic environment that can nurture its many forms. MaxWeber said long ago that the Protestant ethic provided the under-lying spirit of thrift, hard work, and eﬃciency that motivated therise of early capitalism. In a similar fashion, the shared commitmentto the creative spirit in all its many manifestations is what underpinsthe new creative ethos that powers our age.
Thus, creativity has come to be the most highly prized commodity
in our economy—and yet it is not a “commodity.” Creativity comes6 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

from people. And it annihilates the social categories we have im-
posed on ourselves. A Creative Economy requires diversity becauseevery human is creative—creativity cannot be contained by cate-gories of gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. And thoughpeople can be hired and ﬁred, their creative capacity cannot bebought and sold, or turned on and off at will. Thus, our work-places have changed and continue to do so. Schedules, rules, and
dress codes have become more ﬂexible to cater to how the creativeprocess works. Creativity must be motivated and nurtured in amultitude of ways, by employers, by creative people themselves,and by the places we live. Capitalism has expanded its reach to cap-ture the talents of heretofore excluded groups of eccentrics andnonconformists. In doing so, it has pulled oﬀ yet another aston-ishing mutation: taking people who would once have been viewedas bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe and placingthem at the very heart of the process of innovation and economicgrowth. These changes in the economy and in the workplace havein turn helped to propagate and legitimize similar changes in societyat large. The creative individual is no longer viewed as an iconoclast.
He—or she—is the new mainstream.
In tracing economic shifts, I often say that our economy is moving
from an older corporate-centered system deﬁned by large compa-nies to a more people-driven one. This view should not be confusedwith the unfounded and silly notion that big companies are dyingoﬀ. Nor do I buy into the fantasy that our economy is being re -organized around small enterprises and independent “free agents.”
4
Companies, including very big ones, obviously still exist, are stillinﬂuential, and almost certainly always will be. I simply mean tostress that as the fundamental source of creativity, people are thecritical resource of the new age. This has far-reaching eﬀects—forinstance, on our economic and social geography and the nature ofour communities.7 THE TRANSFORMATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

It has often been said that in this age of globalization and modern
communication technology, “geography is dead,” “the world is
ﬂat,” and place no longer matters.5Nothing could be further from
the truth. Place has become the central organizing unit of our time,taking on many of the functions that used to be played by ﬁrmsand other organizations. Access to talented and creative people isto modern business what access to coal and iron ore was to steel-making. It determines where companies will choose to locate andgrow, and this in turn changes the ways that cities must compete.As I once heard Carly Fiorina tell this nation’s governors when shewas CEO of Hewlett-Packard: “Keep your tax incentives and high-way interchanges; we will go where the highly skilled people are.”
6
In this environment, it is geographic place rather than the corpo-ration that provides the organizational matrix for matching peopleand jobs.
The New Class
The economic need for creativity has registered itself in the rise ofa new class, which I call the Creative Class. More than 40 millionAmericans, roughly one-third of all employed people, belong to it.I deﬁne the core of the Creative Class to include people in scienceand engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music,and entertainment whose economic function is to create new ideas,new technology, and new creative content. Around this core, theCreative Class also includes a broader group of creative professionals
in business and ﬁnance, law, health care, and related ﬁelds. Thesepeople engage in complex problem solving that involves a greatdeal of independent judgment and requires high levels of educationor human capital. In addition, all members of the Creative Class—whether they are artists or engineers, musicians or computer sci-8 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

entists, writers or entrepreneurs—share a common ethos that values
creativity, individuality, diﬀerence, and merit.
The key diﬀerence between the Creative Class and other classes
lies in what its members are primarily paid to do. Members of theWorking Class and the Service Class are primarily paid to do rou-tine, mostly physical work, whereas those in the Creative Class arepaid to use their minds—the full scope of their cognitive and socialskills. There are gray areas and boundary issues in my scheme ofthings, to be sure. And though some may quibble with my deﬁnitionof the Creative Class and the numerical estimates that are basedon it, I believe it has a good deal more precision than existing, moreamorphous deﬁnitions of knowledge workers, symbolic analysts,or professional and technical workers.
The class structure of the United States and other advanced na-
tions has been the subject of great debate for well over a century.For a host of writers in the 1800s and 1900s, the big story was therise, and then the decline, of the Working Class, which peaked atroughly 40 percent of the US workforce before beginning its longslide to roughly one in ﬁve workers today.
7For writers like Daniel
Bell and others in the mid to later twentieth century, a second bigstory was the rise of a postindustrial society, in which many of usshifted from making goods to delivering services.
8The Service
Class, which includes such ﬁelds as personal care, food services,and clerical work, is the largest class today, with some 60 millionmembers, more than 45 percent of the entire US workforce. Thebig story unfolding now—and it has been unfolding for sometime—is the rise of the Creative Class, the great emerging class ofour time.
Although the Creative Class remains somewhat smaller than the
Service Class, its crucial economic role makes it the most inﬂuential.The Creative Class is dominant in terms of wealth and income, withits members earning nearly twice as much on average as members9 THE TRANSFORMATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

of the other two classes and as a whole accounting for more than
half of all wages and salaries.
Creativity in the world of work is not limited to members of the
Creative Class. Factory workers and even the lowest-end serviceworkers have always been creative in valuable ways. Also, the cre-ative content of many Working and Service Class jobs is growing—a prime example being the continuous-improvement programs onmany factory ﬂoors, which call on line workers to contribute theirideas as well as their physical labor. On the basis of these trends, Iexpect that the Creative Class, which is still emergent, will continueto grow in coming decades, as more traditional economic functionsare transformed into Creative Class occupations. And, as I will arguein the last chapter of this book, I strongly believe that the key toimproving the lot of underpaid, under employed, and disadvantagedpeople lies not in social welfare programs or low-end make-workjobs, nor in somehow bringing back the factory jobs of the past,but rather in tapping their innate creativity, paying them appropri-ately for it, and integrating them fully into the Creative Economy.
The Creative Class is the norm-setting class of our time. And
the norms of the Creative Class are diﬀerent from those of moretraditional society. Individuality, self-expression, and opennessto diﬀerence are favored over the homogeneity, conformity, and“ﬁtting in” that deﬁned the previous age of large-scale industryand organization. Our private lives are diﬀerent than they oncewere. During the Leave It to Beaver era of the 1950s and early 1960s,
roughly eight in ten Americans lived in married households, butby 2010, less than half did. In 1960, almost half of all Americans werepart of a nuclear family, with a mom, a dad, and kids in the house;by 2010, that number had fallen to just one in ﬁve. These profoundchanges are not, as commonly portrayed, signs of the reckless self-indulgence of a spoiled people. They are undergirded by powerfuleconomic forces that are reshaping our society and our lives.10 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

The Creative Class is also the key force that is reshaping our ge-
ography, spearheading the movement back from outlying areas to
urban centers and close-in, walkable suburbs. A relatively mobileclass, it is much more concentrated in some cities and metros areasthan in others. As of 2010, the Creative Class composed more than40 percent of the workforce in larger metro areas like San Jose, thefabled Silicon Valley, greater Washington, DC, and Boston, as wellas smaller college towns such as Durham, North Carolina; Ithaca,New York; and Boulder and Ann Arbor. These places are prosper-ing, distinguished by a new model of economic development thattakes shape around the 3T’s—technology, talent, and tolerance.The most successful and prosperous metros excel at all three.
Not all is rosy in this emerging mainstream of the Creative Age.
People today bear much more personal risk than did the corporateand working classes of the Organizational Age—as has become alltoo obvious with the onset of the economic crisis. Stress levels, too,are high. The technologies that were supposed to liberate us fromwork have invaded our lives. Our increasingly unequal society hasbecome deeply divided, sorted, and segmented by level of education,the kinds of work we do, and where we live, and this in turn shapesever more divisive culture wars and politics. One of the most sig-niﬁcant fault lines of our age is the growing geographic segregationof the Creative Class and the other classes.
Although the immediate occasion for the crash of 2008 was the
bursting of the real estate bubble, economic historians will see itas the last crisis of the old Fordist industrial order—the tippingpoint when an outmoded, exhausted set of social and institutionalstructures could no longer contain or harness the productive powerof the new Creative Age. We have seen this happen before—in theearth-shattering religious, political, intellectual, and social upheavalsthat accompanied the shift from feudalism to capitalism; in the cat-astrophic Panic and Long Depression of 1873, which coincided11 THE TRANSFORMATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE

with the rise of modern industry; and in the Great Depression of
1929, which followed the rise of mass-production capitalism.
These powerful economic and social shifts are altering the struc-
ture of everyday life. As witnessed by our two time-travelers, thedeepest and most enduring changes of our age are not technological,but economic, cultural, and geographic. These changes have beenbuilding for decades and are only now coming to the fore, drivenby the rise of the Creative Economy and of the Creative Class.12 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

PART ONE
THE
CREATIVE
AGE

CHAPTER 2
The Creative Economy
Powering the great ongoing changes of our time is the rise
of human creativity as the deﬁning feature of economic life.
Creativity has come to be valued—and systems have evolved
to encourage and harness it—because it is increasingly recognizedas the font from which new technologies, new industries, newwealth, and all other good economic things ﬂow. As a result, ourlives and society have begun to resonate with a creative ethos. Anethos is deﬁned as the fundamental spirit or character of a culture,and it is our commitment to creativity in its varied dimensions thatforms the underlying spirit of our age. To grasp the spirit and char-acter of the emerging Creative Age, this chapter takes a closer lookat creativity itself: what it is, and where it comes from. In order tostructure the arguments that follow, I start with three basic points.
First, creativity is essential to the way we live and work today,
and in many senses it always has been. As the economist Paul Romerhas said, the biggest advances in standards of living—not to mentionthe biggest competitive advantages in the marketplace—have alwayscome from “better recipes, not just more cooking.”
1Second, human
creativity is not limited to technological innovation or new businessmodels. It is multifaceted and multidimensional; it is not something
15

that can be kept in a box and trotted out when one arrives at the
oﬃce. Creativity involves distinct habits of mind and patterns ofbehavior that must be cultivated on both an individual basis andin the surrounding society. The creative ethos pervades everythingfrom our workplace culture to our values and communities, re-shapes the way we see ourselves as economic and social actors andmolds the core of our very identities. It reﬂects norms and valuesthat both nurture creativity and reinforce its role. Furthermore, itrequires a supportive environment—a broad array of social, cul-tural, and economic stimuli. Creativity is thus associated with therise of new work environments, lifestyles, associations, and neigh-borhoods, which in turn are conducive to creative work. Such abroadly creative environment is critical for generating technologicalcreativity and the commercial innovations and wealth that ﬂowfrom it.
The third, and perhaps the most critical, issue is the ongoing ten-
sion between creativity and organization. The creative process issocial, not just individual; forms of organization are necessary. Butorganizations can and frequently do stiﬂe creativity. A deﬁningfeature of life in the early to mid-twentieth century—a period re-ferred to as the Organizational Age—was the dominance of large-scale and highly specialized bureaucracies. Writing in the 1940s,the economist Joseph Schumpeter deplored the stiﬂing eﬀect of large
organizations on creativity. In his landmark book Capitalism, So-
cialism and Democracy, Schumpeter noted that capitalism’s greatstrength had long been the “function of entrepreneurs” who “rev-olutionize the pattern of production.” And then he gloomily pre-dicted its demise. “Technological progress is increasingly becomingthe business of teams of trained specialists who turn out what isrequired and make it work in predictable ways,” he wrote. The per-fectly bureaucratized giant industrial unit not only ousts the smallor medium-sized ﬁrm and “expropriates” its owners, but in the end16 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

it also ousts the entrepreneur.2In an interview I conducted in 2000,
a young woman described this chilling eﬀect in stark and memo-
rable terms: “Where I grew up, we were conditioned to play theroles that we were dealt. We were not encouraged to create andbuild our visions, but rather to ﬁt into the visions of a select few. Ilike to say that we were ‘institutionalized’ individuals—because in-stitutions deﬁned our lives.”
3
The ascent of creativity as an economic force over the past few
decades has brought new economic and social forms into existencethat mitigate this tension to a certain degree, but they have notfully resolved it. Everything from the rise of the entrepreneurialstart-up company and the formal venture capital system to theloosening of traditional cultural norms regarding work and lifereflects attempts to elude the strictures of organizational con-formity. But this doesn’t mean that creativity has won the day orthat large organizations are going the way of the dinosaurs. Westill need large organizations to do many things; bureaucraciescontinue to play dominant roles in our society. Whereas one per-son can write brilliant software, it takes large organizations toconsistently upgrade, produce, and distribute that software. Largeorganizations may be more nimble and flexible than they oncewere, but they are still evolving, still developing new ways to fostercreativity while providing a structure in which to produce andmanage work.
Our new creative economic system is far from fully formed.
Furthermore, it is not a panacea for the myriad social and economicills that confront modern society. The emerging Creative Economywill not magically alleviate poverty, eliminate unemployment, over-come the business cycle, and lead to greater happiness and harmonyfor all. In some respects, left unchecked and without appropriateforms of human intervention, this creativity-based system may wellmake some of our problems worse.17 THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

Creative Dimensions
Creativity is often viewed as a rather mystical aﬀair. Over the past
few decades, however, systematic studies have considerably enlargedour understanding of it. Researchers have observed and analyzedcreativity in subjects ranging from eminent scientists and artiststo preschoolers and chimpanzees. They have pored through thebiographies, notebooks, and letters of great creators of the past;modeled the creative process by computer; and tried to get com-puters to be creative.
4Occasionally but notably, they have studied
its workings across entire human societies. From this body of lit-erature I will abstract several main themes that surface repeatedly.As we trace these themes and begin to see what creativity really is,we will also begin to get a deeper sense of how and why the creativeethos has emerged with such force in our lives today.
Let’s start with the basics. Creativity is not the same as “intelli-
gence.” One study summarized the diﬀerence this way: “Many stud-ies recognize creativity as cognitive ability separate from other mentalfunctions and particularly independent from the complex of abilitiesgrouped under the word ‘intelligence.’ Although intelligence—theability to deal with or process large amounts of data—favors creativepotential, it is not synonymous with creativity.”
5
Creativity involves the ability to synthesize. Albert Einstein cap-
tured this nicely when he characterized his own work as “combi-natory play.” It is a matter of sifting through data, perceptions, andmaterials to come up with combinations that are new and useful.A creative synthesis might result in such diﬀerent outcomes as apractical invention, a theory or insight that can be applied to solvea problem, or a work of art that can be appreciated aesthetically.
6
Creativity requires self-assurance and the ability to take risks. In
her book The Creative Mind, Margaret Boden noted that creativity18 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

requires the combination of passion and conﬁdence. “A person
needs a healthy self-respect to pursue novel ideas, and to make mis-takes, despite criticism from others,” she wrote. “Breaking generallyaccepted rules, or even stretching them, takes conﬁdence. Contin-uing to do so, in the face of skepticism and scorn, takes even more.”
7
Small wonder that the creative ethos marks a strong departure
from the conformist ethos of the past. Creative work in fact is oftendownright subversive, because it disrupts existing patterns ofthought and life. It can feel unsettling even to its creator. One fa-mous deﬁnition of creativity is “the process of destroying one’sgestalt in favor of a better one.” Schumpeter wrote about the “cre-ative destruction” that transforms existing industries and createsentirely new ones. The economic historian Joel Mokyr notes: “Econ-omists and historians alike realize that there is a deep diﬀerencebetween homo economicus and homo creativus. One makes the
most of what nature permits him to have. The other rebels againstnature’s dictates. Technological creativity, like all creativity, is anact of rebellion.”
8
Yet creativity is not the province of just a few select geniuses who
can get away with breaking the mold because they possess super-human talents. It is a capacity inherent to varying degrees in virtuallyall of us. According to Boden, who sums up a wealth of research:“Creativity draws crucially on our ordinary abilities. Noticing, re-membering, seeing, speaking, hearing, understanding language,and recognizing analogies: all these talents of Everyman are impor-tant.”
9And she explodes the idea of the lone “creative genius.”
The romantic myth of “creative genius” rarely helps. Often it is insidiously
self-destructive. It can buttress the self-conﬁdence of those individuals whobelieve themselves to be among the chosen few (perhaps it helped Beethovento face his many troubles). But it undermines the self-regard of those whodo not. Someone who believes that creativity is a rare or special power cannot19 THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

sensibly hope that perseverance, or education, will enable them to join the
creative elite. Either one is already a member, or will never be. Monolithicnotions of creativity, talent, or intelligence are discouraging in the sameway. Either one has got “it” or one hasn’t. Why bother to try if one’s eﬀortscan lead only to a slightly less dispiriting level of mediocrity? . . . A verydiﬀerent attitude is possible for someone who sees creativity as based inordinary abilities we all share, and in practised expertise to which we canall aspire.
10
Creativity is multidimensional and experiential. Simonton writes
that “creativity is favored by an intellect that has been enriched
with diverse experiences and perspectives,” and that it is “associatedwith a mind that exhibits a variety of interests and knowledge.”
11
The varied forms of creativity that we typically regard as diﬀerentfrom one another—technological creativity (or invention), eco-nomic creativity (entrepreneurship), and artistic and cultural cre-ativity, among others—are in fact deeply interrelated. Not only dothey share a common thought process, they reinforce each otherthrough cross-fertilization and mutual stimulation. This is one rea-son that historical and present practitioners of diﬀerent forms ofcreativity have tended to congregate and feed oﬀ one another inteeming, multifaceted creative centers—Florence in the early Ren-aissance; Vienna in the late 1800s and early 1900s; the many fast-growing creative centers across the United States today.
Stimulating and glamorous as it may sometimes be, creativity is
in fact hard work. Both Thomas Edison (a paragon of technologicalcreativity) and George Bernard Shaw (a cultural creative) liked tosay that genius is 90 percent perspiration and 10 percentinspiration.
12Or as the journalist Red Smith once said of the de-
mands of his craft: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sitdown at the typewriter and open a vein.” Here we have an inventor,a playwright, and a sportswriter sounding a common theme: the20 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

creative ethos is built on discipline and focus, sweat and blood. As
Boden put it: “A person needs time, and enormous eﬀort, to amassmental structures and to explore their potential. It is not alwayseasy (it was not easy for Beethoven). Even when it is, life has manyother attractions. Only a strong commitment to the domain—music, maths, medicine—can prevent someone from dissipatingtheir energies on other things.”
13
Creativity can take a long time before it bears fruit—there are
many stories of great mathematicians and scientists mulling a prob-lem for months or more, only to be ﬁnally “illuminated” while step-ping onto a bus or staring into a ﬁreplace—but even this apparentmagic is the result of long preparation. Thus Louis Pasteur’s famousdictum: “Chance favors only the prepared mind.” Or as WesleyCohen and Daniel Levinthal have put it in their studies of ﬁrm-based innovation: “Fortune favors the prepared ﬁrm.”
14
Because of the all-absorbing nature of creative work, many great
thinkers of the past were people who “formed no close ties.” Theyhad lots of colleagues and acquaintances, but few close friends andoften no spouse or children. In fact, muses the psychiatrist AnthonyStorr, “if intense periods of concentration over long periods are re-quired to attain fundamental insights, the family man is at a dis-advantage.” Quoting the famous bachelor Isaac Newton on hisprocess of discovery—“I keep the subject constantly before me, andwait till the ﬁrst dawnings open slowly by little and little into thefull and clear light”—Storr notes that “If Newton had been subjectto the demands of a wife for companionship or interrupted by thepatter of tiny feet, it would certainly have been less easy for him.”
15
Surely some creative people are inspired by money, but studies
ﬁnd that truly creative individuals, from artists and writers to sci-entists and open-source software developers, are driven primarilyby internal motivations, by the intrinsic rewards and satisfactionsof their pursuits. Too much pressure from the outside might even21 THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

inhibit them. In a study of motivation and reward, Harvard Business
School psychologist Teresa Amabile observed, “Intrinsic motivationis conducive to creativity, but extrinsic motivation is detrimental.It appears that when people are primarily motivated to do somecreative activity by their own interest and enjoyment of that activity,they may be more creative than when they are primarily motivatedby some goal imposed upon them by others.”
16
Although creativity is often viewed as an individual phenomenon,
it is an inescapably social process. Even the lone creator reliesheavily on contributors and collaborators. Successful creators haveoften organized themselves and others into teams for systematiceﬀort. When Edison opened his laboratory in Menlo Park, NewJersey, he called it an “invention factory” and announced his in-tention to produce “a minor invention every ten days and a bigthing every six months or so.”
17The artist Andy Warhol similarly
dubbed his Manhattan studio The Factory. Warhol liked to cultivatea public image of bemused indiﬀerence, but he was a proliﬁc or-ganizer and worker—mobilizing friends and colleagues to publisha magazine and produce ﬁlms and music, pursuing his own art allthe while.
Creativity ﬂourishes best in a unique kind of social environment:
one that is stable enough to allow for continuity of eﬀort, yet diverseand broad-minded enough to nourish creativity in all its subversiveforms. Simonton identiﬁes four key characteristics of the times andplaces where creativity ﬂourishes the most: “domain activity, intel-lectual receptiveness, ethnic diversity, [and] political openness.” Ina study of the history of Japanese culture—a culture that has been“highly variable in its openness to outside inﬂuences”—Simontonfound that “those periods in which Japan was receptive to alien inﬂuxwere soon followed by periods of augmented creative activity.”
18
One ﬁnal cautionary note: Mokyr, a historian, notes that tech-
nological creativity has tended to rise and then fade dramatically22 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

at various times and places, when social and economic institutions
turn rigid and act against it. Spectacular fade-outs occurred, for in-stance, in late medieval times in the Islamic world and in China.Both societies, which had been leaders in ﬁelds from mathematicsto mechanical invention, then proceeded to fall far behind WesternEurope economically. When one takes the long view of human his-tory, Mokyr writes, one sees that “technological progress is like afragile and vulnerable plant, whose ﬂourishing is not only depend-ent on the appropriate surroundings and climate, but whose life isalmost always short. It is highly sensitive to the social and economicenvironment and can easily be arrested.”
19A continual outpouring
of creativity “cannot and should not be taken for granted,” Mokyrwarns—even today. Creativity doesn’t automatically sustain itselfover long periods, but requires constant attention to and investmentin the economic and social forms that feed the creative impulse.This is all the more reason to study the institutions of the CreativeEconomy closely, so that we can understand their inner workingsand nourish them appropriately.
The Ultimate Source of Creativity
Creativity is not only inherent in humans, it is literally what dis-tinguishes us, economically speaking, from other species. “We pro-duce goods by rearranging physical objects, but so do other animals,often with remarkable precision,” notes the economist Paul Romer.“Where people excel as economic animals is in their ability to pro-duce ideas, not just physical goods. An ant will go through its lifewithout ever coming up with even a slightly diﬀerent idea abouthow to gather food. But people are almost incapable of this kindof rote adherence to instruction. We are incurable experimentersand problem solvers.”
2023 THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

“We are not used to thinking of ideas as economic goods,” he
continues, “but they are surely the most signiﬁcant ones that we
produce. The only way for us to produce more economic value—and thereby generate economic growth—is to ﬁnd ever more valu-able ways to make use of the objects available to us.” Ideas, he notes,are especially potent because they are not like other goods, such asmineral deposits and machines, which deplete or wear out withuse.
21A good idea, like the concept of the wheel, “can be used over
and over again” and in fact grows in value the more it is used. Itoﬀers not diminishing returns, but increasing returns. Moreover,
an idea can be built upon. As other people apply their own creativityto a new scientiﬁc theory or product design, they can tinker withit, improve it, and combine it with other ideas in growing prolif-erations of new forms. This is what has happened in recent cen-turies. The early 1900s were a time when waves of invention—theaccumulated fruits of that creativity—were being harnessed, mass-produced, and widely promulgated through society as never be-fore. What we are living through now is the next step. Now it is
not just the fruits or artifacts of creativity, but creativity itself thatis being harnessed on a truly massive scale and promulgated asnever before.
Today we like to think that we clearly understand creativity as a
source of economic value. Many commentators, for instance, trum-pet the point that “intellectual property”—useful new knowledgeembodied in computer programs, or patents, or formulas—hasbecome more valuable than any kind of physical property. It’s nosurprise that we litigate over intellectual property and argue aboutthe proper means of protecting it as fiercely as miners battledover claims during the California Gold Rush. But as LawrenceLessig has powerfully argued, our penchant for overprotectingand overlitigating intellectual property may well serve to constrainand limit the creative impulse.
22In the long run, we cannot forget24 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

what the fundamental cornerstone of our wealth is. Although useful
knowledge may reside in programs or formulas, it does not originatein them, but in people. The ultimate intellectual property—the onethat really replaces land, labor, and capital as the most valuable eco-nomic resource—is the human creative faculty.
Karl Marx had it more than partly right when he foresaw that
workers would someday control the means of production. This isbeginning to happen to a certain degree, although not as Marxthought it would, with the proletariat rising up and taking overfactories. If workers control the means of production today thatis because it is inside their own heads; they are the means of pro-
duction. Thus, the ultimate “control” issue is not who owns thepatents or whether the creative worker or the employer holdsthe balance of power in labor market negotiations. While those
battles swing back and forth, the ultimate control issue—the onewe have to stay focused on, individually and collectively—is howto keep the creative furnaces that burn inside each and everyhuman being fully stoked.
Creativity Versus Organization
This brings us back to one of the core tensions or contradictionsof our time—that between creativity and organization. Creativepeople come in many diﬀerent forms. Some are mercurial and in-tuitive in their work habits, others methodical. Some prefer to chan-nel their energies into big, radical ideas; others are tinkerers andimprovers. Some like to move from job to job, whereas others preferthe security of a large organization. Some are at their best whenthey work in groups; others like nothing better than to be left alone.Moreover, many people don’t fall at the extremes—and their workand lifestyle preferences may change as they mature.25 THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

What all of these people have in common is a need for organi-
zations and environments that will allow them to be creative —that
value their input, challenge them, have mechanisms for mobilizing
resources around ideas, and that are receptive to both small changesand the occasional game changer. Companies and places that canprovide this kind of environment, regardless of size, will have anedge in attracting, managing, and motivating creative talent. Thesame companies and places will also tend to enjoy a ﬂow of inno-vation, reaping competitive advantage in the short run and evolu-tionary advantage in the long run.
Although certain environments promote creativity, others most
certainly kill it. Adam Smith noted this as early as 1776, in TheWealth of Nations. In his famous description of the pin factory,Smith praised the division of labor, a concept that allowed pins tobe made eﬃciently by splitting the process into eighteen distinctsteps, with each worker or group of workers typically doing onlyone step. “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a fewsimple operations,” he also noted, “has no occasion to exert his un-derstanding or to exercise his invention,” adding: “He naturallyloses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomesas stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be-come. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable ofrelishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of con-ceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment.”
23
In their insightful book The Social Life of Information, John Seely
Brown and Paul Duguid describe the inherent tug-of-war betweenthe ways that organizations generate knowledge and creativity, andthe means by which they translate those assets into actual productsand services.
24Creativity comes from individuals working in small
groups, which Brown and Duguid refer to as “communities of prac-tice.” These communities emphasize exploration and discovery.Each develops distinctive habits, customs, priorities, and insightsthat are the secrets of its creativity and inventiveness. But process26 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

and structure are required to link these communities to one another,
transfer knowledge, achieve scale, and generate growth. Practicewithout process becomes unmanageable, but process without prac-tice damps out the creativity required for innovation; the two sidesexist in perpetual tension. Only the most sophisticated and awareorganizations are able to balance these countervailing forces inways that lead to sustained creativity and long-run growth.
This fundamental tension between organization and creativity
is reﬂected in a remarkable dialogue between two of the greatestchroniclers of everyday life in the mid-twentieth century, WilliamWhyte and Jane Jacobs. Whyte’s classic book, The Organization
Man, published in 1956, documented the stiﬂing eﬀect of organi-
zation and bureaucracy on individuality and creativity.
25A jour-
nalist at Fortune magazine, Whyte showed how the big corporations
of the time selected and favored the type of person who goes alongto get along, rather than someone who might go against the grain.The result, he wrote, was “a generation of bureaucrats.” Even re-search and development, though lavishly funded, was becomingbureaucratized: “Money, money everywhere . . . but not a cent tothink.” Whyte’s organization man had an average workweek of ﬁftyto sixty hours, was more interested in work than in his spouse, anddepended on the corporation for his very identity. He often livedin prepackaged suburban developments like Park Forest, Illinois,a place Whyte studied exhaustively. The new suburban communitieswere seen as more progressive and liberating than the old smalltowns. But as Whyte showed, they came to exert strong pressuresof their own for social adaptation and conformity. In Park Forest,as in the corporations for whom many of its upwardly mobile res-idents worked, the idiosyncratic individual was quickly stigmatized.
In contrast, Jacobs’s monumental work, The Death and Life
of Great American Cities, published just ﬁve years later in 1961,celebrated the creativity and diversity of urban neighborhoodslike her own Greenwich Village in New York City.
26The creative27 THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

community, Jacobs argued, required diversity, an appropriate
physical environment, and a certain kind of person to generateideas, spur innovation, and harness human creativity. In contrastto the conformity, homogeneity, and insularity that Whyte haddeplored, Jacob’s neighborhoods were veritable fountainheads ofindividuality, diﬀerence, and social interaction. The miracle of theseplaces, she argued, was found in the hurly-burly life of the street,which provided the venue for a more or less continuous conver-sation, a source of both civility and creativity. People of all classesand educations, with all kinds of ideas, were constantly jostlingagainst each other and striking intellectual sparks. Jacobs docu-mented in painstaking detail the way this worked in and aroundHudson Street, where she lived, a neighborhood of tenement apart-ments and town houses, shops, and bars, among them the famedWhite Horse Tavern, where workers, writers, musicians, and in-tellectuals gathered for relaxation, conversation, and the occasionalnew idea.
What made Hudson Street so fertile was its combination of phys-
ical and social environments. It had short blocks that generatedthe greatest variety in foot traﬃc. It had a wide diversity of people,from virtually every ethnic background and walk of life. It hadbroad sidewalks and a tremendous variety of types of buildings—apartments, stores, even small factories—which meant that therewere always diﬀerent kinds of people outside and on diﬀerent sched-ules. There were lots of old, underutilized buildings, ideal for indi-
vidualistic and creative enterprises ranging from artists’ studios tosmall entrepreneurial businesses. Hudson Street also fostered andattracted exemplars of a certain type of person: Jacobs’s all-important“public characters.” These people—shopkeepers, merchants, andneighborhood leaders of various sorts—were the antitheses ofWhyte’s organization men. Utilizing their positions in social net-works, they connected and catalyzed people and ideas, playing crit-ical roles in resource mobilization.28 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Ironically but not surprisingly, Jacobs and Whyte were the closest
of friends. When asked in March 2001, on the fortieth anniversary
of the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities , to
name her most admired contemporaries, Jacobs had this to say:“Holly Whyte, William H. Whyte. . . . He was an important personto me and he was somebody whose ideas, yes, were on the same wave-length. And it was through Holly that I met my . . . publisher. . . . Itold him what I wanted and he agreed to publish it and gave me a contract.”
27
This bond is also evident in their work. Whyte lamented the rise
of organizational society and the alienation, isolation, and con-formity it engendered. Jacobs showed the possibility of an alterna-tive, a setting where diﬀerence, nonconformity, and creativity couldthrive. Who at the time could have guessed what verdict historywould render? For much of the past half century, intelligent ob-servers of modern life believed it was Whyte’s world that had tri-umphed. But now it appears that Jacobs’s world may well becarrying the day. Not only are urban neighborhoods similar toHudson Street reviving across the country, but many of the prin-ciples that animated Hudson Street are diﬀusing throughout oureconomy and society. Personal lives and workplaces, whole indus-tries and geographic regions are beginning to operate on the prin-ciples of constant, dynamic, creative interaction.
The Rise of the Creative Economy
I certainly agree with those who say that the advanced nations areshifting to information-based, knowledge-driven economies. Thealways-prescient Peter Drucker, who outlined the rise of the so-called knowledge economy, was one of the ﬁrst and most noted ex-ponents of this view: “The basic economic resources—‘the meansof production,’ to use the economist’s term, is no longer capital,29 THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

nor natural resources . . . nor ‘labor.’ It is and will be knowledge,”
he wrote.28Yet rather than knowledge, I see creativity—the faculty
that enables us to derive useful new forms from knowledge—as thekey driver of today’s economy. In my formulation, knowledge andinformation are merely the tools and the materials of creativity. In-novation, whether in the form of a new technological artifact or anew business model or method, is its product.
None of this is totally new, of course; human beings have been
engaged in creative activities since antiquity, often with spectacularresults. But what we are doing now is mainstreaming these activities;building an entire economic infrastructure around them. Scientiﬁcand artistic endeavors, for instance, have become industries untothemselves, and they have combined in new ways to create stillnewer industries. The joint expansion of technological innovationand creative content work has increasingly become the motor forceof economic growth.
As far as I can tell BusinessWeek was the ﬁrst to introduce the
concept of the Creative Economy, in August 2000.
29Not long after-
ward, John Howkins documented its global impact in his aptlytitled book The Creative Economy,
30though he used the term in a
somewhat diﬀerent sense than I do. Whereas I deﬁne the CreativeEconomy in terms of occupations, Howkins deﬁnes it to includeﬁfteen creative industry sectors such as software, R&D and design,and creative-content industries like ﬁlm and music. These industriesproduce intellectual property in the form of patents, copyrights,trademarks, and proprietary designs.
31
The Creative Factory
Not just the start-up company, the research laboratory, and theartist’s studio, but the factory itself can be and often is an arena for30 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

creative work. In fact, my studies of high performance factories
in the 1980s and 1990s served as the inspiration for my theory ofthe Creative Class. Given the chance factory workers are often theones who come up with basic improvements in productivity andperformance.
32I saw this time and again in my studies of Japanese
and US factories. Even in areas such as environmental quality, itwas line workers doing little things—like putting in drip pans—who were the key to making factories greener and more productiveat the same time.
33Today more and more factory jobs require cre-
ativity as a condition of employment. In many advanced manu-facturing plants, even candidates for entry-level assembly jobs mustpass a battery of tests screening them for aptitudes such as problemsolving and the ability to work in self-directed teams.
34Increasing
numbers of factory workers no longer touch the products theymake but essentially monitor, control, and at times program thecomputers that run the production processes.
35The manager of a
fully automated steel mill in the American Midwest summed it upbest when he told me: “The result is the rise of the creative factory,where factory workers contribute their ideas and intellectual talentas well as their physical labor.”
I ﬁrst came to understand the enormous power of creativity at
work not from economic textbooks or from my research, but veryearly in life, from my father, Louis Florida. Born to Italian immi-grant parents in Newark, New Jersey, he quit school at age fourteenand took a job in a factory that made eyeglass frames to help sup-port his family during the Great Depression. After ﬁghting inWorld War II—he was one of those who stormed the beaches atNormandy—he returned to his previous line of work at a placecalled Victory Optical. By the early 1960s, when I was a small boy,he had worked his way up from laborer to a supervisory post. Onsome Saturdays he had to put in a few hours at work; occasionally,he would give in to my pants-tugging pleas and let me tag along. My31 THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

eyes ablaze with curiosity, we drove through Newark’s sprawling,
industrial Ironbound Section, so called because it was latticed withrailroad lines, to the giant brick factory. Inside the plant, I wouldrace on small legs to keep up with my father as he strode past thepresses, the lathes, the vats of plating solutions, and huge bins ofeyeglass frames of every kind.The energy was incredible; it was aphantasmagoria of rapidly moving people, set amid the sounds ofwhirring machines and foreign-accented English, and the smellsof cutting ﬂuids, melted plastic, and ﬁnely shaved metal chips.
My father and his colleague Karl, a German-born machinist,
would talk about the latest machinery from Italy and Germany andthe advanced production systems used by their European competi-tors. But my father would always remind me that the real productivepower of the factory came not from its machines and presses butfrom the intelligence and creativity of its workers. “Richard,” hewould say, “the factory does not run itself. It is those incrediblyskilled men who are the heart, soul, and mind of this factory.”
My most vivid lesson on that score occurred when I was a Cub
Scout and I entered my ﬁrst Pinewood Derby, a racing event forsmall model cars. Each scout was given the same basic materials towork with: a rectangular block of wood, plastic wheels, and metalaxles. The instructions were to fashion a car from the materials sup-plied, and not to add additional weight in excess of ﬁve ounces.The cars would race by rolling down a sloped track. The week beforemy ﬁrst race, I worked on the car with my father. We basically fas-tened the wheels to the block of wood, added a coat of paint andshowed up. Suﬃce it to say, we were badly beaten. Our primitiveclunker literally fell apart, its wheels ﬂying in all directions, as thesleek cars of the other scouts ﬂew by. Those sharp-looking cars fas-cinated me, and I made my father promise to help me build one.
The next year we set to work early, designing a streamlined racer.
We started by talking to the machinists and machine-tool designers32 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

at Victory Optical, taking the car to the factory on weekends to
seek their advice. We honed that block of wood into an eﬃcientaerodynamic design. We added a precise amount of lead weight,per the guidelines, to gain additional speed. We fashioned a littletest track. In trial runs, the front axle began to crack under the strainof repeated impact with the stopping barrier at the bottom. Withthe help of the machinists, we developed an innovative solution,carving a bit of wood from the rear of the car and gluing it to itsnose to protect the axle. We added a metallic paint job, decals, aroll bar, and the pièce de résistance—a little plastic driver. The ﬁn-ished car looked like a Formula One racer. With the collective in-genuity of Victory Optical in our corner, we went on to win everyPinewood Derby championship for the remainder of my Cub Scoutcareer, at which point the dynasty passed along to my youngerbrother’s racers. The creativity of the workers in the eyeglass-framefactory was multidimensional: it could be applied to my world, too.
My father’s factory also taught me about the consequences of
bad management—and the squelching of creativity—in the age ofhigh Fordism. For years, the Victory Optical plant had been an ex-ception to the Organizational Age rule: it was operated entirely byforemen and self-made managers like my father, who had workedtheir way up from the shop ﬂoor. These managers had tremendousrespect for the ideas of the factory workers. I can remember theworkers looking at samples of the latest designer eyeglass framesfrom overseas and coming up with their own designs to improveon the high-priced imports. Then, in the late 1960s and 1970s, theplant owners began to hire college-educated engineers and MBAsto oversee the factory’s operations. With considerable book knowl-edge but little experience in the actual workings of the factory, thesenew recruits proposed complex new ideas and systems that in-evitably failed and, at worst, brought production to a grinding halt.Their ideas not only were ineﬀective but created growing animosity33 THE CREATIVE ECONOMY

among the workforce. The bitter standoﬀ between workers and
management ﬁnally became intolerable. One day in the late 1970s,when I was at college, my father called me on the phone and said,“Today, I quit.”
At the time, I was a little skeptical about my father’s version of
events: could college-educated experts really have ruined his fac-tory? I was a college student myself, after all, trying to use educationto move up the socioeconomic ladder. But within a couple of years,I realized how right he had been. As the workforce grew more de-moralized, problems mounted. Skilled people quit. Machinists leftin droves. The foremen and supervisors who had come up fromthe ﬂoor quickly followed. Without their storehouse of knowledgeand institutional memory, the factory could not operate. Less thanthree years after my father’s departure, Victory Optical was bank-rupt. The huge, vibrant factory that had captivated me in my youthwas shuttered, vacant, abandoned. It was as heartbreaking as it wasironic. Just when the leading edge of the corporate world had begunmoving toward the creative factory concept—the concept that Vic-tory had been run by all along—Victory had moved in the oppositedirection: back to the past, to the deadening paradigm that delegatedcreativity to the men at the top and denied it to the rank and ﬁle.
The image of the factory as an arena for rote physical labor alone
has always been wrong. It never gave a complete picture of the eco-nomic activity that went on inside. Workers have always used theirintellects and creative capabilities to get things done. And thoughthey were stiﬂed for long periods in many industries, factory work-ers today are coming to be valued more for their ideas about qualityand continuous improvement than for their ability to perform rou-tine manual tasks. Across the board, in a multitude of jobs, workhas taken on an explicitly creative component.34 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

CHAPTER 3
The Creative Class
The rise of the Creative Economy has had a profound eﬀect on
the sorting of people into social groups or classes, changing the
composition of existing ones and creating new ones. I am far
from the ﬁrst to have raised the idea that the advanced industrialeconomies have given birth to new classes. During the 1960s, PeterDrucker and Fritz Machlup described the growing economic roleplayed by “knowledge workers.” Sometime later, Daniel Bell iden-tiﬁed a meritocratic class structure of scientists, engineers, man-agers, and administrators that had been engendered by the shiftfrom a manufacturing to a “postindustrial” economy. The sociol-ogist Erik Olin Wright has written extensively about the rise ofwhat he called a new “professional-managerial” class.
1Robert Reich
advanced the term “symbolic analysts” to describe members of theworkforce who manipulate ideas and symbols.
2All of these ob-
servers picked up on economic aspects of the emerging class struc-ture that I describe here.
Others zeroed in on the wider repercussions of these changes on
social norms and value systems. Near the end of his 1983 bookClass, the University of Pennsylvania’s Paul Fussell taxonomized
many of the attributes that I now assign to the Creative Class. Aftera witty romp through status markers that delineate, say, the upper
35

middle class from “high proles,” Fussell noted the presence of a
growing “X” group that seemed to defy existing categories.
You are not born an X person. You earn X-personhood by a stren-
uous eﬀort of discovery in which curiosity and originality are
indispensable.
The young ﬂocking to the cities to devote themselves to “art,”
“writing,” “creative work”—anything, virtually, that liberatesthem from the presence of a boss or superior—are aspirant X people.
The middle-class person is “always somebody’s man,” the X per-
son is nobody’s.
X people are independent-minded. They adore the work they do,
and they do it until they are ﬁnally carried out, “retirement”being a concept meaningful only to hired personnel or wageslaves who despise their work.
3
Others have charted the rise of knowledge workers. In 1996,
Stephen Barley estimated that professional, technical, and mana-
gerial occupations increased from just 10 percent of the workforcein 1900 to 30 percent by 1991, while both blue-collar work andagricultural work had fallen precipitously.
4In 2001, the sociologist
Steven Brint estimated that the “scientiﬁc, professional and knowledgeeconomy” accounted for 36 percent of all US employment in 1996.Brint’s human-capital–based estimate included industries in whichat least 5 percent of the workforce has graduate degrees, includingagricultural services, mass media, chemicals, plastics, pharmaceu-ticals, computers and electric equipment, scientiﬁc instruments,banking, accounting, consulting and other business services, healthservices and hospitals, education, legal services, and nearly all re-ligious and governmental organizations.
5
In Bobos in Paradise, David Brooks described a new blending
of bohemian and bourgeois values among upper-income profes-36 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

sionals.6But Creative Class identity runs much deeper than a set
of changing affections and affectations; it is rooted in our changed
economic circumstances. What binds it together is not just itsvalues and attitudes but the place it occupies in the economicstructure.
Class membership follows from people’s economic functions.
Their social identities as well as their cultural preferences, values,lifestyles, and consumption and buying habits all ﬂow from this.Whereas members of the Working Class work mainly with theirphysical bodies, members of the Creative Class work mainly withtheir minds. And for all those who believe this kind of mental orcreative labor does not match up to physical work, listen to whatthe great chronicler of the Working Class, Karl Marx, had to say:
Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs,
self-acting mules, etc. These are products of human industry; natural ma-terial transformed into organs of the human will over nature, they are organsof the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledgeobjectiﬁed. The development of [technology] indicates to what degree gen-eral social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to whatdegree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have comeunder the control of the general intellect and have been transformed in ac-cordance with it.
7
There are no shortages of social scientists who believe that class
has declined as a social and economic category. I disagree with them
fundamentally. Class, in particular the rise of the Creative Class,exerts an increasingly powerful inﬂuence over virtually every aspectof our lives. Throughout this book, and in its penultimate chapter,added especially for this revised edition, I will illustrate the eﬀectsclass has on myriad aspects of our very existence, from the economicperformance of our cities, regions, and nations to our political viewsand values, from the ways we work to our very health and well-being.37 THE CREATIVE CLASS

In this book’s original edition, I noted that although my ﬁeld re-
search and interviews made it clear that members of the Creative
Class did not yet see themselves as members of a unique socialgrouping, they actually did share many tastes, desires, and prefer-ences. I added that this new class may not be as distinct in this regardas the industrial Working Class was in its heyday, but it does havean emerging coherence. Since that time, the Creative Class has be-come increasingly self-aware, not just within nations but globally.
This chapter updates all of the statistics on the Creative Class and
the new class structure, based on the most current available data. Italso summarizes a great deal of new research on the deﬁnition of theCreative Class that has appeared since this book was ﬁrst published.
Defining the Creative Class
The distinguishing characteristic of the Creative Class is that itsmembers engage in work whose function is to “create meaningfulnew forms.” I deﬁne the Creative Class by the occupations thatpeople have, and I divide it into two components. What I call theSuper-Creative Core of the Creative Class includes scientists and
engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, en-tertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as the thoughtleadership of modern society: nonﬁction writers, editors, culturalﬁgures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion makers.I deﬁne the highest order of creative work as producing new formsor designs that are readily transferable and widely useful—such asdesigning a consumer product that can be manufactured and sold;coming up with a theorem or strategy that can be applied in manycases; or composing music that can be performed again and again.Whether they are software programmers or engineers, architects,or ﬁlmmakers, the people at the core of the Creative Class engagein this kind of work regularly; it’s what they are paid to do. Along38 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

with problem solving, their work may entail problem ﬁnding: not
just building a better mousetrap, but noticing that a better mouse-
trap would be a handy thing to have.
Beyond this core group, the Creative Class also includes “creative
professionals” who work in a wide range of knowledge-intensiveindustries, such as high-tech, ﬁnancial services, the legal and healthcare professions, and business management. These people engagein creative problem solving, drawing on complex bodies of knowl-edge to solve speciﬁc problems. Doing so typically requires a highdegree of formal education and thus a high level of human capital.People who do this kind of work may sometimes come up withmethods or products that turn out to be widely useful, but it’s notpart of their basic job description. What they are required to do
regularly is to think on their own, apply or combine standard ap-proaches in unique ways to ﬁt diﬀerent situations, exercise a greatdeal of judgment, and perhaps even try something radically newfrom time to time. Creative Class people such as physicians, lawyers,and managers may also be involved in testing and reﬁning newtreatment protocols, new legal interpretations or management tech-niques, and may even develop such things themselves. As they domore of this latter kind of work, perhaps through a career shift orpromotion, they move up to the Super-Creative Core: producingtransferable, widely usable new forms is now their primary function.
Much the same is true of the growing number of technicians who
apply complex bodies of knowledge to their work with physicalmaterials. They are suﬃciently engaged in creative problem solvingthat I have included a large subset of them in the Creative Class.In an insightful study,
8Stephen Barley of Stanford University em-
phasized the growing importance and inﬂuence of this group ofworkers, who are taking on increased responsibility to interprettheir work and make decisions, blurring the old distinction betweenwhite-collar work (done by decision makers) and blue-collar work(done by those who follow orders).39 THE CREATIVE CLASS

There has been a robust debate over how to deﬁne the Creative
Class since this book was originally published. One common mis-
perception is that the Creative Class is just another way of countingpeople who have college degrees—the more conventional measureof human capital. In his review of the original edition of this book,the Harvard University urban economist Edward Glaeser wrote:“While Florida acts as if there is a diﬀerence between the humancapital theory of city growth and the ‘creative capital’ theory ofgrowth, that is news to me. I have always argued that human capitalpredicts urban success because ‘high skilled people in high skilledindustries may come up with new ideas.’”
9Or as Forbes writer Mark
Bergen tweeted about the Creative Class on October 7, 2011, “Ifyou just called it the ‘Bachelor’s Degree or Higher Class,’ it’d be awhole lot less confusing.”
The reality is, while degree holders and the Creative Class overlap
considerably, they’re hardly the same.
10Across the entire United
States, nearly three-fourths (72.2 percent, to be exact) of adults withcollege degrees are members of the Creative Class. But less than 60percent (59.3 percent) of the members of the Creative Class havecollege degrees, according to a detailed analysis by my colleagues
Kevin Stolarick of the University of Toronto and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett of the University of Southern California. In other words,
four in ten members of the Creative Class—16.6 million workers—do nothave college degrees. As Stolarick and Currid-Halkett write:
“Thus, while some correlation would be expected, our results in-dicate that human capital and the Creative Class do not necessarilycapture the same people nor is a measure of each’s respective pres-ence in a regional economy indicative of similar trends.”
11
With data supplied by Stolarick, Glaeser ran a regression analysis
of the relative economic eﬀects of my Creative Class measures ver-sus the conventional human capital measure (the share of adultswith at least a college degree) and found that the conventional vari-able substantially outperformed mine. “Maybe there is more to cre-40 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

ativity than just schooling,” he writes, “but the regression doesn’t
show it.” Maybe he should talk with Sir Ken Robinson, the educa-tion expert who shows that schooling often inhibits and retardscreativity.
12But that’s beside the point. The metric that Glaeser used
to capture performance was population growth, and populationgrowth and economic growth are not the same thing at all. Manyregions that grow population experience little or no economicgrowth. In fact, there is no correlation between the two.
The fact is, a signiﬁcant body of research shows that the Creative
Class measure operates in addition to and through other channelsthan the standard human capital variable. A large-scale study byStolarick, Mellander, and myself shows that the Creative Class hasa bigger eﬀect on wages—a key element of regional productivity—whereas education tends to have a greater eﬀect on income.
13In-
dependent research by economist Todd Gabe and others backs thisup, showing that the Creative Class continues to have a substantialeﬀect on regional economic growth when controlling for the eﬀectsof education and other factors.
More to the point, having a Creative Class job also brings eco-
nomic beneﬁts that extend beyond those of going to college. A col-lege graduate working in the same occupation as a non-collegegraduate earns approximately 50 percent higher wages. But havinga Creative Class job adds another 16 percent, about the same as an-other 1.5 years of additional education, according to Gabe’s re-search.
14Even more important, just counting years of education
ignores a lot of people who do very creative work, including world-shaping entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, or artistsand others who did not complete college.
Others criticized my concept of the Creative Class as a “hodge-
podge,” saying it includes too broad a spectrum of occupationsand types of work to be really meaningful. For example, business-people make a lot more money than artists. True, artists, designers,entertainers, and media workers earn about half ($52,290 per year41 THE CREATIVE CLASS

42 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Table 3.1 Average Annual Wages and Salaries for the Classes, 2010
Class/Occupation Salary
Creative Class $70,714
Management $105,440
Legal $96,940
Computer and Mathematical $77,230
Architecture and Engineering $75,550
Health Care Practitioners and Technical $71,280
Business and Financial Operations $67,690
Life, Physical, and Social Science $66,390
Sales (high-end) $61,484
Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media $52,290
Education, Training, and Library $50,440
Working Class $36,991
Service Class $29,188
Agriculture $24,324
All Occupations $44,410
Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employ-
ment Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/.
Analysis by Kevin Stolarick. in 2010) of what those in management occupations earn and con-
siderably less than lawyers, engineers, and architects. Of the majorCreative Class occupations, only education workers make less.But the pay differences within the Creative Class pale when youcompare them to the differences between the classes (see Table3.1). Other critics pointed out that artists, engineers, and busi-nesspeople are very different kinds of people, with different in-terests and personalities. If you weren’t likely to find them at thesame cocktail party, how could you say they belonged to the sameclass? I could say that they missed the point, but there is a better

answer. My original deﬁnition of the Creative Class was admittedly
based upon my research teams’ subjective assessments of the skillcontent of work. But objective new data have since become available.In a major 2007 study, David McGranahan and Timothy Wojan,two economists with the US Department of Agriculture, independ-ently updated the deﬁnition of the Creative Class, using detaileddata from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational InformationNetwork (O*NET) to specify the skills for each of the occupationsI included in my original deﬁnition.
15For the most part, they found
that my original deﬁnition held up, and that the correlation betweenmy original and their updated deﬁnition was substantial.
16
In his bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the
Value of Work, Matthew Crawford, a philosophy-PhD’d think-tanker turned motorcycle repairman, charged me with trying to el-evate the mind work of faux bohemians, information techies, andcreative professionals over the old fashioned physical skills of shopﬂoor workers (he dubs it the “cult of creativity”). He accused meof subscribing to the fashionable hippie nostrum that “Creativityis what happens when people are liberated from the constraints ofconventionality.” Chastizing me, he notes that “the truth, of course,is that creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cul-tivated through long practice.”
17First, it’s simply not true that I el-
evate one kind of work over another. In the previous chapter, Ishowed how Creative Class theory is built oﬀ my own experiencesas a young boy in my father’s creative factory, and later from mystudies of the advanced factories of Japan, which led a revolutionin productivity by tapping into workers’ knowledge and creativetalents as well as their physical skills.
The empirical fact that the Creative and Service Class sectors
are growing while blue-collar physical jobs are in dramatic declinecannot be avoided. Crawford makes an impassioned case for thekind of skilled trade work that he does in his motorcycle repair43 THE CREATIVE CLASS

shop, as well he should—such work has been and continues to be
the source of good livelihoods and much fulﬁllment to those for-tunate enough to be able to do it. The unfortunate truth, however,is that the kind of work Crawford does is available to only a smallminority of workers. There are 5.3 million installation, repair, andmaintenance workers in the United States, less than one-tenth ofthe more than 60 million workers who toil in mainly low-skill, low-paid service jobs. Only 16,850 of them are motorcycle mechanics,a fraction of a percent of the total US workforce. Crawford’s ownjob is particularly enviable. As the owner-operator of his own shop,he’s not an immiserated proletarian by any means, but an entre-preneur. What makes Crawford’s job a good job—a great one,really—is more than the physical skills he’s honed. It’s that he is oneof a very small minority of workers who can use his full complementof talents and skills—cognitive, social, physical, and managerial. Hehas near-complete control over how his work is done, and the ﬂex-ibility to do it how and when he likes—to be his own boss. For thesereasons, his work is a source of great pride and obvious joy. WhatCrawford does in his shop, in fact, has much in common with Cre-ative Class work. Most manufacturing and production work isn’tlike this. Much of it remains mind-numbing, de-skilled, and con-trolled by machines—a modern, high-tech version of Charlie Chap-lin ﬂailing away as he tries to keep up with the assembly line.
Tracking the Classes
Working with my colleague Kevin Stolarick, ﬁrst at Carnegie MellonUniversity and now at the University of Toronto’s Martin Pros-perity Institute, I developed a detailed statistical portrait of the riseof the Creative Class and the changing class structure of the UnitedStates through history, based on detailed occupational data collectedby the US Census. (The Appendix provides a complete explanation44 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

of all data and sources.) Our original time line covered the years
1900–1999; we have updated and expanded it to cover 1800 through2010 (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2).
As of 2010, the Creative Class included some more than 41 mil-
lion Americans, roughly one-third of the entire US workforce. Thisis up from the 38 million plus workers and 30 percent of the work-force in 1999 that I reported in the original edition. But considerhow much it has expanded over the long sweep of history. In 1800,the Creative Class accounted for just 12 percent of the US work-force, and it hovered between that and 16 percent until 1960. It in-creased gradually to 19 percent in 1970, to 24 percent in 1980, andnow stands at 32.6 percent as of 2010. In dollars-and-cents terms,Creative Class members make quite a lot more than those in otherclasses, averaging more than $70,000 per year. Taken as a whole,the Creative Class packs an even larger economic punch, accountingfor roughly half of all US wages and salaries.45 THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 3.1 The Class Structure, 1800–2010
1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 200010203040506070
0MILLIONS
Creative Class Agriculture Service Class Working Class
Source: Analysis by Kevin Stolarick. See the appendix for full detail on sources.

Growing alongside the Creative Class is the Service Class , which
contains low-end, typically low-wage and low-autonomy occupa-
tions such as: food-service workers, janitors and groundskeepers,personal care attendants, secretaries and clerical workers, and se-curity guards, among many others. In US Bureau of Labor Statistics(BLS) projections from the late 1990s and 2000, service jobs like“janitors and cleaners” and “waiters and waitresses” were some ofthe fastest-growing job categories alongside creative ones like “com-puter support specialists” and “systems analysts.” A decade later,in 2012, the fastest-growing job categories the BLS predicted outto 2020 included “personal care aides” and “home health aides”ahead of Creative Class jobs for “biomedical engineers.”
18
The Service Class includes some 60 million workers, or 47 percent
of the US workforce, making it the largest group of all. This is up46 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 3.2 The Class Structure, 1800–2010 (Percent of Workforce)
1800 1820 1840 1860 1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 200010%20%30%40%50%60%70%
0%
% Creative Class % Agriculture % Service Class % Working Class
Source: Analysis by Kevin Stolarick. See the appendix for full detail on sources.

from 55.2 million, or 43 percent of the workforce, when I wrote
the original edition ten years ago. The Service Class grew fromabout one in ﬁve workers in the late nineteenth century to one-third of the workforce by 1950 before climbing to 45 percent withthe new millennium.
The growth of this Service Class is in large measure a response
to the demands of the Creative Economy. As the economy has be-come more specialized and the occupational division of labor hasdeepened, the Creative Class has increasingly outsourced functionsthat were previously provided within the family to the Service Class.Some Service Class members have high upward mobility and willeventually move into the Creative Class—college students workingnights or summers as food servers or oﬃce cleaners, for example,or highly educated recent immigrants driving cabs in New YorkCity or Washington, DC. A few entrepreneurially minded membersmay be successful enough to open their own restaurants, lawn andgarden services, and the like. But many have no way out; they arestuck for life in menial jobs.
At its minimum-wage worst, life in the Service Class is a grueling
struggle for subsistence amid the wealth of others. By going “under -cover” as a service worker, Barbara Ehrenreich provided a movingchronicle of life on the bottom of the economic food chain in Nickel
and Dimed,
19a book that is even more relevant ten years after its
ﬁrst publication (it was rereleased in 2011 with a new afterword).The economic gap between the Creative Class and the Service Classunderpins the widening economic inequalities in America and else-where. Members of the Service Class earn just slightly more than$30,000 annually, roughly 40 percent of what the Creative Classdoes.
20And though they make up more than 45 percent of the
workforce, they account for just one-third of all wages and salaries.More than this widening gap in income and economic security,this trend reﬂects a fundamental divide in what people are able to47 THE CREATIVE CLASS

do with their lives, and how the economic positions and lifestyle
choices of some people drive and perpetuate the choices availableto others.
Finally, there is the traditional Working Class, which has about
26 million members, down roughly 20 percent from the 33 millionI reported in the original edition of this book. It consists of workersin production operations, transportation and materials moving,repair and maintenance, and construction work.
The Working Class share of the workforce surpassed that of agri-
culture around 1830, and continued to climb steadily, reaching 60percent of the workforce by 1870. America remained a majorityWorking Class nation until the 1950s and the Working Class shareof the workforce remained above 40 percent into the 1970s. It hasdeclined ever since, hitting 31 percent of the workforce in 1990 be-fore declining to 21 percent by 2010. The share of the workforceengaged in direct production has declined even more, to just 6 per-cent. In 2010, the Working Class averaged $34,015 in annual wages,roughly half (52 percent) of the Creative Class.
Alongside the growth in Creative Class occupations, we are also
seeing growth in creative content across other kinds of jobs. Asthis increases—as the relevant body of knowledge becomes morecomplex and workers are more valued for their ingenuity in ap-plying it—some now in the Working Class or Service Class maymove into the Creative Class. A prime example of this can be seenin the secretary in today’s pared-down oﬃces. In many cases thisperson not only takes on a host of tasks once performed by a largestaﬀ but becomes a true oﬃce manager—channeling the ﬂow ofinformation, devising and setting up new administrative systems,often making key decisions on the ﬂy. This person contributesmore than intelligence or computer skills. He or she adds creativevalue. My recent research with Charlotta Mellander shows notonly that Working Class and Service Class members do engage in48 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

creative work but that when they do so, it results in higher produc-
tivity and higher wages (a crucial point I will return to in the ﬁnalchapter of this book). Not all workers are on track to join the Cre-ative Class, however. Since we cannot truly prosper with a systemthat harnesses the creativity of only one-third of its workforce, thekey task of the future must be to fully engage the creative talentsof the other two-thirds.
The Crisis and the Creative Class
Marx long ago showed how capitalist crises fuel the rise of newclasses and the eclipse of older ones and the economic systems theyare inextricably connected to. The Great Depression of the 1930sand the Panic and Long Depression of the 1870s, as I have writtenelsewhere, reset the economic and social order, accelerating therise of new production systems and new classes that were attachedto them. We are seeing this happen again. The crisis that began in2008 has hit hardest at the Working Class and especially at blue-collar men, so hard, in fact, that some pundits dubbed its falloutthe “mancession.” Hanna Rosin’s much-discussed Atlantic article,
“The End of Men,” argued that the age of male dominance mighthave come to its end. “What if,” she asked, “the modern, postin-dustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than men?”
21
As the Working Class shrank, the Creative Class expanded. Be-
tween 2001 and 2010, the Creative Class grew by 2.8 million work-ers, or 7.2 percent, expanding from 38.7 million to 41.4 millionmembers. The Working Class lost some 6 million of its members—nearly one in ﬁve workers—over this same period, shrinking from32.2 million to just 26 million. The shift can also be seen in the shareof the workforce accounted for by each of these classes. The CreativeClass share of the total workforce increased from 27.5 percent in49 THE CREATIVE CLASS

2001 to 32.6 percent in 2010, while the Working Class share fell
from 22.9 percent to 20.5 percent. Creative Class employment didfall over the course of the crisis, declining by about 700,000 workers,or about 1.5 percent, between 2008 and 2010. But this pales in com-parison to what the Working Class and Service Class endured. TheWorking Class lost more than 5 million jobs during that sameperiod, and Service Class lost another 2 million jobs. Figure 3.2
shows the small blip in Creative Class growth caused by the crisis—a deﬁcit that it will more than make up in short order. Accordingto Bureau of Labor Statistics projections, the Creative Class is pro-jected to add another 5.4 million jobs by 2020.
The eﬀects of the crisis can also be seen in the very diﬀerent ways
that the various classes experienced unemployment. The overallUS unemployment rate more than doubled, rising from less than5 percent in November 2007 to 10.1 percent by October 2009. Dur-ing the period of rapidly surging unemployment from Januarythrough June 2009, the unemployment rate for the Working Classrose to 15.2 percent, up from 6.2 percent before the onset of thecrisis, while Service Class unemployment hit 9 percent. But the un-
employment rate for the Creative Class, which was a negligible 1.8
percent in 2007, rose to just 4.4 percent at its apex in 2009—lessthan one-half the rate for the Service Class and less than one-thirdof that of the Working Class.
With Todd Gabe from the University of Maine and my Martin
Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander, I undertook adetailed statistical analysis to gauge the effects of a person’s socio -economic class on unemployment prior to and near the oﬃcial
end of the recession, controlling for the eﬀects of gender, age, ed-ucation, and other factors that might be expected to have an eﬀect
on unemployment.
22Working Class members were more likely to
be unemployed even before the crisis struck: belonging to the Work-ing Class increased the probability of being unemployed by 1.8 per-50 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

centage points as of March 2007. This probability more than dou-
bled, to 4.1 percentage points, by March 2009. Creative Class mem-bers faced far less risk of unemployment over the course of thecrisis. Having a Creative Class job actually lowered a person’s prob-ability of being unemployed by 2.8 percentage points—a very bigimpact. We also found that having a large Creative Class presencein a region lessened the impact of the crisis on members of theWorking Class—mainly because, as Part 4 will show, such regionsare more economically vibrant and resilient across the board.
A separate study by Stolarick and Currid-Halkett examined the
relationship between the Creative Class and unemployment ratesbetween July 2007 and February 2011 across more than 350 US met-ropolitan areas.
23Overall, they found the Creative Class to be neg-
atively associated with regional unemployment: the larger a region’screative workforce, the lower its unemployment rate. They note:
At the peak, a 1% increase in the creative class and a 1% decrease in the
working class, ceteris paribus, are associated with an unemployment rate
that is 5.7% lower. Increasing the creative class by 1% and decreasing the service class by 1%, ceteris paribus, would reduce unemployment by7.1%. Increasing the working class by 1% with a service class decrease of1%, ceteris paribus, would increase unemployment by 1.4%. The overall
impact indicates that a higher share of creative workers is associated withlower unemployment, from the expansion of the crisis through to the cur-rent day.
Just the class variables alone explained between 30 and 57 percent
of the variation in regional unemployment rates. “Cities with a
larger creative class experienced slower unemployment as the crisisstarted, and the rate was even slower as joblessness was expandingacross the country,” they write. “Cities with a creative workforcereached a lower peak unemployment rate and then recovered more51 THE CREATIVE CLASS

quickly.” They conclude, “In short, having a creative workforce going
into the crisis helped mitigate its eﬀects on the regional economy.”
This pattern has been the case not just for the current crisis but
going back more than four decades. Figure 3.3 tracks the unem-ployment rate for the three major classes from 1971 to 2009. TheWorking Class unemployment rate surged to 14.5 percent in the re-cession year of 1975, hit 16.8 percent in 1983, 12 percent in 1992,
and then 15.2 percent in 2009. Service Class unemployment hit 9 percent in 1983 and again in 2009. Creative Class unemploymentnever topped 5 percent over this entire period, hitting highs of 3 percent in 1976, 3.7 percent in 1983, 3.1 percent in 1993 and againin 2003, and its modern-day high of 4.4 in 2009.52 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 3.3 The Unemployment Rate by Class, 1971–2009
1971 1975 1979 1983 1987 1991 1995 1999 2003 2007 2009*2%4%6%8%12%10%14%18%
16%
0%
% Creative Class % Service Class % Working Class
* Jan.–June 2009 seasonally adjusted, otherwise annual average
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Current Population Survey, various
years. Analysis by the Martin Prosperity Institute.

Which isn’t to say that the crisis hasn’t been hard on some mem-
bers of the Creative Class—it’s been hard on everyone. On October
1, 2011, Salon’s Scott Timberg went so far as to declare that theCreative Class’s very existence is in jeopardy in an article that borethe provocative title “The Creative Class Is a Lie.”
24Just as video
purportedly killed the radio star, the Internet and the economiccrisis is murdering the Creative Class, in Timberg’s view. “This cre-ative class was supposed to be the new engine of the United Stateseconomy, post-industrial age, and as the educated, laptop-wieldingcohort grew, the U.S. was going to grow with it,” he wrote. “But forthose who deal with ideas, culture and creativity at street level—the working- or middle-classes within the creative class—thingsare less cheery. Book editors, journalists, video store clerks, musi-cians, novelists without tenure—they’re among the many groupsstruggling through the dreary combination of economic slump andInternet reset. The creative class is melting, and the story is largelyuntold,” he added.
To Timberg’s point, the Creative Class did have its share of losers
during the last decade. The biggest job losses occurred among “newsanalysts, reporters, and correspondents” (a category that lost 15,130jobs, a substantial 22.9 percent decline), musicians and singers(8,830 jobs lost, down 16.9 percent), photographers (10,810 jobslost, down 16.5 percent), and editors (5,050 jobs lost, down 4.9 per-cent). But as I pointed out when I responded to Timberg’s Salonpiece, other segments of the Creative Class experienced substantialjob growth. Jobs for producers and directors went up by nearly 80percent (36,770 new jobs); art director jobs grew by 45 percent;nearly 60,000 new jobs opened up for graphic designers (up 45 per-cent); and audio and video equipment technician jobs increasedby roughly 40 percent. Overall, the Creative Class added nearly 3million jobs between 2001 and 2010, growing jobs at a 7 percentclip. The subgroup of the Creative Class that spans arts and media53 THE CREATIVE CLASS

grew at nearly double that rate (13.8 percent) over the same period.
Average Creative Class wages increased by more than one-third(34.5 percent), from $52,707 to $70,890, over this decade—morethan any other major occupational group—and wages for arts andmedia creatives rose by 31.5 percent.
The Creative Class’s hard times hardly register in comparison
to the outright decimation of the blue-collar Working Class, whichlost a staggering 6.2 million jobs over the same decade. Not tomention that Creative Class workers, even in the hardest-hit ﬁelds,have the skills and education that allow them to switch jobs andeven careers when required—an option that is largely unavailableto blue-collar and service workers. Although some parts of theCreative Class have fared better than others, people who work withtheir heads haven’t suﬀered nearly as much as those who workwith their hands.
Gender, Race, and the Creative Class
The original edition of this book tracked the Creative Class as amonolithic unit, but gender and race remain key fault lines inAmerican society. To what extent do they register in and acrossthe Creative Class and other classes? Utilizing detailed data fromthe American Community Survey, Charlotta Mellander and I tooka close look at this issue.
Women make up the majority of the Creative Class, accounting
for 52 percent of its members. A greater percentage of women holdCreative Class jobs (37.1 percent) than men (32.6 percent). ButMellander and I found that Creative Class men earn about 40 per-cent more than women—$82,009 versus $48,077—a gap of nearly$35,000.
25Some of this can be explained by diﬀerences in work ex-
perience, skills, education, and longer work hours. But even when54 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

we control for these factors, Creative Class men still outearn Cre-
ative Class women by a substantial $23,700—nearly 50 percent ofthe average salary for Creative Class women.
26
Men continue to dominate the Working Class, holding more
than 80 percent of positions. Four in ten men are members of theWorking Class, compared to just 6 percent of women. Womenhold the lion’s share of Service Class jobs—nearly two-thirds (62.2percent). More than half of women (54 percent) hold Service Class
jobs, compared to just 30 percent of men.
These statistics help explain the diﬀerent ways that the crisis has
aﬀected women and men. Before the crisis struck, the unemploy-ment rate was pretty similar for men and women—4.3 percent formen and 3.8 percent for women. By 2009, the diﬀerential had grownto more than two percentage points—9.5 percent for males and 7.1percent for women. A large part of this diﬀerence comes from theconcentration of men in the Working Class and women in the Cre-ative and Service Classes.
Race is the source of even more substantial divides within the
Creative Class. More than eight in ten (80.9 percent) of CreativeClass jobs are held by whites, who make up just 74 percent of thenation’s population. The rest are more or less evenly split amongthe three remaining racial groups—African Americans (6.8 per-cent), Hispanics (6.2 percent), and Asians (6.1 percent).
When we look within racial groups, we ﬁnd an interesting racial
division of labor, so to speak. Asians are by far the most heavilyrepresented in Creative Class work. Nearly one-half (47 percent)of them work in Creative Class jobs, compared to roughly one-third (34 percent) of whites, 24 percent of African Americans, and18 percent of Hispanics. The Service Class is more evenly split acrossthe races. Roughly 40 percent of whites and Hispanics do ServiceClass work, compared to 48.2 percent of blacks and 37 percent ofAsians. Four in ten Hispanics are members of the Working Class,55 THE CREATIVE CLASS

compared to 28 percent of blacks, 25 percent of whites, but just 16
percent of Asians.
Creative Class Values
The rise of the Creative Class is reﬂected in powerful and signiﬁcantshifts in values, norms, and attitudes. Although these changes arestill in process, a number of key trends can be identiﬁed. Not allof these attitudes break with the past: most have long been asso-ciated with more highly educated and creative people; some rep-resent a melding of traditional values with newer ones. On thebasis of my own interviews and focus groups, along with a closereading of statistical surveys conducted by others, I cluster themalong three basic lines.
Individuality. Members of the Creative Class exhibit a strong
preference for individuality and self-expression. They are reluctant
to conform to organizational or institutional directives and resisttraditional group-oriented norms. This has always been the caseamong creative people, from “quirky” artists to “eccentric” scien-tists. But it has become far more pervasive. In this sense, the in-creasing nonconformity with organizational norms may representa paradoxically new mainstream value. Members of the CreativeClass endeavor to create individualistic identities that reﬂect theircreativity. This can entail a mixing of multiple creative identities.
Meritocracy. Merit is very strongly valued by the Creative Class,
a quality shared with Whyte’s class of organization men. The Cre-
ative Class favors hard work, challenge, and stimulation. Its mem-bers have a propensity for goal setting and achievement. They wantto get ahead because they are good at what they do. There are many56 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

reasons for this emphasis on merit. Creative Class people have al-
ways been motivated by the respect of their peers. They are ambi-tious and want to move up based on their abilities and eﬀort. Butmeritocracy also has its dark side. Qualities that confer merit, suchas technical knowledge and mental discipline, are socially acquiredand cultivated. Yet those who have these qualities may easily beginto believe that they were born with them, or acquired them all ontheir own, or that others just “don’t have it.” By papering over thecauses of cultural and educational advantage, meritocracy maysubtly perpetuate the very prejudices it claims to renounce. Ofcourse, meritocracy also ties into a host of values and beliefs we’dall agree are positive—from faith that virtue will be rewarded tovaluing self-determination and mistrusting rigid caste systems.Researchers have found such values to be on the rise, not onlyamong the Creative Class in the United States, but throughout ourown and other societies.
Diversity and Openness. Diversity has become a politically charged
buzzword. To some it is an ideal that we should always be striving
for; to others it is the Trojan-horse concept that introduced aﬃr-mative action and other liberal abominations to our society. TheCreative Class people I study use the word a lot, but not to pressany political hot buttons. Diversity is simply something they value,in all its manifestations. It is spoken of so often, and so matter-of-factly, that I take it to be a fundamental marker of Creative Classvalues. As my focus groups and interviews reveal, members of thisclass strongly favor organizations and environments in which theyfeel that anyone can ﬁt in and get ahead.
Diversity is favored ﬁrst of all out of self-interest; it can be a signal
of meritocratic norms. A number of Creative Class people havetold me that they always ask if a company oﬀers same-sex partnerbeneﬁts when they are interviewing for a job, even if they are not57 THE CREATIVE CLASS

gay themselves. What they’re seeking is an environment that is
open to diﬀerences—of gender, sexual preference, race, or evenpersonal idiosyncrasies. Many highly creative people, regardless oftheir ethnic background or sexual orientation, grew up feeling likeoutsiders, like they were diﬀerent in some way from most of theirschoolmates. They may have odd personal habits or extreme stylesof dress. Also, Creative Class people are mobile and tend to movearound to diﬀerent parts of the country; they may not be “natives”of the places where they live, even if they are American-born. Whenthey are sizing up a new company and community, acceptance ofdiversity is a sign that reads “nonstandard people welcome here.”Diversity also registers itself in changed behaviors and organiza-tional policies. For example, in some Creative Class centers likeSilicon Valley in California and Austin, Texas, the traditional oﬃceChristmas party is giving way to more secular, inclusive celebra-tions. The big event at many ﬁrms is now the Halloween party: Justabout anyone can relate to a holiday that involves dressing up incostume. Surveys show such openness to diversity has increasedsubstantially over the past decade. The astounding celerity withwhich gay marriage has moved from the unthinkable to mainstreamacceptance provides an indication of how widely Creative Class val-
ues have been disseminated—and how deeply they’ve penetratedthe culture.
Although the Creative Class favors openness and diversity, to
some degree it is a diversity of elites, with membership limitedto highly educated, creative people. Speaking of a small softwarecompany that had the usual assortment of Indian, Chinese, Arabic,and other employees, an Indian technology professional said:“That’s not diversity! They’re all software engineers.” Althoughthe rise of the Creative Class has opened up new avenues of ad-vancement for women and members of ethnic minorities, its exis-tence has certainly failed to put an end to long-standing divisions58 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

of race and gender. Within high-tech industries in particular, these
divisions still seem to hold. As we have seen, although women makeup the majority of the Creative Class, a substantial gender gap per-sists in wages and salaries. Race remains an even more salient factor.The high-tech world doesn’t include many African Americans. Sev-eral of my interviewees noted that a typical high-tech company“looks like the United Nations minus the black faces.” On October8, 2011, the scholar and tech entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa sent outan apposite tweet on this subject: “More than 50% of Silicon Valleyis foreign born. Less than 5% women, almost no blacks or Hispanics,sadly. A lot needs to be ﬁxed.”
This is unfortunate but not surprising. As we have seen, African
Americans are underrepresented in Creative Class occupationsand make nearly $10,000 less than their white peers, even whencontrolling for education, skill, and work effort—a substantialgap. And though my research for the original edition of this bookfound a strong association between centers of high-tech industryand communities that are more open toward immigrants andgays, it also found a troublingly strong negative correlation be-tween high-tech concentrations and the percentage of the popu-lation that is nonwhite.
Global Values Shift
In more than three decades of careful research, Ronald Inglehart,a political science professor at the University of Michigan, has doc-umented the powerful shift in values as these norms and attitudestook hold. Researchers participating in Inglehart’s World ValuesSurvey have administered detailed questionnaires to random sam-ples of adults in countries around the world ﬁve times since 1981(a sixth wave of surveys will conclude in 2012).
27By 2007, the end59 THE CREATIVE CLASS

of the last survey period, the number of nations studied had grown
to ninety-seven, including some 88 percent of the world’s popula-tion. Along with speciﬁc issues like divorce, abortion, and suicide,the survey has delved into matters such as deference to authorityversus deciding for oneself, openness versus insularity (“can strangersbe trusted?”), and what, ultimately, is most important in life. In-glehart and his colleagues have sifted the resulting data to look forinternal correlations (which kinds of values tend to go together)and for correlations with economic and social factors, such as a na-tion’s level of economic development, its form of government, andits religious heritage. The researchers compared nations to one an-other, mapping out various similarities and diﬀerences—and theyalso looked for changes over time.
Among other things, Inglehart has found a worldwide shift from
economic growth issues to lifestyle values, which he sometimesrefers to as a shift from “survival” to “self-expression” values. More-over, where lifestyle values are rising or dominant, as in the UnitedStates and most European societies in the present day, people tendto be relatively tolerant of other groups and in favor of gender equal-ity, which is very much in line with Creative Class values. In every-thing from sexual norms and gender roles to environmental values,Inglehart ﬁnds a continued movement away from traditional normsto more progressive ones. Furthermore, as economies grow, livingstandards improve and people grow less attached to large institu-tions; they become more open and tolerant in their views aboutpersonal relationships.
Inglehart believes this new value system reﬂects a “shift in what
people want out of life, transforming basic norms governing politics,work, religion, family and sexual behavior.” Research that my teamand I have conducted on more than one hundred countries sincethe original edition of this book was published (which I will discussin later chapters) ﬁnds that the Creative Class is strongly associatedwith Inglehart’s “self-expression” and “secular-rational” values60 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

across nations.28And other studies I conducted with my colleagues
(which I will also discuss in detail later) show a strong association
between the Creative Class and openness toward gays and ethnicand racial minorities across nations.
29
This shift in values and attitudes, as Inglehart notes, is driven by
changes in our material conditions. In agricultural societies andeven for much of the industrial age, people endured chronic con-ditions of scarcity. We had to work simply to survive. The rise ofan aﬄuent or “post-scarcity” economy means that we no longerhave to devote all our energies just to staying alive, but have thewealth, time, and ability to enjoy other aspects of life. This in turnaﬀords us choices we did not used to have. “Precisely because theyattained high levels of economic security,” writes Inglehart, “theWestern societies that were the ﬁrst to industrialize have graduallycome to emphasize post-materialist values, giving higher priorityto the quality of life than to economic growth. In this respect, therise of post-materialist values reverses the rise of the Protestantethic.”
30Elsewhere, Inglehart comments that “the overriding trend
appears to be an intergenerational shift from emphasis on economicand physical security toward increasing emphasis on self-expression,subjective well-being, and quality of life. . . . This cultural shift isfound throughout advanced industrial societies; it seems to emergeamong birth cohorts that have grown up under conditions in whichsurvival is taken for granted.”
31
Although conservative commentators frequently bemoan these
shifts as hedonistic, narcissistic, and damaging to society, the Cre-ative Class isn’t subversive through and through—far from it. Onthe one hand, its members have taken what look to be alternativevalues and made them mainstream: by making nonconformitymandatory, they’ve instilled a new kind of conformity. On the other
hand, many of its most strongly held values—such as the commit-ment to meritocracy and to hard work—are quite traditional andsystem reinforcing in and of themselves. In my interviews, members61 THE CREATIVE CLASS

of the Creative Class resist characterization as alternative or bo-
hemian. Those labels carry the connotation of standing outside oreven against the prevailing culture, and they insist that they areworking and living within it. It is in this sense that they representnot an alternative group but a new and increasingly norm-settingmainstream of society. This has become even more pronouncedover the past decade as the Creative Class and its values have per-meated society, in the United States and also around the world.Perhaps we are indeed witnessing the rise of what economic his-torian Joel Mokyr has dubbed homo creativus. We live diﬀerently
and pursue new lifestyles because we see ourselves as new kinds ofpeople. We are more tolerant and more liberal because our materialconditions and way of life allow it.
When I ﬁrst published this book, I argued that the rise of the Cre-
ative Class had already permanently transformed our economy andsociety—and I predicted that there would be deeper changes tocome. The last decade has borne that out. Far from calling CreativeClass theory into question, the economic meltdown provided dra-matic conﬁrmation that our world has become a fundamentallydiﬀerent place than most of us were born into. We are living in theeye of the storm, a period of life-altering creative destruction as anew economic order and a new way of life emerges from the old.62 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

PART TWO
WORK

CHAPTER 4
The Machine Shop
and the Hair Salon
During the late 1990s, I served on the board of Team Penn-
sylvania, an economic development advisory group con-
vened by then governor Tom Ridge. At one of our meetings,
the state’s secretary of labor and industry, a big burly man, bangedhis ﬁst on the table in frustration when the topic turned to theshortage of welders and machine-tool operators. “Our workforceis out of balance,” he steamed. “We’re turning out too many hair-dressers and cosmetologists, and not enough skilled factory work-ers. What’s wrong?”
The problem was not limited to Pennsylvania. There were acute
shortages of skilled factory workers across the United States at thetime that many found perplexing. Machinists, for example, earngood wages and beneﬁts. They do important work. For many years,a machinist’s job was considered an elite career for anyone not col-lege bound. It is the sort of good job that politicians and editorialwriters fret that our economy is losing. Yet as older machinists re-tire, there are not enough young people to ﬁll their positions. Tradeschools that teach skills like machining and welding have had to
65

cut back or close their programs for lack of interest. Meanwhile,
young men and women ﬂock to beauty academies.
At the Team Pennsylvania meeting, the diagnosis was that (1)
guidance counselors at high schools have been steering the kidswrong, because (2) our job projections have been off. If we fixedthe projections and worked with the high schools—and maybedid some public-image work—surely droves of young people wouldcome back to those good, secure manufacturing jobs.
After the meeting, I laid out the problem to my ﬁrst-year public
policy students (I was teaching at Carnegie Mellon at the time). Iasked them: if you had just two career choices open to you, wherewould you work—in a machine shop, with high pay and a job forlife, or in a hair salon, with less pay and where you were subject tothe whims of the economy?
Virtually every student chose the hair salon, and mainly for the
same reasons. Even though the pay was not as good, they saw thework as more stimulating and more ﬂexible. You’re scheduled tomeet your clients and are then left alone with them, instead of grind-ing away to meet quotas and schedules with your bosses lookingover your shoulder. It’s clean. You get to work with interestingpeople and you’re always learning new things, the latest styles. Youget to add your own touches and make creative decisions, becauseevery customer is a new challenge, and you’re the one in charge.When you do good work, you see the results right away: peoplelook good; they’re happy. If you’re really talented, you can openyour own salon. Maybe you could even become a hairdresser tothe rich and famous and get written up in celebrity magazines—like Christophe or Vidal Sassoon. Even when I pressed the issue ofpay, most said the pay diﬀerential really didn’t matter. In almostevery case, the content of the job and the nature of the work envi-ronment mattered much more than the compensation.
I don’t think guidance counselors can change this. My students
who chose the hair salon over the factory saw it as the more creative,66 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

exciting, and satisfying place to work. It oﬀers intrinsic rewards—
rewards inherent in the nature of the job. I suspect that similar mo-tives drive many of the people who choose the hair salon in reallife—as well as the growing numbers of young people who are goodwith their hands but choose to wrap their hands around a tattooingneedle, a DJ turntable, a chef’s knife, or landscaping tools ratherthan the controls of a turret lathe. Those same values and attitudesturned up time and time again in more structured interviews andfocus groups that I conducted with Creative Class people and othersacross the United States.
My students were onto something I did not, and could not, fully
understand at the time. Work in the hair salon is creative work—among the most creative work in the entire economy. When econ-omist Todd Gabe mapped the twenty most creative industries inthe United States based upon the share of workers in high-creativityjobs (using data that were unavailable to my team and me when Iwrote the original edition of this book), he came to a startling con-clusion. Guess what was the single most creative occupation of all,besting artists, computer scientists, designers, and scores of others?Work in beauty salons, where nearly eight in ten jobs—for hair-dressers, stylists, and cosmetologists—require high levels of cre-ativity. Compare this to 76 percent for specialized designers, 60percent for computer system designers, and 58 percent for inde-pendent artists.
1
Although just ﬁnding a job has become a bigger concern since
2008, I continue to hear the same kinds of things from youngercollege grads today, who are unwilling to sacriﬁce freedom, ﬂexi-bility, and challenging work simply for security an d pay. This is
not suprising from an economic standpoint. Although collegegrads have not been unaﬀected by the crisis, they have seen muchlower rates of unemployment and joblessness than their less-educatedpeers. Even though the job pickings are scarcer than they mighthave been for their older siblings, they still feel that they have some67 THE MACHINE SHOP AND THE HAIR SALON

latitude, that they have the freedom to make their own choices. Al-
though many young college grads are burdened with substantialstudent loan debt, they are much less likely to be saddled with largemortgages or have children to support. In fact, one consequenceof the crisis has been that younger people are putting off home buy-ing and marriage, continuing to room together with friends ormoving back in with their parents.
In a much-talked-about story in New York magazine, “The Kids
Are Actually Sort of All Right,” Noreen Malone described the falloutfrom the recession that she and her twenty-something friends, mostof them college graduates, were suﬀering. “This is not just a rottenmoment to be young,” she wrote. “It’s a putrid, stinking, several-months-old-stringy-goat-meat moment to be young.”
2But the
lifestyle she describes—a combination of slacking, travel, tryingout new jobs and new personas—sounds almost alluring, a far cryfrom the bleak prospects faced by the unskilled and uneducated.
Why are people’s desires so diﬀerent than what the pundits and
policy makers say they should be? The reason is basic and reﬂectsthe changing nature of work for the Creative Class. Conventionalwisdom says people work for money, that they will go where theﬁnancial opportunities are best and the shot at ﬁnancial security issurest. In the halcyon days of the so-called New Economy, this waswidely assumed to be true even of high-tech workers, whose over-riding goal, the story went, was to turn stock options into untoldwealth. That assumption was wrong. “You cannot motivate the bestpeople with money,” says Eric Raymond, author of The Cathedraland the Bazaar and a leading authority on open-source software.
“Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any ﬁeld aremotivated by passion.”
3Writing at the apex of the dot-com boom
in the 1990s, Peter Drucker had this to say:
Bribing the knowledge workers on whom these industries depend will there-
fore simply not work. The key knowledge workers in these businesses will68 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

surely continue to expect to share ﬁnancially in the fruits of their labor. But
the ﬁnancial fruits are likely to take much longer to ripen, if they ripen atall. . . . Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industrieswill come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold, andmotivate knowledge workers. When this can no longer be done by satisfyingknowledge workers’ greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to bedone by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition andsocial power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates intofellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners.
4
Of course people work to make money: Money is necessary, but
it’s not suﬃcient in and of itself. I am hardly the ﬁrst observer to
notice that money isn’t the only thing people want. Yet my researchhas convinced me that many ﬁrms, scholars, and business punditsstill overrate money as a motivating factor, especially in the worldof creative work. What I ﬁnd generally is this: yes, people wantenough money to live in the manner they prefer. But money alonewill not suﬃce to make most workers happy, committed, or moti-vated. As this chapter will show, drawing on my own research andthat of leading management theorists and organizational psychol-ogists, creative workers are most motivated by their work’s intrinsicrewards—which ﬂow from its very creativity.
What Creatives Want at Work
For all the attention given to workplace motivation over the years,surprisingly little hard numerical research or analysis has beendone on what motivates today’s creative workers.
5But back in the
summer of 2001, I had a chance to address this issue by analyzingdata from surveys conducted by the magazine InformationWeek,
which I believe are among the largest and most comprehensive onthe subject. Some 20,000 information technology (IT) workers69 THE MACHINE SHOP AND THE HAIR SALON

completed these surveys in 2000 and 2001, answering detailed ques-
tions about their pay and beneﬁts as well as a host of other questionsabout their job satisfaction and dissatisfaction and other work-related issues. Approximately 11,000 identiﬁed themselves as staﬀand 9,000 as management. The samples were not scientiﬁcally ran-dom, in that people self-selected by choosing to respond. But theywere extremely large and reached far beyond the computer andsoftware industries per se, including IT workers in virtually everysector of the economy.
IT workers provide an interesting vantage point from which to
examine these issues. On the one hand, they are regarded as a fairlyconventional sector of the Creative Class. They are certainly a gooddeal more mainstream than artists, musicians, or advertising copy-writers. On the other hand, IT workers are said to care a great dealabout money. They were a highly paid segment of the workforceto begin with, and during the late 1990s, companies went to greatlengths to provide bonuses, stock options, six-ﬁgure salaries, andother ﬁnancial incentives to lure them.
One key question in the survey asked: “What matters most to
you about your job?” It then listed thirty-eight factors, from whichrespondents could check one or more. My colleague Kevin Stolarickand I combed through the raw data and repeatedly resifted it to seeka better understanding of what IT workers value. From our ﬁrstglance at the data, one bottom line was clear: money was an im-portant but insuﬃcient motivator. Base pay ranked fourth as a keyfactor, selected by 38.5 percent of respondents. Nearly twice as manyselected the top-ranked factor, “challenge of job/responsibility.”Interestingly, the ability to share in the ﬁnancial upside throughstock options did not even make the top twenty: Fewer than 10 per-cent of all respondents selected it. When we sorted the thirty-eightindividual job factors in the InformationWeek survey into eleven
broad clusters, challenge was by far the top-ranked factor, followed70 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

by ﬂexibility and job stability. Compensation was fourth again, fol-
lowed by peer respect, technology, and location; further down thelist were company orientation, organizational culture, career ori-entation, and beneﬁts.
The things that matter to IT workers stayed fairly constant as
economic conditions changed between 2000, when the tech boomwas at its zenith, and 2001, after the NASDAQ crash. The samethree general attributes—a challenging job, a ﬂexible workplace,and job stability—topped the list in both years. Only a small per-centage of people in each survey, the roughly 10 percent cited above,ranked stock options as being very important. Both before and afterthe NASDAQ crash, pay was generally important, but not nearlyso much as intrinsic rewards.
Challenge and Responsibility
The primacy of intrinsic rewards wasn’t something that particularlysurprised me. Interview subjects and participants in the focusgroups I conducted in the late 1990s and early 2000s persistentlytold me that they like to be on the front lines, doing work that makesa diﬀerence. They talked about wanting to work on “exciting proj-ects,” “great technology,” and “important stuﬀ.” And it was veryimportant for them to work on things that would see the light ofday. One of the most frustrating events they reported was havingtheir project dropped, pecked to death, or strangled in red tape.One person commented, “I would go crazy if I could not contribute.I would die if I had to deal with constant bureaucracy and couldnot contribute directly.”
6My respondents displayed a general dis-
dain for the bureaucratic strictures and long career developmentpaths of the past. I believe this was a key factor that drove peopleto small companies during the high-tech boom. In a small ﬁrm,everyone counts.71 THE MACHINE SHOP AND THE HAIR SALON

