Author examines slide in creativity in U.S.
Reviewed by Michele Wucker >Original article
In his 2002 best-seller "The Rise of the Creative Class," Richard Florida argued that the biggest economic change of the last half-century has been the rise of human creativity. In the United States, scientists, entertainers, architects, lawyers, financiers and others who make their livelihood "creatively" now outnumber traditional blue-collar workers. Though the creative class makes up just 30 percent of the U.S. work force, it earns nearly half of the nation's wages. In Florida's view, America's ability to attract the world's best and brightest to high-end, high-margin, creative industries has been the decisive factor in America's global leadership in innovation, economic growth and prosperity.
In his new book, "The Flight of the Creative Class," Florida warns that the U.S. now risks losing this competitive edge. Unfortunately, the book is sometimes not clearly organized or argued. Yet despite his meandering logic and fuzzy idealism, Florida, who teaches public policy at George Washington University, has sent a badly needed wake-up call to American leaders.
The biggest economic threat to America, he contends, comes not from emerging giants like India or China but from countries like Finland, Ireland, Canada and Australia, who will end America's advantages not with one great blow but with a thousand tiny cuts. Investing heavily in their universities and research centers, these nations are nurturing creativity through open immigration and urban planning as well as creating regional talent magnets in major population centers.
In New Zealand, for example, "The Lord of the Rings" movie trilogy catalyzed a whole new technology and entertainment industry in Wellington. Dublin, Taipei, Bangalore, Dubai and dozens of other "cauldrons of creativity" are building their own economic niches in hopes of luring global talent -- including Americans.
Florida argues that Americans' tolerant, open society has long been our greatest asset for attracting human capital. Yet today, after 9/11, we are making it harder for the world's most talented people to come here. In 2002-03, the number of green cards issued fell more steeply than in any other year since the 1953 McCarthy witch hunts. Foreign-student applications to U.S. schools are dropping prodigiously. In the face of rising demands for science and engineering graduates and the falling number of U.S. degrees in these fields, U.S. companies increasingly must go offshore to hire talent they ought to be able to find here. Florida also makes much of the rise of the religious right and opposition to gay rights as indicators of a decline in tolerance.
An economist to the core, Florida offers a trio of indices to quantify these changes in creative potential: talent (the education level and size of the creative class), technology (patents and R&D spending) and tolerance (values and respect for individuals, as measured by survey data on attitudes about such issues as religion, women's rights, democracy and science). Together, these make up his Global Creativity Index, which shows that the United States is no longer the undisputed leader of innovation and openness.
Out of 45 countries on his Tolerance Index, the U.S. is in a dismal 20th place. It ranks fourth on the overall Global Creativity Index, behind Sweden, Japan and Finland. If you usually see your glass of water as half-full, you might distrust an index that puts Japan's anemic economy (not to mention strict immigration rules) ahead of ours. If you're a glass-half-empty type, you may conclude that the rankings confirm how serious the U.S. decline is. A more convincing measure is Florida's comparison of the creative class as a percentage of a country's work force, where we rank 11th.
Why is America surrendering its lead? The very success of the creative class, this book argues, is feeding the tensions that have made the U.S. less tolerant and threatened its innovative ability. Florida gives ample ink to America's failure to address the creative economy's downsides, including widening inequality and the failure of the U.S. education system. After all, as creative wages have risen, manufacturing jobs have disappeared and service-industry wages stagnated. This also pits homogeneous, less populous regions left behind by the creative economy against diverse, urban centers of innovation. This fissure in American society -- the real red-blue divide -- alienates the creative class, whose members, Florida claims (not entirely convincingly), are apolitical and inclined to vote with their feet.
How, then, would Florida stem the loss of American creative capital? Above all, we must protect our open society, he argues, making only brief mentions of real post-9/11 security concerns. We also must invest in education, science and technology, cultivating new creative-industry sectors. Much of this is sensible enough, but Florida is frustratingly vague on the details. He urges the adoption of measures "as large-scale as the New Deal" and calls for "new kinds of social institutions and policies" but does not suggest what these might be. Perhaps this is all meant merely as a call to creativity on the part of business, community and government leaders who want to avert the grim scenario of which he warns, but the absence of specifics is irksome.
