Richard Florida on the global competition for the creative class

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, has an interesting piece in the latest Washington Monthly on the global competition for creative talent, and why in his view the U.S. is starting to lose.

The essay's title, "Creative Class War: How the GOP's anti-elitism could ruin America's economy" pretty much gives away his political stance. One may disagree with its political analysis, but the essay is still notable for how it ties together a few strands: the declining attractiveness of the U.S. for foreign-born scientists (a subject I recently discussed here); efforts by other countries to create enclaves that will attract entrepreneurs and creative people; attempts by regions like Silicon Valley to stay on the edge; the impact of cultural creatives on the nation's political geography and the 2000 election; and the author's own work on cultural creatives.

Even if you don't like the political framing of the problem, it's the sort of argument you can have useful disagreements with. (Anyone who can come up with a line like "Our research universities are... the Ellis Islands of the 21st century" is worth reading.)

The important ideas:

[T]he loss of U.S. jobs to overseas competitors is shaping up to be one of the defining issues of the 2004 campaign. And for good reason. Voters are seeing not just a decline in manufacturing jobs, but also the outsourcing of hundreds of thousands of white-collar brain jobs--everything from software coders to financial analysts for investment banks. These were supposed to be the "safe" jobs, for which high school guidance counselors steered the children of blue-collar workers into college to avoid their parents' fate.

But the loss of some of these jobs is only the most obvious--and not even the most worrying--aspect of a much bigger problem. Other countries are now encroaching more directly and successfully on what has been, for almost two decades, the heartland of our economic success -- the creative economy....

We came up... these new technologies and ideas largely because we were able to energize and attract the best and the brightest, not just from our country but also from around the world. Talented, educated immigrants and smart, ambitious young Americans congregated, during the 1980s and 1990s, in and around a dozen U.S. city-regions....

But now the rest of the world has taken notice of our success and is trying to copy it. The present surge of outsourcing is the first step--or if you will, the first pincer of the claw.... Though alarming and disruptive, such outsourcing might be manageable if we could substitute a new tier of jobs derived from the new technologies and ideas coming out of our creative centers. But so far in this economic recovery, that hasn't happened.

What should really alarm us is that our capacity to so adapt is being eroded by a different kind of competition--the other pincer of the claw--as cities in other developed countries transform themselves into magnets for higher value-added industries. Cities from Sydney to Brussels to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. They're doing it through a variety of means--from government-subsidized labs to partnerships between top local universities and industry. Most of all, they're luring foreign creative talent, including our own. The result is that the sort of high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States' province and a crucial source of our prosperity have begun to move overseas.

Comments

[Bill]

Interesting story in Time Europe two weeks back "How To Plug Europe's Brain Drain" by Jeff Chu.

The basic argument is that the U.S. continues to be a more attractive place to work for European brains -- the science people.

Europe's best and brightest scientific minds are leaving in droves for the U.S. — and billions of euros and thousands of jobs are at stake. Here's how Europe is trying to lure them back.

Recent personal experience with the brains across Switzerland, Germany and Italy has been very enlightening.

As a related aside, a friend said to me last week, "For all the excitement that Switzerland is showing with the new Zurich Google office, this means that Switzerland is now the #2 destination for U.S. startups... after India."

[askpang]

Quite interesting.

And re: the "U.S. is losing the talent wars" discussion, it occurs to me that while we're hearing stories of researchers moving to Cambridge to do stem cell research (for example), I haven't come across any stories of academics who are established in America, and leave for places other than European universities. And there's long been a traffic of academics across the Atlantic, particularly between the U.S., Canada, and British universities. When we see well-established Americans leaving professorships for universities in India or Ghana, then we'll have passed an important milestone.