One young woman in Des Moines, Iowa, described the mind-
numbing tedium of her ﬁrst job after college. She worked for an
insurance company in an entry-level post that was essentially thatof a better-paid secretary. “They had me Xeroxing paper all dayand answering phones,” she said. “So I quit, even though the paywas great, I had normal hours, and a secure job.” She left for a jobin a smaller company. There, she said, “[I could] use my skills, make a contribution, and not be bored silly all day.”
7
The young chief technology oﬃcer of a Seattle software start-up
oﬀered still another take on the subject. A boyish thirty-somethingof Asian American descent, he had earned his PhD in computerscience at Carnegie Mellon and taught at Harvard. He had givenup a promising career at the pinnacle of academia for the high-riskworld of a start-up because he wanted to see his ideas have an eﬀectin the real world. “It’s not enough to just publish papers and ad-vance theory,” he told me. “I did that. For me and for an increasingnumber of people of my generation, you have to show the impactof your work in the commercial market. You have to show thatyour technology can make a real diﬀerence in the market and inpeople’s lives.”
8This desire has only increased over the past decade;
it’s become a literal precondition for creative work.
Flexibility
The people in the focus groups and interviews I conducted a decadeago blanched at the very idea of a nine-to-ﬁve schedule or a standarddress code. For them, how you use your time and how you dressand adorn yourself are intensely personal aspects of life; they wouldnot compromise on those matters simply to get a job. Many spokeof wanting to be able to “bring themselves to work”—their realidentities and selves—rather than have to create a separate, instru-mental self to function in the workplace. This was nothing new—72 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

creative people from artists to professors and even scientists in cor-
porate R&D labs have always demanded ﬂexibility of this sort. Butnow it had become part and parcel of all creative work.
Flexibility means more than the freedom to show up at the oﬃce
at 10:00
AMwearing a nose ring. Creative people want the freedom
and ﬂexibility to pursue side projects and outside interests—someof which are directly related to their work, others perhaps less so,like being a musician or artist or being involved in community af-fairs. Regardless of whether they are directly work related, creativepeople see such activities as a necessary means for cultivating theircreativity. In a detailed ethnographic study of high-tech designﬁrms in Chicago, the sociologist Richard Lloyd quoted one personas saying: “The place where I’d want to work would support mycreative endeavors and the kinds of creative things that I did on theside, and would recognize the fact that if I was continually buildingmy skills with my own stuﬀ, it would also beneﬁt the company.”
9
Another key aspect of ﬂexibility is having input into the design
of your workspace—and your role in the organization. Scientistshave always controlled their work environments, setting up theirown labs and designing their own experiments. The people in myfocus groups and interviews wanted the same kind of freedom. Inher research on high-tech start-up ﬁrms, Laurie Levesque foundthat this process of role making is highly valued by creative em-ployees and their employers alike. Levesque studied eight ﬁrms indepth, interviewing both top executives and employees on theirroles in the organization.
10The most salient attributes, cited as de-
sirable by both executives and workers, were “flexibility,” meaningadapting to different responsibilities, and “defining one’s ownrole” in the organization. Many of the employers said a key criterion
for hiring an individual was that person’s penchant for “wearingmany hats.” This was important because employers were too busyto be constantly monitoring employees. The employees, meanwhile,73 THE MACHINE SHOP AND THE HAIR SALON

thrived on “ambiguity” and the ability to “create” their own role in
the enterprise, which they deﬁned as being able to take on tasks
and ﬁgure out what they needed to accomplish on their own. Asone high-tech worker told Levesque: “My role is unclear, and that’show I like it.” Much of this looseness is a function of size. Small,emergent companies have less structure or hierarchy by their na-ture. People can make it up as they go along. But as a companygrows, division of labor develops and people get pigeonholed inparticular roles: structure emerges inexorably.
Peer Recognition
Peer recognition has always been a strong motivator for thinkersand scientists. The sociologist Robert Merton pointed to its impor-tance in the work life of scientists a long time ago, whom he foundto be motivated more by reputation than by money.
11Building on
Merton’s idea, the economists Partha Dasgupta and Paul David ar-gued that peer recognition is the primary force in the “new eco-nomics of science” because it motivates scientists to be lauded asthe ﬁrst to discover something new.
12The economist Scott Stern
has calculated that academic scientists actually “pay” to engage inscience, sacriﬁcing roughly 25 percent of their potential private-sector earnings in order to pursue self-deﬁned projects at prestigiousuniversities.
13
In one sense, these scientists are the polar opposite of the chief
technology oﬃcer I interviewed, who had abandoned academia be-cause he wanted his work to have a commercial impact. But in an-other sense, they are the same. Both chose jobs that let them dowhat they want to do. Neither was motivated primarily by moneyor security, whether in the form of academic tenure or a fat corpo-rate pension plan.
Peer recognition and reputation provide powerful sources of mo-
tivation for open-source software developers, who have evolved a74 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

complex, self-organizing, self-governing system of peer review that
works much like that in academic science.14Most are paid nothing
for the time they devote to such work. They post their contributionsfor free so that their peers will recognize them as competent andsuccessful developers.
The intrinsic nature of my work is what keeps me at my keyboard
for hours, hardly noticing that it’s long past bedtime and hardlycaring that I’ve missed the chance to go to a party or have someother kind of fun. The work itself is the reward. The psychologistMihaly Csikszentmihalyi dubs this feeling a state of “ﬂow”
15that
is both productive and rewarding. Can this kind of passion for workand ﬂow come dangerously close to workaholism? Of course it can.But for me and many others, it is far better than work that has youcounting the minutes until it’s time to stop.
Location and Community
For a long time, people have been arguing—wrongly, I believe—that globalization and technology are rendering community andlocation obsolete and irrelevant. Showing the limits of that kind ofthinking and the ongoing role of place, community, and locationin the economy and in our lives has been a key focus of my researchover the past several decades. Virtually all of the creative workersI talked to when I was ﬁrst writing this book, those I have inter-viewed since, and my empirical studies underline the fact that lo-cation and community are more important than ever. My interviewsubjects continually recounted their desire and need to live in places
that oﬀer stimulating, creative environments. Many would not evenconsider taking jobs in certain cities or regions—a stark contrastto the Organizational Age, when people gladly let ﬁrms shuttlethem from one backwater to another as part of the price of climb-ing the corporate ladder. Some told me they used location as theirprimary criterion in a proactive sense: they picked the place they75 THE MACHINE SHOP AND THE HAIR SALON

wanted to live and then focused their job search there. Many sub-
sequent studies have noted this tendency as well.
Almost one in five of the workers in the 2000 and 2001 Infor-
mationWeek surveys reported that the geographic location of their
workplace (18.7 percent) and the amount of time they had to com-mute to get there (18.8 percent) had been important factors intheir choice of jobs—more important than the potential for pro-motion, bonus opportunities, financial stability, company prestige,stock options, on-site child care, telecommuting, and the abilityto work from home. Research proves that long commutes are trulymisery inducing. When the behavioral economist and Nobel lau-reate Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger asked900 women to rate their favorite activities, commuting came indead last.
16
People not only want to live near their workplace; they want to
likeliving there. In the original edition of this book, I noted that
picking a location simply for economic reasons can and often doesbackﬁre. My focus groups and interviews provided many examplesof people who moved strictly for a job and later quit in quest of alocation that was a better ﬁt for their lifestyle. Back then I oftenheard from former students who were looking to leave the high-paying consulting jobs they’d landed for improved quality of life.Economic conditions have become even more unequal since thecrash of 2008, making location more important still, both for accessto jobs and quality of life.
Numerous Creative Class people I interviewed noted their desire
to become actively engaged in the places they live—to contributeto their communities and to have some latitude in their jobs to doso. Of course, executives have long been enlisted to lead charitablecampaigns or to serve on the boards of nonproﬁt institutions. ButCreative Class people don’t just dutifully add their names to blue-ribbon committees; they seek direct involvement on their own76 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

terms, in part because it is an expression of who they are, of their
essential creative identity—a point I will return to later in this book.
The idea that young creatives might care as much about where
they live as who they work for seemed a bit strange to some readersa decade ago. But more and more—and not just in the UnitedStates, but around the world—it has become the norm, so muchso that I now teach a graduate course at the Rotman School ofManagement in which I challenge my students to develop loca-tional strategies for selecting and being involved in their commu-nities. The key point is that people use these extracurricularactivities as a way of cultivating their interests, values, and iden-tities, both in the workplace and in society more generally. In myview, they reﬂect a broader process of self-actualization and an at-tempt to use work as a platform for pushing forward an overallcreative identity.
Money and More
Compensation, of course, still matters, and compensation involvesmore than base pay. The decade before this book was ﬁrst published,the 1990s, saw a rapid run-up in the use of alternative forms ofcompensation, such as stock options and bonuses. Workers, it wasunderstood, were trading job stability and security for bigger pay-days. Although the kinds of outsized bonuses that executives in theﬁnancial industry paid themselves have fallen into justiﬁable dis-repute, many commentators still believe that bonuses can providean eﬀective means of aligning company and individual interests.
So how do workers value these various forms of compensation?
The 2000 and 2001 InformationWeek survey data oﬀered a number
of insights. Job stability was more highly valued than any form ofdirect compensation. More than 40 percent of workers chose it asa key factor. Base pay was slightly less important, with 38.5 percent77 THE MACHINE SHOP AND THE HAIR SALON

saying it was a key factor. Vacation and time oﬀ ranked next highest,
chosen by slightly more than one-third. Beneﬁts (such as medicalinsurance and pension plans) mattered almost as much as vacationtime. Surprisingly enough, bonuses were not critical. At the timethe InformationWeek surveys were conducted, the American Com-
pensation Association reported that 83 percent of companies oﬀered bonuses to upper management, 80 percent to middle man-agement, and 74 percent to technical staﬀ. Despite (or perhaps be-cause of) their extensive use, bonuses rated twentieth of thirty-eightfactors in the surveys, with just 18 percent of workers identifyingthem as important. They ranked lower than location, commutingdistance, casual attire, and job atmosphere.
Long oﬀered to top management, stock options became popular
for other employees as well during the tech boom, because they al-legedly enabled employees to share in company growth. Stock op-tions are said to serve three interrelated functions: to lure top jobcandidates, to provide additional incentives for senior management,and to act as “golden handcuﬀs” to keep key people on the job untilthey become fully vested. Yet for all that, stock options ranked thir-tieth in the InformationWeek surveys, with less than 10 percent of
workers rating them as important.
Not surprisingly, job stability and security have increased in im-
portance since the onset of the economic crisis. I’ll have more tosay about the crisis in a moment, but ﬁrst, let’s take a look at howpay and compensation interact with other factors to shape overalljob satisfaction. Back in 2000 and 2001, more than half of all ITworkers were satisﬁed with their compensation and nearly two-thirds were satisﬁed with their jobs overall. Roughly nine in ten ofthose who were satisﬁed with their compensation were also satisﬁedwith their jobs.
But that only tells part of the story. The most satisﬁed workers
were also the ones who made the most money; overall job satisfac-78 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

tion climbed in tandem with compensation. Perhaps the best-paid
workers felt they could “aﬀord” to focus on the other intrinsic as-pects of their work. Or perhaps those workers had been performingbetter than their peers for a long time and so earned raises, man-agement approval, and greater control over their jobs.
For whatever reasons, dissatisﬁed workers rate pay as one of the
principal factors of their dissatisfaction. Furthermore, people look-ing for new jobs are frequently seeking higher pay. More than three-fourths of the IT workers who were looking for work in 2000 and2001 said “higher compensation” was the main reason, followedby dissatisfaction with management (42.4 percent), the desire for“more interesting work” (39.5 percent), and “more responsibility”(31.1 percent). Job stability (18.5 percent), stock options (13.4 per-cent), and the chance to join a start-up company (2.9 percent) wereamong the lowest-rated answers. Pay clearly has much more to dowith job dissatisfaction than satisfaction.
So what can we say about the almighty dollar? Creative people
want challenging work and the ability to do their jobs flexibly,and, as with anyone else, those who receive low pay are morelikely to be unhappy. But though money is important, it is notall-important. According to a series of surveys that Gallup con-
ducted over the past decade and incorporated into its Wellbeing
17
books and programs, two factors—employee engagement andgood, ethical management—are the real keys to job satisfaction.The more engaged employees are in their work, the more satisfiedthey are. On the flip side, nothing contributes to employee dis-satisfaction more than meddling, incompetent management.
Herding Squirrels
Unlike the traditional Working Class, Creative Class workers expectto be treated as distinct individuals. But working from the raw data79 THE MACHINE SHOP AND THE HAIR SALON

in the InformationWeek salary surveys, Stolarick and I were able
to sort the respondents into six broad preference groups. (Our per-
centages add up to more than 100, as many people fell into morethan one category, and people in every group desired challenge intheir work.)
• About one-third of the IT workforce sample (34.5 percent) val-
ued ﬂexibility over other factors. Important job factors for these
people included a ﬂexible work schedule and the ability to workfrom home when they like.
• Another one-third (34 percent) were compensation driven, fa-
voring base pay, beneﬁts, and vacation time.
• One in ﬁve were technologists, motivated principally by the
opportunity to work with leading-edge technology and highlytalented peers.
• Roughly 15 percent were professionals, desiring skill develop-
ment, eﬀective supervision, and recognition for work well done.
• Company men and women (14 percent) tended to align their
interests with the overall success of the company.
• About one in ten (11 percent) were entrepreneurs who pre-
ferred to work in start-up companies and rated stock optionsas important.
Employers seeking to align such workers’ needs with their own
requirements must consider two additional points. The ﬁrst is that
while motivations have always varied, these variations can no longerbe ignored. The nature of both the work and the workers haschanged. Second, employees’ preferences are frequently mixed andsubject to change over time. For a long stretch of his life, our ex-Harvard Seattle software CTO believed that academic researchsuited him. But then he began to feel he had been there, done that,so he moved on to fulﬁll another yearning. Most creative workers80 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

are already on the upper rungs of the ladder of Abraham Maslow’s
classic hierarchy of needs, in which physiological and social needshave been largely met and intrinsic rewards, such as a sense of ac-complishment, are sought. Having satisﬁed their basic needs forsafety and security, they can and do move laterally, trying out ﬁrstone form of esteem and self-actualization and then another.
Coping with the Crisis
So how have things changed a decade later—especially in the wakeof the devastating economic and jobs crisis? Many commentatorshave noted that workers have become more hunkered down andfearful, more oriented to the basics. They’ve let go of their dreamsof challenge and ﬂexibility and are happy to have a job, any job, solong as it pays. At best, that’s only partly true. Yes, the economiccrisis has made people more cautious. But the biggest trade-oﬀsthey’re making are not in the realm of pay but in job security. Andthat is not so much of a diﬀerence after all. Recall that we foundthat “job stability was more highly valued than any form of directcompensation.” When we analyzed the 2000–2001 InformationWeek surveys, “More than 40 percent of workers chose it as a key
factor.” It has become even more highly valued since.
Looking at the published results of InformationWeek’s 2010 Salary
Survey for Insurance IT Professionals (a much narrower samplethan those we worked with in 2000 and 2001), a few trends popout. Crisis or not, two-thirds overall and nearly three-fourths (72percent) of managers said they were “satisﬁed” or “very satisﬁed”with their jobs. Although the crisis clearly had a big impact on theirthinking at ﬁrst, their attitudes were beginning to rebound by 2010.
Base pay shot up in importance at the outset of the crisis—56
percent of IT managers cited it as mattering most to their job in81 THE MACHINE SHOP AND THE HAIR SALON

2008, besting “challenge of job/responsibility” (52 percent); only
one-third (33 percent) cited “my opinion and knowledge are val-ued” as their most important consideration. But by 2010, that hadturned around with less than one-half (47 percent) citing base pay,compared to more than one-half (51 percent) citing “challenge ofjob/responsibility,” and 50 percent citing “my opinion and knowl-edge are valued.” “Job/Company stability” also became more im-portant, understandably, rising from one-third in 2008 (33 percent)to 50 percent in 2010.
But the very same job dimensions that I described as important
in 2000–2001 rebounded between 2008 and 2010. “Recognition forjob well done” rose from a low of 25 percent in 2008 to 35 percentin 2010. “Job atmosphere” rose from 25 percent in 2008 to 30 per-cent in 2010. “Working with highly talented peers” climbed from18 percent in 2008 to 27 percent in 2010. “Corporate culture andvalues” rose from 27 percent in 2008 to 33 percent in 2010.
IT workers in the 2010 salary survey felt much more secure than
other workers. A large majority felt their jobs were at least some-what secure, and most felt their jobs were much more secure thanother workers’, so much so that more than one-third of both man-agers and staﬀ were actively looking for better work prospects. Paywas clearly important (66 percent of staﬀ and 58 percent of man-agement cited “higher compensation” as key reasons), but manywere looking for “more interesting work” (55 percent of staﬀ and47 percent of management), “seeking more personal fulfillment”(49 percent of management and 40 percent of staﬀ), “didn’t like
the present company’s management/culture” (41 percent of staﬀand 43 percent of management), or wanted more responsibility (35percent of staﬀ, 40 percent of management). Only 6 percent of staﬀand 13 percent of managers cited stock options as a reason for look-ing for a new job.
Just one in ten (11 percent) cited the geographic location of the
job as something that mattered most in 2008, but that rebounded82 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

to nearly one in ﬁve (18 percent) in 2010. Commuting distance
sank to 11 percent in 2008 but rebounded to 19 percent in 2010.Job atmosphere fell to 25 percent in 2008 but rebounded to 30 per-cent in 2010.
18
In his book The Fourth Great Awakening, Robert Fogel notes that
in the advanced industrial nations, growing segments of the pop-ulation work for challenge or enjoyment, to do good, to make acontribution, and to learn.
19Such motivations, he suggests, will
eventually eclipse compensation as the most important motivatorsfor work. Within the Creative Class, this has already happened—and high unemployment and economic insecurity have not reversedthe trend.83 THE MACHINE SHOP AND THE HAIR SALON

CHAPTER 5
Brave New Workplace
Hayes Clement did not seem like the type of person who
would someday be stuﬃng and delivering gift baskets for a
living. Born into an upper-middle-class family in suburban
Atlanta, he grew up tall and athletic, with razor-sharp intelligenceand Brooks Brothers good looks. After earning his undergraduatedegree at Duke University and an MBA at the University of Vir-ginia’s Darden School, he was aggressively recruited and took aprime oﬀer from PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York City. Hissigniﬁcant other from Darden had also landed a job in New Yorkwith the pharmaceutical ﬁrm Pﬁzer, so they made the move to-gether. For about ten years, life in most respects was beautiful. With
two healthy salaries, the pair was able to move from a cozy butcramped apartment in Greenwich Village to a large, stylishly redoneplace on a much-sought-after block. Clement was on the glamourside of PWC—consulting, not accounting—and he worked in aglamour division as well, media and entertainment. His job oﬀeredplenty of variety and challenge, and he was good at it. But he cameto see consulting as a treadmill: the constant new assignments, theunrelenting travel, the lurching from project to project, never seeingthe end result of his labors. He wanted to build something.
84

Along came the perfect opportunity. One of his clients was a
high-tech start-up called MediaSite that had developed a technology
for searching video and still images—a revolutionary and much-needed development that an MIT survey had lauded as one of thetop-ten emerging technologies that would change the world. MediaSite was not just an R&D project masquerading as a company:it had a real market, real customers, and a bright, energetic staﬀ.In early 2000, at the peak of the New Economy boom, Clement leftPWC to become MediaSite’s vice president of business develop-ment. The ﬁrm was in Pittsburgh, but that was only four hundredmiles from New York; he would commute between his work lifeand his social circle. The pay was much less than at PWC, but therewere stock options, and the real upside was the chance to be partof a long-running success story.
Clement’s honeymoon didn’t last for long. A new CEO was
brought in from Silicon Valley to ready the ﬁrm for an IPO. As theNASDAQ began to track downward, things got frantic, and man-agement, in Clement’s view, lost focus. Changes of direction becameso frequent that he stopped asking himself, “Do we have an exe-cutable strategy?” and began asking, “Do we have a strategy?” Oneday, barely six months into the job, Clement walked into the CEO’soﬃce and said: “I don’t want to be here. You don’t want me to behere. So let’s make it easy and get an amicable divorce.”
Back in New York, Clement received frequent calls from head-
hunters. But why rush the next step? He was about to turn fortyand, thinking back, he realized he’d never taken more than a weekor so oﬀ at a time. His partner—the only member of their old DardenSchool gang who’d stayed with the same ﬁrm since graduation—was by now a senior executive at Pﬁzer; money was not an issue.So Clement decided to just hang for a while, do some reading, andcatch up with friends. One of those friends had a small gift-basketcompany. As the weeks passed and holiday orders began to stream85 BRAVE NEW WORKPLACE

in, the man asked Clement if he might enjoy a little workplace slum-
ming, taking orders and getting the baskets out. Clement said,“What the heck, I’ll do it.”
He found he enjoyed coming to work. The people were friendly;
the place had energy; it seemed to ﬁt. Before long, Clement was hav-ing ideas on how to grow the business: they could cultivate elite cor-porate accounts; they could put gourmet foods and digital goodiesinto fancy containers like leather-bound chests; they could expandinto markets outside New York City. He had the contacts from hisconsulting days, he had the skills, and better yet, for the ﬁrst timein years, he was having fun. Clement invested in the business, threwhimself into the work, and gradually the ﬁrm took oﬀ.
1A happy
ending? No, more like a happy restart. Clement has since moved onto other ventures. As I was revising this book, in fact, in the summerof 2011, he was making a name for himself in local politics, runningfor mayor of Kingston, New York! Clement’s story illustrates how
people have been charting new paths for themselves in the CreativeEconomy—and sometimes reinventing themselves altogether.
As the tech bubble swelled and burst more than a decade ago,
the stereotype of the New Economy career path went somethinglike this: someone leaves a boring, humdrum job at a big companyfor a high-tech start-up because it’s exciting and cool and free-ﬂoatingand promises instant wealth. Then the start-up folds and the chas-tened Icarus slinks back to the traditional job market, looking fora job with more security. But Clement had already been in a “cool,”exciting industry. What he wanted—and what I consistently ﬁndthat most people want—was to exercise his creativity in buildingsomething, to experience the whole cycle of having ideas, puttingthem into action, and seeing them bear fruit.
MediaSite hadn’t come close to folding: in fact, it was acquired
by a successful, publicly traded company in late 2001—some ofClement’s ex-colleagues did in fact cash in. What bugged him,86 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

and what drove him to leave, was the chaos and confusion—it
wasn’t shaping up as a place where he could enjoy that wholecycle of creativity. Once Clement recognized this, he didn’t say,“I’ll give it two more years,” or even one. He left and he found anenvironment where he could be himself and feel at home and dowhat he really wanted to do. But even then, after he had scratchedthat itch for a while, other opportunities beckoned and he movedon again.
Both time and the economic crisis have provided perspective
from which to view the kinds of work and the kinds of jobs thatarose with the Creative Class and the Creative Economy morethan a decade ago. Looking back, I was perhaps too optimisticabout the potential for worker mobility, flexibility, and freedom.I have tried to temper that view in this revision. That said, themain facets of Creative Class work remain pretty much as theywere then. But the level of uncertainty and risk that goes alongwith them—especially in the form of unportable benefits—is un-acceptable. A new social compact is required, one I will detail inthe next chapter.
More than two decades ago, in our book The Breakthrough Illu-
sion, Martin Kenney and I were already pointing to what we dubbed
the “hypermobility” of labor in high-tech clusters like Silicon Valleyand Boston’s Route 128 area, where workers changed jobs with as-tonishing frequency.
2Soon that would become the norm across
the whole economy. In 2001, when I wrote the original edition ofthis book, Americans were changing jobs every 3.5 years; workersin their twenties were doing so on average every 1.1 years. One-fourth of workers in the 2000–2001 InformationWeek salary surveys
said that they had been in their current job for two years or lessand expected to change jobs within a year.
Economic mobility took a big hit with the economic crisis, with
rates of residential mobility hitting record lows, according to US87 BRAVE NEW WORKPLACE

Census data. The housing crisis exacerbated this, trapping many
people in homes whose mortgages were underwater or for which
buyers simply couldn’t be found because of the glut on the market.By 2010, Americans’ rate of job changing had slowed to a median
tenure of 4.4 years, almost a year more than in 2001 but still wellshort of a gold watch. Interestingly enough but perhaps not sur-
prisingly, professional, technology-oriented, and creative workerswere now staying in their jobs the longest—perhaps because oftheir skills and relative job security—with a median tenure of 5.2years, compared to 3.1 years for service workers and just 2.3 yearsfor food service workers.
3As Chapter 3 has shown, creative workers
were spared the worst of the crisis, with unemployment rates less
than half those of blue-collar workers. But by 2010, according tomany sources, some high-ﬂying Silicon Valley companies were re-suming their war for talent, oﬀering bonuses to attract new workersand retain existing talent. The churn—at least at the higher levelsof the high-tech world—was beginning again.
The shift is epoch making. Under the old industrial or Fordist
order, companies provided their employees not just with economicsecurity but with social identities as well. And this was backed upwith the New Deal social compact among capital, labor, and gov-ernment. Many towns—even big cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh—were literally company towns, with just a few big corporationsproviding most of the employment, and a whole social and eco-nomic infrastructure. You were a company man, identifying withthe company and often moving largely in the circles created or dic-tated by it. Since the rise of the Creative Economy, Creative Classworkers have increasingly assumed the risks that companies andthe government, to a certain extent, used to absorb. This down-loading of risk is onerous enough for well-paid creative workers;it has been even more problematic for Working Class and ServiceClass workers who make a fraction of Creative Class salaries, whose88 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

jobs are at substantial risk, and who have many fewer options for
re employment when they are laid oﬀ.
Free-Agent Nation or the End of the Job?
As with many issues, the debate over the new labor market oftentends to polarize into two extreme camps. On one side are thoseutopian optimists who behold a free-agent paradise, a way to cutloose from the corporate system for a more lucrative independentexistence. On the other side are pessimists, who believe the changein the market is just another sign of growing corporate oppression,social fragmentation, and the end of work. As far back as 1994, acover story in Fortune proclaimed “The End of the Job.”
4In 1999,
Alan Burton-Jones predicted that in two generations people wouldbe asking their grandparents, “What was it like being employed?”
5
Although both sides in this debate make some valid points, theyoverstate their cases and miss the deeper and more fundamentalfactors that are reshaping the world of work.
Daniel Pink is among the most astute observers of the new world
of work.
6He introduced the concept of free-agent liberation in his
2001 book, Free Agent Nation, in which he identiﬁed a revolutionary
new class of workers that he claimed was already 33 million strong.“One-fourth of the American workforce,” he wrote, “has declaredits independence from traditional work.” The real numbers, how-ever, did not add up so neatly. Back in 2001, in the original editionof this book, I noted that the Bureau of Labor statistics placed thenumber of self-employed people at 12.9 million, roughly one-thirdof Pink’s estimate. According to InformationWeek’s 2000–2001 salary
survey, just 1.1 percent of IT workers considered themselves to be“freelance or self-employed” (another 2.3 percent considered them-selves “contract workers”), while an overwhelming 95 percent of89 BRAVE NEW WORKPLACE

IT workers classiﬁed themselves as full-time employees. The ma-
jority of them worked for big companies—more than one-half forcompanies with more than 1,000 employees, and more than one-fourth for companies with more than 10,000 employees. I concludedthen that most creative workers are notfree agents. No matter how
their respective human resources departments might have classiﬁedthem, they worked for companies or institutions and their funda-mental condition was that of employees.
But that was then. The trend has accelerated over the ensuing de-
cade, especially in the wake of the 2008 crisis, as companies haveshifted more and more to temps and contingent workers to bolstertheir bottom lines—improving their proﬁts and worsening theprospects for permanent or at least stable employment, especiallyfor older workers. Writing in The Atlantic online on September 1,
2011, Sara Horowitz, the founder of the Freelancers Union, dubbedthe “freelance surge” the “Industrial Revolution of our time.” Likemost revolutions, she wrote, it has brought a plethora of both goodthings and bad.
We haven’t seen a shift in the workforce this signiﬁcant in almost 100 years
when we transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Now,employees are leaving the traditional workplace and opting to piece togethera professional life on their own. As of 2005, one-third of our workforceparticipated in this “freelance economy.” Data show that number has onlyincreased over the past six years. Entrepreneurial activity in 2009 was at itshighest level in 14 years, online freelance job postings skyrocketed in 2010,and companies are increasingly outsourcing work. While the economy hasunwillingly pushed some people into independent work, many have chosenit because of greater ﬂexibility that lets them skip the dreary oﬃce environ-ment and focus on more personally fulﬁlling projects.
7
But for those who work this way, conditions can be trying and
at times no less disheartening than the prospect from cubicle-land.90 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

The rosy view is that free agents work from the comfort of their
homes, perhaps commuting virtually and doing only the kinds ofwork that interest them, picking the hours and conditions theywant. In reality, freelancing carries considerable risks. The kindsof work you want might not be widely available, especially in a deeprecession, and the assignments may not always pay well. Assumingyou’re in demand, you have a choice: be selective about what youdo and settle for less money; or do a lot of things you don’t reallylike, much as employees often have to do, and make more. Onething you haven’t escaped is competition—if you turn down anonerous rush job because you’ve got a nice weekend planned, theclient will call another freelancer deemed more “responsive” andperhaps they’ll stick with that person in the future. Moreover, onceyou are on a project, guess what? You have to meet deadlines. Youhave to please the people in charge. You have to make it to meetings.You might work late into the night, doing it not your way but theclient’s way. As one commentator aptly put it, “It takes more than
a home oﬃce and temporary badge to build a workers’ paradise.”
8
And then there are the issues raised by working at home—the pres-sures it puts on family life, the complications that ensue for childcare and gender roles.
9
About a million and a half young, educated workers are experi-
encing a new kind of contingent employment—one for which theyreceive little or no compensation. Ross Perlin’s book Intern Nation:
How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economydescribes how companies big and little save billions in labor costsby luring ambitious young college graduates to toil for them forfree in the hope of learning a profession—or getting an inside trackto a real job.
10
New ways of working have been underpinned with a new kind
of employment contract. The old contract was group orientedand emphasized job security. The new one is tailored to the needsand desires of the individual. The old Organizational Age system91 BRAVE NEW WORKPLACE

was truly a package deal, literally a comprehensive social contract,
in which people traded their working lives for money, security, andthe sense of identity that came from belonging to the ﬁrm. Theytook their places in the hierarchy, followed bureaucratic rules, andworked their way up the ladder. In the words of William Whyte,an “ultimate harmony” developed between the managerial classand the large companies it worked for, allowing its members togive themselves over more completely to the organization.
11The
new employment contract turns this on its head. Instead of a broadsocial contract, a key feature of today’s employment relationshipis that employees are seeking out and getting what Carnegie Mellonprofessor Denise Rousseau dubbed more individualized, or “idio-syncratic deals.”
12
Of course idiosyncratic individualism and ﬂexibility has its down-
sides and costs. Back in 2001, a detailed study of new media pro-fessionals by Rosemary Batt and Susan Christopherson of CornellUniversity and two colleagues found a huge gap between the ben-eﬁts received by full-time workers and free agents.
13Whereas
roughly three-fourths of full-time employees enjoyed comprehen-sive health insurance (itself an alarmingly low rate), only 11 percentof free agents received health coverage from their primary employ-ers or clients, and just one-fourth received any sort of beneﬁts atall. Even with new federal health care legislation under Obama, thesituation ten years later has, for the most part, gotten even worse.
The free-agent world would be unthinkable without big compa-
nies. Even when creative workers are not employed full-time andwork on a project basis, it’s still mainly companies one way or an-other that dictate the terms of work available to free agents—manyof whom survive by latching onto one or a handful of big clientsthat can provide them with a steady ﬂow of well-paid work. It’shard to make a living catching nickel-and-dime projects from allover. And though companies may think this is a good deal, theydon’t always come out ahead themselves. As Stanford management92 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

expert Jeﬀrey Pfeﬀer has found, when companies rely heavily on
freelance and contract workers, they implicitly accept high turnover,huge training costs, considerable productivity losses, and signiﬁcantleakage of intellectual property. In some cases they virtually handover key knowledge and ideas to competitors through turnoverand defection.
14
Such sweeping changes in the nature of work and jobs have in-
spired more than one jeremiad over the years. For Stanley Aro no -witz and Jeremy Rifkin, the combination of advanced technologyand globalization has systematically eliminated the prospect of se-cure, meaningful work for most of us, including creatives, takinga toll on social cohesion.
15Corporate downsizing, they contend,
has essentially turned high-paying “primary” sector jobs into lower-paying and less secure work in the “secondary” labor market, al-lowing companies to use people as needed and then spit them out.
The oﬃce has been transformed into a white-collar sweatshop,
16
others contend. Oﬃce workers put in longer hours, bring more oftheir work home, and suﬀer from mounting economic insecurityand stress. A new style of management uses layoﬀs and downsizingto instill fear in the white-collar world, squeezing the pay and ben-eﬁts of those who still have full-time jobs and imposing ever-largerworkloads on them. There’s no denying that some white-collarworkers have been permanently marginalized; many do toil underDickensian circumstances. But as brutal as the economy has beenand as devastating as some of its structural changes have been forwhole classes of mostly blue-collar workers, most people todayknow intuitively that they enjoy better working conditions thantheir parents did, not to mention their grandparents, who mighthave endured long days of backbreaking, dangerous labor in thegrisliest of factories.
The sociologist Richard Sennett warns that the dissolution of
long-term attachments to large corporations leads to a corrosionof character and ultimately to the breakdown of society.
17This view,93 BRAVE NEW WORKPLACE

I confess, leaves me reeling. In a day and age when we ﬁnally accept
that children can ﬂourish in nontraditional families, are we reallysupposed to believe that long-term employment in a large organi-zation is a necessary condition for the psychological stability ofgrown-ups? Long-term jobs and reasonably stable careers withﬁrms are relatively recent phenomena, associated with the IndustrialRevolution and the rise of modern unions and management. Beforethat, people established well-deﬁned identities through their oc-cupations and their families—as farmers, craftsmen, blacksmiths,and midwives; as children, siblings, parents, spouses, friends, andcitizens. This is exactly the situation to which many are revertingtoday: ﬁnding their identities elsewhere than in a ﬁrm. I personallythink it is healthier and more ﬁtting for us to attach our strongestallegiances to our families and friends, our communities, and thethings that truly interest and matter to us. Our own personal devel-opment is much more important than whatever company we hap-pen to be working for.
Where the New Work Comes From
Gideon Kunda, Stephen Barley, and James Evans, leading ethno-graphers of the workplace, exhaustively studied engineers and otherIT professionals who left jobs with established companies to go outon their own.
18Their paper, titled “Why Do Contractors Contract?”
tested a series of hypotheses regarding the shift in the way peoplework. First oﬀ, they looked at the theory of the contingent work-force. At its most extreme, this is the company-as-oppressor view,the one that says that people turn to freelance work only after bigcorporations throw them out. Then they tested the counterclaimsassociated with the free-agent perspective. “Advocates of freeagency,” they wrote, “promote a post-industrial vision of economic94 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

individualism in which entrepreneurial workers regain independence
and recapture a portion of the surplus value that employers formerlyappropriated for themselves.” What they found is similar to whatI have reported.
The “company-as-oppressor” view, Kunda, Barley, and Evans
concluded, is dead wrong. The reasons most people struck out ontheir own had little to do with being thrown out of work. They didit to take control. Their decisions were in many respects liberating;certainly, they felt liberated from the constant fear of being thrownout. The study identiﬁed three major types of complaints that pre-cipitated workers’ leaving. Many were sick and tired of oﬃce pol-itics. “You have to listen to a lot of people’s agendas,” noted oneengineer in the study, “spend time in a lot of unnecessary meetings,trying to keep everybody happy, trying to play their game. It’s notstrictly work-related, it’s very unproductive, and it can be verytense.” Others left due to the Dilbert syndrome—the perceptionthat higher-ups were incompetent or worse. “I was at the naval ship-yard for a couple of years, and they were going nowhere,” anotherengineer related. “I theoretically reported to the chief ﬁnancialoﬃcer and they brought in a couple, how do we say, ‘yo-yos.’ Wecaught one of the CFOs funneling stuﬀ into his condo in Florida.”
Still others left because of a sense of inequity. Skilled creative work-
ers get upset when they perceive that merit is not the coin of therealm or that things are done for the wrong reasons. “I was gettingthe project done not for the goals of the project but for the goalsof the people above,” noted one participant in the study. And again,while striking out on your own does not guarantee complete free-dom, at least you become the person setting the goals and decidinghow to play the cards. As one software developer put it, “I don’twork for free anymore.” Or as another high-tech worker posted onFast Company’s website in 2001: “Just after my daughter was born,I decided that I wanted to be home for dinner on more than just95 BRAVE NEW WORKPLACE

weekends. I wanted to be a Dad, not a wallet. I wanted my daughter
to know who I am, not just what I was able to provide for her.”
People I interviewed and encountered in focus groups cited the
same kinds of things. They got fed up with the politics and bureau-cracy of corporate life, or if they’d worked in smaller, entrepre-neurial companies, of the stress of management-by-chaos. Theytold me they left their jobs because of the inconsistent, incompetent,petty tyrannies that they labored under, because of a daily deathby 1,000 cuts and the constant fear of being ﬁred. And though noperson can achieve total control, many chose this route to takemore control in the areas that mattered the most to them.
Although these changes may appear at first to be the product
of worker choices, at a deeper level they are inevitable concomi-tants of profound, structural changes in the workplace. As Barleyobserved in his 1996 study, The New World of Work, the economy
is moving toward “a more horizontal division of labor.”
19In the
old days, bosses were people who knew their business better thantheir subordinates did, so both the typical organizational structureand the typical career path were vertical. As you stuck aroundand learned more about the business, you moved up. But withgrowing specialization today, this no longer holds: “Those in au-thority,” Barley writes, “no longer comprehend the work of theirsubordinates.” Even the eminent research scientist can’t boss thelab technicians around: they have knowledge and skills that hedoesn’t. Thus, what we used to think of as jobs or occupations,Barley argues, devolve into “clusters of domain-specific knowl-edge.” These clusters must interact on an equal footing for thingsto go well in any organization. This is why the vertical hierarchyand traditional career ladder have been replaced by sideways ca-reer moves between companies and a horizontal labor market.What conservatives criticize as self-indulgence and liberals deploreas the consequence of new tactics of corporate oppression is in96 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

fact the result of the rational evolution of economic forces. Work-
ers not only identify more with their occupations or professionsthan with a company, focus groups and interviews show that theyincreasingly define themselves by both the creative content oftheir work and by their lifestyle interests: biker, climber, musician.
The Unraveling of the Social Contract
If the changing labor market is a product of evolutionary forces, thereis no denying that shrinking corporate loyalty to workers and the de-mise of the old social contract have exacerbated things. For compa-nies, it’s become more eﬃcient to be able to exercise greater ﬂexibilityin staﬃng decisions. Some companies have reduced costs by termi-nating employees and then promptly hiring them back as indepen-dent contractors. The company no longer has to provide beneﬁts,and it doesn’t have to promise continued employment once a projectis done. Workers are responding in kind. As Joanne Ciulla writes,
The downsizings of the 1990s were a wake-up call. The social compact—
You do your job well and you stay employed—is dead, at least for the timebeing. Jobs were destroyed and lives were ruined, but one message camethrough loud and clear: Employment insecurity is the new way of life, evenduring times of low unemployment. Many workers have begun to rethinktheir commitment to employers, because their employers have changedtheir commitment to them. The extra sacriﬁce of missed family birthdaysbecause of long hours at the oﬃce no longer makes sense, and maybe neverdid. As the old saying goes, people on their deathbeds never wish they hadspent more time at the oﬃce.
20
Or as Stanford’s Pfeﬀer likes to say: Loyalty isn’t dead. Companies
have driven it away.97 BRAVE NEW WORKPLACE

If the social contract was already fraying back in the 1990s, the
crisis of 2008 annihilated what little was left. Individual workers
have assumed most risks, corporate and government shock absorbershave been removed, and workers today bear more responsibility—perhaps I should say all responsibility—for their careers and lives.We not only take on all the risks of our job moves, we assume thetask of taking care of our creativity—of investing in it, supportingit, and nurturing it. Creative workers invest tremendous amountsof time and money on their educations. They go through basic port-of-entry education, education for a career-track change, and on-going learning and upgrading of skills. People in my interviewsand focus groups report that they, not their employers, are respon-sible for keeping their skills up to date. This is particularly true forworkers in rapidly changing high-technology ﬁelds. According tothat study of new media professionals by Batt and Christopherson,workers in New York City spent an average of 13.5 unpaid hoursper week obtaining new skills,
21one-third of a forty-hour workweek.
The report concludes that skill acquisition has become an individualresponsibility, “both because the interactive nature of computertools allows new media workers to learn new skills at their own paceand within their own learning styles and because formal learningprograms have not kept pace with skill needs in this fast-changingindustry.” Moreover, in the new labor market it no longer pays forcompanies to invest signiﬁcantly in developing their people’s skillsand capabilities when they frequently leave for better opportunitiesand greater challenge. Just 30 percent of 262 network professionalsin a Lucent Technologies survey of job satisfaction said that theircompany’s formal training programs met their needs, even thoughnearly three-fourths (73 percent) said their careers required themto learn and grow.
22
Perhaps the biggest change is that people now expect to manage
their working lives in these ways, as impossible as it might be to do98 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

so. For her investigative book Bait and Switch, Barbara Ehrenreich
joined the ranks of laid-oﬀ white-collar workers . She noted how
our system encouraged them—the people who “did everything
right,” earning higher degrees, deferring gratiﬁcation, working longhours at jobs that bored them—to blame themselves for their dis-appointments and traumas, marshaling battalions of outplacement
counselors and career coaches to teach them how to adopt a more
winning attitude.
23
Increasingly, workers have come to accept that they are com-
pletely on their own—that the traditional sources of security andentitlement no longer exist, or even matter. This is a sea change,and in many ways, a disquieting one, with implications that go wellbeyond the workplace. The three downsized executives whose sto-ries are told in the 2010 Ben Aﬄeck movie The Company Men all
internalized their anger and frustration. This is a sad commentaryon how thoroughly we have capitulated to these new conditions—conditions that in themselves militate against the kind of solidaritythat once animated the labor movement. Freelancers have diﬃcultyﬁnding each other, working alone as they mostly do. And they areconditioned to think of each other as competitors rather than col-leagues. More and more, we simply accept our lot as the way thingsare and go about our busy lives.99 BRAVE NEW WORKPLACE

CHAPTER 6
No-Collar
One spring day back in 2000, I was running late for a meet-
ing and called ahead to say so. The meeting was with a se-
curities lawyer and an accountant, so I asked the woman
who answered the phone if I should take a few extra minutes tochange from my usual jeans, black T-shirt, and boots into moreprofessional attire. “That’s unnecessary here,” she said, “just come asyou are.” My heart sank as I parked my car and approached thegrand stone building, a stunning exemplar of nineteenth-centurycorporate elegance in the heart of Pittsburgh’s downtown businessdistrict. I walked sheepishly through the door, absolutely certain Iwas underdressed. To my surprise, the people I saw inside weredressed more casually than I was, in khakis and polo shirts, withsneakers and even sandals on their feet. Some of them were carryinggym bags. Was I in the wrong place, maybe a high-tech company,or the lobby of a new clothing store? No, the receptionist assuredme. I was where I was supposed to be—at the oldest and most pres-tigious corporate law ﬁrm in town.
The environments in which we work are changing, and it isn’t
just the clothes. Many features of the workplace seem to be moreopen and user friendly: open-oﬃce layouts and other new oﬃce
100

designs, ﬂexible schedules, new work rules and management meth-
ods. Trends can be time-bound, of course, but the emergence ofthis new kind of workspace is no passing phase: it is an evolutionaryadaptation to the changing nature of creative work, and its stayingpower is a tribute to its greater eﬃciencies. In the original editionof this book, I dubbed those changes the “no-collar workplace.” AsI argued then, it was no coincidence that their rise was concurrentwith the rise of the Internet and dot-com businesses. The no-collarworkplace integrates elements of the ﬂexible, open, interactivemodel of the scientist’s lab or artist’s studio into the machine modelof the factory or the traditional corporate oﬃce. It did not erupton the scene overnight: many of its features had been evolving fordecades and are continuing to do so. Some of the changes thatseemed startling and even revolutionary as recently as a decade agoare so ensconced today that there’s little more to say about them ex-cept to underline the fact that they are part and parcel of the emerg-ing Creative Economy. The original edition also included an entirechapter about the unique challenges of managing creativity—andabout the underside of this brave new workplace, in which workersinternalized an insidious set of norms I dubbed “soft control.” Icombine those two chapters here.
New Codes
When I wrote the original edition of this book, few workplace trendswere drawing more attention than the loosening of dress codes.Roughly one-fourth of information-technology workers in the2000–2001 edition of the InformationWeek salary survey reported
that the ability to wear “casual attire” was among the things thatmattered most to them on their jobs. I told the story of my visit tothe Seattle branch of Barney’s, a high-end clothing store. The store101 NO-COLLAR

was jammed with young professionals sipping mineral water and
chilled white wine as they browsed the racks. The manager was awoman in her thirties, dressed in black, who had worked at thestore since its inception. Over the last few years, she told me, shehad noticed a signiﬁcant change in the buying patterns of Seattle’sCreative Class—particularly those who worked at Microsoft, longa haven for nerds. Sales of traditional suits had declined every yearsince the store opened, and sales of classic geek wear such as khakis,crewnecks, and blue blazers had declined as well. But the store wasdoing well with New York–style fashion wear: black pants, HelmutLang T-shirts, Prada outerwear and shoes, leather jackets, and fash-ionable carry-all bags. Noting the preference for Prada and othercutting-edge designers among some Microsoft executives, a Sep-tember 2000 story in the Wall Street Journal had dubbed the new
look “geek chic.”
1A decade later, the tech geek look has given way
to the even more artsy hipster look—sneakers, hoodies, skinnyjeans, and V-neck tees.
For decades before oﬃce dress codes changed, dress outside the
oﬃce had been becoming more and more casual. In the early de-cades of the twentieth century, men wore suits and ties to baseballgames, and women wore long dresses and fancy hats to picnics. Bythe mid-1960s, around the same time that dress gloves ceased tobe de rigueur for ladies and men stopped wearing hats, the suitcame to be thought of as primarily a business uniform, with lessand less utility outside the oﬃce. Casual dress crept into oﬃcesduring the 1980s, partly for the simple reason that it’s more com-fortable, but also because creative work came to be more highlyvalued. Loosened dress codes aren’t just about the way peoplelook—they signal an acceptance of diﬀerence and diversity in theworkplace, which is squarely in line with the desire to work ﬂexiblyand express one’s identity. Status no longer accrues from being anoﬃcer, or, at the lower ranks, a good soldier. It accrues from being102 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

a member of the creative elite—and creative people don’t wear uni-
forms. They dress to express themselves, as artists do; they dresssimply and practically as professors and scientists do, so they canfocus on the serious creative work at hand. They dress as they please.
When they were ﬁrst instituted, the new dress codes drew a storm
of reaction and criticism from more established quarters. During thelate 1990s, the Wall Street Journal ran numerous stories on women
who dressed in clothes perceived to be “too risqué” for the oﬃce.
2
USA Today criticized casual dress as a recipe for slacking, deploring
“the casualization of America.”3I experienced some of this back-
and-forth myself. Back in the 1980s, when I was ﬁrst starting out, I wore business suits and ties to meetings and speeches. But when Istarted to give talks about the subject of this book in the late 1990sand early 2000s, some requested that I wear casual clothes to reinforcemy message, while others—sometimes at the same organizations—leaned the other way. In winter 2001, a ﬂurry of e-mails came acrossmy desktop from the organizers of an event, asking about my dressas well as the contents of my speech. Some thought I should wear asuit and tie and not mention “controversial” subjects like gays. Oneof the principals responded to his worried corporate partners: “Ispoke with Dr. Florida and he assured me that there is no cause forconcern. He will be giving his talk completely in ebonics, wearing apink tutu, with a large sombrero. At the conclusion, he will stompon a light bulb inside a white napkin. His only request is that every-thing in the ballroom be situated properly for positive feng shui.”
4
Nothing like that has happened for a long time—though not too
long ago, when I was speaking in the Middle East, I was asked notto talk about my ﬁndings regarding tolerance toward gays. I didnot restrict my remarks, but that’s another story.
The Creative Economy doesn’t have one monolithic dress code;
it has a diversity of them. This was brought home to me one day in2000 when I looked around at the participants in a meeting room103 NO-COLLAR

at a large Washington, DC, law ﬁrm. One person was wearing a
business suit; another had on a blazer and khakis. A young womanin a short skirt and funky blouse sported a tongue ring. The talk atthat moment had in fact turned to dress codes, and when someonepointed out the range of attire in the room, it suddenly dawned onus that up to that point we’d hardly even noticed it. Just telling thatstory dates me—the change is that complete.
Working Flexibly . . . and Longer
Oﬃce workers not only dress diﬀerently than they did just a decadeor so ago, they have a diﬀerent attitude toward the clock. Instead offollowing the Organizational Age core menu of Monday throughFriday, nine to ﬁve, growing numbers of workers in all industriesare now able to vary both the hours and the days they work. In theoriginal edition, I cited 1997 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) ﬁguresthat showed that more than 25 million workers—27.6 percent of allfull-time wage and salary workers—had varied their schedules tosome degree, either formally or through informal arrangementswith their employers.
5More than two-thirds (68 percent) of work-
ers were able to periodically change their starting and quitting times,
according to a survey by the Families and Work Institute; more thanhalf (55 percent) occasionally worked at home. By May 2004, thishad grown to 36.4 million workers, about 30 percent of the totalworkforce. Flexible work schedules were much more likely to befound among Creative Class workers. In 2004, the BLS reportedthat more than 50 percent of all computer scientists and mathemati-cians; 49.7 percent of life, physical, and social scientists; 46.7 percentof managers; 44.5 percent of architects and engineers; and 41.9 per-cent of arts, design media, and entertainment workers had ﬂexibleschedules, compared to just 13.8 percent of production workers.
6104 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

The ﬂexible schedule is partly a response to the realities of our
lives today—in households with two working parents, for instance,
someone might have to bail out early to see the children home fromschool. But it is also tied to the very nature of creative work. A lotof creative work is project work, and projects tend to run in cycles,with periods of crunch time followed by slower periods. Creativework requires enormous concentration; it also requires periods ofdowntime, even during the day. Many people tell me they like towork hard through lunch hour, then take a long run or bicycle ridein the afternoon to recharge themselves for the remaining part oftheir workday, which might extend well into the evening, amount-ing to almost a “second workday.” Also, creative thinking is hardto turn on and oﬀ at will. It is an odd sort of activity: one often ﬁndsoneself percolating an idea, or hammering away desperately insearch of a solution to a problem, only to see the answer begin click-ing into place at unusual times.
Flexibility does not mean the end of long hours—not by any
means. The long trajectory of modern capitalism has involved therelentless extension of the working day across time and space—ﬁrst through electricity and the electric light and now via the per-sonal computer, the mobile phone, and the Internet. According toBLS estimates, professional, technical, and managerial workerswere the most likely to put in long workweeks of more than forty-nine hours
7—and Creative Class people tend to put in the longest
hours of all.
New Work/Space
Oﬃces look diﬀerent than they did not so long ago, and not justbecause most of the workers are dressed in shirtsleeves and slacks.Newly built or renovated oﬃces often feature exposed pipes and105 NO-COLLAR

unﬁnished-looking walls and ﬂoors; instead of acres of cubicles,
there are more common spaces. As Ben Watson, the executive cre-ative director of the oﬃce furniture giant Herman Miller told AlisonArieﬀ in 2011: “Ten years ago, 80 to 90 percent of an organization’sbudget would be spent on individual workspaces. Now, it’s 65 to70 percent and is scaling down to 50 percent real fast. . . . Today,70 percent of work in North America happens with two or morepeople. It’s no longer about the individual worker. So we need tounderstand the way collaborative work happens, we need to createmicroenvironments—a mix of them, in fact, so you want to be atyour oﬃce more than you want to be at home or at Starbucks.”
8
Silicon Valley’s style of free-spirited, laid-back, blurred-boundaries,
around-the-clock work is reﬂected in its campus-like workplaces.When Google opened its New York oﬃce in Chelsea in 2006 theNew York Times took note of the culture clash:
The campus-like workspace is antithetical to the oﬃce culture of most New
York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich,young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan. TheNew York tradition of leaving the oﬃce to network over lunch or an eveningcocktail party has no place at Google, where employees are encouraged tosocialize among themselves. There are groups of Gayglers, Newglers andBikeglers (who bike to work together) . . . For a Thank God It’s Almost Fri-day gathering on Dec. 14, Laura Garrett, a sales operations specialist, or-ganized an art show. “Being a Googler and being part of Chelsea, I wantedto do something that was more downtownish than a typical Google event,”said Ms. Garrett, a blonde wearing Marc Jacobs heels. Williamsburg artistscreated the work on display, for prices from $225 to $8,000 . . . The EmpireState Building glowed red and green in the background as if color-coordinatedto the Googleplex’s interiors rather than Christmas. By 6:30
P.M., Steve Sa-
viano, 22, a software engineer, was hanging out with his fellow Googlers ata table littered with empty beer and wine bottles. “This is academic life all106 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

over again,” Mr. Saviano said. “But I’m getting paid. This is a 100 percent
better option than graduate school.”9
Scanning the photos that went with the story, I was struck by the
similarity between Google’s and other no-collar workplaces and
college dorm rooms, or for that matter, the play spaces of privilegedteenagers. You can’t pump work out of creative people, assembly-line style. Motivating this kind of mental work requires a new kindof workplace—one that at the very least appears to be nurturing,attuned to individuality, and “fun.”
The traditional vertical corporation, with its top-down hierarchy,
was based on a factory model of information ﬂow and work ﬂow.There were bosses who required separate areas for privileged com-munication, and workers who followed routines and were putinto standardized spaces to discourage deviation. Bosses and sub-ordinates alike were literally required to think inside the box. The
Creative Economy is premised on the rapid generation and trans-
mission of ideas across the enterprise. This world of tight deadlines,uncertainty, and discovery—of knowledge creation, teamwork, andbuilding oﬀ each other’s ideas—requires the interactive spaceheretofore found only in the design studio or scientiﬁc lab.
Although there are inﬁnite variations on the theme, creative work
spaces generally come in two major types, each with its own ways ofdelivering symbolic and functional value. In the suburbs and sprawl-ing high-tech oﬃce parks of places like Silicon Valley and NorthCarolina’s Research Triangle, one typically ﬁnds new architecture.Big ﬁrms that require a lot of space—electronics design-and-assemblyﬁrms, for instance—often build expansive campuses in such locales.Exteriors may feature bold or unusual design elements. Inside thenewer suburban buildings, open arrangements for high trafficflow are mostly the rule. Occasional design touches that disrupt
the slick newness of the interiors (such as ragged surfaces or exposed107 NO-COLLAR

infrastructure) help take the edge oﬀ the sterility of new space, mak-
ing it feel livable. Overall, the suburban campus may have virtuallyeverything a worker would want or need—from espresso bars andfree food to on-site day care, state-of-the-art health facilities, out-door Frisbee ﬁelds, and concierge services. The message and func-tion are clear: no need to go wandering oﬀ; stay right here at work.
The other type is renovated space in older buildings found in
downtowns and urban neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs anticipated thistrend decades ago, when she wrote, “Old ideas can sometimes usenew buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”
10This kind of
setting is also popular with smaller companies that require lessspace and perhaps want to establish their own identities. Olderspace, of course, has some obvious practical advantages. As longas extensive renovation isn’t required, it can be had for cheap—ideal for a small ﬁrm bursting with ideas but not money. Open loftspace is ﬂexible and easy to equip. If located in a bustling urbanarea, the company can rely on the surrounding neighborhood toprovide services such as cafés, shops, and health facilities that bigsuburban companies provide on their campuses (a point I will re-turn to later).
Form Follows Function
Thomas Allen of MIT is an expert on the organization of innova-tion. In a ten-year study of engineers in R&D labs, he found thatproximity matters: people interact most with those located closeto them; people seated more than seventy-ﬁve feet apart rarely in-teract at all.
11In the 1990s, I worked with Steelcase, which had been
a leading maker of the much-maligned cubicles of the corporateage. Familiar with Allen’s work and other studies, Steelcase wantednew designs to help its clients take advantage of proximity withoutsacriﬁcing privacy. One result was the new line of work modules108 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

called “Personal Harbors,” private work spaces mounted on wheels
that could be rolled into groups around common areas as needed,to facilitate collaborative work, then rolled apart as people neededto work alone.
12
In a thoughtful New Yorker essay, Malcolm Gladwell connected
the layout of the new open-plan workspace to the urban-vitalitytheories of Jane Jacobs—and to the rise of the Creative Class. Inthe 1960s, Jacobs had been vehemently opposed to urban renewalschemes that destroyed the organic nature of neighborhoods, re-placing their bustling sidewalk life and diverse traﬃc ﬂows with aplanned order that deadened creative interaction. While city plan-ners largely ignored her, Gladwell suggests that her ideas informedthe basic principles of the new oﬃce design. “Who, after all, has adirect interest in creating diverse, vital spaces that foster creativityand empathy? Employers do. Oﬃces need the sort of social milieuthat Jane Jacobs found on the sidewalks of the West Village,” hewrote. And the new work space, like Jacobs’s West Village, stimu-lates creative interaction by being conducive to “the casual, non-threatening encounter.”
When employees sit chained to their desks, quietly and industriously going
about their business, an oﬃce is not functioning as it should. That’s becauseinnovation . . . is fundamentally social. Ideas arise as much out of casualconversations as they do out of formal meetings. More precisely, as onestudy after another has demonstrated, the best ideas in any workplace ariseout of casual contacts among diﬀerent groups within the same company.
Ideal interactions occur among people whose roles are diﬀerent
enough to give them diﬀerent perspectives, but who have enough
common knowledge and common interest to know what would bemutually useful. Old-style workspaces don’t foster such serendip-itous sharing. They are like the suburbs, where functions and peopleare sequestered and important people occupy exclusive enclaves109 NO-COLLAR

similar to gated communities. These workspaces are often found
in high-rise towers, where, as Gladwell noted:
The center part of every ﬂoor is given over to the guts of the building: ele-
vators, bathrooms, electrical and plumbing systems. Around the core arecubicles and interior oﬃces, for support staﬀ and lower management. Andaround the edges of the ﬂoor, against the windows, are rows of oﬃces forsenior staﬀ. . . . The best research about oﬃce communication tells us thatthere is almost no worse way to lay out an oﬃce. The executive in one corneroﬃce will seldom bump into any other. . . . To maximize the amount ofcontact among employees, you really ought to put the most valuable staﬀmembers in the center of the room, where the highest number of peoplecan be within their orbit. Or, even better, put all places where people tendto congregate—the public areas—in the center. . . . Is it any wonder thatcreative ﬁrms often prefer loft-style buildings, which have usable centers?
13
The no-collar workplace is the newest stage in the ongoing evo-
lution toward more eﬃcient ways of harnessing ideas and creativity.
It aims to accomplish what John Seely Brown, the former directorof Xerox PARC, called “the ability to leverage the community mind”by providing the physical and social context required for creativity.
14
Artists have long worked in open studio environments but theytended to work alone. Architects and designers extended the studioenvironment to creative group work, with open-plan oﬃces to en-courage collaboration, peer review, and feedback. Andy Warhol’soriginal Factory was a raw, open space, entirely covered in silver foil,including the exposed pipes, to provide a space age look. Filling itout was a mélange of equipment for silk-screening, ﬁlmmaking,and other art forms—and a constant parade of friends and associ-ates trooping in and out at all hours. Floating through it all wasWarhol himself, the archetypal creative director: sometimes cod-dling or nudging, sometimes merely observing or recording whatwas going on, sometimes retreating into his own work.110 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Laboratories were also developed on the open-plan model, where
scientists could come and go as they pleased, engaging their stu-
dents and colleagues, where work could be done on a collaborativebasis and ideas could ﬂow. Even the large megacorporations ofthe mid-1900s created special places for the scientists and engineerswho provided them with valuable innovations. R&D laboratorieswere often sited at college-like campuses that were far removedfrom the factory or the downtown headquarters, both to encourageﬂexibility and openness and to ensure that the eccentric ways ofscientists and engineers would not infect the executives and man-agers or, worse, be seen by customers. A casual dress code was ac-cepted at the R&D labs, too. Yet even there, bureaucracy andmicromanagement often crept in. In The Organization Man, asearlier noted, Whyte noted that the truly creative R&D lab was anexception that proved a rule:
In the great slough of mediocrity that is most corporation research, what
two laboratories are conspicuous exceptions in the rate of discovery? Theyare General Electric’s research department and Bell Labs: exactly the twolaboratories most famous for their encouragement of individualism—themost tolerant of individual diﬀerences, the most patient with oﬀ-tangentideas, the least given to the immediate, closely supervised team project. Byall accounts, the scientists in them get along quite well, but they do notmake a business of it, and neither do the people who run the labs. They carenot a whit if scientists’ eyes fail to grow moist at company anthems; it isenough that the scientists do superbly well what they want to do, for thoughthe consequences of proﬁt for The Organization are secondary to the sci-entist, eventually there are these consequences, and as long as the interestsof the group and the individual touch at this vital point, such questions asbelongingness are irrelevant.
15
What motivated corporate leaders to create such labs in the ﬁrst
place? Simply put, they wanted to attract top scientiﬁc talent away111 NO-COLLAR

from leading academic centers. To get such people, they had to es-
tablish environments and procedures similar to those in academicsettings—allowing scientists to pursue their own lines of interest,to host visitors in their labs, and freely publish their research in sci-entiﬁc journals.
16It was the culture of these R&D centers, born at
laboratories like GE, Bell, and many others, that later companieslike Fairchild Semiconductor, Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard,and even Apple and Microsoft, sought to emulate and build upon.Gradually, their norms and practices began to seep into the tech-nical divisions of other large companies. Before long they wouldpenetrate larger and larger segments of the economy.
These practices oﬀered one great eﬃciency to ﬁrms—and one
incredible advantage to capitalism—which ultimately assured theirfurther diﬀusion. They enabled ﬁrms and the economy as a wholeto capture the creative talents of people who would have been con-sidered oddballs, eccentrics, or worse during the high period of theOrganizational Age. In the emerging Creative Age, these peopleare no longer hidden away—they’re actively recruited and proudlydisplayed. In a study that explored the sociology of new media en-terprises, the sociologist Richard Lloyd quoted the founder of aChicago high-tech ﬁrm, “Lots of people who fell between the cracksin another generation and who were more marginalized are [now]highly employable and catered to by businesses that tend to be ﬂex-ible with their lifestyles and lifecycles.”
17
Soft Control
When the ﬁrst edition of this book was published, sociologists, culturecritics, and management gurus couldn’t decide whether the big prob-lem with the workplace was that it was becoming too stressful or toocomfortable. Some maintained that our oﬃces were high-tech sweat-112 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

shops, presided over by corporate Simon Legrees. Others, like the so-
ciologist Arlie Russell Hochschild,18took the opposite stance, arguing
that if anything, management coddles us; our oﬃces have become socomfortable that we retreat to them to avoid the demands of privatelife. Both arguments presented an exaggerated, caricatured point ofview, but they each captured a part of the truth: that in the quest toelicit creativity, the typical workplace tends to become both morestressful and more caring. The result could be called a “caring sweat-
shop,” but as oxymoronic as it sounds, there’s not really any contra-diction. It’s just the reality of a workplace in the Creative Economy.
Stress increases because the Creative Economy is predicated on
change and speed. If a firm is to survive, it must always top whatit did yesterday. Employees must be constantly coming up withnew ideas; perpetually devising faster, cheaper, and better waysto do things—and that’s brutally stressful. Back in 1999, morethan four in ten American workers described themselves asworkaholics in a Gallup poll.
19And yet for all that frantic dedi-
cation, fewer than half of all professionals, according to a 2001Towers Perrin study, responded that “my company inspires meto do my best work.”
20Ten years later, we still have far to go in both
the knowledge and the practice of managing creative workers.
There is a vast literature on eﬀective creative organization and
management. Although there’s an awful lot of academic jargon tocut through, most of it basically boils down to the idea that creativepeople and knowledge workers respond well to organizations thatprovide solid values, clear rules, open communication, good work-ing conditions, and fair treatment. People don’t want to be aban-doned, and they don’t want to be micromanaged. They don’t wantto take orders, but they do want direction. Creative work cannotbe regimented, like rote work in the old factory or oﬃce. Becausea lot of it goes on inside people’s heads, you literally cannot see ithappening—and you can’t Taylorize what you can’t see.113 NO-COLLAR

Peter Drucker famously said that knowledge workers do not re-
spond to ﬁnancial incentives, orders, or negative sanctions the way
blue-collar workers are expected to. I particularly like his obser-vation that the key to motivating creative people is to treat themas “de facto volunteers,” tied to the ﬁrm by a commitment to itsaims and purposes, and often expecting to participate in its ad-ministration and its governance. “Volunteers,” he wrote, “have toget more satisfaction from their work than paid employees preciselybecause they do not get a paycheck.”
21The commitments of creative
people are also highly contingent, and their motivation comeslargely from within.
But volunteerism isn’t an entirely apt analogy for the no-collar
workplace. Although it appeals to employees’ intrinsic motivations,it runs on very subtle models of control. Rather than boss or bribeus, it basically seduces us to work harder—and we are putty in man-agement’s hands when it comes to the so-called challenge of thejob and respect of our peers, as we saw in Chapter 4. As Business-
Week bluntly put it, “The smartest companies know this. Instead
of ensnaring employees with more signing bonuses and hugesalaries, they are trying to hook them emotionally.”
22It’s an insid-
ious internalization of work norms I call “soft control.”
The practices and structures of creativity would eventually have
permeated corporate life on their own, but the meteoric rise of theso-called New Economy of the late 1990s and early 2000 acceler-ated their diffusion. Like the early days of Silicon Valley beforeit, the New Economy unleashed a powerful cultural force for busi-ness change, but in an even more pervasive way. The New Economy
uprooted the age-old distinction between appropriate businessnorms and alternative culture. In those heady days, joining a newdot-com became a form of self-expression and self-actualization.Many companies actively embraced this by wedding their com-mercial zeal to a mission to transform business culture.
23A clear114 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

distinction was drawn between the outmoded, staid, and constrict-
ing practices of the “old” economy and the open, progressive, lib-erating practice of the “new.”
As the culture critic Andrew Ross noted at the time, “A lot of
these companies presented themselves as alternatives to corporateAmerica and took on all things bohemian.” In propagating themyth of the New Economy as social force, this period raised people’sexpectations about what they wanted in a company and a job,which, as Ross put it, “meant that a lot of activism, or socially pro-ductive work that they otherwise might have done, was redirectedinto a kind of infatuation with changing the shape of corporateAmerica. That could only have happened, of course, because of theparticularly bohemian cast—the sort of counterculture cast—ofthe companies that recruited these employees, for better or worse.”
24
A lot of it was worse, in my view—amounting to little more than
a well-choreographed charade. Many companies merely presenteda cheap facade of the alternative—a ping-pong table, perhaps anespresso machine. And many otherwise sensible people boughtinto it because they were starved for something diﬀerent. It wasn’tabout the money after all. As countless people in my focus groupsand interviews told me, they wanted to be a part of a diﬀerent, moreinclusive, more progressive culture. Most of them, however, werequickly disappointed. A great migration turned into a great exodus,captured in this telling epitaph: “I’d rather work at Starbucks.”
25
In summer 2000, I was invited to address the top management
of a major regional bank on how to attract and retain creative andtalented workers. We selected an edgy high-tech company as thevenue for our workshop and invited two of its top executives tojoin in the discussion. The bank managers wanted to know whatcreative people care about and seemed particularly interested inyounger employees. They asked questions about the role of dresscodes, work-space design, perks, compensation, location, and the115 NO-COLLAR

like. It was very clear to me that they were genuinely concerned
with managing and motivating their employees—if truth be told,with treating them like human beings.
As we got further into it, the two high-tech executives began to
chime in with their views, which essentially amounted to “man-agement by stress”—working people as long and as hard as theycould stand it. It was painfully apparent that they didn’t have thefoggiest idea about how to treat, never mind motivate, creativepeople, let alone build an eﬀective and enduring organizationalculture. As the end of the workshop drew near and the clock edgedtoward 6:00
PM, the high-tech pair, seemingly unaware of the time,
began an extended harangue. As the rest of us sat uncomfortablyin our seats, one of the bank managers interrupted: “At our com-pany,” he said, “we respect the ﬂexibility and the right of our peopleto go home, if need be, to their spouses, signiﬁcant others and fam-ilies, so I think we should draw this meeting to a close.”
Too many of these sorts of companies became not workplace
utopias but what Stanford management expert Jeﬀrey Pfeﬀer hasaptly dubbed the “toxic workplace.” The toxic workplace operateson the principle that “we own you.” Or as Pfeﬀer puts it: “We’re goingto put you in a situation where you have to work in a style and ona pace that is not sustainable. We want you to come in here andburn yourself out—and then you can leave.”
26
The NASDAQ crash and 9/11 were wake-up calls, as I pointed
out in the original edition of this book. No longer so beguiled bythe myth of striking it big, people became much savvier about thekinds of places where they really wanted to work—companies thatcombined the flexibility and openness of the no-collar workplacewith job stability, that had reasonable expectations about working
hours, and that oﬀered talented peers and responsible management.The real legacy of the rise and fall of the New Economy is that itbrought people back down to earth, recalibrating their expectations116 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

about their jobs. For this alone, it was an invaluable collective learn-
ing experience.
And then the economic crisis of 2008 hammered it home. The old
order really has entered a terminal crisis; the new order has yet tofully emerge. Still, the management of many if not most big com-panies only partially gets it. In 2011, the Harvard Business School’sTeresa Amabile and the independent researcher Steven Kramernoted that nearly one-third of American workers are unhappy andunmotivated in their jobs, and no wonder. “When we asked 669managers from companies around the world to rank ﬁve employeemotivators in terms of importance,” they wrote, “they ranked ‘sup-porting progress’ dead last. Fully 95 percent of these managers failedto recognize that progress in meaningful work is the primary mo-tivator, well ahead of traditional incentives like raises and bonuses.”
27
Managing Creativity at SAS
The software giant SAS Institute has enjoyed substantial revenuegrowth every year since its founding in 1976. Its employee turnoverrate is less than 5 percent (compared to an industry average of 20percent), and it has scored in the top twenty of Fortune’s “BestCompanies to Work For” lists every year since they’ve been pub-lished. SAS’s Fortune 500 customers are happy, too—they renewtheir subscriptions to its products at an astounding 98 percent rate.What are the keys to its success?
In 2005, I had the privilege of collaborating with SAS’s cofounder
and CEO Jim Goodnight on a study of the social and managementcontexts in which SAS has most eﬀectively nurtured, harnessed,and mobilized creativity. We summarized our ﬁndings in an articleentitled “Managing for Creativity,” which was published in theJuly–August 2005 issue of the Harvard Business Review.117 NO-COLLAR

Through trial and error, as well as organic evolution, SAS has
learned how to tap the creative energies of all of its stakeholders—
customers, software developers, managers, and support staﬀ alike.
Beyond that, it has developed a unique framework for managingcreativity that rests on three guiding principles: 1) help employeesdo their best work by keeping them intellectually engaged and byremoving distractions and impediments to their productivity; 2)make managers responsible for sparking creativity, not enforcingrules; and 3) engage the customers as creative partners to be surethat the product always meets their needs.
A management framework like SAS’s produces a corporate
ecosystem in which creativity and productivity ﬂourish, where prof-itability and ﬂexibility go hand in hand, and where hard work andwork-life balance aren’t mutually exclusive.
Help Workers Be Great
SAS operates on the belief that invigorating mental work leads tosuperior performance and, ultimately, to better products. Itdoesn’t bribe workers with stock options; it has never oﬀered them.At SAS, the most ﬁtting thanks for a job well done is an even morechallenging project. SAS sends its developers to industry and tech-nology conferences, where they can hone their skills and build re-lationships within the larger software community, and it encouragesemployees to publish papers and books.
SAS provides services and amenities like on-site day care and
medical facilities; a pool, ﬁtness room, and basketball courts; sub-sidized meals; haircuts; dry cleaning; and more. Flexible workdayguidelines encourage people to strike a balance between work andfamily; the company takes its thirty-ﬁve-hour workweek seriously(and knows that employees will put in extra time when it’s required).Creative people can be trusted to manage their own workloads;118 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

their inner drive to achieve, not to mention accountability among
their colleagues and peers, compels a high level of productivity.Employees who don’t perform are swiftly winnowed. “Hire hard,manage open, ﬁre hard,” are SAS’s watchwords.
We’re All Creatives
Everyone at SAS is a creative, suits and workers alike. All of SAS’smanagers roll up their shirtsleeves from time to time, including itsCEO, who still sometimes writes code. The willingness—even eagerness—of managers to delve into the “real” work of the orga-nization sends an important message: we are all on the same team,working toward the same goal, the creation of a superior product.An egalitarian culture fosters mutual respect—and encouragesopenness and constructive criticism in both directions. Experimen-tation necessarily involves failures and dead ends; SAS’s manage-ment recognizes that safety and stasis don’t lead to new insightsand encourages its employees to take risks. Fully 26 percent of itsbudget is dedicated to R&D (more than twice the norm for a high-tech company).
Focus on Customers and End-Users
SAS aggressively solicits customer feedback—and acts on it. Ittracks complaints and makes sure they are addressed in productrevisions; it treats its users’ conferences as occasions to elicit crit-icism and ideas from its customers rather than simply to marketto them. SAS resolves more than three-fourths of its customers’problems within twenty-four hours; the wait time on its tech sup-port lines averages thirty-four seconds. Most important of all, thecompany strives to release bug-free products. Testing teams runthrough a product from a developer’s standpoint, a salesperson’s119 NO-COLLAR

standpoint, and a customer’s standpoint. Any glitches and it goes
back to the drawing board.
The key elements of the SAS approach to managing creativity
include:
• leveraging the intrinsic motivation of creative workers by stim-
ulating their minds and minimizing their hassles;
• minimizing the barriers between managers and workers by en-
suring that managers are creatives, too;
• tapping into the creative talents of customers as well as workers;
and
• nurturing long-term relationships with users and employees alike.
As SAS has learned, a company’s most important asset isn’t raw
materials, real estate, machinery, transportation systems, or politicalinﬂuence. It is its creative capital—its arsenal of creative thinkerswhose ideas can be turned into valuable products and services. Suc-cessful companies recognize that their most valuable assets walkout the door every evening; they dedicate their best eﬀorts to en-suring that they come back and give their very best every morning.
Although creative people take their jobs less for granted today
than they did in ﬂusher times, they still want to work for companieslike SAS that value them, provide them with challenging yet stablework environments, nurture and support their creativity, and allowthem to realize their full potential. They desire ﬂexibility on matterssuch as hours, dress, and personal work habits. They seek a work-place that incorporates both the freedom and ﬂexibility of a smallerstart-up and the stability and direction of a larger ﬁrm. But the tra-jectory is not backward to the boredom and drudgery of a tradi-tional corporate bureaucracy.
Even the most conservative companies are adopting aspects of the
no-collar workplace in order to recruit and retain the best employees.120 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

And when they start down this road, there’s no turning back—
improvements in workplace conditions tend to be sticky; once in-stituted, they are not easily reversed or rescinded. Companies ofall types are converging on a new style of managing creative work.If we ﬁnd this new style more suited to our needs than the old, somuch the better.121 NO-COLLAR

PART THREE
LIFE

CHAPTER 7
Time Warp
If the very word “time” elicits a tight, edgy feeling in your chest
and makes your temples throb, you are not alone. Growing num-
bers of Americans feel increasingly pressed for time. Creative
Class people do tend to work long hours, but the biggest news abouttime goes deeper than how long our workdays are. The key changeis that our use of time has intensiﬁed. We now try to pack everymoment full of activities and experiences—at work, at home, andat leisure. In the process, the ways in which we think about time aswell as use it are being warped into new conﬁgurations.
This intensiﬁcation of the experience of time began with the ad-
vent of the clock, which created a more ﬁnely divided day, changingthe nature of work and subsequently the rest of life, as the Britishhistorian E.P. Thompson has noted.
1In agricultural societies, people
lived and worked by the sun and the seasons. With the IndustrialRevolution, distinct compartments of work time and oﬀ time wereformally demarcated. In the second half of the nineteenth century,new technologies like Edison’s incandescent bulb facilitated theextension of the workday. Then at the turn of the twentieth century,Frederick Taylor’s scientiﬁc management timed each movementin the performance of tasks, extending the division of labor into
125

the division of time itself. The Organizational Age led to a further
ordering and intensiﬁcation of time and also helped promote theidea that a steady chronological climb up the corporate and statusladders was the normal life course. Today our sense of time is chang-ing again, and the story is more insidious than you might think.
It is not so much that we suﬀer from overwork, but rather from
a severe shortage of time. Between 1965 and 1995, researchers JohnRobinson and Geoﬀrey Godbey tracked detailed time diaries ofthousands of Americans for the Americans’ Use of Time Projectand reported the results in their book Time for Life. Their main
conclusion: Americans suﬀer from a “time famine.” “Time has be-come the most precious commodity,” they wrote, “and the ultimatescarcity for millions of Americans.”
2Their research found an across-
the-board increase in people saying they felt “hurried” or “rushed”in their daily activities. The number reporting they “always feelrushed” increased from 24 percent of working-age (eighteen tosixty-four years old) respondents in 1965 to 38 percent by 1992.
3
High levels of time-related stress were most prevalent among thecollege educated and aﬄuent. As Robert Putnam noted in the book’sforeword, “The most worrisome social trend in America over thelast several decades has been the widening gap in wealth and incomebetween the social classes. Robinson and Godbey report a less no-ticed counterpart trend: less well-educated Americans appear tobe enjoying more free time, whereas their college-educated counter -parts, for the most part, are not. Paradoxically, as the authors putit, the ‘working class’ is spending fewer hours at work, while theerstwhile ‘leisure class’ has less leisure.”
4
A 2010 Gallup survey found that roughly one-third of Americans
suﬀered from high levels of time-related stress. Most stressed wereparents with young children and working women; people withhigher levels of skills and income tended to suﬀer the most.
5Paul
Romer makes the intriguing argument that even when we are not126 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

actually pressed for time, we may perceive that we are because our
time is worth more than it used to be. In advanced nations, Romerexplains, the long-term trend is for average real income to increase.There are ﬂuctuations, to be sure—real wages may stagnate or fallat times for various sectors of the workforce—but overall, adjustingfor inﬂation, the dominant trend is for most of us to earn more perhour than our counterparts of previous years. This ought to makeus feel pretty good about the returns we’re getting on our time. Butour minds don’t work that way. Instead, we assign an ever-increasingcost to every minute that we spend outside work—and thus worry
constantly about the minutes slipping away. It is, says Romer, anunavoidable side eﬀect of our economy: “Our children will havemore of almost everything, with one glaring exception: They won’thave more time in the day. As income and wages increase, the costof time will continue to grow and so will the sense that time is scarceand that life proceeds at a faster pace than in the past.”
6
Technology has contributed to the time famine. The past several
decades have seen a relentless march of technologies that extendthe workday. Many observers have noted how, thanks to smartphones and laptops, our work tends to follow us wherever we are.It follows us whenever we are, too. But creative work tends to fol-
low you around regardless of technology, in the sense that it in-habits your head. At the end of each workday, there are usuallyproblems remaining to be solved or decisions waiting to be made.These things may not occupy the foreground of your time oﬀ, butthey linger in the background. If you mulled over these problemswhile riding your bike or eating dinner, would you bill the time toa client? Would you record it as work in a time diary? Creativeworkers may actually “work” more than statistics show.
This is compounded, of course, by the demands of home and
family. Households with two working parents or a working singleparent are increasingly numerous, and the absence of a support127 TIME WARP

spouse crunches time tremendously. The Americans’ Use of Time
Project found that in 1995 the average (nonemployed) housewifewas spending some forty-two hours per week on family care, house-hold chores, and commuting duties—the equivalent of a full-timejob (though this was down from ﬁfty-four hours in 1965). It alsofound that women continued to provide more than two-thirds ofall family care. When the housewife vanishes, paid caretakers suchas maids and child-care workers can pick up some but not all ofthe slack. And though the ﬂexible life of creative workers helps tocreate a demand for a 24/7 corps of service workers, it’s not a zero-sum transaction. The all-night restaurant might be wonderful forthe code writer who wants a hamburger at 3:00
AM, but it might
not be so wonderful for the waitress. She isn’t on a ﬂexible scheduleafter all, just the night shift.
To cope, many people arrive at a complex interweaving of work
and personal life: working to meet the demands of the job, certainly,but in patterns attuned to their own creative rhythms. From morn-ing to night and from workplace to home, they intersperse burstsof work with chunks of personal time for exercise, errands, social-izing, family time, or just plain downtime. The folks sitting in thecoﬀee shop with their laptops—are they working or are they social-izing? Well, both, sort of. Working now, but ready to shift quicklyinto social mode, they very much resemble the old craftsman in hisshop on the village main street—busy, but always ready to share apot of tea if somebody interesting walks in. Indeed, many peoplesee interweaving as a natural way of operating, a sort of throwbackto the cottage-industry days when life was integrated and whole.It seems a healthy reaction to the Organizational Age system, whichsplit work and life into compartments and required you to be oneperson here, another there.
Unfortunately, the ﬂexible, interwoven life can be more hectic
than idyllic. The traditional nine-to-ﬁve workday required only afew transitions of mindset and location. You show up at work and128 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

stay there, then you switch oﬀ your work brain and go home. Maybe
you run a few errands on the way. An interwoven day—with mid-day run or bike ride, late-night work, and meals and errands scat-tered across diﬀerent times and places—requires many transitions.Although some of these are easy, many are taxing. They take time.
You need to shift focus, remember where you put your papers andmaterials, be sure you’ve got everything—and be sure you’re dressedproperly. Moreover, there are times in the interwoven day whenparallel worlds collide. It can happen in the coﬀee shop or at homewith the children: you want to work, but someone is standing beforeyou demanding something else. Do you get that tight, edgy feelingin your chest? That’s the pang of the time famine.
And though your personal allocation of time may be ﬂexible,
scheduled events are not. A good bit of time stress comes from try-ing to meet someone else’s schedule: the meeting is at 4:00
PM, the
soccer game is at 6:00, the plane leaves without you if you’re noton it. I think the stress is exacerbated if, like many creative workers,you spend much of the day working at a self-dictated pace and thensuddenly have to switch to a mode dictated by the clock. This maybe the most jarring transition of all. It reﬂects, in the realm of time,the ongoing tension between creativity and organization.
Front-Loading
In many Creative Class ﬁelds, people manage their careers by“front-loading”—working excruciatingly long and hard at the outsetof their professional lives in the hope that it will pay oﬀ in greaterincome, marketability, and mobility later. Granted, young peoplehave often worked hard in the past. Young executive-track hopefulsin the Organizational Age were certainly expected to be diligent,but in those days the responsibilities and the time demands grewas they climbed the ladder. Besides, you wanted to start a family129 TIME WARP

early because it showed the company that you were a stable person
and a belonger. Today that has all been turned upside down. In-dicative of the trend, both men and women on average are gettingmarried ﬁve years later in 2010 than they were in 1970.
7In 2008,
41.4 out of 1,000 American adults had gotten married within thelast twelve months; in 2012, that number dropped to 37.4. Just 9percent of Americans age eighteen to twenty-four had a spouse in2010, about one-ﬁfth of the share for this age group in 1960, accord-ing to a December 2011 report from the Pew Research Center.
8
The growing number of women in the professions—along with
the fact that a lot of employers still don’t care to see their youngprofessional women on the mommy track—has been one factordriving the trend to front-load work and defer the rest of life, butthere are many others. In the universities, postdocs and assistantprofessors have long been notorious for working ﬁendishly at theirresearch. Often they forgo family aspirations and other nice thingsin life through their twenties because they are aiming for the tenuretrack. Academic tenure provides more than a secure lifetime posi-tion. It puts you in the ranks of the privileged. You get choice teach-ing assignments, a higher salary, a nicer oﬃce. As you build yourreputation, it becomes easier to secure research funds, to generatenovel ﬁndings, and to publish. Other universities bid for your talent.Something similar has always been the case with artists. Musicians,painters, writers, and actors may not aim for academic tenure at auniversity, but it makes a big diﬀerence if they come barreling outof their youth tagged as stars or at least comers. They still have tokeep working hard, but the returns on their early investment arehigh. Now that they have been noticed, they can get the choicecommissions, the savvy agents, the nice gigs. I would submit thata similar phenomenon is taking hold today in the private sector. Itis particularly true in the so-called up-or-out professions such aslaw or consulting, where great advantages accrue to those who130 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

make partner status, whereas those who do not are essentially out
of luck. But it is also becoming true more generally.
There are several reasons for this. Young recent graduates are
the workhorses of many sectors of the Creative Economy. Theyhave the most up-to-date skills in highly specialized ﬁelds likecomputing, consulting, or turbo-ﬁnance, and being young and un-attached, they are able to work ridiculous hours. Rather than beinggroomed slowly for advancement, they are thrown quickly to thefront lines to see what they can do. And they set to it with avengeance. They do so partly because they relish the challenge butalso because, in a ﬂuid market, this is the time to make your mark.You are hot now. If you want to be hot later—if you want to be call-ing the shots rather than waiting for calls, and have people biddingfor you rather than screening your résumé—you need to be on thestar track. If you acquire a reputation as just another hacker, youmay spend the rest of your days on the hack track.
With so many people feeling chronically pressed for time, a new
strategy of sorts has emerged: “time deepening.” Robinson andGodbey describe it this way:
Time-deepening fools people into thinking they can avoid sacriﬁcing one
activity for another. We instead seek to do it all, and see it all, and to do itand see it now. In eﬀect, time has become a commodity, and time viewedas a commodity seems to have made people’s lives shorter and less tranquil.The experience of life is increasingly catalogued in terms of a patternlesschecklist of “been there, done that.”
9
They note its four key elements:
• Speeding up of activities.
• Substituting a leisure activity that can be done more quickly for
one that takes longer, such as getting take-out or home delivery131 TIME WARP

rather than cooking, playing racquetball rather than a slower
game like tennis—or, in my case, an hour of spinning in thegym as opposed to a two- or three-hour bike ride with friends.
• Multitasking, or doing more than one thing at once: watching
TV while reading the paper, eating dinner while editing a chap-ter, tweeting while on a conference call.
• Detailed time planning and budgeting— especially for leisure or
recreational activities; compartmentalizing time so as to get ahandle on it. Astoundingly, my students are never without theirsmart phones, which parcel their days into half-hour chunks.I certainly did not need to schedule my time like that when Iwas a student. I didn’t even keep a calendar until I became anassistant professor.
Quite a trick, actually: to me, time deepening seems even more
insidious than long hours. Robinson and Godbey also see it as part
of a bigger shift from the “consumption of goods” to the “consump-tion of experiences.” This is a theme that takes us from the sphereof work to the sphere of life as a whole. In the next chapter, I de-scribe a key facet of the Creative Class lifestyle: the quest for richand multi dimensional experiences. In this classic creative view,time is truly deep not when it is rushed or crammed, but when itfully engages every faculty of one’s being in every waking moment.132 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