Ultimately, Florida worries about the rise of a global creative class seeking to "trump" the United States and "erode our lead." In fact, today's competition for talent is an opportunity for greater global growth, which eventually should benefit America, too. The threat lies only in America's failure to rise to the challenge. How ironic it is that much of the rest of the world understands what made the United States great -- and is busily outdoing America's own example of innovation, openness and competitiveness.
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"The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent" by Richard Florida (HarperBusiness). 326 pages, $25.95.
Project for Public Spaces has a radical idea--transportation can create great places, not destroy them. We see the vast amount of urban land dedicated to cars, traffic, and parking lots as a huge opportunity to create public spaces that serve community. Transportation can be the handmaiden of this transformation. But we must follow some simple rules. >Link
March 10 at 7 p.m.
Pontiac Branch Library (2215 Hanna Street)
Presented by David Duvall, Indiana State Architect,Indiana Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology
Learn about tax incentives available for historic properties, both commercial and residential. These tax credits are beneficial for rehabilitating historic structures and are valuable community and economic development tools. The lecture is hosted by ARCH, Fort Wayne's historic preservation organization, and is free and open to the public.
from the LA Times:
Artists open studios in empty storefronts and add color to struggling Pittsfield, Mass. Now the mayor hopes for an economic renaissance. >Link
Sunday, November 14, 2004, 2 p.m.
General admission. Members of The Lincoln Museum and the African/African American History Museum admitted free of charge.
In conjunction with The Lincoln Museum’s temporary exhibit, The National Pastime in Black and White: The Negro Baseball Leagues, 1867-1955, courtesy of Exhibits USA, The Friends of The Lincoln Museum welcome Al Brothers. Brothers will present Fort Wayne Baseball Legends: The Fort Wayne Colored Giants.
The Fort Wayne Colored Giants was the team for its time. The team established its mark in Fort Wayne and in Baseball history. The Fort Wayne Wizards are the benefactors of the Legacy of the Fort Wayne Colored Giants and the white league teams of the era. They all contributed to baseball history in Fort Wayne. The Giants are unique. They have moved from the veil and mist of time past and segregation into the light and the consciousness of the 21st century. They now take their proper place in the history of Fort Wayne as true contributors to the development of sports history in the Summit City. They were lost but not forgotten. The story of Black Baseball in Fort Wayne is a story of a family, a family involved in the community and involved in baseball. It is a story of a man, a visionary and an entrepreneur, who became the catalyst for the creation of a baseball team.
During the late teens and 1920s, Indiana experienced a revitalization of the KKK that included some highly placed state government officials. At the same time nationally, racial prejudice led to the lynching of many Black Americans. It was in this climate that the Fort Wayne Colored Giants infused and energized the Black community.
Today, they have moved from the veil of segregation into the consciousness of the 21st century. Al Brothers’ research will establish the Fort Wayne Colored Giants’ role in sports history.
Learn about Moses Taylor, a visionary entrepreneur, who became the catalyst for the creation of a baseball team that provided jobs, careers and futures for young Black American athletes in a time when opportunities were rare. Al Brothers will introduce you to the legend of the Fort Wayne Colored Giants and Moses Taylor, the man behind their success on Sunday, November 14, 2004, 2 p.m.
Al Brothers is the former chair and a current board member of the Fort Wayne African/African American History Museum.
Visitors may also tour The Lincoln Museum’s award-winning permanent exhibit Abraham Lincoln and The American Experiment, as well as the thought-provoking temporary exhibit The National Pastime in Black and White: A History of the Negro Baseball Leagues, 1867-1955. The Lincoln Museum Store also extends an invitation for you to view a new art exhibition, An Increased Devotion: A New Look At Abraham Lincoln, by contemporary artist Wendy Allen.
The Lincoln Museum is located at the corner of Clinton and Berry Streets in downtown Fort Wayne. The Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday, 1 p.m.-5 p.m. General admission is $3.99, seniors and children (5-12 years old), $2.99. Parking is free in front of the Museum.
Phone 260-455-3864 for additional information or visit www.TheLincolnMuseum.org
By Johon Markoff From The New York TimesMOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Aug. 12 - Raj Reddy was fed up debating the problem of the digital divide between the rich and the poor and decided to do something about it.
Mr. Reddy, a pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, plans to unveil at the end of this year his new project, called the PCtvt, a $250 wirelessly networked personal computer intended for the four billion people around the world who live on less than $2,000 a year. >Link
He says his device can find a market in developing countries, particularly those with large populations of people who cannot read, because it can be controlled by a simple TV remote control and can function as a television, telephone and videophone.
