Richard Florida joins Jared Diamond as
a bad thinker who's thinking keeps getting worse.
Florida became well known with his Rise of the Creative Class that claimed cities with a high proportion of “creatives” had greater economic growth resulting from new businesses. Creatives were drawn by 'three Ts--technology, talent, and tolerance--characterized by a highly educated workforce, and a population diverse enough to include, among other things, a large number of immigrants and a sizeable gay community.' Some of that reasoning is circular.
Now Florida is claiming that creatives who used to migrate to the U.S. are finding it easier to stay at home in their third world countries and the U.S. is ignoring the kind of education needed to create new scientists and engineers.
Florida's first thesis wasn't entirely
nonsense. Urban tolerance does draw creative people, immigrants and
gays. But few people have the background I have in knowing what
creates new business. I was at the critical vortex that created
nearly all the new American industries in the 1970s that started and
flourished in hippy Bay Area. I worked with thousands of businesses;
helping them get started then I duplicated my success in Sweden in
the 1980s with thousands more new businesses.
Business needs the following to get started: the creative people who are drawn to tolerant urban areas (Florida is right on his point), a climate of cooperation among the creatives (in the case of the hippies the cooperation came from having a sense of being outlaws who smoked pot and used drugs), cooperation is usually because the entrepreneurs are actually outlaws operating in the illegal zones (think of Steve Jobs and gang who made and sold illegal blue/black boxes to cheat the phone company) and most importantly new businesses need slums and bad neighborhoods where new businesses find cheap space and neighbors who 'mind their own business.' (Unlike suburbs, snooty areas and middle-class zones where people mind everyone else's business.)
Few cities are going to listen to me
when I tell them to leave their slums and illegal zones (porn, drugs,
bikers etc) alone in order to get thriving new businesses. I have
decades of experience, Florida is a professor with a sweet little
theory.
Florida's new observation is flat out wrong.
Aside: In the 1970s the Japanese government hired me to advise on creating commercial innovation in science and technology. I told them that Japan had a population of 120 million while the U.S. had 5 billion people. Perplexed, they asked how I got my numbers. The explanation was in the form of the Bell Labs phone book. Brilliant minds from every country in the world came to the U.S. because they could settle down and be part of the society comfortably. The names in the Bell Lab phone book represented immigrants from every nation and ethnicity on the planet.
Japan couldn't match that. Even third generation Koreans were still not comfortable in Japan. (I gave the Japanese an alternative solution which they have used.)
The United States remains the only
country on the planet (excuse me Canada) where people from anywhere
can settle in easily and become comfortable. That hasn't changed and
it won't. Neither will the rest of the world. We do, will and will
always do better than everyone else in attracting the brilliant minds
and entrepreneurs to the U.S. People fit into America easily.
Florida's thesis about declining schools is way off base. Schools don't and never will generate entrepreneurs. Schools teaching science and technology are nearly irrelevant, but even if they were relevant we still attract the best university students and professors because France, Germany, China and a few other countries always seem to kick out the best people (think Bauhaus, Raymond Aron and Leszek Kolakowski). That kind of creative person knows it.