CHAPTER 8
The Experiential Life
At the dawn of the new millennium, on the morning of
January 1, 2000, 10 million computer users logged into the
domain DotComGuy.com and watched via webcam as a
bland-looking twenty-six-year-old former systems analyst, who’dlegally changed his name to DotComGuy, moved into a bland sub-urban house in North Dallas, Texas. There he would remain forthe rest of the year, living entirely on goods and services orderedover the Internet: groceries from Food.com, housecleaning byTheMaids.com, and more.
He was as unlikely a media sensation as could be imagined. The
secret of DotComGuy’s appeal could not have been his daily rou-tine, which often resembled that of an elderly shut-in waiting forMeals on Wheels to arrive. Nothing kinky here: no webcam sex ormoody personal revelations. He spent much of his time playingwith his dog, DotComDog, watching TV, or surﬁng the Web. Yethe drew a devoted online following for a while, including a chatroom frequented by young girls commenting on his cuteness. Newsreporters and eager visitors came to call. What made DotComGuyso fascinating was that he perfectly embodied all the myths of homo
new economicus in the Internet age. Here was the quintessential
maverick, using the Internet to turn the system on its ear. He was
133

a free agent and entrepreneur, out on his own, doing it his way. He
had lined up corporate sponsors to provide everything he neededin exchange for publicity and banner ads on his website, and notjust start-ups and gimmicks like online pizza deliverers but suchlong-established giants as UPS, Gateway, and 3Com. Rather thanholding a faceless job in corporate America, DotComGuy had thebig companies beating a path to hisdoor. Rather than traveling
for what he wanted, he had the world brought to him. He was avirtual Horatio Alger, a housebound king of inﬁnite cyberspace.When DotComGuy left his house at the end of the year, he an-nounced that he planned to marry a woman he had “met” in hiswebsite chat room.
Although some dubbed him an avatar of the Internet age, Salon
called him the “Poster Child for Internet Idiocy.”
1In either case,
his ﬁfteen minutes didn’t outlast the NASDAQ crash. Not longafter he returned to the real world, DotComGuy changed his nameback to the one his parents gave him and auctioned oﬀ his domain,which is now the trademark of a business that provides IT services.As it turned out, he wasn’t such a bellwether after all. His entre-preneurial spirit and his ﬂair for self-promotion might have antic-ipated the reality TV boom to come, but his virtual lifestyle wasnot at all what members of the Creative Class wanted. Althoughe-commerce has grown bigger than most would have imagined andsocial media like Twitter and Facebook have penetrated our livesto an extent that would have boggled even DotComGuy’s imagi-nation, the ﬂip side of these trends has been an even more relentlessquest for real community, real experiences, and, yes, real life.
On many fronts, the Creative Class lifestyle comes down to a pas-
sionate quest for experience. The ideal is to live a more creative life,packed with more intense, high-quality, multidimensional expe-riences. The interviews and focus groups I conducted in the late1990s and early 2000s indicated that creative people favor active,134 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

participatory recreation over passive spectator sports. They like
indigenous street-level culture—a teeming blend of cafés, sidewalkmusicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it’s hard to drawthe line between participant and observer, creativity and its cre-ators. They crave creative stimulation but not escape. As one youngman told me, explaining why he and his friends favored nonalco-holic hangouts, “We can’t aﬀord the recovery time.” In their bookThe Experience Economy, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore explain
the shift from consumption of material goods to consumption ofexperiences as “a fourth economic oﬀering, as distinct from servicesas services are from goods,” noting:
Experiences have always been around but consumers, businesses, and econ-
omists lumped them into the service sector along with such uneventful ac-tivities as dry cleaning, auto repair, wholesale distribution, and telephoneaccess. When a person buys a service he purchases a set of intangible ac-tivities carried out on his behalf. But when he buys an experience, he paysto spend time enjoying a series of memorable events that a companystages—as in a theatrical play—to engage him in a personal way. . . . Thenewly identiﬁed oﬀering of experiences occurs whenever a company inten-tionally uses services as the stage and goods as props to engage an individual.While commodities are fungible, goods tangible, and services intangible,experiences are memorable.
2
The Creative Class is experience driven. My interviews and focus
groups reveal a considerable orientation to active and authentic
experiences that participants can structure themselves. In practicaleveryday terms, this means running, rock climbing, or cyclingrather than watching a game on TV; it means travel to interesting,remote, and even risky locations that engage one physically or in-
tellectually; it means the purchase of unique antique pieces or orig-
inal midcentury modern furniture, as opposed to just buying135 THE EXPERIENTIAL LIFE

something to sit on. In the 1950s, the psychologist Carl Rogers
noted the connection between creativity and experiences, writing,“It has been found that when the individual is ‘open’ to all his ex-perience then his behavior will be creative, and his creativity maybe trusted to be essentially constructive.”
3He deﬁned openness to
experience as consisting of the following attributes: “lack of rigidityand permeability of boundaries in concepts, beliefs, perceptions,and hypotheses,” “a tolerance for ambiguity,” and an “ability to re-ceive much conﬂicting information without forcing closure uponthe situation.” He found that in people who are open to experience,“each stimulus is freely relayed without being distorted by any pro-cess of defensiveness,” whether it “originates in the environment,in the impact of form, color, or sound on the sensory nerves, orwhether it originates in the viscera.” Based on this, he concluded,“This complete openness of awareness to what exists at this momentis, I believe, an important condition of constructive creativity.” Theexperiential lifestyle is about much more than fun. It complementsthe way members of the Creative Class work and is a fundamentalcomponent of their lives.
The Active Life
“In the early 1960s, there was no such thing as a middle-aged manjogging on the street,” the journalist Andy Sheehan wrote in Chasing
the Hawk, a book about his late father, Dr. George Sheehan, the
well-known “running guru” of the 1960s and 1970s.
4A successful
doctor in Red Bank, New Jersey, George Sheehan began runningin 1963 at the age of forty-ﬁve. At the time, grown men simply didnot exercise in public; doing so entailed the risk of appearing friv-olous or even “subversive.” So Sheehan ran in his backyard. “It waswith no small amount of wonder,” his son writes, “that I stood on136 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

my back porch one day . . . and watched my father running the
perimeter of our backyard. The backyard covered two acres, and Iwatched as he ran the length of the house, trotted down a smallslope, turned right at a neighbor’s fence.” When his father eventuallytook to the streets, he did so “despite the honking horns and thesounds of laughter from the cars that passed him.” The jibes weresometimes directed at the younger Sheehan and his siblings: “‘Whydoes your father run around town in his underwear?’ we childrenwere asked.” But through it all, according to his son, running helpedestablish George Sheehan as a creative person. “My father attributeda whole host of astonishing personal transformations to running.It made him stop drinking, freed him from anger, got him in touchwith himself, and made him a creative being.” Around the sametime that Sheehan was discovering running on the Jersey shore,human potential pioneers at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Cali-fornia, were treating jogging and even golf as a spiritual practice.
Few of us, of course, achieve such a radical makeover from run-
ning or any other single activity. But we are engaging in many newbehaviors that add up to a radical makeover of leisure in our society.And though Sheehan claimed that his pastime made him creative,I would suggest that for us, the causality runs the other way as well.Because we relate to the economy through our creativity and thusidentify ourselves as “creative beings,” we pursue pastimes and cul-tural forms that express and nurture our creativity.
The ensuing decades have witnessed a virtual revolution in active
recreation. In 1964, when George Sheehan entered his ﬁrst BostonMarathon, he was one of just 225 runners. Today the event is lim-ited to 18,000. According to a 2000 Roper Starch survey, 67 per-cent of all Americans participated in active outdoor recreation ona monthly basis in 1999, up from 50 percent in 1994. The studyalso noted that an increasing number of people, some 30 percent,participate in more than ﬁve diﬀerent active recreational activities137 THE EXPERIENTIAL LIFE

per year.5By 2010, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analy-
sis, Americans were spending $918.3 billion on recreation.6
Buried in this staggering statistic is the extent to which people—
particularly Creative Class people—have thrown themselves into
active sports and physical exercise. It is increasingly normal andeven expected that Creative Class people, well into middle age andbeyond, will engage in these activities that were once deemed ju-venile or deviant. Health-club memberships in the United Statesgrew from virtually nothing in the early 1960s to more than 15 mil-lion by the mid-1980s. By 2000, they’d reached 32.8 million; by2009, the number had risen by almost another one-third, to 45.3million.
7An article in the Wall Street Journal on September 7, 2011,
noted that “health clubs and gyms accounted for 8.8% of new leasessigned so far this year by retail chains in the U.S., compared with7.9% at the same point last year. . . . The rush into shopping centershas helped fuel a 57% increase in square footage occupied by U.S.health clubs since 2007, to more than 70 million square feet.”
8Many
larger companies provide on-site physical exercise facilities. Somesubsidize gym memberships or even reduce the employee contri-bution for health-care beneﬁts for those who engage in regular ex-ercise. Although much has been made of our increased televisionviewing (which ballooned from 10.4 hours a week in 1965 to 16hours in 1995, climbing to 19 hours by 2010), active sports andexercise registered the largest percentage increase of all free-timeactivities, tripling between 1965 and 1995.
9
In the original edition of this book I used data on American con-
sumer behavior from Equifax to illustrate the experiential consump-tion preferences of higher income, more well-educated people.
10
According to these data, eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds earningmore than $75,000 a year were more than twice as likely to scubadive, snow ski, travel, play tennis, ﬂy frequently, or jog than theirlower-paid peers, whereas those with incomes of $30,000 or less138 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

were more likely to play home video games, horseback ride, ﬁddle
with electronics, camp, ride a motorcycle, or do automotive work.Looking at slightly older people, ages thirty-ﬁve to forty-four,higher-income people were more than twice as likely to travel, ski,or scuba dive, and one and one-half times more likely to play tennis,golf, jog, and enjoy wines. Lower-income people were more likelyto horseback ride, play video games, collect stamps, ride motorcycles,camp, and do automotive work. Equifax stopped conducting thisparticular survey in the mid-2000s, but a 2008 Bureau of Labor Sta-tistics Time Use Survey noted that “people with higher levels of ed-ucation were more likely to participate in sports and exercise.Among people aged 25 years and older, those with a bachelor’s de-gree or higher were more than twice as likely to participate in sportsand exercise activities on an average day during the 2003–06 periodas those with a high school diploma or less.”
11
My focus groups and interviews with Creative Class people re-
vealed that they value active outdoor recreation very highly. Theyare drawn to places and communities where many outdoor activitiesare prevalent—both because they enjoy those activities, and becausetheir presence is seen as a signal that the place is amenable to thebroader creative lifestyle. The Creative Class people in my studiesare into a variety of active sports, from traditional ones like bicy-cling, jogging, and kayaking to newer, more extreme ones like trailrunning and snowboarding.
Some of these class preferences reﬂect the nature of work itself.
Members of the traditional Working Class spend the day engagedin physical labor and are thus inclined to relax during their timeoﬀ. But if you spend your workday in front of a computer screenor an artist’s canvas, you are probably not eager to spend yourleisure time in front of a TV screen. You are much more likely towant to get out and be active. As one person I interviewed put it,“Recreation is stress relief away from everyday work.”
12Time and139 THE EXPERIENTIAL LIFE

again, when people in my interviews and focus groups spoke of
active sports, they used the word “release.” Climbing a rock faceor pedaling a bike releases the physical energy pent up throughlong hours of sitting, and it is also a form of mental release. As thewife of a high-powered executive put it, “He is compelled to engagein these kinds of activities simply to release the incredible energyhe has.”
13
My Creative Class subjects were not especially interested in
conventional spectator sports; they preferred to participate di-rectly. On the infrequent occasions that they did take in a game,the sports they appeared to favor featured continuous action, likebasketball and hockey, rather than football or baseball. Part ofthe reason is that continuous-action sports are more packed withexperience. But beyond this, an even broader reason—highlightedin a fair number of my interviews—is that basketball and hockeygames are played in the evening during times of year when theweather is cold and daylight ends early. My interview subjectssaid that they simply could not afford to “sacrifice” a warm sum-mer evening to watch baseball, or an entire Sunday afternoon toattend a football game.
As noted earlier, Paul Fussell’s book Class is full of barbed but
often perceptive comments on everyone from “proles” to the “out-of-sight” wealthy. An obsession with spectator sports tends to bea marker of Working Class status for two reasons, he observes. Oneis the need “to identify with winners, the need to dance and scream,We’re number one! while holding an index ﬁnger erect.” And two,he adds that sports are also popular because they “sanction a ﬂuxof pedantry, dogmatism, record-keeping, wise secret knowledge,and pseudo-scholarship of the sort usually associated with the‘decision-making’ or ‘executive’ or ‘opinion-molding’ classes,”adding that “the World Series and the Super Bowl give every manhis opportunity to play for the moment the impressive barroom140 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

pedant, to imitate for a brief season the superior classes identiﬁed
by their practice of weighty utterance and informed opinion.”14
There are other reasons that traditional spectator sports are less
popular among the Creative Class. When people move frequentlyto pursue careers and lifestyle interests, it becomes harder for themto sustain the home-team allegiances built in youth. Also, as wehave seen, more and more of the Creative Class are immigrants,people who grew up with cricket or ﬁeld hockey or soccer. Stillmore are globally minded. The unprecedented US interest in the2010 World Cup was perhaps a harbinger of some of these deepercultural shifts.
When I undertook this revision, I asked my colleague Daniel Sil-
ver for his comments. In an email, he suggested that I had over-simpliﬁed some of these issues, writing:
In my view even the generalities are more mixed than you make them out.
Personal story: I am a big football fan, and I often do “waste” my Sundaysto watch the 49ers. Just last weekend, I left my wife and kids in the middleof a neighborhood outdoor block party to go ﬁnd a sports bar showingthe game. I’m also relatively unconvinced by the argument that highlystructured activities are unattractive to creative types. Martial Arts wouldbe my prime example. In fact, they are near unique among most amenitiesin that they are associated with BOTH college grads and substantial andoften rising levels of blacks and hispanics. But martial arts clubs are highlystructured, and training your way up the belts requires that you learn allsorts of rigid rules. It is only at the most advanced levels that you are al-lowed to fully freelance and ﬂow. For many, it is that very structure thatis so attractive.
I could not agree more. Some Working Class people have no in-
terest in spectator sports or motor sports. Some wealthy Creative
Class people love them: think of Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld and their141 THE EXPERIENTIAL LIFE

automobile collections, or Spike Lee in his courtside seat at New
York Knicks games. I, too, am a big sports fan and follow not justthe Knicks, but the Jets, Giants, and Yankees with the ardor of themost die-hard fanatic. The sociology of sport and class clearly con-tains many nuances and subtleties. That said, the Creative Classdoes have a special penchant, both comparatively and historically,for more active and participative pursuits.
Noting the toned bodies on so many young members of the
Creative Class, my brother Robert, himself a fellow who likes tostay fit, says that “college students today look like they major instaying in shape.” Much the same is true of another CreativeClass subgroup, performing artists. Some musicians have biggerbiceps than pro athletes did forty years ago. A number of middle-aged rock stars, such as Bruce Springsteen, Sting, and Madonna,appear fitter now than when they started out. If Bob Dylan wereto come along today, his agent would probably send him to theweight room.
Every year since 2008, the American College of Sports Medicine
has ranked America’s fifty largest metros on its American FitnessIndex, which takes into account both personal health indicators(statistics on specific diseases, obesity, smoking levels, and so on)and community and environmental factors (health-care access,community resources that promote fitness, and the like).
15In
2011, its top fifteen metros were Minneapolis; Washington, DC;Boston; Portland, Oregon; Denver; San Francisco; Hartford; Seat-tle; Virginia Beach; Sacramento; San Jose; Richmond; San Diego;Cincinnati; and Salt Lake City. When Charlotta Mellander and Ianalyzed the data we found that fitter metros also had higher av-erage wages and income, higher shares of residents with collegedegrees, greater levels of innovation, more high-tech companies,and a higher percentage of Creative Class workers than their less-fit counterparts.142 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

This Creative Class obsession with ﬁtness goes beyond a concern
with health. And it is much more than a mere shifting of the aes-
thetic standard to favor, say, bigger biceps. With marriage oftendeferred and divorce more common, Creative Class people spenda lot of time on the mating market. Physical display is a key aspectof mating: you are more marketable if you look your best. Beingeconomically mobile and entrepreneurial, members of the CreativeClass also spend a lot of time advertising themselves to prospectiveemployers, partners, and clients. And though it might be a perni-cious stereotype, studies show that in-shape people are perceivedto be not just more presentable but more reliable than their less-toned counterparts. Staying in shape creates more energy, moreendurance, and more physical ﬂexibility—it helps optimize thebody for the long haul of a life of creative work.
Leisure as Work
And that might be what it’s all about—not just leisure, but workmasquerading as leisure. That’s the point made by two thoughtfulsociologists, Richard Lloyd and Mark Banks, who in their separatewritings note that what at ﬁrst glance might appear to be leisureactivities—engagement in art, participation in active sports andrecreation, even bohemian rejection of the status quo—may at adeeper level be a less-obvious form of work. In a 2009 essay, Bankscriticized me on this score, writing that the “traditional notion ofleisure as an autonomous, work-antithetical practice may be dis-appearing.” And he added:
What seems most apparent amongst Florida’s emergent “creative class” is
not simply that work and nonwork have become somehow “imbalanced,”or even “reversed” in meaning, but that work has come to colonize life to143 THE EXPERIENTIAL LIFE

such an extent that it has pervasively absorbed leisure into its own logic,
entirely eﬀacing the work-leisure distinction and, what is more, now appearsto have achieved this with the express support and enthusiasm of labour.”
16
Again, I could not agree more, and I believe I said as much in the
original edition. Leisure is undertaken not for its own sake but to
enhance the creative experience—which for the Creative Class, is
work. The boundaries between leisure and work have become soblurry that the two have eﬀectively blended into one another.
The norms of work have likewise inserted themselves into leisure.
As I noted in the original edition, when asked why he and his peersfavor highly active forms of recreation, one young member of theCreative Class gave a succinct reply: “You get more entertainmentvalue per unit of time.” The young man went on to explain that inhis view, even a relatively tame pastime like hiking or simply goingfor a walk is more continuously engaging, and on more levels, thanwatching baseball or playing a sport like golf. You are in motionevery minute. The scenery is varied and changing; the world is un-folding around you. You can stop to sightsee or window-shop ortalk with people along the way, get deep into conversation with awalking companion, or just walk solo and let your mind range.
An article in the Wall Street Journal in August 2011 noted the
research of Marc Berman, a postdoctoral fellow at the RotmanSchool of Management at the University of Toronto, where I teach,whose experiments make a strong case for the proposition that theproverbial walk in the woods (or in this case, an arboretum) canboost performance on cognitive tests by as much as 20 percent. Ac-cording to his research, a walk down a busy city street producedno such beneﬁts. “In a follow-up study,” the Wall Street Journal
noted, “the researchers had participants take a break for 10 minutesin a quiet room to look at pictures of a nature scene or city street.Again, they found that cognitive performance improved after the144 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

nature break, even though it was only on paper. Although the boost
wasn’t as great as when participants actually took the walk amongthe trees, it was more eﬀective than the city walk.”
17
Extreme sports like rock climbing provide mental beneﬁts as
well, albeit in a much more concentrated and demanding form.Climbing provides continuous engagement on both the physicaland mental planes. You get variety and novelty, and the possibilitiesexpand as you grow more skilled, because you can try new andmore diﬃcult climbs. The mental engagement of climbing, intenseas it may be, is a profound release from work. One cannot thinkabout tomorrow’s meeting while grasping for a piton a hundredfeet in the air, yet once you reach a secure perch, you can indulgein sightseeing and reverie. All told, it packs a lot of experience intoeach unit of time. The essence of climbing, hiking, and a host ofsimilar sports that the Creative Class favors is to enter some otherworld, away from the workaday world, and explore it and experi-ence it while performing a task that is challenging in and of itself.In short, the idea is to have an adventure. Game sports like baseballare fundamentally diﬀerent. The world that it invites its spectatorsand participants into is highly structured: four bases at ninety feetapart, three strikes and you’re out. And though rock climbing hasits own rules and limits—you can’t, for instance, violate the law ofgravity—there are thousands of ways to apply the basic skills inpicking your way up any given rock face; it’s more of a freelancething. Game sports are competitive: it’s you against the opponent.Adventure sports are you against the task; against nature; againstyour own physical and mental limits.
“Riding a bike through a city,” the musician and artist David
Byrne wrote in his book Bicycle Diaries, “is like navigating the col-
lective neural pathways of some vast global mind.” Biking, he added,“facilitates a state of mind that allows some but not too much ofthe unconscious to bubble up. As someone who believes that much145 THE EXPERIENTIAL LIFE

of the source of his work and creativity is to be gleaned from those
bubbles, it’s a reliable place to ﬁnd that connection.”18
I agree. My sport of choice is bicycling, too, more speciﬁcally,
touring on a skinny-tired road bike. Summer evenings are a delight,because they give me a couple of hours’ daylight after work to puton my helmet, head for the hills, and ride until dusk. Bicycling ismultidimensional. A long ride combines physical exertion andchallenge, release, exploration, and communion with nature. Asyou focus on pedaling you get into a rhythm and ﬂow, losing trackof whatever was on your mind, dumping the garbage. The mind’sshelves are cleared for restocking while the body, the crucial infra-structure that sustains the mind, is reinvigorated. Sensory inputs
are exquisite, for without the speed and roar of a motorized vehicle,
you can really see and hear the world. Because you’re breathingdeeply, you can smell the world—damp earth in the countryside,fresh leaves and grass. There is also the “I’m doing it” factor: thejoy of moving as fast as it is possible for a human to move underhis or her own power, upward of 30 mph on level ground, 50-plusdownhill; the satisfaction when you conquer a hill. Think, too, ofthe nature of the act of powering a bicycle. The up-and-downpumping of the legs, translated into the smooth rotation of thewheels, is very similar to the mesmerizing, almost mystical mech-anism by which our beloved internal-combustion engine works:the explosive, up-and-down motion of the pistons ﬂowing outthrough the crankshaft as rotary power. Except on a bicycle, it’syoumaking it and feeling it happen. Certainly, motorcycles oﬀer
thrills of their own. To sit astride a motorcycle and control the pow-erful engine between your legs can be gratifying, I’m sure. But toclimb onto a bicycle and be the engine is a fundamentally trans-forming experience—a creative experience.
The fact that the demographics of my sport are almost obscenely
skewed has not escaped me. Nearly every rider I meet on my jour-146 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

neys is a graduate student, professor, transplant surgeon, corporate
lawyer, engineer, entrepreneur, or something similar. Why is thesport so Creative Class? It can’t be the expense. Although some bikes,like my titanium model, are undoubtedly pricey, an adequate ma-chine can be had for much less. Bicycles cost little to maintain andnothing to ride. They are far less expensive than motorcycles. Whenmy team at the Martin Prosperity Institute ran the numbers on themetros that had the highest shares of bike commuters in 2010, Cre-ative Class communities came out on top. The top ﬁve were Eugene,Oregon; Fort Collins, Colorado; Missoula, Boulder, and Santa Bar-bara. College towns like Gainesville, Florida; State College, Penn-sylvania; Santa Cruz, Madison, Champaign-Urbana, and Iowa Cityall ranked high as well. Our statistical analysis showed that metroswith more bike commuters were more aﬄuent, more educated,and more diverse than most communities, with higher shares ofthe Creative Class.
Taking It to the Street
For more than a century, the mark of a cultured city in the UnitedStates has been the presence of a major art museum plus an“SOB”—the high-art triumvirate of symphony orchestra, operacompany, and ballet company. In many cities recently, museumsand the SOB have fallen on hard times. Attendance ﬁgures havedeclined, donations have dried up, and audiences are aging: toomany gray heads, not enough purple ones. Consultants have de-scended to identify the problems and oﬀer solutions. One problemis static repertoire. In a museum, for instance, the permanent col-lection is, well, permanent: it just hangs there. A typical solution isto bring in more packaged traveling exhibits, preferably interactivemultimedia exhibits, with lots of bells and whistles. Premiers serve147 THE EXPERIENTIAL LIFE

the same function in the SOB, but there aren’t a lot of new sym-
phonies, operas, and ballets being composed, and fewer still arebeing performed, because it is so expensive to stage them. One so-lution is to augment the experience. Instead of a night at the sym-phony, have a Singles Night at the Symphony. Sometimes orchestrasbring in offbeat guest performers—a jazz or pop soloist, say, or acomedian for the kids. Or musicians are sent out to play in exoticlocales—the symphony in the park, a chamber group at an art gallery,the symphony playing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture at the Fourthof July ﬁreworks. All this is reminiscent of the eﬀorts of old-linechurches to ﬁll seats by augmenting the experience—how about aguitar and drum set with the organ?—or what many professionalsports teams do to attract fans to their stadiums: bring in cute mas-cots, sexy cheerleaders, and exploding scoreboards.
Most of these eﬀorts are wasted on the Creative Class, whose
members are more drawn to organic and indigenous street-levelculture,
19which is typically found not in large venues like New York
City’s Lincoln Center or in designated cultural districts like themuseum district in Washington, DC, but in multiuse urban neigh-borhoods. The neighborhood can be upscale like DC’s Georgetownor Boston’s Back Bay, or reviving-downscale, like DC’s U and HStreet Corridors, Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, Toronto’s West QueenWest neighborhood, or Pittsburgh’s Lawrenceville. Either way, itgrows organically from its surroundings, and a sizable number ofthe creators and patrons of the culture live close by. This is whatmakes it indigenous. Much of it is native and of-the-moment, ratherthan art imported from another century for audiences importedfrom the suburbs. Certainly, people may come from outside theneighborhood to partake of the culture, and they will undoubtedlyﬁnd things that are foreign in origin or inﬂuence, such as Germanﬁlms or Senegalese music. But they come with a sense that they areentering a cultural community, not just attending an event. I think148 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

this is a key part of the form’s creative appeal. You might not paint,
write, or play music yourself, but if you are at an art-show openingor in a nightspot where you can mingle and talk with artists and aﬁ-cionados, you might be more creatively stimulated than if you merelywalked into a museum or concert hall, were handed a program, andproceeded to spectate. The people in my focus groups and interviewssaid they prefer street-level culture partly because it gives them achance to experience the creators along with their creations.
The culture is called street level because it tends to cluster along
certain streets lined with a multitude of small venues. These mayinclude coﬀee shops, restaurants, and bars, some of which oﬀerperformances or exhibits along with food and drink; art galleries;bookstores and other stores; small to mid-sized theaters for ﬁlmor live performance, or both; and various hybrid spaces—like abookstore-tearoom-little theater or gallery-studio-live musicspace—often in storefronts or old buildings converted from otherpurposes. The scene may spill out onto the sidewalks, with diningtables, musicians, vendors, panhandlers, performers, and plenty ofpassersby at all hours of the day and night. This kind of “scene ofscenes” where music, art, ﬁlm, and nightlife scenes interact andoverlap provides a key source of visual and aural energy.
In his book Clubbing, Ben Malbon provides a vivid description
of the late-night street scene in London’s Soho, drawn directly fromhis research diary:
We stumble out of the club at around 3-ish—Soho is packed with people,
crowding pavements and roads, looking and laughing—everyone appearshappy. Some are in groups, bustling their way along noisily—others arealone, silent and walking purposefully on their way. . . . Cars crawl downnarrow streets which are already impossibly full of cars, Vespas, people,thronging crowds. This wasn’t “late night” for Soho—the night had hardlystarted.
20149 THE EXPERIENTIAL LIFE

It is not just ascene but many. For the young people Malbon
studied, the actual visit to a dance club was only a part of the ex-
perience. He describes, in detail, the lengthy and intricate processesof clubbers debating where and when to go, laying out clothes forthe event, and discussing and creating histories of their experiencesafterward. Malbon admits that he spent “150 nights out” researchingthe book, and as he puts it, “many of these were the best nights outI have had.”
Which is not to say that members of the Creative Class avoid the
high arts. Many also visit the big-ticket, high-art cultural venues,at least occasionally, as well as consume mass-market culture likeHollywood movies and rock or pop concerts. But street-level cultureis a must. Consider just the practical reasons for this. Big-ticket,high-art events are strictly scheduled on a limited number ofevenings, whereas the street-level scene is ﬂuid and ongoing. As alarge number of my interview subjects have told me, this is a bigbeneﬁt for creative types who may work late and not be free until9:00 or 10:00
PM, or work through the weekend and want to go out
Monday night. Moreover, creative workers with busy scheduleswant to use their cultural time eﬃciently. Attending a large-venueevent, be it a symphony concert or a professional basketball game,is a single, one-dimensional experience that consumes a lot of recre-ational resources: it is expensive and takes a big chunk of time. Vis-iting a street-level scene puts you in the middle of a smorgasbord;you can easily do several things in one excursion. The street scenealso allows you to modulate the level and intensity of your experi-ence. You can do active, high-energy things—immerse yourself inthe bustle of the sidewalks or head into an energized club and danceuntil dawn—or ﬁnd a cozy café to drink some espresso, a bar whereyou can listen to live jazz while sipping a brandy, or retreat into abookstore where it is quiet.
Consider, too, the nature of the street-level smorgasbord’s oﬀer-
ings. In culture as in business, the most radical and interesting stuﬀ150 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

tends to start in garages and small rooms. Smaller independent
venues oﬀer a dense spectrum of musical genres from blues, R&B,country, rockabilly, world music, and their various hybrids to elec-tronic music—techno and deep house, trance and drum and bass.Nor is everything new. The street-level scene is often the best placeto ﬁnd seldom-performed or little-known works of the past. Onone block you might ﬁnd a little theater showing a new productionof an Elizabethan revenge drama; a gallery specializing in historicphotography; a local folk-rock group performing old Americanpolitical songs; and a street musician who plays violin repertoirethat you won’t hear on the classical radio programs that endlesslyrecycle the symphonic equivalent of the Top Forty.
The street scene is eclectic. This is another part of its appeal. Con-
sider that eclecticism is also a strong theme within many of today’sart forms. Think of DJs in Harlem nightclubs of the 1970s whostarted the technique known as sampling—or GirlTalk today,whose songs are mash ups and remixes of other people’s songs,sometimes as many as a dozen at a time. Think of the proliferationof hyphenated music genres like Afro-Celtic, Balkan-Jazz, andHip-Hop-Klezmer. Think of Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg de-cades ago and Shepard Fairey of the Obama “Hope” poster fametoday, whose works appropriate images from news photos, comicstrips, food packages, wherever. Eclectic scavenging for creativityis not new. Picasso borrowed from African art as well as Greco-Roman classical forms; rock-and-roll pioneers melded blues andR&B and country; and one could argue that the literary DJ whoreally pioneered sampling was T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, a poem
built largely by stringing together quotations and allusions fromevery corner of the world’s literature. Today, however, eclecticism isrampant and spreading to a degree that seems unprecedented—and a taste for it is a social marker that can usually be counted onto distinguish a Creative Class person. Cultural intermixing, whendone right, can be a powerful creative stimulus.151 THE EXPERIENTIAL LIFE

Street-level culture is social and interactive. In addition to the
music or art that is on oﬀer, one can meet people, hang out and
talk, or just sit back to watch tonight’s episodes of the human com-edy. To many, the social milieu is the street’s main attraction. Ifthat sounds a bit vapid and superﬁcial, sometimes it is. This is nothigh art; it admits amateurs. You don’t hang out in a sidewalkcafé to experience the rariﬁed, exquisitely crafted intensity ofBeethoven’s late string quartets. For some people, hitting the street-level cultural scene devolves into little more than cruising the singlesscene. But even if experiencing culture is truly your goal, you areinevitably going to pick up a lot of chaﬀ along with it. You run therisk of becoming chaﬀ yourself: a dilettante, a poseur, a gallerygadﬂy, a coﬀee-shop talker.
Then again, people watching can be stimulating. As Andy Warhol
liked to say, he didn’t go to restaurants just to eat. Take the expe-rience of strolling through a good street scene in, say, New York,or the city of your choice. The ﬁrst thing that strikes you is thesheer visual variety of the people. Many ethnic groups are present,of course, in various ages, conditions, and sizes, and this alone isthought provoking. You might ﬁnd yourself meditating on the history of our species—the many so-called races of humans, and howthey came to grow apart as they spread across the globe, and how they endlessly intermix. You may find yourself broodingabout your own history—how you were once as young as that one,and may someday be as old as that one, and are liable to look likethat one if you don’t mend your wicked ways. And then, if it is aproper street scene, there will be many people of exotic appearance:foreigners in long skirts and bright robes; young people with hairin colors and conﬁgurations that bend the laws of physics, at leastNewtonian physics; people dressed as cowboys, Goths, Victorians,hippies—you get the picture. For many people, the experience ofthis picture is exhilarating, liberating, similar to the thrill of a costumeparty or carnival, when people literally put on new identities—152 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

including masks that obliterate or alter the social masks they nor-
mally wear—and there is a delicious sense of adventure in the air.One has an awareness of the possibilities of life.
I would go so far as to say that this kind of experience is essential
to the creative process. We humans are not godlike; we cannot createout of nothing. Creativity for us is an act of synthesis, and in orderto create and synthesize, we need the stimuli of new experiences—bits and pieces to put together in new and unfamiliar ways, existingframeworks to deconstruct and transcend. I also feel it is inherentto the creative mind-set to want to maximize choices and options,to be always on the lookout for new ones, because in the game thatEinstein called combinatory play, this increases your chances ofcoming up with novel combinations. As more people earn theirkeep by creating, the more these aspects of experience are likely tobe highly valued and just plain necessary.
And ﬁnally there’s this: the very eclecticism of scenes provides a
means of both attracting and bridging diverse communities. A fas-cinating paper by Joseph Yi and Daniel Silver, entitled “God, Yoga,and Karate: Local Pathways to Diversity,” draws on zip-code-levelresearch across 40,000 localities to show how scenes and amenitiescan provide “spaces where people from across societal cleavages canﬁnd common pleasures and opportunities to take into account theother as more than an abstraction or stereotype.”
21A karate dojo, for
example, as Silver noted in his personal communication to me, canbridge black and white, New Age and Christian communities; at-tending sporting events or shopping at discount superstores can havesimilar, though cruder and more superﬁcial, eﬀects as well.
Pitfalls of the Experiential World
There is much that seems good about the constant quest for expe-rience. It is an energetic and productive way to live. It can even be153 THE EXPERIENTIAL LIFE

a more humane and benevolent way to live. The emphasis on ac-
tive, participatory recreation seems healthy physically and psy-chologically, as well as more satisfying than the thin diet of theTV junkie. Done properly, it should lead to good experiences allaround. So where are the pitfalls? Where exactly does the insidi-ousness come in?
First, experiences can be packaged and sold. Commodiﬁed ex-
perience is often perceived to be—and often is—inauthentic. AsThomas Frank and others have noted, the commercialization ofexperience can empty it of its original creative content.
22Retailers
from H&M and AllSaints Spitalﬁelds to Prada do this with clothes.They try to create brand recognition around experience and, indoing so, sell you experience as brand: just wearing the clothes sup-posedly makes you cool and with it. Or, to paraphrase what nu-merous Creative Class people have told me: “You can’t just enjoya ballgame; you have to go to a ‘state-of-the-art’ $500 million sta-dium for a multimedia circus that distracts you from the very gameyou paid to see.” Many Creative Class people thus tend to shunthe heavily packaged commercial venues they call “generica”—thechain restaurants and nightclubs, the stadiums with bells andwhistles—or they patronize them but with a conscious sense ofirony and camp, as in the obligatory trip to a business conferencein Las Vegas. They prefer more authentic, indigenous, or organicvenues that oﬀer a wide range of options, places where they canhave a hand in creating them.
But it can be a struggle to ﬁnd such venues, because generica has
a way of creeping in everywhere. Music clubs that used to be dy-namic, street-level places to enjoy real music are more and more
being replaced by late-night versions of those multimedia circuses.
Not only do you immerse yourself in booming music, but you getdigital lighting, smoke machines, and water sprinklers activated inconcert with peaks in the music—everything you need to be hot154 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

and cool. Some such clubs have even become chains. What began
as an organic development from the street has become a Disney-land facsimile of itself—safe, secure, and predictable—traffickingnot in a series of unique experiences but in the same generic ex-perience night after night. There are deeper concerns as well.“Clubbers distinguish themselves from others through their tastesin clothing, music, dancing techniques, clubbing genre and soon,” notes Malbon. “These tastes are trained and refined, andconstantly monitored not only in order to distinguish oneselffrom another, but also in identifying with those that share one’sdistinctive styles and preferences.”
23In all of these ways they are,
he says, constructing identities. Not to be too judgmental here, butone could well say that Malbon’s clubbers sound like little morethan trendy sheep. Others have made much the same point aboutthe uniform look of the hipster. If the goal is to construct an iden-tity or discover an identity, there are other, better ways to do it.Neighborhoods do it, too. In many ways, when people select aneighborhood they are selecting a way of life and reinforcing theirown identify.
Using the market to try to satisfy the craving for experience can
turn weirdly self-contradictory in many ways. Writing in the Wall
Street Journal, columnist Kara Swisher chronicled the thousandsof dollars she spent outfitting her “fantasy kitchen,” the equiva-lent of “about 1,000 takeout meals or at least 600 outings at pretty
good restaurants.”
24The point is that all those pricey appliances
and cookware are no longer appliances and cookware in the tra-
ditional utilitarian sense. They are there to provide experiences—
the visual experience of looking at them, the status experience ofowning them, and the active experience of cooking “like a profes-sional” on those infrequent occasions when we actually do usethem to whip up a dinner that mixes Pan-Asian, Italian, and home-grown inﬂuences. 155 THE EXPERIENTIAL LIFE

In short, if we crave experiences, we will be sold experiences,
and in the process we may ﬁnd ourselves buying a bill of goods.
The ﬁnal pitfall is that in the attempt to avoid packaged-and-soldexperiences, we may pack our lives so full that we overdo it. Whilewe scorn the couch potatoes hooked on TV, the desire for constantstimulation and experiences can come close to an addiction itself.But no way of life is perfect, and the trend is inexorable. And whenall is said and done, the experiential life is much more than a pas-tiche of recreational fads and marketing gimmicks. As I’ve shown,it is a product of the rising creative ethos—which, as I will arguein the next chapter, was born from a deep cultural fusion.156 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

CHAPTER 9
The Big Morph
One blustery winter day in 2001 , I boarded a plane in Pitts-
burgh and emerged a couple of hours later into warm south-
western air. I was in Austin, Texas, one of the country’s
leading creative centers, where, I would soon learn, more than theweather was diﬀerent. I was there to speak about economic devel-opment at the Austin 360 Summit, an annual conference of localbusiness and civic leaders. I had been to many such meetings inother cities, not to mention countless professional conventions andmeetings of US mayors and governors. But the Austin 360 Summitwas not like any of them.
Typically, this sort of meeting is held at the city’s most lavish
hotel or perhaps amid the classic Greek columns and Beaux Artssplendor of an important civic landmark. Here we gathered at thefunky, folksy Austin Music Hall. Usually at such a conference, youcheck the agenda for the keynote speakers if you want to hear some-one important. Here, Michael Dell, founder and chair of Dell Com-puters, was just one of many participants in a panel discussion. Ofcourse, he didn’t wear a tie, nor did anyone else. If you wanted tointerrupt him with a question or comment in midspeech you wentright ahead. All the trappings of status and privilege had been leftat home.
157

The usual drill at a convention is to endure a long day of stuﬀy
presentations and working-group sessions, then head out to the
local nightspots and cut loose. At the Austin 360 Summit work andplay went together all day long. When we ﬁled into the noisy mainmeeting room in the morning, we were issued plastic Wiﬄe balls.If you didn’t like what a speaker was saying, you could pelt himwith one. The lunchtime keynote speech on the ﬁrst day—typicallydelivered by a gray-headed pillar of the community—was a satiricmonologue by the performance artist Steve Tomlinson, who ap-peared only because Sandra Bullock, originally scheduled, was onlocation making a ﬁlm. A rock band performed during the interludesbetween conference sessions, and this wasn’t the kind of watered-down, easy-listening rock band you sometimes hear at businessfunctions. This was an excellent, hard-driving band, guys with realchops. Austin, after all, is the music capital of the Southwest.
After a half-day of this, it was my turn. I was the moderator of a
panel of CEOs and venture-capital types, and the question I wantedthem to address was one that I believed to be central to the region’sfuture economic development: “Is Austin losing its soul?” I hadgotten the idea from my cab driver on the way in from the airport,who worried that the crush of high-tech industry and people werethreatening to drive out the ethnic and cultural diversity that hadfueled Austin’s creativity to begin with. After some predictableback-and-forth among the panelists about their investments in themusic and cultural scene, I used the moderator’s prerogative to in-terject. “Creativity is multidimensional,” I boomed. “It’s not some-thing you can keep in a box and trot out at work. You can’t havehigh-tech innovation without art and music. All forms of creativityfeed oﬀ each other”—and so on. Then a sudden inspiration struckme. “If you really want to know how important this is,” I said, “don’task your fellow high-tech CEOs or the mayor or the head of theChamber of Commerce. Ask the guys in the band!” I gestured158 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

grandly to the musicians seated at the edge of the stage, who looked
like the members of Conan O’Brien’s late-night ensemble. Thenone of the panelists clued me in. The guys in the band, now grinningbroadly at me, were not local grungers. All of them were high-techCEOs and venture capitalists themselves. It was as if Jack Welch,George Soros, and Warren Buﬀett had gotten down and jammedfor the crowd at Davos.
When the old markers that distinguish one type of person from
another begin to fade and blur, it is a clear sign that profound socialchange is afoot. Although the blending of bourgeois and bohemian,highbrow and lowbrow, alternative and mainstream, work and playcuts across many aspects of our life and culture, the change hasn’tbeen dramatic or sudden enough to be labeled a revolution. It isnot a Big Bang but a Big Morph, an evolutionary process that ﬂow-ered ﬁrst and strongest in certain enclaves and is now gradually ﬁl-tering through the rest of society. It is also a dialectical process,with major elements of society either ﬁghting the shifts or at leastpassively resisting them. The Big Morph is not merely cultural andrecreational. It originates from work and the workplace and movesoutward from them to inform new cultural forms and lifestyles.This is what makes it so powerful. Changes in taste and lifestylethat at ﬁrst glance seem superﬁcial and unrelated are in fact rootedin a deeper economic change.
At the heart of the Big Morph is a new resolution of the centuries-
old tension between two value systems: the Protestant work ethicand the bohemian ethic. Many observers have noted the clashingof these two systems, and some, most notably David Brooks, havecommented on their blending.
The Protestant work ethic supposes that meaning is to be found
in hard work. We are put here to serve others and we serve themby making ourselves productive and useful. It is our duty to work.And it is from this—inexorably, but almost incidentally, as a side159 THE BIG MORPH

eﬀect—that ﬂow the personal rewards that mark us as worthy. Writ-
ing at the turn of the twentieth century, the great German sociol-ogist Max Weber called this ethic the very “spirit of capitalism.”
1
The Protestant work ethic demanded a great deal of conscious struc-turing and budgeting—managing one’s time, practicing thrift, de-ferring gratiﬁcations, and so forth. It was traditionally pursuedwithin the structure of institutions, like the large corporations thatgrew economically and socially dominant in the late 1800s andthat continued to dominate until the late twentieth century. Thusthis ethic became an organizational and social ideology. One isproductive and efficient so that the organization can be productiveand efficient. As such, this ethic is essentially mainstream andconformist. One accepts the existing social structure as the waythings are. As Paul admonished the early Christians, one obeysthe secular authorities and observes the laws of the land—onedoes one’s duty.
2
The bohemian ethic is more hedonistic. It says that value is to be
found in pleasure and happiness—not necessarily in gross indulgenceor gluttonous excess, but in experiencing and appreciating what lifehas to oﬀer. The bohemian ethic has its own form of discipline, whichis largely aesthetic. In his classic but too-little-read book BohemianVersus Bourgeois, the cultural historian Cesar Graña notes thatCharles Baudelaire “gave his praises to cats because they appearedto him as the very embodiment of well-managed voluptuousness.”
3
The bohemian ethic has its spiritual and sociopolitical dimensions,too. On these fronts, it tends to be intuitive rather than logical, andindividualistic rather than conformist. In the cosmology of the En-glish poet William Blake, the “dark Satanic mills” of the early Indus-trial Revolution were not just England’s smoke-belching factories.They also evoked the mills of cold logic and clockwork materialism—the mental grindstones that ground men’s souls to dust. In Blake’seyes they could only be countered by unleashing the “Poetic Genius”160 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

that lay divinely planted in every human breast. Over time, as writers
and artists since Blake carried this theme forward, the bohemian ethiccame to signify everything that the Protestant work ethic was not.
Conservative scholars worried long and loud about the experi-
ential, bohemian culture that washed across America in the 1960s.Some feared that the Protestant work ethic had undermined itselfby succeeding too well—bathing us in such a ﬂood of material goodsand leisure that we were turning soft. Salvos were ﬁred from thebohemian side as well. In the patois of Rastafarian reggae musicians,the Satanic world of oﬃces and factories was “Babylon”—the greatwhore that must someday fall.
The so-called culture wars did not begin in the twentieth century,
however. Almost since the time of its emergence, industrial societyhas been a house divided.
The Great Divide
In Karl Marx’s seminal analysis, capitalist society was the battle-ground for a war between two great classes, the bourgeoisie andthe proletariat. The bourgeoisie were the true, literal capitalists whoowned and controlled the means of production. The proletarianswere the mostly poorer majority, who lived by selling their labor.Marx’s sympathies, of course, lay with the proletariat, but his salientpoint for our purpose is this: The mainspring driving the course ofmodern history and shaping modern society was the ongoing ten-sion between these two classes—and that tension was almost en-tirely caused by economic matters. Later cultural and social theoristsbelieved that Marx had neglected the cultural dimensions of thestruggle. Some of his disciples, from Georg Lukács and AntonioGramsci to the members of the Frankfurt School, tried to constructa theory that dealt suﬃciently with culture.
4161 THE BIG MORPH

Others, meanwhile, identiﬁed a second divide coinciding with
the rise of capitalism—the divide between the bourgeoisie and
the bohemians. Graña argues that this conﬂict came to life after theFrench Revolution. The toppling of the aristocracy frightened writ-ers, artists, and intellectuals, who had, after all, depended on thearistocrats as their patrons. The new capitalist bourgeoisie weremore concerned with amassing wealth than with advancing the artsor becoming culturally literate. They had brought to power withthem the businesslike grinding of the Protestant ethic, combinedwith the gross materialistic tastes of what Thorstein Veblen wouldlater dub “conspicuous consumption.” In response, according toGraña, the self-styled bohemians of France in the early to mid-1800s
created an ideology that valorized the aesthetic, challenged tradi-
tional social values, and espoused a distaste for material things. Itwas a powerful and enduring brew—and a direct assault on thebourgeois weltanschauung. Graña, who, by the way, was quite crit-ical of bohemianism, noted, “The industrious man who shoulderedhis way into the leadership of modern society threatened all threeideals of intellectual aristocracy—the heroic, the formal, and theintrospective.” And he added, “By making new and unexpected de-mands on human vitality, modern pragmatism was also likely toundermine man’s total sensitivity, his emotional free play, and thatcapacity for physical pleasure which in the past had represented ameans both of biological and of aesthetic fulﬁllment.”
5
In the bohemian subculture of Paris—and in its later American
counterpart, the café society of Greenwich Village that sprang upin the early 1900s—Marxists, anarchists, and labor radicals rubbedshoulders with artists and writers.
6All of them had a common ad-
versary, the bourgeois juggernaut. But in Graña’s view, the essenceof bohemianism was apolitical. The real enemy was not the op-pressive capitalist economic order but the prevailing culture’s sup-pression of key elements of the human spirit. Near the end of his162 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

book, Graña notes that the twentieth-century poet and novelist
D. H. Lawrence was equally disenchanted with Western-style cap-italism and Russian-style communism: “Lawrence,” he writes, “saidthat all of modern society was ‘a steady sort of Bolshevism; justkilling the human thing and worshiping the mechanical thing.’”
7
The bohemians not only valued creativity but were responsible
for a vast and substantial outpouring of it: paintings in a successionof new styles, which saw the world in radically diﬀerent ways, anda ﬂood tide of novels and poetry depicting the struggles of modernmen and women in their search for identity, love, and meaning—from Madame Bovary to J. Alfred Prufrock, Lady Chatterley, andDean Moriarty.
Bewailers of Bohemianism
A far-seeing thinker who inﬂuenced my own thinking in powerfulways, Daniel Bell liked to describe himself as a social conservativeand an economic liberal. His book The Coming of Post-Industrial
Society put a label on our times that has stuck to the present day.
8
He wrote in another of his books, The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism, “Modern culture is deﬁned by this extraordinary free-
dom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and everystyle it comes upon. Such freedom comes from the fact that theaxial principle of modern culture is the expression and remakingof the ‘self ’ in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulﬁllment.”
9
Note that he put the word “self ” in ironic quotation marks. Notonly were our modern-day bohemians narcissistic,
10according to
Bell, they were also childish and unoriginal; he dubbed theirlifestyle “pop hedonism” and said the counterculture amountedto little more than a “children’s crusade.” Worse yet, he added,capitalism had brought this upon itself. “In brief not work but the163 THE BIG MORPH

‘life style’ became the source of satisfaction and the criterion for
desirable behavior,” he wrote. “What has happened in society inthe last ﬁfty years—as a result of the erosion of the religious ethicand the increase in discretionary income— is that culture has taken
the initiative in promoting change, and the economy has been geared
to meeting these new wants.”
11
But is that necessarily a bad thing? Isn’t a free-market economy
supposed to be geared to meeting our wants? It’s bad, says Bell, becausethe economy is what supports all the other activity, and the economywill not work well if its ethical bedrock is undermined: “When theProtestant ethic was sundered from bourgeois society, only the he-donism remained, and the capitalist system lost its transcendentalethic,” he noted. “The cultural, if not moral, justiﬁcation of capitalismhas become hedonism, the idea of pleasure as a way of life.”
12
The great error in this line of thinking is that it persists in see-
ing work and life, or the economy and the culture, as separatespheres with distinct value systems that should be allowed to in-teract only in certain prescribed ways. David Brooks recognizedthe emerging synthesis between these two spheres and chronicledtheir melding into a distinct new class. In his book Bobos in Par-adise, he even gave its avatars a catchy handle—Bobos—short forbourgeoisie-bohemians.
13“It used to be pretty easy to distinguish
between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemiancounter culture,” he wrote. “The bourgeois worked for corporations,wore gray and went to church. The bohemians were artists and in-tellectuals. Bohemians championed the values of the liberated 1960s;the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s. But nowthe bohemian and the bourgeois are all mixed up. It is hard to tellan espresso-sipping professor from a cappuccino-gulping banker.”
14
Brooks traces the rise of the meritocratic ethic and diversity in
the new Bobo world and describes how student populations on IvyLeague campuses changed after World War II, from predominately164 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

upper-class WASPs to a mix of ethnicities and economic back-
grounds. Much of the book, however, is not sociology so much asit is satire. Brooks takes us on a detailed tour of the lifestyles andconsumption habits of this curious new class. Bobos buy food atupscale grocery stores like Whole Foods, furnish their homes atPottery Barn and Restoration Hardware, and wear clothing fromBanana Republic and J. Crew, or if they are a little edgier or a littlemore aﬄuent, perhaps Gucci or Helmut Lang.
Although his observations of their visible quirks and aﬀectations
are acute and witty, Brooks neglects the deep economic shifts thatshaped his Bobos and made them possible. In his portrayal, theyare mostly aging baby boomers—bourgeoisie in bohemian clothing.When he does follow them to work, he fastens mostly on the trap-pings of the new workplace, missing the ways in which the contentand meaning of work has become fundamentally diﬀerent to thepeople at the heart of this synthesis. But even if he fails to recognizeit himself, he has put his ﬁnger on something that runs far deeperthan the lifestyle trends he so adeptly lampoons.
In “The Organization Kid,”
15an April 2001 article in The Atlantic,
Brooks added a grim coda to Bobos in Paradise. To see what kindsof children the Bobos had been rearing, he visited students atPrinceton and found them to be grimly workaholic, obsessively ca-reer conscious, and deferential to any authority that will help themget ahead—a reversion to Whyte’s organization man of the 1950s.His message is subtle but unmistakeable: the crazy 1960s are over;it’s back to business as usual. The only diﬀerence is that these kidsare deader inside than their businessmen grandparents ever were.Not only don’t they have much fun, they have no uplifting senseof purpose or higher calling; they are driven by personal achieve-ment merely for its own sake—or more precisely, for their own
sake. These kids, writes Brooks, are “missing [the] conceptions ofcharacter and virtue”; they’ve been reared in “a country that has165 THE BIG MORPH

lost, in its frenetic seeking after happiness and success, the language
of sin and character-building.”16The sole legacy of the 1960s was
not only transitory and skin deep, but profoundly destructive.
I can’t imagine how Brooks came to such conclusions. Perhaps
he didn’t stay up late enough to see what Princeton students do afterpeople their parents’ ages have gone to bed. He should have lookedat my students. They work hard, but they also play hard. And theydo not see any conﬂict between organization, discipline, and pleasure—all of which reﬂect one element or another of the creativeethos. Or perhaps the problem is that Brooks, in the same fusty spiritas Daniel Bell before him, is intent on drilling home the saw thatthe bohemianism of the 1960s was an adopted child that neveramounted to much—and one that we should never have taken intoour house.
17
Co-Opting Cool
Critics at the liberal end of the spectrum, ironically, have also foundthe bohemian-bourgeois synthesis to be soul destroying, but in adiﬀerent way. “Hip is how business understands itself,” writes thepolitical and cultural critic Thomas Frank, suggesting that the riseof new alternative cultures is just another feature of capitalism.There is no counterculture anymore—if there ever really was.
18
In Frank’s baleful view, the word counterculture is itself a mis-
nomer. The counterculture was—and is—just popular culture, andpopular culture is a ticket to sell things. In his best-selling booksOne Market Under God and The Commodiﬁcation of Cool, Frank
dolefully chronicled capitalism’s co-optation of counterculturesymbols in an onslaught of hip new products and advertisingthemes that target consumers who want to associate themselveswith youth and alternative culture.
19166 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

The trends Frank described have continued apace over the past
decade. The music of Nick Drake, for example, an underground
jazz-rock cult hero, has been co-opted to sell Volkswagens. Gen-erations of edgy new musicians, from 1960s bands to punks to reg-gae and hip-hop artists, have had their creative integritycompromised and their hard-edged political messages blunted bymajor labels that turned them into mass-market commodities—anew kind of Muzak that’s played in workplaces to make people feelalternative and even subversive, when all that they’re really doingis grinding away at a desk in Babylon.
But the liberal scolds are just as oﬀ-key as the conservatives. Mil-
lions of people would never have gotten to hear any number of ﬁnemusicians, either recorded or in concert, had they not been massmarketed. And let’s not forget that many of these musicians want
to be mass-marketed. The hip-hop artists who wear dollar signs ongold chains around their necks and chant lyrics about money andﬁne cars aren’t indulging in poetic irony. They really do want a littleof your cash.
Mass marketing doesn’t necessarily compromise artistic integrity,
either. Bob Dylan ﬁrst hit it big as a folk and Southern-style bluesballadeer in the traditional vein, armed only with an acoustic guitarand harmonica. Then came the infamous 1966 concert in Manches-ter, England, when he took to the stage with an electric guitar androck-style backup band. People in the audience were outraged. Oneman memorably screamed “Judas!” at the top of his lungs. ButDylan wasn’t selling out. On the contrary: he had already built alucrative global brand on the basis of the traditional style. Notonly was he taking an artistic risk, he was taking a bit of a commer-
cial risk in departing from a proven and still viable formula. In-
deed, the Manchester concert is now regarded as a seminal eventin contemporary music. One critic claims that the torrent of soundthat Dylan and his mates unleashed that night amounted to a167 THE BIG MORPH

proto-version of punk rock—“ten years before Johnny Rotten” and
“rather better played.”20
Dylan, of course, went on to experiment again and again, with
forays into the Nashville-style country sound, Christian rock, andnumerous other subgenres. Artistic integrity doesn’t mean doingonly the things you’ve done before. The security that comes fromhitting it big can make it easier for artists to conduct experiments,to take greater artistic risks. Consider The Beatles and Sergeant Pep-
per;Peter Gabriel’s excursions into Third World music; Sting’s for-
ays into the exotic: none of them would have been widely heardhad they not already been wildly successful.
As for the fear that mass marketing kills the artist’s political mes-
sage: reports of that death have been greatly exaggerated. Althoughthere are exceptions, of course, most cultural products have littlepolitical content to begin with. Many cultural theorists like toframe cultural forms such as graﬃti and rap as political move-ments, expressing the voices of the oppressed. This does a disserviceto both politics and art. True political movements, from the civilrights movement to the grassroots organizing of the right wing, areserious enterprises, laboriously put together and self-consciouslydirected to speciﬁc political ends. These movements sometimesadopt art forms, but they are not generated by them. Meanwhile,most good graﬃti artists and rappers are like good artists of anykind. They mainly want to hone their skills and express themselves.They spend a lot of time practicing, as you may know if you livenear any of them. If they can make money in the process, that’swonderful.
A ﬁnal argument, heard from both the right and the left, is that
the mass marketing of alternative culture produces an undesirableleveling eﬀect, dragging high art down to the gutter and elevatinglow or gross art to a stature it doesn’t deserve. This complaint relieson the always questionable assumption that art comes in “high”168 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

and “low” varieties to begin with. As the writer John Seabrook ar-
gued a decade ago, it is all really just “NoBrow.”21In reality, the rise
of the Creative Economy is drawing the spheres of innovation (tech-nological creativity), business (economic creativity), and culture(artistic and cultural creativity) into one another, in more intimateand more powerful combinations than ever.
The Real Legacy of the 1960s
Conservative scholars exulted and liberal scholars lamented whenthe fruits of the so-called 1960s revolution seemed to be witheringduring the 1980s. Not only were many of the landmark legislativemeasures of the era rolled back by the Reagan and Bush adminis-trations, but its bohemian cultural leaders were fading into obscu-rity. Timothy Leary had become a sideshow attraction on the lecturecircuit. His former colleague Baba Ram Dass (né Richard Alpert)was oﬀ somewhere chanting at an ashram. Abbie Hoﬀman andRichard Brautigan died; Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin,and many others were long in their graves. For a brief while, theold corporate system based on the Protestant work ethic seemedto be ﬁrmly back in the driver’s seat, with the surviving bohemiansof the Woodstock generation relegated to cranking out tribute al-bums. The barbarians having been beaten back from the gates, wecould all resume business as usual.
It didn’t turn out that way. What happened instead was neither
1960s nor 1980s, neither bourgeois nor bohemian, but the openingof a path to something new. The great cultural watershed of the1960s, as it turned out, was not Woodstock, but something thathad evolved at the other end of the continent. It was Silicon Valley.This place in the very heart of the San Francisco Bay area becamethe proving ground for the new ethos of creativity. If work could169 THE BIG MORPH

be made more aesthetic and experiential; if it could be spiritual and
useful in the poetic sense rather than in the duty-bound sense; ifthe organizational strictures and rigidities of the old system couldbe transcended; and if bohemian values like individuality—whichalso happens to be a tried-and-true all-American value—could bebrought to the workplace, then we could move beyond the old cat-egories. And though the Valley itself has now mushroomed intosomething quite diﬀerent than it was, the ethos that it pioneeredhas spread and endured, and continues to permeate our society. Itdoes so because, unlike Woodstock or Haight-Ashbury—andequally unlike the Beat subculture of the 1950s or the bohemiancafé society of Paris, from Baudelaire to Gertrude Stein—it has awide and sustainable economic base. It engages the world of workand the world of life and weaves them together, profoundly chang-ing both.
The 1960s are too easily stereotyped. They were not simple times,
nor was what happened then merely a generational phenomenon.Many diverse movements and schools of thought—some of whichhad been building for decades and were spearheaded by people alot older than the baby boomers, such as Martin Luther King Jr.and Betty Friedan—came to the fore during a period of social fer-ment that actually stretched from the mid-1950s, with the launchingof a serious civil rights movement in the South, well into the 1970s.One common thread, however, is that few of these movementssought to fundamentally transform the world of work and eco-nomics. The civil rights movement and the women’s movementaﬀected the world of work mainly by crusading for equal workplacerights and treatment for certain groups of people. Ringing speechesoften called for a fundamental transformation of the economic sys-tem, but this never quite made it to the top of the practical agenda.Similarly, the peace movement assailed the “military–industrialcomplex” that former president Dwight Eisenhower had famously170 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

warned of, but mainly aimed to lessen its inﬂuence, not to change
the system fundamentally. Pure socialism never gained much of afoothold in the United States, even in the years of the Great De-pression. And though it eventually proved quite successful in push-ing its agenda, organized labor concerned itself mostly with thebalance of power in the workplace. Largely through union eﬀortsover many decades, rank-and-ﬁle working people gained higherpay, shorter hours, better beneﬁts and working conditions, andsuch rights as collective bargaining and the power to contest an in-dividual ﬁring. But these powers and rights were all within the
framework of the existing economic system.
The bohemian counterculture of the San Francisco Bay Area—
which embraced phenomena as diverse as the Beat poets of the1950s, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the early 1960s,and the Summer of Love in 1966—included a wide spectrum ofviews on work and economics. Some in the hippie milieu preferredto opt out of the world of work altogether, perhaps living by theirwits or the generosity of friends or parents. Some sought to rob“the system,” as described how-to style in Abbie Hoﬀman’s Steal
This Book. For many, the strategy was to grudgingly coexist with
the system. Get a job, even a haircut if you must; earn the moneyyou need and do what you have to do, but no more.
There were various attempts to create alternative economic sys-
tems: farm-based communes, often in remote rural areas; urbanexperiments like that of the Diggers in San Francisco. Drawingtheir name from a seventeenth-century communal experiment inEngland, the Diggers promoted the building of a system within thesystem, based on a literally “free” market. Money was not to be used,nor were any barter accounts to be kept. If you worked at the freeclinic, you would give your services without charge, but you couldalso take any goods you wanted at the free stores, or have your carrepaired for free, and so forth. With both the need and the incentive171 THE BIG MORPH

to make money removed, ideally people would do what they were
truly moved to do—whether by the calling of their own muses orby a sense of service. The Diggers actually put parts of their systeminto eﬀect but never achieved the critical mass to sustain it in themidst of a larger system running by quite diﬀerent rules.
And so it was with many other economic experiments of the time.
As interesting as some of them were, they were small and highlylocalized. Most folded after a few years; they became footnotes tothe history of the period. Still, some common bohemian themesthat ﬁred the experiments persisted, including a general dislike oflarge organizations and bureaucracy. Many so-called 1960s radicals,like earlier bohemians before them, found the existing capitalistsystem to be oppressive and dehumanizing, regardless of how thebalance of power played out. The increase of human happinessand well-being, they believed, should be the explicit goal of bothwork itself and its products—not the incidental side eﬀects of aninvisible hand.
The Bay Area in the late 1960s and 1970s was full of eccentric
technology types from Berkeley and Stanford. The broad valleysouth of San Francisco, midway between Haight-Ashbury and hip-pie havens like Monterey and Big Sur, was a natural gathering pointfor many of them. There were already a fair number of ﬁrms therethat would hire you without worrying much about your long hairand jeans, or your weird personal habits and beliefs. The older en-gineers who populated companies like Hewlett-Packard, FairchildSemiconductor, and Intel found it relatively easy to tolerate thisnew counterculture breed. Certainly, they were more open to idio-syncrasies of personal style than their East Coast corporate counter -parts. The engineering culture tends to be meritocratic—you arewhat you produce—and this was, after all, the West Coast, whereprevious generations had come to escape the traditional norms ofmore established society. And it so happened that just as the172 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

younger counterculture computer people were inﬁltrating the Val-
ley, a new dream was emerging. Computers were becoming bothmore powerful and more compact and aﬀordable. By the late 1960s,the massive mainframes had been joined by a new generation ofrefrigerator-sized or smaller minicomputers built by companieslike DEC. The next step, said the dream, would be computers thatanyone could own and create with. Most people still consideredthis a radical idea, even a silly or pointless one: who would buy sucha thing?
The entrepreneurs who pioneered the personal computer were
farther outside the corporate and cultural mainstream than is com-monly known. Lee Felsenstein, a proliﬁc inventor and the moderatorof the Valley’s legendary Homebrew Club, where early personal-computer buﬀs met, had been a writer for the radical paper The
Berkeley Barb.
22The club’s ﬁrst meeting occurred in March 1975,
when an anarchic cadre of thirty-two engineers, inventors, tinkerers,and programmers met in the Palo Alto garage of Frederick Moore—but only after Moore had spent the earlier part of the evening tack-ing up peace-activist notices on local bulletin boards and telephonepoles. Homebrew Club members, many with their own tenuouslyﬁnanced garage ﬁrms, traded ideas and designs without worryingoverly much about competitive considerations—a “hacker ethic”that would persist in the open-source software community andelsewhere. Many were associated with counterculture ventureslike the People’s Computer Company, a users’ collective that pub-lished a newspaper. IMSAI, one of the ﬁrst personal-computermakers in the Valley, was run by graduates of Werner Erhard’sest training, a San Francisco–based consciousness-raising and personal-improvement program.
When Steven Dompier, a hobbyist hacker, played a rendition of
the Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill” on an Altair computer he had labo-riously programmed, the members of the Homebrew Club gave173 THE BIG MORPH

him a rousing ovation. Early members Paul Allen and Bill Gates
had done some mischief hacking in their teens, exploiting theirability to ﬁnd bugs in mainframe systems. Others were phone hack-ers who tapped into the inner workings of the telephone system inthe 1960s and 1970s. John Draper had earned his nickname “Cap-tain Crunch” after he discovered that the tone produced by thewhistle prize in the cereal box could unlock AT&T’s long-distancesystem. In the old photos reproduced in Paul Freiberger andMichael Swaine’s book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the PersonalComputer, Steve Jobs and Steven Wozniak look like a couple of
1960s hippie-boppers who had refused to straighten up—which isexactly what they were. With their jeans and long scraggly hair,they wouldn’t have made it past the receptionist if they had triedto raise investment capital in New York, Chicago, or Pittsburgh.Yet in Silicon Valley, they and others like them found a warm re-ception. As Donald Valentine, one of the original venture capitalistsbehind Apple Computer, told me some years ago, he didn’t carewhat Steve Jobs looked like; the guy had an idea worth backing.
23
When Wozniak eventually left Apple “to pursue other interests,”he really did just that—he launched not another high-tech companybut the Woz Music Festival.
What set Silicon Valley apart was not just Stanford University
or the warm climate. It was open to and supportive of the creative,the diﬀerent, and the downright weird. The Valley integrated thosewho were offbeat; it didn’t ostracize or discourage them. And itsgrowth can only be understood in relation to the place that was afocal point of the Sixties Revolution—San Francisco. The samebasic pattern can be found in almost every other high-growth tech-nology region. Before these regions were high-tech hotspots, theywere places where creativity and eccentricity were accepted andcelebrated. Boston has always had Cambridge. Seattle was the homeof Jimi Hendrix and later Nirvana and Pearl Jam as well as Microsoft174 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

and Amazon. Austin was home to Willie Nelson and its fabulous
Sixth Street music scene long before Michael Dell ever set foot inhis University of Texas fraternity house. Before Silicon Alleyerupted, New York had Christopher Street, SoHo, and the East Vil-lage. All of these places were open, diverse, and culturally creativeﬁrst. Then they became technologically creative, birthing high-tech
ﬁrms and industries.
The tone of the Creative Economy was set. Bohemian values met
the Protestant work ethic head-on, and the two more than survivedthe collision. They morphed into a new work ethic—the creativeethos—steeped in the cultivation of creativity. Everyone from soft-ware developers to circuit designers could now work as creativepeople, coming and going virtually as they pleased, taking breaksto exercise, working to blaring rock music if they so desired. Em-ployees at Apple wore T-shirts that read “90 Hours a Week andLoving It,” and why not? Their work was fun to them, and besides,they were changing the world.
Not everything stayed as it was in those early days—nothing
ever does. Big ﬁrms like IBM and the Valley’s own Hewlett-Packardbelatedly entered the personal-computer market, of course, andsoon made their presence strongly felt. Silicon Valley turned intoa massively congested and high-priced suburban megalopolis.Nevertheless, the synthesis pioneered in those early days took rootand spread through many elements of our economy and society.It even gave us a new cultural role model.
Microsoft and Jimi Hendrix
American society has romanticized some of the most unlikely oc-cupations over the years. In the mid-1800s young men read TwoYears Before the Mast and dreamed of becoming lowly merchant175 THE BIG MORPH

seamen. Well into the 1900s, the heroes of thousands upon thou-
sands of books, plays, ﬁlms, and cigarette ads were those miserablewage slaves of the Western plains, the cowboys. Other occupationstraditionally have not fared so well. Through long centuries, fromShylock to Scrooge and Willy Loman , drama and literature have
portrayed the businessman as either hardhearted or heartsick. Andtell me this: how many well-known novels, ﬁlms, or plays that ap-peared before, say, 1980, can you think of in which the hero wasan engineer? Even in works of science ﬁction, the hero typicallywas the pilot who ﬂew the spaceship, not the engineer who designedit. The engineer was kept in the background because he was a geek.Engineers were useful people, of course, but they were not cool. Infact, they were the opposite of cool, the very deﬁnition of the ab-sence of cool. They had thick glasses and no sex lives. They told badjokes, wore bad clothes, and toted slide rules in holsters. Theyworked for businessmen, for heaven’s sake.
Now the picture has been reversed. Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, and
others have inserted the idea of the entrepreneur into the fabric of
popular mythology. They created a powerful new identity that brokewith the old images of the robber baron and the organization man.They became celebrities in the truest sense of the term. They hobnobwith movie stars, invite rock stars to play at their parties, and appearon late-night TV talk shows; Jobs’s untimely death inspired someof the same frantic mourning as Elvis’s, JKF Jr.’s, or Princess Di’s.
Consider Paul Allen, one of the world’s richest men. Setting aside
his accomplishments at Microsoft, which he cofounded, his realestate interests, and the sports teams he owns, he has donated mil-lions to the search for intelligent life in the universe and is the cre-ator of Seattle’s Experience Music Project, an interactive musicmuseum designed by Frank Gehry, which was initially created asa tribute to Seattle native Jimi Hendrix but has now expanded toencompass genres from jazz and blues to hip-hop.
24Consider the176 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

implications. Unlike powerful plutocrats of the past, Allen did not
build an opera house or a library or a high-culture museum. Hebuilt a museum that celebrates the art of a man who taunted anddisdained white-collar conservatives; who deﬁed them to point“their plastic ﬁnger at me” and vowed to “wave my freak ﬂag high.”
25
Other factors helped change the image of the engineer. A key
early development was the massive infusion of technology intopopular music—a blending of technological and artistic creativity.Les Paul, a tinkerer and inventor as well as a master musician,launched the process in the 1940s when he began producing un-earthly sounds with his revolutionary solid-body electric guitar.He also pioneered studio techniques such as overdubbing andmulti track recording. Then came inventor-entrepreneurs likeRobert Moog and Raymond Kurzweil with the synthesizer, andAmar Bose and Henry Kloss with their high-ﬁdelity sound equip-ment. All became cult ﬁgures in the music world. So did the techno-wizards who put together the light shows for concerts in the 1960sand worked ever-greater magic with recorded tracks in the studios.Many of the most famous musicians of the 1960s, from the Beatlesto Hendrix, experimented with new sounds and recording techniquesin state-of-the-art studios built expressly for such experiments.
Another key development, of course, was the growth of comput-
ing. Here was a technology with double-feature appeal to the pop-ular imagination. The big supercomputers had been perceived asremote and mysterious, even dangerous, like rockets or H-bombs,whereas personal computers were ubiquitous and charming, likeTV. But unlike TV, these computers and their software kept chang-ing and metamorphosing before our eyes, right there on our desks.And it was maverick engineers who were working the miracles,members of a new and awesome fellowship of the elect. They wrotecode—a secret language!—and with it, they could do just aboutanything: start a company, make art, play games. Better still, you,177 THE BIG MORPH

too, could join them. Exactly as in rock music, you could hack away
in your basement or garage with a couple of friends and dream ofhitting it big.
So today we have the engineer as pop-culture hero. The very word
geek, which Webster’s dictionary deﬁnes as “a person often of an
intellectual bent who is disliked,” has lost its pejorative connotation,becoming a term of endearment and status. One of the hottest socialevents in Pittsburgh in the late 1990s was a bimonthly Geek Nite,packing upward of ﬁve hundred people into a local microbrewery.The event began drawing so many hangers-on and groupies, notto mention headhunters and service providers, that its organizerscreated a more exclusive event, Shadow Geek Nite, for the engi-neers, programmers, and other real geeks who wished to party inpeace. As cyberpunk novels and ﬁlms like Neuromancer and The
Matrix glamorized cyberculture, computer nerds found their way
into mainstream ﬁction as well. In Richard Powers’s acclaimed2000 novel Plowing the Dark, the heroes are Stevie, an ex-poet who
ﬁnds the essence of poetry in computer code, and Adie, a disillu-sioned painter whose passion for art is rekindled when she discoverscomputer graphics. Artists become geeks and reconnect with theirartistic creativity through technology: such a plot line would havebeen unthinkable just a few years before.
26Jon Katz’s 2000 bestseller
Geeks celebrated the term in its very title.27More recently, Lisbeth
Salander, the heroine of Stieg Larsson’s best-selling The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo, is a hacker with a profoundly antisocial but
highly charismatic and sexy personality.
Cultural icons in past eras tended to fall into two general types.
The ﬁrst was the romantic, rebellious outsider. Included here werethe sailors and cowboys of the 1800s—lowly blue-collar types whoeschewed the common workaday world to roam the wide sea orthe Great Plains—as well as twentieth-century drifters like the char-acters played by Marlene Dietrich, Humphrey Bogart, and James178 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Dean. In real life, these icons were the bohemian artists and writers
themselves, from Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent van Gogh to thepunk rockers: rebels, with or without causes, but questing againstthe grain. The other type was the straight-arrow good guy, such asthe young heroes of factory-produced Young Adult series, like theHardy Boys and Nancy Drew; many of the movie characters playedby Jimmy Stewart; the Cleaver family on TV’s Leave It to Beaver;
and real-life culture heroes such as Eisenhower. These heroes werebuilders and problem solvers: exemplars and upholders of the Pro-testant ethic, welcome in any living room or boardroom. And then,in a unique and unprecedented role, came the geek. Neither outsidernor insider, bohemian nor bourgeois, the geek is simply a techno-logically creative person.
The New Mainstream
Whether people deﬁne themselves as geeks or not, they are comingto see themselves as having deeply fused identities. This was broughthome to me rather forcefully as I was working on this book, whenI noticed that the Creative Class people I was interviewing, partic-ularly the younger ones, did not like to be called Bobos—and thatthey bridled at the suggestion that they were in any way bohemian.Many of them hated the word: some urged me to ﬁnd another oneto use in the book.
At ﬁrst I thought the problem was that bohemian sounded passé
to them, conjuring up old images of beatniks with bongos orspaced-out hippies strumming acoustic guitars. Perhaps theywanted something more up-to-date, from an argot that belongedto their own generation. But that wasn’t it. They disliked terms likealternative, too—and thus the real issue became clear. Bohemiansare alienated people, living in the culture but not of it, and these179 THE BIG MORPH

people didn’t see themselves that way at all—not even the immigrants
who really were aliens. What they did like, however, was the notion
that in whatever they did, they could be thought to be creative.
Are they cutting-edge? Deﬁnitely. On top of it, open to new ideas
and to neglected old ones, too? Yes. Youthfully inventive and attimes youthfully rebellious, walking into a situation and wonderingwhy it has to be that way? Absolutely. At a fall 2001 meeting inProvidence, Rhode Island, organized to help the city become moreof a Creative Class center, one young man stood up in front ofthe city’s leadership and said: “You say you want us here so long
as we don’t cause ‘trouble.’ It’s our very nature to ask tough ques-tions; so by our very nature, we’re troublemakers.”
28The point is
that these people want to contribute; they want to be heard. Theyare not drifters in our midst, nor by any means are they barbariansat the gates. They see no need to overthrow the established orderwhen they will soon be joining their older counterparts at eventslike the Austin 360 Summit. They will be helping society run, andrun on an even more powerful new work ethic—not on some nitro-burning strain of pure hedonism or narcissism.
The people we’re seeing today are neither Baudelaire nor Babbitt.
The synthesis that they are living is not just a matter of sticking abohemian lifestyle onto an organization-man value set, like a bikerack on the back of a chrome-bumpered Country Squire stationwagon. The melding has become so deep that the old componentsare no longer recognizable; the old categories no longer apply. Thepeople of the Big Morph see themselves simply as creative peoplewith creative values, working in increasingly creative workplaces,living essentially creative lifestyles. And, in this sense, they representa new mainstream—and they are setting the norms and pace formuch of society.180 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

PART FOUR
COMMUNITY

CHAPTER 10
Place Matters
One ﬁne spring day around the turn of the millennium, I
was taking a stroll across the campus of Carnegie Mellon
University when I came upon a table surrounded by young
people, chatting and enjoying the spectacular weather. Several werewearing identical blue T-shirts with “Trilogy@CMU” printed acrossthem, Trilogy being an Austin-based software company that oftenrecruited our top students. I walked over to the table. “Are you guyshere to recruit?” I asked. “No, absolutely not,” they answered, seem-ing taken aback that I would even ask. “We’re not recruiters. We’rejust hangin’ out, playing a little Frisbee with our friends.” How in-teresting, I thought. They’ve come all the way from Austin to Pitts-burgh on a workday, just to hang out with some new friends.
I noticed one member of the group sitting slouched over on the
grass, dressed in a tank top. This young man, an obvious slacker,had spiked multicolored hair, full-body tattoos, and multiple pierc-ings in his ears. “So what’s your story?” I asked. “Hey, man,” he an-swered. “I just signed on with these guys.” As I would later learn,he had inked the highest-paying deal of any graduating student inthe history of his department, right at that table on the grass, withthe recruiters who do not “recruit,” because, of course, that would
183

be pushy and not cool. What a change from my own college days,
when students would put on their dressiest clothes and carefullyhide any counterculture symptoms, in order to show recruiters thatthey could ﬁt in. Here, the company was trying to ﬁt in with the stu-dents. Trilogy had wined and dined this young man over margaritasin Pittsburgh and ﬂown him to Austin for private parties at hipnightspots and aboard company boats. When I called the recruitersto ask why, they answered, “That’s easy. We wanted him becausehe’s a rock star.” Moreover, “when big East Coast companies trekdown here to see who is working on their project, we’ll wheel himout”—blowing the customers’ minds with his skill and coolness.
So it went in the heady days of the dot-com boom. But what
struck me most forcibly at the time was the spectacle of yet anothertalented young person leaving Pittsburgh. That was exactly theproblem that had started me on this line of research in the ﬁrstplace. Pittsburgh was ﬁlled with impressive assets, not least of themCarnegie Mellon where I taught for nearly two decades, one of theworld’s leading centers for information technology research. Closeby is the University of Pittsburgh, with its world-class medical cen-ter. The city has three major sports franchises, renowned museumsand cultural venues, a spectacular network of urban parks, remark-able industrial-age architecture, and truly great urban neighbor-hoods with an abundance of charming yet aﬀordable housing. Itis a friendly city, deﬁned by strong communities and a strong senseof pride. But the best and brightest products of its universities wereleaving as soon as they graduated.
With all of this whirring in the back of my brain, I asked the
young man with the spiked hair why he was decamping to a smallercity in the middle of Texas, a place with no sports teams, museums,or high-art cultural amenities that were comparable to Pittsburgh’s.
The company is excellent, he told me. It has terriﬁc people and thework is challenging. But this was the clincher: “It’s in Austin!” 184 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

“Why is that good?” I asked. There are lots of young people, he
explained, and a tremendous amount to do, a thriving music scene,
ethnic and cultural diversity, fabulous outdoor recreation, and greatnightlife. That’s what mattered—not the symphony or the opera,which he enjoyed but would not feel comfortable attending. What’smore, Austin was aﬀordable, unlike Silicon Valley, another placethat oﬀered the kind of work he desired. (He was right: at the time,Austin ranked as the fourth-most-aﬀordable place for information-technology workers like him. Its pay diﬀerential was more than$18,000 over the San Francisco Bay area when cost-of-living diﬀer-ences were taken into account.)
1
“I can have a life in Austin,” he concluded, not merely a job.
When I asked him about Pittsburgh, where he had chosen to go tocollege, he replied that he had lived in the city for four years andknew it well. Although he had several good oﬀers from Pittsburghhigh-tech ﬁrms, the city lacked the lifestyle options, cultural diver-sity, and tolerant attitude that would make it attractive as a placeto live. As he summed it up, “How would I ﬁt in here?”
He has since gone on to quite a career, with stops at the Savannah
College of Art & Design before heading back to Austin, where heworks for Frog Designs, and founded the nonproﬁt Austin Centerfor Design.
His answer helped me frame the questions that formed the very
heart of his book: How do we decide where to live and work? Whatreally matters to us in making this kind of life decision? How hasthis changed—and why?
Most economists would say that we move in pursuit of jobs and
ﬁnancial rewards. But jobs are not the whole story. People balancea host of other considerations when deciding where to work andlive. What we want today is diﬀerent from what our parents wanted,and from what many of us once thought we wanted. And thoughthe young man with the spiked hair and impressive tattoos is not185 PLACE MATTERS

representative of everyone in the Creative Class, my research shows
that the kinds of things that he liked about Austin are what manyof his fellow creatives are looking for when they are choosing aplace to live.
Creative people do not move for traditional reasons. The physical
attractions that most cities focus on building—sports stadiums,freeways, urban malls, and tourism-and-entertainment districtsthat resemble theme parks—are irrelevant, insuﬃcient, or actuallyunattractive to them. What creatives look for are abundant high-quality amenities and experiences, an openness to diversity of allkinds, and above all else the opportunity to validate their identitiesas creative people. The communities that creatives are attractedto do not thrive for traditional economic reasons, such as accessto natural resources or proximity to major transportation routes.Nor is their economic success tied to tax breaks and other incentivesdesigned to lure businesses. A big part of their success stems fromthe fact that they are places where creative people want to live. Thiscircumvents the age-old chicken-and-egg problem of what comesﬁrst, jobs or people. The answer is simple: it is not either-or, butboth. Creative centers provide the integrated ecosystem or habitatwhere all forms of creativity—artistic and cultural, technologicaland economic—can take root and ﬂourish.
This next section of the book will summarize my original research
on the importance of place that informed the 2002 edition of thisbook, updating it with research that my team and I have conductedsince. But before I get to the factors and motivations that shape thelocation decisions of the Creative Class, it’s important to considerwhy, in spite of the many and varied predictions about how glob-alization and technology would make location irrelevant, place hasnot only endured but become more important.
Not that there is anything like a consensus on the issue—the de-
bate over the role of place in our economy and society continues186 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

full force. Perhaps the greatest of all the New Economy myths is
that “geography is dead.” Thanks to advances in technology, thethinking goes, the global playing ﬁeld has been leveled; all of us arepotential players, no matter who we are or where we live. “Whenthe world is ﬂat,” as Thomas Friedman famously put it, “you caninnovate without having to emigrate.”
2
It’s not a new idea. Since the advent of the telegraph and the tele-
phone, the automobile and the airplane, commentators have re-marked on the diminishing importance of place. In 1995, The
Economist proclaimed The Death of Distance on its cover. “Thanks
to technology and competition in telecoms,” journalist FrancesCairncross prognosticated, “distance will soon be no object.” Fouryears later, the same magazine and author announced the Conquestof Location: “The wireless revolution is ending the dictatorship ofplace,” Cairncross declared.
3
My own research has convinced me that this “end of place” view
is unequivocally wrong. The most obvious challenge to the ﬂat-world hypothesis is the explosive growth of cities and urban areasworldwide. The share of the world’s population living in urban areasincreased from just 3 percent in 1800 to 14 percent in 1900. By 1950,it had reached 30 percent. Today, this number stands at more than50 percent, and in the advanced countries, cities and metros accountfor some three-fourths of the population. Cities are projected togrow at nearly double the rate of the rest of the world. More andmore people are clustering in urban areas—and there’s no evidenceto suggest that this trend will slow down anytime soon. In “TheWorld Is Spiky,” an essay I published in The Atlantic in October
2005, and in my book Who’s Your City? I presented detailed maps
of light emissions, captured in satellite photographs, that clearly re-vealed the densely populated mega-regions that drive the world’seconomies, such as the Boston-Washington corridor (which pro-duces more than $2 trillion in output), greater Tokyo ($2.5 trillion),187 PLACE MATTERS

and Europe’s Amsterdam-Brussels-Antwerp ($1.5 trillion). The
world is anything but ﬂat and its spikes are getting higher and higher.At the same time, its valleys—the dark places on the maps that boastlittle, if any, economic activity—are mostly languishing.
4
The reality is that globalization has two sides. The ﬁrst and more
obvious one is the geographic dispersion of routine economic func-tions such as straightforward manufacturing or service work (forexample, making or answering telephone calls). The second, less ob-vious side to globalization is the tendency for higher-level economicactivities such as innovation, design, ﬁnance, and media to clusterin a relatively small number of locations. Thinkers like Friedmanfocus on the ways that globalization spreads out economic activity(its centrifugal force, so to speak), missing the reality of this clus-tering (the centripedal force). Michael Porter, a Harvard BusinessSchool professor and expert on competitive strategy, dubs thisthe “location paradox.” “Location still matters,” he told Business-
Week in August 2006. “The more things are mobile, the more de-
cisive location becomes.” “This point,” he added, “has tripped upa lot of really smart people.”
5The mistake they make is to see glob-
alization as an either-or proposition. It’s not. The key to our newglobal reality lies in understanding that the world is both ﬂat andspiky at the same time.
It all boils down to one simple fact: Place has replaced the indus-
trial corporation as the key economic and social organizing unitof our time. Cities have always been important engines of economicgrowth, but they are assuming an even greater importance in today’sknowledge-driven innovation economy, in which place-basedecosystems are critical to economic growth. Students of urban andregional growth have long pointed to the role of places as incubatorsof creativity, innovation, and new industries.
6We’ve known for a
while that the cities and metros that attract the most human capitalprosper. But brainpower alone only tells part of the story. Even morekey is the aptitude for marshaling and focusing all that raw intel-188 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

ligence that’s on tap. Cities are not just containers for smart people;
they are the enabling infrastructure where connections take place,networks are built, and innovative combinations are consummated.
Many local economies are characterized by clusters of like busi-
nesses. As the great nineteenth-century economist Alfred Marshallwas the first to notice, companies benefit from the “agglomera-tion” economies that come from locating near each other—frombeing a part of a tight network of suppliers, users, and customers.
7
Such clusters can be found in the automotive industry in Detroit,the theater and garment districts in New York, and of course inSilicon Valley for high tech. Farther afield are the maquiladoraelectronics and auto-parts districts in Mexico, the clusters of disk-drive manufacturers in Singapore and of flat-panel displays inJapan. Porter has identified clusters of insurance companies inHartford, casinos in Las Vegas, furniture manufacturing in HighPoint, North Carolina, and advanced imaging laboratories inRochester, New York. As he told the Clinton Global Initiative in thesummer of 2011: “There is no one US economy but a collectionof local economies.”
The question is no longer whether ﬁrms cluster, but why. Several
answers have been proposed. Some believe that clustering capturesthe eﬃciencies generated from tight linkages between ﬁrms. Otherssay it has to do with the positive beneﬁts of co-location, or whatthey call spillovers. Still others claim it is because certain kinds ofeconomic activities require face-to-face contact.
8All of these are
true, but they provide only partial explanations. The real force be-hind this clustering is people.
The Jane Jacobs Economy
The study of economic growth is an arcane field, and until re-cently, it paid scant attention to the importance of location. Going189 PLACE MATTERS

back to 1776, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations argued that
specialization, eﬃciency, and division of labor were the cornerstones
of modern economic growth. Later, David Ricardo’s theory of com-parative advantage argued that not just ﬁrms but countries gainadvantage by specializing in certain kinds of economic activity.
9
Economists and geographers have always acknowledged that eco-nomic growth is driven by and spreads from speciﬁc regions, cities,or even neighborhoods. The traditional view, however, is that placesgrow either because they are located on or near transportationroutes or because they have endowments of natural resources thatencourage ﬁrms to locate there. According to this conventionalview, the economic importance of a place is tied to the eﬃciencywith which companies can make things and do business there. Localgovernments employ this theory when they use tax breaks andhighway construction to attract businesses. But these cost-relatedfactors are no longer the key to success.
The great urban theorist Jane Jacobs
10was not an academically
trained economist, but her theory of growth made an indelible con-tribution to the ﬁeld. In her eyes, it was new types of work and newways of doing things that drove large-scale economic expansions.But while most economists located momentum in great companies,entrepreneurs, and nation-states, Jacobs identiﬁed great cities asthe prime motor force behind innovation. Companies come underextraordinary pressure to specialize—to do things more cheaply,eﬃciently, and uniformly. But cities are host to a wide variety oftalents and specialties, the broad diversity of which is a vital spurto creating things that are truly new. “The diversity, of whateverkind, that is generated by cities rests on the fact that in cities somany people are so close together, and among them contain somany diﬀerent tastes, skills, needs, supplies, and bees in their bon-nets,” Jacobs argued. When asked in 2001 what she hoped to be re-membered for, she responded:190 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