Mr. Reddy is hoping his project - with backing from Microsoft and TriGem, the Korean computer maker, and in partnership with the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Institute of Information Technology and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley - can prove that it is possible to bring information technology to impoverished communities without depending on philanthropy.
Because his low-cost computer doubles as a TV and a DVD player, Mr. Reddy believes that he will be able to use it as a vehicle to take computing and communications to populations that until now have been excluded from the digital world.
What separates Mr. Reddy's approach from other efforts is his belief that even the world's poorest communities can become a profitable market for computers.
"I kept asking myself, 'what would the device have to do for someone on the other side of the digital divide to be desirable?' " Mr. Reddy said. The answer, he decided, was a simple device that would offer entertainment, making it something that even the world's poorest citizens might be willing to pay a sizable share - perhaps more than 5 percent - of their annual income to own.
"Entertainment is the killer app, and that will smuggle something that is a lot more sophisticated into the home," said Tom Kalil, special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology at Berkeley.
Earlier this year Mr. Reddy persuaded TriGem, South Korea's third-largest PC maker, to supply prototypes of a fully equipped computer and Microsoft to support the project with an inexpensive, stripped down version of its Windows operating system.
This November Mr. Reddy hopes to begin installing the first 100 prototypes of the PCtvt in India and possibly several other countries. The project will work in partnership with University of California researchers who are attempting to develop high-speed wireless digital networks for rural communities.
The philosophy behind the PCtvt grew from ideas explored in the early 1980's by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the founder of the World Center for Computing and Human Resources, which is based in Paris. The center was built on the idea that developing countries could use biological and microelectronic technologies to leapfrog the industrial stage of economic development.
Mr. Reddy was among dozens of leading international researchers working on design projects at the center, including Alan Kay, Nicholas Negroponte and Seymour Papert. Mr. Kay was the creator of the Xerox Alto, an early PC. Mr. Negroponte had designed a pioneering videodisc system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mr. Papert was the inventor of the LOGO programming language.
The French center established a pilot project in Senegal that experimented with adapting the LOGO language for a Third World population. But that project failed years later because of politics and because the computers involved were too expensive.
"We needed three decades," Mr. Reddy said, for those technologies to help developing nations. He noted that in the early 1980's, computing was more focused on data processing, while today the focus is communications.
Coincidentally, he said that designing a system largely for people who cannot read will require more wireless network bandwidth than is currently required for most modern computer networks since communication will rely more heavily on audio and video transmissions than on text messages.
With a small team of students and faculty here at Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast campus, Mr. Reddy has built a simple control screen that allows the PCtvt to be used for audio and video conferencing, electronic mail and viewing local newspapers on the Web through a TV remote control. The designers have intentionally limited the computer's functions because they are struggling to simplify what the users see and experience.
One challenge Mr. Reddy faced was in persuading Microsoft to offer a version of its Windows software for the project for far less than its commercial price. But Mr. Reddy said he eventually won the support of Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer and a senior strategist at Microsoft.
Meanwhile, Mr. Reddy's team is also working with social scientists to determine the effect that access to this technology has on communities. "If we can do these experiments" and show that people living in poverty are a market for computers, Mr. Reddy said, "we will have proved something."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
Submitted by Shlomo Goltz
I like to see that there is a website dedicated to what this city needs to improve on cultivating. I have lived here my whole life, and just finished my first year at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Let me tell you, that city, and the people in it know creativity, and how to make it accessible. Accessibility is the key here. We should take some hints from other cities that are better off creatively.
In a college town like that, comedy clubs, dance clubs, and even some sports bars are open to minors. Of course minors must get big giant X's written on both hands so that they cannot partake in the forbidden fruit. Most kids are respectful of the rules and the atmosphere is great, as teens are treated as adults and are let into venues that they would not have otherwise been aloud.
Creativity is cultivated by allowing people to experience and share creative activities. If teens can do nothing more then watch movies, go to the mall, go to each other's houses, etc. teens will get frustrated, and will feel stifled and stuck with nothing to do.
This is an easy change, and a good step towards opening up the community of Fort Wayne. For instance, on Getz road, there is Mick's Recroom. It is a pool hall with a bar attached. Minors are allowed in, but not in the bar area. Simple. I realize that the mentality of those in Fort Wayne are not as liberal as those in Ann Arbor, but I think my ideas are well founded and easy to implement.