If I were to be remembered as a really important thinker of the century,
the most important thing I’ve contributed is, “What makes economic ex-pansion happen?” This is something that has puzzled people always. Ithink I’ve figured out what it is, and expansion and development are twodifferent things. Development is differentiation—new differentiation ofwhat already existed. Practically every new thing that happens is a dif-ferentiation of a previous thing. Just about everything—from a new shoesole to changes in legal codes—all of those things are differentiations.Expansion is an actual growth in size or volume of activity. That is a dif-ferent thing.
11
When the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas went
back to Jane Jacobs’s early writings, he put cities and places front
and center. “I will be following very closely the lead of Jane Jacobs,whose remarkable book, The Economy of Cities, seems to me mainly
and convincingly concerned (although she does not use this termi-nology) with the external eﬀects of human capital,” he wrote. Build-ing on Jacobs’s fundamental contribution, Lucas identiﬁed themultiplier eﬀects that stem from talent-clustering as the primarydeterminants of economic growth. Lucas contends that cities wouldbe economically unfeasible if not for the productivity eﬀects thatare associated with endowments of human capital, what he called“Jane Jacobs externalities”:
If we postulate only the usual list of economic forces, cities should ﬂy apart.
The theory of production contains nothing to hold a city together. A cityis simply a collection of factors of production—capital, people and land—and land is always far cheaper outside cities than inside. . . . It seems to methat the “force” we need to postulate to account for the central role of citiesin economic life is of exactly the same character as the “external humancapital.” . . . What can people be paying Manhattan or downtown Chicagorents for, if not for being near other people?
12191 PLACE MATTERS

Labor, capital, and technical knowledge are all well and good, he
allowed, but none of those would amount to anything signiﬁcant if
people could not combine their talents, ideas, and energy in realplaces. The music industry provides a prime example. Musiciansdon’t require a lot of equipment or capital; using the computer andthe Internet, they can make and record music virtually anywhere theywant. Every town and city needs at least some musicians—if not tomake records, then to give piano lessons and provide entertainmentin night spots and at weddings. The music business and musicians,to use Lucas’s language, have every reason to ﬂy apart. But they don’t.In fact they have become more and more concentrated.
My colleagues and I have tracked the locations of musicians and
musical groups in the United States, using data from a wide rangeof sources.
13In 1970, despite its status as the capital of country and
western, Nashville was not even among the top ﬁve regions for themusic business. But by 2004, only New York and Los Angeles hadmore musicians and music businesses. In fact, Nashville—whichhad been busily expanding its reach to many other genres, particularlyrock and pop—accounted for almost all of the industry’s growth dur-ing those thirty-four years. Today, it is home to much of the world’sbest studio talent and has eclipsed even New York and LA as the go-to place for music writing, recording, and publishing.
Just as high-tech companies trek to Silicon Valley, a great deal
of top musical talent eventually ends up in Nashville’s orbit. In2005, one of the most signiﬁcant rock musicians of the past decade,Jack White, the founder of the White Stripes, relocated his newestband and recording project, The Raconteurs, from Detroit toNashville. White had produced and performed on Loretta Lynn’shighly regarded album Van Lear Rose, which was recorded inNashville. Impressed by what he saw, he bought a house there.None of the other musicians in The Raconteurs are originallyfrom Nashville, either. White and Brendan Benson are from De-
troit; the drummer, Patrick Keeler, and bass player Jack Lawrence192 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

had been members of a Cincinnati band, The Greenhornes. When
asked why he relocated, White said that Detroit’s scene had be-come too negative and confining, that people who were once hisfriends and associates had become jealous of The White Stripes’s
success. Nashville was diﬀerent, he said: it was more professional,less confrontational, less melodramatic. Like Silicon Valley, it wasa place where the best and the brightest could collaborate with othertop talent and make the most of its world-class infrastructure.
When talented and creative people come together, the multiplying
eﬀect is exponential; the end result is much more than the sum ofthe parts. Clustering makes each of us more productive—and ourcollective creativity and economic wealth grow accordingly.
Human Capital City
Human capital theory has been the dominant theory of regionalgrowth over the past decade or so. The person most associated withit is Harvard professor Edward Glaeser, whose 2011 book Triumphof the City made an eloquent case for the proposition that what
powers cities is not their great buildings, companies, or physicalinfrastructure but the concentrations of skilled and talented peoplethey house.
14Glaeser and other proponents of human capital theory
argue that regional growth is best achieved by protecting and prop-agating local endowments of highly educated, productive people.
There is more than anecdotal evidence to back this up. Cross-na-tional studies of economic growth ﬁnd a clear connection betweenthe economic success of nations and their human capital, as mea-sured by the level of education. And it is human capital clustersthat lie behind the regional agglomerations of ﬁrms.
15Firms con-
centrate to reap the advantages that stem from common laborpools—not merely to tap the advantages from linked networks ofcustomers and suppliers, as is more typically argued. Research by193 PLACE MATTERS

one of Glaeser’s former graduate students, Spencer Glendon, shows
that a good deal of city growth over the twentieth century couldbe predicted by their levels of human capital at the beginning ofthe century.
16Places with greater numbers of highly educated people
grew faster and were better able to attract more talent.
My own theory shares much in common with human capital
theory; I certainly agree that skilled and talented people are thekeys to city and regional growth. As I mentioned back in Chapter3, where human capital theory uses education as a proxy for skills,I look at the kinds of work that people actually do—a subject I’llreturn to in greater depth later.
Urban Metabolism
But what about the inevitable drawbacks and obstacles that arisefrom this clustering and concentration of talented people and otherkey assets? One problematic consequence is the accelerated sortingof people and cities into an economic hierarchy. Our society is notjust becoming more unequal, its inequities are being etched intoour economic geography.
Concentration and density contribute to all sorts of other prob-
lems, too, such as traﬃc congestion, rising crime rates, and un -aﬀordable housing—all of them predictable by-products of big-citylife. You would think such problems, or what economists sometimesrefer to as urban diseconomies, would be enough to eventually killa city; at the very least, they must pose signiﬁcant barriers to its fu-ture development. Compelling research suggests otherwise. In mybooks Who’s Your City? and The Great Reset, I wrote about the
ﬁndings of a multidisciplinary team of researchers led by GeoﬀreyWest of the Santa Fe Institute.
West and his team wondered whether cities and mega-regions,
though not literally living things, might have a metabolism that in-194 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

creases as their populations do, allowing them not just to overcome
the drawbacks associated with size but to continue to innovate andimprove their productivity as they grow. To test this idea, they col-lected data from the United States, Europe, and China at a varietyof diﬀerent stages in their development and looked at a wide rangeof characteristics, such as crime rates, disease transmission, demo-graphics, infrastructure, energy consumption, economic activity,and innovation. Sure enough, they found:
Social organizations, like biological organisms, consume energy and re-
sources, depend on networks for the ﬂow of information and materials,and produce artifacts and waste. . . . Cities manifest power-law scalingsimilar to the economy-of-scale relationships observed in biology: a doub -ling of population requires less than a doubling of certain resources. Thematerial infrastructure that is analogous to biological transport networks—gas stations, lengths of electrical cable, miles of road surface—consistentlyexhibits sublinear [less than one] scaling with population.
17
This might have been expected. But what the researchers had not
expected to see was that the correlation between population growth
and characteristics that had fewer or no analogies in biology—suchattributes as innovation, patent activity, the numbers of super-creatives, the levels of wages, and gross domestic product—wasgreater than one. In other words, a doubling of population resultedin more than twice the creative and economic output. They calledthis phenomenon “superlinear” scaling: the larger a city’s population,they concluded, the greater the innovation and wealth per person.
The World According to Zipf
Urban metabolism is not the only paradox that helps explain theenigma of cities. One of the great remaining puzzles of urban195 PLACE MATTERS

economics and regional analysis revolves around Zipf’s Law.18
Named for its discoverer, George Zipf, it is also referred to as the
rank-size rule. Zipf’s Law says that the distribution of virtually allcities within a nation follows a simple power law: the second-largest city is roughly half the size of the largest; the third, roughlyone-third the size of the largest; and so on. According to detailedempirical studies, Zipf’s Law accurately describes the real size dis-tribution of US cities over the past century, and of virtually everyother advanced industrial nations’ cities as well. Plotted on a log-arithmic graph, populations of cities form a nearly perfect line witha descending slope. There are some exceptions, of course—capitalsor former capitals of empires, London, for example—tend to bedisproportionately large; cities in highly planned economies, likeChina’s, tend to fall oﬀ the scale as well. Also bear in mind thatZipf’s Law applies to the relative sizes of cities, not metropolitanareas. The city of Los Angeles is about half the size of the city ofNew York; greater LA’s population is much closer to New York’s.
Try as they might, economists and social scientists have failed to
develop plausible explanations for why Zipf’s Law holds up as wellas it does. In their book The Spatial Economy, the economistsMasahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman, and Anthony Venables wrote: “At-tempts to match economic theory with the data usually face theproblem that the theory is excessively neat . . . whereas the realworld throws up complicated and messy outcomes. When it comesto the size distribution of cities, however, the problem we face isthat the data oﬀer a stunningly neat picture, one that is hard to re-produce in any plausible (or even implausible) theoretical model.”After devoting more than eight pages and scads of sophisticatedmathematical formulas to this problem, they conclude: “ At thispoint we have no resolution of the striking regularity in city sizedistributions. We must acknowledge that it poses a real intellec-tual challenge to our understanding of cities. . . . Nobody has come196 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

up with a plausible story about the process that generates the rank
size rule.”19
That is, until now. The remarkable computer models built by
Robert Axtell shed new light on this enigma. Part computer scien-tist, part economist, and part physicist, Axtell, a former CarnegieMellon student, is a professor at George Mason University, a fre-quent visitor to the Santa Fe Institute, and a leader in the ﬁeld ofagent-based modeling. Along with his Brookings Institution col-league Josh Epstein, he pioneered high-level computer programsto evaluate how people or organizations—which they refer to asagents—behave. Taking my creative capital theory as his point ofdeparture, Axtell built a model of how cities form, based on the lawof “preferential attachment,” in which skilled and productive peopleattract other skilled and productive people. First, creative agentscluster around other creative agents, reinforcing each other’s pro-ductivity. Then, these creative agents combine to form larger eco-nomic units or ﬁrms. These economic units or ﬁrms then locate incities where they grow and develop. As they grow, they become thelocations for still more creative agents and ﬁrms. As the computerruns thousands of iterations of this basic scenario, a discerniblepattern for the size distribution of cities comes clearly into view—a hierarchical distribution that conforms almost perfectly to Zipf’sLaw and matches the real size distribution of US cities.
20If its cause
still remains mysterious, preferential attachment and creativity areclearly the mechanism by which Zipf’s Law operates.
The Place of Creativity
The history of human creativity and of human progress is intimatelyintertwined with that of cities. The Epic of Gilgamesh—perhaps the
oldest known work of literature—closes with an awed description197 PLACE MATTERS

of the walls of the city of Uruk. Plato’s Republic—which envisioned
an ideal city—was a product of the cultural and intellectual ﬂowering
of the earthly city of Athens, as well as a broadside against its politics.Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Brunelleschi, da Vinci, and Michelan-gelo all were born in or near the city of Florence. Great thinkers,artists, and entrepreneurs rarely come out of nowhere. They clusterand thrive in places that attract other creative people and providean environment that fosters and supports creative eﬀort.
That environment is provided by cities. Cities have long func-
tioned as critical containers and mobilizers of creativity, attractingcreative people from the surrounding countryside while providingthe structures, scenes, and ecosystems that undergird and supportcreative eﬀort. As the great Swedish economic geographer Åke An-dersson, a leading student of creativity and cities, puts it: “Creativepeople need creative cities.”
21He notes the ﬂourishing of creativity
in four diﬀerent cities from four very diﬀerent eras: Athens in 400
BC, Renaissance Florence, Enlightenment London, and ﬁn de siècle
Vienna. “The creative city as an informal and spontaneously evolv-ing spatial organization has been the arena for all large-scale creativerevolutions,” he writes. “In the course of the past 2,500 years, asmall number of relatively large cities have functioned as hotbedsof revolutionary creativity. These cities attracted a disproportionateshare of migrants with creative inclinations, and they also facilitatedthe growth of creativity among those already present. Such citieswere both used as arenas for presenting ﬁndings from elsewhereand as fertile locations for developing new ideas in collaborationwith other creative people.”
Even deeper in our past, the congregation of populations into
progressively larger, denser, and less isolated groups may have beenwhat enabled humanity’s rise. Archaeologists and anthropologistshave been aware of the incredible ﬂowering of artistic and materialcreativity that occurred roughly 40,000 years ago in Europe, re-198 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

ﬂected in everything from cave paintings, ﬁgurines, and jewelry to
the complex tools that allowed our ancestors to begin to transformnature. Some scientists have attributed this leap to evolutionaryadvances in cognition and memory alone. But more recent researchputs communities—not genes—at the center of this evolutionarywatershed.
Research by Stephen Shennan at University College London,
Robert Boyd at UCLA, and others indicates that shifting demograph-ics was an important cause of early leaps in human development.Shennan’s research—which notes that artistic and technologicalleaps similar to the one in Europe had occurred in Africa and theMiddle East and tens of thousands of years earlier—suggests thatwhat all these leaps had in common was the growth of local popu-lation density beyond a certain threshold. Many of these culturalblooms withered, Shennan observes, when populations subse-quently shrank. Boyd’s research shows the close relationship be-tween toolmaking advances and population size. As peoplegathered into larger groups and came into contact with one anothermore frequently, knowledge was shared, retained, and advancedmore easily.
22
Writing in the early decades of the twentieth century, Robert
Park, the pioneering University of Chicago urban sociologist, notedthe functional importance of loose ties and anonymous lifestylesin giving rise to what he called the “mobilization of the individualman.”
23“Great cities,” wrote Park, “have always been melting pots
of races and of cultures. Out of the vivid and subtle interactions ofwhich they have been the centers, there have come the newer breedsand the newer social types. They have multiplied the opportunitiesfor the individual man for contact and association with his fellows,but they have made these contacts and associations more transitoryand less stable.” He went on to point out the importance of thesestructures to the creative environment of the city:199 PLACE MATTERS

This makes it possible for individuals to pass quickly and easily from one
moral milieu to another, and encourages the fascinating but dangerous ex-periment of living at the same time in several diﬀerent contiguous, butother wise widely separated worlds.
All of this tends to give city life a dangerous and adventitious character;
it tends to complicate social relations and to produce new and divergentindividual types.
It introduces, at the same time, an element of chance and adventure which
adds to the stimulus of city life and gives it, for young and fresh nerves, apeculiar attractiveness.
The lure of great cities is perhaps a consequence of stimulations which
act directly upon the reﬂexes.
Park goes on to contrast the stasis of the small, tightly knit com-
munity with the dynamism of the city. “In a small community, it
is the normal man, the man without eccentricity or genius, whoseems most likely to succeed. The small community often tolerateseccentricity,” he noted. “The city, on the contrary rewards it. Neitherthe criminal, the defective, nor the genius has the same opportunityto develop his innate disposition in a small town that he invariablyﬁnds in the big city.”
In her fascinating and detailed study of Greenwich Village life in
the 1920s, Carolyn Ware identiﬁed loose ties and quasi-anonymityas its fundamental feature: “Many who were drawn to the Villagecame to seek escape from their community, their families, or them-selves,” she wrote.
24The Villagers were “intensely individualistic
in both their social relations and their point of view,” “independentof virtually all institutions.” They scorned the “the joining habit”and took “full advantage of both the selectiveness and anonymitythe city oﬀered.” They “avoided the usual casual contacts with fam-ily, friends, neighbors, or members of the same economic or socialclass and the relations growing out of institutional connections.”200 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Rather than this more traditional life, “they maintained individual
ties with friends scattered all over the city.”
But cities do more than just attract creative people and provide
a broad environment or ecosystem for creativity; they stimulateit as well. They do this in two key ways, according to Dean KeithSimonton.
25First, they play a critical role in “creative development.”
Creators must be exposed to role models and mentors during ado-lescence and young adulthood. “To the extent that such mentorsare more likely to be found in urban areas, this apprenticeship phasewill necessarily occur in city environments,” Simonton writes. “Infact,” he adds, “research on talent development indicates how oftenexceptional gifts will have to move to metropolitan areas once theyreach a certain stage in their intellectual or artistic growth.”
Second, creativity requires cultural heterogeneity: it is enhanced
by “early exposure to ideational diversity and conﬂict, enabling theindividual to engage in cultural ‘hybridization’ or ‘cross-fertilization’as an adult creator.” Again, this is more likely to occur in urbansettings, which have “educational or cultural institutions that helpmix up the broth,” not to mention an overﬂowing and ever-shiftingspectacle of things to look at. When a solution to a problem is notforthcoming, a creative person will put it aside temporarily and re-sume the tasks of ordinary life. During this time, he or she is ex-posed to a host of stimuli that prime associations. Given suﬃcienttime, Simonton writes, “one of these stimulated pathways may leadto a solution to the problem”—a eureka moment. “It goes withoutsaying that an urban environment will aﬀord a more diverse varietyof potential priming stimuli than will a rural environment. The for-mer, relative to the latter, is more likely to oﬀer a world replete withdiﬀerent languages, cultures, religions and lifestyles.”
The popular image of the solitary creator notwithstanding, much
of the creativity in modern societies emerges in groups—in re-search laboratories, cinematic collaborations, and architectural201 PLACE MATTERS

teams, to name just a few examples. “Naturally, the members of
these problem-solving or brainstorming groups are most often re-cruited from the immediate environment, whether suburb, townor city,” Simonton observes. The more urban the setting, the morediverse and hence more creative such a group is likely to be.202 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

CHAPTER 11
The Geography of Class
Many people like lists and maps, and I’m one of them. In
this chapter, I investigate the geography of the Creative
Class across America’s cities and metro regions. This chap-
ter and the next update all of the various measures for the CreativeClass, the other classes, and the three T’s of economic development:technology, talent, and tolerance.
Diﬀerent kinds of people have always sorted themselves into dif-
ferent kinds of neighborhoods. There have always been ethnic en-claves, such as the Italian American community in Newark whereI was born. There have long been artistic and cultural communitieslike New York’s Greenwich Village, college towns like Madisonand Boulder and manufacturing towns like Pittsburgh and Detroit.But when I was ﬁrst researching this book over a decade ago, mydata pointed me toward something new: a large-scale re-sorting ofpeople geographically, based on class, that was becoming increas-ingly pronounced. This new geo graphy of class, I noted, seemed tohave a direct connection to a place’s economic prospects. Regionswith greater concentrations of the Creative Class were more likelyto be economic winners. Those with larger Working Class concen-trations were becoming economically stagnant; some were in themidst of grim downward spirals. Those with large Service Class
203

concentrations, such as tourist destinations like Las Vegas, were
attracting people and creating jobs at a rapid pace, but they were notreally prospering. Many of the jobs they had were low skill and lowpay: a job cleaning hotel rooms or even dealing cards, I wrote then,does not oﬀer much of a ladder up into our economy’s jet stream.I suspected that those Service Class centers were fated to becomeincreasingly disconnected from the economic engine of our society.As this chapter and later ones will show, subsequent research, byme and by others, backs up those presentiments. The United Statesand the world have become more unequal, and that inequality isnot only one of income, it reﬂects the increasingly uneven geogra-phy of class. Furthermore, we have learned that rapid populationgrowth, such as occurred in many Sun Belt locations, does not nec-essarily lead to economic growth. Many Sun Belt metros addedpopulation like crazy but improved neither their productivity norwages. Some built entire economies around the housing bubbleand fell victim to the illusion of “growth without growth.”
In the original edition, I found that the Creative Class made up
more than 35 percent of the workforce in the leading metros as of1999. By 2010, that ﬁgure had jumped to nearly 50 percent. Backthen, the leading Creative Class metros (with populations over 1million) were greater Washington, DC, Raleigh-Durham, Boston,Austin, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Hartford, Denver, Seattle, andHouston. I noted that large metros had not exclusively corneredthe market for the Creative Class, despite their considerable ad-vantages. In fact, a number of smaller regions ranked among thehighest in Creative Class concentration, notably such college townsas Gainesville, East Lansing, and Madison. Other smaller-scale Cre-ative Class centers were Bloomington, Illinois; Melbourne, Florida;Huntsville, Alabama; Santa Fe; and Boise. I also pointed out thatthe Creative Class was not limited only to well-known high-techand artistic centers. Kansas City; Rochester, Minnesota; and Detroit,for example, numbered among the top twenty centers for the Cre-204 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

ative Class among large regions in 1999. Albany, Omaha, Little
Rock, Birmingham, and Baton Rouge ranked alongside Albu-querque as leading Creative Class locations among medium-sizedmetro regions (with populations between 500,000 and 1 million).
I now turn to the updated 2010 rankings for Creative Class metros
(see Figure 11.1). These new rankings were developed by KevinStolarick, based on occupational data from the Bureau of LaborStatistics. Two things are worth noting about them. First, insteadof separating larger and smaller metros, they are all ranked together.And second, whereas our earlier rankings were based on broaderconsolidated metropolitan areas (which combine certain metroareas into bigger, more populous units), the new rankings cover205 THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLASS
Figure 11.1 Creative Class by Metro, 2010
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Kevin Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson.

all of the individual metropolitan statistical divisions separately.
(Appendix Table A.1 provides full data for all US metros.)
The Creative Class remains concentrated geographically, making
up more than 40 percent of the workforce in eleven metros. Itmakes up more than 35–40 percent in another thirty-four metros.There are 105 metros where the Creative Class accounts for be-tween 30 and 35 percent of the workforce and 162 where it makesup between 25 and 30 percent of the workforce. On the ﬂip side,there is one metro where the Creative Class makes up less than 20percent of the workforce and forty-eight where it accounts for be-tween 20 and 25 percent.
The top-ranked region is Durham, where the Creative Class
makes up 48.4 percent of the workforce (see Table 11.1, which pro-vides a list of the top twenty Creative Class metros). It is followedby San Jose, greater Washington, DC; Ithaca, New York; and Boul-der. Rounding out the top ten are Trenton, New Jersey (which in-cludes Princeton); Huntsville, Alabama; Corvallis, Oregon; Boston,and Ann Arbor. Among the top twenty Creative Class metros areTallahassee, Gainesville, Rochester, Minnesota; Charlottesville,Hartford, Bridgeport, San Francisco; Olympia, Washington; Madi-son, and Burlington, Vermont.
This list belies the fatalistic notion that geography is destiny. It
includes many northern Frost Belt locations, among them AnnArbor in the very shadow of Detroit. There are some noticeable ab-
sences among this top-tier group: greater New York ranks thirty-fourth, with 34.9 percent of its workforce in the Creative Class;Chicago is forty-fourth (35.1 percent); LA is sixtieth (34.1 percent);Greater Detroit, on the other hand, scores a surprisingly high rankof ﬁfty-third—which bodes reasonably well for its future. Some ofDetroit’s suburbs have among the very highest concentrations of theCreative Class in the nation.
In the original edition of this book, I noted that among large met-
ros, Las Vegas, Grand Rapids, and Memphis had the smallest con-206 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

centrations of the Creative Class as of 1999, and that the Creative
Class had nearly abandoned a wide range of smaller regions in theoutskirts of the South and Midwest. In 2010, Las Vegas had just22.7 percent of its workforce in the Creative Class, placing it in thebottom ten of all US metros. Of large metros, Riverside, Memphis,Louisville, and Orlando had less than 30 percent of their workforcein the Creative Class. The places with the very lowest concentra-tions of the Creative Class remained small, mostly tourist destina-tions in the Sun Belt, such as Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; Dalton,207 THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLASS
Table 11.1 Top Twenty Creative Class Metros, 2010
Creative Class
Metro Share
Durham, NC 48.4%
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 46.9%Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 46.8%Ithaca, NY 44.6%Boulder, CO 44.4%Trenton-Ewing, NJ 42.9%Huntsville, AL 42.7%Corvallis, OR 41.7%Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH 41.6%Ann Arbor, MI 41.3%Tallahassee, FL 40.5%Rochester, MN 40.0%Charlottesville, VA 39.7%Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT 39.7%Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT 39.5%San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA 39.4%Gainesville, FL 39.3%Olympia, WA 38.9%Madison, WI 38.3%Burlington-South Burlington, VT 37.9%
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employ-
ment Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/.
Analysis by Kevin Stolarick.

Georgia; Ocala and Naples, Florida; Houma, Louisiana; and Ocean
City, New Jersey—and manufacturing towns in the old Rust Belt,like Elkhart, Indiana; Sandusky, Ohio; and Michigan City, Michigan.
There is considerable variation in Creative Class wages across met-
ros, which is something that I did not track in the original edition.Figure 11.2 maps Creative Class wages for all metros across the UnitedStates, and Table 11.2 lists the top twenty. Not surprisingly, San Jose(Silicon Valley) tops the lists with Creative Class wages of more than$100,000. San Francisco is second, followed by Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, Connecticut. The Washington metro area makes the list,
as do college towns such as Boulder, Durham, and New Haven.208 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 11.2 Creative Class Wages by Metro, 2010
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Kevin Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson.

The Creative Class share is also concentrated and uneven across
the ﬁfty states. (See Figure 11.3 and Table 11.3.) The District of Co-
lumbia tops the list, with 57.8 percent of its workforce in CreativeClass occupations. This is not surprising because DC is a small geo-graphic area with a high-skill workforce. Massachusetts is next, wherethe Creative Class makes up nearly four in ten workers (39 percent),followed by Maryland, Connecticut, and Virginia. Colorado, New
Hampshire, New York, Washington, and Minnesota round out thetop ten. Nevada is the state with the smallest percentage of the Cre-ative Class (24.2 percent). Missouri, West Virginia, North and209 THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLASS
Table 11.2 Top Twenty Metros for Creative Class Wages, 2010
Average
Rank Metro Annual Wages
1 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA $101,827
2 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA 91,361
3 Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT 90,713
4 Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 90,442
5 Napa, CA 87,765
6 New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA 87,6257 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH 84,403
8 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA 80,859
9 Trenton-Ewing, NJ 80,816
10 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 80,036
11 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 79,455
12 Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA 78,481
13 Boulder, CO 78,348
14 Santa Barbara-Santa Maria, CA 78,173
15 Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT 77,187
16 Durham, NC 77,132
17 Salinas, CA 77,086
18 New Haven, CT 76,826
19 Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD 76,69420 Anchorage, AK 76,612
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Charlotta Mellander.

South Dakota, Wyoming, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana,
and South Carolina number among the states with the lowest Cre-ative Class concentrations.
The Creative Class is even more concentrated by county (see Fig-
ure 11.4). Counties are a smaller geographic unit than metros: thereare more than three thousand counties in the United States, com-pared to several hundred metros. In 1999, I only had metro datato work with, but since then researchers such as David McGranahanand Tim Wojan and my own colleague Kevin Stolarick have beenable to use data from the American Community Survey to chartthe Creative Class by county.
Nationwide, the leading Creative Class county is Los Alamos, New
Mexico, home to the famous laboratory that bears its name, with210 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 11.3 Creative Class Share by State, 2010
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Kevin Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson.

211 THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLASS
Table 11.3 Leading and Lagging Creative Class States, 2010
Creative Class
Rank State Share
Top Ten
1 District of Columbia 57.8%
2 Massachusetts 39.0%
3 Maryland 38.0%
4 Connecticut 37.0%
5 Virginia 36.4%
6 Colorado 35.9%
7 New Hampshire 34.8%
8 New York 34.7%
9 Washington 34.7%
10 Minnesota 34.6%
Bottom Ten
41 South Carolina 28.5%
42 Indiana 28.4%
43 Louisiana 28.2%
44 South Dakota 28.1%
45 Arkansas 28.1%
46 Mississippi 27.5%
47 Wyoming 27.4%
48 North Dakota 27.4%
49 West Virginia 27.3%
50 Missouri 27.1%
51 Nevada 24.2%
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Kevin Stolarick.
nearly 70 percent of its workers employed in Creative Class occu-
pations (see Table 11.4). Other counties with large concentrations(44 percent or more) of the Creative Class include DC and its sub-urbs of Arlington, Fairfax, and Loudon Counties in Virginia, andHoward and Montgomery Counties in Maryland; Kalawao, Hawaii;

New York County, New York (which covers Manhattan); Carter
County, Montana; San Francisco County and nearby Marin Countyin California; Douglas County, Colorado (outside Denver); Mid-dlesex County, Massachusetts (which includes Cambridge andother Boston suburbs); and Orange County, North Carolina (whichincludes Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina). On theﬂip side, the Creative Class accounts for less than 10 percent of the workforce in the lowest ranked county, and it composes lessthan one in ﬁve workers in more than 200 others.
The original edition of this book looked at the Creative Class as
a whole and separated it into two main groups, the Super-CreativeCore and Creative Professionals. Since that time, my colleaguesand I have broken down the key types of Creative Class workers212 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 11.4 Creative Class Share by County, 2010
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Kevin Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson.

or occupational groups into smaller categories. My ever-pragmatic
colleague Lou Musante came up with the acronym TAPE (tech-nology, arts, professional, and eds and meds workers) to refer tothem. Since writing the original edition of this book, we have beenable to break out these key segments of the Creative Class and iden-tify the leading regions for them (see Figure 11.5 and Table 11.5).
Technology: San Jose, Huntsville, and Boulder lead in science and
technology; greater Washington, DC, Seattle, and Boston also
boast large concentrations of technology workers.213 THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLASS
Table 11.4 Top Twenty Creative Class Counties, 2010
Creative Class
County Share
Los Alamos County, NM 65.9%
Arlington County, VA 60.8%
Falls Church, VA 58.9%
District of Columbia 53.7%
Kalawao County, HI 52.5%
Alexandria, VA 53.4%
New York County, NY 51.9%
Fairfax County, VA 51.8%
Howard County, MD 51.6%
Loudoun County, VA 50.9%
Montgomery County, MD 51.0%
Fairfax County, VA 48.2%
Carter County, MT 47.0%
San Francisco County, CA 46.2%
Albemarle County, VA 45.3%
Douglas County, CO 44.4%
Middlesex County, MA 45.1%
York County, VA 44.9%
Marin County, CA 44.5%
Orange County, NC 44.1%
Note: Includes cities that are considered as “county equivalents” by the US Census.
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010, and US Census, American Community Survey, 2005–10.
Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by Kevin Stolarick.

214 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASSFigure 11.5 Major Creative Class Subgroups, 2010
Arts: LA, New York, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Boston
lead in arts, culture, media, and entertainment occupations.
Professionals: Washington, DC, San Francisco, Bridgeport, Hart-
ford, and Trenton have the largest concentrations of business,
management, ﬁnancial, and legal professionals.
Eds and Meds: Not surprisingly, college towns dominate. The
leaders are Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University;
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment Statistics (OES)
Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by Charlotta Mellander. Map by Zara
Matheson.

215 THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLASS
Table 11.5 Leading Metros for Major Creative Class Subgroups, 2010
Creative Share of
Class Subgroup Total Employment
Technology and Science
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 17.0%
Huntsville, AL 16.5%
Boulder, CO 14.5%
Framingham, MA 13.4%
Lowell-Billerica-Chelmsford, MA-NH 13.0%
Arts, Culture, and Media
Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, CA 3.4%
New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ 2.8%
San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, CA 2.7%
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 2.4%
Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA 2.2%
ProfessionalsWashington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 23.1%
San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, CA 20.6%
Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT 20.2%
Trenton-Ewing, NJ 18.8%
Tallahassee, FL 18.8%
Eds and MedsIthaca, NY 29.6%
Gainesville, FL 22.1%
Athens-Clarke County, GA 21.1%
Rochester, MN 21.0%
Ann Arbor, MI 21.0%
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Charlotta Mellander. Gainesville (the University of Florida); Athens (University of
Georgia); Rochester, Minnesota (the Mayo Clinic); and AnnArbor (University of Michigan). Among large metros, the great-est concentrations of these occupations are in Rochester, Buf-falo, Nassau-Suﬀolk, New York; Boston, and Providence.

216 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
We’ve also been able to identify which of these key Creative Class
groups add the most to regional development. Three of these
groups—technology, business professionals, and arts and culturalworkers—add considerably to regional economic output andwages.
1The ﬁnding for artistic and cultural occupations is especially
notable: these occupations are signiﬁcantly associated with regionalwages. Many simply presume that art follows wealth: richer citiesand regions have more money to invest in the arts, hence they havemore artists. That may have been true in the past, but today it worksboth ways. It is an empirical fact that arts, design, and entertainmentoccupations are among the most important contributors to regionalincome and wealth.
Many regions that lost manufacturing jobs have rebuilt their
economies around meds and eds. In Rochester and Buﬀalo as wellas Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh, the largest employ-ers are colleges, universities, and hospitals. This would seem tobode well for these places—it oﬀers a steady supply of good jobsfor residents and a solid foundation for further growth. But accord-ing to our analysis, high concentrations of these meds and eds jobsadd little to regional income. In fact, we found that regional earningsand incomes fall as a region’s share of meds and eds jobs rises. Themore Creative Class jobs in education and health care, the lower aregion’s wages tend to be. Why might this be? For one thing, edsand meds tend to monopolize a region’s workforce—the demandfor employees is so great that it leaves other sectors with smallerhiring pools. Like police and ﬁre departments, eds and meds arebasic necessities. Every place must devote some of its workforce tothem. But out-of-state tuitions and government research grantsnotwithstanding, they bring in relatively little money from outside.Occupations like management science and engineering and evenarts and culture tend to produce exportable products that can besold far and wide.

Creative Class occupations are also highly clustered and concen-
trated, according to a 2011 study by economists Jaison Abel and
Todd Gabe. This is especially true of the occupations that add themost to regional wages, those of artists, media workers, scientists,social scientists, information technology workers, environmentaldesigners, and engineers.
2The more clustered they are, the more
wages they add.
My own research uncovered a related feature. When Charlotta
Mellander and I examined the relationship between wages andmetro size, we found that the wages for Working Class jobs tendedto rise beyond the national average and then level oﬀ in commu-nities where the labor market was about 120,000 people. The pop-ulation threshold where wages passed the national average wasmuch higher for the Creative Class—roughly 1 million for businessprofessionals, scientists, and engineers, and more than 1.5 millionfor artistic, cultural, and entertainment occupations. The criticalmass at which Creative Class wages rise, in other words, is as muchas ten times higher than that for manufacturing. The Creative Econ-omy thrives at a larger scale.
We have already seen that Creative Class workers earn a sub-
stantial premium even when their level of education is taken intoaccount. And this, too, varies by region as well as industry. In a fas-cinating study, Gabe identiﬁed the key factors behind this CreativeClass wage premium.
3“Is it working around other creative workers
in the same industry?” he asked. Or, “Is it interacting with othercreative workers who reside in the same region?” The study foundlittle evidence that the wage premium related to creativity was pos-itively associated with industry eﬀects—that is, the share of creativeworkers in the same industry or sector—and concluded that pro-ductivity gains from creativity are in fact diminished by workingaround other creative workers involved in producing the same goodor delivering a similar type of service. But Gabe found evidence that217 THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLASS

the creativity-based wage premium is driven up by the share of
Creative Class workers in the region. Even more importantly, thestudy ﬁnds that Creative Class wages are higher in metros with adiversity of Creative Class occupations; for example, where thereare more artists and cultural creatives as well as technological cre-atives and creatives in management and business. This makes in-tuitive sense as the interaction across varieties of Creative Classwork creates greater “knowledge spillovers” and higher rates of in-novation, ultimately leading to higher wages.
Working Class Enclaves
The United States has witnessed a long decline in its share of Work-ing Class jobs—high-paying, family-supporting jobs in production,maintenance, and installation, as well construction, transportation,and related ﬁelds. When I wrote the original edition of this book,the Working Class still made up a substantial share of jobs—from40 percent to more than 50 percent—in Elkhart, Indiana; Decatur,Alabama; Fort Smith, Arkansas; Hickory, North Carolina; andHouma, Louisiana. Working Class jobs accounted for roughly threein ten workers, not just in older industrial metros like Milwaukee,Buﬀalo, and Detroit, but in Nashville, Louisville, Charlotte, andSalt Lake City.
Figure 11.6 maps the Working Class across US metros in 2010.
One thing is abundantly clear: the economic crisis has substantiallyreduced the Working Class, even in its leading centers. The shareof the Working Class in Elkhart-Goshen fell from 55 percent in1999 to 46 percent in 2010. It has shrunk even more in large met-ros. Its largest concentrations are found in Memphis (26.2 per-cent), Louisville (26.1 percent), and Houston (24.4 percent), wherethe Working Class accounts for roughly one in four jobs. In the218 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Figure 11.6 The Working Class by Metro, 2010
Table 11.6 Top Twenty Working Class Metros, 2010
Metro Working Class Share
Elkhart-Goshen, IN 46.0%
Dalton, GA 45.6%
Pascagoula, MS 39.7%
Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, LA 39.0%
Morristown, TN 38.4%
Decatur, AL 37.1%
Fort Smith, AR-OK 36.1%
Hickory-Morganton-Lenoir, NC 35.3%
Odessa, TX 34.4%
Columbus, IN 34.3%
Holland-Grand Haven, MI 34.2%
Longview-Kelso, WA 33.3%
Gainesville, GA 33.3%
Decatur, IL 33.2%
Joplin, MO 32.9%
Farmington, NM 32.6%
Harrisonburg, VA 32.5%
Oshkosh-Neenah, WI 32.5%
Spartanburg, SC 32.4%
Sheboygan, WI 32.4%
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Kevin Stolarick.Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Kevin Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson.

once-great industrial centers of Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh,
just one in ﬁve workers belongs to the Working Class today.
The original edition of this book covered the Working Class overall.
Although roughly one in ﬁve US workers (20.5 percent) are membersof the Working Class, production workers compose a much smallershare—just slightly more than one in twenty (6.0 percent).
Not surprisingly, metros with high concentrations of production
workers have a large Working Class in general. They tend to besmaller regions, mainly in the old South and the Midwest. Thereis one metro where production workers make up 30 percent ofthe workforce and another where they number more than 25 per-cent (see Figure 11.7 and Table 11.7). In no other metro do pro-duction workers make up more than one in five members of theentire workforce.220 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 11.7 Production Workers by Metro, 2010
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Charlotta Mellander. Map by Zara Matheson.

It is even more striking how far industrial work and production
workers have fallen in the larger blue-collar metros that were once
the bastions of America’s manufacturing might. Production work-ers make up roughly 10 percent of the workforces in Milwaukeeand Youngstown. They account for just 8 or 9 percent of the work-force in the industrial-era stalwarts of Toledo, Akron, and Cleve-land, and Scranton, Pennsylvania. That’s about the same level asin Napa, California—in fact, production workers make up asmaller share of Gary, Indiana’s workforce than they do in that
sunny center of wine and tourism. The share of production workersis lower still in Dayton, Detroit, Allentown, Syracuse, Rochester221 THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLASS
Table 11.7 Top Twenty Metros for Production Workers, 2010
Production
Rank Region Occupation Share
1 Elkhart-Goshen, IN 30.3%
2 Dalton, GA 25.8%
3 Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, NC 19.5%
4 Morristown, TN 18.3%
5 Columbus, IN 18.3%
6 Sheboygan, WI 17.6%
7 Holland-Grand Haven, MI 17.4%
8 Oshkosh-Neenah, WI 16.5%
9 Spartanburg, SC 16.3%
10 Decatur, AL 16.3%
11 Cleveland, TN 16.2%
12 Decatur, IL 15.9%
13 Gainesville, GA 15.1%
14 Racine, WI 15.0%
15 Fort Smith, AR-OK 14.8%
16 Anderson, SC 14.8%
17 Battle Creek, MI 14.8%
18 Logan, UT-ID 14.5%
19 Wausau, WI 14.3%
20 Florence-Muscle Shoals, AL 13.9%
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Charlotta Mellander.

and Buﬀalo—all of which have a smaller share of production work-
ers than Augusta, Georgia, or Asheville, North Carolina. In my
former hometown of Pittsburgh, the heart and soul of America’siron and steel industry, production workers make up just 5.7 per-cent of the workforce, about the same as in Eugene, Oregon;Ann Arbor, and Charleston, South Carolina!
It’s no wonder America’s industrial workers feel like they’ve
been shunted aside—they have. A decade into the new millenniumand three years into the worst economic crisis since the Great De-pression, both America’s smokestack industries and the workerswho stoked them are increasingly on the margins.
Service Class Centers
In numbers, the Service Class is the largest class of all, employingmore than 45 percent of American workers. Back in 1999, when Iwas ﬁrst writing this book, Las Vegas was the country’s preeminentService Class center, with nearly 60 percent of its workforce in Ser-vice Class occupations. The Service Class made up roughly one-half or more of the workforce in some ﬁfty metros, including WestPalm Beach, Orlando, Miami, Naples, Fort Myers, Daytona Beach,Panama City, and Sarasota, Florida; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina;and the towns on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Few of them boastedany signiﬁcant concentrations of the Creative Class, save for visitorson vacation. The Service Class also dominated employment in anumber of metros that were a far cry from tourist meccas, like
Shreveport, Louisiana; Rapid City and Sioux Falls, South Dakota;Bismarck and Grand Forks, North Dakota; Pittsﬁeld, Massachusetts;Utica, New York; Chico, California; and Victoria, Laredo, Killeen,and Lubbock, Texas. The economic and social future of these non-tourist destinations, I wrote then, was troubling to contemplate.222 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Figure 11.8 The Service Class by Metro, 2010
Table 11.8 Top Twenty Service Class Metros, 2010
Metro Service Class Share
Myrtle Beach-Conway-North Myrtle Beach, SC 64.9%
Ocean City, NJ 62.7%
Atlantic City, NJ 62.0%
Punta Gorda, FL 60.9%
Naples-Marco Island, FL 59.3%
Las Vegas-Paradise, NV 59.1%
Laredo, TX 58.3%
Brownsville-Harlingen, TX 57.9%
Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL 57.3%
Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach, FL 57.2%
Ocala, FL 57.1%
Missoula, MT 56.3%
Barnstable Town, MA 56.1%
Dover, DE 55.9%
Panama City-Lynn Haven, FL 55.7%
Pittsﬁeld, MA 55.7%
McAllen-Edinburg-Pharr, TX 55.6%
Sebastian-Vero Beach, FL 55.3%
Norwich-New London, CT 55.0%
Jacksonville, NC 54.8%
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Kevin Stolarick.Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Kevin Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson.

Figure 11.8 charts the Service Class across US metros. Tourist
destinations Myrtle Beach, Ocean City, Atlantic City, Punta Gorda
and Naples, Florida, and Las Vegas, continue to top the list. Butnon-tourist destinations like Laredo, Brownsville, and McAllen,Texas, are present as well (see Table 11.6). These places continueto have among the least resilient and most vulnerable economiesof anywhere.
The Role of Skills
One of the more interesting developments to occur since the orig-inal edition of this book appeared is our improved ability to zeroin more precisely on the underlying skills that inform CreativeClass and other types of work, allowing us to make ﬁner distinc-tions and better understand the underlying nature of work. Thiswas made possible by the incredible Occupational InformationNetwork (or O*NET)
4database developed by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, which provides richly detailed information on the mixand level of skills required for more than 800 occupations. My col-leagues and I, as well as several other research groups, have usedthese data to identify the fundamental skills underlying CreativeClass and other types of work, to chart the economic returns tothese core skills, and ultimately to map their distribution acrossthe US economic landscape.
There are three core types of skills. The ﬁrst is one we are all fa-
miliar with—basic physical skill of the sort associated with tradi-tional work. Its attributes include good hand-to-eye coordination,strength, and dexterity.
The other two types of skills are associated with Creative Class
work. The second basic skill type—cognitive skill—is reasonablywell understood. It involves the ability to acquire knowledge, pro-cess information, and solve problems. This basic intellectual and224 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

analytical horsepower has been identiﬁed as the core skill under-
pinning the knowledge economy by writers from Peter Drucker andDaniel Bell to Robert Reich and Charles Murray.
5
However, there is a third type of skill set that is less well under-
stood, or even talked about, but even more critical. The O*NETsystem deﬁnes its core attributes as the “capacities used to workwith people to achieve goals.” My colleagues and I dubbed it socialskill, or, to put it a bit more accurately, “social intelligence.” Itssalient characteristics are discernment, communications abilities,leadership, awareness, and the like. These are more than just peopleskills. Bartending, retail clerking, and waiting tables may requiresociability and pleasantness, but not social intelligence. Highly de-veloped social skills include the capacity to bring the right peopletogether on a project, persuasion, social perceptiveness, the abilityto help develop other people, and a developed sense of empathy.These are the leadership skills that are needed to innovate, mobilizeresources, build eﬀective organizations, and launch new ﬁrms. So-cial skill and analytical skill are highly complementary—and indeed,the very highest paying jobs, and the most robust economies, usuallyrequire exceptional skills in both realms.
Even a cursory glance at the relationship between these skills and
income conﬁrms how far the US economy has evolved beyond theindustrial age and toward the Creative Economy. Analytic and so-cial skills add greatly to wages and salaries, according to our analy-sis. Occupations that rank in the top quartile of analytic skill pay$25,600 more than those in the lowest quartile, on average; thosethat rank in the top quartile of social skill pay $34,600 more thanthose in the lowest 25 percent. Occupations in the top quartile ofphysical skill, on the other hand, pay $13,600 lessthan those that
demand the least physical skill. That’s not to say that an individualconstruction worker will make less as he or she becomes moreskilled—the opposite is true. But by choosing an occupation inwhich physical skill is predominant, workers are, by and large,225 THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLASS

isolating themselves from the more dynamic and higher-paying
parts of the economy. Higher levels of analytical and social skill areassociated with higher wages, and not just for Creative Class workbut for Working and Service Class jobs as well.
What’s even more telling is the way that skills are distributed ge-
ographically. This has been probed in a series of fascinating studiesby the University of Toronto economists William Strange, MarigeeBacolod, and Bernardo Blum; the economic geographer Allen Scottof UCLA; and my own team.
6Jobs requiring physical skill cluster
in smaller and medium-sized metro areas—industrial centers whereland for factories is relatively inexpensive. Jobs featuring analyticskills are sparse in these places and heavily concentrated in thelargest metro areas, indicating rising beneﬁts from having largernumbers of well-educated, highly intelligent people working closetogether. And jobs requiring the highest level of social skill are themost concentrated in the very largest metro areas. In fact, these skills
seem to grow ever-more essential as local economies grow largerand more complex. What this research has helped us understandis that it is not just the accumulation of knowledge or cognitive abil-ity that drives the growth of cities, but the additional clustering ofsocial-intelligence skill. This clustering of social-intelligence skillincreases the quality of the combinations and recombinations thatdrive innovation and economic growth. In this sense, cities are likebrains: their growth and development require the development ofan increasingly dense web of synaptic connections.
We’ve known for a while that the cities and metros that attract
the most highly educated populations prosper. But brainpoweralone only tells part of the story. Even more key is being able tomarshal and focus all that raw intelligence, the ability to inspiredisparate groups of people to focus on a common goal, to persuadeventure capitalists to underwrite a new idea or product and thepublic to buy shares in your company. 226 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Think of it as the Steve Jobs side of cities. Jobs was certainly smart,
though being a college dropout, he wouldn’t have been captured
by the standard economists’ measure of human capital. But his an-alytical intelligence wasn’t what made him who he was. Most of all,he was a connector and resource mobilizer, the quintessential at-tributes of an entrepreneur. When he toured Xerox’s famous PARClaboratory, he saw all the various components of a personal com-puter waiting there to be put together. He enlisted Steve Wozniakand others to help him with the task and attracted venture capitalto pay for it. What he possessed and what cities enable, in additionto cognitive skills, are the critical social or relational skills requiredfor true innovation and creative destruction.
As many beneﬁts as the Creative Class brings to cities, metros,
and regions, they’re not equally shared. The correlation betweenCreative Class and Working Class metros was negative and signiﬁ-cant in 2002, and it has increased today, indicating that the diﬀerentclasses were and are continuing to sort themselves into distinctregional centers.
7These patterns cut across the lines of race, na-
tionality, and sexual orientation. Creative Class people of variedbackgrounds are increasingly clustering in the same kinds of metros.More African American members of the Creative Class may headfor Washington DC and Atlanta, and gay members may favor SanFrancisco, but all are attracted to regions with considerable con-centrations of their own class.
The new geography of class might be giving rise to a new form
of segregation—diﬀerent from racial segregation or the old schismbetween central city and suburb, and perhaps even more threat-ening to national unity. Over the past decade and especially sincethe economic meltdown of 2008, this trend has only become morepronounced.227 THE GEOGRAPHY OF CLASS

CHAPTER 12
The 3T’s of
Economic
Development
The key to understanding the new economic geography of
creativity and its positive effects on economic outcomes is
what I call the 3T’s of economic development: technology,
talent, and tolerance. Each is a necessary but by itself insufficientcondition for prosperity; for real innovation and sustained eco-nomic growth a place must offer all three. The 3T’s explain whysome cities fail to grow, despite their deep reservoirs of technologyand world-class universities: they have not been sufficiently tol-erant and open to attract and retain top creative talent. The in-terdependence of the 3T’s also explains why others do not makethe grade, even though they are lifestyle meccas: they lack the re-quired technology base. The most successful places put all 3T’stogether. Together, these 3T’s comprise my Creativity Index, anupdated version of which I present at the end of this chapter. Theappendix provides updated data for all 3T’s and the CreativityIndex for all US metros.
228

Technology
The ﬁrst and also the least controversial of the T’s is technology.
Economists agree that technology is key to growth. First Karl Marxand then Joseph Schumpeter recognized that advances in technol-ogy are what enable capitalism to constantly revolutionize itself.“Capitalism not only never is but never can be stationary,” Schum-peter wrote in 1942. MIT’s Robert Solow won a Nobel Prize for hiswork that isolated technology as the driving force of growth. Fromnew inventions like software, robotics, and biotechnology to im-provements in manufacturing systems and processes, technologymakes economies and societies more eﬃcient and productive.
1
Figure 12.1 shows how US metros stack up on the updated Tech-
nology Index. The index is a composite of the Milken Institute’sTech-Pole Index, a measure of high-tech industry, plus two mea-sures of regional innovation, patents per capita and average annualpatent growth.
Silicon Valley, home to leading-edge technology companies
from Intel, Apple, and Cisco to Google and Facebook, and theworld’s largest center for venture capital, has been widely acknowl-edged as the nation’s dominant center for high-tech innovationand entrepreneurship since the 1970s. But on the 2010 version ofthe Technology Index, its hegemony has been supplanted bygreater Seattle—the home of Microsoft, Amazon, and many otherhigh-tech powerhouses. San Jose takes second, followed by thegreater San Francisco metro, which has gained ground as largenumbers of key high-tech talent and ﬁrms have come to prefermore urban locations (a subject I will return to in greater detailin Chapter 15). Portland, Oregon, is fourth, and Austin, is ﬁfth,followed by Raleigh, San Diego, and then Durham, at the otherend of the Research Triangle from Raleigh. Boston and Boulder229 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

round out the top ten. Completing out the top twenty are Burling-
ton, Tucson, Provo, Corvallis, Huntsville, Poughkeepsie (home toIBM), Minneapolis–St. Paul, Madison, Oxnard–Thousand Oaks,and Manchester, New Hampshire (near Boston’s Route 128).
In the original edition of this book, I noted the close correlations
between the Creative Class and our technology indicators, and con-versely the negative associations between high-tech and the WorkingClass. The same basic pattern continues a decade later, only it is evenmore accentuated. The Creative Class makes up more than 35 per-cent of the workforce in fourteen of the top twenty TechnologyIndex metros, and exceeds 40 percent in six of them. The CreativeClass remains positively correlated with all of the various measures230 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 12.1 The Technology Index by Metro, 2010
Source: Analysis by Kevin Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson. See the appendix for full
detail on sources.

of high-tech industry and innovation, whereas the correlations with
Working Class share are negative across the board.2
The changing geography of US innovation can be seen in Figure
12.2, which is constructed from data charting trends in innovation(based on patents) for the top 10 US metros over roughly the pastthree decades, 1976 to 2009.
3The level of innovation has fallen oﬀ
considerably in older industrial regions like Pittsburgh and Detroitand in Sun Belt regions like Dallas and Houston. During the sameperiod, innovation increased substantially in high-tech regions likeSilicon Valley, San Francisco, and Seattle, and also in Los Angeles.Two other large regions—New York and Chicago—saw dramaticgrowth in the late 1990s, followed by precipitous drops in the 2000sthat erased those gains. Overall, American innovation has becomemore geographically concentrated and spikier.
Talent
The second T is talent. Economists agree that skilled, ambitious, ed-ucated, and entrepreneurial people—whom they refer to as humancapital—are a central force in economic progress. Whereas my orig-inal measure of talent combined the Creative Class and the conven-tional measure of human capital, essentially the number of collegegraduates, our updated index counts only the Creative Class. Inthe original edition of this book, I found a close association be-
tween Creative Class share, the Talent Index, and levels of high-tech companies and of innovations. The same is true today.
Tolerance
Tolerance is the third T. Economists have long recognized that di-versity is important to economic performance, but they have usually231 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

meant the diversity of ﬁrms or industries. The economist John
Quigley, for instance, argues that regional economies beneﬁt fromthe location of a diverse set of ﬁrms and industries.
4Jane Jacobs
was among the ﬁrst to highlight the role of diversity of both ﬁrmsand people in powering innovation and city growth.
5Tolerance and
openness to diversity is part and parcel of the broad cultural shift
toward post-materialist values identiﬁed by Ronald Inglehart.6
New ideas are generated most eﬃciently in places where diﬀerent
cognitive styles are tolerated—and diﬀerent cognitive styles arelinked to demographic diversity, as University of Michigan econ-omist Scott Page has shown.
7Tolerance—or, broadly speaking,
openness to diversity—provides an additional source of economic232 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Table 12.1 Top Twenty Metros on the Technology Index, 2010
Technology Index
Metro Score
1 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA .996
2 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA .983
3 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA .976
4 Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR .956
5 Austin-Round Rock, TX .955
6 Raleigh-Cary, NC .952
7 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA .945
8 Durham, NC .940
9 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH .933
10 Boulder, CO .920
11 Burlington-South Burlington, VT .918
12 Tucson, AZ .912
13 Provo-Orem, UT .909
14 Corvallis, OR .898
15 Huntsville, AL .894
16 Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown, NY .893
17 Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, MN-WI .891
18 Madison, WI .891
19 Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA .886
20 Manchester-Nashua, NH .885
Source: Analysis by Kevin Stolarick. See the appendix for full detail on sources.

advantage that works alongside technology and talent. The places
that are most open to new ideas and that attract talented and cre-ative people from across the globe broaden both their technologyand talent capabilities, gaining a substantial economic edge.
Most economists tend to see technology and talent as ﬁxed stocks,
like raw materials or natural resources, but the reality is that theyare ﬂows. Unlike seams of coal or natural harbors, talented peopleare not forever wedded to one place; they are mobile factors—theycan and do move around. The fact that some places are better thanothers at generating, attracting, and holding onto talent has every-thing to do with how open, diverse, and tolerant they are. Our workﬁnds a strong correlation between, on the one hand, places that arewelcoming to immigrants, artists, gays, bohemians, and socioeco-nomic and racial integration, and, on the other, places that expe-rience high-quality economic growth. Economists speak of the233 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Figure 12.2 The Changing Geography of Innovation, 1976–2009
Source: US Patent and Trademark Oﬃce, various years. Data processed by Debbie
Strumsky. Additional analysis and graph by Kevin Stolarick.Patent Applications by Metro Region
1976–2009 (3 year moving average)

importance of industries having low entry barriers, so that new
ﬁrms can easily enter and keep the industry vital. Similarly, I thinkit’s important for a place to have low entry barriers for people—that is, to be a place where newcomers are accepted quickly intoall sorts of social and economic arrangements. Such places gain acreativity advantage. All else being equal, they are likely to attractand retain the sorts of people who power innovation and growth(see Figure 12.3 and Table 12.2).
Openness to entrepreneurial individuals from around the globe
is a fabled hallmark of the United States. Immigrants have beenoverrepresented among America’s leading entrepreneurs since thedays of the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. The Hungarian JewAndy Grove founded Intel in the 1960s; over the past two decades,immigrants have been among the principals of more than half of234 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 12.3 The Foreign-Born Index by Metro, 2010
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2005–09. Analysis by Kevin
Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson.

all Silicon Valley start-ups—like Google’s Sergey Brin, who hails
from Russia; Hotmail’s Sabeer Bhatia, who grew up in Bangalore;Yahoo’s Taiwan-born Jerry Yang; and eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, whowas born in Paris, France. Omidyar’s highly talented parents, asurgeon and a linguistics professor, had immigrated to Paris fromIran; they moved on to the United States when Omidyar was six.Even though immigrants make up just 12 percent of the US pop-ulation, they generate more than 25 percent of its global patentsand account for nearly one-half (47 percent) of its science and en-gineering workers with PhDs.
With the economic crisis, some pundits and a growing share of
Americans have come to believe that legal and illegal immigrants235 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Table 12.2 Top Twenty Metros on the Foreign-Born Index, 2010
Foreign-Born
Rank Metro Index Score
1 Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach, FL .365
2 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA .356
3 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA .342
4 El Centro, CA .315
5 Salinas, CA .296
6 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA .291
7 McAllen-Edinburg-Pharr, TX .286
8 Laredo, TX .279
9 New York-Newark-Edison, NY-NJ-PA .276
10 El Paso, TX .266
11 Yuma, AZ .250
12 Merced, CA .247
13 Brownsville-Harlingen, TX .244
14 Stockton, CA .231
15 Naples-Marco Island, FL .229
16 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA .227
17 Visalia-Porterville, CA .226
18 Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Goleta, CA .222
19 Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA .220
20 Napa, CA .215
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2005–09. Analysis by Kevin
Stolarick.

alike are taking jobs away from Americans and pushing down
wages. In recent years, Arizona, Alabama, and several other stateshave instituted draconian measures to restrict immigration. But infact there are more high-skill immigrants in the United States thanlow-skill ones, according to a June 2011 Brookings Institutionreport.
8“In 1980, just 19 percent of immigrants aged 25 to 64 held
a bachelor’s degree, and nearly 40 percent had not completed highschool,” the report ﬁnds. “By 2010, 30 percent of working-age im-migrants had at least a college degree and 28 percent lacked a highschool diploma.” Compared with their US-born counterparts, thereport continues, “low-skilled immigrants have higher rates of em-ployment and lower rates of household poverty.” In more than fourin ten of the nation’s largest 100 metro areas, such as Washington,DC, and San Francisco, college educated immigrants outnumberthose that did not complete high school by at least 25 percent.
Even more than its natural resources, native ingenuity, or other
factors, what stood at the heart and soul of US prosperity historicallyis its openness to hardworking, ambitious, and talented immigrantsof all stripes. And that includes low-skill immigrants. Careful studiesby economist Giovanni Peri of the University of California at Davishave found that immigrants add rather than detract from Americanprosperity for the simple reason that “the skill composition of im-migrants is complementary to that of natives.” At the low-skill endof the spectrum, immigrants specialize in “manual intensive taskssuch as cooking, driving, and building” that their American coun-terparts tend not to do, specializing instead in “in language-intensivetasks such as dispatching, supervising and coordinating.” At thehigh-skill end of the spectrum, immigrants bring scientiﬁc, tech-nical, and entrepreneurial skills that are in short supply and vitalfor America’s innovative and entrepreneurial engine. A “more mul-ticultural urban environment,” Peri concludes, “makes U.S.-borncitizens more productive.”
9236 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

The Gay Index
When I ﬁrst started looking at the patterns of economic develop-
ment, I never imagined I would ﬁnd connections between gay de-mography and high-tech industry. Then, as I recounted in theintroduction to the ﬁrst edition of this book, I met Gary Gates, who,along with economists Dan Black, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor,had created a new measure that he called the Gay Index.
10Gates
has since become the world’s leading authority on gay and lesbiandemographic patterns; he is co-author of The Gay and Lesbian Atlas
and a researcher at UCLA’s Williams Institute.
Building upon a report Gates and I wrote for the Brookings In-
stitution, the original edition of this book noted that the Gay Index
11
was closely associated with regional clusterings and concentrationsof high-tech industry, as well as with its growth.
12Four of the regions
that ranked in the top ten for high-technology growth from 1990 to1998 also ranked in the top ten on the Gay Index in both 1990 and2000.
13In addition, we found that the correlation between the Gay
Index (measured in 1990) and the High-Tech Index (calculated foreach year from 1990–2000) increased over time, suggesting thatthe beneﬁts of openness to gays actually compounds.
Some of our critics argued that our results might be biased by
the unique situation of San Francisco, which ranked highly (number1, in fact) on both measures at the time. To check for this, we re-moved San Francisco from the analysis. The ﬁndings remained vir-tually the same. In fact, the correlation between the Gay Index andhigh-tech industry was strengthened. Overall, twelve of the toptwenty Gay Index regions continued to rank among the top twentyhigh-tech regions, and ten of the top twenty Gay Index regionsnumbered among the top twenty centers for the Creative Class.The Gay Index was positively associated with the Creative Class in237 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

both periods; but it was negatively associated with the Working
Class.14Figure 12.4 and Table 12.3 show the updated Gay-Lesbian
Index for US metros.
It’s amazing how consistently people have misconstrued what
Gates and I have to say about the connection between gays andeconomic growth. Many seem to think we believe the connectionis linear. But not once have either of us ever said that gays literallycause high-tech growth. Rather, we see a strong and vibrant gay
community as a solid leading indicator of a place that is open to
many diﬀerent kinds of people. If gays feel comfortable in a place,then immigrants and ethnic minorities probably will, too, not tomention eggheads, eccentrics, and all the other non-white-breadtypes who are the sources of new ideas. As Bill Bishop put it, “Wheregay households abound, geeks follow.”
15
Ronald Inglehart, who has studied the relationship between cul-
ture and economic growth for some four decades, has noted that238 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 12.4 The Gay/Lesbian Index by Metro, 2009
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2005–09. Analysis by Kevin
Stolarick. Map by Zara Metheson.

the lack of societal acceptance of gays is the most signiﬁcant re-
maining bastion of intolerance and discrimination around theworld. Accordingly, places that accept gays are also likely to be ac-cepting of all diﬀerent types of people. Gates himself always saidthat gays can perhaps best be thought of as the veritable “canaries”of our high-tech, Creative Class centers.
My close friend Terry Nichols Clark, a sociologist at the University
of Chicago, oﬀered a more reasoned and nuanced critique of ourﬁndings on gays and high-tech location.
16Using detailed information
from thousands of US counties, Clark found that “gay relations withjobs appear strong in large metro areas, but fall in smaller metroareas.” Gates and I have no quarrel with Clark’s county-level results.It’s in fact exactly why we designed our research the way we did.Metro areas are natural economic units, designated based on thejourney to work. People can easily live in one county and commuteto another. The metro, not the county, is the more appropiate unitfrom which to view the role of tolerance and diversity.
The Bohemian Factor
A number of studies have pointed to the role of amenities in eco-nomic growth. An early one by Paul Gottlieb found a relationshipbetween the presence of amenities and high-tech companies inNew Jersey.
17Another by the economists Dora Costa and Matthew
Kahn found that high-income power couples preferred locationswith high levels of amenities.
18In a detailed study of the rise of the
consumer city, Edward Glaeser and his collaborators concluded:“The future of most cities depends on their being desirable placesfor consumers to live. As consumers become richer and ﬁrms be-come mobile, location choices are based as much on their advan-tages for workers as on their advantages for ﬁrms.”
19An April 2000239 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

story in the Economist, “The Geography of Cool,” pointed out that
cities that had long been centers of culture and fashion, from New
York to Berlin, had also emerged as leading destinations for talentedpeople and centers of certain new technology-intensive industries.
20
All this was highly suggestive, but I wanted a more direct measurefor a place’s artistic and creative climate.
One day Stolarick and I were sitting at my kitchen table in Pitts-
burgh, discussing our research on tolerance and economic growth,when I blurted out a question: Could we actually chart the locationswhere working artists, writers, designers, musicians, actors, andthe like cluster? The Bohemian Index that we created, as I notedback in 2002, turned out to be quite strongly associated with both240 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Table 12.3 Top Twenty Metros on the Gay/Lesbian Index, 2009
Gay/Lesbian
Rank Metro Index
1 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA 2.22
2 Burlington-South Burlington, VT 1.82
3 Barnstable Town, MA 1.80
4 Portland-South Portland, ME 1.78
5 Ithaca, NY 1.74
6 Santa Rosa-Petaluma, CA 1.68
7 Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR-WA 1.63
8 Santa Fe, NM 1.63
9 Flagstaﬀ, AZ 1.58
10 Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA 1.55
11 Springﬁeld, MA 1.50
12 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 1.50
13 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH 1.48
14 Billings, MT 1.47
15 Greeley, CO 1.47
16 Boulder, CO 1.46
17 Austin-Round Rock, TX 1.45
18 Asheville, NC 1.45
19 Napa, CA 1.45
20 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 1.41
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2005–09. Analysis by Kevin
Stolarick.

high-technology and economic growth.21Five of the top ten and
twelve of the top twenty Bohemian Index regions numbered among
the nation’s top twenty high-technology regions. Eleven of the toptwenty Bohemian Index regions ranked among the top twentymost-innovative regions.
22A region’s 1990 Bohemian Index value
predicted both its high-tech industry concentration and its em-ployment and population growth between 1990 and 2000.
Figure 12.5 updates the Bohemian Index for 2009. Los Angeles
takes the top spot, followed by New York, San Francisco, and SantaFe. The list also includes Nashville, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon;Jersey City across the Hudson River from Manhattan; college townslike Boulder, Austin, Santa Cruz, and Iowa City; and somewhatless likely places like Stamford and Danbury, Connecticut; Pittsﬁeld,Massachusetts; and Orange County, California (see Table 12.4).
My Colbert Controversy
A study I conducted with Charlotta Mellander in 2007, utilizingboth the Gay Index and the Bohemian Index, earned me a berthon a top-rated Comedy Central show. I wrote about it in Who’sYour City? “A disturbing new study has found a solution to the
housing slump: Live next to gay people,” Steven Colbert declaredin his lead-in to our interview. “The study found that artistic, bo-hemian, and gay populations increase housing values in the neigh-borhoods and communities they inhabit,” he continued. “I guesspeople these days want a house with a view of some goateed beatnikplaying his bongos while he smokes a clove cigarette and chisels asculpture of k.d. lang.” It might have been good fodder for late-night TV, but the evidence didn’t lie. The Gay Index and the Bo-hemian Index were amazing, indeed, shockingly powerfulpredictors of regional housing prices.
23241 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

There is no single national real estate market, and there are many
reasons some places are more expensive than others. One key factor
is income—where people have more money, they can buy more ex-pensive housing. Housing prices tend to be higher in locations withhigher levels of high-tech industry, as in Silicon Valley. Amenitiesand attractions—like scenic mountains or nearby beaches—alsodrive housing prices higher, a correlation pinpointed in 1982 by theeconomist Jennifer Roback, who found that amenities carried asmuch weight in determining housing prices as land costs andwages.
24Whether it’s a strip of beach or a chunk of Manhattan, prices
will increase in accord with the basic law of supply and demand.
Edward Glaeser and his colleagues found that housing prices
tend to rise faster than wages in cities. To explain this, they devised242 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 12.5 The Bohemian Index by Metro, 2009
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2005–09. Analysis by Kevin
Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson.

a formula that assumes that urban housing demands a premium
for both the improved productivity and the higher levels of ameni-ties that are found in cities.
25But my research was telling me that
neither urban eﬃciencies nor location-speciﬁc amenities (beautifulbeaches, shopping, bike trails) told the whole story.
“Want to know where a great place to invest in real estate will be
ﬁve or ten years from now?” a 2007 BusinessWeek article asked.
“Look at where artists are living now.”
26So we did. It really wasn’t
such a leap—urbanists have long recognized that gentriﬁcation(and the higher housing prices that follow) is set in motion byartists, creatives, and gays. Yet artistic and gay populations are rel-atively small, and evidence of their relation to housing prices is243 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Table 12.4 The Top Twenty Metros on the Bohemian Index, 2009
Bohemian
Rank Metro Index
1 Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA 2.62
2 New York, NY 2.54
3 San Francisco, CA 2.46
4 Santa Fe, NM 2.45
5 Stamford-Norwalk, CT 2.11
6 Danbury, CT 1.78
7 Boulder-Longmont, CO 1.72
8 Jersey City, NJ 1.66
9 Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA 1.57
10 Nashville, TN 1.51
11 Medford-Ashland, OR 1.47
12 Austin-San Marcos, TX 1.44
13 Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA 1.44
14 Iowa City, IA 1.41
15 Pittsﬁeld, MA 1.37
16 Portland-Vancouver, OR, WA 1.36
17 Ventura, CA 1.36
18 Orange County, CA 1.35
19 Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Lompoc, CA 1.35
20 Santa Rosa, CA 1.30
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2005–09. Analysis by Kevin
Stolarick.

limited. As of 2000, there were approximately 1.3 million bohemians
in the United States and 8.8 million self-identiﬁed gay and lesbianpeople, totaling roughly 4 percent of the country’s adult population.Can groups this small really be so highly associated with housingprices?
Mellander and I looked closely at the associations between high-
tech industry, human capital, high-paid workers and occupations,wages and incomes, and artist, bohemian, and gay populationsacross more than 300 US metropolitan regions. We used statisticaltechniques to isolate the correlations between each of these factorson housing values as well. The results were striking. We foundthat two factors combine to shape housing values. The first ispretty obvious: income—the wealthier the residents, the pricierthe housing. But the correlation was to wealth, not salaries. Wagesalone, in the absence of capital gains and other earnings, had littlerelation to housing values. For that matter, neither did levels ofeducation, human capital, the presence of a Creative Class, or themix of occupations.
The second and much larger factor is reﬂected by the combined
Bohemian-Gay Index, which merges the concentration of artists,musicians, and designers with the concentration of gays and les-bians in a region. Regardless of which variables we applied, whatversion of the model we used, or which regions we looked at, theconcentration of bohemians and gays consistently had a substantialcorrelation with housing values, even after controlling for income,human capital, jobs, and city size.
27
Many people believe that bohemians and gays do not cause
growth but are merely drawn to certain types of places. By usingpath models—advanced statistical tools that relate independent,intermediary, and dependent variables—we were able to isolate therelationships between the bohemian and gay populations and otherfactors on housing values, and on each other. Our initial ﬁndings244 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

were on target. The presence of bohemians and gays had a direct
relation to housing values and also to income levels. In other words,the presence of these groups was not only related to higher housingvalues, but to greater regional wealth as well.
Why would this be? For two reasons, each of which sheds further
light on the role of diversity, openness, and tolerance in regionalgrowth and development. Artists and bohemians not only produceamenities but are attracted to places that have them. As selectivebuyers with eyes for amenities, authenticity, and aesthetics, theytend to concentrate in places where those things abound. The sec-ond reason is even more important: the openness that gay and bo-hemian populations not only reﬂect but signal. Places with largebohemian and gay populations possess low barriers to entry, al-lowing them to attract talent and human capital across racial, eth-nic, and other lines. Artistic and gay populations also cluster incommunities that value open-mindedness and self-expression.And, their status as historically marginalized groups means thatartistic and gay populations tend to be highly self-reliant and re-ceptive to newcomers. They’ve had to build networks from scratch,mobilize resources independently, and create their own organi-zations and ﬁrms.
For all of these reasons, regions in which artists and gays have
migrated and settled are more likely than others to provide an en-vironment that is more open to innovation, entrepreneurship, andnew ﬁrm formation. It’s not that gays and bohemians drive uphousing simply by paying more (just as they do not directly stim-ulate the economy); their eﬀect on housing prices, regional inno-vation, and prosperity is less direct. Bohemian and gay residentsdrive up housing values for the same reason they make areas moreproductive and innovative: they create a feedback loop. Their pres-ence signals that a location has the very characteristics that driveinnovation and growth, driving further innovation and growth.245 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The Tolerance Index
In the original edition of this book we used a combined measure of
diversity and tolerance that we called the Composite Diversity Index(or CDI).
28The CDI added together three diversity measures—the
Gay Index, the Melting Pot Index (a measure of the concentrationof immigrants), and the Bohemian Index. The CDI provided pow-erful support for the basic notion that diversity and creativity worktogether to power innovation and economic growth. Five of the topten regions on the CDI were also top-ten high-tech regions: SanFrancisco, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. (seeTable 12.5). The statistical correlation between the High-Tech Index
and the CDI rankings was quite high,
29and even when we factored
in the percentage of college graduates in the region, population, andmeasures of culture, recreation, and climate, the CDI had a signiﬁ-cant relationship to high-tech growth between 1990 and 1998.
For the updated paperback edition of this book in 2004, Stolarick
and I revised the CDI, creating a new measure we called the ToleranceIndex. In addition to the three key measures—the Gay Index, Bo-hemian Index, and Foreign-Born Index, we added a fourth newmeasure of the level of racial integration versus separation in ametro area, which we dubbed the Integration Index (the appendix
provides a full description of its methodology). We did this because,as I’ve already had occasion to mention, unlike most other kinds ofdiversity, racial diversity is not associated with high-tech growth, in-novation, and economic development. In fact my statistical researchconsistently found a negative correlation between concentrations ofhigh-tech ﬁrms and the percentage of the nonwhite population, aparticularly disturbing ﬁnding in light of the positive role that otherdimensions of diversity play. The Creative Economy apparently doeslittle to ameliorate the traditional divide between the white and non-white segments of the population. It might even make it worse. 246 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Seattle topped the list on our new Tolerance Index in 2004, followed
by Portland, Oregon; Boston, Minneapolis, and Providence. San
Francisco, Austin, Denver, Orlando, and Los Angeles rounded outthe top ten.
For this edition, we have revised the Tolerance Index slightly, re-
moving the Bohemian Index from it. We did so because we believethat the Bohemian Index is already captured in our measure of theCreative Class, which includes the same arts and culture-relatedoccupations that comprise the Bohemian Index. The 2010 ToleranceIndex includes three key variables—the share of immigrants orforeign-born residents, the Gay Index, and the Integration Index(see Figure 12.6).247 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Figure 12.6 The Tolerance Index by Metro, 2010
Source: Analysis by Kevin Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson. See the appendix for full
detail on sources.

San Diego is the top-ranked metro on the updated Tolerance
Index, followed by Napa, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Santa Fe (see
Table 12.5). Ithaca, Oxnard-Thousand Oaks, Cape Coral, Florida;Boulder, and Ann Arbor round out the top ten. Miami, Las Vegas,Portland, San Francisco, and Boston all rank in the top twenty.Seattle, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Orlando, and greater Washington,DC, all make the top thirty.
The relationship between tolerance and economic growth has
been conﬁrmed by several independent studies. Meric Gertler andTara Vinodrai, working in collaboration with Gary Gates and me,found that the relationship between bohemians and high-techgrowth not only held but was in fact markedly stronger among248 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Table 12.5 Top Twenty Metros on the Tolerance Index, 2010
Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Score
1 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA .751
2 Napa, CA .747
3 Santa Rosa-Petaluma, CA .739
4 Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA .738
5 Santa Fe, NM .726
6 Ithaca, NY .723
7 Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA .708
8 Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL .702
9 Boulder, CO .701
10 Ann Arbor, MI .693
11 Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach, FL .692
12 Greeley, CO .691
13 Trenton-Ewing, NJ .690
14 Fresno, CA .687
15 Las Vegas-Paradise, NV .686
16 Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR-WA .684
17 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA .683
18 Worcester, MA .680
19 Carson City, NV .679
20 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH .678
Source: Analysis by Kevin Stolarick. See the appendix for full detail on sources.

Canadian regions.30Independent research by the Australian think
tank National Economics discovered the relationship among gays,
bohemians, and tech growth to be quite substantial in their com-parative analysis of Australian regions and urban centers. The Tol-erance Index continues to be closely associated with many sorts ofpositive regional outcomes, from Creative Class share, innovation,and high-tech industry to higher regional incomes and wages, andeven the level of happiness and well-being.
31
Are You Open to Experience?
Psychologists have long noted the connection between self-expressionand creativity. A large body of literature shows a strong correlationbetween the high levels of creativity that are found in artists, sci-entists, and entrepreneurs and a personality type that is curiousand open to new experiences. “The Geography of Personality,” apathbreaking study by two psychologists, Jason Rentfrow of Cam-bridge University and Sam Gosling of the University of Texas,examined the geographic clustering of what psychologists dubthe Big Five personality types: agreeableness, conscientiousness,extraversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Based ona large-scale survey of more than 600,000 people, they found thatpeople with high levels of the open-to-experience characteristicwere both more mobile and much more likely to cluster in specificgeographic areas. Open-to-experience people were more likelyto “attempt to escape the ennui experienced in small-town envi-ronments by relocating to metropolitan areas where their interestsin cultures and needs for social contact and stimulation are moreeasily met.” In other words, they move to and cluster in placesthat welcome them and offer them lots of exciting experiencesand stimuli. They may not do this by design, but over time, certainareas develop large clusters of these kinds of people and more249 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

and more begin to reflect the characteristics that are associated
with them.
A 2011 study by Rentfrow, “The Open City,” explored the dis-
tribution of open-to-experience personality types by metro.32Table
12.6 shows the top ten and bottom ten metros on this score. SanFrancisco has the nation’s largest concentration of open-to-experience people, followed by Los Angeles, Austin, New York,
and San Diego. Each of these metros has a considerable concentra-tion of the Creative Class. Of the top ten open-to-experience metros,only one, Las Vegas, has a low level of the Creative Class—it appearsto be relatively unique in providing employment for open-to-experience people in the nightlife and gaming industries that lie out-
side the Creative Class occupations. At the opposite end of the spec-trum, Detroit, Minneapolis, Cleveland and Columbus, and Pittsburghhave the nation’s smallest concentrations of open-to-experiencepeople. In research conducted jointly with Rentfrow, my team utilizedeven larger surveys to map the concentration and clustering of per-sonality types within large cities and metropolitan areas like NewYork, Los Angeles, Toronto, and others. Conﬁrming Rentfrow’s andGosling’s original insight, we found extreme concentrations of open-to-experience people in downtown urban neighborhoods.
Seeing the strong clustering of personality types and learning more
about the relationship between psychology and place caused a subtleshift in my own thinking. All my professional life, I’d looked at theways that social and economic factors shape the world. I’d neverthought that much about psychology—and certainly not about theways that personal proclivities might aﬀect innovation or economicdevelopment. But all of a sudden it was dawning on me that psy-chology plays a central role.
For years, I had sought to develop better and more reﬁned mea-
sures of what economists refer to as human capital or skill. My
measures of the Creative Class were my attempts to do just that. Butpsychology identiﬁes another key factor over and above the level of250 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

education or the kinds of work people do. Personality involves the
capacity to acquire and perform certain tasks competently andeﬀectively. The type of skills economists are interested in, Rentfrownotes, “implies something that can be acquired with proper training,talent, motivation, and resources.” But, he adds, “it’s more consistentwith personality theory to argue that personality traits predisposepeople to acquire certain skills. For example, highly conscientiouspeople have a disposition to be detail oriented, plan ahead, or stayorganized. Openness inﬂuences people’s ability to acquire new skillsrelatively quickly.” Obviously, some people are more creative ormore ambitious or more motivated than others. What separates a251 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Table 12.6 Openness-to-Experience by Metro
Top 10 Creative Class Share
San Francisco 39.4%
Los Angeles 34.1%
Austin 34.4%
New York 35.8%
San Diego 35.6%
San Antonio 31.2%
Nashville 31.8%
Las Vegas 22.7%
Tampa 33.0%
Denver 37.6%
Bottom 10 Creative Class Share
Detroit 34.5%
Minneapolis 37.7%
Cleveland 32.2%
Columbus 34.0%
Pittsburgh 31.7%
Indianapolis 33.0%
Kansas City 34.8%
St. Louis 33.6%
Memphis 28.5%
Cincinnati 31.8%
Source: Jason Rentfrow, “The Open City,” in Ake Andersson, David Andersson, and
Charlotta Mellander (eds.), Handbook of Cities and Creativity , London: Elgar, 2011,
pp. 117–127.

Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates from most people is not their level of ed-
ucation or even the work they do; it is this “something else.”
To get at the eﬀects of personality on regional economic growth,
my research team and I matched our metro-level data sets on in-novation, human capital, and economic growth to Rentfrow’s dataon personality types. When Mellander and I ran correlations be-tween openness-to-experience and these factors, we found that itwas modestly associated with the Creative Class, college grads, andthe Bohemian Index, and negatively associated with the WorkingClass. Openness was a bit more strongly related to high-tech in-dustry and immigrants, and quite a bit more so for the Gay Index.
33
Rentfrow’s study found similar associations and the correlationsbetween openness-to-experience and three variables—the high-tech industry, percent foreign-born, and the Gay Index—held upeven after controlling for the level of college graduates.
34
Rentfrow’s research suggests that there is a psychological di-
mension to creative cities that contributes to their ethos and char-acter. It is not just that people sort themselves into places wherethey can find work, he notes; they seek out environments wherethey can pursue their personal as well as their professional inter-ests. Clusters of open-to-experience personalities are associatedwith innovation, he suggests, because the “jobs at the center ofinnovation . . . such as design, engineering, science, painting,music, software development, writing and acting, appeal to indi-viduals who are curious, creative, intellectual, imaginative, in-ventive and resourceful. These professions are primarilyconcerned with exploring, developing and communicating newideas, methods and products.” People who are high in opennessare also adventurous, he adds: they are likely to generate new per-spectives on old issues and are comfortable with and adaptableto change. It makes sense that places with high concentrations ofhighly open individuals would also be places with disproportion-ately large numbers of high-tech workers, artists, musicians, and252 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

designers, as well as foreign-born people and gays and lesbians,
who also signal a high level of openness.
The more I thought about it, the more the connection between
open places and open people became clear. At bottom, my measuresof gay and bohemian concentrations not only signaled excitingamenity-rich places but places that had drawn broader clusters ofopen-to-experience people from all walks of life. Openness was lit-erally imprinted on their psychological and cultural DNA.
The Creativity Index
The Creativity Index is my overall measure of regional economicpotential. It combines the three major indexes discussed above:the Technology Index, the Talent Index, and the Tolerance Index.I use it as a baseline indicator of a region’s economic developmentand longer-run economic potential (see Figure 12.7 and Table12.7).
Boulder takes ﬁrst place, followed by San Francisco and Boston.
Believe it or not, there is a three-way tie for fourth place—Seattle,San Diego, and Ann Arbor. Rounding out the top ten are Corvallis,Durham, greater Washington, DC, and suburban Trenton. Ithacais eleventh. And interestingly, Silicon Valley (San Jose) follows intwelfth place. Portland, Worcester, Burlington, Austin, Hartford,Minneapolis-St. Paul, Atlanta, and Tucson complete the top twenty.Madison, Los Angeles, Denver, and Raleigh make the top one-third,with New York City in thirty-ﬁrst place.
Competing “Capitals”
In the original edition of this book, I cited the research of RobertCushing, a former University of Texas sociologist and statistician253 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Table 12.7 Top Twenty Metros on the Creativity Index, 2010
Creativity Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Index Index Index Index Index
Rank Metro Score Rank Rank Rank
1 Boulder, CO .981 10 5 9
2 San Francisco-Oakland-
Fremont, CA .970 3 16 17
3 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy,
MA-NH .968 9 9 20
4 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA .961 1 22 22
4 San Diego-Carlsbad-
San Marcos, CA .961 7 37 1
4 Ann Arbor, MI .961 25 10 10
7 Corvallis, OR .959 14 8 25
8 Durham, NC .953 8 1 45
9 Washington-Arlington-
Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV .947 27 3 30
10 Trenton-Ewing, NJ .945 44 6 13
11 Ithaca, NY .937 61 4 6
12 San Jose-Sunnyvale-
Santa Clara, CA .933 2 2 71
13 Portland-Vancouver-
Beaverton, OR-WA .930 4 59 16
14 Worcester, MA .922 30 40 18
15 Burlington-South Burlington, VT .918 11 20 6116 Austin-Round Rock, TX .916 5 54 34
16 Hartford-West Hartford-
East Hartford, CT .916 42 14 37
18 Minneapolis-St. Paul-
Bloomington, MN-WI .915 17 23 53
19 Atlanta-Sandy Springs-
Marietta, GA .912 23 33 42
20 Tucson, AZ .909 12 64 26
Source: Analysis by Kevin Stolarick. See the appendix for full detail on sources.

who undertook a systematic comparison of the three main theories
of regional growth—Glaeser’s human capital theory, Putnam’s socialcapital theory, and my own, which he referred to as creative capitaltheory. He built statistical models to determine the eﬀects of human,social, and creative capital on regional growth between 1990 and2000, including separate measures of education and human capital;occupation, wages, and hours worked; poverty and income inequal-ity; innovation and high-tech industry; and creativity and diversity.
His results were striking. He found no evidence that social capital
leads to regional economic growth; in fact, the eﬀects were negative.In a related study, he found that leading high-tech regions hadhigher income and higher levels of growth but scored below averageon almost every measure of social capital. They had less trust, lessreliance on faith-based institutions, fewer clubs, less volunteering,255 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Figure 12.7 The Creativity Index by Metro, 2010
Source: Analysis by Kevin Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson. See the appendix for full
detail on sources.

less interest in traditional politics, and less civic leadership, but
much higher levels of “protest politics” and “diversity of friend-ships.” In his own words, “conventional political involvement andsocial capital seem to relate negatively to technological developmentand higher economic growth.”
Both the human capital and creative capital models performed
much better, according to his analysis. Turning ﬁrst to the humancapital approach, he found that though it did a good job of account-ing for regional growth, “the interpretation is not as straightforwardas the human capital approach might presume.” Using creative oc-cupations, bohemians, the Milken High-Tech Index, and innova-tions as indicators of creative capital, he found that the creativecapital theory produced formidable results, with the predictivepower of the Bohemian and Innovation Indexes particularly high.He concluded: “The creative capital model generates equally im-pressive results as the human capital model and perhaps better.”
35
Many other studies have conﬁrmed his results since.
Even so, several critics have questioned the connection between
the Creative Class and regional growth. “Jobs data going back 20years, to 1983,” wrote one of them in 2004, “show that Florida’stop ten cities as a group actually do worse, lagging behind the na-tional economy by several percentage points, while his so-calledleast creative cities continue to look like economic powerhouses,expanding 60% faster than his most creative cities during thatsame period.”
36
First oﬀ, it bears repeating that there is wide consensus that skill—
whether measured as human capital or the Creative Class—is theprimary factor in economic growth and development. But morespeciﬁcally, in my 2004 essay in Next American City titled “The
Great Creative Class Debate” and in my follow-up book The Flight
of the Creative Class, I reported the results of an analysis by Kevin
Stolarick that blew those jobs numbers out of the water.
37Stolarick256 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

examined the economic performance of two groups of regions. To
keep things comparable, he conﬁned his analysis only to the forty-nine regions that had more than 1 million people at the time. Theﬁrst group was composed of the top eleven performers on the 2004version of the Creativity Index; the second group included theeleven lowest-ranked regions. He used eleven instead of the morecommon top ten because two of the lowest-ranked regions were tied.
His ﬁndings speak for themselves. Between 1990 and 2000, the
creativity leaders generated three times as many jobs as the lowest-ranked, 2.32 million versus 850,000 jobs. Even after controlling forthe fact that those regions employed more people, they still gener-ated jobs at more than twice the rate of the others, 22 percent versus11 percent. Still, looking at job creation alone can be misleading.A place might create lots of jobs, but the quality of those jobs—thewealth they generate and the salaries they pay—also matters. Sto-larick’s analysis showed that the leading creative regions addedmore than $100 billion in total wages between 1999 and 2002, morethan ﬁve times the $20 billion added by the lowest-ranked regions.Workers in the leading creative regions averaged over $5,000 morein wages and salaries than those in the lowest-ranked regions,$40,091 versus $34,383. Wages in the top-ranked creative regionsgrew at almost double the rate (5.1 percent) of the laggards (2.8percent). This translates into a far better “raise” for workers in cre-ative cities, who took home more than one-third (37 percent) moremoney than their counterparts in lower-scoring regions, $5,125versus $3,129.
I asked at the time: Which city would you put your money on to
be an economic powerhouse ﬁfty years from now—Las Vegas,which had among the fastest population growth in modern mem-ory, or a Creative Class center like San Francisco? It’s true that be-tween 1990 and 2000, Las Vegas ranked ﬁrst in population growthand third in job growth. But look at it today. Aside from perhaps257 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Detroit, Las Vegas was the metro that was hardest hit by the eco-
nomic crisis of 2008, experiencing one of the worst housing crisesand staggeringly high unemployment. I would have made a heckuvalot of money had my critics been willing to take the bet.
For this latest edition of this book, Stolarick updated the numbers
for the period 2005 through 2010, comparing the top ten and bot-tom ten metros on the Creativity Index. Needless to say, the eco-nomic crisis dramatically reshaped the jobs picture. The tenlowest-ranked regions lost 5 percent of their jobs and the leadersonly showed slight gains. The picture for Creative Class jobs, how-ever, was somewhat brighter. The leaders added 50,000 CreativeClass jobs, as compared to just 9,000 for the lowest-ranked metros.Even controlling for population, the leaders added Creative Classjobs at more than double the rate of the laggards, 8.0 versus 3.6 per-cent. Average salaries were $12,631 higher in the top ten CreativityIndex metros, $54,207 versus $41,576 for the bottom ten regions,growing by 27 percent in the former, compared to 20 percent inthe latter. And the earnings gap was considerably higher in themost creative metros. Average salaries for Creative Class memberswere a full 25 percent higher ($16,435) in the leading CreativityIndex regions, $82,242 versus $65,987.
Another set of critics questioned my theory on the grounds that
it was not related to population growth. Creative Class cities andmetros were not adding population as fast as many of their SunBelt peers. How could my theory be right, they asked, if its top citiesweren’t expanding? When interviewed for a story in the Boston
Globe in 2004, Edward Glaeser insisted that people prefer to live
in sunny, dry climates and that they actually like car-centered cities.“In place of Florida’s ‘Technology, Talent, and Tolerance,’” thestory noted, “Glaeser proposes a diﬀerent recipe, ‘Skills, Sun, andSprawl.’” In 2009, Glaeser wrote, “There is no variable that predictsurban population growth in the 20th century better than Januarytemperature.”
38258 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Having more people or adding them at a faster rate might make
some city leaders and residents proud, but it is a terribly misleading
measure of economic growth. A decade ago, the urban economistPaul Gottlieb coined a term for this disconnect between populationand economic growth: “growth without growth.”
39When Gottlieb
compared population growth to growth in real per-capita incomein the one hundred largest US metropolitan areas, he found that theydivided into four basic categories. Some—like Atlanta, Austin, andDallas—were above the national average in both categories. Others,including many older Rust Belt metros, were below average in both.But it’s the last two categories that were the deal breakers. Half of theone hundred largest metros divided into “population magnets”(places where populations grew but not income) and “wealthbuilders” (where incomes rose much faster than populations).
Real economic growth comes not from population growth, but
from improvements in productivity. The gold standard for mea-suring productivity is economic output per capita. To get at this,Kevin Stolarick and I partnered with José Lobo, an urban econo-mist at Arizona State University. When we compared the averageannual growth in population against average annual growth inGDP per capita across America’s 350-plus metros between 2001and 2010, we found virtually no correlation between the two.
40In
fact, the disconnect Gottlieb discovered had become even morepronounced. Just one in three metro areas experienced gains in bothproductivity and population that exceeded the national average—and we found no statistical association at all between populationgrowth and productivity growth, either for metros or states. Thisnot only challenges the notion that population growth is a proxyfor economic growth; it puts the lie to development strategies thatencourage population growth as an end in itself. A rising popula-tion can create a false illusion of prosperity, as it did in so manySun Belt metros, which built their house-of-cards economiesaround housing construction and real estate development, leaving259 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

ghost towns, mass unemployment, and empty public coﬀers in
their wake when the bubble inevitably burst.
How has Creative Class theory fared since the crisis of 2008? To
get at this, Charlotta Mellander and I examined the eﬀect of theCreative Class and other factors on the growth in regional economicoutput between 2007 and 2010. We can start out with what’s not
associated with regional economic growth. The economic growthof metros between 2007 and 2010 had little or no relationship topopulation size, density, levels of innovation, wages, or places withwarmer summers. It had only a weak relationship to high-tech industry and a weak negative association with housing prices. Themost powerful factor in our analysis by far was Creative Classshare. The correlation between it and regional economic growth
was the strongest of any in our analysis.
41Despite the strong show-
ings posted by some traditional manufacturing metros like Elkhart,Indiana, economic growth was much less likely to occur in metroswhere the Working Class makes up a greater share of the workforce.In fact, regional economic growth was negatively associated withthe share of Working Class jobs.
Despite hemming and hawing, mainly among non-academics,
it is well established that skill, talent, and what economists refer toas human capital all drive economic development. My own workis squarely in line with that view. Still, a number of economistsquestioned my Creative Class measure. As we have seen, their con-cern was that it was a warmed-over version of the standard educa-tional measure of human capital. But as Chapter 3 has shown,independent studies showed that although the two are indeed re-lated, they measure diﬀerent things; also, membership in the Cre-ative Class adds to wages and salaries over and above the returnsto education. To reiterate, the standard educational attainmentmeasure does not account for individuals who are incredibly im-portant to the economy but who for one reason or another did not260 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

go to or ﬁnish college, such as, for example, Bill Gates, Michael
Dell, and Steve Jobs. Also, the conventional educational measureis too broad; it does not capture diﬀerences in types of skill. An occupation-based measure like mine has obvious empirical advan-tages, as we have seen, in that it identiﬁes more precisely the kindsof skills or talent that add to regional productivity and wealth. Myoccupation-based measure has the added advantage of providingregions and their leadership with a practical tool that they can ac-tually use to better identify, understand, and act on their uniqueadvantages and disadvantages. Occupational cluster analysis is atool that both complements industrial cluster analysis and goes be-yond it in important ways.
Several careful empirical studies have compared my theory to
human capital theory. Two economists aﬃliated with the US De-partment of Agriculture, David McGranahan and Timothy Wojan,used sophisticated statistical techniques to gauge the eﬀects of theCreative Class versus human capital on regional growth. Thesetechniques, they note, allowed them to undertake a “critical exam-ination of the most cutting critique of Florida’s analysis: that he ismerely substituting employment in highly skilled occupations asa proxy for the endowment of human capital.” To do so, they usedsystems of simultaneous equations rather than the conventionalsimple regression models to control for the endogeneity of popu-lation and employment growth as well as inﬂuences from a rangeof other local conditions and attributes. Their key ﬁndings over-whelmingly conﬁrm the “strong independent inﬂuence on employ-ment growth from both the initial share employed in the recastcreative class occupations and its growth over the decade. By con-trast, the statistical association with human capital variables is quiteweak.” And they add: “The econometric test of the creative classthesis provides strong support for the notion that creativity has aneﬀect on growth independent of the endowment of human capital.”
42261 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Another detailed study, this one investigating regional develop-
ment in the Netherlands, also found that the Creative Class con-
siderably outperformed the standard human capital measure inaccounting for employment growth. This led its authors to con-clude that using Creative Class in analysis sets a “new standard”for measuring skill and talent, especially when considering regionallabor productivity. “With our Dutch data set we do ﬁnd evidencethat Florida’s creative class is a better predictor of city growth thantraditional education standards,” they wrote. “Therefore we con-clude that Florida’s major contribution is his successful attemptto create a population category that is a better indicator for levelsof human capital than average education levels or amounts ofhighly educated people. The point is, as Florida stated, not whichor how much education people can boast of, but what they reallydo in working life.”
43
Other critics have said that my approach falls victim to the
proverbial chicken-and-egg problem. What typically come ﬁrst,these critics argue, are the jobs. Once a region has those, thepeople—as well as the amenities, lifestyle, and tolerance—will follow.
One conventional economic developer put it this way: “Create thejobs and diversity will follow.” As I have said before, jobs-versus-people is a false dichotomy. The rationale behind my approach isworth reiterating: skills and skilled people are an incredibly mobilefactor of production; they ﬂow. The key question my theory posesis: what are the factors that shape that ﬂow and determine the di-vergent levels of talent and skill across regions?
As far as I can determine, there are three basic answers. The ﬁrst
argues that amenities attract human capital. For example, a studyby the economist Jesse Shapiro found that though “roughly 60 per-cent of the employment growth eﬀect of college graduates is dueto enhanced productivity growth,” the “rest” is “caused by growthin quality of life,” adding that: “this ﬁnding contrasts with the com-262 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

mon argument that human capital generates employment growth
in urban areas solely through changes in productivity.” The secondcenters on the university’s role in producing and concentratinghuman capital. But how is it that some regions have great univer-sities and substantial amenities (symphony, ballet, opera, museums,professional sports, golf courses, and the like) but still experiencea signiﬁcant outﬂow of talented people?
This led me to a third answer, which I believe provides an even
simpler and more basic explanation for the ﬂow of talent and skill.I say that the key factor in the divergence or ﬂow of human capitalis the openness of a given place to human capital. If ﬁrms and mar-kets beneﬁt from low barriers to entry, why not people and labormarkets? Thus, the more open a place is, the more likely it is to at-tract the kinds of people who power innovation and economicgrowth. There are two reasons this should be so. First, such placespossess some underlying characteristics that allow individuals, in-cluding entrepreneurs, to readily mobilize resources. And second,they are oriented toward personal self-expression and openness toexperience, which psychological studies show is a key characteristicof entrepreneurial behavior.
The most complete test of the Creative Class theory can be found
in a detailed study I conducted with Charlotta Mellander and KevinStolarick entitled “Inside the Black Box of Regional Economic De-velopment.” We devised it to be the fullest and most accurate testof my theory versus human capital theory. We sought to show thatit is not just the endowment of skill and talent that matters but itsﬂow, and we wanted to test my notion that a low barrier to entryfor human capital—reﬂected by openness to diversity—is a key fac-tor for both talent and regional growth.
We used an advanced statistical technique called path analysis
to examine the relative roles played by the Creative Class, the con-ventional measure of human capital, and tolerance on two key263 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

elements of regional growth—regional income and wages. These
two measures can and do vary widely across metros. Wages refersto pay for work; income is a broad measure of wealth that includescapital gains, rents, interest, transfers, and the like, in addition towages. Naples, Florida, for example, a tourist and second-homedestination, has high income, of which only 32 percent comesfrom wages. Silicon Valley has one of the highest income levels inthe nation, and more than 92 percent of it is made up of wages. Inthis sense, wages are a more direct measure of local productivity.
Our study was designed to identify the eﬀects of three key classes
of factors on regional incomes and wages. First, it tested for the dif-ferential eﬀects of educational human capital and occupational class,enabling us to parse their relative eﬀects vis-à-vis high-tech industryand technological innovation, which have also been shown to aﬀectregional growth. Then, it tested for the eﬀects of regional cultural andinstitutional factors—amenities, university, and openness—on tal-ent, technology, and ultimately on regional incomes and wages.
Our models enabled us to not only identify the direct eﬀects of
these classes of factors but also to identify how they might relateto one another indirectly through other variables. A big limit ofthe standard regression techniques used in most studies is that theydo not allow for these indirect eﬀects. The nuanced eﬀects of vari-ables that work through other variables cannot be ascertained; key,if subtle, factors may register as insigniﬁcant. We did the analysisfor all 300-plus US metro areas, running varied permutations ofthe model to examine the relative roles played by the Creative Classversus human capital, the role of high-tech industry, and the ef-fects of tolerance. We deﬁned openness as a combination of bo-hemian and gay concentrations. We added variables for technologyof diﬀerent kinds—taking both high-tech industry and patents percapita into account. We put all of that into our model and generatedresults that help us better understand the dynamics of the so-calledblack box of regional growth.264 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

What did we ﬁnd? First and foremost, we found that the Creative
Class and human capital both play a role, but they seem to operate
through diﬀerent channels. Human capital relates more strongly toincome, and the Creative Class relates more strongly to wages. Thisis a critical diﬀerence, as wages are a better gauge not just of wealth,which can be imported from elsewhere, but of the productivity ofa region. Human capital may reﬂect richer places, but it seems thatthe Creative Class actually makes a place more productive.
In the next chapter, we will look at the Creative Class’s growing
global impact.265 THE 3T’S OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

266CHAPTER 13
Global Reach
In March 2003, I traveled to New Zealand to address a major
forum on the future of the Creative Economy. I took advantage
of the opportunity to meet with Peter Jackson, the Academy
Award–winning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his stu-
dios in lush, green, otherworldly Wellington, a smallish but excitingcosmopolitan city of roughly 400,000, and one certainly not pre-viously considered a global cultural capital. But Jackson’s is one ofthe world’s most sophisticated ﬁlmmaking complexes, and he builtit in his hometown of Wellington for a reason. He realized, he toldme, that the allure of the Rings movies could entice the best cine-
matographers, costume designers, sound technicians, computergraphic artists, model builders, editors, and animators from all overthe world to relocate to New Zealand.
Jackson had ﬁgured out what many American cities discovered
during the 1990s: that paradigm-busting creative industries couldsingle-handedly change the way cities ﬂourish while driving dy-namic and widespread economic change. During my visit toWellington, I saw dozens of Americans from places like Berkeleyand MIT working alongside talented ﬁlmmakers from Europe andAsia. Many had begun the process of establishing residency in NewZealand, ready to relinquish their American citizenship for what

they saw as greener creative pastures. One of them, a digital wun-
derkind from Silicon Valley, told me he was launching his newhigh-tech start-up in Wellington because of its technology infra-structure, which for his purposes had advantages that trumpedeven Silicon Valley. As we walked past a wall map with pins stuckin it showing the studio workers’ native countries, the head of digitalanimation joked that the organization looked more like the UnitedNations than a ﬁlm production studio.
My encounter with Jackson and his Wellington ﬁlm complex had
a big eﬀect on me. A decade ago, when I was preparing the ﬁrst edi-tion of this book, I focused almost exclusively on the United States.I’m an American after all, and I knew my own country best. TheUnited States has lots of cities—several hundred metros overall—so it provided a good test case on which to base my statistical re-search on the role and eﬀects of the Creative Class and of the 3T’son economic development. When the original edition of this bookcame out, a number of commentators argued, and some still do,that its main ﬁndings and implications had scant relevance forother nations—especially ones that are smaller, have fewer largecities, and whose populations are less mobile. But within just a cou-ple of years, international researchers began applying my frameworkto study the Creative Class in their own countries, conﬁrming manyof my insights. That was what had gotten me invited to New Zealandin the ﬁrst place.
When I returned home, I immediately got to work with my col-
leagues and students to develop estimates of the Creative Class aroundthe world. That work led directly to two things—“Europe in the Cre-ative Age,” a report I wrote with Irene Tinagli, the ﬁrst serious censusand analysis of the global Creative Class, and a new metric, the GlobalCreativity Index, which I unveiled in my 2004 book, The Flight ofthe Creative Class.
1This chapter updates and revises them, this time
covering eighty-two nations across the world.2267 GLOBAL REACH

The Creative Class Around the World
Our statistics for the global Creative Class come from the Interna-
tional Labour Organization (ILO). The ILO collects the most de-tailed available data on occupations, breaking the workforce downinto job categories like scientists and engineers, artists, musicians,architects, engineers, managers, professionals, and so forth. Al-though the ILO’s occupational categories and deﬁnitions diﬀersomewhat from the US-based statistics my team and I use in ourdomestic research, they are consistent across nations and thereforeprovide the best available measures of the extent and growth ofcreative occupations worldwide.
The Creative Class numbers 300 million workers in the eighty-
two nations for which data are available. This is double the 150 mil-lion I estimated in The Flight of the Creative Class in 2005, mainly
because our data now covers more countries. Still, this numbershould be interpreted carefully. It is a very rough estimate that inall likelihood still vastly underestimates the true number of CreativeClass workers worldwide.
Although the United States leads in the total number of Creative
Class workers, it ranks a dismal twenty-seventh in terms of its Cre-ative Class share, with Creative Class workers making up roughly35 percent of its workforce. (You will notice that this number diﬀerssomewhat from the ﬁgure used in most of this book. In order tomake sure we are comparing apples to apples, this 35 percent Cre-ative Class ﬁgure is based on the same ILO data we use for othernations.)
The highest-ranking countries have close to one-half of their
workforce in the Creative Class. Singapore takes the top spot, with47.3 percent of its workforce in the Creative Class, followed by theNetherlands with 46.2 percent and Switzerland with 44.8 percent.Australia is fourth, with 44.5 percent of its workforce in the Creative268 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Class. Scandinavian and Northern European countries take many
of the top spots: Sweden (43.9 percent), Belgium (43.8 percent),Denmark (43.7 percent), Finland (43.4 percent), Norway (42.1 per-cent), and Germany (41.6 percent). Canada ranks twelfth, with 40.8percent of its workforce in the Creative Class. Of the countrieswith newly advanced economic development—the BRICs (Brazil,Russia, India, China)—Russia ranks highest at twentieth (38.6 per-cent), Brazil is ﬁfty-seventh (18.5 percent), and China is seventy-ﬁfth (7.4 percent).
So much for countries: The real drivers of the Creative Economy
are cities and metros. Unfortunately, we lack a single organizedsource of comparable data for cities worldwide—not just for theCreative Class, but for lots and lots of other factors we would like tomeasure. After Rise was published, researchers in a wide range of
countries undertook projects to collect Creative Class data for theircountries and regions.
A particularly notable eﬀort to collect and organize data for
Canada, Western Europe, and the Nordic countries was organizedby Björn Asheim from Lund University in Sweden, with RonBoschma of Utrecht University; Phillip Cooke of Cardiﬀ University;Michael Fritsch of Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena; Meric Gertlerfrom the University of Toronto; Arne Isaksen of Norway’s Universityof Agder; Mark Lorenzen of the Copenhagen Business School; andMarkku Sotarauta, University of Tampere, Finland. Using theirdata, we can compile an illustrative list of the Creative Class in citiesand metro regions outside the United States. I need to emphasizethat this list is illustrative only—there are many Creative Class re-gions, nations, and cities around the world where data are eitherunavailable, have not been organized or published, or of which Iam not aware. Some of those cities may well have higher CreativeClass shares than any of the ones here. Table 13.1, compiled by Mel-lander and me from the available data, shows twenty cities outsidethe United States for which Creative Class data are available.
3269 GLOBAL REACH

Table 13.1 The Creative Class in Global Cities
Creative Class
Region Country Share
Amsterdam Netherlands 46.0%
Stockholm Sweden 46.0%
Helsinki Finland 44.0%
Oxford UK 42.8%
Munich Germany 42.2%
London UK 41.2%
Cambridge UK 41.2%
Malmö-Lund Sweden 41.0%
Berlin Germany 39.3%
Hamburg Germany 38.2%
Hannover Germany 37.8%
Oslo Norway 37.6%
Ottawa Canada 37.6%
Bonn Germany 37.3%
Toronto Canada 37.1%
Copenhagen Denmark 36.8%
Stuttgart Germany 36.6%
Leicestershire UK 36.2%
Leeds UK 35.3%
Paris France 35.1%
Sources: Analysis by Charlotta Mellander from various sources, but see in particular the
European Science Foundation project, Technology, Talent and Tolerance in European
Cities: A Comparative Analysis. The project was carried out over a three-year period,
2004–2006, and was coordinated by Björn T. Asheim, Lund University, Sweden, and
supervised by Meric Gertler, University of Toronto (and also aﬃliated with the Universityof Oslo). The national project leaders were Ron Boschma, Utrecht University, the Nether-lands; Phil Cooke, University of Cardiﬀ, Wales; Michael Fritsch, Technical UniversityFreiberg (now aﬃliated with Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena), Germany; Arne Isaksen,University of Agder, Norway; Mark Lorenzen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark;and Markku Sotarauta, University of Tampere, Finland. Available online at http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/running-programmes/ecrp/ecrp-scheme-2001-2004.html.Also, see the special section in Economic Geography, Volume 85, Number 4, October
2009, pp. 355–442. Data for French metros provided by Sébastien Chantelot of ESC Bre-tagne Brest University.

271 GLOBAL REACH
Figure 13.1 The Global Creative Class Map
Amsterdam and Stockholm top the list, with 46 percent of their
workforce in the Creative Class. The Creative Class makes up more
than four in ten workers in Helsinki, Oxford, Munich, Malmö,London, and Cambridge. This is roughly the same as the top rankedUS metros at the time—Boulder and San Jose (Silicon Valley). TheCreative Class made up between 35 and 40 percent of the workforcein Paris, Toronto, Hamburg, Berlin, Oslo, Copenhagen, and severalother metros—more than Boston, greater Washington, DC, Austin,or San Francisco at the time.
Technology, of course, is the ﬁrst of my three T’s of economic
development. From cutting-edge inventions in software, robotics,and biotechnology to improvements in manufacturing systems andprocesses, technology makes economies and societies more eﬃcientand productive.Source: Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, Creativity and Pros-
perity: The 2011 Global Creativity Index, University of Toronto, Martin Prosperity Insti-
tute Report, October 2011. Available online at www.research.martinprosperity.org.

The Global Technology Index employs three key technology
metrics—a Global R&D Investment Index (based on R&D spend-
ing as a percent of GDP), a Global Researchers Index (which mea-
sures professionals engaged in R&D, controlling for population),and a Global Innovation Index (patents per capita). The UnitedStates does much better here than it did on Creative Class share,ranking third overall. With its well-developed infrastructure forentrepreneurial venture-capital ﬁnance, the United States remainsa technology leader.
Finland is ﬁrst on the Global Technology Index and Japan takes
second place. Israel ranks fourth. Its high ranking might come as asurprise to some, considering its small size, but as Dan Senor andSaul Singer’s Start-Up Nation argues, Israel’s economic development
strategy has been based on launching innovative ﬁrms.
4Israel has
the highest concentration of engineers in the world—135 per 10,000people, compared to 85 per 10,000 people in the United States. Swe-den is ﬁfth. Canada ranks eleventh.
Although much has been made of the ascendance of the BRIC
countries—Brazil, Russia, and especially India and China—they donot rank highly on the Global Technology Index. Russia, in thetwenty-eighth spot, ranks highest, and China is thirty-seventh, aboutthe same as Latvia and Bulgaria. Brazil takes forth-eighth place andIndia, forty-ninth, just behind Serbia and Croatia.
Talent is the second T. In The Flight of the Creative Class, I pre-
dicted that the competition for global talent would soon supplantthe competition for goods, investment, and resources as the keyfactor in global competition and found that the United States wasalready beginning to falter on this score. We measure talent withthe Global Talent Index, a composite of the Creative Class and “ter-tiary education,” which includes technical and vocational educationas well as colleges and universities.
The United States ranks eighth on the Global Talent Index. The
Scandinavian countries come out on the top, with Finland and Swe-272 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

den taking ﬁrst and second place. Singapore ranks third, Denmark
fourth, New Zealand ﬁfth, Norway sixth, and Australia seventh.Canada ranks seventeenth. Of the BRIC nations, Russia ranks high-est at thirteenth, with Brazil in sixty-sixth, India in seventy-ﬁfth,and China in seventy-sixth place.
Tolerance, the third T, is critical to a region’s or nation’s ability
to attract and mobilize creative talent. Tolerance is more than amatter of political correctness—it’s an economic growth imperative:places that welcome diversity foster creativity. We measure globaltolerance as a combination of two variables, both taken from theGallup World Poll. The ﬁrst is the percentage of respondents who
believe that the community where they live is a good place for ethnicand racial minorities to live. The second is the percentage that saysthat their community is a good place for gay and lesbian people to273 GLOBAL REACH
Figure 13.2 The Global Technology Index
Source: Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, Creativity and Pros-
perity: The 2011 Global Creativity Index, University of Toronto, Martin Prosperity Insti-
tute Report, October 2011. Available online at www.research.martinprosperity.org.

live. A signiﬁcant body of independent research conﬁrms that open-
ness to gays and lesbians is associated with higher levels of regionalas well as national economic performance.
5
The United States ranks eighth on the Global Tolerance Index,
perhaps reﬂecting recent increases in anti-immigrant sentimentand social conservatism toward gays and lesbians. Canada takesthe top spot, and Ireland ranks second. The Netherlands ranksthird: it is the only country among the top ﬁve that is more opento gay and lesbian people (83 percent) than it is to racial and ethnicminorities (73 percent). New Zealand ranks fourth, followed bynearby Australia in ﬁfth place. Both have open immigration systemsand have made it a priority to attract foreign talent. Spain, wherethe Zapatero administration made tolerance and openness a pri-ority, is in sixth place, followed by Sweden.
The Global Creativity Index, or GCI, brings all these measures
together, providing an integrated and comprehensive assessmentof a nation’s standing on the 3T’s of economic development (seeFigure 13.5). The United States takes second place, up from fourthplace in the original 2004 index. Sweden takes ﬁrst, maintainingthe top position it held in 2004. Finland is third, followed by Den-mark in fourth, and Australia in ﬁfth place. New Zealand takessixth place; Canada ties with Norway for eighth; Singapore and theNetherlands round out the top ten. Despite their rapid economicrise, the BRIC nations still do not crack the upper tiers on the GCI:Russia ranks thirtieth, Brazil forty-sixth, India ﬁftieth, and Chinaﬁfty-eighth.
Creativity and the Wealth and Happiness of Nations
Looking through the lens of the Global Creativity Index, two thingsbecome clear. First, the more creative and innovative a country’seconomy is, the more of an economic edge it enjoys. And second,274 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

the US model, which combines high levels of creativity and inno-
vation with high levels of economic inequality, is not the norm: infact, it is somewhat unique.
When we examined the relationship between overall creativity
(measured on the GCI) and key gauges of economic output, inno-vation, and entrepreneurship we found that the GCI was closelyrelated with the standard measure of economic output (gross do-mestic product per capita). The GCI was also closely associatedwith the Global Competitiveness Index (another GCI, confusingly)developed by Harvard professor Michael Porter for the World Eco-nomic Forum, which includes factors associated with economicoutput, innovation, eﬃciency, and business climate, among others.275 GLOBAL REACH
Figure 13.3 The Global Talent Index
Source: Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, Creativity and Pros-
perity: The 2011 Global Creativity Index, University of Toronto, Martin Prosperity Insti-
tute Report, October 2011. Available online at www.research.martinprosperity.org.

We then looked at the connection between creativity and entre-
preneurship using the Global Entrepreneurship Index, which coversﬁfty-four nations, worldwide. The index shows the wide disparityin entrepreneurial activity across the nations of the world. Canada,Israel, and the United States have the highest levels of entrepre-neurial activity, whereas Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, andJapan have the lowest. The correlation between the GCI and theGlobal Entrepreneurship Index was considerable.
Economic competitiveness is one thing, but what about broader
concerns for happiness and well-being? To get at this, we examinedthe connection between the GCI and a comprehensive measure ofhappiness and life satisfaction collected by the Gallup Organiza-tion’s World Poll. Once again, the correlation was very close.276 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Figure 13.4 The Global Tolerance Index
Source: Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, Creativity and Pros-
perity: The 2011 Global Creativity Index, University of Toronto, Martin Prosperity Insti-
tute Report, October 2011. Available online at www.research.martinprosperity.org.

Many argue that the shift to a knowledge-intensive Creative Econ-
omy exacerbates levels of inequality as once high-paying, family-
supporting manufacturing jobs inevitably decline and the labormarket splits into higher-pay, higher-skill knowledge and profes-sional jobs, on the one hand, and lower-pay, lower-skill service jobs,on the other. There is clear evidence that this is happening in theUnited States. But is this the case everywhere? Must more innovativeand Creative Economies necessarily bring greater levels of economicinequality? To get at this, we examined the relationship between theGCI and a standard measure of income inequality, the Gini Index.Although it may come as a surprise to those familiar with the caseof the United States, we found that the GCI is in fact systematicallyassociated with lower levels of socio economic inequality—and hence277 GLOBAL REACH
Figure 13.5 The Global Creativity Index
Source: Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, Creativity and Pros-
perity: The 2011 Global Creativity Index, University of Toronto, Martin Prosperity Insti-
tute Report, October 2011. Available online at www.research.martinprosperity.org.

Figure 13.6 Creativity and Inequality Across Nations
Source: Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, Creativity and Prosperity: The 2011 Global Creative
Index, University of Toronto, Martin Prosperity Institute Report, October 2011. Available online at www.research
.martinprosperity.org.

greater equality—across the nations of the world. The correlation
between inequality and the GCI is actually negative.6
Figure 13.6 plots the association between the Gini measure of in-
come inequality and the GCI. On the one hand, there are countrieslike the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and to alesser extent, Australia and New Zealand, where high levels of cre-ativity, productivity, and economic competitiveness go hand inhand with higher levels of inequality. But, on the other hand, thereare also a large number of countries—mostly Scandinavian andNorthern European nations, along with Japan—where high levelsof creativity combine with much lower levels of inequality. In fact,this pattern appears to be the more general one, with the UnitedStates and Singapore appearing more as outliers. As Chapter 16will show, US inequality appears to be at least in part driven notjust by globalization, technology, and changes in the skills requiredof knowledge-based and creative jobs, but by concentrated poverty.
A high-road path to prosperity—an innovative and competitive
economic system that causes far less severe socioeconomic dividesthan we are experiencing today in the United States—is not onlypossible, it is already in place in some of the world’s most advancedand competitive nations.
In this respect, the United States has much to learn from other
Creative Economies.279 GLOBAL REACH

280CHAPTER 14
Quality of Place
Why do people—especially talented Creative Class people
with lots of choices—opt to locate in certain places? What
draws them to some places and not others? Economists
and social scientists have paid a great deal of attention to the loca-tion decisions of companies, but they have virtually ignored howpeople, especially creative people, make the same choices. In searchof answers, I began by simply asking people how they made theirdecisions about where to live and work. I started with my studentsand colleagues and then turned to friends and associates in othercities. Eventually, I began to ask virtually everyone I met. Ultimately,in the mid-2000s, I put the question at the heart of a major surveyI conducted along with the Gallup Organization. The same answercame back, time and again.
Place itself, I began to realize, was the key factor. So much so,
that I coined a term—quality of place—to sum it up. I use the termin contrast to the more traditional concept of quality of life. It refersto the unique set of characteristics that deﬁnes a place and makesit attractive. Over time, my colleagues and I have come to refer toit as the fourth T: “Territorial Assets.” Generally, one can think ofquality of place as cutting across three key dimensions:

281 QUALITY OF PLACE
What’s there: the combination of the built environment and the
natural environment; a proper setting for pursuit of creative
lives.
Who’s there: the diverse kinds of people, interacting and pro-
viding cues that anyone can make a life in that community.
What’s going on: the vibrancy of street life, café culture, arts, music,
and people engaging in outdoor activities—altogether a lot ofactive, exciting, creative endeavors.
Quality of place can be summed up as an interrelated set of ex-
periences. Many of them, like the street-level scene, are dynamic
and participatory. You can do more than be a passive spectator;you can be a part of the scene. The street buzz is right nearby if youwant it, but you can also retreat to your home or some other quietplace, chill out in an urban park, or even set out for the country.
Many members of the Creative Class also want to have a hand
in actively shaping their communities’ quality of place. At that samemeeting of the downtown revitalization group in Providence, RhodeIsland, that I mentioned earlier, during which a member of the au-dience spoke about “troublemakers,” another participant remarked:“My friends and I came to Providence because it already has theauthenticity that we like—its established neighborhoods, historicarchitecture, and ethnic mix.” He then implored the city leaders tomake these qualities the basis of their revitalization eﬀorts and to doso in ways that actively harness his and his peers’ energy. Or as heaptly put it: “We want a place that’s not done.” Quality of placedoes not occur automatically; it is an ongoing dynamic process thatengages a number of disparate aspects of a community. But likemost good things, it is not all good—what looks like neighbor-hood revitalization from one perspective is gentriﬁcation from an-
other; rising housing values often go hand in hand with thedisplacement of long-term residents, a serious problem that de-mands serious responses.

282 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Some of my critics argue that my focus on quality of place is a
distraction, pointing to tech enclaves like the suburbs of northern
Virginia, Silicon Valley, or the outer rings of Seattle to make thepoint that the people who work in high-tech industries actuallyprefer traditional suburban lifestyles. My response is simple: allthose places are located within major metropolitan areas that areamong the most diverse in the country and that oﬀer a wide arrayof lifestyle amenities. As colorless as those suburbs might appearto some, they are a product of the openness and diversity of theirbroader milieu. Silicon Valley can’t be understood without referenceto the counterculture of nearby San Francisco. Had it not been re-ceptive to offbeat people like the young Steve Jobs years ago, it couldnot have become what it is today.
What people want is not an either-or proposition. Successful
places do not provide just one thing; they provide a range of qual-ity of place options for different kinds of people at different stagesin their lives. Great cities are not monoliths; as Jane Jacobs saidlong ago, they are federations of neighborhoods. Think aboutNew York City and its environs. When they first move to NewYork, young people live in relatively funky places like the EastVillage, South Slope, Williamsburg, or Hoboken, where there arelots of other young people, the rent is more affordable, and room-mate situations can be found. When they earn a little more, theymove to the Upper West Side or maybe Tribeca or SoHo; earn alittle more and they can go to the West Village or the Upper EastSide. Once marriage and children come along, some stay in thecity while others relocate to bedroom communities in places likeWestchester County, Connecticut, or the New Jersey suburbs.Later, when the kids are gone, some of these people buy a co-opoverlooking the park or a duplex on the Upper East Side. Membersof the Creative Class come in all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, andlifestyles. To be truly successful, cities and regions must offer
something for all of them.

283 QUALITY OF PLACE
Social Capital and the City
I have mentioned Robert Putnam and his theory of social capital
a number of times in the course of this book. Although I don’talways agree with him, he is a distinguished scholar and a truepublic intellectual who has had a profound influence on my ownthinking. I greatly admire his willingness to climb down from theivory tower to address pressing social issues and stimulate in-formed public debate. The title of his widely read book BowlingAlone comes from his finding that from 1980 to 1993, league bowl-
ing declined by 40 percent, while the number of individual bowlersrose by 10 percent.
1This, he argues, is just one indicator of a
broader and more disturbing trend: a long-term decline in socialcapital. By this, he means that people have become increasinglydisconnected from one another and from their communities. Thedecline is evident in everything from the loosening bonds betweenfamily, friends, and neighbors to declining participation in orga-nizations of all sorts—churches, neighborhood associations, po-litical parties, and recreational leagues. This social capital deficitis in turn rattling many aspects of our society, weakening ourneighborhoods, affecting our health, making us less happy, dam-aging our educational system, threatening the well-being of ourchildren, eroding our democracy, and threatening the very sourcesof our prosperity.
Putnam identiﬁed four key factors behind this civic malaise. First,
longer working hours and increasing pressures of time and moneymean we have less time to spend with one another. Second, rampantsuburban sprawl keeps us farther away from family and friendsand makes it harder for us to get to activities. Third, television andother electronic mass media take up more of our time, leaving lessof it for more active pursuits and volunteer eﬀorts. Fourth and mostimportant, according to Putnam, is the “generational shift” from

the “civic-minded generation of World War II” to “me-oriented”
boomers and generation X-ers that followed.
Much of Putnam’s account initially resonated with me. I grew
up surrounded by relatives and friends in just the sort of communitywhose decline Putnam laments. My father belonged to the Italian-American Club; he was the manager of my Little League team, andmy mother was a den mother for my Cub Scout troop. My brotherand I played in our own rock band with some friends from Catholicschool; we frequently entertained neighborhood kids in the base-ment of our family home. Pittsburgh, where I lived for nearly twodecades, was ﬁlled with strong ethnic neighborhoods and burstingwith community pride of the sort Putnam describes; it was thanksto its strong sense of community that it stayed as intact as it did inthe wake of the near-total collapse of the region’s steel and otherheavy industries.
The Quasi-Anonymous Life
But as compelling as Putnam’s story is, my own research led me tovery diﬀerent conclusions. The people in the focus groups and in-terviews I did when I was preparing the original edition of this bookexpressed little interest in living in tightly knit, social-capital kindsof communities; they did not want friends and neighbors peeringover fences into their lives. Rather, they desired what I have cometo call quasi-anonymity .Like the denizens of 1920s Greenwich Vil-
lage whom Carolyn Ware described, they craved openness, diver-sity, and the ability to be themselves. Social structures that werethe hallmark of community in the past were fading. Where strongties among people were once important, weak ties are becoming thenorm. Where old structures were once nurturing, they have becomemore and more restrictive and exclusionary. The life that Madison284 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

285 QUALITY OF PLACE
Avenue and politicians encourage us to think of as distinctively
American—close families and friends, tight neighborhoods, civicclubs, vibrant electoral politics, strong faith-based institutions,and a reliance on civic leadership—has been giving way to some-thing new.
At the root of these changes is the distinction between two types
of social bonds—strong versus weak ties. Strong ties are of longstanding, marked by trust and reciprocity in multiple areas of life:the kinds of relationships we tend to have with family members,close friends, and longtime neighbors or coworkers. When youhave strong ties with someone, you know each other’s personalaﬀairs and do things like trade visits, run errands, and do favorsfor one another. Practically all of us have at least a few such rela-tionships; most people can manage between ﬁve and ten of them,according to sociologists who study such things. These are thefriends you can conﬁde in, the neighbor who watches your housewhile you’re away, perhaps the uncle who gets you a job. The ad-vantages of such relationships are obvious.
But weak ties are often more important. The modern theory of the
“strength of weak ties” comes from the sociologist Mark Granovetter’sclassic research on how people ﬁnd jobs.
2When it comes to ﬁnding
work, Granovetter discovered, weak ties matter more than strongones. Other research on social networks has shown that weak tiesare the key mechanism for mobilizing resources, ideas, and infor-mation, whether for ﬁnding a job, solving a problem, launching anew product, or establishing a new enterprise. The key reason thatweak ties are so important is that we can manage so many more ofthem. Strong ties, by their nature, consume much more of our timeand energy. Weak ties require less investment, and we can use themmore opportunistically. Weak ties are critical to the creative envi-ronment of a city or region because they allow for rapid entry of newpeople and rapid absorption of new ideas.
3The idea that proximity

286 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
to total strangers is more important than connections to lifelong
friends may seem strange until you think about it for a minute.Chances are, you and your close friends travel in mostly the samecircles. You know the same people, frequent the same places, andhear about the same opportunities. Weak ties allow us to admit newpeople and new information into the equation, which exposes us toa larger set of novel and potentially unforeseen opportunities.
I am not advocating that we abandon our strong ties and oppor-
tunistically structure our lives around weak ones. That would be alonely and shallow way of life, indeed, and it is the fate that Putnamfears we are facing. But most Creative Class people that I’ve metand studied do not aspire to such a life and don’t seem to be fallinginto it. Most maintain a core of strong ties. They have signiﬁcantothers; they have close friends; they call Mom. But life in moderncommunities revolves around a larger set of looser ties, and inter-estingly enough, most people seem to prefer it that way.
The shift from small, homogeneous strong-tie communities to
larger, more heterogeneous weak-tie communities is a basic factof modern life, identiﬁed a century ago by the giants of modern so-cial theory—Max Weber, George Simmel, and Emile Durkheim.
4
Writing in the 1930s, the inﬂuential German critical theorist WalterBenjamin quoted from a police report written in 1798 that lamentedthe fact that surveillance had become impossible because “each in-dividual, unknown to all the others, hides in the crowd and blushesbefore the eyes of no one.”
5In his musings on nineteenth-century
Parisian life, Baudelaire portrayed a city of passing encounters,fragmentary exchanges, strangers, and crowds where people couldﬁnd relief from their “inner subjective demons.” Although Baude-laire disliked many aspects of the city—the factories, the merchants,and the crowds—he “loved its freedom and its opportunities foranonymity and curious observation.”
6This aspect of city life was
reﬂected in the ﬂaneur—a citizen who is quasi-anonymous andfree to enjoy the diversity of the city’s experience.

287 QUALITY OF PLACE
The desire for such quasi-anonymous communities is not limited
to urban enclaves. William Whyte identiﬁed it as a primary moti-
vator behind the great migration of middle-class professionals from
closely knit urban neighborhoods to the more transient suburbs inthe 1950s. For Whyte, suburbia was a new kind of community —the
preferred home of the new, upwardly mobile “transients” who couldbuild the lives they desired, unencumbered by close family andethnic-group ties.
7
What People Really Want
So if creative people no longer want to live in a culture that revolvesaround a big corporation during the working day, and the churchleague and the Oddfellows and the Garden Club the rest of thetime, what do they want? What draws them to some places rather
than others?
Thick Labor Markets
Yes, jobs still matter. But it is not just a question of a single job. Aswe have seen, the old employment contract has broken down;people recognize that the idea of a job for life is a thing of the past.When I asked about the role that jobs and employment opportu-nities play in location decisions in interviews and focus groups, Ikept hearing the same things. My subjects told me they could notsettle for a location that provided just one good job; they neededto go to a place that oﬀered many and varied employment oppor-tunities. The reason, they told me, was simple. They did not expectto stay with the same company for very long. Companies are dis-loyal, and careers are increasingly horizontal. To be attractive, aplace needed to oﬀer a job market that is conducive to a horizontalcareer path.

288 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
In this way, place solves a basic puzzle of our economic order: It
facilitates the matching of creative people to economic opportuni-
ties, providing a labor pool for companies that need people and athick labor market for people who need jobs. Place has become thecentral organizing unit of our economy and society, taking on arole that used to be played by the large corporation. The gatheringof people, companies, and resources into particular places withparticular specialties and capabilities generates both the eﬃcienciesand the innovations that power economic growth.
Lifestyle
The people in my focus groups told me they consider lifestyle along-side employment when choosing where to live. Many said that theyhad turned down jobs or decided not to look for them in placesthat did not aﬀord the variety of scenes they desired—music, art,technology, outdoor sports, and so on. Some recounted how theyor their friends had taken jobs for economic reasons, only to quitand move elsewhere for lifestyle reasons. In the course of my re-search, I have come across many people who moved somewherefor the lifestyle and only then set out to look for employment. This
has been independently conﬁrmed in systematic empirical researchconducted since the original edition of this book. The most com-prehensive study of the subject, “The Young and the Restless” byJoe Cortright and Carol Coletta found that though jobs and eco-nomic growth are important, highly educated young singles placea “higher priority on quality of life factors.” Furthermore, theirﬁndings show that almost 60 percent of the time, well-educatedyoung people are “more likely to move to a place with slower jobgrowth than the place they left.”
8
People expect more from the places where they live than they
used to. In the past, many were content to work in one place andvacation somewhere else, getting away for weekends to ski, enjoy

289 QUALITY OF PLACE
a day in the country, or sample nightlife and culture in another
city. Remember Clement Hayes, commuting between his job inPittsburgh and his life in New York City, hundreds of miles away.The idea seemed to be that some places are for making money andothers are for fun. This is no longer suﬃcient. The sociologistsRichard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark of the University of Chicagonote that “workers in the elite sectors of the postindustrial city make‘quality of life’ demands, and increasingly act like tourists in theirown city.”
9One reason is the nature of modern creative work. Of
course, people still go away at times, but given their ﬂexible andunpredictable work schedules, they want ready access to recreationon a just-in-time basis. They may need an extended break in themiddle of a long, grueling workday to recharge their batteries andgo for a bike ride or a run. For this, a beach house or country get-away spot doesn’t do them much good. They require trails or parksclose at hand.
Nightlife is another important part of the mix. A survey con-
ducted by one of my former students found that for one-third ofthe respondents, nightlife is indeed an important component of acity’s lifestyle and amenity mix. Deﬁning nightlife as “all entertain-ment activities that happen after dark,” the survey examined whatyounger Creative Class people (respondents ranged in age fromearly twenties into their thirties) desire in urban nightlife. Thehighest-rated nightlife options were cultural attractions from thesymphony and theater to music venues and late-night dining, fol-lowed by small jazz and music clubs and coﬀee shops. Bars, largedance clubs, and after-hours clubs ranked much farther down thelist. Most of the respondents desired a gestalt of entertainment op-tions and safe and reliable “after-hours transportation.”
10
Time and again, the people I speak with, informally and in in-
terviews and focus groups, say that the availability of a wide mixof cultural attractions is the signal that a place “gets it”—that it em-braces the culture of the Creative Age; that it is a place where they

290 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
can ﬁt in. Interestingly, some of the biggest complaints I heard in
my focus groups were about cities where the nightlife closes downtoo early. Not that most of those people were all-night partyers,but with long work hours and late nights, they wanted to have op-tions around the clock.
Social Interaction
Not surprisingly, the ability to meet people and make friends is oneof the most important factors that determines our happiness withour lives and communities. Human beings crave interaction, butas Putnam reminds us, modern society isolates us; satisfying inter-actions and social support are harder to ﬁnd than they once were.As I mentioned in my book Who’s Your City? a 2006 study by so-ciologists from the University of Arizona and Duke Universityfound that the share of Americans who feel socially isolated in theircommunities (deﬁned by having no one to talk to about personalmatters) increased from 10 percent in 1985 to more than 25 percentin 2004.
11Highly educated middle-class families felt this lack the
most, possibly as a consequence of their longer commutes andworking hours. The authors note that people are spending moretime “interacting with multiple computers in the home, instead ofwith each other.” But the biggest change since 1985, the study re-ports, has been the momentous decline in ties between neighbors.An increasing number of people live alone, and many of them lackfriends or family nearby. A 2012 book by the sociologist EricKlineberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal
of Living Alone, documents the substantial increase in the numberof people living alone in America over the past several decades—from four million in 1950, slightly less than 10 percent of US house-holds, to 32.7 million today, or 28 percent of US households.
One reason our cities and communities are changing is to help to
ﬁll that void. Ethan Watters has suggested that what he calls “urban

291 QUALITY OF PLACE
tribes”12—close-knit groups of friends—are assuming the roles that
families once did. “If our tribes were maximizing our weak ties
within a city,” Watters writes, “might we be creating the social sci-ence equivalent of dark matter—a force that was invisible but wasnonetheless critical to holding everything together?” Furthermore,Watters argues, the urban tribe meets members’ needs for self-
expression and self-actualization in ways that actual parents andsiblings sometimes suppress. As a young woman I interviewed inChicago put it: “You don’t get to pick your family. But you do getto pick your new family— your friends.”
There are not just people we can turn to but places where we can
go to allay our sense of isolation. The sociologist Ray Oldenburgidentiﬁed the role played by “third places.” Neither home nor work(the “ﬁrst two” places), venues like coﬀee shops, bookstores, andcafés make up “the heart of a community’s social vitality,” placeswhere people “hang out simply for the pleasures of good companyand lively conversation.” Barbershops, beauty parlors, and nail sa-lons ﬁll this role in many urban neighborhoods.
13
Creative Class people in my focus groups and interviews report
that such third places play critical roles in making a communityattractive. Home life is less stable than it once was—many couplesboth have demanding jobs; many more people are single. And worklife is changing as well. Even if we are lucky enough to have a securejob, more and more of us do not work on ﬁxed schedules and manyof us work in relative isolation—for instance, in front of a keyboardat home, as I often do. Human contact is harder to come by, and e-mail or phone interruptions only go so far. When I feel myself
going stir crazy, I take a break and head to the coﬀee shop downthe street, where I’m likely to run into someone I know. Manypeople I interviewed described doing pretty much the same thing.
Writing in the Daily Beast in July 2010, I noted the rise of the
fourth place—a venue that integrates work and community. I de-ﬁned it as a place where creative workers can go not just to “escape

292 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
from work but to do some: to check our e-mail, post a tweet, to
grab an impromptu meeting . . . it’s ironic but true: it’s hard to getany real work done in an oﬃce.”
14Real estate developers are be-
ginning to respond to freelancers’ and travelers’ needs for temporaryoﬃces and meeting facilities, making cubicles, oﬃces, and confer-ence rooms available for rent on an as-needed basis.
The Mating Market
Another factor that’s so basic that it’s hard to imagine why it’s sooften overlooked is the need to be in a place where you might ﬁndpeople to date or, if you desire, a life partner. For young people, orolder people who are looking for a second chance, the thickness ofthe mating market is as important as the thickness of the job market.Our odds of meeting a compatible partner are better in some lo-cations than others. Not only are we more likely to make connec-tions with people that we have something in common with—race,national origin, religion, job, education, lifestyle—but some placessimply have more single people than others, as well as more ameni-ties and activities that bring singles together.
In 2006, National Geographic published its wildly popular “Singles
Map,” which plotted the metros where single men outnumber singlewomen, and vice versa. The metropolitan region with the best ratiofor heterosexual men was New York’s, which includes New YorkCity and its suburbs in Long Island, Westchester, New Jersey, andConnecticut. Together, those areas housed 165,000 more singlewomen than men. Other places where single women outnumberedsingle men were Boston, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Baltimore,Miami, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and San Francisco. On the otherhand, the best ratio for heterosexual women was in greater Los An-geles, where single men outnumbered single women by 40,000.Other places favorable to single women included San Diego, Port-land, Seattle, Dallas, Houston, and Austin.
15

293 QUALITY OF PLACE
Diversity
If commonalities are important for mating, my focus group and
interview participants consistently listed diversity as among themost important factors in their choice of locations. People weredrawn to places that were known for diversity of thought andopen-mindedness, and they looked for signs of it when evaluating
communities—among them, a mix of ages, people of differentethnic groups and races, people with diﬀerent sexual orientationsand alternative appearances, such as signiﬁcant body piercings ortattoos. Small wonder that when I polled a group of my CarnegieMellon students about where they wanted to live after graduation,highly diverse Washington, DC, was the clear favorite. A Koreanstudent liked it “because there’s a big Korean community,” mean-ing Korean religious institutions, Korean grocery stores, and Ko-rean children for his children to play with. An Indian studentfavored it for its large Indian population, an African American forits large black professional class, and a gay student for the com-munity around DuPont Circle. But there’s more at work here thanexpatriates and minorities who want to be around people likethemselves. The diﬀerences are important, too. A young femalepre-med student of Persian descent summarized the many criteriafor diversity:
I was driving across the country with my sister and some friends. We were
commenting on what makes a place the kind of place we want to go, or thekind of place we would live. We said: It has to be open. It has to be diverse.It has to have a visible gay community; it has to have lots of diﬀerent racesand ethnic groups. It has to have people of all ages and be open to youngpeople. It has to have people who look diﬀerent.
16
Like the diverse workplace, a diverse community is a sign of a
place that is open to outsiders. Just as domestic partner beneﬁts

294 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
convey that a potential employer is open and tolerant, a visible gay
presence conveys that a community is broad-minded. Youngerwomen in particular said they liked to live in gay neighborhoodsbecause they feel safe. As with employers, visible diversity sends asignal that a community embraces the open meritocratic values ofthe Creative Age.
Diversity also means excitement and energy. Creative-minded
people enjoy a mix of inﬂuences. They want to hear diﬀerent kindsof music and try diﬀerent kinds of food. They want to meet and so-cialize with people unlike themselves, to trade views and spar overissues. A person’s circle of closest friends may not resemble theRainbow Coalition—in fact, it usually doesn’t—but creatives wantthe rainbow to be available.
An attractive place doesn’t have to be a big city, but it does have
to be cosmopolitan—a place where anyone can ﬁnd a peer groupto be comfortable with and other groups to be stimulated by,seething with the interplay of cultures and ideas, where outsiderscan quickly become insiders. In her book Cosmopolitan Culture,
Bonnie Menes Kahn says a great city has two hallmarks: tolerancefor strangers and intolerance for mediocrity.
17These are precisely
the qualities that appeal to members of the Creative Class—andthey also happen to be qualities conducive to innovation, risk taking,and the formation of new businesses.
Authenticity
Places are also valued for their authenticity and uniqueness. Au-thenticity comes from several aspects of a community—historicbuildings, established neighborhoods, a distinctive music scene, orspeciﬁc cultural attributes. It especially comes from the mix—urbangrit alongside freshly renovated buildings, the commingling ofyoung and old, longtime neighborhood characters and yuppies,fashion models and street people.

People in my interviews and focus groups often deﬁne authen-
ticity as the opposite of generic. They equate authentic with being
real, as in a place that has real buildings, real people, real history.A place that’s full of chain stores, chain restaurants, and chain night-clubs is seen as inauthentic: Not only do these venues look prettymuch the same everywhere, they oﬀer the same experiences youcould have anywhere. One of my Creative Class interview subjects,emphasizing the way people are attracted to the authenticity anduniqueness of a city, put the two terms together and used them asa portmanteau word:
I’m thinking in particular of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. Here
was a free concert that drew a million people the ﬁrst year . . . and featureda stellar lineup of Detroit and some national performers and DJs, a greatboon to the city and its image. This year, they . . . start to drop Detroit artistsin favor of more well-known national acts. So more people come, but theevent is losing much of the uniqueness/authenticity that makes people wantto come to this event from around the world.
18
Music is a key part of what makes a place authentic. The phrase
“audio identity”19refers to the identiﬁable musical genre or sound
associated with local bands, clubs, and so on that give a city a unique
sound track: electric blues in Chicago, Motown in Detroit, grungein Seattle, Philadelphia soul, Austin’s Sixth Street, second-line brassbands and R&B in New Orleans, bluegrass in greater DC. This isthe ﬁrst thing many people associate with these cities; it is also oneof the principal ways that they promote themselves.
Music, in fact, plays a central role in the creation of identity and
the formation of real communities. Musical memories are some ofthe strongest and most easily evoked. You can often rememberevents in your life by what songs were playing at the time. SimonFrith writes that music “provides us with an intensely subjectivesense of being sociable. It both articulates and oﬀers the immediate295 QUALITY OF PLACE

experience of collective identity. Music regularly sound tracks our
search for ourselves and for spaces in which we can feel at home.”20
It is hard to think of a major high-tech region that doesn’t have
a distinct audio identity. Consider the San Francisco Bay area, hometo perhaps the most creative music scene of the 1960s, with theGrateful Dead, Jeﬀerson Airplane, Big Brother and the HoldingCompany and Janis Joplin, Santana, The Mamas and the Papas,and the seminal Monterey Pop Festival. Chapel Hill, at the heartof the Research Triangle, was recently recognized for having oneof the best local music scenes in the country. Technology and musicscenes go together because they reﬂect a place that is open to newideas, new people, and creativity. It is for this reason that I like totell city leaders that ﬁnding ways to help support a local music scenecan be just as important as investing in high-tech business and farmore eﬀective than building a downtown mall.
Scenes
Other kinds of sound tracks are important besides music. A big,exciting city can and does throw up countless scenes, which shiftover time and space. Scenes enable talented people to collaborateand compete with one another—to seek inspiration, to look overand learn from each other’s work. Authentic, locally groundedscenes help to establish a creative environment and the buzz of a place.
The dynamics of scenes are similar in some respects to the clus-
ters and agglomerations of ﬁrms, people, and businesses. As theHarvard economist Richard Caves explains in his book Creative
Industries, art, music, theater, design, and the like are characterizedby high levels of uncertainty: it is nearly impossible to predict whatwill be a hit in advance. That makes it very diﬃcult to organizethese businesses and industries in a vertically integrated style like,296 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

297 QUALITY OF PLACE
say, automotive or steel production. Instead, they tend to take shape
around clusters, agglomerations, and local scenes. As my former stu-dent Elizabeth Currid-Halkett points out in her insightful book, The
Warhol Economy, these scenes are not just about going out and hav-ing fun but equally about work—building connections, learning fromone another, networking, and building a career. Instead of doing thisin companies and oﬃces or at breakfast and lunch meetings at ex-pense-account restaurants, this kind of social networking takes placein a local environment of clubs and performance venues.
21
But scenes have social and psychological, and creative, dimen-
sions, not just economic ones. Scenes are places where experiencesare made and enjoyed—“modes of organizing cultural productionand consumption,” according to Daniel Silver, Terry Clark, andLawrence Rothﬁeld, who have written widely on them.
22“Cafés,
theatres, parks, music venues, restaurants, markets, shops, andother amenities,” they write, “deﬁne a range of possible experientialqualities that give meaning and value to a given place.” The value ofscenes, in their view, comes from the way they make places morethan just spaces for living and working. Scenes become “aﬀectivearenas for sharing, aﬃrming or rejecting feelings, sensibilities andvalues” and provide “a range of symbolic meanings.” They distin-guish between diﬀerent types of scenes—from highly authenticlocal scenes to self-expressive and highly glamorous and charis-matic scenes. “Film festivals, high fashion, and movie stars may,for example, indicate the presence of a glamorous scene,” whereas“tattoo parlours, punk music venues, body art studios and piercingsalons” are associated with self-expressive scenes. “Local craftsstores, farmers markets, community centres and arts festivals” sig-nal a crunchier, more environmentally aware, authentic scene.
A related study documents the ways that scenes directly and in-
directly contribute to local economies. Bohemian neighborhoods,for example, are not just centers of arts and artiness, but provide

298 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
key economic functions. Such neighborhoods—“ﬁlled with used
clothing boutiques, late night bars, tattoo parlours, smoke shops,galleries, ethnic restaurants and marginal individuals” functionas veritable “laboratories for generating new consumption styles,”aﬀording insight into what is cutting edge, youth-oriented, edgy,and retro. They provide companies access to edgy designers butalso clued-in marketers who “can go to the bars and ﬁnd out whatis (about to be) hip” and who can “consume on the edge of ac-cepted conventions, without themselves having to be artists orrevolutionaries.” Their research ﬁnds an especially close connectionbetween “self-expressive scenes” and economic growth. In theiranalysis of the eﬀects of more than twenty separate variables onthe economic performance of thousands of neighborhoods (mea-sured at the zip code level) across the United States, they foundthat self-expressive scenes had the biggest impact of all—morethan “such urban development staples as growth and level ofhuman capital, arts jobs, technology jobs, population density, andcommute times.” And they found that the economic eﬀects of suchscenes went beyond their role in attracting talented and creativepeople. No other “single variable” they concluded, “showed asconsistently strong and broad a set of economic impacts” as thepresence of self-expressive scenes.
23
Identity
As the sociologist Manuel Castells noted in his seminal The Power
of Identity, an elusive, varied sense of self has become a deﬁningfeature of our insecure, constantly changing, postmodern world,where so many traditional institutions no longer provide meaning,stability, and support.
24In the old economy, many people took their
cues from the corporation and found their identity there. Otherslived in the towns where they grew up and could draw on the strongties of family and long-term friends.

299 QUALITY OF PLACE
Today, where we choose to live as opposed to what we do has
become our main element of identity. I travel by plane a lot and
have noticed that the standard conversation-starter has changed.Twenty years ago, people were likely to ask, “Where do you work?”Today it’s “Where do you live?”
With the demise of the company-dominated life, a new kind of
pecking order has developed around places. Place, of course, hasalways been a source of status; the right neighborhoods in citieslike Paris, London, and New York City have always been highlydesirable. But if most people were content to substitute the statusthat came from having a good job with a prestigious company forthe status of place, this is no longer the case. Most of the people inmy focus groups and interviews told me they hope to trade up toa higher-status location.
As noted, many Creative Class people also express a desire to be
involved in their communities. This is not so much the result of ado-gooder mentality as a reﬂection of their desire to establish theirown identities in places, and to build places that reﬂect and validatethose identities. In Pittsburgh, for instance, a group of young peoplein creative ﬁelds, ranging from architecture and urban design tographics and high-tech, formed a loose association they dubbedGround Zero. The group emerged on its own out of a series ofbrainstorming sessions that I organized in early 2000 to gain insightinto the lifestyle and other concerns of young Creative Class people.The group’s initial impetus was to combat a redevelopment planthat would have replaced an authentic downtown shopping districtwith a generic urban mall, but then it shifted its focus to reshapingthe creative climate and identity of the whole city. From organizingedgy community arts events to working to organize a shuttle sys-tem to establish connectivity between the various neighborhoodsthat make up Pittsburgh’s street-level mix—they called it the Ultra-
Violet Loop—they sought to implant their creative identity intothe urban fabric of the city.

300 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
The role of place in our identity is also evident in the growing
struggles over who controls places. I got a ﬁrsthand taste of the pas-
sions that so-called gentriﬁcation inspires one warm night in Seat-tle’s up-and-coming Belltown neighborhood in May 2000. Walkingdown newly fashionable First Avenue, with its mix of high-techcompanies, high-end residences, and nice restaurants, our groupcame upon a ragtag band banging on drums and bellowing: “Sayno to the construction noise.” Jolted by the commotion, well-dressed yuppies emerged onto the street to see what it was about.A boisterous debate broke out between them and the protestersover who were the neighborhood’s “true” residents.
Soul of the Community
Back when this book was ﬁrst published, my views on quality ofplace stoked quite a backlash. Conservative social critics and evena number of self-proclaimed urbanists complained that I was urgingcities to squander money on frivolities that only the urban gentry,bohemian gays, and feckless, spoiled young people really caredabout. Most Americans, they said, continued to opt for goodschools, safe streets, and a family-friendly environment. Althoughit has been debated endlessly, this is a question that can in fact besettled empirically. As I mentioned earlier, in the mid-2000s, I un-dertook a large-scale study with the Gallup Organization.
The survey led us to several important insights. One is that place
itself is an important contributor to our happiness and subjectivewell-being. Subjective well-being is a clunky-sounding locution,but it is how psychologists describe an individual’s self-reportedlevel of happiness. In his book Stumbling on Happiness, Harvardpsychologist Daniel Gilbert lists the three most important decisionsthat most of us will make in our lives: “where to live, what to do,

301 QUALITY OF PLACE
and with whom to do it.”25Place, in his telling, is the ﬁrst leg in the
triangle of a happy and fulﬁlled life—something that my research
objectively conﬁrms.
Our second insight revolves around the attributes or character-
istics of places that contribute to our happiness and satisfaction.We looked at a wide array of factors that fell into ﬁve major cate-gories: physical and economic security, that is, the presence of athriving job market, low crime rate, and so forth; basic services, likeschools, trash removal, and road repair; leadership, or the forward-looking qualities of community stakeholders and politicians; open-ness to immigrants, minorities, gay people, and the like; and qualityof place, meaning natural scenery, parks, architecture, and so on.
What we found might shock those who still subscribe to the view
that the basics trump everything else. The most highly valued at-tributes of cities weren’t basic services or economic opportunities,but a place’s social and cultural amenities, its friendliness, and itsnatural and physical beauty. This isn’t just me talking. With ﬁnancialsupport from the Knight Foundation, Gallup has expanded andupdated the survey that we originally undertook together. It is nowcalled the Soul of the Community Study.
26“After interviewing close
to 43,000 people in twenty-six communities over three years, Gallupconcluded in 2011, “the study has found that three main qualitiesattach people to place: social offerings, such as entertainment ven-ues and places to m eet, openness (how welcoming a place is) and
the area’s aesthetics (its physical beauty and green spaces).”
27
Gallup’s and Knight’s ﬁndings actually make a great deal of in-
tuitive sense. Most people expect their communities to providebasic services, and most communities do. Because we expect basicservices to be provided, we end up valuing aesthetics a little higher.Economists call this a beauty premium.
28As for openness, the sur-
vey probed it in detail by asking respondents how they would ratetheir city or area as a place to live for families with children, racial

302 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, immigrants, the poor,
young singles, recent college grads, and so on. As the level of tol-erance toward each group rose, the overall happiness of the com-munity increased. One ﬁnding did surprise us. The group thatcommunities were least open to was recent college graduates look-ing for work. Although cities and towns around the country haveupped their eﬀorts to battle brain drain, the reality is that most areless than welcoming to the young talented people who do chooseto live in them. I’ll have more to say about this in the next chapter.
The key conclusions of the Soul of the Community Survey are so
interesting and powerful that they are worth quoting at length.
After three years of research, the results have been very consistent, and pos-
sibly surprising. First, what attaches residents to their communities doesn’tchange much from place to place. While we might expect that the driversof attachment would be diﬀerent in Miami, Fla., from those in Macon, Ga.,in fact, the main drivers of attachment show little diﬀerence across com-munities. In addition, the same drivers have risen to the top in every yearof the study.
Second, these main drivers may be surprising. While the economy is ob-
viously the subject of much attention, the study has found that perceptionsof the local economy do not have a very strong relationship to resident at-tachment. Instead, attachment is most closely related to how accepting acommunity is of diversity, its wealth of social oﬀerings, and its aesthetics.This is not to say that jobs and housing aren’t important. Residents mustbe able to meet their basic needs in a community in order to stay. However,when it comes to forming an emotional connection with the community,there are other community factors which often are not considered whenthinking about economic development. These community factors seem tomatter more when it comes to attaching residents to their community.
And ﬁnally, while we do see diﬀerences in attachment among diﬀerent
demographic groups, demographics generally are not the strongest drivers

303 QUALITY OF PLACE
of attachment. In almost every community, we found that a resident’s per-
ceptions of the community are more strongly linked to their level of com-munity attachment than to that person’s age, ethnicity, work status, etc.
Quality of life features define the very soul of a successful com-
munity. And though they are factors that the Creative Class in
particular desires, they are things that everyone wants in theircommunities, regardless of their demographic or economic status.This is not to say that great schools, good jobs, and safe streetsdo not also matter. Quite the contrary. But those who continueto frame the issue as an either-or between quality and basic ser-vices offer a false choice. In Who’s Your City? I likened what we
want in our communities to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hi-erarchy of needs. Just as we want more from our lives than themere basics of bodily subsistence, we also desire more from ourcommunities. Quality of place, it turns out, is less a frivolity andmore a necessity.

CHAPTER 15
Building the
Creative Community
One of the questions I get asked most frequently is: how
do you actually do it, how do you build a truly creative
community—one with real quality of place—that can survive
and prosper in this still-emerging new economic order? There isno easy, silver-bullet answer, but one thing is for certain: the oldapproaches simply will not work. It’s not enough to just providegood schools or a family-friendly environment, just as it is notenough merely to have an environment that’s teeming with restau-rants and bars. Neither gargantuan downtown stadiums and con-vention centers nor gleaming arts centers, leafy suburbs ringedwith high-tech industrial parks, and upscale shopping malls aresuﬃcient unto themselves. It makes no sense to use precious publicfunds to lure companies from state to state or even across nationalborders: research shows those eﬀorts typically cost more than theyare worth. Trying to be the next Silicon Somewhere seldom paysoﬀ, either, as countless communities have learned.
The rise of the Creative Economy has altered the rules of the eco-
nomic development game. Cities used to measure their status bythe number of corporate headquarters they were home to. Although
304

305 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
companies remain important, they no longer call all the shots. As
I’ve said repeatedly, it’s people who are increasingly key. In theoriginal edition of this book, I quoted Robert Nunn, then the CEOof a major semiconductor company, who told the Wall Street Jour-
nalthat the “key element of building a technology business is at-
tracting the right people to the company. It’s a combination ofexperience, skill set, raw intelligence, and energy. The most impor-tant thing is to be somewhere where you have a pool of people todraw that.”
1
The bottom line is that cities need a people climate as much as,
and perhaps even more than, they need a business climate. By apeople climate I mean a general strategy aimed at attracting andretaining people, especially, but not limited to, creative people. Thebeneﬁts of this kind of strategy are obvious. Openness costs nothing.Whereas companies that get ﬁnancial incentives—and sports teams,for that matter—can pull up and leave at virtually a moment’s noticewhen an even more attractive inducement materializes somewhereelse, investments in broad amenities like urban parks last for gen-erations while beneﬁting a broad swath of the population.
There is no one-size-ﬁts-all model for a successful people climate.
As we have seen, the Creative Class is diverse across the dimensionsof age, ethnicity and race, marital status, and sexual orientation. Aneﬀective people climate cannot be restrictive or monolithic. Trulycreative communities appeal to many diﬀerent groups. Buildinga creative community is something of an organic process, one thatcannot be dictated in any top-down fashion. It’s a matter of pro-viding the right conditions, planting the right seeds, and then lettingthings take their course. A decade ago, I pointed out that I had yetto ﬁnd a community whose leaders and citizens have sat downand written out an explicit strategy for building a people climate.Most communities, however, do have a de facto one. If you askmost community leaders what kinds of people they’d most wantto attract, they’d likely say successful married couples in their thirties

306 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
and forties—people with good middle- to upper-income jobs and
stable family lives. And this in fact is what many communities (par-ticularly suburban ones) actually do, by emphasizing services likegood school systems, parks with plenty of amenities for children,and strict (read: exclusionary) zoning for single-family housing. Icertainly think it is important for cities and communities to begood for children and families, and I am fully supportive of betterschools and parks. But as we have seen, less than one quarter of allAmerican households consist of traditional nuclear families. Com-munities that want to be economically competitive need to casttheir nets wider, to appeal to all the diverse groups of people thatmake up both the Creative Class and American society at large.
And as mentioned in the previous chapter, one group that has
been sorely neglected by most communities, at least until recently,is young single people. Young workers have typically been thoughtof as transients who contribute little to a city’s bottom line. But inthe Creative Age, they matter for several reasons. Young peopleare workhorses: they are able to work longer and harder and aremore prone to take risks, precisely because they are young andchildless. In rapidly changing industries, it’s often the recent grad-uates who have the most up-to-date skills. This is why so many lead-ing companies aggressively target them in their recruiting strategies.In Washington, DC, it’s often quipped that twenty-three-year-oldsrun the country.
Single people make up a large and growing segment of our de-
mography. In the early 1960s, approximately 80 percent of Ameri-cans lived in households headed by married couples. As of 2010,that number had fallen to just a bit less than one-half—48.4 percent—or 56.6 million out of 116.7 million total households. Asnoted previously, people are marrying later and staying single longer.
Younger people are the most mobile group in society. The like-
lihood that someone will move peaks at around age twenty-ﬁve,declines steeply for the next two decades, and then continues to

307 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
trail oﬀ into retirement and old age. A twenty-ﬁve-year-old is three
times more likely to move than a forty-ﬁve- or ﬁfty-year-old, ac-cording to a 2005 study.
2Highly educated young people are the
most mobile of all.
The mathematics of this do not bode well for cities and regions
that are content to watch their young people move away in searchof fun and adventure, complacently believing that they will be ableto lure them back once they hit their thirties and are ready to settledown and start families. The likelihood that they will move backdiminishes with each year they spend away. The winning placesare the ones that establish an edge early on, by attracting and re-taining residents in their mid-twenties.
But in the end, age is less relevant than most people think. What
does matter is that cities and regions have a people climate thatvalues every type of person and every type of family. Creative Classpeople don’t give up their lifestyle preferences as they age. Theydon’t stop bicycling or running, for instance, just because they havechildren. When they put their children in child seats or joggingstrollers, amenities like traﬃc-free bike paths become more impor-tant than ever. They don’t stop valuing diversity and tolerance, either.The middle-aged and older people I speak with may no longer hangout in nightspots until 4:00
AM, but they enjoy stimulating, dynamic
places with high levels of cultural interplay. And if they have children,that’s the kind of environment they want them to grow up in. Somethings that beneﬁt young people are even supported by those oldenough to be their grandparents. When a colleague of mine spoketo a group of senior citizens in Pittsburgh about the importance oflifestyle amenities like bike paths, he got a fascinating response. Theseniors were enthusiastic about the idea, because the bike laneswould keep the cyclists oﬀ the sidewalks, where the seniors werefrightened by them and sometimes even knocked down.
A woman from Minneapolis whom I interviewed put the age issue
into perspective. She originally came to Minneapolis as a young single

308 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
because of the lifestyle it oﬀered. She liked being able to engage in
active outdoor recreation in the city’s fabulous park system andbeing able to walk from her house to bars and clubs. She neverthought she would want to raise a family there. But when she gotmarried and had children, she was more than pleasantly surprisedto discover that some of the same lifestyle am enities she had enjoyed
when she was single—the parks and walkable neighborhoods—were
even more attractive to her as a new parent.
Lots and lots of families prefer to stay in urban settings. In my
book Who’s Your City? I quoted a 2007 New York Times report that
found that the number of children under age ﬁve living in Man-hattan had increased by nearly one-third since 2000. The boroughthat was the “glamorous and largely childless locale for Sex and the
City” was starting to more closely resemble “a decidedly upscaleand even more vanilla version of 1960s suburbia in The WonderYears,” it added.
3A 2006 Yankelovich survey found that young
married couples with children were as open to moving to urbanneighborhoods close to downtown as to small towns and suburbs—as anyone who has ever tried to negotiate the stroller-clogged side-walks of Park Slope, Brooklyn, well knows.
4
True, many of those families tend to leave the city when their
kids reach school age. The demography of urban America resemblesa barbell, with singles and empty-nesters bulging at both ends ofthe age spectrum. But what’s important to remember is that fam-ilies themselves are increasingly diverse; cities that attract diversepeople necessarily attract families. While some maintain that myﬁndings regarding gays and regional growth put me at odds withfamily values, they miss the fact that many gay and lesbian house-holds are families with children. Roughly half of lesbians and gaymen in the United States, between 4 and 5 million people, weremembers of same-sex couples in 2011, including an estimated
160,000 who are married, according to Gary Gates’s detailed studies.And nearly one in ﬁve of those same-sex couple households were

309 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
raising children.5Table 15.1, provided by Gates, shows the ﬁfteen
metros that have the largest percentage of same-sex couples with
children under eighteen years old. The densest concentrations ofsuch families are not necessarily in the places where you’d expectto ﬁnd them. Especially surprising are the metros that don’t makethe cut—for instance, San Francisco and New York.
The University as Creative Hub
The potential of the university as an engine for regional economicdevelopment has captured the fancy of business leaders, policymakers, and academics—and it has led them astray. A theory ofTable 15.1 Leading Metros for Same-Sex Households with Children, 2010
Same-Sex Creative
Couples with Class
Rank Metro Children Share
1 San Antonio-New Braunfels, TX 33.9% 31.2%
2 Jacksonville, FL 32.4% 30.4%
3 Raleigh-Cary, NC 29.5% 37.6%
4 Las Vegas-Paradise, NV 28.4% 22.7%
5 Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA 28.1% 31.3%
6 Rochester, NY 28.1% 35.1%
7 Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX 27.2% 33.0%
8 Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT 26.7% 39.7%9 Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA 25.7% 27.4%
10 Oklahoma City, OK 25.4% 33.0%
11 Buﬀalo-Niagara Falls, NY 24.9% 31.3%
12 Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 24.9% 34.3%
13 Baltimore-Towson, MD 24.8% 37.7%
14 Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI 24.5% 34.5%
14 Kansas City, MO-KS 24.2% 34.8%
Source: Gary Gates, “How Many People Are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender?”
UCLA Williams Institute, April 2011.

310 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
sorts has been handed down that assumes a linear pathway from
university research to commercial innovation to an ever-expandingnetwork of newly formed companies. This is a naive and mechanisticview of the university’s contribution to economic development.
The university is indeed a key institution of the Creative Econ-
omy, but what’s not so widely understood is the multifaceted rolethat it plays. It doesn’t simply crank out research projects that canbe spun oﬀ into companies. To be an eﬀective contributor to re-gional growth, the university must play three interrelated roles thatreﬂect the 3T’s of creative communities.
6
Technology: Universities are centers for cutting-edge research in
ﬁelds from software to biotechnology and important sources
of new technologies and spin-oﬀ companies.
Talent: Universities are amazingly eﬀective talent magnets. By at-
tracting eminent researchers and scientists, universities in turnattract graduate students, generate spin-oﬀ companies, and en-courage other companies to locate nearby in a cycle of self-reinforcing growth.
Tolerance: Universities foster a progressive, open, and tolerant
people climate that helps attract and retain members of the Cre-ative Class. College towns from Austin to Iowa City have alwaysbeen places where gays and other outsiders in those parts ofthe country could ﬁnd a home.
In doing these things, universities help to establish the broader
quality of place of the communities in which they are located.
In my view, major research universities are key—if not the key—
hubs of the Creative Economy. The Boston high-tech miracle
would not have happened without MIT. Silicon Valley would beunthinkable without Stanford University, its longtime creative nu-cleus. Many of the places that score high on my Creativity Indexare home to major research universities. This includes large metros

311 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
like San Francisco, greater Washington, DC, Seattle, Boston, and
classic college towns like Madison, Burlington, Boulder, and AnnArbor.
In late 2011, New York City hosted a competition to lure a major
engineering and technology campus to Roosevelt Island, which drewproposals from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon amongothers, before a consortium of Cornell University and Technion
Israel Institute of Technology was selected. “This is Mayor MichaelBloomberg’s attempt to create a locus of entrepreneurial educationthat would mate with venture capital to spawn new enterprises andenrich the city’s economy,” is the way the New York Times’s BillKeller put it. The mayor himself noted: “New York City’s goal of
becoming the global leader in technological innovation is now
within sight. By adding a new state-of-the-art institution to ourlandscape, we will educate tomorrow’s entrepreneurs and createthe jobs of the future. This partnership has so much promise becausewe share the same goal: to make New York City home to the world’smost talented workforce.”
But a university cannot do it alone—it is a necessary but insuﬃ-
cient condition for generating high-tech ﬁrms and growth. Al-though many places generate new knowledge, relatively few ofthem can absorb and apply it. The surrounding community mustalso have the capacity to exploit the innovation and technologiesthat the university generates, and the will to put in place thebroader lifestyle amenities and qualities of place the Creative Classseeks. The economist Michael Fogarty has found that patented in-tellectual property consistently migrates from universities in olderindustrial regions such as Detroit and Cleveland to high-technologyregions such as the greater Boston area, the San Francisco Bay re-gion, and the New York metropolitan area. To turn intellectualproperty into economic wealth, the creative communities sur-rounding the universities must be able to utilize it within a socialstructure of creativity.

312 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
The university is only one part of this social structure. It is up
to communities to put the other pieces into place: both the eco-
nomic infrastructure and the quality of place to retain the talentthe university attracts. Stanford did not transform the Silicon Val-ley area into a high-tech powerhouse on its own, nor did MITmake Cambridge what it is. The once run-down Kendall Squarearea around MIT had to be refurbished and renovated, its aban-doned factories and warehouses turned into homes for start-upcompanies and venture-capital funds, not to mention restaurants,microbreweries, cafés, and hotels. Regional leaders in Austinunder took aggressive measures to create not only incubator facil-ities and venture capital but outdoor amenities and the quality ofplace that creative people demand. A pioneering initiative inPhiladelphia, Campus Philly, has worked to make the city and re-gion more attractive to college students and to retain as well as attract recent college grads. And the city’s major universities, es-pecially the University of Pennsylvania, have devised new andmore cooperative approaches for revitalizing their surroundingneighborhoods by investing in local schools, supporting home and storefront improvements, and opening their health centersand other facilities to residents as well as students and faculty.University and regional leaders in cities like Providence, Pittsburgh,and Baltimore have worked hard to develop quality of place in andaround their universities.
Revenge of the Squelchers
So why are so many communities unable to leverage the consider-able creative assets they have? It’s not that these places don’t wantto grow. In most cases, their leaders are doing everything they thinkthey can to spur innovation and high-tech growth. But most of the

time, they either can’t or won’t do the things required to create an
environment or habitat that is attractive to the Creative Class. Theypay lip service to the need to attract talent but dedicate their re-sources to underwriting big-box retailers, subsidizing downtownmalls and convention centers, and recruiting corporations to relocatetheir call centers to their corporate parks. Or they try to reinventthemselves as facsimiles of quirkiness and charm, erasing their old,authentic neighborhoods and retail districts and replacing themwith the generic and new—and in so doing driving the residentCreative Class away.
At a time when genuine political will seems diﬃcult to muster
for virtually anything, city after city across the country can generatethe political capital to underwrite hundreds of millions of dollarsof investment in professional sports stadiums. The ostensible eco-nomic goal of these facilities is one to which they are sublimely ir-relevant. Recent studies show that, far from producing wealth,stadiums actually reduce local incomes.
7Ponder, just for a moment,
the opportunity costs of these facilities. Imagine what could beaccomplished if those hundreds of millions of dollars had beenspent on something genuinely productive, like university research,
or on more ﬁnely grained neighborhood improvements and lifestyleamenities that can actually attract and retain talented people. Notonce during any of my focus groups and interviews did a memberof the Creative Class mention professional sports teams as playingeven a marginal role in their choice of where to live and work. Whyare most civic leaders unable to muster the will to pursue the thingsthat really matter to their communities and their economic futures—or even to imagine that such things exist?
The answer is simple. These cities are trapped by their pasts. The
economist Mancur Olson long ago noted that the decline of nationsand regions is a product of an organizational and cultural hardeningof the arteries that he called “institutional sclerosis.”
8Places that313 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

grow and prosper in one era, he argued, ﬁnd it diﬃcult, oftentimes
impossible, to adopt new organizational and cultural patterns, re-gardless of how beneﬁcial they might be. Consequently, innovationand growth shift to new places, which can adapt to and harnessthese shifts for their beneﬁt. This is why the United States surpassedEngland as the world’s great economic power, he contends. Olson’sprophetic diagnosis explains the decline of cities like Detroit, Cleve-land, and Pittsburgh, the great stars of the Organizational Age, andthe rise of creative centers like Silicon Valley and Austin, and theadaptability of great cities like New York and Los Angeles, whichhave eclipsed and supplanted them. The cultural and attitudinalnorms that drove their success became so engrained that they pre-vented the new norms and attitudes of the Creative Age from be-coming generally accepted. Instead of nurturing their cities’ creativity,
their leaders stamped it out, causing talented people to seek outmore congenial and challenging places. Their departure, in turn,removed much of the impetus for change.
When traveling to cities for speaking engagements, I have come
up with a handy metric to distinguish the cities that are a part ofthe Creative Age from those that are not. If city leaders tell me towear whatever I want, take me to a casually contemporary café orrestaurant for dinner, and, most important, encourage me to talkopenly about the role of diversity and gays, I am conﬁdent theircity will be able to attract the Creative Class and prosper in thisemerging era. If, on the other hand, they ask me to “please wear abusiness suit and a tie,” escort me to a private club for dinner, andask me to “play down the stuﬀ about bohemians and gays,” I canbe reasonably certain that they will have a hard time making it.
Not long after the ﬁrst edition of this book was published, I was
invited to Toronto to participate in a public conversation with JaneJacobs, humorously billed as “Lunch with Dick and Jane.” Beforewe went on I asked her, why do some places make it and others get314 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

trapped? She told me that all communities are ﬁlled with deep reser-
voirs of creative energy. But what holds so many back, she added,are “Squelchers”—overly controlling types who believe that theyand they alone know what’s best for their city or region. They usethe word no a lot and respond to new initiatives or ideas with com-
ments like, “That’s not how we do things here”; “That will neverﬂy”; or “Why don’t you just move someplace else?”
Writing in the preface to the Australian edition of this book, the
Australian entrepreneur Terry Cutler described some of theseSquelchers at work in his account of a presentation he made beforea gathering of distinguished intellectuals and civic leaders. “Sum-moning my courage,” he writes, “I described Florida’s ﬁndingsabout the correlation between bohemianism and diversity in thelocation of high-tech ﬁrms. The palpable recoil around the roomat such a radical and distasteful recipe for success left me in nodoubt that these civic leaders would clearly prefer to drift into agenteel poverty.”
9
The venture capitalist Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combina-
tor, Silicon Valley’s premier start-up funding ﬁrm, has thoughtlong and hard about what makes for a successful start-up hub. Mostplaces that aspire to be the next Silicon Valley, he writes, haveamounted to little more than “roach motels” for start-ups: “Smartambitious people went in, but no start-ups came out.”
10It is as if,
Graham wrote, those places were sprayed with “start-upicide.”What makes Silicon Valley and a very few other places diﬀerent,he noted, is that they embrace an ethos that encourages rather thancrushes start-ups and the broader mentality from which they grow.“The problem is not that most towns kill start-ups. It’s that deathis the default for start-ups and most towns don’t save them,” he ex-plains. “Instead of thinking of most places as being sprayed withstart-upicide, it’s more accurate to think of start-ups as all beingpoisoned, and a few places being sprayed with the antidote.”315 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

316 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
The Great Creative Class Debate
I would have never imagined that my theory relating openness and
tolerance to economic growth would become so controversial whenI was ﬁrst writing this book. And yet I opened a ﬂoodgate. Onecritic quipped that it was ridiculous to put street buskers with T-shirts and jeans at the center of regional growth. Another claimedthat I am wrongly focused on “singles, young people, homosexuals,sophistos, and trendoids.” In the decade since the original editionof this book was published, I have been accused of attacking tra-ditional family values, of promoting a gay agenda, and of under-mining the foundations of Judeo-Christian civilization.
I have taken ﬂack from the right as a pseudo-leftist:
To a new generation of liberal urban policymakers and politicians who favor
big government, Florida’s ideas oﬀer a way to talk economic-developmenttalk while walking the familiar big-spending walk. . . . Now comes Floridawith the equivalent of an eat-all-you-want-and-still-lose-weight diet. Yes,you can create needed revenue-generating jobs without having to take theunpalatable measures—shrinking government and cutting taxes—that ap-peal to old-economy businessmen, the kind with starched shirts and lodgepins in their lapels. You can bypass all that and go straight to the neweconomy, where the future is happening now. You can draw in Florida’screative-class capitalists—ponytails, jeans, rock music, and all—by liberal,big-government means: diversity celebrations, “progressive” social legis-lation, and government spending on cultural amenities.
11
And from the left as a proverbial sellout:
Florida’s proposals ultimately amount to a plea for grassroots agency with acommunitarian conscience amongst a privileged class of creatives, lubricated

by modest public-sector support for culturally appropriate forms of gen-
triﬁcation and consumption. There is no challenge to the extant “order” ofmarket-oriented ﬂexibility. . . . Florida is not asking for a blank check fornew government programs, for major concessions to be made to the non-creative underclasses, nor even for regulatory transformation. His calls forcreative empowerment can be met in relatively painless ways—by manip-ulating street-level façades, while gently lubricating the gentriﬁcation pro-cesses. This, critics justly complain, is cappuccino urban politics, with plentyof froth.
12
An attack piece in the American Prospect accused me of essentially
ﬂeecing the rubes, giving speeches, consulting with economic de-
velopment groups in hard-hit Rust Belt towns, and then pronounc-ing them dead in the water.
13The alleged smoking gun was a single
sentence in my 2009 cover story in The Atlantic, “How the Crash
Will Reshape America”: “We need to be clear that we can’t stopthe decline of some places, and that we would be foolish to try.”
14
The gist of my remarks was aimed at the federal government’sbailout of the big automakers who had managed themselves intofinancial ruin. My larger point was that the crisis had blightedthe prospects of some places—not just older industrial cities butthe Sun Belt’s cities of sand as well—whereas others would reboundmore quickly.
I have spent my entire life living, working, and studying in in-
dustrial cities. I adore the realness and authenticity of these greatcities. I have always believed and still believe that they can returnto prosperity, if not to their former grandeur. As we have seen,some already have. But today’s key drivers and revivers of economicgrowth are not massive government programs aimed at revivingold industries, but rather community-based eﬀorts to cultivate di-versity and harness human creativity from all possible quarters. AsRyan Avent of the Economist responded to the piece at the time:317 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

The man went from city to city encouraging leaders to be gay-friendly, to
support artists, to encourage creativity, and to build amenities like bikelanes. Perhaps he was wrong to suggest that these measures would deliveran economic turnaround. I’d say he was less wrong about the secret tourban success than those urging cities to throw tax incentives at potentialemployers, or those suggesting that we ought to adopt an industrial policyaimed at returning Midwestern cities to manufacturing glory.
15
To which the urbanist Aaron Renn added:
I might even suggest that if there is any scamming going on, the arrow ispointing the other direction. Cities go hire a big name like Florida to give aspeech or two and do a few ﬂash in the pan arts projects, all for a very smallsum of cash. They trumpet that as showing Something Is Being Done andthat change will happen Real Soon Now. Then they go back to doing what itis they really want to do—namely spending money on all those other things.
16
The American Prospect essay didn’t just criticize me, but also the
allegedly circular nature of my theory, writing: “A tautology lies at
the heart of Florida’s theory that has limited its instructive valueall along: Creative people seek out places that draw a lot of creativepeople. Florida has now taken this closed-loop argument to anotherlevel by declaring that henceforth, the winners’ club is closed tonew entrants.”
17But in fact this tautology is the very mechanism
by which cities, urbanization, and economic development works.Renn describes it as a positive feedback system. “Mathematicaltruths like ‘2 + 2 = 4’ are tautologies,” he writes. “A positive feed-back system is one where an eﬀect tends to produce more of itself.”Avent adds:
That tautology doesn’t just lie at the heart of Florida’s theory; it describes
the actual functioning of urban economies. The value in economically 318 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

dynamic cities is the people that populate them. Where once, ﬁrms would
pay high land prices to be near coal deposits or harbors, based on the eco-nomic advantages those amenities conferred, they now pay high land pricesto be near talent. This yen to concentrate in particular areas has a numberof dynamics. Firms want to be near customers and clients. Workers wantto be near ﬁrms. Firms want to be near workers. Where there are lots ofﬁrms and workers, there will also be businesses serving those workers—inbusiness and in the provision of consumption opportunities—and thoseservices attract additional ﬁrms and workers. Everyone wants to be whereeveryone is, and it’s tough for anyone to go somewhere else because some-where else is where people aren’t. The result is an urban geography that’svery lumpy. People clump together, because there are gains to doing so.
18
I’m an open book. I harbor no hidden agendas. Over the course
of a more than three decades long academic career, my work has
been concerned with one thing: identifying the key factors thatdrive economic growth. When I ﬁnd myself in front of audiencesprimarily interested in arts, culture, or diversity issues, I alwaysbegin with an apology: I am not a student of those subjects, I say,I have only a cursory understanding of them. The reason I came toarts, culture, and diversity issues (rather late in my career) is becauseI found them to be fundamental to the process of economic growth.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I’m politically
independent, ﬁscally conservative, socially liberal, and a believerin vigorous international competition and free trade. As I write,I’m middle-aged, white, Italian-American, married, and straight.I have voted for and served under Democrats, Republicans, andindependents, and I work closely with mayors, governors, and busi-ness, political, and civic leaders from both sides of the aisle on eco-nomic development issues. The members of my core team ofcolleagues and collaborators include Canadian, Swedish, andother international researchers, as well as Americans, registered319 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

Democrats and Republicans, far left socialists, staunch conserva-
tives, liberals and libertarians, married and single people who areboth straight and gay, recent college graduates and the middle-aged. What binds us together is not a political agenda but our com-mon determination to identify the factors that drive economicdevelopment and rising standards of living.
Let me be clear on where I stand. I believe in markets but recog-
nize government has an important role to play. That said, I don’tadvocate giving government a blank check. I have unequivocallymaintained that large, top-down development projects are a majorpart of the problem. I roundly criticize public boondoggles likestadium-building eﬀorts, giant convention centers, and urban casi-
nos; in fact, I’ve called for a moratorium on all such governmentmega-projects. Real economic development is people oriented,organic, and community-based. Nor do I believe in favoring theCreative Class over any other group. My theory says that we needto harness the creativity of each and every person. I have pointedto the rising inequality of wages, the unaﬀordability of housing,and the increasing spikiness of our world as perhaps the key issueof our time, one that new institutions and a new social compactare required to solve. I urge communities everywhere to spend theirmoney wisely, to do the small things that matter, and to focus onbeing open to everyone.
Back to the City
In the original edition of this book, I identiﬁed the beginning of aback-to-the-city movement fueled by the rise of the Creative Classand the Creative Economy. I pointed to data from the 2000 USCensus that documented the trend in cities as diverse as New Yorkand Oakland, California. I cited the 2000 State of the Cities Report320 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which
found that high-tech jobs made up almost 10 percent of all jobs incentral cities, roughly the same as in the suburbs, and that high-tech job growth in cities had increased at three times the nationalaverage in the 1990s.
19I used Seattle to illustrate the trend. Nearly
one-half of all high-tech jobs in Seattle were located in the city(most of them in the central business district, Pioneer Square, andBelltown), versus 35 percent in the suburbs, according to a 2000study by Paul Sommers and Daniel Carlson of the University ofWashington.
20The study found that many high-tech companies
prefer the urban environment for its “vertical character, specialtyshops, street life, entertainment and proximity to a great mixtureof businesses and cultural activities.” Because so many employeespreferred to live downtown, Microsoft had initiated a bus serviceto take employees to its suburban Redmond headquarters. I quotedthe city’s former mayor, Paul Schell, who noted that the key to successlay in “creating a place where the creative experience can ﬂourish.”
21
Cities were leveraging their diversity. Signiﬁcant numbers of
people were moving back downtown in some twenty-one largeAmerican cities, according to a 2001 study.
22When Gary Gates and
I compared HUD’s State of the Cities Report’s ﬁndings to our ownmeasures of innovation and diversity, we found a clear set of cor-relations. Metros with thriving downtowns were positively corre-lated with our own measures of high-tech industry; metros withhigh levels of downtown living also scored high on our Gay Indexand the Bohemian Index, as well as on our Composite DiversityIndex.
23
The back-to-the-city movement has only accelerated since. Many
large US cities saw their fastest growth in the wake of the economiccrisis of 2008. A 2010 Brookings Institution study found that nearlytwo-thirds of the cities with more than 1 million people, “includingNew York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—grew faster in 2008–2009321 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

than the year before, and 23 grew faster than at mid-decade when
many migrants were following the boom to suburbs, exurbs, andsmaller places. Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, and Washington,DC, each exhibited their fastest growth of the decade in the pastyear.” As a consequence, the study added, “the growth rate diﬀer-ential between suburbs and cities narrowed considerably over thelatter half of the decade (1.1 percent versus 1.0 percent in 2008–2009, compared with 1.3 percent versus 0.6 percent in 2004–2005).”
24
Urban Tech
When I wrote the original edition of this book, the suburban nerdis-tan remained the predominant high-tech industrial model. Sincethat time there has been a substantial shift to what I have come tocall urban tech. In Seattle, where the shift to more central locations
was already afoot in the early 2000s, it became more pronounced.The city’s South Lake Union District development, pioneered byPaul Allen, has become a major center for technology, with Ama-zon’s new headquarters at its hub. San Francisco began to vie withSilicon Valley as a location for both tech talent and new start-ups,such as Twitter, which is located in the city. Twitter co-founderJack Dorsey highlighted the shift when he tweeted in February 2012:“I love the idea of an urban corporate campus with all the energyand variety that provides.”
And the shift to urban tech was not conﬁned to the United States.
London’s Silicon Roundabout became one of Europe’s leading high-tech districts, and the older, once bohemian districts of Berlin didso as well.
Leading high-tech companies also sought out more urban loca-
tions. Google, for example, expanded beyond its Silicon ValleyGoogleplex, adding successful centers in New York, London,Toronto, and other major urban centers. Google’s New York location322 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

323 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
was so successful that in 2010 it purchased the entire building where
it was renting oﬃce space for $1.8 billion, adding 2,390,000 squarefeet to the 550,000 it was already occupying (the building, at 111Eighth Avenue in Chelsea, has more ﬂoor space than the EmpireState Building). A 2010 article in the Harvard Business Review,
headlined “Back to the City,” noted that for a growing number ofcompanies “the suburbs have lost their sheen.” The article cautionedthat “businesses that don’t understand and plan for it may suﬀerin the long run.”
25
Some commentators have even gone so far as to suggest that the
shift to urban tech has advantaged New York over Silicon Valley.Rather than suggesting that New York would supplant Silicon Val-ley as the nation’s and the world’s preeminent tech center, thesecommentators were simply pointing out that more urban settingssuch as New York’s have their own considerable virtues.
Writing in his Washington Post blog on September 21, 2011, Do-
minic Basulto noted that “some of the most exciting new start-upsover the past two years have been companies like Foursquare, Etsy,Tumblr, Gilt Groupe, Boxee and Kickstarter—all of which got theirstart in New York. At a time when the cost of launching a start-uphas dropped to nearly nothing, New York’s young Creative Class hasbeen starting new companies at an astonishing pace. And, in the pro-cess, they are transforming entire industries from media to food tofashion to the arts.” Whether Silicon Valley’s hegemony is in jeopardyor not, there can be little doubt that high-tech has taken on muchmore of an urban cast in the ﬁrst decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century.
In a 2006 speech, Silicon Valley icon Paul Graham noted that
for all its advantages and power, Silicon Valley has a great weak-ness. The “paradise Shockley found in 1956 is now one giant park-ing lot,” he noted. “San Francisco and Berkeley are great, butthey’re forty miles away. Silicon Valley proper is soul-crushingsuburban sprawl. It has fabulous weather, which makes it signiﬁ-cantly better than the soul-crushing sprawl of most other American

324 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
cities. But a competitor that managed to avoid sprawl would have
real leverage.”26He could not be more right. “The entire world is
now a rival to Silicon Valley,” the venture capitalist Fred Wilsondeclared in the New York Times in summer 2011. “No country,
state, region, nor city has a lock on innovation in technology any-more.” Or as Basulto spells it out:
Silicon Valley is unquestionably still the role model around the world. It is
the place where foreign dignitaries visit when they want to export “inno-vation” back to their homeland. Yet, the New York model might be moreﬂexible for European cities trying to become innovative hubs—especiallyif those cities already have the type of urban density that makes somethingas simple as a “check-in” worthwhile. One thinks immediately of denselypopulated cities like Mumbai and Shanghai—where a Silicon Alley modelmay make more sense than a Silicon Valley model.
27
The data bear this out, at least to some extent. On July 20, 2011,
Crain’s New York Business reported that New York City had sur-
passed Boston as the nation’s second-largest technology hub. “A
cool $642.2 million in venture capital funding ﬂooded the NewYork metro area during the second quarter, with more than $416million going to 48 Internet-based companies, according to a reportreleased by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National VentureCapital Association. A total of 98 companies in the area receivedventure capital funding. This is compared to the New England area,where 22 Internet-based companies received $290 million.”
28It
was not a one-time occurrence: It was the third consecutive quarterthat the New York metropolitan area, mainly Manhattan, had at-tracted more than $500 million in venture capital. And it continueda trend. New York actually edged past Boston in venture capital in2010, taking in $896 million, compared with $866 million forBoston. Then, in the ﬁrst nine months of 2011, New York venturecapital surged to $2.2 billion, more than double the ﬁgure for the

325 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
entire previous year, according to a follow-up report in Crain’s.
Despite the rapid growth in venture funding to New York start-ups,this amount was but one-fourth of the more than $8 billion in ven-ture funding raked in by Silicon Valley ﬁrms over the same period.
29
In the Boston area as well, venture capital has shifted from the
outlying suburbs around Route 128 to the urban core. In 2011, start-up companies in the city limits raised almost $600 million in ven-ture capital, roughly the same amount as ﬁrms located in the Route
128 suburbs.
30
Driving this trend is the fact that a growing number of cities and
urban centers have become ever-more powerful talent magnets, thelocations of choice for talented young people. Since 2000, the numberof college-educated young people between the ages of 25 and 34years old increased twice as fast in the urban centers (deﬁned as thethree miles surrounding the urban core) as in other parts of Amer-ica’s 51 largest metros, according to a 2011 study by CEOs forCities.
31The number of young adults with a four-year degree living
in those close-in urban neighborhoods increased by 26 percent from2000 to 2009, compared to 13 percent in outlying neighborhoods.In ﬁve metros—New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, and SanFrancisco—more than two-thirds of the residents of the urban corehad college degrees.
What a remarkable change from the past. During the 1970s and
1980s, when I was in college and graduate school, many of my pro-fessors maintained that structural changes in society and industryhad dealt most American cities a death blow. Multistory factoriesof the sort found in neighborhoods like New York’s SoHo or Cleve-land’s Flats had been rendered redundant by the shift to large-scalehorizontal factories in Greenﬁeld locations, the Sun Belt, or abroadthat oﬀered the advantages of mass production and economies ofscale. Government policies encouraging home ownership and ex-tensive freeway subsidies had helped to fuel a shift to the suburbsthat was accelerated by white ﬂight in the 1960s.