August 6, 2003
By DAVID LEONHARDT
FORT WAYNE, Ind. — On a tree-filled boulevard known as Doctors' Row, the four- and five-bedroom brick Tudor homes that are the jewels of this city's housing stock were selling for about $150,000 two decades ago. At the time, some homes in the nation's most desirable suburbs, like Brookline, Mass.; Sausalito, Calif.; and Great Neck, N.Y., cost the same.
Over the last 20 years, however, the nation's housing market has been cleaved in two, and the break has helped create two very different economies in one country.
Homes in the areas that were already the most expensive — California and the Boston-to-Washington corridor — have often doubled or tripled in value, even after adjusting for inflation. The increases have created nest eggs for longtime owners and allowed them to borrow billions of dollars against their equity, financing new kitchens and college educations and keeping the current economic malaise from being far worse than it might have been.
But while the boom has become the subject of daily conversations among the middle class and affluent in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, people in much of the country have little housing bounty to tap for home improvements, retirement or other needs. From Fort Wayne to Rochester to Salt Lake City, the prices of typical homes across most of the country's vast middle have risen just ahead of inflation — and more slowly than incomes. The cost of homes in the most expensive cities is now about six times that in the least expensive, up from a ratio of three to one two decades ago.
Here in Fort Wayne, the homes with elegant porticoes and broad lawns on Doctors' Row sell for about $300,000 today, roughly the same as they did in the early 80's, after being adjusted for inflation.
Not a single house in Fort Wayne — a small, manufacturing-heavy city halfway between Chicago and Detroit, with a jobless rate below the nation's — has sold this year for more than $800,000, according to real estate industry data. That is roughly the average price of a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan.
"The real housing boom is fairly concentrated," said Mark M. Zandi, the chief economist of Economy .com, a research firm. "And at the moment, it is clearly keeping the economy afloat in those areas."
There is no such cushion throughout much of the nation's interior. Some economists argue that the Federal Reserve's aggressive interest rate cuts might have been more effective at ending the economic slowdown if the gains in house prices — and the potential they create for consumer spending — had been more broadly shared.
Last year, Tom and Judy Auer sold the four-bedroom Fort Wayne house where they raised their three children for $107,900, or slightly less than the $34,000 they bought it for in 1974, after adjusting for inflation. Without a bonanza from the sale, the couple now live in a smaller house in Fort Wayne, relying on the pension from Mr. Auer's job as a hardware salesman at Sears, Roebuck and Social Security, which they began drawing early.
Marva and Bill Herx, on the other hand, left Fort Wayne in 1998 to move to the Philadelphia suburbs for his job. When they returned last year, they had made enough profit selling their Pennsylvania house — for about 40 percent more than the purchase price — that they were able to move into a house in Fort Wayne noticeably bigger than the one they had left.
"The home costs in Fort Wayne have stayed pretty much the same," said Ms. Herx, who is in her 50's. "In Philadelphia, we made a good profit in just four years."
The dynamic is reversed for younger adults, who are struggling to afford houses on the coasts while their counterparts elsewhere in the country are taking advantage of low mortgage rates to buy bigger, better homes than in the past.
"All my friends in Fort Wayne have houses. I think the biggest thing in the world I own is a cellphone," said Michael Korte, a 28-year-old Fort Wayne native who works for the City Council in New York and rents a two-bedroom apartment along with his sister, brother-in-law and nephew on the Lower East Side. "It blows my mind."
For $102,000, Brady Gerding, a high school classmate of Mr. Korte, recently bought 27 acres of land outside of the city where he and his wife will build a house. It will be the second house owned by Mr. Gerding, who, unlike Mr. Korte, did not graduate from college.
"You can still live like a king in Fort Wayne for $200,000," said Linda Duesler, who has been selling houses here since 1977. "And you can live pretty well for $100,000."
Beyond determining many families' wealth and standard of living, the two-tier housing market has begun to create difficult questions for government officials trying to create policies that apply to the entire nation. For example, when designing pensions, it becomes very difficult to judge the ability of people to retire because their finances might be in much better shape than their income suggests.
Some top universities, meanwhile, recently announced that they would no longer consider the entire value of many homes when determining financial-aid awards. University officials had become concerned that the values exaggerated some households' abilities to pay tuition.