326 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
City leaders tried to stanch the trend by buttressing the one eco-
nomic activity left in cities: building taller and denser central business
districts that were increasingly ﬁlled with government or nonproﬁtactivities. As failing mixed-use neighborhoods were bulldozed in thename of urban renewal, cities were transformed into skyscraper ghosttowns—ﬁled with workers by day but empty and dangerous after5:00
PM, when middle-class workers climbed into their cars and drove
back to their lives in the suburbs, leaving the city to the underclass.
I saw those changes play out in my own life. I was born in 1957,
in Newark, New Jersey, the city that became the nation’s posterchild for urban decay. The Newark of my youth—the place thatPhilip Roth has written about so eloquently—was a wonderlandfor a little boy, a mix of industries, thriving multiethnic neighbor-hoods, and a prosperous downtown. On weekends, our extendedfamily would gather at my grandmother’s home in the predomi-nantly Italian American neighborhood of North Newark. On warmnights, we’d take in the professional bicycle races in Branch BrookPark; during holiday season, we shopped in the retail district at de-partment stores like Bamberger’s. Among the times I recall mostfondly were Saturdays with my father, especially when he took meto Newark Public Library, and turned me loose in the stacks, whereI would eventually devour volume upon volume on urban America.
Then, almost all at once, everything changed. I can vividly recall
driving through downtown Newark with my father during the sum-mer of 1967, when I was ten. The once-bustling streets were barri-caded, many buildings were in ﬂames. Everywhere, I could seepolice, National Guardsmen, and armored vehicles brought in toquell the riots. The Newark Star Ledger oﬃce building where my
mother worked—a place I had often visited—had been transformedinto a barbed-wire fortress.
In subsequent years, I witnessed the fall of Victory Optical, the
once-grand factory where my father worked, which had provided

327 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
solid livelihoods for ethnic families in Newark and surrounding
communities for years. For many people who grew up as I did, thedecline of manufacturing and of America’s great urban centers sig-naled the end of this country’s golden age.
But the past decade has seen a dramatic turnaround in the for-
tunes of urban America. In deﬁance of expert pessimism, cities areback. Many have become preferred destinations for creative peopleand creative companies. Not all cities and not all creative people,for sure—there are still many who prefer suburbs and rural areas—but for quite a considerable number. Several forces have combinedto bring people and economic activity back to urban areas. For onething, crime is down to its lowest level in forty years. Part of thereason for this lies in better policing, but much of it can be attributedto the growing diversity and improved conditions of the cities them-selves.
32Couples now push baby carriages down city blocks where
not so long ago even the hardiest urban dwellers feared to tread.
Cities are cleaner than they were—there are no more coal-ﬁred
furnaces and incinerators and fewer smokestack industries; they arealso greener and more environmentally eﬃcient, as David Owenand others have shown.
33Multifamily dwellings that share walls are
easier to heat than detached single-family houses; density discour-ages car use and promotes mass transit and walking. People picnicin urban parks, Rollerbladers and cyclists whiz along trails wheretrains used to roll, and water-skiers jet down once-toxic rivers.
Beyond the Size Fetish
There is no denying the advantage of size. Bigger cities have biggermarkets. They have more people and more resources to throw atproblems. They generate higher densities, which put people in closerphysical contact and which also increase their energy and resource

328 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
efficiency. Bigger cities also have higher levels of well-educated
individuals. But it is possible to make too much of this: manyeconomists, urbanists, and city leaders suffer from a size fetish.Edward Glaeser argues that cities need to grow bigger and higherstill, because “tall buildings enable the human interactions thatare at the heart of economic innovation, and of progress itself.”Land-use restrictions should be eased, he wrote in The Atlanticin March 2011, because they tie “cities to their past and limit thepossibilities for their future. If cities can’t build up, then they willbuild out. If building in a city is frozen, then growth will happensomewhere else.”
34
It’s an understandable mistake, seeing the raw compacting of
people into space as the key to urban economic advantage, becausemarginal returns to scale do seem to be ever-increasing. But den-sity does in fact have its limits. Giant buildings and massive sky-scrapers can, and often do, function as vertical suburbs where it’smuch easier to conduct your business and life inside, muting thespontaneous, freewheeling encounters that give cities so much oftheir energy. Asia’s great cities are the biggest and densest in theworld, but their innovative and creative impetus pales in com-parison to places like New York and London in finance, to Parisin fashion, Milan in design, or Silicon Valley in technology. Theadvantage for cities lies in their pedestrian-friendly scale, whichfeatures mixed use and mid-rise structures, abundant bars, cafés,and other third places, and an active street life that facilitateshuman interaction.
“Does Density Matter?”—that’s the critical question that Peter
Gordon and Sanford Ikeda ask in a detailed empirical study of thesubject. They contrast two types of density. The ﬁrst is “crude den-sity” of the sort associated with taller and taller buildings. Densityin and of itself, they note, will not generate innovation, new ﬁrm for-mation, and economic development. “If it could,” they write, “county
prisons or the streets around Yankee Stadium as fans crowd into

329 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
and out of games would be economically diverse and dynamic
places—they are not. The former are not dynamic for obvious rea-sons while the latter lacks dynamism because it fails to provide thefoundation for dynamic long-term growth, although it may sustainbusinesses such as baseball cap and hot dog sales.” Too much den-sity can stiﬂe the exchange and ﬂow of information and ideas, justas too little does. It is only when density goes hand in hand withwalkability, pedestrian scale, and the like that it can yield real cul-tural and economic beneﬁts.
The second type of density they refer to simply as “Jane Jacobs
density.” I call it “street-level serendipity.” This kind of density, intheir words, maximizes the “potential informal contacts of the av-erage person in a given public space at any given time.”
35Density
of this sort not only provides the all-important “eyes on the street”and facilitates networking and informal exchanges of knowledgeand information, it actively creates demand for local products. Inthis way, it leads to diversity, and not just of populations and ethnicgroups, but of tastes, preferences, and demand. “Jacobs density”cannot be achieved in the absence of diverse land uses and economicfunctions that are authentic and “unique enough to attract peoplefrom outside the locality.”
As Jacobs herself put it: “Densities can get too high if they reach
a point at which, for any reason, they begin to repress diversity in-stead of to stimulate it. Precisely this can happen, and it is the mainpoint in considering how high is too high.” And she added: “In theabsence of a pedestrian scale, density can be big trouble.”
36
Creative Suburbs and Rural Areas
The idea that clustering only happens in Manhattan-style urbancenters is shortsighted and parochial, however. None of America’sthree largest metros—New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago—crack

330 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
the top thirty on my Creativity Index. And though all innovative
activity requires interaction, not every kind of interaction has tooccur at the pedestrian scale. Silicon Valley—the most innovativeplace on earth—is chronically car dependent. Music industry typeswho have relocated to Nashville cite the ease of getting around bycar—zipping oﬀ to meet for lunch, to get to the studio, or to goover to a venue to see a new act—as a big part of its draw. Car-based suburban models necessarily become less eﬀective at largerscales, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot work.
Many suburbs have extraordinary endowments of the Creative
Class and human capital. The level of college graduates approaches50 percent of all adults in just a handful of metros—Boulder andSan Jose, Danbury and Stamford. But more than eight in ten adultsin the suburb of Bethesda are college grads, as are roughly three-fourths of the adults in Princeton, New Jersey; Highland Park,Texas; Park Forest, Illinois; and Palo Alto, California. Roughlytwo-thirds of adults hold college degrees in the Detroit suburb ofBirmingham; and in Reston, Virginia; Coral Gables, Florida;Evanston, Illinois; and Santa Monica, California.
Some of these suburbs are actively fostering their creative
economies. Ferndale, Michigan, just outside of Detroit, has focusedon promoting its arts scene and has been building aﬀordable hous-ing and marketing itself as gay friendly. Arlington, Virginia, hasadded density by building mixed-use high-rise complexes at itseleven Metrorail stations, while encouraging the development ofindependent businesses in its older neighborhoods. It is a placeof exhilarating contrasts, with funky coﬀee shops, vintage clothingstores, and places to hear Indie bands, close upon gleaming oﬃcetowers and chain restaurants. Bellevue, Washington, just acrossfrom Seattle, which has been retroﬁtting and adding density andmixed land use to its downtown for some time, recently launcheda major core-building initiative, the “Bel-Red Area Transformation ,”

a nine-hundred-acre urban inﬁll project that will bring mixed-use
development, light rail, new streets, parks, and open spaces to adisused stretch of highway.
But as car dependent as suburbs are, the ones that are doing the
best are the most walkable. A 2008 Brookings study by ChristopherB. Leinberger identiﬁed more than 150 walkable suburbs in Amer-ica’s thirty largest metros.
37More than one-third of Americans
say that they would prefer to live in walkable communities, accord-ing to research by Jonathan Levine of the University of Michiganand his collaborators. Houses in walkable neighborhoods commandhigher prices than houses in more distant, less dense locations. A2009 study by urbanist Joe Cortright for CEOs for Cities analyzedthe sales of 90,000 homes in ﬁfteen major metros. In twelve out ofﬁfteen of them, walkability commanded premiums—of as much ashundreds of thousands of dollars in some DC suburbs.
38Charlotta
Mellander and I found that metros with walkable suburbs hadgreater economic output, higher incomes, and higher housing prices;higher levels of human capital, higher membership in the CreativeClass; higher levels of patented innovations and of high-tech indus-tries and employees; not to mention higher levels of happiness.
39
Walkable suburbs oﬀer many of the features of great urban neigh-
borhoods but with much less of the hassle. Many move to themfrom the city when they have families, hoping to gain safety andaccess to good schools without giving up the amenities they left be-hind. Whether they move to these suburbs speciﬁcally because of
their walkability, their urban virtues of mixed use and generallymedium-scale density ensure that the innovation and productivity-enhancing eﬀects of clustering continue to be available to them. Themost successful suburbs share attributes of the kinds of street-levelserendipity that are found in the best urban neighborhoods. Justas they do in the city, people bump into each other in coﬀee shopsand other such third places; they discuss projects and make deals.331 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

332 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
In fact, the best urban and suburban neighborhoods look strikingly
more similar than diﬀerent.
More than half of Americans would prefer to walk more and
drive less, a 2003 national survey reported.40Still, most suburbanites
don’t want to move to the city. They’d like the best aspects of citylife—its liveliness, its amenities, its walkability—to come to them.
Walkability’s appeal is also being driven by the downsizing
brought on by the housing crisis. Much has been made of the shiftto a so-called new normal, where consumers scale back on debt,purchase fewer material things, spend more time with family andfriends, and seek greater meaning in their lives. It may sound likethe wishful thinking of ivory-tower pundits—but it really is hap-pening. According to an eye-opening 2009 survey commissionedby Builder magazine, home buyers are no longer willing to drive
to the farthest edges of development to buy the biggest house theycan aﬀord. In fact, those are precisely the kinds of homes that arenot selling. Today’s buyers—surprising numbers of them single
women—are looking for smaller houses that are closer in, with ac-cess to parks and cultural amenities. There is a rapidly growingmarket for super-energy-eﬃcient homes under 1,300 square feet—quite a departure from the 5,000–6,000 square foot McMansionsof just a few years past. “We are entering a new era of home build-ing, where buyers look for spiritual satisfaction rather than materialgain,” the Builder study concludes—not the kind of language we’re
used to hearing from the construction industry.
But not all suburbs are prospering, far from it. Many, if not most,
do not have the option of developing compact cores along old street-car lines or near commuter-train stations; not all are ﬁlled with won-derful old housing stock that is ripe for gentriﬁcation. Many aresprawling, relatively characterless places, with spread-out popula-tions living in cookie-cutter houses on large lots, who commutelong distances to work. With millions of homes underwater or in

333 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
foreclosure, suburbs and exurbs have taken some of the most visible
hits from the great recession. Even as many inner city areas arebeing gentriﬁed, blight and intransigent poverty are moving outto the suburbs, where one-third of the nation’s poor now reside—1.5 million more than in cities. Suburban poverty populations aregrowing at ﬁve times the rate of those in cities, according to arecent Brookings study.
41But even if some of our most stressed
suburbs might have passed the tipping point—like those brand-new unsalable houses on the far-out fringes of Los Angeles thatwere bulldozed to the ground not too long ago, double-paned win-dows, granite countertops, whirlpool baths, and all—most of themaren’t about to fade away.
42For better or worse, our suburbs are
here to stay.
A question I am frequently asked is: how do rural areas factor
into your theory, and are they being left behind by the CreativeAge? The short answer is that their fortunes are divided: some areprospering; others are falling further behind. A large-scale studyby David McGranahan and Timothy Wojan of the US Departmentof Agriculture compared the rural and metropolitan Creative Classacross 3,000-plus US counties. They found that the Creative Classaccounted for 20 percent of rural or “nonmetropolitan” employ-ment, less than the 31 percent in metropolitan areas.
43But com-
posed as it is mainly of “managers, high-end sales positions,scientists, engineers, college professors, artists and designers,” this“rural Creative Class” was “similar in occupational structure to theurban Creative Class.” The main diﬀerence is that the rural CreativeClass had lower levels of college graduates and was older than itsmore urban counterpart. Their research also found that rural coun-ties with large concentrations of the Creative Class tended to haveleading universities and colleges (they mention Cornell in Ithaca,New York) and rich endowments of outdoor amenities, such asmountains, lakes, and other attractive landscape.

334 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Remaking the ‘Burbs
Remaking our fading suburbs and rural areas might well turn out
to be the biggest urban revitalization challenge of modern times—far larger in scale, scope, and cost than the revitalization of ourinner cities. In their book Retroﬁtting Suburbia, Ellen Dunham-
Jones of Georgia Tech and June Williamson of City College of NewYork highlighted some of the most promising approaches.
44In
Phoenix, Arizona, for example, three abandoned strip malls, clus-tered at the corner of Fortieth and Campbell Streets, were convertedinto a restaurant, an upscale grocery, a chic bakery, and a cocktailbar. The development is called Le Grande Orange, and it has be-come a huge attraction for diners, shoppers, and local home buyerswho want to live within walking distance of it. National Harbor, amix of hotels, residential units, marinas, parks, stores, and indoorand outdoor entertainment venues, is being built on the footingsof two previous failed projects in Prince George’s County, Mary-land. When completed, it will extend along 1.25 miles of the Po-tomac River.
A PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that one in ﬁve malls
was dead or dying—a situation that has only worsened since theeconomic crash.
45But some of them have become the sites of a
wave of renewal. Outside of St. Paul, the parking lot that sur-rounded a dead shopping center built on landﬁll was turned backinto wetlands—which in turn attracted a new “lakefront” townhomedevelopment. In Lakewood, a suburb of Denver, Colorado, a deadmall on a single 103-acre superblock is being transformed intoBelmar—twenty-two urban blocks with parks, bus lines, restaurants,stores, and 1,300 new households—the downtown that Lakewoodnever had. Eight of the thirteen regional malls in the Denver areaare now planning or have completed makeovers.

335 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
Perhaps the biggest retrofit of all is happening in Tysons Corner,
Virginia, the virtual archetype of an auto-dependent, sprawling
edge city. Located near the junctions of three major highways, itboasts 25 million square feet of office space and 4 million squarefeet of retail space, including one of the largest malls on the EastCoast. Although only 18,500 people live there, the town’s popu-lation swells to 120,000 on weekdays. Decades ago, developershailed Tysons Corner as the wave of the future—one of hundredsof new stretched out, auto-dependent satellite centers that wouldrender our old downtown commercial centers obsolete. But forall the jobs it supports, stores it houses, and tax revenue it gen-erates, Tysons Corner has been losing out of late. Its perpetualtraffic gridlock and its lack of human energy have caused homebuyers to choose other places; some of the companies that wereheadquartered there have even moved back into the District ofColumbia.
When the DC Metro announced plans to build an extension to
Dulles Airport that would pass through Tysons Corner, the biggestdebate was not about whether or not it was needed, but whetherto bury it underground—an expensive proposition, but one thatwould free up land for densiﬁcation. On June 22, 2010, the FairfaxCounty Board of Supervisors adopted a comprehensive plan thatwill transform the town from “a sprawling suburban oﬃce park”to a “24 hour urban center where people live, work and play.” Itsretroﬁt is being led by its major developers and landowners whoare seeking to make it more walkable, denser with a more integratedmix of uses, and more connected to the city via transit. There is acertain irony in this. America’s archetypal Edge City is seeking toreinvent itself as a place whose hallmarks will be walkability, greenconstruction, access to public transportation, and abundant publicamenities, like parks and bicycle trails—something that soundsvery much like a real city.

336 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
There are countless other opportunities for reclamation all across
America. Disused golf courses can be transformed into parks and
nature sanctuaries; abandoned car dealerships can be landscapedand developed as new, mixed-use neighborhoods. Whole commer-cial corridors, as Dunham-Jones and Williamson put it, “are beingretroﬁtted in ways that integrate rather than isolate uses and re-generate underperforming asphalt into urban neighborhoods.” De-velopers are decking over the parking lots at commuter rail stationsand building high- and mid-rise oﬃce/commercial/residential com-plexes atop them; they are cutting streets through formerly walled-oﬀ corporate campuses and adding restaurants, stores, and publicspaces. Although the recession has slowed down many of the mostambitious suburban renewal projects, it’s provided further impetusfor community service and greening eﬀorts. Abandoned big-boxstores are being made over into senior centers and schools andlibraries—amenities that are just as essential for neighborhoods aseateries and boutiques. This type of strip commercial redevelopmentwill be the major development feature of the next generation. Mostof these retroﬁts, of course, are a far cry from the organic authen-ticity of real cities, Dunham-Jones and Williamson note, but theybuild community and lay the groundwork for still further redevel-opment. Writ large and multiplied across hundreds of other metros,they are remaking the way Americans live and laying the ground-work for future economic prosperity.
Talent in Cities and Suburbs
Although we have long known that human capital is central to eco-nomic growth, most studies have measured it across either nationsor metropolitan regions. But how is human capital distributedwithin metros? And how might that aﬀect regional development?

337 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
Metros vary widely in terms of their shape as well as their size.
Some have concentrated central cities or cores—for example,within the greater New York metropolitan area, Manhattan hasheavy concentrations of business and also signiﬁcant concentrationsof higher-income, higher-skill, higher-human-capital individuals.Others, like Los Angeles and Atlanta, are more sprawling, withhigher-income, higher-skill, higher-human-capital individuals re-siding mainly in the suburbs.
In a 2011 study, Charlotta Mellander, Kevin Stolarick, and I used
statistical models to examine the eﬀects on regional incomes andhousing values of the distribution of human capital in the suburbsand cities of metro areas. We found that both suburbs and citiesplay diﬀerent but important roles in regional development. Sub-urban human capital is the key factor in smaller and medium-sizedmetros, those with fewer than one million people. This makes sense,actually. It is easier to get around in smaller metros; there is lesscongestion and less pressure for central locations. Skilled peoplecan live further out and easily get to the center when needed.
But once metro populations surpass one million people, human
capital in the center city begins to play a bigger role. In these largermetros, center city human capital was more strongly related to re-gional incomes and housing values. And the eﬀect grew strongeras metros got bigger. Metros with more than three million peoplehad nearly twice the density of human capital as those betweenone and three million. This, too, makes intuitive sense. Commutesare longer and congestion worse in larger metros, causing higherskilled, higher human-capital people to begin to seek out more cen-tral locations.
Overall, we found that the distribution of human capital between
suburbs and cities had a greater eﬀect than we expected on a metro’soverall economic performance. In virtually every permutation of ouranalysis, the results were stronger when we separated center-city and

suburban shares than when we looked at a metro’s overall level of
human capital.
Metro Nation
Take it from me, a card-carrying, dyed-in-the-wool urbanist whohas lived in inner cities for most of my adult life: my urbanist fellowtravelers are making a big mistake when they impugn the suburbswholesale. Just over one-half of Americans live in the suburbs, andthe great majority of them are content to stay there. More thantwo-thirds (68 percent) of suburbanites are “satisﬁed” or “verysatisﬁed” with where they live; 57 percent rated their communitiesas the “best” or “near-best,” according to a survey I conductedwith the Gallup Organization and report in my book Who’s YourCity?. A separate Pew survey identiﬁed the group of Americans
that is most satisﬁed with their living choices as college-educatedsuburbanites—62 percent of whom said there was no better placefor them to live.
46
As Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution says, “the real America
isn’t found in cities or suburbs or small towns, but in the metropol-itan areas or ‘metros’ that bring all these places into economic andsocial union. We are not a nation of cities vs. suburbs but a metronation.”
47I heartily concur. A metro, or a metropolitan area, en-
compasses not just a center city but its suburban rings. Suburbs don’tgrow at the expense of cities; suburbanization and urbanization alikeare parts of the same larger process. Suburbs no longer draw mostof their populations from inner cities, according to the research ﬁnd-ings of the Brookings Institution’s Audrey Singer, but grow by at-tracting people from small towns and rural areas further out, as wellas immigrants from foreign countries, more than 50 percent of whombypass cities and settle directly in the suburbs of larger metro areas.
48338 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

Great metropolitan areas are like economic suns; their gravita-
tional appeal is irresistible. Suburbs and cities are mutually depend-
ent. We need to stop debating which is better and start buildingthe stronger, more tightly connected metropolitan areas that arethe key to our future competitiveness. This task becomes evenmore important as our metropolitan areas morph into ever largermega-regions, like the gargantuan Bos-Wash corridor that is hometo 50-plus million people and generates more than $2 trillion ineconomic output.
49
Building the Creative Community
So after all that, how do you build a creative community? Certainly
not all at once and from the top down—most of what deﬁnes andshapes creative communities emerges gradually over time. But thatdoes not mean that strategy and public policy do not matter. Quitethe contrary. Smart strategies that recognize and enhance bottom-up, community-based eﬀorts that are already working can help ac-celerate the development of creative communities, as we can seein the following cases.
Austin City Limits
A good case in point is Austin, Texas. Although much of what oc-curred there happened organically, over time the city developedan integrated strategy for harnessing the 3T’s and leveraging qualityof place. It started with the ﬁrst T, technology. During the 1980sand 1990s, Austin went to great lengths to bolster its technologybase. It began, as many places do, by recruiting branches of ﬁrmsfrom other places—IBM, Intel, and Motorola to name a few.
50The
city’s leadership made benchmarking visits to leading high-tech339 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

regions, both to learn from their best practices and to pay visits to
companies they wanted to attract. Austin was selected as the homeof two major research consortia, MCC (the Microelectronics andComputer Technology Corporation) and SEMATECH (Semicon-ductor Manufacturing Technology), both of them supported bythe federal government and leading ﬁrms in those ﬁelds. But theeﬀort did not stop there. Under the leadership of fabled entrepre-neur George Kozmetsky and others, the region built a thriving en-trepreneurial climate. It also invested heavily in the second T, talent,by building up the University of Texas and attracting hundreds ofmillions of dollars in federal and state research dollars.
The Austin story would not be complete without the third T, tol-
erance. Ask the average person the following question: what is theﬁrst thing that comes to your mind when you hear about Austin?Most people don’t answer Dell, Trilogy, or any other high-techcompany. Many of them mention Austin City Limits, the live music
broadcast on public TV, or perhaps the South-by-Southwest Fes-tival. Alongside eﬀorts to develop technology and tolerance, theregion has made considerable investments in its lifestyle and musicscene—right down to the clubs and bars of Sixth Street. The city’sdowntown running trail features a bronze sculpture of a famousregional ﬁgure, the late guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn. When onehigh-tech company, Vignette, expanded into a new facility in down-town Austin, it agreed to establish a $1-million fund to support thelocal music scene.
51
After I delivered a speech in Austin in spring 2000, a group of
business and political leaders invited me to join them for “HippieHour” at a local club. Delighted, I replied that I was certainly readyfor “Happy Hour.” “It’s not Happy Hour,” they pointedly correctedme, “we said Hippie Hour.” We ended up at the Continental Club,a ramshackle old place on South Congress Street, hanging out witha crowd of musicians, Latinos, politicians, high-tech business types,340 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

341 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
and even a few hippies—a veritable cauldron of creativity where
everyone could let their hair down and be themselves.
More than ten years later, Austin continues to attend to its unique
cultural qualities as well as its economic growth. “Ronnie Johnson,my bass player, used to say, ‘Austin is a good place to leave yourstuﬀ,’” the alt country performer James McMurtry wrote on hisblog in 2011.
I can’t imagine a better place for a musician to grow up than Austin. There
are so many live music venues. A kid with ample talent and drive can ﬁnda gig here. . . . After my Tuesday night show, I usually hang around to hearthe Ephraim Owens Trio, three incredible jazz players. I don’t know whatthey’re doing, but I like it. Through the plate glass window, I can see ourrapidly changing skyline, new glass high-rises climbing skyward. The re-mains of Liberty Lunch and countless other clubs are buried somewhereunder that glass, metal, and stone. Ronnie Johnson leaves his stuﬀ in Marfanow, Austin having grown expensive for a side man. It’s not the same town,but the music carries on. I’ll stay a while yet.
52
U2 and High-Tech
Dublin, Ireland, provides another interesting case of a city that
consciously cultivated its creative development.53In the 1970s, Ire-
land suﬀered from double-digit unemployment, stagnant incomes,and a brain drain of its best and brightest. Then it began recruitingglobal high-tech companies through a policy of “industrializationby invitation.” Financial and tax-related incentives helped attracthigh-tech giants, including IBM, Lotus, Intel, Microsoft, Dell, Gate-way, and Oracle, which were also lured by the thick talent poolemerging from the country’s world-class universities. The Irishgovernment formed a body called Enterprise Ireland to support

342 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
entrepreneurship and venture capital and foster an indigenous
high-tech industry. By 2000, the Irish software industry includedsome 900 ﬁrms, employing over 30,000 people.
But these traditional economic development eﬀorts would not
have worked if Ireland had not buttressed them with a majorlifestyle eﬀort. First, the basic idea of recruiting technology com-panies and entrepreneurs was extended to the artistic and culturalscene of actors, writers, and musicians. By oﬀering tax breaks toculturally creative people and a high-quality place to live and work,the country has not only retained its growing legion of nativecelebrities, such as U2, Van Morrison, and Liam Neeson, but alsoplays host—and home—to many international stars. The secondstep revolved around building true quality of place, grounded inhistory and authenticity. Dublin began by restoring its Temple Bardistrict, utilizing $25 million in European Union tourism funds torevitalize the pubs where James Joyce, Bram Stoker, and SamuelBeckett might once have enjoyed a pint. As the New York Times
reported in October 2000, “Planners were determined not to turnthe neighborhood into a Euro-Disney of faux-Georgian architec-ture, but to encourage innovative design.”
54Today, the district is
hipper and more energetic than ever.
The Irish economy took a body blow during the ﬁnancial crisis,
and the country has seen its real estate values tumble and much ofits wealth disappear. But there is widespread agreement that itsCreative Economy provides the only way forward.
Back in 2000, when I was ﬁrst writing this section, I could never
have imagined that in fall 2011, at the Global Irish EconomicForum, Bono, on a panel with Bill Clinton, would cite The Rise of
the Creative Class by name, as he made the case that the Irish people
were “very, very well suited for the 21st century.” “Hierarchical so-cieties don’t translate well into the 21st century,” he continued.“The industrial revolution may sit well with some of our neighbours,

but the Irish have never been good at ﬁtting into it. We’re not good
at taking orders, perhaps. But we are great anarchic thinkers. . . .We have an environment that creative people want to be around—like Richard Florida talks about in The Creative Class. There is an
environment that people want to be around and music and cultureare part of that.”
55
Zappos and Las Vegas
Far from the glitz and bling of the Strip, an intriguing transforma-tion has been under way in Las Vegas’s struggling downtown core.
Las Vegas, as Chapter 11 showed, has the lowest Creative Class
concentration of any large metro in the United States—but perhapsnot for long. Zappos is moving its headquarters from an outlyingsuburb to the old City Hall building and CEO Tony Hsieh’s goalis to create a vibrant, urban district in the surrounding area.
As I wrote in my 2010 book, The Great Reset, Zappos has been a
leader in upgrading low-pay, low-skill service jobs. Most of Zappos’employees work in fulﬁllment and customer service—taking cus-tomer orders and packing and shipping shoes. Zappos’s base payfor unskilled work is $11.00 an hour, well above the average. Thecompany works hard to recruit the right people and has adopteda radical policy to screen them even further—a week after a newperson starts, he or she is oﬀered a $1,000 bonus to quit. Employeeswho take the company up on “The Oﬀer” prove that they don’thave the commitment that Zappos demands. Zappos oﬀers exten-sive in-house training and development programs so employeescan gain higher wages and advance their careers through promotionfrom within; at the same time, team members are encouraged tobe themselves by embracing their diﬀerences.
Hsieh and his partners plan to invest as much as $350 million in
redeveloping downtown Las Vegas, according to several accounts343 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

published in early 2012. In addition to $60 million in renovations
to the City Hall Building, where some 1200 Zappos workers willbe employed, another $100 million will be dedicated to residentialdevelopment, $50 million for high tech startups, and $50 millionfor other small businesses like cafes, bars, book stores, restaurants,and other third places to help ﬂesh out the character and textureof the neighborhood. Another $50 million has been set aside foreducation and upgrading local schools. Fortune called Hsieh a
“combination of Steve Wynn meets Walt Disney meets Jane Ja-cobs.” Hsieh responded, “This isn’t so diﬀerent than what we builtat Zappos. We’re just scaling it.”
56
Hsieh wants as many Zappos employees to move downtown as
possible, so one of the ﬁrst uses he put all that money to was to takeover the leases for 50 apartments in The Ogden, one of the neigh-borhood’s most desirable high-rise buildings. Apartments are of-fered to Zappos employees at subsidized rents. Hsieh and hisDowntown Project team have already moved into the top ﬂoor.
Zappos’ urban-renewal project is two-pronged. On the one hand,
the company is building a facility and importing Creative and ServiceClass jobs. On the other, it is working to turn Las Vegas itself intoan idea center. Hsieh has entered into a partnership with a companythat leases small jets to start a new airline that will shuttle techiesand entrepreneurs between the Bay Area and Las Vegas. Zapposhas invested in a monthly downtown arts festival and has spurreda local start-up incubator program. Its employees have partneredwith local tech groups on regular exchanges and seminars.
Hsieh believes that serendipitous interactions—what he calls
“collisions” between people—facilitate relationships and sparkideas. “When you’re in a city, the bar or the restaurant becomes anextended conference room,” he says. Since downtown Las Vegasdidn’t have that, he explained, “The idea went from ‘let’s build acampus’ to ‘let’s build a city.’”344 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

345 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY
An article in Forbes magazine dubbed these eﬀorts a new form
of “corporate neo-urbanism”—a way of “reviving, in an interesting
new form, a kind of intimate relationship between corporationsand cities.” The article contrasts this with two previous paradigmsof company community interaction. At the beginning of the In-dustrial Revolution, rising manufacturers literally built companytowns from the bottom up for their workers. During the Organi-zational Age, the suburbs became virtual dormitories for their man-agers. “In the third era, corporations need creative talent, and herethey run into an immediate problem. Unlike the blue-collar workerof the ﬁrst generation company towns, or the docile OrganizationMan types of second-generation suburban towns, the Creative Classworkforce needs a far more stimulating environment to function,”it notes.
57Hsieh’s and Zappos’ solution, the article concludes, is to
adapt and absorb a small, relatively manageable and inexpensivecity, Las Vegas, to this new model. All in all, it is an interesting andimportant experiment that may point the way to the revitalizationof many other struggling downtown urban centers.
58
Pittsburgh—Still the Base Case
In the original edition of this book, I used my then hometown ofPittsburgh as my base case about the transition from an old in-dustrial age economy and society to a creative community. If acity with all of Pittsburgh’s assets—great universities, industrialage architecture, splendid natural amenities, and emerging humancreativity—can’t make it in the Creative Age, I wrote, then the fu-ture does not bode well for other older industrial cities. Back then,it looked like Pittsburgh might be on the wrong track. Too muchof its precious creative capital (graduates of the University of Pitts-burgh and Carnegie Mellon) were leaving, along with the start-up companies they’d founded. Although the city had made some

346 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
important strides in self-reinvention, and indeed ranked near the
top of some magazines’ lists of the “Best Places to Live,” it had beenhurt by its long legacy of top-town redevelopment, such as thetransformation of the Homestead Steel Works into a giant water-front mall featuring islands of big-box retail stores amid yawningacres of parking lots.
I noted the conﬂict between the Squelchers who ran the town—
the old capitalists who frequented the Duquesne Club—and theemerging energy of the region’s Creative Class. In the 1990s, whenI lived there, the Squelchers were promoting a revitalization planthat turned on spending $1 billion for two new sports stadiumsand a convention center, even after their initial proposals had beensoundly rejected by a popular vote. The National Center for HistoricPreservation singled out their “Fifth and Forbes” downtown plan—which sought to raze several blocks in the center of downtown andreplace them with an urban mega-mall, complete with a Nord-strom’s, multiplex cinema, and chain nightspots like a Hard RockCafé and a Planet Hollywood—as perhaps the worst example ofurban renewal of the past forty years.
But there were good things, too. I was involved with some of them
while I was living there, and many of them have since borne fruit.As my friend and colleague Don Carter, the architect, professor, anddirector of Carnegie Mellon’s Remaking Cities Institute, recounts:
Something else was happening—an unprecedented bubbling up of quality
of life initiatives from individuals, volunteer groups, and non-governmentalorganizations, many of which were in turn funded by the corporations andfoundations. There was receptivity to new things and willingness to takerisks. This bottom-up energy was especially exhibited by young adults intheir twenties and thirties who began populating older neighborhoods, ren-ovating houses, creating art, and starting new businesses. Two importantcivic groups, PUMP (Pittsburgh Urban Magnet Program) and GroundZeroAction Network, were created by and for young adults. Word of mouth fed

a trickle and then a steady ﬂow of young expatriate Pittsburghers back home
(“boomerangs”) and young newcomers eager to take advantage of the lowcost of living, available jobs, and a vibrant cultural scene.
Pittsburgh has made signal progress on the arts, culture, and
community development front. The Andy Warhol Museum and
the Mattress Factory, a museum-work space devoted to large-scale installation art, have both achieved worldwide recognition.Pittsburgh Filmmakers and the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild,which started as grassroots efforts more than thirty years ago,have become nationally known. Smaller visual-arts collectives like
the Brew House (which originated as a squatter-artist project) havethrived, as have a multitude of small theater companies.
Street-level culture has gained a growing foothold in Pittsburgh,
too, as main street corridors in several older Working Class districtshave been transformed. Along Carson Street on the South Side, aformer steel-mill neighborhood once best known for having a polkanamed after it, galleries, theaters, and cafés have sprung up amidthe older stores and bars; as one local wit has observed, this is nowa place where “blue-hairs of both types converge.” Similar street-level scenes have cropped up elsewhere, notably along Penn Avenuein Garﬁeld, long one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, and pre-dominately black.
Carter points to Lawrenceville as another particularly promising
neighborhood. “It is attracting hipsters, blue-collar families, pro-fessional families, artists, cool restaurants, architects, students, fac-ulty, renovators and landlords, bicyclists, and most importantly,private and public investment,” he notes. “Lawrenceville has manyneighborhood celebrations: Art All Night; 16 to 62 Design Zone;Disposable Film Festival; Doo Dah Festival (honoring Stephen Fos-ter, who grew up in Lawrenceville); Joy of Cookies Tour; AnnualHouse Tour; Annual Artist Tour, etc.” As a result, Pittsburgh hasmoved from a laggard to a leader in locally oriented creativity and347 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

quality of place. Its architecture and urban design community has
become much more vocal about the need to preserve historic build-ings, invest in neighborhoods, and institute tough design standards.And it has developed exemplary initiatives for green building andthe conversion of old rail lines to bike trails.
On the economic development front, Pittsburgh has shifted its
attention from downtown to the universities and has embracedstart-ups, innovation, and creativity. It worked hard to attract andretain the Creative Class. It has generated high-tech companiesand has navigated the current economic crisis very well. Pittsburghranked as one of the top twenty strongest-performing metro regionsin spring 2009, at the peak of the economic crisis, according to theBrookings Institution’s Metro Monitor. A 2010 study by the Uni-versity of Pittsburgh’s University Center for Social and Urban Re-search, comparing the educational attainment of workers agetwenty-four to thirty-four in the country’s top forty metropolitanareas, found that nearly one-half (48.1 percent) of Pittsburgh res-idents in that cohort had obtained at least a bachelor’s degree.
59
This puts Pittsburgh in ﬁfth place, after Boston, San Francisco,Washington, DC, and Austin.
Many pundits have begun to single out Pittsburgh as an example
of successful transformation from an older industrial to a moreknowledge-based economy. Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, a Pitts-
burgh native, has taken to invoking Pittsburgh as a model for re-vitalizing older industrial cities and even for urban policy in theage of Obama. “Before jetting oﬀ to the Middle East and Europe,”Fineman wrote in spring 2009, “President Obama took care ofanother piece of international diplomatic business: He announcedthe city in which the United States will host the next G20 summitin September. His choice drew laughter and puzzlement from re-porters and diplomats alike. Pittsburgh? Are you serious? As aproud native,” Fineman continued, “I understand and agree with348 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

the president’s decision. Pittsburgh’s story is inspiring and im-
pressive. It was a rusting steel-making behemoth that, throughstruggle, pain and creativity, retooled itself as a surprisingly vibrant,21st-century leader in education, computer science, medical re-search, sports entertainment and boutique manufacturing. Bymost measures—unemployment and foreclosure rates, to nametwo—Pittsburgh is an island of calm in the raging recession.”
60
But Pittsburgh’s transformation, though successful, is not yet
complete. As of 2010, Pittsburgh’s population was just 305,704, lessthan one-half its 1950 level of 676,806 people. And the region re-mained one of the least diverse in the country, with a populationthat is 87 percent white, the third-whitest of America’s 100 largestmetro areas, according to a Brookings Institution study.
61
Regional economic transformation takes a long time. Greater
Boston’s revitalization, which began in the 1940s and 1950s, didn’tturn the corner until the 1980s or 1990s, and it is still ongoing.Viewed in this light, Pittsburgh’s transition is midstream. As JohnCraig, the former editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote in the
Washington Post, “When I think about the lessons that the Steel
City’s 30-year economic transformation may hold for Detroit, an-other town built on an industry beaten by competition and con-fronting bankruptcy, I have to say that the ﬁrst and hardest lessonfor the Motor City is this: Fundamental change will be much longerin coming than you can imagine.”
A headline in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette on January 15, 2012,
proclaimed how far the city had come. “Watch Out Portland—Pittsburgh’s Lookin’ Hip.” Its subtitle added the necessary coda:“Is It Really Possible We are Actually, Authentically Cool?”
62The
jury is still not in, but things in Pittsburgh are going in a muchbetter direction than they were a decade ago.349 BUILDING THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY

PART FIVE
CONTRADICTIONS

353CHAPTER 16
The Geography
of Inequality
One evening in 2002, I found myself in a Zen-style garden
in one of Northern California’s most upscale neighborhoods.
Enclosed by high walls, with ﬂowering plants and small
sculptures artfully placed amid beds of raked sand, the garden ad-joined the home of a Palo Alto venture capitalist. The audience
facing me could have served as a group portrait for the CreativeClass. There were engineers and entrepreneurs, artists and musi-cians, businesspeople and venture capitalists. Many were tastefullyclad in black or neo-hippie garb. Everyone looked permanentlyyoung in that ineﬀably California way. They asked challenging andprovocative questions, most of them having little to do with theirown status in life. Mostly, they wanted to know what the CreativeAge had in store for people like the ones who tended the gardenwe were sitting in and who had prepared the ﬁnger foods we wereenjoying—and who were being left further and further behind bythe onslaught of technology-based growth and rising housing prices.
I’d had a ﬁrsthand look at those left behind myself, just a few
hours before, when my cab driver had taken a wrong turn and wefound ourselves in East Palo Alto. The streets were lined with shabby

storefronts with signs for check-cashing services and cerveza fria,
and instead of people who looked forever young, I saw teenagers
who looked too old too soon. East Palo Alto was a poster child forrising inequality. Granted, it’s hardly the poorest place on earth.Most of its adult residents have jobs—indeed, some have more thanone. Many are immigrants, and they come from places where livingconditions and life prospects are much worse. But their poverty isdeepening and their numbers are vast—in East Palo Alto, in neigh-borhoods up and down the Silicon Valley, and all over the countryand the world.
I had intended to include a chapter on inequality in the original
edition of this book, but my editor at the time informed me thatthe book had already run to a quite substantial length. The originaledition did touch on some aspects of it. I cited a February 2000story in the New York Times, reporting the housing aﬀordability
crisis faced by Working and Service Class people in Silicon Valley.
1
I cited another report that found that roughly one-third of the es-timated 20,000 homeless people in Santa Clara County (the heartof Silicon Valley) had full-time jobs. And I noted that at the veryheight of the technology boom in the late 1990s, the Valley’s No.22 bus had become known as “the rolling hotel” because a growingnumber of workers had nowhere else to sleep.
2I cited Rebecca
Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg’s 2001 book, The Hollow City,
which argued that rising rents were undermining San Francisco’sunique advantage as a creative center by driving out artists, musi-cians, small shopkeepers, and people with children. “When the neweconomy arrived in San Francisco,” they wrote, “it began to laywaste to the city’s existing culture.”
3
I did take up the issue of inequality in my 2004 follow-up, The
Flight of the Creative Class. There, I cited a Brookings Institution
study that traced inequality in US cities (as opposed to metros) be-tween 1979 and 1999.
4Only thirteen cities had a balanced class354 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

structure, it found. Eight cities, including San Jose and Raleigh, had
class structures strongly tilted to the high-end groups, and sevenadditional cities, including Washington, DC, and San Francisco,had divided class structures, characterized by an extreme U-shapeddistribution of wealth between the rich and poor. Forty-three citieshad become repositories for predominantly low-income households.
That book also introduced a new metric of wage inequality across
metros developed by my colleague Kevin Stolarick, which comparedthe wages of Creative Class members to those in the other classes.What he found was disconcerting. Metros that ranked highest onthe Creativity Index also tended to have the highest levels of in-equality. San Jose was the most unequal metro in the nation, NewYork was second, and greater Washington, DC, Raleigh-Durham,Austin, and San Francisco all ranked among the most unequal met-ros in the country.
In a 2006 essay in The Atlantic, I showed that America’s economic
and social fabric was being reshaped by a realignment that is assigniﬁcant as the historical migrations of pioneers westward, ofAfrican Americans from the rural South to the urban North, and
of postwar families from cities to suburbs to exurbs. I called it the“means migration”—the mass relocation of highly skilled, highlyeducated, and highly paid Americans to a relatively small numberof metropolitan regions and a corresponding exodus of the tradi-tional lower and middle classes from these same places.
5
I noted that the geographic sorting of people by their economic
potential on this large a scale is simply unprecedented. I quotedWharton School economist Joseph Gyourko, who told me that this“spatial sorting will aﬀect the nature of America as much as therural-urban migration of the late nineteenth century did.” I citeda 2005 study that documented the growing divergence in humancapital among US metros over the past four decades.
6In 1970, most
metros had similar levels of college graduates. Eleven percent of355 THE GEOGRAPHY OF INEQUALITY

American adults had a college degree at the time, and the ﬁgure
was between 9 and 13 percent in fully half of metros. By 2000, therewere metros with more than 40 percent college graduates and otherswith less than 10 percent. By 2010, three metros had more than 50percent college grads, and nineteen had more than 40 percent. InFlight of the Creative Class, I cited the research of Robert Cushing,who used tax-return data from the IRS to chart the means migra-tion. He found that households moving from Austin to Kansas Cityin the 1990s earned an average of $25,912 a year, for example. Thosegoing in the other direction, from Kansas City to Austin, earnedover $65,000. The same basic pattern was occurring in other creativecenters, from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Boston and Seattle.
Inequality moved from the margins to the very front and center
of American life in 2011. The rise of the Occupy Movement shonea powerful light on the humongous gap between the top 1 percentand remaining 99 percent. “The upper 1 percent of Americans arenow taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year,”is how the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz summedup the situation. “In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1percent control 40 percent,” he said, adding that “twenty-ﬁve yearsago, the corresponding ﬁgures were 12 percent and 33 percent.”And then he cautioned: “One response might be to celebrate theingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, andto contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would bemisguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actuallyseen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, thedecline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-centuryalone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone tothose at the top.”
7
In his speech on the economy in Osawatomie, Kansas, on Decem-
ber 6, 2011—where Theodore Roosevelt delivered his New Nation-356 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

357 THE GEOGRAPHY OF INEQUALITY
alism speech in 1910—Barack Obama framed the issue in moral and
pragmatic terms: “In the last few decades, the average income of thetop one percent has gone up by more than 250 percent, to $1.2 millionper year,” he said. “For the top one-hundredth of one percent, theaverage income is now $27 million per year.” Then he added: “Andyet, over the last decade, the incomes of most Americans have actuallyfallen by about 6 percent. This kind of inequality—a level we haven’tseen since the Great Depression—hurts us all.”
8
Although much popular attention and conversation has focused
on the avarice and privileges of the top 1 percent, most economistsargue that rising inequality has been driven by broader structural
Figure 16.1 The Metro Wage Inequality Map, 2010
Wage In equa lity Index
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Analysis by
Kevin Stolarick. Map by Zara Matheson.

358 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Table 16.1 Most Unequal Metros by Wage Inequality, 2010
Wage
Inequality
Rank Metro Index
1 Hunstville, AL .500
2 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA .481
3 College Station-Bryan, TX .473
4 Boulder, CO .446
5 Durham, NC .446
6 Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT .432
7 Las Cruces, NM .428
8 Decatur, IL .426
9 Austin-Round Rock, TX .418
10 Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA .417
11 New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, .413
NY-NJ-PA
12 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA .409
13 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA .409
14 Raleigh-Cary, NC .408
15 Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, .407
DC-VA-MD-WV
16 Columbus, IN .406
17 Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX .406
18 Rochester, MN .404
19 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA .401
20 Fort Collins-Loveland, CO .399
Source: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment
Statistics (OES) Survey, 2010. Available online at http://www.bls.gov/oes/. Compiled
by Kevin Stolarick. changes in the economy. The combination of globalization and the
shift of manufacturing to lower-wage counties like China, dubbedthe world’s factory, new technologies of robotics and automation,and increases in productivity and eﬃciency have eliminated millionsof formerly low-skill but high-paying jobs. As the middle has dis-appeared, the job market has literally been split in two. On one sideare higher-paying, professional, knowledge and creative jobs thatrequire considerable education and skill. On the other are an evenlarger and faster-growing number of more routine jobs in ﬁeldslike personal care, retail sales, and food service that pay much lower

359 THE GEOGRAPHY OF INEQUALITY
wages. This process, one of “skill-biased technical change,” according
to MIT economist David Autor, has shaped the huge rise in wageinequality, which in turn underpins a broader set of social, cultural,geographic, income, and other inequalities.
Whereas most studies of inequality have focused exclusively on
its manifestations on a national or international scale, much can belearned by examining its appearance across US metros. Figure 16.1updates the Metro Wage Inequality Index for 2010, and Table 16.1lists the top twenty most unequal metros on this metric.
9The pat-
tern remains basically the same as it was in 2004. The list of unequalmetros reads like a who’s who of Creative Class centers. Silicon
Valley is now second, and Huntsville is on top. Boulder is fourth,Durham ﬁfth, Austin ninth, New York eleventh, and Los Angelesis tied with San Diego for twelfth. Raleigh is fourteenth, greaterWashington DC is ﬁfteenth, and San Francisco is nineteenth.Figure 16.2 The Metro Income Inequality Map, 2010
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2008–2010. Analysis by
Charlotta Mellander. Map by Zara Matheson.

360 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Even though the wage gap is greater in more highly skilled,
knowledge-based metros, those at the bottom of the wage scale also
do better. A metro’s average wage overall is higher in more highly
skilled Creative Class metros—the correlation between the two is oﬀthe chart. Housing prices tend to be higher in Creative Class metros,however, which migrates this eﬀect for service and working classworkers to some degree. Still, there is no getting around the fact thatwages across the board are higher in Creative Class locations.
10Table 16.2 Most Unequal Metros by Income Inequality, 2010
Income Inequality
Rank Metro Index
1 Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT .539
2 Naples-Marco Island, FL .522
3 College Station-Bryan, TX .515
4 Athens-Clarke County, GA .514
5 Gainesville, FL .508
6 New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA .503
7 Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL .498
8 McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, TX .497
9 Brownsville-Harlingen, TX .496
9 Sebastian-Vero Beach, FL .496
11 Morgantown, WV .494
12 Monroe, LA .489
13 Corvallis, OR .487
14 Tallahassee, FL .486
15 Auburn-Opelika, AL .485
15 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA .485
15 Midland, TX .485
18 Bloomington, IN .484
18 Santa Fe, NM .484
18 Shreveport-Bossier City, LA .484
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2008–2010. Analysis by
Charlotta Mellander.

361 THE GEOGRAPHY OF INEQUALITY
But when we turn to a second measure of inequality, the picture
changes substantially. Whereas wage inequality considers the dif-
ferences between salaries only, income inequality as measured bythe Gini coeﬃcient takes rents, royalties, as well as dividends intoaccount. Figure 16.2 maps the Income Inequality Index acrossAmerican metro areas, and Table 16.2 lists the twenty most unequalmetros based on income inequality across the country.
It is striking how diﬀerent the two maps are. Bridgeport-Stamford,
Connecticut, has the highest level of overall income inequality inthe nation—no surprise to anyone who has made the short drivefrom leafy Westport to gritty, downtown Bridgeport. Greater NewFigure 16.3 Comparing Metros on Wage and Income Inequality
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2010, and US Department
of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) Sur-
vey, 2010. Analysis by Charlotta Mellander. Design by Michelle Hopgood.

362 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
York is sixth, and Miami, seventh. But those three are the only met-
ros with more than 1 million people to make the list. The majorityof metros on this list are much smaller, for example, second, ﬁfth,and ninth place Naples, Gainesville, and Vero Beach, Florida, andthird place College Station, Texas. College Station and Gainesvilleare far from the only college towns represented—Athens, Georgia;Morgantown, West Virginia; Corvallis, Oregon; Auburn, Alabama;and Monroe, Louisiana, score relatively high, along with some in-dustrial metros like Brownsville, Texas. High-tech, knowledge-basedmetros are conspicuously absent from this list.
The differences between the two inequality measures, two maps,
and two lists could not be more striking. Figure 16.3 shows this,comparing the way metros fall out on these two inequality metrics.It arrays into four basic quadrants. Metros in the upper right-handcorner—College Station, Bridgeport, New York City, Gainesville,and Boulder—face the double whammy of high income and highwage inequality. Metros in the lower right—Oxnard, California,and Columbus, Indiana, for example—have relatively high levelsof wage inequality alongside relatively lower levels of income in-equality. Metros in the upper left—for example, Tusca loosa, Ala-bama, and Naples, Florida—have high income inequality alongsiderelatively lower levels of wage inequality. Lastly, metros in the lowerleft—for example, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Ogden and St.George, Utah—have relatively low levels of both.
Our statistical analysis uncovers only a modest association be-
tween these two measures of inequality. When Mellander ran asimple regression analysis she found that wage inequality accountsfor 15 percent of the variation in income equality across regions.What accounts for the other 85 percent?
A number of studies have looked beyond the increasingly diver-
gent returns to high- and low-skill jobs brought on by technologyand globalization. A couple of decades ago, Bennett Harrison and

363 THE GEOGRAPHY OF INEQUALITY
Barry Bluestone pointed to the declining rate of unionization.
Unionization was a key factor in the postwar social compact thatelevated the wages of manufacturing workers and others. In theirbook The Great U-Turn, they argued that attacks on unions by cor-
porations and the right had led to a weakening of this core insti-tutional support for wages, driving them downward.
11
It might not be so much the growing divide between high- and
low-skill jobs that drives inequality, but the endemic poverty ofthe people that William Julius Wilson identiﬁes in The Truly Dis-
advantaged, who don’t have jobs at all or who scrape by in the un-
derground economy.
12
Geography also seems to be at play. As we have seen, Christopher
Berry and Edward Glaeser noted the divergence of human capitallevels across cities in 2005, and I wrote about the “means migration”in The Atlantic. In his book The Big Sort, Bill Bishop showed how
America is becoming increasingly sorted and divided by skill, eco-nomic position, and political diﬀerences.
13
The size and density of cities has also been shown to be a factor in
inequality. Large cities and metros have distinct advantages whenit comes to attracting high-skill people, high-tech jobs, and othereconomic assets in more global knowledge-based economies. Animportant study by Nathaniel Baum-Snow of Brown University andthe National Bureau of Economic Research and Ronni Pavan of theUniversity of Rochester ﬁnds a close connection between city sizeand inequality.
14City size alone accounted for roughly 25 to 35 per-
cent of the total increase in economic inequality over the past threedecades, after taking into account the role of skills, human capital,industry composition, and other factors.
With help from Charlotta Mellander, I looked at the associa-
tions between wage inequality and income inequality, as well asthe factors that bear on each of them from skills and human cap-ital to unionization, poverty, and race as well as metro size and

364 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
density. Our findings are striking along a number of fronts. Wage
and income inequality, we found, are completely diﬀerent beasts.15
Wage inequality is closely associated with the shift to more high-
tech, human capital, knowledge-based economies—as one wouldexpect it to be. It is closely associated with the percent of adultswho are college grads and even more so with the Creative Class.Wage inequality is also closely associated with both of the key skillsets associated with Creative Class work—analytical skill and socialskill. It is even more closely associated with the concentration ofhigh-tech industry.
16Wage inequality, not surprisingly, also follows
the aﬄuence of metros, being closely associated with region in-comes, wages, and output per person. Wage inequality is signiﬁ-cantly associated with the density and even more so with the sizeof metros. Although many believe large disparities in housing costsacross cities and metros are part of the problem, wage inequalityis only modestly related to housing costs as a share of income.
17
But when we turn to income inequality, the story is diﬀerent.
Surprisingly income inequality bears little if any relation to thewealth of regions. There is no correlation whatsoever between in-come inequality and average incomes and wages, and only a weakrelationship to economic output per capita. In striking contrast towage inequality, income inequality is not driven so much by risingaverage levels of wealth and aﬄuence.
The broader shift to an innovative, skill-driven, human-capital-
powered economy plays a much smaller role than expected in incomeinequality as well. The correlation between human capital and in-come inequality is less than half of that between human capital andwage inequality. There is even less of a correlation to the CreativeClass. Income inequality is only modestly related to social skill andnot at all to analytical skill, the two skill types that are associatedwith Creative Class work and that are most advantaged by the pro-cess of skill-biased technical change.
18

The size and density of cities and metros also has little if any re-
lation to income inequality. Income inequality is only modestly
related to the size of a metro and has no correlation whatsoever todensity. And income inequality has no relation at all to the shareof income devoted to housing costs.
So which among the factors we analyzed appear to play the biggest
role in income inequality? Unions, race, and poverty. Let’s takethem one at a time. Unions mitigate income inequality, accordingto our analysis. Overall income inequality is lower where unionsare stronger.
19
Tellingly—and ominously, for its implications about the state
of the nation—income inequality is linked considerably to bothpoverty and race. Income inequality is signiﬁcantly associated withthe share of the population that is black,
20and poverty plays an
even larger role.21When Mellander ran a regression for income
inequality, poverty and race remained signiﬁcant factors alongsidewage inequality.
What it boils down to is this: although the broad structural
transformation of our economy splits the labor market and in-creases the wage gap between the major classes, it has only a mod-est effect on income inequality broadly. In fact, the least-skilledand lowest-paid workers—the members of the Working and ServiceClasses—are actually economically better oﬀ in more aﬄuent andknowledge-based regions with higher concentrations of the CreativeClass, even if the wage gap is wider. To really understand the prob-lem of income inequality, it is necessary to look at the bottom ofthe socioeconomic order rather than just the top, where we areconfronted with the tragedy of endemic poverty. 365 THE GEOGRAPHY OF INEQUALITY

CHAPTER 17
The Inclining
Signiﬁcance of Class
The late New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp
once wrote that “just by daring to use the word class,” I had
“changed the framework for discussing social and economic
inequality.”1In the cold war environment of the 1950s and 1960s,
class had become something of a dirty word in America. In 1959,the sociologist Robert Nisbet declared that “the term social class. . . is nearly valueless for the clariﬁcation of data on wealth, powerand status.”
2Daniel Bell proclaimed not just the end of class but
of ideology.3A 2001 book was titled simply The Classless Society.4
Sociologists supplanted the older construct of class with a new, em-pirically grounded construct of “socioeconomic status,” based oneducation, income, and other factors, and referred to by the short-hand SES. A wide range of categories—“lower,” “middle,” and“upper,” and many combinations thereof—was formulated to cap-ture and parse people’s position in the social order. Class came tobe viewed less in terms of the kind of work we do and more in termsof what we buy or how we identify ourselves.
But whether we sweep it under the rug or not, class remains a
major force in our economy and society. As this book has shown,
366

367 THE INCLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASS
the members of the three major classes today, the Creative Class,
the Working Class, and the Service Class, each have very diﬀerentconnections to the economy. They live diﬀerent kinds of lives, andthey pursue them in very diﬀerent kinds of places. The more I lookat the reality of today’s society, the more I’m reminded of the ItalianMarxist thinker Antonio Gramsci’s famous aperçu, “Hegemonyhere is born in the factory.”
5Gramsci, like Marx before him, reminds
us of an essential point: the reality of everyday life is structured toa large degree by the very mode of how we work. And as this chapterwill show, class structures everything, from where we live and howmuch we pay for housing to our very health and happiness.
One clear line of class demarcation is politics. Political commen-
tators have long pointed to the underlying social and economicsorting that underpins America’s growing Red-Blue divide. In hisinﬂuential book Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, Andrew
Gelman of Columbia University helps unpack this phenomenon:whereas rich voters trend Republican, rich states trend Democratic.
6
Based on large-scale surveys, the Gallup Organization tracks the
numbers of Americans who identify themselves as “conservatives,”“moderates,” and “liberals” across the ﬁfty states.
7Conservatism is
clearly growing across America. In February 2011, Mississippi be-came the ﬁrst state in which more than half of all residents identiﬁedas conservative, with Idaho, Alabama, Wyoming, and Utah ap-proaching that level. In Arkansas, South Carolina, North Dakota,Louisiana, and South Dakota (the rest of Gallup’s top-ten conser-vative states), conservative identiﬁcation was 45 percent or higher.The Gallup data found conservatives outnumbering liberals in eventhe most liberal-leaning states (excluding the District of Columbia):Vermont (30.7 percent conservative to 30.5 percent liberal), RhodeIsland (29.9 conservative to 29.3 percent liberal), and Massachusetts(29.9 to 28.0 percent).
When Charlotta Mellander and I used the Gallup data to examine
the factors that shape these state-by-state patterns, we found class

368 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
to be a key driver of the rising conservatism. Conservative political
aﬃliation was strongly and positively correlated with the WorkingClass and religion (measured as the share of state population forwhich religion is an important part of daily life) and negatively as-sociated with Creative Class and college grads. Conservative stateswere also far less tolerant and diverse. Conservative political aﬃl-iation was highly negatively correlated with the percent of the pop-ulation composed of immigrants or gays and lesbians. Conservatismwas most pronounced in America’s least well-oﬀ, least educated,most blue-collar, most economically hard-hit states. More andmore, it had become the default ideology of the economically leftbehind.
Class also registers itself powerfully in the politics of our cities.
In the original edition of this book, I noted that as our cities werebecoming increasingly sorted and divided, place itself was comingto supplant the factory and workplace as the fundamental site ofclass conﬂict. This process has only accelerated over the past de-cade. Serious political tensions were already erupting over gentri-ﬁcation in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and I cited some of them.
8
In summer 2000, for example, a powerful anti-high-tech develop-ment coalition emerged in San Francisco’s SoMa and Mission Dis-tricts and quickly spread. A coalition of artists, club owners, andneighborhood residents held more than three dozen rallies andprotests—including one outside City Hall, in which a group ofdemonstrators smashed a computer with a baseball bat. In a pro-tracted battle that ultimately came to be known as the SoMa Wars,the coalition collected more than 30,000 signatures across the cityto place Proposition L on the ballot—a measure to ban high-techdevelopment and other forms of gentriﬁcation from SoMa, theMission, and other largely residential neighborhoods. The measurewas defeated by less than 1 percent of the vote.
9Back in 2002, I
noted the prospect of a new set of “place wars” that were likely toemerge in other creative centers.

369 THE INCLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASS
But I could not anticipate the riots that broke out in London dur-
ing the summer of 2011. Commentators on the right mostly put
the blame on hooliganism, whereas those on the left cited frustra-tions with the United Kingdom’s faltering economy and newly im-posed ﬁscal austerities. But it seemed to me that more than youth,ethnicity, or even race, the riots were about class and the growingdivide among classes.
Globalization has made the world smaller and brought its
economies and peoples closer together. But instead of reducingand ﬂattening economic and class distinctions, it has made themsharper, bringing them into ever-clearer relief. We make a big mis-take when we look out across the peaks of privilege from our aeriesin London or New York or Los Angeles to Tokyo, Shanghai, Sin-gapore, and Mumbai and tell ourselves that the playing ﬁeld is level.The deﬁning feature of our world is that it is spiky—and it is gettingspikier and more divided all the time. Those worsening class divi-sions are ferociously at work in microcosm within our cities.
What happened in London is a tale of two immigrations, which
themselves cut across class lines. On the one hand, the great globalmetropolises are magnets for the international super-rich on thelookout for tax shelters and shopping opportunities. On the otherhand, they attract less-skilled immigrants, hungry for better lives. Inbetween are the local populations, left behind by fast-moving eco-nomic change. London certainly has its rich and poor districts. Butin contrast to the physical divides and segregation that you see inmost American cities, London’s rich and poor often live right on topof each other in rapidly gentrifying enclaves. Rising housing costs,the concentration of wealth, and divergent life prospects are therefor all to see. As the multinational global super-rich skate by, virtuallyunscathed by the economic crisis, the young and the less-skilled im-migrants are out of work for longer and longer periods, their lifeprospects fading as the economy worsens and budget cuts take hold.London’s riots were a global conﬂict, played out on a local scale.

370 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
The riots were also a reaction to the unvarnished corporate re-
making of London. Like so many other global cities, the vast ma-
jority of London’s political energy seems to be directed toward theneeds and interests of an elite sliver of its population. The trans-formation of London into an “Olympic City” involves not just theredevelopment of stadium and venue sites but the physical reloca-tion of groups and populations. With the social compact erodingand a lack of viable mass political institutions to channel the mount-ing resentment, what comes out is not a coherent voice or move-ment, but inchoate rage.
And then there’s this: our greatest cities are not bland monocul-
tures; some of the very features that make them so dynamic alsocontribute to their instability. Eric Hobsbawm long ago noted thatdensity and the closeness of the poor to centers of political inﬂuenceand power made old cities centers of insurrection. Scattered inci-dents of ﬂash-mob violence in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and otherUS cities are almost certainly harbingers of worse things to come;the London riots should serve as a wake-up call to our great globalcities and the people who run them. Our urban centers have be-come increasingly divided and unstable. Left to its own devices,the unbridled operation of the free market will only make thosedivides worse. Simply upping the police presence is a recipe foreven greater disaster.
What’s needed is the recognition that along with the great eco-
nomic rewards of globalization comes substantial responsibilities.The long-term prosperity of London and other great global citiesrequires more than new condominiums, sports complexes, andcultural districts. Real opportunities must be provided for all resi-dents, so that the rewards and promises of the creative city can beshared more equally.
In 2010, Toronto elected a new mayor, not just a conservative or
a Tea Partier, but perhaps the most anti-urban mayor ever electedin a major North American city. Rob Ford rode to oﬃce with the

371 THE INCLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASS
support of lower-middle-class, working-class, and new-immigrant
voters who resented the urban rich, downtown yuppies and hipsters,
and unionized public-sector workers. Styling himself as a man of thepeople, Ford vowed to cut spending and go after the government-sponsored “gravy train.” Upon assuming oﬃce, he declined to attendthe city’s famed gay pride festival. Adding injury to insult, his brotherDoug, his close adviser, slighted Toronto’s leading literary lightMargaret Atwood, who gave them the handle “twinfordmayor(s).”Their plan to turn Toronto’s waterfront into a mega-mall complete
with a monorail, Ferris wheel, and boat-in hotel sparked a publicfury (of which I was a part) and was quickly shelved.
All of this shocked and challenged me because I had long seen
Toronto as a bastion of progressive urbanism, notable for its com-mitment to justice and fairness for all of its residents. But when myMartin Prosperity Institute research team prepared a map thatoverlaid Toronto voting patterns with the locations of its CreativeClass, Working Class, and Service Class jobs, it all became clear. Icould see that Toronto is completely divided. The Creative Classis densely concentrated in a T-shaped pattern in and around thedowntown core and closely clustered along its east-west and north-south subway routes. This is where Ford’s liberal and left-leaningchallengers are located. The Service and Working Classes are pushedoﬀ to the periphery in more outlying areas. Only a handful of dis-tricts where Working Class jobs predominate are left in the city,and one of them is the mayor’s. In the United States, the politicaldivide is also a jurisdictional divide, pitting city against suburb. Butin Toronto, it was all happening within the city itself.
If the world is taking on a Hobbesian cast, it’s because globaliza-
tion, poverty, and aﬄuence have given rise to a new sorting processthat geographically separates economic and social classes, bothdomestically and globally. Social cohesion is eroding within citiesand countries as well as across them. It’s little wonder we ﬁnd our-selves living in an increasingly fractured society, in which growing

372 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
numbers are ready to vote—or tear—down what they perceive to
be the economic elite of our cities and the world.
Class, Health, and Happiness
The original edition of this book focused on conventional gaugesof economic development like innovation, income, and employ-ment. Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars havesuggested that we need broader, less materialistic measures of socialand economic well-being. There is growing interest in the ﬁeld ofhappiness. Early studies found that happiness was not simply afunction of rising incomes at the national level. The famous East-erlin Paradox
10described the fact that while rich people are much
happier than poor people, rich societies are only a little happierthan poor societies, and countries as a whole don’t get happier whenthey get richer. Other studies, notably research by economists JustinWolfers and Betsy Stevenson, ﬁnd a continuing connection betweenincome and happiness.
A great deal of my recent research has focused on the connection
between class and happiness. It finds that class plays a fundamentalrole in happiness—over and above that of income. Income mat-ters, of course, but only up to a point. Once a basic threshold ofincome is met, then class kicks in. Nations with higher levels ofthe Creative Class post higher levels of happiness and subjectivewell-being. Where the Working Class is larger, happiness levelsare lower.
But what about cities and metro areas? In a 2011 study, “The
Happiness of Cities,” Charlotta Mellander, Jason Rentfrow, and Iprobed the factors that shape metro happiness with statistical mod-els that controlled for the effects of income, home ownership,
commuting times, age, unemployment, human capital, and other

373 THE INCLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASS
factors. According to our analysis of data from the Gallup’s City
Well-Being tracking poll,11we found that human capital played by
far the most signiﬁcant role in the happiness of metros, outper-forming income and every other variable.
12Happiness was strongly
positively associated with the Creative Class share as well as withincome. Boulder, Colorado, for instance, ranked ﬁrst on happinessas well as the Creative Class. Happiness was also negatively asso-ciated with the Working Class. Interestingly enough, it was alsonegatively associated with warmer temperatures, belying the notionthat people are happier in places with warmer, sunnier climes.
13
From the TV series The Biggest Loser to Oprah’s documented
struggles with her weight, ﬁtness is a signal obsession of Americanpopular culture. We suﬀer from no dearth of health, ﬁtness, andnutritional experts; celebrities, politicians, and even ﬁrst ladies ex-hort us to eat better and exercise more. But we need to face up tothe fact that healthy or unhealthy lifestyles are not simply the resultof good or bad individual decisions. They are inextricably tied upwith the nature and structure of our society. America’s increasinglyuneven geography of ﬁtness is yet another symptom of its funda-mental economic and class divide.
Smoking and obesity are two of the most signiﬁcant—if not the
most signiﬁcant—health problems we confront. Although smokinghas been trending downward, more than 46 million Americans,about one in ﬁve adults, still smoke. Obesity has reached epidemicproportions: 17 percent of American children (12.5 million) and33.3 percent of American adults (72 million) now meet the Centersfor Disease Control’s criteria for obesity—percentages that havedoubled since 1980. Both smoking and obesity are associated withcancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Smoking takes an average often years oﬀ Americans’ average life spans, and obesity reduces lifespans by between ﬁve and twenty years, depending on age andrace. Each year, about 443,000 Americans die from smoking-related

374 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
diseases; some 300,000 premature deaths are attributed to obesity.
The Centers for Disease Control estimates that smoking and obesitycombined generate annual health costs of more than $300 billion.
We used data from the Centers for Disease Control to build a
Metro Health Index based on smoking and obesity rates across USmetros.
14We measured smoking as the percentage of people who
smoke every day, and obesity as the percent of the population witha Body Mass Index of thirty or more (see Table 17.1). San Jose andSanta Cruz are the most healthy metros, and Boulder comes inthird. The least healthy metros are St. Joseph, Missouri, and Decaturand Gadsen, Alabama. Not surprisingly, smoking and obesity them-selves are closely correlated with one another.
15In a more detailed
statistical study I conducted with Mellander, we found that smokingis lower in metros with a higher share of the Creative Class andhigher levels of human capital, and obesity levels are higher in metroswith higher Working Class concentrations.
16
Using data from a comprehensive measure of metro ﬁtness—the
American Fitness Index—Mellander and I tracked the relations be-tween class and other factors on ﬁtness.
17Metro ﬁtness was strongly
positively associated with the Creative Class and negatively associ-ated with the Working Class. This is a little counterintuitive, perhaps,because Working Class people put more physical eﬀort into theirjobs, but as discussed in these pages, sedentary professionals aremuch more likely to pursue vigorous exercise in their leisure time.Fitter metros had higher levels of college graduates, more high-techindustry, and higher levels of innovation—all characteristics of Cre-ative Class locations. They were also more aﬄuent. Although manypeople presume ﬁtness goes along with warmer locations, we foundjust the opposite. Each of the top ﬁve ﬁtness metros is pretty chilly,and the top-ranked Twin Cities are among the coldest locations inthe United States—certainly compared to warm and sunny LA,which languishes in forty-ﬁrst place. Fitness was strongly related tohappiness as well.
18

375 THE INCLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASS
When rates of smoking and obesity are used as a proxy for
health and wellness, they reflect more than a medical problem—
they are a socioeconomic problem as well. The geography of healthin America varies considerably and consistently with income, ed-ucation, class, and race. Tragically, the very Americans who are pay-ing the greatest cost for these aﬄictions—in health-care expenses,Table 17.1 America’s Healthiest and Unhealthiest Metros, 2010
Healthy Creative
Ten Healthiest Metros Metros Class
Index Share
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA .982 46.9%
Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA .982 32.1%Boulder, CO .980 44.4%Napa, CA .968 27.4%Bend, OR .966 28.6%San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA .965 39.4%Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT .948 39.5%San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles, CA .946 30.1%Corvallis, OR .943 41.7%Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA .943 34.1%
Healthy Creative
Ten Unhealthiest Metros Metros Class
Index Share
Gadsden, AL .040 25.1%
Decatur, AL .046 23.3%
St. Joseph, MO-KS .052 25.1%Gulfport-Biloxi, MS .052 27.8%Huntington-Ashland, WV-KY-OH .054 28.5%Pascagoula, MS .054 23.4%Muskegon-Norton Shores, MI .054 26.6%Anniston-Oxford, AL .058 23.3%Flint, MI .073 29.9%Goldsboro, NC .073 30.1%
Source: Smoking data are from the Centers for Disease Control, Behavioral Risk Factor
Surveillance System (BRFSS), 2002−2008. Obesity data are based on a Body Mass Index
(BMI) greater than 30 and are from the National Center for Chronic Disease Preventionand Health Promotion, 2006−2008. Compiled by Charlotta Mellander.

376 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
lost wages, and general suffering—are the ones who can afford it
the least. We can tell people to smoke less, eat better, and exercisemore, but the United States will not solve its health problems—or reduce its skyrocketing health-care costs—until it comes togrips with class. As America’s class divide worsens, so, too, doesits health outcomes.
Commuting and Class
Class is also evident in the way we get to work. Across the board,nearly nine in ten (86 percent) Americans commute to work by carand more than three-fourths (76.1 percent) drive to work by them-selves. Just 5 percent use public transit, fewer than 3 percent walk,and fewer than 1 percent ride their bikes to work. But these patternsvary widely across metros. It’s no surprise that eight in ten Man-hattan workers get to their places of employment via public transit,bicycle, or on foot. But more than four in ten (43 percent) of allcommuters in the greater New York metro don’t use cars, either.Neither do 25 to 30 percent of workers in San Francisco, Boston,and greater Washington, DC. Fewer than 3 percent (2.9) of Amer-icans walk to work, but more than 5 percent of New Yorkers do.And in the college town of Ithaca, New York, 14 percent do. Onlya little more than one-half of one percent (0.6) of Americans ridetheir bikes to work. But more than 5 percent do in Eugene, Oregon,and Fort Collins, Colorado. In the Portland, Oregon, metro, morethan 2 percent of commuters cycle to work, and in San Franciscoand San Jose, roughly 1.5 percent do. Walking and biking to workare especially prevalent in compact college towns with high per-centages of the Creative Class, including Boulder, Ann Arbor, Madi-son, Iowa City, Corvallis, Gainesville, Burlington, State College,Pennsylvania, and Lafayette, Indiana.

377 THE INCLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASS
I never expected the way we commute to be shaped by class, but
it is. Economist Todd Gabe ran a series of statistical analyses to
gauge the eﬀects of class as well as weather conditions, density, andother factors that one might think to be associated with how weget to work. You’d think that density would matter—transit is moreavailable and it’s easier for commuters to walk or bike to work incities and metros that have less sprawl. Weather and climate shouldalso play a role. Who wants to cycle or walk to work in wet, cold,and snowy places? It’s much easier and more pleasurable to useyour feet to get to work when the weather is nice. But “what you’dthink” isn’t always what is. Gabe found that class plays a much big-ger role than either density or weather and climate—in fact, classplays the biggest role of all. The correlation between the CreativeClass and biking to work is the highest of any in his analysis. Pop-ulation density increases public transportation usage but has noeffect on walking and biking. Weather and climate play a role,but not necessarily in the way that one might think. People aremore likely to drive to work in places where the weather is warm
or wet. Public transit use as well as walking and biking are morecommon in drier climates but also in places with colder Januarytemperatures. The longer the commute, the more likely people
are to use public transit, but—not surprisingly—the less likely theyare to bike or walk. Rapidly growing cities of sprawl (those whichbuilt the most houses during the height of the bubble) are muchmore car dependent than other places. We can see this when welook at another set of correlations, between the share of housingunits built between 2000 and 2006 and the percentage of people whobike, walk, or take public transit to work, which is negative.
19
America is becoming more and more divided and unequal—
by income, by the kind of work we do, by our levels of education, byour politics and culture, and perhaps most dangerously, by our veryhealth and happiness.

The Geography of Guns
Every once in a while a terrible shooting—like that of Congress-
woman Gabrielle Giﬀords and eighteen bystanders, six of them fa-tally, in January 2011—focuses national attention on the horriblecosts of gun violence. But gun violence is something that happensevery day. In 2007, 10.2 out of every 100,000 people were killed byﬁrearms across the United States. When Charlotta Mellander andI charted the statistical correlations between ﬁrearm deaths and avariety of psychological, economic, social, and political character-istics of states, one in particular stood out: ﬁrearm deaths were farless likely to occur in states with higher levels of the Creative Classand more college grads and far more likely to occur in WorkingClass states and those with higher levels of poverty.
Images of drug-crazed gunmen are commonplace in the media.
Guns, mental illness, and drug abuse are presumed to go together.But that’s not borne out in our analysis. We found no statisticalassociation between gun deaths and mental illness or stress levels,and none between gun violence and the proportion of neuroticpersonalities. We found no association between illegal drug useand death from gun violence at the state level. And for all the ter-rifying talk about violence-prone immigrants, states with moreimmigrants have lower levels of gun-related deaths. Some might
think gun violence would be higher in states with higher levels ofunemployment and higher levels of inequality. But, again, wefound no evidence of any such association with either of thesevariables.
20
Overlaying gun deaths with voting patterns from the 2008 pres-
idential election, we found a striking pattern: Firearms-relateddeaths were positively associated with states that voted for JohnMcCain and negatively associated with states that voted for Barack378 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

379 THE INCLINING SIGNIFICANCE OF CLASS
Obama. This might infuriate some, but the statistics are plain to
see. Partisan aﬃliation alone cannot explain the phenomenon; mostlikely it stems from two broader, underlying factors—the economicand employment makeup of the states and their policies towardguns and gun ownership.
The Great Dental Divide
There’s seemingly no end to the dimensions of America’s classdivide—religious versus secular, Starbucks versus Dunkin’ Donuts,NPR versus the NRA, NASCAR versus World Cup Soccer. But oneis particularly striking. Data released by the Gallup Organization
21
in September 2011, based on some 177,000 interviews, portrayedan additional axis of class cleavage, between those who regularlygo to the dentist and those who do not.
When Mellander and I looked at the data, we found a strikingly
familiar pattern. You would expect income to play a role in oralhealth, and it does. We found a close correlation between state in-come levels and how often their residents go to the dentist. But in-come is not the only factor. Frequency of dental oﬃce visits trackedclosely with class, being much higher in Creative Class states andthose with more college grads and much lower in Working Classstates, and even more so where inequality is highest. Oral healthalso reﬂects America’s political divide. Visits to the dentist werepositively associated with states that voted for Obama in 2008 andnegatively associated with McCain states.
Poor oral health is a big problem—one that is linked to heart
disease, stroke, atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and diabetes.
Our analysis found close associations between oral health andtwo key health factors, smoking and obesity. Visits to the dentistwere negatively associated with both smoking and obesity. And

not surprisingly, more frequent dental visits are associated with
higher levels of overall happiness and subjective well-being.22
Access to dental care stands as a remarkably stark divide in Amer-
ican life, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. More than four in tenAmericans pay their dental bills themselves, and the past decadeor so has seen a vicious “oral cost spiral,” as Slate’s June Thomas
puts it,
23with the costs of dental care far outpacing both the rate of
inﬂation and overall medical cost increases. With incomes falling,unemployment rising, and poverty increasing, dental care has be-come a luxury that fewer and fewer Americans can aﬀord—and thisdespite the high premium that we put on appearance. “We rarelythink about our teeth, but without them many of us would be up acreek socially and economically,” writes Ylajali Hansen at GenerationBubble blog. “For many Americans, a tooth can make the diﬀerencebetween security and destitution. That’s right: lose a tooth in theUnited States and you lose your chance to live the dream.”
24
Class remains a key feature of American life, shaping everything
from our politics to our health and happiness. Overcoming thesedivides requires nothing less than a new set of institutions and awholly new social compact that can leverage the full potential thenew Creative Economy holds out, while mitigating the substantialdivides and costs it imposes.380 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

CONCLUSION

383CHAPTER 18
Every Single
Human Being Is Creative
Ten years ago, I concluded this book with a challenge. It’s past
time, I said, that we members of the Creative Class recognize
that our economic function makes us the natural—indeed,
the only possible—leaders of twenty-ﬁrst century society. But beingnewly emergent, we don’t yet have the awareness of ourselves as aclass that we need. We’re even a little squeamish about identifyingourselves as such, as though to do so were to undercut our egali-tarian values.
Then I threw down the gauntlet: it’s time for the Creative Class
to grow up, I declared. We must evolve from an amorphous groupof self-directed, albeit high-achieving individuals into a more co-hesive, more responsible collective. We must recognize that despiteour diﬀerences, we share vital interests and concerns.
I imagined at the time that the dot-com crash and the events of
9/11 might turn out to be our generation’s deﬁning experience—what World War II was to the Greatest Generation, or Vietnamand the Civil Rights Movement was for many boomers. Little didI know about the even bigger temblor that was yet to come—thedeep crisis that emanated from the bursting of the real estate and

credit bubbles in 2008, events that we now recognize as the terminal
spasms of a whole economic order.
But if I could not predict the violence of the crisis, I wasn’t taken
by surprise. The tectonic shift we are witnessing is the result notjust of ﬁnancial shenanigans but of a deeper and more fundamentalshift—the passing of the old industrial order as it gives way to theemerging Creative Economy. If we wish to build a new prosperity,we cannot rely on market forces and the Invisible Hand to guide us.Left alone, as it has been, the new economic and social order—likethe rise of other new social and economic systems before it—hasgenerated and will continue to generate greater and greater in-equalities; the social and economic divides within, across, and be-tween cities and nations will only grow worse. The grand challengeof our time is to build new institutional structures that can guideits emergence and channel its energies in ways that beneﬁt societyand its people broadly.
Inequality has reached levels not seen in the United States since the
Gilded Age. While much attention has been paid to the abuses takingplace at the very top, its persistence today is as much a factor of stag-nation at the bottom of the economic ladder—of endemic and per-sistent poverty. Although all developed nations face some level ofinequality, the United States is a statistical outlier when it comes toits depth and severity. Creativity and inequality, innovation and im-miseration don’t have to go together.
New institutions are needed to harness such powerful economic
forces, to address worsening class divides, and to make society andthe economy work for all of us.
The Creative Compact
The key to all of this is a new social compact—a new set of institu-tions that can provide a Creative Economy analog to the great social384 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

385 EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IS CREATIVE
compact of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, which expanded and ac-
celerated the growth of the industrial economy and led to the lastgreat golden age of prosperity. This Creative Compact would bededicated to the creatiﬁcation of everyone. It would expand partic-
ipation in the Creative Economy to industrial and service workers,leverage new private and public investment in human infrastruc-ture, innovation, education, and our cities, while reaﬃrming andmaintaining America’s long-held commitment to diversity. It wouldrestructure education, moving away from rote learning and overlybureaucratic schools and creativity-squelching standards. It wouldset in place a new social safety net that invests in people and pro-vides mobile beneﬁts that follow workers from job to job. It wouldrecast urban policy as a cornerstone of economic policy and ensurethat America remains a beacon for the best, brightest, most ener-getic and ambitious people in the world.
The Creative Compact would help unleash the innovative and pro-
ductive potential of people—our most precious economic resource—while addressing the many and worsening inequities that have beencaused by our failure to adapt to new structures and realities.
Despite the incredible outpouring of innovation, productivity, and
wealth the Creative Economy has produced to date, most of its ben-eﬁts have been enjoyed by a privileged economic and geographic co-hort. It d oesn’t have to be this way. The challenges we face today
may be diﬀerent in their speciﬁcs, but they are by no means new.We have been through this before. The Industrial Revolution gen-erated new technologies, new industries, and new productive po-
tential alongside gross economic inequalities—which Marx wronglybelieved would ultimately prove to be capitalism’s undoing. Beforethe nascent industrial age could reach its full potential, the devel-opment of a much more broadly based urban-industrial society,in which great masses of people could participate, was required.
This industrial society did not emerge on its own but was gradually
spurred into existence, over the emphatic and sometimes violent

objections of entrenched groups, by a broad social compact—the
creation of new institutions and policies that coped with and mit-igated its most onerous and divisive aspects, extending the beneﬁtsof its productivity to blue-collar workers, turning once terrible low-paying manufacturing jobs into good family-supporting ones, al-lowing workers to organize and collectively bargain for their rights,and ultimately linking wage increases to productivity gains. It alsoestablished Social Security for older people, provided beneﬁts forthe disabled and basic social welfare for the truly needy, while pro-tecting health and safety in the workplace. It spurred human capitalaccumulation by massively expanding the system of higher educa-tion, while providing federal investments for scientiﬁc research anddevelopment, a cornerstone of the innovation economy.
This new social compact squared the circle, turning the once-
divided industrial economy into a middle-class society by allowingthe broad base of the population to participate in it, while enablingits tremendous expansion. Far from undermining business andsubverting capitalism, by making home mortgages more availableand investing in the development of the interstate highway system,this social compact encouraged the expansion of key mass produc-tion industries, from cars to appliances.
It’s worth recalling that this new social compact did not stoke but
actually banked the ﬁres of class warfare. It emerged at a time whencapitalism was not only in crisis but when fascism and communismwere ﬁghting to supplant it. Although some still cherish nostalgiafor the ﬁery idealism of the revolutionary movements of the earlytwentieth century, the long sweep of history suggests that what ap-peared as a meeker, more tepid reformist impulse was not only morepragmatic but better, comparatively speaking. Eﬀorts to overthrowcapitalism—either from the right or the left—devolved into chaosand unprecedented disasters. Eﬀorts to temper capitalism—to har-ness its innovative Schumpeterian engines while spreading its ben-
eﬁts more widely—certainly didn’t solve all of its problems or386 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS

inequities, but they led to unprecedented prosperity and freedom. If
Fordism was ultimately unsustainable, the foundational principle ofthis social compact—that workers must receive a level of compensa-tion that allows them to participate in the economy—underpinnedwhat we still look back on as the golden age of economic prosperity.
The challenges facing us today require something even bigger
and bolder. A new Creative Compact for our time must be builtacross six key principles. I oﬀer them as a series of overarching pre-cepts, not as a full-blown plan. The most eﬀective strategies willemerge from the nitty-gritty, trial-and-error eﬀorts that happen inthe real world.
Invest in Developing the Full Human Potential and
Creative Capabilities of Every Single Human Being
First and foremost, before the United States or any other advanced
nation can recover, prosper, and thrive, it must strive to tap the full
creative capabilities of every one of its people. We can’t simply writeoﬀ the tens of millions of workers who toil in low-wage service jobs.The United States and other nations will have to ﬁnd ways to bringthe service and manufacturing sectors more fully into the CreativeAge. The more creative they become, the more productive they willbe. This means enabling and tapping the intellectual and socialskills of each and every worker.
The manufacturing jobs that pay best today look a lot more like
knowledge work than traditional factory work. In fact high paidmanufacturing work—guiding and maintaining advanced machin-ery, engaging in problem solving and continuous improvementwith other workers and engineers—increasingly is knowledge work.“If you look at what people are doing in manufacturing today, theyare running robots, designing tools, programming computers,” Ju-dith Crocker, director of education at the Manufacturing Advocacy& Growth Network, or MAGNET, a manufacturing promoter in387 EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IS CREATIVE

388 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
Cleveland, told a reporter from The Cleveland Plain Dealer .1This
is true for every kind of job, including service work. As we saw in
Chapter 11, adding analytical and social skills to just about any jobraises both its productivity and its wages.
Every job can and must be creatiﬁed; every worker must be able
to harness his or her own inner entrepreneur. We did it before inmanufacturing. We turned low-wage, low-skill work in horriﬁc,exploitative factories into the good family-supporting jobs workerspine for today. We need to do the same for services—for the morethan 60 million Americans and countless others around the globe,who toil for low wages in everything from food preparation andhome health care to retail sales. Some will counter that this willonly make services more expensive. My response is simple: we can’taﬀord not to do it. Decades ago, we collectively conceded that wewould have to pay more for manufactured goods so that workerscould have better wages and a broad middle class could be born.The demand and productivity it spurred moved the whole economyforward. The same can be done today for low-skill service jobs.Tapping into the innovative and creative capabilities of serviceworkers and engaging them more fully will ultimately make themmore productive. If we paid more for cars and consumer goods,why can’t we pay a little bit more collectively to the people whoprepare our food, look after our homes, and take care of our chil-dren and aging parents? Doing so will build a stronger middle class,enhance social cohesion, and create the demand that can help drivethe economy forward. The service sector is the last frontier of in-novation in our economy; it needs to be brought up to date, andupskilling its workers and upgrading their jobs is key to that. Cre-ativity is our most precious resource; we can’t aﬀord to waste it inany sector of the economy.
Paul Romer and other leading students of innovation have shown
that investments in innovations and ideas have extraordinary rates

389 EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IS CREATIVE
of return and pay incredible dividends, precisely because they are
public goods; the beneﬁts they confer are broad and reverberatethroughout the entire economy. We need to get beyond the notionthat innovation is something that only occurs among scientistsworking in a lab. Innovation happens anywhere and everywhere,and more often than not it comes from small things. We need tosee all members of society as potential innovators, stoke their in-novative potential, and extend the deﬁnition of innovation beyondtechnology and R&D to include investment in the arts, in culture,and in every other form of creativity.
We similarly need to put entrepreneurialism front and center on
the economic agenda. Although many debate the relative meritsof large versus small companies, it is clear that it is dynamic newﬁrms that drive innovation, create new industries, and generate ahuge share of all jobs. When policy makers think of entrepreneur-ship, they think in terms of high-tech start-ups of the Silicon Valleyvariety. Those are important. But we must support every kind ofentrepreneurship.
Fewer and fewer of us have the economic security once provided
by large corporations to fall back on. If industrial age schools read-ied our children for the workforce, Creative Age schools must pre-pare them to manage their careers and build businesses of theirown. The goal can no longer just be to get a job but rather to createa job—and to create more jobs for others. A huge percentage ofnew businesses fail, but we can help increase the odds of their suc-cess. We provide all sorts of assistance to technology-based entre-preneurs, so why not extend this to all new businesses? Instead ofjust building incubators for high-tech companies, why not forneighborhood restaurants, mom-and-pop shops, and hair andnail salons? Why not extend support to personal trainers, dieti-cians, therapists, musicians, artists, and lawn service providers?The list goes on and on. What kills new business is poor management,

390 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
inattention to cost control, lack of marketing and sales skills. We
need to oﬀer all Americans, young and old, rich and poor, the toolsthey need to survive and thrive as creative entrepreneurs.
Make Openness and Diversity and Inclusion a
Central Part of the Economic Agenda
A growing body of economic research shows that diversity and
openness power economic growth.2Immigrants from foreign coun-
tries spearhead innovations and enterprise in everything from steelmaking to semiconductors and all forms of high tech. As we haveseen, literally half of all Silicon Valley start-ups involve immigrants.Our policy makers need to do what the venture capitalist JohnDoerr said they should: staple a green card to the diploma of everyimmigrant who graduates from one of our engineering schools.
3
More than that, we need to make this country welcoming to all en-
terprising, energetic, and ambitious people. This is the biggest no-brainer of them all.
Build an Education System That Spurs, Not Squelches, Creativity
The most important investments we make are not in bridges, high-ways, and other physical assets but in our human assets. Everyoneagrees that education is important, but our deﬁnition of educationmust be broadened. Just as the United States once sank vast amountsof public and private funds into canals, railroads, highways, andother physical infrastructure to power industrial growth, the country
today needs to massively increase its investments in its human cre-
ative capital. The scale of the eﬀort required is enormous—it willneed to dwarf the public education system, land grant colleges, andGI bills of previous generations.
Our current system of elementary and high-school education, as
many have observed, is badly broken. It is not hard to see why: it

391 EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IS CREATIVE
is a complete and total relic of the industrial age, developed to stamp
out workers for the Fordist industrial machine as if they were somany widgets on a, well, assembly line. As Sir Ken Robinson arguesin his book The Element,
4our current approaches to education are
“stiﬂing some of the most important capacities that young peoplenow need to make their way in the increasingly demanding worldof the 21st century—the powers of creative thinking.”
“All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations,
fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think,”he told the Guardian. “Most students never get to explore the full
range of their abilities and interests. . . . Education is the systemthat’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us tomake our way in the world. Instead, it is stiﬂing the individual tal-ents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivationto learn.”
5
We need to rebuild our education system from the ground up—
and on the principles of creativity and the Creative Economy. Thatmeans an educational system that is less focused on test scores andstandards and more around active learning. We need to pay muchmore attention than we have to early childhood learning and de-velopment; these are the most critical years, when creative abilitiesare shaped. We horde our kids into schools, as a form of institu-tionalized day care, so their parents can work. But too small a partof the school day is devoted to actual creative development. AsRobinson says, a Creative Age educational system needs to connectwith kids’ real interests and passions. Kids need to become emo-tionally attached to learning.
And we need to stop blaming teachers for problems created by
an outmoded system. A large-scale economic study that trackedmore than 2.5 million students over two decades found that goodteachers—those who are fully engaged in their work and rewardedby their schools—generate not only better-performing studentsbut eﬀect a wide range of social outcomes. The study developed

392 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
new, comprehensive measures for tracking “teacher value-added,”
separating out excellent, average, and poor teachers. After control-ling for a wide range of factors, including students’ family back-grounds, which play an important role in academic achievementand success, it found that students with top teachers were not onlymore likely to go to college and earn more income over the courseof their careers, they were less likely to become pregnant asteenagers.
6
Build a Social Safety Net for the Creative Economy
The Creative Age is not an Ayn Rand fantasy of rugged individu-alists making their own way; no viable system or society can everbe. A decade ago, Creative Class freelancers were hailed as the van-guard of an army of liberating entrepreneurs who were ﬁnding fun,freedom, and fulﬁllment on their own. The truth, as it always is, ismuch more complicated.
A new social safety net is needed, one that does for the new reality
of creative work what the New Deal safety net did for blue-collarworkers eighty years ago. Not only must today’s creatives and free-lancers provide their own health care, disability insurance, andpensions, or do without, as Sara Horowitz of the Freelancers Unionnotes. There is “no unemployment during lean times; no protectionsfrom age, race, and gender discrimination; no enforcement fromthe Department of Labor when employers don’t pay; and the listgoes on.”
7This must change.
It no longer makes sense to tie beneﬁts to a single employer. The
reality of employment today is mobility. A new social compactmust start from the ﬂexible, hyper-individualized, and contingentnature of work. That means health beneﬁts that move with workers,and retirement accounts that do the same. This is good for workers,good for companies, and good for society as a whole. Canada, for

393 EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IS CREATIVE
example, has a higher rate of self-employment than the United
States; this is one of the key things that has helped bolster its econ-omy over the course of the economic crisis. One thing that helpedmake this possible is that every Canadian has health care; workersdo not need to depend on employers to provide it.
This new safety net must ensure that the truly disadvantaged are
provided with adequate living standards, and even more so, withreal opportunities. Such a system cannot conﬁne itself to materialneeds alone. Income from Social Security for the elderly and incomesupport for the truly disadvantaged are certainly important. Butwhat we need to do goes much further. And here I am not only talk-ing about the United States but also societies that many admire fortheir more extended social safety nets, such as those in Scandinavia,Northern Europe, and Canada. A Creative Compact must providemore than minimal security for those who fall through the cracks;it must invest in everyone and provide them with opportunities todevelop and fully utilize their human talents and potential.
Some will counter that such a system will promote slacking, as
it has in some societies. But here is the bargain I envision: societywill invest all that is needed to enable you to develop your talentsand passions. But you as an individual must keep your part of thebargain. You must use those talents and that social investment tocontribute productively to society. The Creative Compact recog-nizes that all people have the capacity to develop and utilize theirtalents; it should recognize self-expression as a fundamental humanright and provide education and training to foster it.
Strengthen Cities; Promote Density, Clustering, and Concentration
Channelling Jane Jacobs, Felix Salmon said it best. “Jobs requirecities.” We can no longer count on companies to create the millionsof new jobs that are needed; job generation increasingly comesfrom cities. Cities are the key economic and social organizing units

394 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
of the Creative Age. They give rise to the clustering, density, and
interaction that generate economic growth. They speed the metab-olism of daily life, and they accelerate the combinations and re-combinations that spur innovation, business formation, jobcreation, and economic growth.
But so much of public policy either promotes sprawl and decen-
tralization or sees cities as urban basket cases ﬁlled with socialpathologies. Cities must be a centerpiece of economic policy, notan afterthought.
We need to stop taxing the productive potential of our cities and
metro areas to subsidize dumb sprawling growth. At the same time,we must be careful not to go too far, building massive skyscrapercomplexes that isolate people in vertical suburbs. At the local level,cities and communities need to stop subsidizing stadiums, con-vention centers, and other mega-projects that add little to theireconomies and stop encouraging bland, generic development. Theyneed to invest in people climates as well as business climates; cul-tivate all 3T’s; promote density, transit-oriented development, andwalkability; create green spaces and other public spaces; encouragediversity; and build real quality of place.
Our cities are not just economic engines; they are key to our health
and well-being. We need to invest in more green space, greater liv-ability, energy eﬃciency, and sustainability. We need to expandtransit, reducing the need to drive, and promote walking and biking,activities that not only save energy but also improve our health. Weneed to better connect our cities and suburbs with transit, and con-nect our metro areas, especially those that are part of larger mega-regions, to each other with high-speed rail. Our older industrial-agecities are potentially cauldrons of creativity —ﬁlled with just the sorts
of warehouses, factories, and other buildings that can become theﬁgurative garages where start-ups are incubated. We can only suc-ceed if we look at them as opportunities and not blights. Such in-vestments are win-win-win propositions: they reinvigorate our

395 EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IS CREATIVE
older centers, take the pressure oﬀ the new ones, and result in a
stronger system of cities overall.
This is not just an agenda for big cities and downtown areas.
Quality of place, density, walkability, and open-mindedness anddiversity are things large numbers of people not only desire butare willing to pay more for. This is an agenda that all kinds ofcommunities—suburbs as well as cities, Sun Belt as well as RustBelt places—can embrace and prosper from.
Our cities are also fulcrums for social and political innovation.
Everyone recognizes that America’s national government is dys-functional. But cities and community governments actually work.When I meet local oﬃcials in my travels through America andaround the world, I often can’t tell who is a Democrat or a Repub-lican, a liberal or a conservative. The most important policy inno-vations no longer come from national legislatures or federalbureaucracies, but from cities and mayors crafting pragmatic, non-ideological solutions to pressing social and economic problems.Benjamin Barber put it best: “If mayors ruled the world, we’d havea better chance of solving the world’s problems.”
Since its inception, America’s decentralized federalist system has
encouraged experimentation and learning across states and cities.We may have more problems than we know what to do with, butwe also have plenty of latitude to ﬁgure out how to deal with them.Countries with more centralized planning have never brought thekind of social and political creativity to the table that the UnitedStates has been able to muster. Our cities, competitive laboratoriesof democracy as they are, will continue to be the source of truly in-novative solutions to our problems—from education and crimeand safety to innovation and economic development.
The Brookings Institution’s Alice Rivlin long ago said that we’d
be much better oﬀ with a more decentralized approach to economicinnovation and productivity policy.
8Mayors, council people, eco-
nomic developers, business leaders, union oﬃcials, and lay people

396 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
are the ones who know the most about their economies. Just as the
best companies decentralize decision making to work groups onthe factory ﬂoor, we must give cities and neighborhoods the toolsand resources they need to build their economies and in doing sohelp rebuild the broader economy from the bottom up.
From Dumb Growth to True Prosperity
We need to get beyond the idea, handed down from the IndustrialRevolution, that growth is good in and of itself. We have had ourshare of dumb growth. We have polluted our environment, de-graded our human as well as our natural assets, overbuilt housing,and watched our economy crater and collapse. For too long, punditspointed to Sunbelt cities of sand and sprawl whose economies werefueled solely by home building as beacons of growth—until thebubble burst and they turned into virtual ghost towns. As the NobelPrize–winning economist Edmund Phelps put it, “It used to be thebusiness of America was business. Now the business of America ishome ownership.” “To recover and grow again,” he added, “Amer-ica needs to get over its house passion.”
9
But it goes even deeper than that. Our obsession with housing
and the whole housing-automobile-energy complex of Fordism isbut a symptom of a deeper problem: how we think of, measure,and account for economic growth. Back in the industrial age,pounding out more steel, more cars, and more consumer durablesseemed good proxies for growth. Wasted energy and pollution wereaccepted as unfortunate but unavoidable by-products.
That no longer holds today in an era where knowledge, innova-
tion, creativity, and human potential drive the economy. We needto value and measure what really matters. The idea of getting beyondour current crude conception of Industrial Age growth is not afringe idea. More and more economists—smart, leading Nobel

397 EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IS CREATIVE
Prize–winning economists—and other social scientists and thinkers
are coming around to the idea that prosperity turns on more thangross domestic product. New and better metrics of creativity,human potential, and well-being are badly needed. Just as we cameup with new metrics for productivity, innovation, and growth dur-ing the Industrial Age, we need metrics that can capture the essenceof prosperity in the Creative Age.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s Commission on the Measurement of Economic
Performance and Social Progress was recently tasked “to identifythe limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance andsocial progress, including the problems with its measurement; toconsider what additional information might be required for theproduction of more relevant indicators of social progress; to assessthe feasibility of alternative measurement tools, and to discuss howto present the statistical information in an appropriate way.”
The Commission’s chairman, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, noted:
What we measure affects what we do; and if our measurements are flawed,
decisions may be distorted. Choices between promoting GDP and pro-tecting the environment may be false choices, once environmental degra-dation is appropriately included in our measurement of economicperformance. So too, we often draw inferences about what are good poli-cies by looking at what policies have promoted economic growth; but ifour metrics of performance are flawed, so too may be the inferences thatwe draw.
10
My own measures, from the 3T’s to the Creativity Index, are aimed
at just this. We need better measures of true prosperity, not just of
raw output, but of happiness and well-being, measurements that helpus maximize human potential and capture the real costs of growth.
“There might be a problem even deeper than statistical narrow-
ness,” Harvard’s Kenneth Rogoﬀ wrote of our obsession with

398 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
growth. That is “the failure of modern growth theory to emphasize
adequately that people are fundamentally social creatures. Theyevaluate their welfare based on what they see around them, not juston some absolute standard.”
11The University of Chicago economist
Raghu Rajan sums it up nicely: “The advanced countries have achoice. They can act as if all is well, except that their consumers arein a funk, and that ‘animal spirits’ must be revived through stimulus.Or they can treat the crisis as a wake-up call to ﬁx all that has beenpapered over in the last few decades. For better or worse, the nar-rative that persuades these countries’ governments and publics willdetermine their future—and that of the global economy.”
12
This is not an either-or. It is making growth work for us, broad-
ening it, making it smarter. We cannot stop the clock of historyfrom ticking; we cannot impede the logic of capitalism, but we canand must move from dumb (Industrial Age) growth to smarter(Creative Age) growth—growth that fully utilizes human capabil-ities, that makes us happier, that provides more and better experi-ences, and brings greater purpose and meaning into our lives, notjust more stuﬀ.
That’s what a new Creative Compact would do. It would build
new institutions that would ﬁx all that has been papered over. Butit cannot spring into life on its own. Building the necessary newinstitutions requires, as it always has, political action and humanagency, both of which have been in short supply.
The Creative Class Comes of Age
There are signs that the Creative Class may at last be coming of age.The year 2011 was the turning point. The ﬁrst half of the year sawthe uprisings of the Arab Spring, which toppled some regimesand profoundly shook others. Then, in the fall, the Occupy Wall
Street movement began in Manhattan’s Zucotti Park and by Oc-

399 EVERY SINGLE HUMAN BEING IS CREATIVE
tober 15 had spread to 951 cities in eighty-two countries. The van-
guards of both movements were middle-class students and youngprofessionals—highly educated, digitally savvy members of theCreative Class, though there were certain numbers of anarchists,dropouts, and frustrated Working Class people involved as well.Their outcry was for more democracy and greater opportunity;their outrage was directed against old-line dictatorships in the Arabworld and the obscene perquisites of the 1 percent. “It remindsme of 1848—another self-propelled revolution which started inone country, then spread all over the continent in a short time,”the historian Eric Hobsbawm remarked of the Arab Spring. “Twoyears after 1848, it looked as if it had all failed,” he added. “In the longrun, it hadn’t failed. A good deal of liberal advances had been made.So it was an immediate failure but a longer term partial success—though no longer in the form of a revolution.”
13
If the impetus for these uprisings came from the Creative Class,
the movement also had a decidedly urban cast. Although socialmedia—Facebook and Twitter—may have provided the fuel, thesemovements were conceived and brought to life in speciﬁc places.And not just any places—they took root in some of the very largestand densest cities on the planet, New York, London, and Cairo.
This is not unprecedented. Social and political movements have
long arisen in cities—consider the Boston Massacre of 1770, theParis Commune of 1871, the October Revolution of 1917 in St. Pe-tersburg, the Chicago Convention in 1968, the Tiananmen Squareuprising of 1989. At a time when technology was supposed to haveerased place, it is staggering to see how rapidly these place-basedmovements came to the fore, how quickly they spread to othercities, and how the Occupy Movement in particular literally brandeditself by city and place. Such activism is a product of cities, of theirdensity and ability to push people together in public spaces.
All of this seems to signal that the Creative Class may at long last
be developing what Marx would have called class consciousness; that

400 THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS
the dynamic issue of becoming a class foritself may be overtaking
the more academic questions of class of itself.
We are living, as they say, in interesting times, at the dawn of a
broad and fundamental transformation not just of our lifestyles but
of the ways that production and consumption have underpinnedthem. It is a time of tremendous potential, but also of terrible risks.Many a revolution has begun in hope and devolved into chaos. If theCreative Age is a revolutionary epoch, there can be no question thatits beginnings have been less than auspicious. The old regime has leftus with a degraded environment, a broken ﬁnancial system, and asclerotic political culture in thrall to special interests and its ownprejudices. Two decades and counting after the fall of communismand the so-called end of history, the West is as culturally, economi-cally, and politically riven as it’s ever been—but its potential is literallywithout limits.
Today, for perhaps the ﬁrst time in human history, we have the
opportunity to align economic and human development. This is em-bedded in and driven by the very underlying logic of the CreativeEconomy—its further development turns on its ability to utilize evermore talent and more creative capacity. In the meantime, living aswe are amid the ruins of the old order, we feel stuck and frustrated.
But the clock of history never stops ticking. Sooner or later, some
city or nation is going to ﬁgure out what it takes to fully engage thefull creative potential of its people. If we want to gain the advantagesof precedence, we need to accelerate that process. Our future pros-perity depends upon it. Our time, as they say, is now.

401APPENDIX
Defining and Measuring the Creative Class
All ﬁgures for the Creative Class and the Creativity Index are updated using the
latest available data. These data were compiled and analyzed by Kevin Stolarick.
The classes are deﬁned according to the same categories used in the original edi-
tion, using the occupational categories of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)Occupational Employment Survey (OES).
Creative Class:
SUPER -CREATIVE CORE
Computer and mathematical occupationsArchitecture and engineering occupationsLife, physical, and social science occupationsEducation, training, and library occupationsArts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations
C
REATIVE PROFESSIONALS
Management occupationsBusiness and ﬁnancial operations occupationsLegal occupationsHealth-care practitioners and technical occupationsHigh-end sales and sales management
Working Class:
Construction and extraction occupations
Installation, maintenance, and repair occupationsProduction occupationsTransportation and material moving occupations

402 APPENDIX
Service Class:
Health-care support occupations
Food preparation and food-service-related occupations
Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupationsPersonal care and service occupationsLow-end sales and related occupationsOﬃce and administrative support occupationsCommunity and social services occupationsProtective service occupations
Agriculture:
Farming, ﬁshing, and forestry occupations
The metro data for the classes are based on data from the 2010 BLS OES data
available online at www.bls.gov/oes/.
Historical Time Series:
The historical time series data for the classes has been updated and expanded
to cover the period 1800–2010 and are drawn from sources that are fully listedin the endnotes.
1
The Creativity Index
This edition of the book updates the Creativity Index and the measures for the3T’s—technology, talent, and tolerance.
Technology is measured with three variables: the Tech-Pole Index, a measure
of high-tech industry concentration originally developed by the Milken Institute
2
based on data from 2009 County Business Patterns, and two measures of regionalinnovation—patents per capita and average annual patent growth based on datafrom the US Patent and Trademark Oﬃce for the years 2005–2009. The overallTechnology Index combines these three measures.
Talent is measured as the Creative Class (deﬁned above).
Tolerance is measured with three key variables—the share of immigrants or
foreign-born residents, the Gay and Lesbian Index, and the Integration Index.The Gay and Lesbian Index is based on the Gay Index, originally developed byGary Gates and others.
3The Integration Index, developed by Stolarick, measures
level of integration versus segregation of a metro area. It compares diversity ofrace/ethnicities within the census tracts of a metropolitan region to the distri-bution of those same groups across the entire region. The index measures the

403 APPENDIX
distribution of racial and ethnic groups within a single metro; it does not consider
the overall diversity of that metro relative to the rest of the country. In otherwords, it only measures the level to which a metro’s given racial and ethnicgroups are mixed together, and does not take into account the region’s overalllevel of diversity—this is what the other two tolerance measures do. An Integra-tion Index value of 0 identiﬁes a high degree of segregation, whereas an indexvalue of 1 reﬂects a high level of integration. The Integration Index is calculatedusing detailed census tract data for every metropolitan area. All three measuresare from the American Community Survey, 2005–2009.
The Creativity Index is a composite measure based on these variables.

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
1 Durham, NC 48.4% 128,900 12.6% 33,630 38.9% 103,500 266,200
2 San Jose-Sunnyvale-
Santa Clara, CA 46.9% 396,820 16.3% 137,640 36.6% 309,880 845,540
3 Washington-Arlington-
Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 46.8% 1,328,240 12.8% 362,950 40.3% 1,144,430 2,836,790
4 Ithaca, NY 44.6% 21,840 12.1% 5,900 42.9% 20,990 48,920
5 Boulder, CO 44.4% 67,000 13.7% 20,740 41.7% 62,860 150,870
6 Trenton-Ewing, NJ 42.9% 91,830 12.1% 25,810 45.0% 96,190 213,960
7 Huntsville, AL 42.7% 85,280 19.5% 38,930 37.9% 75,730 199,940
8 Corvallis, OR 41.7% 12,730 11.6% 3,560 45.9% 14,040 30,560
9 Boston-Cambridge-
Quincy, MA-NH 41.6% 1,002,440 14.9% 360,440 43.4% 1,047,280 2,411,070
10 Ann Arbor, MI 41.3% 74,140 14.7% 26,340 44.1% 79,220 179,700
11 Tallahassee, FL 40.5% 63,880 11.6% 18,360 47.6% 75,110 157,680
12 Rochester, MN 39.9% 39,500 16.0% 15,820 44.0% 43,470 98,880
13 Charlottesville, VA 39.7% 34,980 14.8% 13,050 45.2% 39,780 88,070
14 Hartford-West Hartford-
East Hartford, CT 39.7% 216,870 16.9% 92,090 43.4% 237,230 546,360
15 Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT 39.5% 159,480 15.2% 61,290 45.4% 183,440 404,210
16 San Francisco-Oakland-
Fremont, CA 39.4% 747,790 16.5% 312,380 44.1% 836,680 1,898,410
17 Gainesville, FL 39.3% 46,360 13.3% 15,670 47.4% 55,870 117,970
18 Olympia, WA 38.9% 36,250 13.9% 12,950 46.8% 43,600 93,120

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
19 Madison, WI 38.3% 123,730 17.5% 56,590 44.0% 141,920 322,680
20 Burlington-South Burlington, VT 37.9% 40,970 18.9% 20,420 43.0% 46,510 108,14021 Baltimore-Towson, MD 37.7% 465,460 17.6% 217,260 44.7% 551,750 1,235,39022 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA 37.7% 602,700 19.8% 317,360 42.3% 677,410 1,599,72023 Minneapolis-St. Paul-
Bloomington, MN-WI 37.7% 630,960 18.3% 306,350 44.1% 738,420 1,675,730
24 Raleigh-Cary, NC 37.6% 183,320 17.4% 84,900 44.9% 219,350 488,13025 Denver-Aurora, CO 37.6% 443,720 17.9% 212,100 44.5% 525,810 1,181,63026 College Station-Bryan, TX 37.4% 34,480 18.5% 17,080 43.8% 40,380 92,18027 Colorado Springs, CO 37.0% 88,540 16.0% 38,410 46.9% 112,480 239,61028 Springﬁeld, IL 36.8% 38,580 15.2% 15,930 47.9% 50,230 104,87029 Athens-Clarke County, GA 36.7% 27,770 18.1% 13,720 45.0% 34,030 75,68030 Sacramento-Arden-Arcade-
Roseville, CA 36.6% 299,700 15.4% 125,950 47.6% 390,170 819,940
31 Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY 36.5% 154,920 16.4% 69,380 47.0% 199,420 423,95032 Fort Collins-Loveland, CO 36.5% 45,290 17.8% 22,130 45.5% 56,450 124,04033 Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA 36.3% 798,550 19.8% 434,970 43.8% 964,350 2,199,25034 New York-Newark-
Edison, NY-NJ-PA 35.8% 2,903,800 16.0% 1,295,520 48.1% 3,899,040 8,100,530
35 New Haven-Milford, CT 35.8% 94,510 18.8% 49,630 45.3% 119,560 263,83036 Warner Robins, GA 35.8% 20,260 26.1% 14,790 38.1% 21,560 56,66037 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 35.6% 440,190 17.0% 210,570 47.2% 584,850 1,238,060

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
38 Kennewick-Richland-Pasco, WA 35.5% 33,450 23.1% 21,800 41.3% 38,950 94,200
39 Ames, IA 35.5% 13,220 20.6% 7,670 43.4% 16,180 37,250
40 Worcester, MA 35.5% 83,610 18.8% 44,310 45.7% 107,730 235,740
41 Manchester-Nashua, NH 35.5% 34,490 18.1% 17,600 46.4% 45,140 97,260
42 Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL 35.4% 67,140 17.0% 32,250 47.5% 90,020 189,410
43 Des Moines, IA 35.2% 111,310 18.8% 59,590 45.9% 145,110 316,460
44 Rochester, NY 35.1% 168,680 19.1% 91,640 45.6% 218,950 479,950
45 Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL-IN-WI 35.1% 1,460,040 21.4% 891,010 43.4% 1,803,920 4,156,84046 Boise City-Nampa, ID 35.0% 89,180 19.3% 49,290 45.0% 114,790 254,880
47 Richmond, VA 34.9% 203,010 19.5% 113,160 45.5% 264,300 581,250
48 Kansas City, MO-KS 34.8% 330,590 19.9% 189,240 45.3% 430,610 951,030
49 Columbia, MO 34.7% 26,950 17.8% 13,830 47.3% 36,740 77,680
50 Lansing-East Lansing, MI 34.6% 67,570 19.6% 38,170 45.6% 89,070 195,140
51 Philadelphia-Camden-
Wilmington, PA-NJ-DE-MD 34.6% 904,360 17.8% 467,020 47.5% 1,243,120 2,616,760
52 Kokomo, IN 34.5% 12,880 23.7% 8,870 41.8% 15,600 37,350
53 Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI 34.5% 580,180 20.7% 347,960 44.8% 754,640 1,683,39054 Austin-Round Rock, TX 34.4% 246,120 16.5% 118,350 49.0% 350,490 715,400
55 Champaign-Urbana, IL 34.4% 33,640 20.3% 19,850 45.0% 43,990 97,810
56 Dallas -Fort Worth-Arlington, TX 34.3% 969,680 21.5% 608,080 44.2% 1,248,770 2,826,53057 Santa Fe, NM 34.3% 20,700 12.0% 7,230 53.7% 32,410 60,340
58 Dayton, OH 34.2% 122,680 20.5% 73,370 45.2% 162,250 358,590

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
59 Portland-Vancouver-
Beaverton, OR-WA 34.2% 328,520 21.7% 209,150 43.8% 421,710 961,860
60 Los Angeles-Long Beach-
Santa Ana, CA 34.1% 1,765,410 19.5% 1,007,910 46.3% 2,394,530 5,172,400
61 Columbus, OH 34.0% 301,170 19.3% 170,980 46.5% 411,730 884,780
62 Jeﬀerson City, MO 34.0% 24,200 21.1% 15,000 44.9% 31,960 71,25063 Portland-South Portland, ME 34.0% 64,980 18.5% 35,380 47.4% 90,740 191,36064 Tucson, AZ 33.9% 116,930 16.5% 57,050 49.5% 170,830 345,04065 Iowa City, IA 33.8% 27,550 19.5% 15,870 46.5% 37,860 81,40066 Anchorage, AK 33.8% 55,570 20.4% 33,450 45.8% 75,280 164,30067 Las Cruces, NM 33.8% 21,880 15.1% 9,770 49.4% 32,000 64,74068 Salt Lake City, UT 33.7% 199,120 21.5% 127,190 44.8% 264,650 591,22069 St. Louis, MO-IL 33.6% 421,810 20.1% 252,890 46.2% 580,640 1,256,02070 Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord, NC-SC 33.6% 271,490 21.8% 175,970 44.6% 360,960 808,95071 Topeka, KS 33.5% 35,270 20.0% 21,010 46.2% 48,540 105,14072 Provo-Orem, UT 33.2% 55,500 19.9% 33,290 46.8% 78,150 167,08073 Fort Walton Beach-Crestview-
Destin, FL 33.2% 24,580 15.5% 11,490 51.2% 37,940 74,070
74 Columbia, SC 33.2% 109,610 19.9% 65,710 46.7% 154,300 330,33075 Birmingham-Hoover, AL 33.1% 152,870 22.5% 104,050 44.2% 203,920 461,55076 Cedar Rapids, IA 33.1% 44,810 23.9% 32,380 42.9% 58,070 135,42077 Houston-Baytown-Sugar Land, TX 33.0% 825,000 24.4% 610,250 42.5% 1,061,070 2,497,100

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
78 Indianapolis, IN 33.0% 281,210 23.3% 198,720 43.6% 370,820 851,240
79 Jackson, MS 33.0% 78,640 20.4% 48,650 46.4% 110,440 238,08080 Oklahoma City, OK 33.0% 181,930 21.6% 118,850 45.3% 249,570 551,01081 Winston-Salem, NC 33.0% 65,460 22.5% 44,650 44.5% 88,220 198,33082 Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL 33.0% 359,710 17.0% 185,500 49.8% 542,420 1,089,90083 Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI 33.0% 258,660 23.0% 180,690 44.0% 344,660 784,01084 Santa Rosa-Petaluma, CA 32.9% 56,160 19.7% 33,600 45.9% 78,340 170,49085 Albuquerque, NM 32.9% 121,750 18.1% 66,840 48.9% 180,880 369,86086 Syracuse, NY 32.9% 97,950 21.1% 62,840 45.9% 136,680 297,67087 Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ 32.7% 549,790 19.1% 321,430 48.0% 807,000 1,681,99088 Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA 32.6% 92,180 19.0% 53,840 45.9% 129,900 282,88089 Honolulu, HI 32.4% 135,780 16.9% 70,960 50.6% 211,660 418,71090 Lexington-Fayette, KY 32.4% 77,090 22.9% 54,420 43.8% 104,200 237,95091 Harrisburg-Carlisle, PA 32.4% 98,490 20.7% 63,030 46.8% 142,320 304,28092 Binghamton, NY 32.3% 34,250 20.2% 21,430 47.4% 50,160 105,89093 Greenville, NC 32.3% 22,650 17.4% 12,190 50.2% 35,220 70,18094 Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH 32.2% 311,700 21.2% 205,080 46.5% 450,410 967,59095 Little Rock-North Little Rock, AR 32.2% 105,310 20.5% 67,180 47.2% 154,350 327,16096 Cheyenne, WY 32.2% 13,080 23.6% 9,590 44.3% 18,000 40,67097 Omaha-Council Bluﬀs, NE-IA 32.1% 142,290 22.0% 97,610 45.8% 203,130 443,55098 Morgantown, WV 32.1% 18,110 20.5% 11,570 47.3% 26,730 56,47099 Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA 32.1% 26,350 15.7% 12,880 51.5% 42,370 82,200

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
100 Virginia Beach-Norfolk-
Newport News, VA-NC 31.9% 227,930 21.0% 150,120 46.9% 334,940 713,630
101 Blacksburg-Christiansburg-
Radford, VA 31.8% 19,250 23.8% 14,370 44.2% 26,730 60,460
102 Lafayette, IN 31.8% 25,120 24.9% 19,640 43.2% 34,100 78,970
103 Nashville-Davidson-
Murfreesboro, TN 31.8% 223,240 22.1% 155,220 46.0% 322,950 701,810
104 Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN 31.8% 305,070 21.8% 209,140 46.4% 445,250 959,460105 State College, PA 31.8% 21,090 17.1% 11,380 50.9% 33,770 66,400106 La Crosse, WI-MN 31.7% 21,890 20.8% 14,380 47.5% 32,750 69,020107 Pittsburgh, PA 31.7% 345,720 20.2% 220,170 48.1% 524,760 1,091,460108 Springﬁeld, MA 31.6% 88,870 20.9% 58,790 47.5% 133,500 281,160109 Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-
Middletown, NY 31.6% 76,190 18.7% 45,090 49.6% 119,590 241,270
110 Bremerton-Silverdale, WA 31.6% 24,810 22.4% 17,570 46.0% 36,130 78,600111 Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-
Goleta, CA 31.6% 51,830 16.6% 27,300 47.9% 78,600 164,260
112 Carson City, NV 31.5% 8,110 17.2% 4,420 51.3% 13,190 25,720113 Flagstaﬀ, AZ 31.5% 17,100 16.3% 8,870 52.2% 28,350 54,320114 Muncie, IN 31.5% 13,620 18.8% 8,140 49.7% 21,510 43,270115 Lincoln, NE 31.4% 49,680 21.9% 34,600 46.7% 73,860 158,300116 Augusta-Richmond County, GA-SC 31.3% 63,110 22.3% 44,850 46.2% 93,090 201,370

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
117 Providence-New Bedford-
Fall River, RI-MA 31.3% 166,140 19.1% 101,540 49.6% 263,360 531,220
118 Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers,
AR-MO 31.3% 59,670 26.5% 50,570 41.8% 79,720 190,830
119 Peoria, IL 31.3% 51,840 25.2% 41,830 43.5% 72,070 165,810
120 Buﬀalo-Cheektowaga-
Tonawanda, NY 31.3% 164,390 19.5% 102,520 49.2% 258,840 525,910
121 Salem, OR 31.2% 44,440 19.1% 27,230 47.8% 67,930 142,230
122 Bismarck, ND 31.2% 19,220 17.8% 10,950 50.8% 31,340 61,640
123 San Antonio, TX 31.2% 258,480 18.6% 154,090 50.1% 415,670 829,120
124 Bangor, ME 31.2% 18,940 19.1% 11,630 49.2% 29,920 60,780
125 Eugene-Springﬁeld, OR 31.1% 42,060 19.4% 26,150 49.0% 66,140 135,100
126 Knoxville, TN 31.1% 99,150 22.7% 72,460 46.2% 147,360 319,200
127 Akron, OH 31.1% 95,220 21.7% 66,620 47.2% 144,690 306,640
128 Rome, GA 31.0% 10,920 24.6% 8,650 44.2% 15,540 35,180
129 Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood, TX 30.9% 37,350 19.2% 23,180 49.9% 60,400 120,980
130 New Orleans -Metairie-Kenner, LA 30.9% 155,310 22.9% 115,460 46.1% 232,170 503,430131 Bloomington, IN 30.8% 21,640 21.3% 14,980 47.9% 33,690 70,310
132 Hinesville-Fort Stewart, GA 30.8% 5,100 21.7% 3,590 47.6% 7,890 16,580
133 South Bend-Mishawaka, IN-MI 30.8% 38,140 23.4% 29,040 45.8% 56,840 124,020134 Tulsa, OK 30.7% 124,880 24.8% 100,550 44.5% 180,730 406,160
135 Idaho Falls, ID 30.6% 14,210 21.5% 9,980 46.8% 21,700 46,370

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
136 Macon, GA 30.6% 27,560 18.7% 16,840 50.4% 45,320 89,950
137 Charleston-North Charleston, SC 30.4% 83,630 20.8% 57,210 48.7% 133,640 274,660
138 Miami-Fort Lauderdale-
Miami Beach, FL 30.4% 651,990 16.2% 347,900 53.0% 1,136,120 2,142,570
139 Jacksonville, FL 30.4% 172,820 19.7% 112,010 49.8% 283,320 568,570
140 Wichita, KS 30.4% 84,240 24.6% 68,250 45.0% 124,780 277,420
141 Kalamazoo-Portage, MI 30.4% 39,160 22.5% 29,080 47.0% 60,620 129,000
142 Ogden-Clearﬁeld, UT 30.3% 57,480 25.2% 47,870 44.4% 84,360 189,890
143 Johnson City, TN 30.3% 22,260 19.8% 14,530 50.0% 36,750 73,540
144 Kankakee-Bradley, IL 30.2% 12,360 21.0% 8,570 48.8% 19,970 40,900
145 Tyler, TX 30.2% 27,140 21.3% 19,210 48.3% 43,460 89,990
146 Pensacola-Ferry Pass-Brent, FL 30.2% 44,730 17.5% 25,970 52.2% 77,490 148,350147 Elizabethtown, KY 30.1% 12,920 22.6% 9,680 47.3% 20,260 42,860
148 San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles, CA 30.1% 26,910 18.2% 16,220 49.6% 44,280 89,300
149 Goldsboro, NC 30.1% 12,810 23.3% 9,940 46.2% 19,670 42,570
150 Spokane, WA 30.1% 58,860 19.7% 38,510 50.2% 98,320 195,690
151 Lawrence, KS 30.0% 13,360 17.2% 7,660 52.8% 23,520 44,540
152 Grand Rapids-Wyoming, MI 29.9% 106,970 27.5% 98,090 42.5% 151,850 357,170153 Davenport-Moline-Rock Island, IA-IL 29.9% 52,830 27.3% 48,260 42.7% 75,340 176,630154 Flint, MI 29.9% 37,710 18.9% 23,820 51.3% 64,730 126,260
155 Fayetteville, NC 29.9% 37,010 22.6% 27,960 47.6% 58,950 123,950
156 Salisbury, MD 29.8% 15,420 21.0% 10,880 48.8% 25,230 51,700
157 Jackson, MI 29.8% 14,720 22.9% 11,300 47.3% 23,350 49,370

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
158 Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, PA-NJ 29.8% 97,400 22.4% 73,270 47.7% 155,900 326,810
159 Fort Wayne, IN 29.8% 57,850 27.4% 53,300 42.7% 82,980 194,240
160 Baton Rouge, LA 29.8% 105,450 25.6% 90,850 44.5% 157,790 354,420
161 Springﬁeld, MO 29.7% 53,910 21.8% 39,620 48.4% 87,780 181,440
162 Lubbock, TX 29.7% 36,110 17.0% 20,740 52.8% 64,290 121,760
163 Orlando, FL 29.6% 284,250 17.0% 163,010 53.2% 510,530 959,410
164 Niles-Benton Harbor, MI 29.6% 16,610 23.8% 13,360 46.6% 26,110 56,080
165 Florence, SC 29.6% 22,600 23.7% 18,080 46.3% 35,420 76,420
166 Redding, CA 29.5% 17,580 17.6% 10,500 51.9% 30,930 59,560
167 Louisville, KY-IN 29.5% 171,450 26.1% 151,760 44.3% 257,420 581,210
168 Montgomery, AL 29.5% 46,400 23.3% 36,630 47.0% 74,010 157,440
169 Greeley, CO 29.4% 21,830 29.9% 22,210 40.3% 29,940 74,240
170 Hattiesburg, MS 29.4% 16,040 19.0% 10,390 51.5% 28,110 54,610
171 Sioux Falls, SD 29.4% 38,450 22.4% 29,270 48.1% 63,040 130,950
172 Lawton, OK 29.3% 12,130 20.4% 8,430 50.3% 20,820 41,380
173 Columbus, GA-AL 29.3% 31,960 20.6% 22,460 50.0% 54,560 109,110
174 Wilmington, NC 29.3% 39,180 20.4% 27,250 50.3% 67,390 133,890
175 Duluth, MN-WI 29.2% 35,370 18.6% 22,570 52.0% 62,980 121,090
176 Chattanooga, TN-GA 29.2% 63,970 25.8% 56,530 45.0% 98,580 219,160
177 Dover, DE 29.2% 14,660 14.6% 7,340 55.9% 28,090 50,240
178 Waco, TX 29.2% 28,620 25.1% 24,640 45.6% 44,730 98,120
179 Billings, MT 29.2% 23,050 21.6% 17,110 49.1% 38,850 79,070
180 Logan, UT-ID 29.1% 13,690 28.1% 13,210 42.6% 20,030 47,000

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
181 Sherman-Denison, TX 29.1% 11,690 21.7% 8,700 49.2% 19,760 40,150
182 Waterloo-Cedar Falls, IA 29.1% 24,540 28.2% 23,800 42.5% 35,870 84,310183 Chico, CA 29.1% 19,620 15.3% 10,340 54.0% 36,420 67,420184 Auburn-Opelika, AL 29.1% 13,230 23.3% 10,610 47.3% 21,540 45,530185 Abilene, TX 29.0% 17,840 18.9% 11,630 51.8% 31,790 61,420186 Greenville, SC 29.0% 82,940 27.2% 77,810 43.6% 124,550 285,890187 Utica-Rome, NY 29.0% 35,970 19.8% 24,620 51.1% 63,390 124,090188 Toledo, OH 28.9% 81,080 23.7% 66,520 47.3% 132,810 280,730189 Prescott, AZ 28.8% 15,400 20.0% 10,690 51.0% 27,240 53,380190 Eau Claire, WI 28.8% 21,260 23.6% 17,380 47.5% 35,000 73,740191 Yuba City-Marysville, CA 28.8% 10,660 19.0% 7,050 49.4% 18,280 37,040192 Fargo, ND-MN 28.7% 33,550 21.9% 25,600 49.0% 57,230 116,870193 Burlington, NC 28.7% 15,450 27.0% 14,510 44.4% 23,880 53,840194 Pocatello, ID 28.7% 9,460 23.7% 7,820 47.6% 15,690 32,970195 Green Bay, WI 28.6% 46,300 27.1% 43,740 44.1% 71,300 161,630196 El Paso, TX 28.6% 76,530 20.7% 55,210 50.6% 135,370 267,340197 Bend, OR 28.6% 16,720 18.5% 10,830 52.4% 30,620 58,450198 Winchester, VA-WV 28.6% 14,350 25.1% 12,600 46.3% 23,280 50,230199 Bowling Green, KY 28.6% 15,700 25.7% 14,120 45.7% 25,110 54,980200 Memphis, TN-MS-AR 28.5% 167,210 26.2% 153,520 45.1% 264,320 585,690201 Norwich-New London, CT 28.5% 35,510 16.4% 20,460 55.0% 68,470 124,440202 Huntington-Ashland, WV-KY-OH 28.5% 30,440 22.6% 24,070 48.9% 52,180 106,690203 Savannah, GA 28.5% 41,220 23.1% 33,390 48.3% 69,900 144,580

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
204 Charleston, WV 28.5% 40,100 25.7% 36,230 45.7% 64,400 140,800
205 Alexandria, LA 28.5% 17,310 21.6% 13,150 49.4% 30,040 60,780
206 Roanoke, VA 28.5% 41,580 24.4% 35,670 47.0% 68,690 146,070
207 Gainesville, GA 28.5% 19,070 33.3% 22,300 38.3% 25,640 67,010
208 Bloomington-Normal, IL 28.4% 20,150 17.2% 12,190 54.2% 38,470 70,970
209 Battle Creek, MI 28.3% 14,650 27.7% 14,320 43.9% 22,710 51,680
210 Reno-Sparks, NV 28.3% 53,530 20.8% 39,310 50.7% 95,810 188,860
211 Kingston, NY 28.3% 16,560 18.1% 10,580 53.3% 31,150 58,430
212 Bakersﬁeld, CA 28.3% 70,610 22.0% 54,970 40.7% 101,520 249,580
213 Rockford, IL 28.3% 38,550 30.9% 42,080 40.9% 55,720 136,390
214 Fresno, CA 28.3% 87,980 19.6% 61,030 43.7% 136,100 311,380
215 Amarillo, TX 28.2% 30,260 23.3% 24,990 48.2% 51,700 107,200
216 Greensboro-High Point, NC 28.2% 94,500 27.4% 91,940 44.3% 148,310 334,950
217 Johnstown, PA 28.2% 15,330 21.1% 11,480 50.7% 27,580 54,440
218 Asheville, NC 28.1% 46,560 22.5% 37,180 49.3% 81,570 165,450
219 Barnstable Town, MA 28.1% 26,100 15.8% 14,640 56.1% 52,090 92,920
220 Jackson, TN 28.1% 15,240 28.0% 15,210 43.7% 23,760 54,310
221 Erie, PA 28.0% 34,670 22.7% 28,120 49.2% 60,830 123,660
222 Hot Springs, AR 28.0% 9,960 18.1% 6,440 53.9% 19,160 35,560
223 Mobile, AL 28.0% 46,660 27.3% 45,530 44.6% 74,320 166,690
224 Decatur, IL 28.0% 13,800 33.2% 16,370 38.9% 19,170 49,340
225 Medford, OR 28.0% 20,380 21.4% 15,630 50.0% 36,460 72,870
226 Jonesboro, AR 27.9% 12,690 24.0% 10,900 47.6% 21,620 45,410

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
227 Pine Bluﬀ, AR 27.9% 9,440 28.2% 9,560 42.9% 14,530 33,850
228 Grand Forks, ND-MN 27.8% 12,890 21.2% 9,830 50.6% 23,430 46,290229 Lima, OH 27.8% 13,670 27.0% 13,260 45.2% 22,180 49,110230 Gulfport-Biloxi, MS 27.8% 28,010 20.6% 20,700 51.5% 51,900 100,700231 Lynchburg, VA 27.8% 27,050 26.2% 25,470 45.8% 44,630 97,340232 Saginaw-Saginaw Township
North, MI 27.8% 22,210 22.3% 17,810 49.9% 39,860 79,930
233 Midland, TX 27.7% 17,720 28.2% 18,010 44.0% 28,100 63,870234 Kingsport-Bristol, TN-VA 27.7% 31,130 27.0% 30,290 45.2% 50,720 112,320235 San Angelo, TX 27.7% 11,410 21.6% 8,880 50.6% 20,840 41,180236 St. Cloud, MN 27.7% 24,700 27.2% 24,290 44.9% 40,060 89,200237 Vallejo-Fairﬁeld, CA 27.7% 32,460 22.2% 25,980 49.8% 58,440 117,250238 Wichita Falls, TX 27.7% 15,380 22.6% 12,580 49.7% 27,630 55,590239 Lewiston, ID-WA 27.6% 6,180 26.5% 5,930 44.6% 9,980 22,370240 McAllen-Edinburg-Pharr, TX 27.6% 60,400 15.9% 34,800 55.6% 121,590 218,830241 Dubuque, IA 27.6% 14,170 26.8% 13,740 45.4% 23,330 51,360242 Pueblo, CO 27.6% 15,110 19.2% 10,510 53.2% 29,150 54,770243 Modesto, CA 27.5% 40,260 25.5% 37,280 43.0% 62,830 146,140244 Sarasota-Bradenton-Venice, FL 27.5% 64,650 17.8% 41,840 54.4% 127,770 234,900245 Reading, PA 27.5% 43,730 27.8% 44,160 44.6% 70,930 159,040246 Shreveport-Bossier City, LA 27.5% 46,690 22.7% 38,590 49.7% 84,420 169,860247 Lewiston-Auburn, ME 27.5% 12,800 22.8% 10,630 49.6% 23,140 46,620248 Riverside-San Bernardino-
Ontario, CA 27.4% 312,510 23.6% 268,470 48.5% 552,930 1,139,750

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
249 Monroe, LA 27.4% 20,000 21.0% 15,360 51.2% 37,340 72,990
250 Madera, CA 27.4% 9,910 16.3% 5,910 41.6% 15,040 36,170
251 Napa, CA 27.4% 16,570 20.9% 12,650 47.2% 28,560 60,500
252 Danville, IL 27.4% 7,360 29.5% 7,920 43.0% 11,550 26,880
253 Cumberland, MD-WV 27.4% 10,020 20.2% 7,410 52.4% 19,170 36,600
254 Wausau, WI 27.3% 17,430 31.4% 20,020 41.0% 26,130 63,750
255 Glens Falls, NY 27.3% 13,900 22.9% 11,660 49.6% 25,230 50,870
256 Fairbanks, AK 27.3% 8,710 23.6% 7,520 49.2% 15,700 31,930
257 Oshkosh-Neenah, WI 27.3% 23,180 32.5% 27,600 40.2% 34,160 85,030
258 Lakeland-Winter Haven, FL 27.2% 51,290 23.3% 43,950 47.7% 89,890 188,570
259 Elmira, NY 27.2% 9,920 23.5% 8,590 49.3% 17,970 36,480
260 Dothan, AL 27.2% 14,990 26.5% 14,620 45.9% 25,310 55,160
261 Clarksville, TN-KY 27.1% 20,840 25.8% 19,810 46.9% 36,020 76,770
262 Jacksonville, NC 27.1% 11,800 17.9% 7,800 54.8% 23,840 43,500
263 Albany, GA 27.1% 15,940 25.2% 14,830 47.7% 28,040 58,810
264 Missoula, MT 27.0% 13,500 16.7% 8,320 56.3% 28,100 49,920
265 Rapid City, SD 27.0% 15,690 20.6% 11,940 52.1% 30,240 58,020
266 Monroe, MI 26.9% 9,260 24.2% 8,330 48.9% 16,860 34,450
267 Mount Vernon-Anacortes, WA 26.8% 11,200 23.7% 9,870 48.8% 20,340 41,720
268 Victoria, TX 26.8% 12,410 29.0% 13,440 44.2% 20,460 46,310
269 Parkersburg-Marietta, WV-OH 26.8% 17,440 27.0% 17,590 46.2% 30,120 65,150
270 Wenatchee, WA 26.8% 9,840 23.8% 8,750 49.4% 18,180 36,770
271 Canton-Massillon, OH 26.8% 41,990 24.7% 38,750 48.5% 76,070 156,970

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
272 Grand Junction, CO 26.7% 15,160 23.8% 13,510 49.3% 27,960 56,680
273 Hagerstown-Martinsburg, MD-WV 26.7% 24,710 21.0% 19,400 52.2% 48,250 92,430274 Holland-Grand Haven, MI 26.7% 25,790 34.2% 33,060 38.4% 37,040 96,570275 Great Falls, MT 26.6% 9,290 19.8% 6,890 53.3% 18,590 34,860276 Lafayette, LA 26.6% 37,580 28.2% 39,910 45.1% 63,740 141,310277 Bellingham, WA 26.6% 19,400 23.2% 16,930 49.8% 36,380 73,000278 Muskegon-Norton Shores, MI 26.6% 14,620 24.2% 13,290 49.3% 27,110 55,020279 Corpus Christi, TX 26.5% 45,820 25.2% 43,500 48.1% 83,130 172,720280 Spartanburg, SC 26.5% 29,500 32.4% 36,110 41.0% 45,700 111,390281 Brownsville-Harlingen, TX 26.5% 32,570 15.4% 18,980 57.9% 71,250 123,110282 Janesville, WI 26.4% 15,690 28.5% 16,930 45.0% 26,750 59,430283 Terre Haute, IN 26.4% 17,390 25.0% 16,470 48.5% 31,980 65,930284 Brunswick, GA 26.3% 9,990 19.6% 7,440 53.9% 20,510 38,030285 Columbus, IN 26.2% 9,730 34.2% 12,710 39.5% 14,670 37,110286 Port St. Lucie-Fort Pierce, FL 26.2% 30,460 18.7% 21,760 53.3% 61,960 116,250287 Coeur d'Alene, ID 26.1% 13,270 22.1% 11,210 51.5% 26,170 50,780288 Texarkana, TX-Texarkana, AR 26.1% 13,630 28.0% 14,630 45.7% 23,830 52,180289 Deltona-Daytona Beach-
Ormond Beach, FL 26.1% 38,960 16.6% 24,870 57.1% 85,370 149,380
290 Casper, WY 26.0% 8,100 22.8% 7,090 51.2% 15,920 31,110291 Fond du Lac, WI 26.0% 10,570 28.2% 11,470 45.6% 18,570 40,720292 Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, PA 25.9% 64,150 25.4% 62,850 48.6% 120,090 247,300293 Beaumont-Port Arthur, TX 25.9% 40,100 29.6% 45,800 44.4% 68,690 154,670294 Owensboro, KY 25.9% 11,910 28.9% 13,300 45.0% 20,680 45,970

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
295 Evansville, IN-KY 25.9% 42,920 32.1% 53,370 41.9% 69,620 166,030
296 Yakima, WA 25.8% 20,320 25.4% 20,020 44.4% 34,960 78,680297 Sebastian-Vero Beach, FL 25.8% 11,380 16.5% 7,260 55.3% 24,380 44,100298 Salinas, CA 25.8% 39,310 15.0% 22,870 41.6% 63,470 152,470299 Longview, TX 25.7% 23,560 31.2% 28,550 43.1% 39,450 91,610300 Stockton, CA 25.6% 50,670 26.7% 52,770 44.3% 87,690 197,750301 Appleton, WI 25.4% 28,070 30.3% 33,480 44.1% 48,670 110,370302 Mansﬁeld, OH 25.4% 12,500 26.8% 13,180 47.8% 23,480 49,160303 York-Hanover, PA 25.3% 42,520 31.5% 52,870 43.1% 72,270 167,840304 Tuscaloosa, AL 25.3% 22,460 31.1% 27,590 43.3% 38,440 88,700305 Anderson, SC 25.3% 13,980 31.1% 17,160 43.6% 24,100 55,240306 Rocky Mount, NC 25.3% 13,940 28.1% 15,470 46.2% 25,450 55,120307 Hanford-Corcoran, CA 25.2% 9,510 19.1% 7,200 47.8% 18,020 37,700308 Harrisonburg, VA 25.2% 14,280 32.5% 18,420 41.6% 23,610 56,700309 St. Joseph, MO-KS 25.1% 12,910 28.1% 14,420 46.5% 23,910 51,380310 Wheeling, WV-OH 25.1% 15,560 21.5% 13,330 53.4% 33,060 61,950311 Gadsden, AL 25.1% 8,410 29.3% 9,810 45.4% 15,220 33,500312 Bay City, MI 25.0% 8,270 21.0% 6,950 54.0% 17,850 33,070313 Punta Gorda, FL 25.0% 9,590 14.1% 5,420 60.9% 23,360 38,370314 Vineland-Millville-Bridgeton, NJ 25.0% 14,560 27.1% 15,780 47.9% 27,940 58,280315 Lebanon, PA 24.9% 11,350 31.3% 14,230 43.5% 19,790 45,530316 St. George, UT 24.9% 11,050 21.9% 9,690 53.1% 23,540 44,330317 Youngstown-Warren-Boardman,
OH-PA 24.9% 53,240 24.3% 51,990 50.7% 108,270 213,590

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
318 Pittsﬁeld, MA 24.8% 7,630 19.5% 6,000 55.7% 17,130 30,760
319 Sumter, SC 24.8% 8,200 29.2% 9,660 46.0% 15,230 33,090320 Racine, WI 24.8% 17,330 30.1% 21,050 45.2% 31,610 69,990321 Joplin, MO 24.8% 18,290 32.9% 24,330 42.3% 31,230 73,890322 Lake Charles, LA 24.7% 21,470 27.9% 24,250 47.4% 41,200 86,950323 El Centro, CA 24.7% 11,870 17.8% 8,550 45.2% 21,750 48,140324 Valdosta, GA 24.7% 12,010 23.4% 11,400 51.1% 24,910 48,720325 Altoona, PA 24.6% 13,900 25.0% 14,130 50.4% 28,470 56,500326 Springﬁeld, OH 24.6% 11,470 26.4% 12,310 49.0% 22,870 46,650327 Visalia-Porterville, CA 24.6% 31,930 19.4% 25,190 38.7% 50,290 129,960328 Danville, VA 24.5% 8,970 29.1% 10,640 46.2% 16,870 36,540329 Cleveland, TN 24.5% 8,560 31.5% 11,000 44.0% 15,340 34,900330 Lancaster, PA 24.4% 53,920 29.8% 65,770 45.4% 100,340 220,800331 Atlantic City, NJ 24.4% 32,920 13.5% 18,250 61.9% 83,570 134,910332 Sheboygan, WI 24.4% 13,390 32.4% 17,780 43.1% 23,660 54,880333 Florence-Muscle Shoals, AL 24.3% 12,350 30.0% 15,230 45.3% 23,000 50,720334 Laredo, TX 24.3% 20,270 17.4% 14,510 58.3% 48,580 83,360335 Merced, CA 24.2% 13,650 26.5% 14,970 43.7% 24,690 56,510336 Yuma, AZ 24.1% 13,150 17.9% 9,740 44.5% 24,290 54,560337 Weirton-Steubenville, WV-OH 24.1% 9,420 27.6% 10,810 48.3% 18,910 39,140338 Panama City-Lynn Haven, FL 24.0% 15,260 20.3% 12,930 55.7% 35,470 63,660339 Williamsport, PA 23.9% 11,780 29.1% 14,350 46.9% 23,180 49,380

Table A.1 The Class Structure for All Metros (continued)
Creative Class Working Class Service Class Total
Rank Metro Share Employment Share Employment Share Employment Employment
340 Odessa, TX 23.8% 13,480 34.4% 19,460 41.8% 23,680 56,620
341 Anderson, IN 23.6% 8,800 23.3% 8,670 53.1% 19,740 37,210342 Sioux City, IA-NE-SD 23.5% 16,470 30.8% 21,550 45.2% 31,660 70,070343 Pascagoula, MS 23.4% 12,300 39.7% 20,880 36.9% 19,370 52,550344 Fort Smith, AR-OK 23.3% 26,760 36.1% 41,360 40.3% 46,220 114,670345 Anniston-Oxford, AL 23.3% 10,450 32.1% 14,400 44.6% 19,990 44,840346 Decatur, AL 23.3% 11,980 37.1% 19,090 39.5% 20,290 51,430347 Morristown, TN 23.2% 9,890 38.4% 16,380 38.3% 16,330 42,640348 Hickory-Morganton-Lenoir, NC 22.9% 31,460 35.3% 48,450 41.6% 57,060 137,220349 Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL 22.8% 41,710 19.4% 35,520 57.3% 104,700 182,690350 Farmington, NM 22.8% 10,820 32.6% 15,510 44.3% 21,090 47,560351 Longview-Kelso, WA 22.7% 7,600 33.3% 11,150 42.2% 14,140 33,500352 Las Vegas-Paradise, NV 22.7% 183,050 18.2% 147,030 59.1% 476,720 806,910353 Michigan City-La Porte, IN 22.7% 9,290 26.6% 10,910 50.5% 20,670 40,960354 Sandusky, OH 22.6% 7,280 23.9% 7,700 53.3% 17,180 32,240355 Naples-Marco Island, FL 22.1% 22,700 18.6% 19,020 59.3% 60,810 102,530356 Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, LA 22.1% 19,890 39.0% 35,150 38.8% 34,970 90,110357 Elkhart-Goshen, IN 21.8% 21,580 46.0% 45,600 32.2% 31,880 99,120358 Ocean City, NJ 21.8% 8,130 15.5% 5,800 62.7% 23,430 37,360359 Ocala, FL 21.2% 17,620 21.2% 17,650 57.1% 47,530 83,300360 Dalton, GA 21.1% 13,270 45.6% 28,750 33.3% 20,970 62,990361 Myrtle Beach-Conway-North
Myrtle Beach, SC 17.1% 17,410 18.0% 18,290 64.9% 66,020 101,720
Source: See pages 401–403 for full detail on sources. Data analysis by Kevin Stolarick.

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
1 Boulder, CO .981 10 5 9
2 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA .970 3 16 17
3 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH .968 9 9 20
4 Ann Arbor, MI .961 25 10 10
5 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA .961 1 22 22
6 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA .961 7 37 1
7 Corvallis, OR .959 14 8 25
8 Durham, NC .953 8 1 45
9 Washington-Arlington-Alexandria,
DC-VA-MD-WV .947 27 3 30
10 Trenton-Ewing, NJ .945 44 6 13
11 Ithaca, NY .937 61 4 6
12 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA .933 2 2 71
13 Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR-WA .930 4 59 16
14 Worcester, MA .922 30 40 18
15 Burlington-South Burlington, VT .918 11 20 61
16 Hartford-West Hartford-
East Hartford, CT .916 42 14 37
17 Austin-Round Rock, TX .916 5 54 34
18 Minneapolis-St. Paul-
Bloomington, MN-WI .915 17 23 53
19 Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta, GA .912 23 33 42
20 Tucson, AZ .909 12 64 26

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
21 Madison, WI .907 17 19 67
22 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA .901 26 60 24
23 Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA .898 19 88 7
24 Denver-Aurora, CO .896 42 25 48
25 Sacramento-Arden-Arcade-Roseville, CA .894 49 30 38
26 Manchester-Nashua, NH .889 20 41 62
27 Raleigh-Cary, NC .887 6 24 95
28 Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk, CT .886 39 15 71
29 Santa Rosa-Petaluma, CA .878 48 84 3
30 Fort Collins-Loveland, CO .872 34 32 74
31 New York-Newark-Edison, NY-NJ-PA .871 52 34 57
32 Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ .869 34 87 23
33 Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX .865 46 56 47
34 Olympia, WA .861 94 18 41
35 Santa Cruz-Watsonville, CA .858 54 99 4
36 Albany-Schenectady-Troy, NY .857 28 31 99
37 Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Goleta, CA .850 21 111 33
38 Rochester, NY .849 72 44 50
39 Santa Fe, NM .849 104 57 5
40 Baltimore-Towson, MD .837 55 21 103
41 Kansas City, MO-KS .837 24 48 106
42 Champaign-Urbana, IL .834 49 55 78
43 Gainesville, FL .830 80 17 88

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
44 Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL .829 32 42 112
45 Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL-IN-WI .829 62 45 79
46 Charlottesville, VA .826 58 13 119
47 Salt Lake City, UT .823 41 68 86
48 Albuquerque, NM .820 56 85 56
49 Columbus, OH .819 64 61 73
50 Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington,
PA-NJ-DE-MD .806 64 51 97
51 Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL .805 77 82 55
52 Houston-Baytown-Sugar Land, TX .794 33 77 116
53 Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI .787 36 53 145
54 Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown, NY .787 16 109 109
55 Lexington-Fayette, KY .785 45 90 100
56 Des Moines, IA .784 66 43 127
57 Orlando, FL .784 47 163 27
58 Iowa City, IA .782 97 65 76
59 New Haven-Milford, CT .778 68 35 139
60 Rochester, MN .777 22 12 211
61 Honolulu, HI .776 128 89 29
62 Greeley, CO .774 66 169 12
63 Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Miami Beach, FL .772 101 138 11
64 Provo-Orem, UT .769 13 72 168
65 State College, PA .768 100 105 49

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
66 Tallahassee, FL .766 83 11 162
67 Colorado Springs, CO .765 103 27 128
68 Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI .763 62 83 112
69 Lafayette, IN .762 78 102 81
70 Reno-Sparks, NV .761 31 210 21
71 Portland-South Portland, ME .757 53 63 150
72 Cedar Rapids, IA .757 29 76 161
73 Bremerton-Silverdale, WA .756 73 110 84
74 Huntsville, AL .748 15 7 254
75 Syracuse, NY .745 85 86 108
76 Indianapolis, IN .744 80 78 120
77 Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord, NC-SC .736 88 70 130
78 Providence-New Bedford-Fall River, RI-MA .733 90 117 85
79 Flagstaﬀ, AZ .732 121 113 58
80 Las Cruces, NM .727 177 67 53
81 San Luis Obispo-Paso Robles, CA .727 105 148 46
82 Carson City, NV .720 175 112 19
83 Eugene-Springﬁeld, OR .716 120 125 66
84 Lansing-East Lansing, MI .714 127 50 136
85 Springﬁeld, MA .703 148 108 68
86 Springﬁeld, IL .695 138 28 166
87 Binghamton, NY .693 118 92 125
88 Richmond, VA .692 99 47 191

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
89 Blacksburg-Christiansburg-Radford, VA .689 51 101 187
90 Boise City-Nampa, ID .685 106 46 192
91 Harrisburg-Carlisle, PA .683 70 91 185
92 Athens-Clarke County, GA .680 227 29 94
93 Spokane, WA .680 94 150 105
94 Anchorage, AK .679 220 66 64
95 Cleveland-Elyria-Mentor, OH .676 87 94 173
96 Kennewick-Richland-Pasco, WA .672 74 38 246
97 Bend, OR .672 56 197 104
98 Kingston, NY .667 125 211 28
99 Napa, CA .665 112 251 2
100 San Antonio, TX .663 123 123 121
101 Greenville, SC .659 60 186 126
102 Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro, TN .658 117 103 152
103 Columbia, MO .657 235 49 89
104 Ames, IA .656 110 39 225
105 Lawrence, KS .655 161 151 64
106 Oklahoma City, OK .645 185 80 122
107 Winston-Salem, NC .645 123 81 182
108 Omaha-Council Bluﬀs, NE-IA .645 71 97 218
109 Jacksonville, FL .645 134 139 115
110 Vallejo-Fairﬁeld, CA .644 115 237 36
111 Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA .642 110 248 32

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
112 Grand Rapids-Wyoming, MI .641 129 152 111
113 Chico, CA .634 181 183 34
114 Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN .633 79 104 216
115 College Station-Bryan, TX .633 180 26 195
116 St. Louis, MO-IL .632 84 69 249
117 Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton, PA-NJ .627 75 158 174
118 Salem, OR .626 218 121 69
119 Bloomington, IN .625 39 131 238
120 Sarasota-Bradenton-Venice, FL .616 131 244 43
121 Tyler, TX .602 119 145 170
122 Midland, TX .601 131 233 70
123 Fort Wayne, IN .596 126 159 156
124 Cheyenne, WY .591 191 96 158
125 Idaho Falls, ID .587 37 135 277
126 Wichita, KS .587 86 140 224
127 Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport
News, VA-NC .586 107 100 244
128 Knoxville, TN .584 108 126 220
129 Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers, AR-MO .582 206 118 132
130 Ogden-Clearﬁeld, UT .582 109 142 204
131 Las Vegas-Paradise, NV .580 91 352 15
132 Prescott, AZ .577 197 189 74
133 Bangor, ME .575 184 124 155

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
134 Port St. Lucie-Fort Pierce, FL .572 93 286 87
135 Bakersﬁeld, CA .569 144 212 112
136 Kalamazoo-Portage, MI .566 150 141 181
137 Bellingham, WA .566 112 277 83
138 Fresno, CA .565 246 214 14
139 Columbia, SC .564 198 74 203
140 Barnstable Town, MA .564 162 219 93
141 Logan, UT-ID .560 37 180 262
142 Akron, OH .558 58 127 296
143 Pittsburgh, PA .557 76 107 300
144 Lincoln, NE .557 152 115 215
145 New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner, LA .555 202 130 152
146 Sebastian-Vero Beach, FL .555 137 297 51
147 Kankakee-Bradley, IL .554 187 144 154
148 Columbus, IN .554 157 285 44
149 Asheville, NC .553 179 218 90
150 Kokomo, IN .548 133 52 307
151 Medford, OR .547 192 225 77
152 Flint, MI .545 130 154 212
153 Dayton, OH .544 152 58 286
154 Tulsa, OK .543 136 134 228
155 Louisville, KY-IN .536 168 167 171
156 Morgantown, WV .534 92 98 318

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
157 Charleston-North Charleston, SC .533 194 137 178
158 Salisbury, MD .529 265 156 92
159 Niles-Benton Harbor, MI .529 80 164 266
160 South Bend-Mishawaka, IN-MI .528 102 133 279
161 Bloomington-Normal, IL .527 173 208 133
162 Davenport-Moline-Rock Island, IA-IL .526 140 153 223
163 Memphis, TN-MS-AR .523 69 200 251
164 Pensacola-Ferry Pass-Brent, FL .521 228 146 146
165 Birmingham-Hoover, AL .517 141 75 310
166 Augusta-Richmond County, GA-SC .517 135 116 275
167 Gainesville, GA .517 221 207 96
168 Warner Robins, GA .514 316 36 176
169 Norwich-New London, CT .512 170 201 160
170 Wilmington, NC .510 172 174 187
171 Buﬀalo-Cheektowaga-Tonawanda, NY .502 154 120 266
172 Fort Walton Beach-Crestview-Destin, FL .500 257 73 214
173 Salinas, CA .498 142 298 106
174 Elmira, NY .491 146 259 148
175 Greensboro-High Point, NC .490 158 216 179
176 Roanoke, VA .489 158 206 190
177 Savannah, GA .487 199 203 157
178 Naples-Marco Island, FL .484 167 355 40
179 El Paso, TX .482 245 196 123

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
180 Lubbock, TX .477 262 162 143
181 Eau Claire, WI .476 162 190 216
182 Peoria, IL .474 122 119 332
183 Myrtle Beach-Conway-North
Myrtle Beach, SC .470 164 361 52
184 Toledo, OH .469 183 188 207
185 Stockton, CA .469 247 300 31
186 Deltona-Daytona Beach-Ormond Beach, FL .466 173 289 118
187 Redding, CA .461 297 166 124
188 Cape Coral-Fort Myers, FL .461 230 349 8
189 Rockford, IL .460 156 213 218
190 Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood, TX .459 291 129 169
191 Fargo, ND-MN .458 89 192 309
192 Reading, PA .457 211 245 135
193 Billings, MT .452 231 179 184
194 Greenville, NC .450 189 93 316
195 La Crosse, WI-MN .450 258 106 233
196 Little Rock-North Little Rock, AR .444 238 95 272
197 Pocatello, ID .440 216 194 197
198 Utica-Rome, NY .440 228 187 194
199 Johnson City, TN .439 208 143 260
200 Elizabethtown, KY .438 293 147 172
201 Hinesville-Fort Stewart, GA .432 248 132 237

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
202 Madera, CA .431 310 250 58
203 Decatur, IL .427 170 224 229
204 Auburn-Opelika, AL .426 187 184 253
205 Rome, GA .424 305 128 193
206 Burlington, NC .422 307 193 129
207 Chattanooga, TN-GA .421 254 176 200
208 Mount Vernon-Anacortes, WA .419 234 267 130
209 York-Hanover, PA .418 97 303 232
210 Pueblo, CO .417 189 242 201
211 Waterloo-Cedar Falls, IA .416 158 182 293
212 Green Bay, WI .415 215 195 227
213 Modesto, CA .415 296 243 98
214 Holland-Grand Haven, MI .415 115 274 247
215 Gulfport-Biloxi, MS .413 203 230 206
216 Fayetteville, NC .412 250 155 233
217 Lancaster, PA .410 147 330 164
218 Duluth, MN-WI .406 214 175 257
219 St. George, UT .402 193 316 142
220 Springﬁeld, MO .398 212 161 280
221 Macon, GA .397 288 136 231
222 Bismarck, ND .396 205 122 330
223 Muncie, IN .395 345 114 197
224 Waco, TX .391 282 178 201

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
225 Sioux Falls, SD .389 200 171 293
226 St. Cloud, MN .389 262 236 164
227 Oshkosh-Neenah, WI .389 139 257 268
228 Lawton, OK .388 350 172 144
229 Dover, DE .386 314 177 176
230 Visalia-Porterville, CA .386 280 327 60
231 Columbus, GA-AL .384 287 173 210
232 Lakeland-Winter Haven, FL .382 304 258 110
233 Ocala, FL .377 217 359 102
234 Lewiston-Auburn, ME .376 331 247 100
235 Yakima, WA .374 346 296 39
236 Appleton, WI .374 145 301 235
237 Winchester, VA-WV .369 231 198 255
238 Canton-Massillon, OH .367 96 271 320
239 Yuba City-Marysville, CA .362 317 191 186
240 Baton Rouge, LA .360 244 160 292
241 Erie, PA .360 204 221 271
242 McAllen-Edinburg-Pharr, TX .360 318 240 137
243 Goldsboro, NC .357 361 149 189
244 Spartanburg, SC .356 207 280 213
245 Missoula, MT .355 242 264 196
246 Odessa, TX .351 225 340 139
247 Amarillo, TX .347 285 215 209

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
248 Saginaw-Saginaw Township North, MI .344 143 232 337
249 Topeka, KS .343 338 71 306
250 Sherman-Denison, TX .342 290 181 245
251 Jackson, MS .341 277 79 360
252 Bowling Green, KY .339 255 199 265
253 Grand Junction, CO .338 209 272 239
254 Hot Springs, AR .333 298 222 204
255 Mobile, AL .331 273 223 230
256 Hagerstown-Martinsburg, MD-WV .331 279 273 175
257 Lafayette, LA .329 166 276 288
258 Pittsﬁeld, MA .329 186 318 225
259 Evansville, IN-KY .327 114 295 323
260 Vineland-Millville-Bridgeton, NJ .327 327 314 91
261 Jeﬀerson City, MO .323 333 62 341
262 Dubuque, IA .323 150 241 344
263 Abilene, TX .321 295 185 258
264 Panama City-Lynn Haven, FL .321 250 338 148
265 Janesville, WI .319 260 282 197
266 Elkhart-Goshen, IN .319 243 357 141
267 Hanford-Corcoran, CA .318 353 307 82
268 Rocky Mount, NC .315 165 306 274
269 Farmington, NM .314 231 350 163
270 Kingsport-Bristol, TN-VA .312 213 234 301

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
271 Atlantic City, NJ .311 182 331 236
272 Brownsville-Harlingen, TX .309 311 281 158
273 Corpus Christi, TX .307 294 279 180
274 Harrisonburg, VA .307 308 308 138
275 Laredo, TX .306 341 334 79
276 Wenatchee, WA .305 318 270 166
277 Montgomery, AL .303 256 168 334
278 Dalton, GA .303 335 360 63
279 Scranton-Wilkes-Barre, PA .298 169 292 302
280 Jackson, MI .295 277 157 331
281 Longview-Kelso, WA .291 177 351 242
282 Glens Falls, NY .284 241 255 280
283 Monroe, MI .284 154 266 357
284 Coeur d'Alene, ID .283 210 287 280
285 Battle Creek, MI .283 302 209 268
286 Shreveport-Bossier City, LA .283 201 246 333
287 Wausau, WI .278 261 254 270
288 Texarkana, TX-Texarkana, AR .272 352 288 151
289 Huntington-Ashland, WV-KY-OH .271 300 202 291
290 Sheboygan, WI .271 176 332 285
291 El Centro, CA .270 337 323 134
292 Florence, SC .269 273 165 356
293 Charleston, WV .269 282 204 308

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
294 Hickory-Morganton-Lenoir, NC .268 196 348 252
295 Racine, WI .266 148 320 329
296 Lynchburg, VA .262 221 231 348
297 San Angelo, TX .259 321 235 250
298 Grand Forks, ND-MN .256 268 228 311
299 Yuma, AZ .255 357 336 117
300 Williamsport, PA .255 221 339 248
301 Punta Gorda, FL .254 315 313 183
302 Sioux City, IA-NE-SD .249 252 342 222
303 Rapid City, SD .246 240 265 314
304 Alexandria, LA .242 332 205 287
305 Merced, CA .241 343 335 146
306 Jackson, TN .239 253 220 354
307 Johnstown, PA .237 267 217 345
308 Hattiesburg, MS .235 324 170 335
309 Fond du Lac, WI .235 219 291 322
310 Longview, TX .235 292 299 241
311 Lebanon, PA .233 224 315 295
312 Parkersburg-Marietta, WV-OH .231 268 269 297
313 Brunswick, GA .231 344 284 208
314 Casper, WY .229 288 290 259
315 Anderson, IN .229 276 341 221
316 Joplin, MO .227 235 321 283

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
317 Mansﬁeld, OH .226 299 302 240
318 Wichita Falls, TX .225 328 238 276
319 Beaumont-Port Arthur, TX .224 266 293 284
320 Jacksonville, NC .217 237 262 351
321 Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, OH-PA .216 195 317 340
322 Terre Haute, IN .213 309 283 263
323 Fairbanks, AK .212 336 256 264
324 St. Joseph, MO-KS .197 225 309 337
325 Houma-Bayou Cane-Thibodaux, LA .194 258 356 261
326 Tuscaloosa, AL .191 239 304 336
327 Danville, IL .189 324 252 303
328 Monroe, LA .183 285 249 353
329 Sumter, SC .183 271 319 298
330 Lima, OH .179 359 229 304
331 Morristown, TN .176 248 347 299
332 Jonesboro, AR .172 322 226 351
333 Anderson, SC .167 280 305 319
334 Springﬁeld, OH .167 262 326 314
335 Clarksville, TN-KY .166 303 261 342
336 Cleveland, TN .166 334 329 243
337 Victoria, TX .164 351 268 289
338 Lewiston, ID-WA .163 358 239 312
339 Bay City, MI .160 275 312 326

Table A.2 The Creativity Index for All Metros, 2010 (continued)
Creativity Technology Talent Tolerance
Rank Metro Index Index Rank Index Rank Index Rank
340 Cumberland, MD-WV .158 323 253 339
341 Muskegon-Norton Shores, MI .156 324 278 313
342 Owensboro, KY .150 305 294 324
343 Pine Bluﬀ, AR .137 356 227 355
344 Wheeling, WV-OH .135 284 310 346
345 Albany, GA .132 330 263 349
346 Fort Smith, AR-OK .129 329 344 273
347 Valdosta, GA .125 349 324 278
348 Anniston-Oxford, AL .125 301 345 305
349 Great Falls, MT .119 354 275 328
350 Decatur, AL .117 268 346 343
351 Ocean City, NJ .114 347 358 256
352 Sandusky, OH .104 272 354 347
353 Dothan, AL .103 355 260 359
354 Gadsden, AL .103 342 311 320
355 Danville, VA .100 360 328 290
356 Pascagoula, MS .096 312 343 327
357 Lake Charles, LA .086 313 322 358
358 Altoona, PA .084 320 325 349
359 Michigan City-La Porte, IN .071 339 353 317
360 Weirton-Steubenville, WV-OH .070 347 337 325
361 Florence-Muscle Shoals, AL .048 340 333 361
Source: See pages 401–403 for full detail on sources. Data analysis by Kevin Stolarick.

437NOTES
Notes to Preface to The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited
1. See http://blog.linkedin.com/2011/12/13/buzzwords-redux/.
2. Erick Schonfeld, “The Rise of the ‘Creative’ Class,” TechCrunch, December 14, 2011,
available online at http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/14/creative-class/.
3. Joseph Stiglitz, “The Book of Jobs,” Vanity Fair, January 2012.
4. See Kenneth Rogoﬀ and Carmen Reinhart, This Time Is Diﬀerent: Eight Centuries
of Financial Folly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); and my own The Great
Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity (New York:
Harper, 2010).
5. See, for example, Ronald Inglehart, “Post-Materialism in an Environment of Inse-
curity,” American Political Science Review 75 (4) (December 1981): 880–900.
6. Andrew Whitehead, “Eric Hobsbawm on 2011,” BBC World Service News, December
22, 2011, available online at www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16217726.
Notes to Chapter One
1. For a careful empirical comparison of technological change at the turn of the twentieth
century versus modern times, see Robert Gordon, “Does the New Economy Measure Upto the Great Inventions of the Past?” Working Paper No. 7833, National Bureau of Eco-nomic Research, Cambridge, MA, August 2000. His answer is a resounding no. The greatmajority of the technological inventions in the National Academy of Engineering’s “GreatestEngineering Accomplishments of the 20th Century” occurred prior to 1950. Only two ofthe top ten occurred after World War II (semiconductor electronics, number ﬁve; andcomputers, number eight), whereas the Internet ranked number thirteen in 2000.
2. Among the most popular works in this vein are: Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920); and Babbitt (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1922);
William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956);David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1950); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle
Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); John Kenneth Galbraith, The New
Industrial State (New York: Houghton-Miﬄin, 1967). Also see Anthony Sampson, Com-
pany Man: The Rise and Fall of Corporate Life (New York: Times Books, 1995).
3. Dean Keith Simonton, “Creativity: Cognitive, Developmental, Personal, and Social
Aspects,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 151–158; and his “Big-C Creativity in the Big
City,” in David Emanuel Andersson, Åke Emanuel Andersson, and Charlotta Mellander,eds. Handbook of Creative Cities (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), pp. 72–84.

438 NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO
4. There are many statements of the free agent view, but the most notable is Daniel
Pink, Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming
the Way We Live (New York: Warner Books, 2001).
5. Again there are many statements of this view, but for a contemporary one see Kevin
Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy: Ten Radical Strategies for a Connected World
(New York: Viking, 1998).
6. Fiorina preceded me in speaking to the Annual Meeting of the National Governors
Association in Washington, DC, in winter 2000, where she made these remarks.
7. The classic statement here is that of Karl Marx in both Capital and The Communist
Manifesto, among his many other works.
8. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
Notes to Chapter Two
1. See Paul Romer, “Economic Growth,” in The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics,
David R. Henderson, ed. (New York: Time Warner Books, 1993), p. 9; “Ideas and Things,”Economist, September 11, 1993, p. 33; “Beyond the Knowledge Worker,” Worldlink
(January-February 1995), also available at his website. The classic statement is Romer,“Endogenous Technical Change,” Journal of Political Economy 98 (5) (1990): 71–102.
2. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and
Row, ﬁrst edition 1942, second [revised] edition 1947, third and ﬁnal author’s revision1950); quotes are from Harper Torchbooks edition of the latter, 1975, pp. 132–134.
3. Personal interview, summer 2000.4. See, for example, Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Hutchinson, 1964);
Margaret Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (New York: Basic Books,
1990); Robert J. Sternberg, ed., Handbook of Creativity (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1999); Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Carl R. Rogers, “Toward a Theory of Cre-ativity,” chap. 19 in his On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy
(Boston: Houghton Miﬄin, 1961); Douglas Hofstader, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal
Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Silvano Arieti, Creativity: The Magic Syn-
thesis (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
5. See Antonio Preti and Paolo Miotto, “The Contribution of Psychiatry to the Study
of Creativity: Implications for AI Research,” at http://cogprints.org/2026/, p. 2. Also seeF. Barron and D. M. Harrington, “Creativity, Intelligence and Personality,” Annual Reviewof Psychology 32 (1981): 439–476; D. W. McKinnon, “The Nature and Nurture of Creative
Talent,” American Psychologist 17 (1962): 484–494; M. Dellas and E. L. Gaier, “Identiﬁ-
cation of Creativity in Individuals,” Psychological Bulletin 73 (1970): 55–73.
6. See Boden, The Creative Mind; Arieti, Creativity: The Magic Synthesis ; and S. A.
Mednick, “The Associative Basis of the Creative Process,” Psychological Review 69 (1968):
220–232.
7. Boden, The Creative Mind , p. 255. Also see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientiﬁc
Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
8. Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Schumpeter initially advanced this distinctionin his article “The Creative Response in Economic History,” Journal of Economic History
7 (1947): 149–159.
9. Boden, The Creative Mind, p. 245.