If the price boom in some cities is a result of a bubble, as some economists warn, many of the people who borrowed against their homes might come to regret it. If mortgage rates were to continue rising and prices on the coasts were to drop, many people could end up with loans they could not repay by selling their houses.
So far, however, the housing boom has been an important economic salve for the regional economies of the Northeast and California.
In the San Jose, Calif., area, home to the slumping Silicon Valley, households have raised about $10,000 on average since the start of 2002 simply by taking additional equity out of their homes when refinancing a mortgage, according to Economy .com. In Boston and Washington, they have taken out about $4,000. In much of the Midwest, they have taken out less than $2,000.
In fact, households in the middle of the country that fall behind on mortgage bills cannot rescue themselves by dipping into their rising home equity and making up for a series of missed payments in one swoop. The states where home foreclosures have spiked most sharply since 2000 — including Indiana, which tops the list — are in the Midwest or Southeast.
"The only reason that mortgage delinquencies aren't soaring in the entire country is that house prices are still rising," Mr. Zandi said.
The housing gulf stems in part from the relative open space and lack of building regulations away from the coasts that allow builders in Fort Wayne and elsewhere to put up new homes as soon as there is demand for them, and sometimes even before. Prices in Austin, Tex., and Las Vegas, two fast-growing areas, have risen only moderately, for example, as high-ceilinged houses with room-size closets have sprung up over the last decade.
The gulf is also a byproduct of trends that have drawn educated, highly skilled people to the coasts. The surge of global trade and the growth of finance, health care and other white-collar industries have led the Northeast's and West Coast's share of the nation's economy to grow to almost 45 percent, from 39 percent in 1980, according to Economy.com. High-earning workers have followed the jobs, and not even an economic downturn that has hit Wall Street and Silicon Valley particularly hard has reversed the trend.
"We are seeing a migration pattern of talented, creative people that we may never have seen before," said Richard Florida, a professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "More and more people are demanding what's found in New York and Boston and San Francisco, and there's not enough space to accommodate them."
The executives at the Lincoln Financial Group, a money-management and insurance company, moved the company headquarters to Philadelphia after almost a century in Fort Wayne, in part to have an easy time recruiting talented employees, the executives said. But the workers who moved with the company were so vexed by the gap in housing prices that they began having dinner together, along with their spouses, to talk about strategies for buying in the Northeast. In the end, their main strategy consisted of making a lot of sacrifices, they said.
"I now have half the house and twice the mortgage," said Priscilla Brown, a vice president at Lincoln. "We just weren't quite prepared for the sticker shock."
Over the long term, house values tend to increase at roughly the same rate as incomes in any region, economists say. Because prices have outgained incomes on the coasts the last two decades, many analysts expect the housing gap to narrow eventually — but they were saying the same a decade ago.
"It takes generations for people to react to economic realities," said Patrick Lawler, chief economist at Office of Federal Housing Oversight, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage companies. "But it's remarkable that prices could have moved so differently over an extended period of time without more correction occurring."
It will begin to occur, real estate agents say, only when people decide that a mansion in Fort Wayne is more appealing than a small apartment in New York or San Francisco.
Source:
Aimee Younger, labor studies student, IPFW
Terry Ratliff, artist
'Art is crucial the democratic vision." Adrienne Rich
Let's come together to collect the energy gathered by the series and to generate ideas for change!
Special thanks to the Women's Studies Dept., IPFW.
ABOUT THEATER FOR IDEAS: TFI has won numerous awards for community
programming and has sparked social change on a variety of issues including
women, ethnic, mentally ill, and communication.
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Contact: Terry Doran, Theatre for Ideas at 260-357-5030
Allowing creative people to work freely is key not only to improving products and developing new ones, but to anticipating tomorrow's business — "people who can predict changes," said IUPU Fort Wayne marketing professor Zoher Shipchandler.Read the rest of the article here.
Hoosier caution and resistance to change stifle Indiana's economy.Read the entire article here.Passive leaders shrink from challenges.
As a result, incomes lag, and jobs and homes are lost as the state sinks deeper into one of the worst economic crises in its history.
Indiana workers once ranked among America's elite, pouring steel beams for the nation's skyscrapers and stamping parts for the nation's cars. [...] A seven-month examination of Indiana's economy by The Indianapolis Star reveals a slow, steady decline that has reached a crisis point. Poor leadership and a failure to invest in the future have left Hoosier workers with paychecks that lag behind those of other Americans.Read the article here.