10. Ibid., pp. 255–256.
11. Simonton, Origins of Genius. 12. As quoted in Boden, The Creative Mind, p. 254.
13. Boden, The Creative Mind, pp. 254–255.
14. Wesley Cohen and Daniel Levinthal, “Fortune Favors the Prepared Firm,” Man-
agement Science (February 1994): 227–251.
15. Anthony Storr, Churchill’s Black Dog, Kafka’s Mice: And Other Phenomena of the
Human Mind (New York: Grove Press, 1988), p. 103.
16. Teresa M. Amabile, Creativity in Context (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), p. 15.
Originally published as The Social Psychology of Creativity, 1983.
17. Cited in Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Tech-
nological Enthusiasm (New York: Viking, 1989), p. 29.
18. Simonton, Origins of Genius, pp. 206–212.
19. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches, p. 16; this warning is reprised in Epilogue, p. 301.20. Paul Romer, “Ideas and Things,” Economist, September 11, 1993, online version,
p. 2.
21. A comprehensive review of the new growth theory is presented in Joseph
Cortwright, “New Growth Theory, Technology and Learning: A Practitioner’s Guide toTheories for the Knowledge Based Economy,” report prepared for the US Economic De-velopment Administration, Washington, DC, 2000.
22. Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (New York: Random House, 2001).
23. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, entire text online at The Adam Smith
Institute, www.adamsmith.org.uk. Quote is from book 5, chap. 1, part 3, article II .
24. John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 2000).
25. William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1956).
26. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random
House, 1961).
27. Interview by James Kunstler, September 6, 2000, Toronto, Canada, for Metropolis
Magazine, March 2001. Available online at www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs1.htm.
28. Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society (New York: Harper Business, 1993), quote
from p. 8; also “Beyond the Information Revolution,” Atlantic Monthly 284 (4) (October
1999): 47–57; “The Next Society,” Economist, November 1, 2001 ( Economist Survey ),
pp. 1–20. Fritz Machlup is often credited with the term from his 1962 book, The Production
and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1962). There are many others who have written on the knowledge economy: see, for ex-ample: Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiroetaka Takeuchi, The Knowledge Creating Company: HowJapanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995); Alan Burton Jones , Knowledge Capitalism: Business, Work and Learning in
the New Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Steven Brint provides a com-
prehensive review of this entire ﬁeld in his article “Professionals and the KnowledgeEconomy: Rethinking the Theory of the Postindustrial Society,” Current Sociology 49 (1)
(July 2001): 101–132.
29. “The Creative Economy,” Business Week, special double issue: The 21st Century
Corporation, Business Week Online, August 28, 2000, pp. 1–5.
30. John Howkins, The Creative Economy (New York: Allen Lane, Penguin Press,
2001). There is also an interesting report, “The Creative Economy Initiative,” by the New439
NOTES NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

440 NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE
England Council, June 2000, that uses the term “Creative Economy.” But the New England
Council report limits its deﬁnition of the Creative Economy to artistic and cultural ﬁelds.
31. Others had written on the intellectual capital economy; see, for example, Thomas A.
Stewart, Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations (New York: Doubleday/
Currency, 1997); and Leif Edvinsson and Michael S. Malone, Intellectual Capital: Realizing
Your Company’s True Value by Knowing Its Hidden Brainpower (New York: Harper-
Collins, 1997).
32. There are many studies of the new role of knowledge and intelligence in the factory.
See, for example, Shoshana Zuboﬀ, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work
and Power (New York: Perseus Books, 1989); Dorothy Leonard-Barton, Wellsprings of
Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation (Boston: Harvard Business
School Press, 1995); James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos, The Machine That
Changed the World (New York: Rawson/Macmillan, 1990); Michael Dertouzos, Richard
Lester, and Robert Solow, Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1989); Richard Lester, The Productive Edge: How U.S. Industries Are Pointing
the Way to a New Era of Economic Growth (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).
33. On Japanese transplant factories, see Martin Kenney and Richard Florida, Beyond
Mass Production: The Japanese System and Its Transfer to the United States (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993). On environmental innovation, see Richard Florida andDerek Davison, “Gaining from Green: Environmental Management Systems Insideand Outside the Factory,” California Management Review 43 (3) (Spring 2001): 64–84;
and Richard Florida, “Lean and Green: The Move to Environmentally-Conscious Man-ufacturing,” California Management Review 39 (1) (Fall 1996): 80–105.
34. Field research visit and personal interviews by author.35. Zuboﬀ, In the Age of the Smart Machine; also see Joanne Gordon, “The Hands-on,
Logged-on Worker,” Forbes, October 30, 2000, pp. 136–142.
Notes to Chapter Three
1. See Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books,
1973); Peter Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity (New York: HarperCollins, 1969) and
Post-Capitalist Society (New York: Harper Business, 1995); Fritz Machlup, The Production
and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1962); Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 1990), Class Counts (Cambridge, En-
gland: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Class Crisis and the State (London: Verso,
paperback reissue, 1996).
2. Robert Reich, The Work of Nations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991).
3. Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Summit,
1983).
4. Steven Barley, The New World of Work (London: British North American Committee,
1996), p. 7.
5. Steven Brint, “Professionals and the Knowledge Economy: Rethinking the Theory
of the Postindustrial Society,” Current Sociology 49 (1) (July 2001): 101–132.
6. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
7. As quoted in Steve Shuklian, “Marx, Dewey, and the Instrumentalist Approach to
Political Economy,” Journal of Economic Issues (September 1995): 781–805.
8. Barley, The New World of Work.

9. Edward L. Glaeser, “Review of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class,” Re-
gional Science and Urban Economics 35 (5) (2005): 593–596.
10. The correlation is substantial, .77, as per analysis by Charlotta Mellander.
11. Kevin Stolarick and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, “Creativity and the Crisis: The Impact
of Creative Workers on Regional Unemployment,” Cities: The International Journal of
Urban Policy and Planning, forthcoming 2012.
12. Ken Robinson, The Element (London: Penguin Books, 2009).
13. Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, “Inside the Black Box
of Regional Development—Human Capital, the Creative Class and Tolerance,” Journal
of Economic Geography 8 (5) (2008): 615–649.
14. Todd Gabe, “The Value of Creativity,” in David Emanuel Andersson, Åke Emanuel
Andersson, and Charlotta Mellander, eds ., Handbook of Creative Cities (Cheltenham,
UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), pp. 128–145.
15. David McGranahan and Timothy Wojan, “Recasting the Creative Class to Examine
Growth Processes in Rural and Urban Counties,” Regional Studies 41 (2) (2007): 197–216.
16. With the extremely signiﬁcant caveat that they excluded health, education, and to
a certain extent law from their measure, reducing the size of the Creative Class by some40 percent.
17. Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
(New York: Penguin, 2009), p. 51.
18. See Kristina Bartsch, “The Employment Projections for 2008–2018,” Monthly Labor
Review (November 2009): 3–10. 2012 projections for “The 30 Occupations with the Fastest
Projected Employment Growth 2010– 2020” at www.bls.gov/news.release/ecopro.t07.htm.
19. Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America (New York:
Henry Holt, 2001, 2011).
20. Service Class workers averaged $30,597 in salary and wages in 2010, 41 percent of
Creative Class wages and salaries.
21. See Hanna Rosin, “The End of Men,” Atlantic (July–August 2010), and online at
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/; and CatherineRampell, “The Mancession,” New York Times, Economix Blog, August 10, 2009, and
online at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/the-mancession/.
22. See Todd Gabe, Richard Florida, and Charlotta Mellander, “The Creative Class
and the Crisis,” Martin Prosperity Institute Research Paper, September 2011.
23. Stolarick and Currid-Halkett, “Creativity and the Crisis.”24. Scott Timberg, “The Creative Class Is a Lie,” Salon, at http://entertainment.salon
.com/2011/10/01/creative_class_is_a_lie/?source=newsletter.
25. See Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Karen King, “The Rise of Women
in the Creative Class, ” University of Toronto, Martin Prosperity Institute Research Report,
October 2011, online at www.martinprosperity.org/research-and-publications/publication/women-in-the-creative-class. Also, “The Gender Wage Gap: 2009,” Institute for Women’sPolicy Research, 2009, online at www.iwpr.org/pdf/C350.pdf.
26. The gap is the smallest for Education ($8,700), Arts, Design, Media, Entertainment,
and Sports ($9,400), and Life, Physical, and Social Science ($9,800), and the biggest forManagement ($23,400), Law ($24,300), and Health Care ($26,600), the latter a sectorwhere 75 percent of the employees are women.
27. See Ronald Inglehart, “Globalization and Postmodern Values,” Washington Quar-
terly 23 (1) (Winter 2000): 215–228; The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political
Styles in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977);441
NOTES NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

442 NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR
Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990);
Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic and Political Change in Forty-
Three Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and “Culture and Democ-
racy,” in Lawrence Harrison and Samuel Huntington, eds., Culture Matters: How Values
Shape Human Progress (New York: Basic Books, 2000), pp. 80–97.
28. I discuss this in my book, The Flight of the Creative Class (New York: Harper, 2007).
29. See, Charlotta Mellander, Richard Florida, and Jason Rentfrow, “The Creative
Class, Post-Industrialism and the Happiness of Nations,” Cambridge Journal of Regions,Economy and Society (April 2011), and online at http://cjres.oxfordjournals.org/
content/early/2011/04/05/cjres.rsr006.abstract.
30. Inglehart, “Globalization and Postmodern Values,” p. 225.31. Inglehart, “Culture and Democracy,” p. 84.
Notes to Chapter Four
1. Todd Gabe, “The Value of Creativity,” in David Emanuel Andersson, Åke Emanuel
Andersson, and Charlotta Mellander, eds .,Handbook of Creative Cities (Cheltenham,
UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), pp. 128–145.
2. Noreen Malone, “The Kids Are Actually Sort of All Right,” New York, October 16,
2011.
3. William C. Taylor, “Eric Raymond on Work,” Fast Company (November 1999),
p. 200. Also see Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open
Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly and Associates, 1999).
4. Peter Drucker, “Beyond the Information Revolution,” Atlantic Monthly 284, October
4, 1999, pp. 47–57, quote from p. 57.
5. Information Week, Annual Salary Survey, 2000 and 2001.
6. Personal interview by author, summer 2000.7. Personal interview by author, winter 2000.8. Personal interview by author, spring 2000.9. See Richard Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New
York: Routledge, 2006).
10. Laurie Levesque, “Creating New Roles: Understanding Employee Behavior in High
Tech Start-Ups,” Academy of Management, Washington, DC, August 2001; and “A Qual-itative Study of Organizational Roles in High Tech Start-Up Firms,” Academy of Man-agement, Toronto, 2000.
11. See Robert Merton, “Priorities in Scientiﬁc Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology
of Science,” American Sociological Review 22 (6) (1957): 635–659; and The Sociology of
Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
12. See Partha Dasgupta and Paul David, “Information Disclosure and the Economics
of Science and Technology,” in G. Feiwel, ed., Arrow and the Ascent of Modern Economic
Theory (New York: New York University Press, 1987); and “Toward a New Economics of
Science,” Research Policy 23 (3) (May 1994): 487–521. Also see Paula Stephan, “The Eco-
nomics of Science,” Journal of Economic Literature 34 (1996): 1199–1235.
13. Scott Stern, “Do Scientists Pay to Be Scientists?” Management Science 50 (6) (June
2004): 835–853.
14. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.15. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York:
Harper, 1990).

443 NOTES NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE
16. Nick Paumgarten, “There and Back Again,” New Yorker, April 16, 2007.
17. Tom Rath and Jim Harter, Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements (Washington,
DC: Gallup, 2010).
18. Published results of Information Week salary survey for insurance professionals can
be found here: www.4shared.com/get/i685EGSa/Information_Week_2010_Salary_S.html.
19. Robert Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Notes to Chapter Five
1. Personal interviews and communication by author, 2000–2001.
2. Richard Florida and Martin Kenney, The Breakthrough Illusion (New York: Basic
Books, 1990).
3. US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employee Tenure 2010, Sep-
tember 14, 2010, available online at www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm.
4. “The End of the Job,” Fortune (cover story), September 19, 1994.
5. Alan Burton-Jones, Knowledge Capitalism: Business, Work and Learning in the New
Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 48.
6. Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are
Transforming the Way We Live (New York: Warner Books, 2001).
7. Sara Horowitz, “The Freelance Surge Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time,”
Atlantic Online, September 1, 2001, at www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/
the-freelance-surge-is-the-industrial-revolution-of-our-time/244229/.
8. Mickey Butts, “Let Freedom Ring,” review of Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation: The In-
dustry Standard, April 30, 2001, p. 77.
9. See Helen Jarvis and Andy C. Pratt, “Bringing It All Back Home: The Extensiﬁcation
and ‘Overﬂowing’ of Work: The Case of San Francisco’s New Media Households,” Geo-
forum 37: 331–339.
10. Ross Perlin, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the New Econ-
omy (London: Verso, 2011).
11. William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956).
12. Denise Rousseau, “The Idiosyncratic Deal: Flexibility Versus Fairness?” Organi-
zational Dynamics 29 (4) (Spring 2001): 260–273; “The Boundaryless Human Resource
Function: Building Agency and Community in the New Economic Era,” Organizational
Dynamics 27 (4) (Spring 1999): 6–18; and Idiosyncratic Employment Arrangements: When
Workers Bargain for Themselves (Armonk, NY: W. E. Sharpe, 2002).
13. Rosemary Batt, Susan Christopherson, Ned Rightor, and Danielle Van Jaarsveld,
Net Working: Work Patterns and Workforce Policies for the New Media Industry (Wash-
ington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 2001).
14. Jeﬀrey Pfeﬀer, as cited in a review of Pink’s book, “Not Holding a Job Is the New
Work System,” New York Times, May 27, 2001. Also see Pfeﬀer, “Fighting the War for
Talent Is Hazardous to Your Organization’s Health,” Organizational Dynamics 29 (4)
(Spring 2001): 248–259.
15. Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the
Dawn of the Post-Market Era (New York: Putnam, 1995); Stanley Aronowitz and
Wil DeFazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1994). The Jobless Future was updated and reissued by the
University of Minnesota Press in 2010.

444 NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX
16. Jill Andresky Fraser, White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its
Rewards in Corporate America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
17. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work
in the New Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
18. Gideon Kunda, Stephen R. Barley, and James A. Evans, “Why Do Contractors
Contract? The Experience of Highly Skilled Technical Professionals in a Contingent Labor
Market,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 2001.
19. Stephen Barley, The New World of Work (London: British North American Com-
mittee, 1996). Lawrence Friedman argues that virtually all major economic and socialinstitutions are moving to a horizontal structure; see his The Horizontal Society (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
20. Joanne Ciulla, The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work (New
York: Times Books, 2000), p. 230.
21. Batt et al., Net Working.22. Job Satisfaction Survey, conducted by Lucent Technologies, February 2001, on
p. 262 “network professionals,” at www.lucentservices.com/knowledge/surveys/01jobs/.
23. Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
(New York: Holt, 2005).
24. Sara Horowitz, Atlantic Online, September 1, 2001, “The Freelance Surge Is the
Industrial Revolution of Our Time,” at www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/the-freelance-surge-is-the-industrial-revolution-of-our-time/244229/.
Notes to Chapter Six
1. “Geek Chic,” Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2000.
2. See, for example, Scott Omellanuk, “Survival Strategies for the Casual Oﬃce,” Wall
Street Journal, June 23, 2000.
3. Stephanie Armour, “Companies Rethink Casual Clothes,” USA Today, June 27, 2000.
4. Personal communication, winter 2001.5. These ﬁgures are drawn from Lonnie Golden, “Flexible Work Schedules: What Are
We Trading Oﬀ to Get Them?” Monthly Labor Review (March 2001): 50–67.
6. Terrence McMenamin, “A Time to Work: Recent Trends in Shift Work and Flexible
Schedules,” Monthly Labor Review (December 2007): 3–15, at www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/
2007/12/art1full.pdf.
7. See Phillip Rones, Randy Ilg, and Jennifer Gardner, “Trends in Hours of Work Since
the Mid-1970s,” Monthly Labor Review (April 1997): 3–14.
8. Allison Arieﬀ, “It’s Not About the Furniture: Cubicles, Continued,” New York Times,
Opinionator Blog, August 22, 2011, at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/its-not-about-the-furniture-cubicles-continued/.
9. Deborah Schoeneman, “Can Google Come Out to Play?” New York Times, December
31, 2006.
10. See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random
House, 1961); quote is from the Modern Library Edition, p. 245.
11. Thomas Allen, Managing the Flow of Technology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977).
12. See Claudia Deutsch, “New Economy: IBM and Steelcase Lay Out Their Vision of
the Oﬃce of the Future,” New York Times, January 14, 2001.
13. See Malcolm Gladwell, “Designs for Working: Why Your Bosses Want to Turn
Your Oﬃce into Greenwich Village,” New Yorker, December 8, 2000, pp. 60–70; quotes

445 NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVEN
are from pp. 62, 64–65. Also see Jeﬀrey Huang, “Future Space: A New Blueprint for Busi-
ness Architecture,” Harvard Business Review (April 2001): 149–157.
14. “John Seely Brown Interview,” by Michael Schrage, Wired, August 2000. Also see
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Busi-
ness School Press, 2001).
15. William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1956), p. 446.
16. See Richard Florida, “Science, Reputation and Organization,” Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, PA, unpublished working paper, January 2000. Scott Stern, “DoScientists Pay to Be Scientists?” Management Science 50 (6) (June 2004): 835–853; Michelle
Gittelman and Bruce Kogut, “Does Good Science Lead to Valuable Knowledge? Biotech-nology Firms and the Evolutionary Logic of Citation Patterns,” Management Science 49
(4) (2003): 366–382.
17. Richard Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New
York: Routledge, 2006).
18. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home
Becomes Work (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).
19. Lydia Saad, “American Workers Generally Satisﬁed, but Indicate Their Jobs Leave
Much to Be Desired,” Gallup News Service, September 3, 1999, at www.gallup.com/poll
/releases/pr990903.asp.
20. The Towers Perrin Talent Report: New Realities in Today’s Workplace. New York:
Towers Perrin, 2001.
21. See Peter Drucker, “Management’s New Paradigm,” Forbes 7, October 5, 1998, pp.
152–177.
22. Michelle Conlin, “Job Security, No. Tall Latte, Yes,” Business Week, April 2, 2001,
p. 63.
23. See Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger, The Clue-
train Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual (Cambridge: Perseus Books, 2000).
24. As quoted in Christine Canabou, “The Sun Sets on the Bohemian Workplace,” Fast
Company, August 2001, at www.fastcompany.com/learning/bookshelf/ross.html, p. 3.
25. Personal interviews by and communication with the author, 1999–2000.26. Quote from “Danger: Toxic Company,” Fast Company, November 19, 1998,
p. 152; but also see Jeﬀrey Pfeﬀer, The Human Equation: Building Proﬁts by Putting PeopleFirst (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998).
27. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, “Do Happier People Work Harder?” New
York Times, September 3, 2011.
Notes to Chapter Seven
1. The classic statements are E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial
Capitalism,” Past and Present 88 (1967); David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and
the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Sebastian
De Grazia, Of Time, Work and Leisure (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962). Also
see Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discoveryof Geological Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Stephen Hawking, A
Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1988);
Robert Levine, A Geography of Time (New York: Basic Books, 1997); J. David Lewis and
Andrew Wiegert, “The Structure and Meanings of Social Time,” Social Forces 60 (2) (De-

446 NOTES TO CHAPTER EIGHT
cember 1981); Frank Dubinskas, ed., Making Time: Ethnographies of High-Tech Organi-
zations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). Joanne Ciulla, The Working Life:
The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work (New York: Times Books, 2000), provides a
very good overview of these concepts.
2. John Robinson and Geoﬀrey Godbey, Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans
Use Their Time, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press), 1997.
3. Ibid., chap. 16, “Perceptions of Time Pressure,” pp. 229–240.
4. Ibid., p. xvi.
5. July 20, 2011, “In US, 3 in 10 Working Adults Are Strapped for Time,” at www
.gallup.com/poll/148583/Working-Adults-Strapped-Time.aspx?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=syndication&utm_content=morelink&utm_term=Wellbeing.
6. Paul Romer, “Time: It Really Is Money,” Information Week, September 11, 2001;
found at www.informationweek.com/803/romer.htm, May 2001. The classic economicperspective on time is Gary Becker, “A Theory of the Allocation of Time,” Economic Jour-
nal(75) (1965): 493–517. Also see Stephan Linder, The Harried Leisure Class (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1970).
7. US Census Bureau, “Median Age at First Marriage, 1890–2010,” at www.infoplease
.com/ipa/A0005061.html.
8. “Barely Half of US Adults Are Married—a Record Trend,” Pew Research Center,
Social and Demographic Trends, December 12, 2011, www.pewsocialtrends.org/ﬁles/2011/12/marriage-decline-ﬁnal.pdf.
9. Robinson and Godbey, Time for Life, p. 44.
Notes to Chapter Eight
1. Janelle Brown, “A Poster Child for Internet Idiocy,” Salon.com, August 1, 2001, at
www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/08/01/dotcomguy/print.html.
2. Joseph Pine III and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre
and Every Business a Stage (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999), pp. 2, 11.
3. Carl Rogers, “Toward a Theory of Creativity,” in On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s
View of Psychotherapy (Boston: Houghton Miﬄin, 1961), pp. 352–354.
4. Andy Sheehan, Chasing the Hawk (New York: Delacorte, 2001).
5. Cited in Joan Raymond, “Happy Trails: America’s Aﬃnity for the Great Outdoors,”
American Demographics (August 2000): 1–4.
6. US Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, at
www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=74&Freq=Year&FirstYear=2009&LastYear=2010.
7. Bear Stearns, America at Leisure, p. 33; 2009 statistic from IHRSA Press Release, at
www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-health-club-industry-records-solid-performance-in-2009–89599167.html.
8. Kris Hudson, “Gyms Working Out for Landlords,” Wall Street Journal, September
7, 2011.
9. John Robinson and Geoﬀrey Godbey, Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans
Use Time, 2nd ed. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
10. The Lifestyle Market Analyst is compiled by Equifax and based on the responses to
15.3 million consumer-information questionnaires that are weighted and stratiﬁed, basedon demographic information from the US Census and Claritas. It rates activities for various

447 NOTES TO CHAPTER NINE
demographic and income groups, as well as geographic regions, based on a Lifestyle Index:
an index value of 100 is the national average, thus an index value over 100 exceeds the na-tional average, whereas a value less than 100 is below the national average.
11. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Spotlight on Statistics: Sports and Exercise, May 2008,
at www.bls.gov/spotlight/2008/sports/.
12. Personal interviews by author, winter 2000.13. Personal interview by author, spring 2000.14. Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Sum-
mit, 1983, p. 115).
15. The American Fitness Index was developed by the American College of Sports
Medicine to gauge the relative ﬁtness of America’s ﬁfty largest metros, based on datafrom the US Census, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral RiskFactor Surveillance System (BRFSS), and The Trust for Public Land City Park Facts,among other sources. The AFI takes both personal health indicators (statistics on speciﬁcdiseases, obesity, smoking levels, etc.) and community and environmental factors (healthcare access, community resources that promote ﬁtness, etc.) into account. “The AmericanFitness Index, 2011,” at www.americanﬁtnessindex.org/docs/reports/2011_aﬁ_report_ﬁnal.pdf.
16. Mark Banks, “Fit and Working Again? The Instrumental Leisure of the Creative
Class,” Journal of Environment and Planning (2009), p. 668–681. Also see Richard Lloyd,
Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006).
17. Shirley S. Wang, “Coﬀee Break? Walk in the Park? Why Unwinding Is Hard,” Wall
Street Journal, August 31, 2011.
18. David Byrne, Bicycle Diaries (New York: Viking, 2009), p. 2.
19. There is a large literature on street scenes, but see, for example, Nicholas Fyfe, ed.,
Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space (New York: Routledge,
1998); Tracy Skelton and Gil Valentine, eds., Cool Spaces: Geographies of Youth Cultures(New York: Routledge, 1998). Also see Janine Lopiano-Misdom and Joanne De Luca,Street Trends: How Today’s Alternative Youth Cultures Are Creating Tomorrow’s Main-stream Markets (New York: HarperBusiness, 1997).
20. Ben Malbon, Clubbing: Dancing, Ecstasy, Vitality (Critical Geographies) (New York:
Routledge, 1999), p. 174.
21. Joseph Yi and Daniel Silver, “God, Yoga and Karate: Local Amenities and Pathways
to Diversity,” University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management, Martin Prosperity
Institute Working Paper Series, 2011. Available at: http://research.martinprosperity.org/2012/01/god-yoga-and-karate/.
22. See Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism,
and the End of Economic Development (New York: Doubleday, 2001); and The Conquest
of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997).
23. Malbon, Clubbing, p. 55.
24. Kara Swisher, “How Kitchen Fixes Can Add Up Fast,” Wall Street Journal, August
7, 2001.
Notes to Chapter Nine
1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge,
1992 [orig. 1921]).

448 NOTES TO CHAPTER NINE
2. See, for instance, Romans 13: “Let every person be subject to the governing author-
ities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been
instituted by God,” etc.; or Titus 2 and 3, in which slaves must give their masters “satis-faction in every respect” and “show complete and perfect ﬁdelity,” while all are “subjectto rulers” and “ready for every good work.” Quotes from the Holy Bible, New RevisedStandard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990), New Testament, pp. 162, 214–215.
3. Cesar Graña, Bohemian Versus Bourgeois (New York: Basic Books, 1964), also ex-
panded and reissued as Modernity and Its Discontents: French Society and the French
Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967).
4. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1971); Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks: Selections, ed. and trans.
Quintin Hoare (New York: Geoﬀrey N. Smith International Publishers Company, 1971).
5. Graña, Modernity and Its Discontents, p. 169.
6. Graña, of course, has Paris covered. On Greenwich Village, see Carolyn Ware’s
classic study, Greenwich Village, 1920–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1963 [orig. 1935]).
7. Graña, Modernity and Its Discontents, p. 208.
8. Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (New York: Basic Books, 1973).
9. Ibid., p. 13.10. The classic source work on narcissism in our society remains Christopher Lasch,
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
11. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976),
pp. xxiv–xxv. Italics in the original.
12. Ibid., pp. 21–22.13. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
14. Quote is from the dust jacket of Bobos in Paradise.
15. David Brooks, “The Organization Kid,” Atlantic 287 (4) (April 2001): 40–54.
16. Ibid., p. 54.17. For a full-scale conservative appraisal of the sixties, see Roger Kimball, The Long March:
How the Culture Revolution Changed America (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000).
18. There is a huge literature on subcultures; see, for instance, Dick Hebidge, Subculture:
The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979); Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton, eds.,
The Subcultures Reader (London: Routledge, 1997).
19. Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism,
and the End of Economic Development (New York: Doubleday, 2001); and The Conquest
of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997). Also see Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of
America (New York: Eagle Brook/William and Morrow, 1999).
20. See Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music (New
York: Penguin, 1975); Lipstick Traces; A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Double Trouble: Bill Clinton and Elvis Presley
in a Land of No Alternatives (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).
21. John Seabrook, Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture (New
York: Alfred Knopf, 2000).
22. On the Homebrew Club, see Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the Valley:
The Making of the Personal Computer (Berkeley: Osborne/McGraw Hill, 1984). Also see

449 NOTES TO CHAPTER TEN
John Markoﬀ, “A Strange Brew’s Buzz Lingers in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, March
26, 2000.
23. Personal interview by author and Martin Kenney, March 1987.
24. See Kevin Gray, “Paul Allen: Revenge of the Nerd,” Details (October 2000): 256–
263; Sam Howe Verhovek, “He’s Turning Seattle into His Kind of Town,” New York
Times (online version), May 17, 2000; Neil Strauss, “Making a Museum out of Music,”
New York Times, June 26, 2000.
25. From the Jimi Hendrix song “If 6 Was 9,” 1967.26. See Harvey Blume, “Geek Studies,” Atlantic Unbound, July 13, 2000, and “Two
Geeks on Their Way to Byzantium: An Interview with Richard Powers,” Atlantic Unbound,
June 28, 2000; Scott Stossel, “Soul of the New Economy,” Atlantic Unbound, June 8, 2000.
All available at www.theatlantic.com.
27. Jon Katz, Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho (New York:
Villard, 2000).
28. Visit and personal interview by author, fall 2001.
Notes to Chapter Ten
1. Adjusted for the costs of living diﬀerences, the average salary for an IT worker in
Austin was $65,310, compared to $47,173 in San Francisco in 2001 (based on salary datafrom the Information Week Salary Survey).
2. See Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2005). Also see Edward E. Leamer, “A Flat World, a Level Playing Field, a Small WorldAfter All or None of the Above? Review of Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat,” Jour-
nal of Economic Literature 45 (1) (2007): 83–126.
3. The original article is Frances Cairncross, “The Death of Distance,” Economist 336
(7934), September 30, 1995. She later published an inﬂuential book by the same title, The
Death of Distance (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001 [ﬁrst ed., 1997]). Also
see her “Conquest of Location,” Economist, October 7, 1999.
4. Richard Florida, “The World Is Spiky,” Atlantic (October 2005), and Who’s Your
City? How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decisionof Your Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
5. “Q&A with Michael Porter,” Business Week, August 21, 2006, at www.businessweek
.com/magazine/content/06_34/b3998460.htm.
6. Some classic statements include: Robert Park, E. Burgess, and R. McKenzie, The
City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925); Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of
Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), The Economy of Cities (New
York: Random House, 1969), and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (New York: Random
House, 1984); Wilbur Thompson, A Preface to Urban Economics (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1965); Edwin Ullman, “Regional Development and the Geo -graphy of Concentration,” Papers and Proceedings of the Regional Science Association4 (1958): 179–198.
7. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2006 [original
ed. 1890]).
8. The literature on agglomeration economies is vast, for a recent review see Maryann
Feldman, “Location and Innovation: The New Economic Geography of Innovation,Spillovers, and Agglomeration,” in Gordon Clark, Meric Gertler, and Maryann Feldman,eds., The Oxford Handbook of Economic Geography (New York: Oxford University Press,

450 NOTES TO CHAPTER TEN
2003), pp. 373–394; Adam Jaﬀe, “Real Eﬀects of Academic Research,” American Economic
Review 79 (5) (1989): 957–970; David Audretsch and Maryann Feldman, “R&D Spillovers
and the Geography of Innovation and Production,” American Economic Review 86 (3)
(1996): 630–640; David Audretsch, “Agglomeration and the Location of Innovative Ac-
tivity,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 14 (2) (1998): 18–30.
9. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Bantam, 2003 [ﬁrst ed., 1776]);
David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (New York: Cosimo Classics,
2006 [ﬁrst ed., 1817]).
10. Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.
11. As quoted in Bill Steigerwald, “City Views: Urban Studies Legend Jane Jacobs on
Gentriﬁcation, the New Urbanism, and Her Legacy,” Reason (June 2001). Retrieved Jan-
uary 9, 2012, from http://reason.com/archives/2001/06/01/city-views/singlepage.
12. Robert Lucas Jr., “On the Mechanics of Economic Development,” Journal of Mon-
etary Economics 22 (1988): 38–39.
13. Richard Florida and Scott Jackson, “Sonic City: The Evolving Economic Geography
of the Music Industry,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 29 (3) (2010): 310–321; Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, “From Music Scenes toMusic Clusters: The Economic Geography of Music in the U.S., 1970–2000,” Environment
and Planning A 42 (4) (2010): 785–804; Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and KevinStolarick, “Geographies of Scope: An Empirical Analysis of Entertainment, 1970–2000,”Journal of Economic Geography 1 (2011): 1–22.
14. Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City (New York: Penguin 2011).
15. See Robert Barro, “Economic Growth in a Cross Section of Countries,” Quarterly
Journal of Economics 106 (2) (1991): 407–443; and Determinants of Economic Growth: ACross-Country Empirical Study (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). See Edward Glaeser, “Are
Cities Dying?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 12 (1998): 139–160. The human capital
literature has grown large; other important contributions include: Glaeser, “The New Eco-nomics of Urban and Regional Growth,” in Clark, Gertler, and Feldman, eds., The OxfordHandbook of Economic Geography, pp. 83–98; James E. Rauch, “Productivity Gains from
Geographic Concentrations of Human Capital: Evidence from Cities,” Journal of Urban
Economics 34 (1993): 380–400; Curtis Simon, “Human Capital and Metropolitan Employ-
ment Growth,” Journal of Urban Economics 43 (1998): 223–243; Curtis Simon and ClarkNardinelli, “The Talk of the Town: Human Capital, Information and the Growth of EnglishCities, 1861–1961,” Explorations in Economic History 33 (3) (1996): 384–413. A compre-hensive review is provided by Vijay K. Mathur, “Human Capital-Based Strategy for RegionalEconomic Development,” Economic Development Quarterly 13 (3) (1999): 203–216.
16. Spencer Glendon, “Urban Life Cycles,” unpublished working paper, Department
of Economics, Harvard University, November 1998.
17. Geoﬀrey West, Luis Bettencourt, Jose Lobo, Dirk Helbing, and Christian Kuehnert,
“Growth, Innovation, Scaling and the Pace of Life in Cities,” Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 104 (17), April 24, 2007, pp. 7301–7306.
18. George Zipf, Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Eﬀort (New York:
Addison–Wesley, 1949). Later, the Nobel Prize–winner Herbert Simon elaborated onZipf’s early ﬁndings; see Herbert Simon, “On a Class of Skew Distribution Functions,”Biometrika 42 (1955): 425–440.
19. Masahisa Fujita, Paul Krugman, and Anthony J. Venables, The Spatial Economy:
Cities, Regions and International Trade (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 216–225.

451 NOTES TO CHAPTER ELEVEN
20. Robert Axtell and Richard Florida, “Emergent Cities: A Microeconomic Explana-
tion,” Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, April 2001.
21. Åke Andersson, “Creative People Need Creative Cities,” in David Emanuel An-
dersson, Åke Emanuel Andersson, and Charlotta Mellander, eds., Handbook of Creative
Cities (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), pp. 14–55. Also see Peter Hall, Cities in
Civilization (New York: Pantheon, 1998). Charles Landry, The Creative City: A Toolkit
for Urban Innovators (London: Earthscan, 2000).
22. See, for example, Peter J. Richerson, Peter J. Boyd, and Robert. L. Bettinger, “Cultural
Innovations and Demographic Change,” Human Biology 81 (2–3) (2009): 211–235;
Stephen Shennan, “Evolutionary Demography and the Population History of the European
Early Neolithic,” Human Biology 81 (2–3) (2009): 339–355.
23. Robert Park, E. Burgess, and R. McKenzie, The City (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1925). Quotes are from p. 40.
24. Carolyn Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920–1930 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1963 [orig. 1935]). Quotes are from pp. 5 and 37.
25. Dean Keith Simonton, “Big-C Creativity in the Big City,” in Andersson, Andersson,
and Mellander, eds., Handbook of Creative Cities, pp. 72–84.
Notes to Chapter Eleven
1. The correlations are as follows: Economic output per capita is positively associated
with business professionals (.61), technology and science (.56), and artistic occupations(.53), but negatively associated with meds and eds (–.31). Wages are similarly positivelyassociated with professionals (.64), science and technology (.53), and especially artisticoccupations (.71), but negatively associated with meds and eds (–.12). The patternholds as well for income: it is similarly positively associated with professionals (.59),science and technology (.54), and artistic occupations (.53), and negatively with medsand eds (–.28). See Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, “Insidethe Black Box of Regional Development,” Journal of Economic Geography 8 (2008):
615–649.
2. Todd Gabe and Jason Abel, “Agglomeration of Knowledge,” Urban Studies 48 (7)
(2011): 1353–1371.
3. Todd Gabe, “The Value of Creativity,” in David Emanuel Andersson, Åke Emanuel
Andersson, and Charlotta Mellander, eds., Handbook of Creative Cities (Cheltenham,
UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), pp.128–145.
4. Available at www.onetonline.org/.5. See, for example, Peter Drucker, Post-Capitalist Society (New York: HarperCollins,
1993); Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting(New York: Basic Books, 1973); Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve:
Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994); Robert
Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).
6. I summarize this line of research in: “Where the Skills Are,” Atlantic (October
2011), at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/where-the-skills-are/8628/,and “Rise of the Social City,” TheAtlanticCities.com, September 15, 2011, at www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2011/09/rise-social-city/140/. See also MarigeeBacolod, Bernardo Blum, and William Strange, “Skills in the City,” Journal of Urban

452 NOTES TO CHAPTER TWELVE
Economics 65 (2009): 136–153; Allen J. Scott, “Human Capital Resources and Require-
ments Across the Metropolitan Hierarchy of the USA,” Journal of Economic Geography
9 (2009): 207–226; Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, Kevin Stolarick, Adrienne
Ross, “Cities, Skills, and Wages,” Journal of Economic Geography (May 2011), at http://
joeg.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/07/13/jeg.lbr017.short?rss=1&ssource=mfr.
7. The correlation coeﬃcient between Creative Class and Working Class metros was
–0.52 in the original edition. It increased to –.59 in 2010.
Notes to Chapter Twelve
1. See Joseph Schumpeter, “The Process of Creative Destruction,” chap. 7 in Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942), pp. 81–86. Schumpeter,
The Theory of Economic Development, trans. R. Opie (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1934); Robert Solow, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” Quar-terly Journal of Economics 70 (1956): 65–94.
2. The correlations for the Creative Class are as follows: Tech-Pole (.46), patents per
capita (.56), patent growth (.35), and the overall Technology Index (.65); for the WorkingClass they are: Tech-Pole (–.23), patents per capita (–.26), patent growth (–.22), and theoverall Technology Index (–.36).
3. See Richard Florida, “The New Geography of American Innovation,” TheAtlantic
.com, July 16, 2009, at www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2009/07/the-new-geography-of-american-innovation/20574/.
4. John M. Quigley, “Urban Diversity and Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic
Perspectives 12 (2) (Spring 1998): 127–138.
5. See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random
House, 1961), The Economy of Citie s (New York: Random House, 1969), and Cities and
the Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House, 1984). Also see Åke Andersson, “Cre-
ativity and Regional Development,” Papers of the Regional Science Association 56 (1985):
5–20; Pierre Desrochers, “Local Diversity, Human Creativity, and Technological Inno-vation,” Growth and Change 32 (2001): 369–394.
6. See Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shifts in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1989) and Modernization and Post-Modernization (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997). Inglehart and Wayne Baker, “Modernization, Cultural Changeand the Persistence of Traditional Values,” American Sociological Review 65 (2000): 19–
51. Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change Aroundthe World (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Inglehart and
Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy: The Human Develop-ment Sequence (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
7. Scott Page, The Diﬀerence: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms,
Schools, and Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
8. Matthew Hall, Audrey Singer, Gordon F. De Jong, and Deborah Roempke Graefe,
“The Geography of Immigrant Skills,” Brookings Institution, June 2011.
9. Giovanni Peri, “Immigration and Cities,” Vox.eu, November 20, 2007, at
http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/734. Also Gianmarco Ottaviano and GiovanniPeri, “The Eﬀects of Immigration on U.S. Wages and Rents: A General Equilibrium Ap-proach,” CEPR Discussion Paper No. 6551, 2007; “The Economic Value of Cultural Di-versity: Evidence from U.S. Cities,” Journal of Economic Geography 6 (1) (2006): 9–44;
and “Cities and Cultures,” Journal of Urban Economics 58 (2) (2005): 304–307.

453 NOTES TO CHAPTER TWELVE
10. Daniel Black, Gary Gates, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor, “Demographics of the
Gay and Lesbian Population in the United States: Evidence from Available Systematic
Data Sources,” Demography 37 (2) (May 2000): 139–154.
11. The data measure only individuals in same-sex unmarried partner relationships
and do not include those not in such partnerships. In addition, Black et al. note that the1990 data captured just 35 percent of all gay and lesbian partnerships. See ibid.
12. The Pearson correlation between the 1990 Gay Index and the High-Tech Index
was 0.57, and 0.48 using the 2000 Gay Index. Both are signiﬁcant at the 0.001 level. ThePearson correlation between the 1990 Gay Index and technological growth was 0.17, and.16 with the 2000 Gay Index. Again, both are signiﬁcant at the 0.001 level.
13. The growth index measures change in high-tech output within metropolitan areas
from 1990 to 1998, relative to national change in output during the same period.
14. The correlation between the Gay Index and Creative Class regions was 0.40 in 1990
and 0.27 in 2000 (both signiﬁcant), whereas the correlation between Working Classcenters and the Gay Index was–0.30 in 1990 and–0.26 in 2000.
15. Bill Bishop, “Technology and Tolerance: Austin Hallmarks,” Austin American-
Statesman, June 25, 2000.
16. Terry Clark, “Urban Amenities: Lakes, Opera and Juice Bars: Do They Drive De-
velopment?” in The City as an Entertainment Machine, vol. 9 of Research in Urban Policy
(Oxford: Elsevier, 2003), pp. 103–140.
17. Paul Gottlieb, “Amenity-Oriented Firm Location,” unpublished doctoral dissertation,
Princeton University, The Woodrow Wilson School, January 1994; “Residential Amenities,Firm Location and Economic Development,” Urban Studies 32 (1995), pp. 1413–1436.
18. Dora Costa and Matthew E. Kahn, “Power Couples: Changes in the Locational
Choice of the College Educated, 1940–1990,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 115 (4)
(2000): 1287–1315.
19. Edward L. Glaeser, Jed Kolko, and Albert Saiz, “Consumer City,” Journal of Eco-
nomic Geography 1 (2001): 27–50.
20. “The Geography of Cool,” Economist, April 15, 2000.
21. The correlations for the Bohemian Index are as follows: high-tech industry (0.38),
with population growth (0.28) and with employment growth (0.23). All are signiﬁcantat the 0.001 level.
22. Alone, the Bohemian Index explained nearly 38 percent of the variation in high-
tech concentration. Together, the Bohemian Index and the Talent Index account fornearly 60 percent of the high-tech concentration measure.
23. Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander, “There Goes the Metro: How and Why
Artists, Bohemians and Gays Aﬀect Housing Values,” Journal of Economic Geography
10 (2) (2010): 167–188.
24. Jennifer Roback, “Wages, Rents, and the Quality of Life,” Journal of Political Econ-
omy 90 (6) (1982): 1257–1278.
25. See Glaeser, Kolko, and Saiz, “Consumer City,” pp. 27–50.26. Maya Roney, “Bohemian Today, High Rent Tomorrow,” Business Week, February
26, 2007, at www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnﬂash/content/feb2007/db20070226_149427.htm.
27. Florida and Mellander, “There Goes the Metro,” pp. 167–188.28. One question raised by this strong connection between gays and high technology
is the extent to which gays and lesbians are overrepresented in the industry. If gays andlesbians make up large fractions of this industry, then it could be that the location of high-

454
technology ﬁrms brings about a larger concentration of gays in a region. To look at this,
Gates analyzed 1990 census data to assess the extent to which gays and lesbians are over-represented in some high-technology ﬁelds and industries. Gay men were about 1.3 timesmore likely to be scientists and engineers than the population in general. Lesbians wereas likely as the rest of the population to be in these occupations. Gay men and lesbianstogether were 1.2 times more likely than the population to be scientists and engineers.Although some of the correlation between gays and high technology might result fromtheir overrepresentation in the industry, it seems diﬃcult to explain how their overrep-resentation would predict growth. To do so would be to suggest that gays and lesbiansare somehow on the average more productive or entrepreneurial than their heterosexualcounterparts.
29. The correlation coeﬃcient between CDI and high-tech industry was 0.475. The
Spearman rank order correlation between the Milken Tech-Pole and CDI was 0.63.
30. See Meric Gertler, Richard Florida, Gary Gates, and Tara Vinodrai, “Competing
on Creativity,” Report for the Ontario Ministry of Enterprise, Opportunity and Innovation,November 2002.
31. The correlations for the 2010 Tolerance Index are as follows: Tech-Pole (.48),
patents per capital (.31), the Creative Class (.42), income (.45), housing values (.62), andhappiness (.36). Conversely, it is negatively associated with the Working Class (–.46).
32. Jason Rentfrow,
“The Open City,” in David Emanuel Andersson, Åke Emanuel
Andersson, and Charlotta Mellander, eds ., Handbook of Creative Cities (Cheltenham,
UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), pp. 117–127.
33. Openness to experience was positively associated with the Creative Class (.20),
human capital (.29), the Bohemian Index (.25), high-tech industry (.31), immigrants(.43), and the Gay Index (.58), and negatively with the Working Class (–.31).
34. Rentfrow found openness to experience to be positively associated with college
grads (.29), post-college grads (.32), high-tech industry (.46), average income (.34), theBohemian Index (.27), percent foreign born (.43), and the Gay Index (.69). When he ranpartial correlations controlling for human capital, the correlations to high-tech industry(.36), percent foreign born (.39), and the Gay Index (.65) remained positive and signiﬁcant.
35. See Robert Cushing, “Creative Capital, Diversity and Urban Growth,” unpublished
manuscript, Austin, Texas, December 2001. My team and I collaborated a bit with Cushingon subsequent projects in the early 2000s.
36. Steven Malanga, “The Curse of the Creative Class,” City Journal (Winter 2004), at
www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_curse.html.
37. See Richard Florida, “The Great Creative Class Debate,” Next American City 5 (July
2004) and Flight of the Creative Class (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
38. On sun, skills, and sprawl, see Christopher Shea, “Road to Riches,” Boston Globe,
March 1, 2004. On temperature, see Glaeser, “Revenge of the Rustbelt,” New York Times,Economix blog, February 3, 2009, at http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/revenge-of-the-rust-belt/. But in a 2007 study he concludes diﬀerently noting that “itseems that the growth of the Sunbelt has little to do with the sun.” Glaeser and KristinaTobio, “The Rise of the Sunbelt,” NBER Working Paper No. 13071, 2007, at www.nber.org/papers/w13071.pdf.
39. Paul Gottlieb, Growth Without Growth: An Alternative Economic Development
Goal for Metropolitan Areas (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, February 2002),
at www.brookings.edu/reports/2002/02useconomics_gottlieb.aspx.NOTES TO CHAPTER TWELVE

455 NOTES TO CHAPTER THIRTEEN
40. Richard Florida, “The Metro Story: Growth Without Growth,” TheAtlantic.com,
April 5, 2011, at www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/04/the-metro-story-growth
-without-growth/73368/, and “The State Story: Growth Without Growth,” TheAtlantic.com, April 4, 2011, at www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/04/the-state-story-growth-without-growth/73367/.
41. See Richard Florida, “The Metro-covery and the Limits of Growth Without
Growth,” TheAtlanticCities.com, September 20, 2011, at www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2011/09/metro-covery-and-limits-growth-without-growth/168/.
42. David McGranahan and Timothy Wojan, “Recasting the Creative Class to Examine
Growth Processes in Rural and Urban Counties,” Regional Studies 41 (April 2007): 197–
216. They used O*NET data to reestimate the Creative Class and came up with a slightlynarrower deﬁnition, but as they note, it still remains quite highly correlated with my orig-inal deﬁnition.
43. Gerard Marlet and Clemens van Woerkens, “Skills and Creativity in a Cross-Section
of Dutch Cities,” Utrecht School of Economics, Tjalling C. Koopmans Research Institute,Discussion Paper Series 04–29, October 2004; published as, “The Dutch Creative Classand How It Fosters Urban Employment Growth,” Urban Studies 44 (13) (December
2007): 2605–2626.
Notes to Chapter Thirteen
1. Richard Florida, Flight of the Creative Class (New York: HarperCollins, 2005);
Richard Florida and Irene Tinagli, Europe in the Creative Age (London: Demos, 2004),
at www.demos.co.uk/publications/creativeeurope.
2. See Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, “The 2011 Global
Creativity Index,” University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management, Martin Pros-perity Institute, October 2011.
3. See the European Science Foundation project, “Technology, Talent and Tolerance
in European Cities: A Comparative Analysis.” The project was carried out over a three-year period, 2004–2006, and was coordinated by Björn T. Asheim, Lund University,Sweden, and supervised by Meric Gertler, University of Toronto (and also aﬃliated withthe University of Oslo). The national project leaders were Ron Boschma, Utrecht Uni-versity, the Netherlands; Phil Cooke, University of Cardiﬀ, Wales; Michael Fritsch, Tech-nical University Freiberg (now aﬃliated with Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena),Germany; Arne Isaksen, University of Agder, Norway; Mark Lorenzen, CopenhagenBusiness School, Denmark; and Markku Sotarauta, University of Tampere, Finland.Available online at: www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/running-programmes/ecrp/ecrp-scheme-2001–2004.html. Also, see the special section in Economic Geography 85
(4) (October 2009): 355–442. Data for French metros provided by Sébastien Chantelotof ESC Bretagne Brest University.
4. See Daniel Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic
Miracle (New York: Twelve, 2009).
5. See Richard Florida and Gary Gates, “Technology and Tolerance,” Brookings Review
20 (1) (2002): 32–36; Marcus Noland, “Popular Attitudes, Globalization and Risk,” In-
ternational Finance 8 (2) (2005): 199–229.
6. The GCI correlations are as follows: GDP per capita (.84), global competitiveness
(.79), global entrepreneurship (.81), happiness (.74), and inequality (–.43).

456 NOTES TO CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Notes to Chapter Fourteen
1. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). Also see Putnam, “The Prosperous Community:
Social Capital and Public Life,” American Prospect (Spring 1993): 35–42, and “The Strange
Disappearance of Civic America,” American Prospect (Winter 1996): 34–38.
2. See Mark Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1974); “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problemof Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91 (3) (November 1985): 481–510;“The Nature of Economic Relationships,” in Richard Swedberg, ed., Explorations in
Economic Sociology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1993), pp. 3–41; “A Theoretical
Agenda for Economic Sociology,” in Mauro Guillen, Randall Collins, Paula England, andMarshall Meyer, eds., New Directions in Sociology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation,
2002). Also see Peter Marsden and Karen Campbell, “Measuring Tie Strength,” Social
Forces 63 (2) (December 1984): 482–501.
3. See Brian Uzzi, “Social Structure and Competition in Interﬁrm Networks: The Par-
adox of Embeddedness,” Administrative Science Quarterly 42 (1997): 35–67, for an ex-
position of the ways that social ties aﬀect innovation and risk taking.
4. Their contributions are succinctly outlined in the classic article by Louis Wirth, “Ur-
banism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology 44 (July 1, 1938): 1–24.
5. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
6. Cesar Graña, Bohemian and Bourgeois (New York: Basic Books, 1964), pp. 135–
136; also expanded and reissued as Modernity and Its Discontents: French Society and the
French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967).
7. Ibid., p. 237.8. Carol Coletta and Joe Cortright, “The Young and the Restless in a Knowledge Econ-
omy,” CEOs for Cities, 2005 and 2011 update. Available online at www.ceosforcities.org/work/young_and_the_restless.
9. See Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark, “The City as an Entertainment Machine,”
in Kevin Fox Gotham, ed. , Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment: Research in
Urban Sociology, vol. 6 (Oxford: JAI Press/Elsevier, 2001), pp. 357–378.
10. Erica Coslor, “Work Hard, Play Hard: The Role of Nightlife in Creating Dynamic
Cities,” unpublished paper, Heinz School of Public Policy and Management, CarnegieMellon University, Pittsburgh, December 2001.
11. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears, “Social Isolation
in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades,” American Soci-
ological Review 71 (3) (June 2006): 353–375.
12. Ethan Watters, Urban Tribes: Are Friends the New Family? (New York: Bloomsbury
USA, 2004).
13. Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coﬀee Shops, Bars, Hair Salons and
Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community (New York: Marlowe and Company, 1989).
14. Richard Florida, “The Fourth Place,” Daily Beast, July 6, 2010, at www.thedaily
beast.com/articles/2010/07/06/starbucks-oﬀers-free-wi-ﬁ-and-the-fourth-place-for-work.html.
15. “The Singles Map,” National Geographic, February 2007.
16. Personal interview by author, spring 2001.

457 NOTES TO CHAPTER FIFTEEN
17. Bonnie Menes Kahn, Cosmopolitan Culture: The Gilt-Edged Dream of a Tolerant
City (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987).
18. Personal interview by author, winter 2001.
19. I am indebted to Lenn Kano, a former Carnegie Mellon student for this term.20. Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), p. 273, italics in original.
21. Richard Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). See also Elizabeth Currid, The Warhol Economy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
22. See Terry Nichols Clark, “Making Culture into Magic: How Can It Bring Tourists
and Residents?” International Review of Public Administration 12 (January 2007): 13–25.
Also see Terry Nichols Clark, Lawrence Rothﬁeld, and Daniel Silver, eds., Scenes (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 2007). Also see Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark, “The Cityas an Entertainment Machine,” Research in Urban Sociology: Critical Perspectives onUrban Redevelopment 6 (2001): 357–378.
23. Daniel Silver, Terry Nichols Clark, and Christopher Graziul, “Scenes, Innovation,
and Urban Development,” in David Emanuel Andersson, Åke Emanuel Andersson, andCharlotta Mellander, eds., Handbook of Creative Cities (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar,
2011), pp. 229–258.
24. Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society,
and Culture, vol. 1 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).
25. Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York: Knopf, 2006).
26. See the Knight Foundation’s “Soul of the Community” study, at http://www
.soulofthecommunity.org/.
27. “What Attaches People to Their Communities?” Gallup Organization and Knight
Foundation, at www.soulofthecommunity.org/. Also see Richard Florida, Charlotta Mel-lander, and Kevin Stolarick, “Beautiful Places, The Role of Perceived Aesthetic Beauty inCommunity Satisfaction,” Regional Studies 45 (1) (2011): 33–48; and Richard Florida,
Charlotta Mellander, and Kevin Stolarick, “Here to Stay: The Eﬀects of Community Sat-isfaction on the Decision to Stay,” Spatial Economic Analysis 6 (1) (2011): 5–24.
28. See Daniel Hamermesh, Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); also Daniel Hamermesh and Jeﬀ Biddle,“Beauty and the Labor Market,” American Economic Review 84 (5): 1174–1194.
Notes to Chapter Fifteen
1. Peter Loftus, “Location, Location, Location,” Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2001.
2. Joseph Cortright and Carol Coletta, The Young and the Restless in a Knowledge Econ-
omy, CEOsforCities.com, 2005 and 2011 Update. Available online at www.ceosfor
cities.org/work/young_and_the_restless.
3. Sam Roberts, “In Surge in Manhattan Toddlers, Rich White Families Lead Way,”
New York Times, March 23, 2007.
4. The Segmentation Company, a division of Yankelovich, “Attracting the Young
College-Educated to Cities,” CEOs for Cities, May 11, 2006, at www.ceosforcities.org/rethink/research/ﬁles/CEOs forCitiesAttractingYoungEducatedPres2006.pdf.
5. Gary Gates, “How Many People Are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender?” UCLA
Williams Institute, April 2011, at williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/census-lgbt-demographics-studies/how-many-people-are-lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-transgender/.

458
6. See Richard Florida, “The Role of the University: Leveraging Talent, Not Technology ,”
Issues in Science and Technology (Summer 1999), at www.issues.org/15.4/ﬂorida.htm.
Also, Richard Florida, Brian Knudsen, and Kevin Stolarick, “Education in the Creative
Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Innovation,” in Daniel Araya, ed., The
University and the Creative Economy (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 45–76.
7. See John Siegfried and Andrew Zimbalist, “The Economics of Sports Facilities and
Their Communities,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (3) (Summer 2000): 95–114.
8. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagﬂation, and
Social Rigidities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); The Logic of Collective Action:
Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971);
“Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Nations Are Rich, and Others Poor,” Journal
of Economic Perspectives 10 (2) (1996): 2–24; also see Jonathan Rauch, Demosclerosis: The
Silent Killer of American Government (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 1994).
9. From his forward to the Australian edition of this book.10. Paul Graham, “Why Startup Hubs Work,” October 2011, at http://paulgraham
.com/hubs.html.
11. Steven Malanga, “The Curse of the Creative Class,” City Journal (Winter 2004).
12. Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 29 (4) (December 2005): 740–770.
13. Alec MacGillis, “The Ruse of the Creative Class,” American Prospect (January 2010),
at http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=the_ruse_of_the_creative_class.
14. Richard Florida, “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” Atlantic (March 2009),
at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/how-the-crash-will-reshape-america/7293/.
15. Ryan Avent, “More on the Urban Economy,” Bellows, January 6, 2010. Available
online at www.ryanavent.com/blog/?p=2270.
16. Aaron Renn, Review: The Great Reset by Richard Florida, urbanophile.com, May
9, 2010, at www.urbanophile.com/2010/05/09/review-the-great-reset-by-richard-ﬂorida/.
17. MacGillis, “Ruse of the Creative Class.”18. Ryan Avent, “Understanding the Rise and Fall of Urban Economies,” Seeking Alpha ,
December 31, 2009, at http://seekingalpha.com/article/180466-understanding-the-rise-and-fall-of-urban-economies.
19. The State of the Cities 2000 (Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and
Urban Development, June 2000).
20. Paul Sommers and Daniel Carlson, “The New Society in Metropolitan Seattle: High
Tech Firm Location Decisions Within the Metropolitan Landscape,” Brookings Institution,Washington, DC, May 2000.
21. As quoted in Scott Kirsner, “Seattle Reboots Its Future,” Fast Company (May 2001),
p. 44.
22. Rebecca R. Sohmer and Robert E. Lang, “Downtown Rebound,” Fannie Mae Foun-
dation and Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy Center Note,Washington, DC, May 2001.
23. The Sohmer and Lang data set covers only a small sample of cities, and Gates and
I could only match twenty-one cities to our data. We ran the analyses for two measuresof downtown growth: percent change in downtown population and change in percentof the population living downtown. The correlation between the CDI and percent down-town population is 0.52 and for change in downtown share is 0.46. The Gay Index is cor-related with percent downtown population at 0.48 and change in downtown share atNOTES TO CHAPTER FIFTEEN

459
0.39. The Bohemian Index is correlated with percent downtown at 0.54 and change in
downtown share at 0.35. The Milken High-Tech Index is correlated with percent down-town at 0.50 and downtown share at 0.30. All are statistically signiﬁcant.
24. Willam Frey, “Texas Gains, Suburbs Lose in 2010 Census Preview,” Brookings In-
stitution, June 25, 2010, at www.brookings.edu/opinions/2010/0625_population_frey.aspx.
25. Ania Wieckowski, “Back to the City,” Harvard Business Review 88 (5): 23–25. Re-
trieved January 9, 2012, from http://hbr.org/2010/05/back-to-the-city/ar/1.
26. Paul Graham, “How to Be Silicon Valley,” May 26, 2006, at www.paulgraham
.com/siliconvalley.html.
27. Dominic Basulto, “Out of the Valley and Into the Alley,” Washington Post “Ideas
@Innovations,” September 21, 2011, at www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/post/out-of-the-valley-and-into-the-alley/2010/12/20/gIQAxusnjK_blog.html.
28. Emily Laremer, “New York Replaces Beantown as No. 2 Tech Hub,” Crain’s New
York, July 20, 2011, at www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20110720/FREE/110729992.
29. Al Barbarino, “Sizing Up That Dream to Surpass Silicon Valley,” Crain’s New
York Business, January 1, 2012, available at www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20120101/TECHNOLOGY/301019974.
30. Kyle Alspach, “Behind the City of Boston’s US Surge: 25 Notable Deals,” Boston
Business Journal, January 24, 2012, www.bizjournals.com/boston/blog/startups/2012/01/boston-venture-capital-startups-funding.html?ara=twt.
31. Carlo Coletta and Joe Cortright, “The Young and the Restless in a Knowledge Econ-
omy,” CEOs for Cities, 2001 Update, at www.ceosforcities.org/pageﬁles/Young_and_Restless_2011.pdf.
32. Richard Florida, “Why Crime Is Down in America’s Cities,” TheAtlantic.com, July 2,
2010, at www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/07/why-crime-is-down-in-americas-cities/240781/. Also see Elizabeth Kneebone and Steven Raphael, “City and SuburbanCrime Trends in Metropolitan America,” Brookings Institution, May 26, 2011, at www.brookings.edu/papers/2011/0526_metropolitan_crime_kneebone_raphael.aspx.
33. David Owen, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving
Less are the Keys to Sustainability (New York: Riverhead, 2009).
34. Edward Glaeser, “How Skyscrapers Can Save the City, Atlantic (March 2011), at
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/8387/1/.
35. Peter Gordon and Sanford Ikeda, “Does Density Matter?” in David Emanuel An-
dersson, Åke Emanuel Andersson, and Charlotta Mellander, eds . Handbook of Creative
Cities (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2011), pp. 435–455.
36. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random
House, 1989), p. 209.
37. Christopher Leinberger, “Footloose and Fancy Free: A Field Survey of Walkable
Urban Places in the Top 30 U.S. Metropolitan Areas,” The Brookings Institution, December4, 2007, at www.brookings.edu/papers/2007/1128_walkableurbanism_leinberger.aspx.
38. Joe Cortright, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Housing Values in
U.S. Cities,” CEOs for Cities, August 2009, at www.ceosforcities.org/work/walkingthewalk.
39. The correlations based on Walkscore.com’s Walkability Index are as follows: Cre-
ative Class (.5), Working Class (–.46), human capital (.44), high-tech industry (.57),average income (.66), Bohemian Index (.54), Gay Index (.51), housing prices (.63 ), andrents (.56).NOTES TO CHAPTER FIFTEEN

460
40. “Americans’ Attitudes Toward Walking and Creating Better Walking Communi-
ties,” Belden, Russonello, and Stewart, Research and Communications, April 2003, at
www.transact.org/library/reports_pdfs/pedpoll.pdf.
41. Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr, “The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in
Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008,” Brookings Institution, January 20, 2010, atwww.brookings.edu/papers/2010/0120_poverty_kneebone.aspx.
42. Diana Olick, “Are Bulldozers Now the Best Neighbor?” CNBC.com, May 5, 2009,
at www.cnbc.com/id/30580830/Are_Bulldozers_Now_The_Best_Neighbor.
43. David McGranahan and Timothy Wojan, “Recasting the Creative Class to Examine
Growth Processes in Rural and Urban Countries, Regional Studies 41 (2) (2007): 197–216.
44. Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, Retroﬁtting Suburbia, updated edition:
Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2011).
45. “Greyﬁeld Regional Mall Study,” PWC Global Strategic Real Estate Group for the
Congress of New Urbanism, January 2001, at www.cnu.org/sites/www.cnu.org/ﬁles/Greyﬁeld_Feb_01.pdf.
46. Paul Taylor and Rich Morin, “For Nearly Half of Americans, Grass Is Greener
Somewhere Else,” Pew Research Center, January 29, 2009, at http://pewsocialtrends.org/ﬁles/2010/10/Community-Satisfaction.pdf.
47. Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley, “A Small-Town or Metro Nation?” October 2,
2008, Brookings Institution, at www.brookings.edu/articles/2008/1008_smalltowns_katz.aspx.
48. Audrey Singer, Susan W. Hardwick, and Caroline B. Brettell, “Twenty-ﬁrst Century
Gateways: Immigrants in Suburban America,” Immigration Policy Institute, at www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/print.cfm?ID=680.
49. Richard Florida, Tim Gulden, and Charlotta Mellander, “The Rise of the Mega-
Region,” Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society 1 (3) (2008): 459–476, at
http://cjres.oxfordjournals.org/content/1/3/459.abstract.
50. This section draws from personal interviews conducted by the author between 1992
and 2001, particularly ongoing conversations with Mayor Kirk Watson and reporter BillBishop of the Austin American-Statesman. See Bob Walker’s story in the October 2000
issue of Money Magazine, pp. 109–114; and the insightful reporting of Bishop and his col-
leagues: Dylan Rivera and Bill Bishop, “High-Tech Companies Leading the Charge Down-town,” Austin American-Statesman, March 3, 2000; Bishop, “What Is Austin Becoming?”
Austin American–Statesman, May 9, 2000; Bishop, “Austin Wants to Be Austin: Austin
Doesn’t Want to Be Silicon Valley,” Austin American-Statesmen, February 26, 2000.
51. Kirk Ladendorf and Leah Quinn, “Vignette Seeks New Digs Because It Digs Down-
town,” Austin American-Statesman, August 29, 2000.
52. Available at www.jamesmcmurtry.com/blog.html.53. My discussion of Ireland draws heavily from conversations with Anita Sands, a
former Carnegie Mellon graduate student who is now my colleague in the Software Center.See Anita Sands, “Ireland and the 3Ts: Technology, Talent and Tolerance,” unpublishedpaper, December 2001, Carnegie Mellon, Heinz School of Public Policy and Management,Pittsburgh. Also see “From Backwater to Boomtown: Dublin Is a Magnet for Technologyand Young People,” New York Times, October 31, 2000.
54. Florence Williams, “Dublin: Now Fair and Worldly.” New York Times, October
12, 2000.
55. Paraphrase of Bono’s remarks comes from the evening panel discussion with Enda
Kenny, Eamon Gilmore, Bill Clinton, Loretta Brennan Glucksman, Declan Kelly, andNOTES TO CHAPTER FIFTEEN

461 NOTES TO CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Willie Walsh, at www.rte.ie/news/economicforum/video.html.
56. Leigh Gallagher, “Tony Hsieh’s New $350 Million Startup,” Fortune, January 23,
2012.
57. Venkatesh Rao, “Zappos and the Rise of Corporate Neo-Urbanism,” Forbes, October
26, 2011, at www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/2011/10/26/zappos-and-the-rise-of
-corporate-neo-urbanism/.
58. In March 2011, I was part of a team from the Creative Class Group that met with
Hsieh, Zappos management and employees, and Las Vegas government and businesspeople to discuss strategies for urban revitalization. Other leading urbanists and urbandesigners are also participating in this ambitious project.
59. Chris Briem, “Educational Attainment in the Pittsburgh Regional Workforce,” Pitts-
burgh Economic Quarterly (March 2010), at www.ucsur.pitt.edu/ﬁles/peq/peq_2010–03.pdf.
60. Howard Fineman, “What Pittsburgh (Don’t Laugh) Can Teach Obama,” Newsweek,
June 6, 2009.
61. William Frey, “The New Metro Minority Map: Regional Shifts in Hispanics, Asians,
and Blacks from Census 2010,” Brookings Institution, August 2011, at www.brookings.edu/papers/2011/0831_census_race_frey.aspx.
62. Bill Toland. “Watch Out Portland, Pittsburgh’s Lookin’ Hip,” Pittsburgh Post
Gazette, January 15, 2012. www.post-gazette.com/pg/12015/1203716-455.stm.
Notes to Chapter Sixteen
1. Evelyn Nieves, “Many in Silicon Valley Cannot Aﬀord Housing Even at $50,000 a
Year,” New York Times, February 20, 2000. Also see John Ritter, “Priced Out of Silicon
Valley,” USA Today, May 18, 2000; “The California Housing Market: Squeezed Out,”
Economist, July 22, 2000.
2. Nieves, “Many in Silicon Valley.”3. Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco
and the Crisis of American Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2000). On San Francisco’s history,
also see Richard Walker, “Landscape and City Life: Four Ecologies of Residence in theSan Francisco Bay Area,” Ecumene 2 (1) (1995): 33–64.
4. Alan Berube and Thatcher Tiﬀany, “The Shape of the Curve: Household Income
Distribution in U.S. Cities, 1979–1999,” Brookings Institution, August 2004.
5. Richard Florida, “Where the Brains Are,” Atlantic (October 2006), at www.the
atlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/10/where-the-brains-are/5202/.
6. Christopher Berry and Edward Glaeser, “The Divergence of Human Capital Levels
Across Cities,” Papers in Regional Science 84 (3) (2005): 407–444.
7. Joseph Stiglitz, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%,” Vanity Fair (May 2011), at www
.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105?currentPage=all&wpisrc=nl_wonk.
8. Remarks by the president on the economy, at Osawatomie, Kansas, December 6,
2011, available at www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-oﬃce/2011/12/06/remarks-president-economy-osawatomie-kansas.
9. The Metro Wage Inequality is based on a statistical technique called the Theil Index.10. The correlation between average overall wage and the average Creative Class wage
across US metros is a whopping .94, an almost perfect relationship. The correlations be-tween the average Creative Class wage and Working and Service Class wages are .6 and.8, respectively.

462 NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
11. See Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone, The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restruc-
turing and the Polarizing of America (New York: Basic Books, 1981).
12. See William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass,
and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
13. See Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing
Us Apart (Boston: Houghton-Miﬄin, 2008); Dante Chinni and James Gimpel, Patchwork
Nation: The Surprising Truth About the “Real America” (New York: Gotham, 2010).
14. Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Ronni Pavan, “Inequality and City Size,” April 2010,
available at www.econ.brown.edu/fac/nathaniel_baum-snow/ineq_citysize.pdf.
15. See Richard Florida, “The Geography of Inequality,” TheAtlanticCities.com, 2012;
Richard Florida, “What’s Behind the Geography of Inequality,” TheAtlanticCities.com,
2011; Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellender, “The Inequality of Cities: Diﬀerence andDeterminants of Wage and Income Inequality Across US Metros,” University of Toronto,Martin Prosperity Institute, January 2012.
16. The correlations are as follows: human capital (.61), Creative Class (.68), analytical
skills (.44), social skills (.55), high-tech concentration (.74).
17. The correlations are as follows: income (.46), wages (.56), economic output per
capita (.48), population size (.48), population density (.38), housing costs as a share ofincome (.19).
18. The correlations are as follows: human capital (.3), Creative Class (.2), social skills
(.24).
19. The correlation between income inequality and unionization is –.3, more than
double the correlation between unions and wage inequality.
20. The correlation between income inequality and percent black is .3 percent. In con-
trast, there is almost no correlation between race and wage inequality.
21. The correlation between poverty and income inequality is .5, one of the highest of our
analysis; there is no correlation whatsoever between poverty and wage inequality, by the way.
Notes to Chapter Seventeen
1. Herbert Muschamp, “Art, Architecture, the Year in Review,” New York Times, De-
cember 29, 2002.
2. Robert Nisbet, “The Decline and Fall of Social Class,” Paciﬁc Sociological Review 2
(1) (Spring 1959): 11–17.
3. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press 1960).
4. Paul Kingston, The Classless Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). For
a review of the concept of class, see Annette Lareau and Dalton Conley, Social Class (New
York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010).
5. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, eds. Quintin Hoare and
Geoﬀrey Nowell-Smith (London: International Publishers, 1971), p. 276. Also, DavidForgacs, ed., The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935 (New York: NewYork University Press, 2000).
6. Andrew Gelman, Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote
the Way They Do (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
7. Gallup Organization, “State of the States” poll, at www.gallup.com/poll/125066
/State-States.aspx.
8. On gentriﬁcation, see Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentriﬁcation and the
Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996).

463 NOTES TO CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
9. See Bill Hayes, “Artists vs. Dotcoms: Fighting San Francisco’s Gold Rush,” New
York Times, December 14, 2000. Also see the detailed coverage in the San Francisco Gate
at www.sfgate.com.
10. Richard Easterlin, “Does Money Buy Happiness?” Public Interest 30 (1973): 3–10;
Easterlin, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence,”
in P. A. David and M. W. Reder, eds., Nations and Households in Economic Growth:Essays in Honor of Moses Abramowitz (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Easterlin, “Will
Raising the Income of All Increase the Happiness of All?” Journal of Economic Behavior
and Organization 27 (1995): 35–47.
11. US City Well-Being Tracking, Gallup Organization, March 15, 2011, at www
.gallup.com/poll/145913/City-Wellbeing-Tracking.aspx.
12. Richard Florida, Charlotta Mellander, and Jason Rentfrow, “The Happiness of
Cities,” Regional Studies (2011), at http://rsa.informaworld.com/srsa/section?content
=a940484338&fulltext=713240928.
13. See Richard Florida, “America’s Healthiest Metros,” TheAtlanticCities.com, January
4, 2010, available at www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/01/healthiest-metros/367/; Richard Florida, “Why Some Cities Are Healthier than Others,” TheAtlanticCities.com, January 5, 2012, available at: www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/01/why-some-cities-are-healthier-others/365/. The correlations with happiness are as follows: wages (.41), income (.38), economic output per capita (.38),human capital (.69), Creative Class (.5), Working Class (.4).
14. Centers for Disease Control, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, at www
.cdc.gov/brfss/.
15. The correlation is .55.16. Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander, “The Economic Geography of Smoking
and Obesity,” Martin Prosperity Institute Working Paper, University of Toronto, RotmanSchool of Management, September 2011, at http://research.martinprosperity.org/2011/09/smoking-and-obesity/.
17. See again “The American Fitness Index, 2011” at www.americanfitness
index.org/docs/reports/2011_afi_report_final.pdf.
18. The correlations for ﬁtness are as follows: Creative Class (.58), Working Class (–.56),
human capital (.64), high-tech industry (.42), innovation (.48), warm temperature (–.49),wages (.56), average income (.47), and happiness (.71).
19. Richard Florida, “The Geography of How We Get to Work,” TheAtlantic.com, July
13, 2011, at www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/07/the-geography-of-how-we-get-to-work/240258/. Also, Richard Florida, “America’s Top Cities for Bike Commuting,Happier Too,” TheAtlantic.com, June 22, 2011, at www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/06/americas-top-cities-for-bike-commuting-happier-too/240265/.
20. Deaths from ﬁrearms are positively correlated with the Working Class (.55), poverty
(.59), and McCain voters (.66), and negatively associated with the Creative Class (–.52),college grads (–.64), immigrants (–.34), and Obama voters (–.66).
21. Gallup press release, September 10, 2011, at www.gallup.com/poll/149504
/residents-mass-connecticut-lead-nation-dentist-visits.aspx. Data collected from GallupHealthways Well-Being Index, available at www.well-beingindex.com/.
22. Dentist visits were positively correlated with the Creative Class (.31), college grads
(.65), Obama voters (.38), and happiness (.57), and negatively associated with the WorkingClass (–.28), McCain voters (–.42), smoking (–.55), and obesity (–.6).
23. June Thomas, “The American Way of Dentistry,” Slate, September 29, 2009, at

464 NOTES TO APPENDIX
www.slate.com/articles/life/the_american_way_of_dentistry/2009/09/the_american_way
_of_dentistry_2.htm.
24. Ylajali Hansen, “Spooky Tooth: Dental Health and Social Determinism,” March
23, 2011, Generation Bubble, www.generationbubble.com/2011/03/23/spooky-tooth-dental-health-and-social-determinism/.
Notes to Chapter Eighteen
1. Robert L. Smith, “Greater Cleveland Manufacturers Testing New Strategies to Fight
Skills Gap,” January 28, 2012, at www.cleveland.com/business/index/ssf/2012/01/take_this.
2. See, for example, Scott Page, The Diﬀerence: How the Power of Diversity Creates
Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
3. Available at www.zdnet.com/videos/green/john-doerr-how-obama-can-kick-start
-green-innovation/247002.
4. Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes
Everything (New York: Viking, 2009).
5. “Fertile Minds Need Feeding,” Guardian, February 9, 2009, available at www
.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/feb/10/teaching-sats.
6. Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Jonah E. Rockoﬀ, The Long-Term Impact of
Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood (Cambridge, MA:
National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. 1769, December2011). Also, Annie Lowery, “Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain,” New YorkTimes, January 6, 2012, available at www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/education/big-study-links-good-teachers-to-lasting-gain.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all.
7. See Sara Horowitz, The Atlantic (online), September 1, 2001, “The Freelance Surge
Is the Industrial Revolution of Our Time,” available at www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/09/the-freelance-surge-is-the-industrial-revolution-of-our-time/244229/.
8. See Alice Rivlin, Reviving the American Dream: The Economy, the States and the
Federal Government (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1992).
9. As quoted in Amity Shlaes, “America’s Obsession with Housing Hobbles Growth,”
Bloomberg, August 20, 2009.
10. “Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and
Social Progress,” available at www.stiglitz-sen-ﬁtoussi.fr/documents/rapport_anglais.pdf.
11. Kenneth Rogoﬀ, “Rethinking the Growth Imperative,” Project Syndicate, January
2, 2012, available at www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rogoﬀ88/English.
12. Raghu Rajan, “Faultlines Blog,” January 2, 2012, available at http://forums.chicago
booth.edu/faultlines?entry=45.
13. Andrew Whitehead, “Eric Hobsbawm on 2011: ‘It Reminds Me of 1848 . . . ,’” BBC
World Service News, December 22, 2011, available at www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16217726.
Notes to Appendix
1. Pascal K. Whelpton, “Occupational Groups in the United States, 1820–1920,” Journal
of the American Statistical Association 21 (155) (September 1926): 335–343, available at
www.jstor.org/stable/2277062. Susan B. Carter, “The Labor Force, by Industry: 1800–

1960,” in Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead,
Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest
Times to the Present: Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
Table Ba814–830. Available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ISBN-9780511132971
.Ba652–1032. Matthew Sobek, “Major Occupational Groups: All Persons: 1860–1990,”in Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, RichardSutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times tothe Present: Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Table
Ba1159–1395. Available online at http://hsus.cambridge.org/HSUSWeb/toc/tableToc.do?id=Ba1159–1395. Matthew Sobek, “Major Occupational Groups: All Persons:1860–1990,” in Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olm-stead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright, eds., Historical Statistics of the United States,
Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press,2006), Table Ba1033–1046. Available online at http://hsus.cambridge.org/HSUSWeb/toc/tableToc.do?id=Ba1033–1046.
2. Ross DeVol, “America’s High Tech Economy: Growth, Development and Risks for
Metropolitan Areas,” Milken Institute, July 1999.
3. See Daniel Black, Gary Gates, Seth Sanders, and Lowell Taylor, “Demographics of
the Gay and Lesbian Population in the United States: Evidence from Available SystematicData Sources,” Demography 37 (2) (May 2000): 139–154.465
NOTES TO APPENDIX

467ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Creativity is a team eﬀort; both the original edition of this book and this updated
one beneﬁt from an incredible team of colleagues and collaborators. The con-tributions of four people stand out. First and foremost is Kevin Stolarick, whodeveloped much of the data for both editions as my colleague at the Universityof Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI), where we both are based, andearlier at Carnegie Mellon. Charlotta Mellander of the Jönköping InternationalBusiness School and Martin Prosperity Institute also developed many of the keyindicators and collaborated on many of the statistical studies reported here. BillFrucht, my editor on the original edition of this book, worked closely with meon its core ideas as well as its scope, structure, and presentation. Arthur Goldwagdeftly edited my writing for this revised edition.
Jim Levine, my literary agent, encouraged me to undertake this new edition,
and John Sherer, publisher of Basic Books, graciously supported it. Patrick Adler,Todd Gabe, Brian Hracs, José Lobo, Jason Rentfrow, and Daniel Silver providedhelpful ideas, comments, and/or data. Zara Matheson developed all the mapsand assisted with data. Marisol D’Andrea assisted with overall project man-agement, as well as fact-checking and editing. Kim Silk, our data librarian,helped track down sources and assisted with fact-checking, copyediting, andbibliographic details of the manuscript. Taylor Brydges helped with proofingthe copyedited draft, checking references, fact-checking, and organizing theart files, tables, and figures. Michelle Hopgood developed several of the figuresand graphics.
I have the support of great colleagues and the staﬀ of a fantastic institute, the
MPI in the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. I amgrateful to them, and also for the generosity of our funders, Joe and Sandy Rot-man, the Province of Ontario, and the Royal Bank of Canada. My colleagues atThe Atlantic help ground my ideas in day-to-day reality, as well as provide a sup-
portive home for my writing. Our team at the Creative Class Group (CCG), es-pecially Reham Alexander and Steven Pedigo, provides an exceptional level ofsupport for my speaking, travel, and writing. I am especially grateful to the manycommunities, organizations, and individuals that have embraced these ideasand invited me to visit and speak to them over the years. My thinking andideas beneﬁt immensely from being exposed to and immersed in the real world
of economic transformation and community building. I would like to express

my personal gratitude to every single person who took time from his or her busy
schedule to participate in ﬁeld research, personal interviews, and focus groups.
Of the many people who contributed to the original edition of this book,
several stand out. Gary Gates, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, and Brian Knudsenmade important contributions to the research. Bill Bishop, Don Carter, andTerry Clark provided helpful ideas and comments. Campos Research Associatesconducted some of the early focus groups. Bob Evans and the team at Information
Week provided access to their Salary Survey data. Susan Schulman, my literary
agent at the time, worked diligently to ﬁnd the right editor and publisher. Thework for the initial edition of this book was carried out when I was a facultymember at Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz School and was supported by grants fromthe Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Heinz Endowments, and Richard King MellonFoundation.
I am fortunate to have a large extended family that is the source of great comfort
and joy: my brother, Robert, his wife, Ginny, and my nieces Sophia and Tessaand nephew Luca; the Kozouz clan: Ruth, Reham; my bros Markis and AdievAlexander; Dean and Ruba Alexander; Leena, Adam, Christian, Melia, andSophia Hosler; Tarig, Anastasia, Zackary, and Zaiden; Ramiz and Christina;and my DeCicco cousins, too numerous to mention.
This book gave me the greatest gift of all. Not long after it was published, I
was invited by then governor Jennifer Granholm to speak to a conference oncreative cities in Lansing, Michigan. That was the day I met my wife, Rana.We’ve been together ever since. She is my partner in everything I do. She helpsfocus and sharpen my ideas, edits what I write, and sweats the details large andsmall, so that I can think and write. I cannot thank her enough for everythingshe does. She’s the love of my life and ﬁlls every day with fun, passion, andboundless energy.468 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

469INDEX
Abel, Jaison, 217
Academic tenure, 130Aﬄeck, Ben, 99Aﬄuence, 61, 364–365African-Americans, 55–56, 59, 355Agriculture occupations, 402Allen, Paul, 174, 176–177Allen, Thomas, 108Alternative culture, mass marketing
of, 166–169
Amabile, Teresa, 22, 117American Fitness Index, 142, 374Americans’ Use of Time Project,
128
Analytic skills, 224–226Andersson, Åke, 198Apple Computer, 174–175Arab Spring, 398–399Aronowitz, Stanley, 93Arts
mass marketing of, 166–169scenes in cities and, 296–297street culture vs. high, 147–153
Asians, in Creative Class, 55–56Atwood, Margaret, 371“Audio identity,” 295Austin, Texas, 157–158, 183–186,
339–341
Authenticity, 154, 294–296, 299,
336
Autor, David, 359Avent, Ryan, 317–319Axtell, Robert, 197Back-to-the-city movement,
320–322
Bait and Switch (Ehrenreich), 99
Banks, Mark, 143–144Barber, Benjamin, 395Barley, Stephen, 36, 39, 94–96Base pay, 77–79, 81–82Basulto, Dominic, 323–324Batt, Rosemary, 92, 98Baudelaire, 286Bell, Daniel, 9, 35, 163–164, 166,
366
Bellevue, Washington, 330–331Beneﬁts, importance of, 78Benjamin, Walter, 286Bergen, Mark, 40Berry, Christopher, 363Bicycle Diaries (Byrne), 145–146
Bicycling, 145–147, 376–377Big Morph, 159–161Big Sort, The (Bishop), 363
Bishop, Bill, 238, 363Blake, William, 160–161Blue-collar jobs, loss and decline of,
43, 54
Bluestone, Barry, 363Bobos in Paradise (Brooks), 36, 164
Boden, Margaret, 18–21Bohemian Index, 239–241, 242
(ﬁg.), 243 (table)
Bohemian Versus Bourgeois
(Graña), 160, 162
Bohemian-Gay Index, 244–245

Bohemianism
cultural opinions on, 163–166
economic growth and, 239–241,
297–298
happiness and, 160, 172housing values and, 241–245openness to experience and,
249–253
Protestant work ethic vs.,
159–161, 175
in San Francisco Bay Area,
171–175
Bono, 342–343Bonuses, importance of, 78Boston Marathon, 137Bourgeoisie, 161–166Bowling Alone (Putnam), 283
Boyd, Robert, 199Breakthrough Illusion, The (Florida
and Kenney), 87
Brint, Steven, 36Brooks, David, 36, 164–166Brown, John Seely, 26, 110Bureaucracies, past and present
roles of, 16–17
Burton-Jones, Alan, 89Byrne, David, 145–146
Cairncross, Frances, 187
Capital, types of, 253, 255–265Capitalism, Socialism and
Democracy (Schumpeter), 16
Careers, front-loading, 129–132Carter, Don, 346–347Castells, Manuel, 298Cathedral and the Bazaar, The
(Raymond), 68
Caves, Richard, 296CDI. See Composite Diversity
Index
Challenge
Creative Class and, 71–72,
79–80, 117, 145
IT workers and, 70–72meritocracy and, 56–57young workers and, 131
Changing jobs, frequency of, 87–88Chasing the Hawk (Sheehan),
136–137
Children, environments for, 307–308Christopherson, Susan, 92, 98Cities, 190, 283–284, 296–298,
314–315, 320–322, 336–338
clustering in, 187–189, 191, 194,
226, 227, 250, 393–396
Creative Class in Global Cities,
270 (table)
Creative Compact strengthening,
393–395
decline of (in Organizational
Age), 314
density of, 328–329, 363–365,
393–395
as places of creativity, 197–202social uprisings in, 399See also Metros; Urban
neighborhoods
Ciulla, Joanne, 97Clark, Terry Nichols, 239, 289, 297Class (Fussell), 35–36, 140–141
Class structure, 46 (table), 49–54,
52 (table), 375 (table)
for all metros, 404–420 (table)of bourgeoisie vs. proletariat,
161–163
commuting and, 376–377geography of, 11, 203–227happiness and, 367, 372–376health and, 372–376, 375 (table)in United States, 9, 45 (table)wages and salaries of, 42 (table)
Classless Society, The (Bell), 366
Climate
commuting and, 377people, 305–309
Clubbing (Malbon), 149–150, 155
Clustering of Creative Class, 188,
226470 INDEX

of human capital, 193–194
in music industry, 192–193of openness to experience, 252“preferential attachment” and,
197
of talent, 191–193
Colbert, Stephen, 241Coletta, Carol, 288College graduates
Creative Class and, 40–41jobs for, since Crash of 2008,
67–68
in suburban communities, 330in urban centers, 325, 355–356
Coming of Post-Industrial Society,
The(Bell), 163
Commodiﬁcation of experience,
154–156
“Communities of practice,” 26–27Community, Creative, 185–189
back-to-the-city-movement and,
320–322
building, 304, 339–349city size and, 327–329Creative Class and importance
of, 75–77
Creative Class debate and,
316–320
happiness and, 300–301metropolitan areas, 338–339as people climate, 305–309quasi-anonymity in, 284–287soul of, 300–303squelchers of, 312–315in suburbs and rural areas,
329–333
talent in cities and suburbs,
336–338
universities as creative hubs in,
309–312
urban tech shift in, 322–327
Commuting
with bicycles, 147, 376–377class structure and, 376–377as job search factor, 76in large metros, 337
Compensation, forms of, 77–79
See also Salaries of classes; Wages
of classes
Competition
business location and, 188with free-agents, 99in game sports compared to
adventure sports, 145
Global Competitiveness Index,
275
“hacker ethic” and, 173
Composite Diversity Index (CDI),
246
Computers, personal, development
of, 173–175, 177–178
Conservatism, political, 367–368Contractors, 94–97Corporate downsizing, 93, 97Cortright, Joe, 288, 331Costa, Dora, 240Counterculture, 163–164, 166–167,
169–175
Counties, Creative Class
distribution of, 212 (ﬁg.), 213(table)
Craig, John, 349Crawford, Matthew, 43–44“Creatiﬁcation” of jobs, 388Creative Age
cities in, 314–315creativity in, 15–17oddballs and eccentrics in, 112as revolutionary epoch, 400risks and stress in, 11young people in, 306–307
Creative capital, 255–265Creative Class, 40–41, 73–74, 98,
135, 138, 140–142, 205 (ﬁg.),207 (table), 210 (ﬁg.), 211(table), 257–258, 383–384, 401
challenge and, 71–72, 79–80,
117, 145471 INDEX

Copyright Notice

© Licențiada.org respectă drepturile de proprietate intelectuală și așteaptă ca toți utilizatorii să facă același lucru. Dacă consideri că un conținut de pe site încalcă drepturile tale de autor, te rugăm să trimiți o notificare DMCA.

Acest articol: Richard Florida The Rise Of The Creative Class, Revisited [619467] (ID: 619467)

Dacă considerați că acest conținut vă încalcă drepturile de autor, vă rugăm să depuneți o cerere pe pagina noastră Copyright Takedown.

Richard Florida The Rise Of The Creative Class, Revisited [619467]

Copyright Notice

Conceptia lui Descartes despre natura umana [604201]

Veniturile publice includ resursele financiare ale administra ției de stat, [626356]

Ϲοοrdοnɑtοr ștііnțіfіс, Аbѕοlvеnt, ……. ……. Οrɑѕul…. Аnul…. Ϲuрrіnѕ ІΝТRΟDUϹЕRЕ 4 ϹАΡІТΟUL 1. FАϹТΟRІІ GЕΝЕТІϹІ АІ ϹLІΜЕІ 5 1.1. Rɑdіɑțіɑ… [304277]

ED 243 111AUTHORTITLEINSTITUTION SPONS AGENCYPUB DATECONTRACTNOTEAVAILABLE FROM PUB TYPEDOCUMENT RESUMECS 208 231Fearing, Bertie E.; Allen,… [603717]

Din punct de vedere etimologic, cuvântul principiu provine din limba latina – principium , care înseamn ă idee de baz ă, fundament. A șadar, urm… [606200]

I. Cadru teoretic [615597]

Copyright Notice

Similar Posts