by Richard Florida
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Product Description
The most valued workers today are what the economist Richard Florida calls the Creative Class, skilled individuals ranging from money managers to make–up artists, software programmers to steady–cam operators who are in constant demand around the world. Florida's bestselling The Rise of the Creative Class identified these workers as the source of economic revitalization in American cities. In that book, he shows that investment in technology and a civic culture of tolerance (most–often marked by the presence of a large gay community) are the key ingredients to attracting and maintaining a local creative class. In The Flight of the Creative Class, Florida expands his research to cover the global competition to attract the Creative Class. The United States was, up until 2002, the unparalleled leader in creative capital. But several key events––the Bush administrations emphasis on smokestack industries, heightened security concerns after 9/11 and the growing cultural divide between conservatives and liberals––have put the US at a substantial dis–advantage.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Building On His Thesis, But With A Warning, 2008-08-08
In the first portion of this book, Richard Florida recaps and defends the major ideas in his first book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. He addresses some of his critics and reasserts his thesis, which proposes that the ascendancy of a powerful class of creative, talented workers is making PLACES more important than companies. The Places that this new class will be attracted to display an abundance of what Florida calls the 3 T's: Technology, Talent, and Tolerance.
Florida expands this thesis to a wider canvas in this second book: In the Global economy, as the world becomes more "flat," American cities won't just be competing against other American cities for talent. They will be they will be competing against cities in Australia, India, Ireland, Sweden, etc. In other words, a city like Pittsburgh won't just be looking to keep talented grads from Carnegie Mellon from migrating to Austin; those grads may decide they want to go to Dublin, Ireland to live and work.
Florida outlines how important immigration has been to our nation's economic development and how two major factors with regards to immigration are beginning to make some erosive headway. The first is outsourcing, which is moving up the skill scale from customer service to application development. While certainly a difficulty, Florida thinks that outsourcing is a manageable problem, and that the jobs we lose from outsourcing can be replaced with new jobs created by innovative companies.
However, the second "pincer of the claw" is the increasing difficulty that the United States experiences in attracting and retaining the talented, super-educated knowledge workers who will be the innovators. If the erosion of that class of workers continues, eventually we will not be creating the new jobs to replace the outsourced ones.
Rather than a doomsday now scenario, Florida admits that the United States still holds a Technological edge and probably will hold that dominance for a little while yet. However, he shows that there is no doubt that other countries have made at least some headway with patents in certain areas where America held sway uncontested.
It is the other T's that Florida focuses on in the latter half of the book. Where is the Talent going? And how can we create a more diverse, open society? Using studies and statistics, his research tracks where people are moving globally, and he examines how our immigration policies and our increasing class divisions may be contributing to our difficulties in retaining talented innovators and entrepeneurs.
Flight of the Creative Class has more focus than Rise of the Creative Class, and the benefit is a more compelling read. There are still some issues I think holdover from the first book. For instance, it is very hard to pin down exactly who is the Creative Class, and Florida seems to avoid any significant discussion of how unions will play out in this mix.
Contrary to many criticisms I have seen here on Amazon and elsewhere, Florida does look at factors such as housing affordability, and he is extremely sensitive to the inequalities the Creative Class itself can create.
My paperback edition includes the essay, "The World is Spiky," which is Florida's Atlantic Monthly article responding to the growing acceptance of Thomas Friedman's idea that "The World Is Flat." Florida argues that the while globalization is helping to economically develop some areas, the peaks and valleys created by the "spikyness," of that world map are making it more treacherous for those in the lows than it has ever been.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Good Observation, Bad Conclusion, 2008-04-09
The "creative class" is much to broad a description for what Mr. Florida attempts to describe as an autonomous mass. Yes, there is a global competition for skilled workers, yes, several companies are outsourcing jobs, but no, these workers are not a sort of uber-elite "creative class", they are merely a human resource easy to exploit by corporations. The author may have made a couple of good observations but in the end his theory is preposterous.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
 Kinda Lightweight Social Science, 2007-11-01
Florida was all the rage in the Ivory Tower a while back. I read this book when it first came out and immediately saw it for what it was; a lightweight treatise marketed to self professed intellectuals and humanities types who emphasize the 'socio' in socio-economic.
It is here where Florida's book fell totally apart. He obviously has not had the rigorous education needed to incorporate the 'economic' into his argument. No discussion of taxes, regulations, etc. He says the smaller European nations are our chief threat, but never discusses the consistent flow of European PhDs who migrate to the USA. They are looking for opportunity, not lifestyle.
This book could be used as one among many to discuss 'livability' standards in cities, but by itself is nothing more than the most shallow of observations about successful free market economies.
3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Still needs to take on the 900-pound gorilla, 2007-04-11
"If America continues to make it harder for some of the world's most talented students and workers to come here, they'll go to other countries eager to tap into their creative capabilities--as will American citizens fed up with what they view as an increasingly repressive environment."
-- Dr. Richard Florida, The Flight of the Creative Class
From this quote you can see immediately the sort of society Dr. Florida wants. Me, too. What's puzzling is he doesn't explicitly attach his shiny new cart of creativity to the thoroughbred of peace and political liberty.
In particular, you'd expect him to lambaste the Neocon Usurpers for launching expensive wars for isolated benefit of the Carlyle Group. Is he pulling his punches so Rush Bimbaugh won't accuse him of Bush-bashing? In general, why doesn't Florida boldly oppose the bonecrushing machinery of government per se?
That's my 900-pound-gorilla reservation about The Creative books. Otherwise, they provide a nice boost to the kinds of people we want to cultivate in society... or even want to be.
It appears many in public office, more semi-comatose Democrats than fully rabid Republicans, are interested in developing and retaining creative communities.
But are they willing to do what it takes?
The more political power they wield the less willing they are.
Rise shows that what Dr. Florida calls the three Ts of creative-class communities--Talent, Technology, and Tolerance--occur rarely. And when they do, it's more from the tolerance angle.
Austin, San Francisco, Seattle, Burlington (VT), Boston, the highest American cities on the creative-class list, achieve their vaunted status by spontaneous order. When governments catch up to what's going on and want to push people around, it's too late.
Tolerance is also another word for freedom. We can easily argue that liberty is fundamentally what the creative havenots have not. Talent and technology gravitate toward communities naturally when political leaders see their mission as preserving a natural order based on civil liberties.
They accomplish that mission mainly by removing government obstacles and keeping the infrastructure efficient.
Government never furthered any enterprise but by the alacrity with which it got out of its way. -- Thoreau
Libertarians need no writer from the halls of the Carnegie Mellon Institute to tell us this dear Hamlet. But it's nice that in Rise Dr. Florida makes such a good statistical case for what creativity is, where it lives, and how we can nurture it. He also makes us aware that we, too, are paid-up members of the CC.
Flight is about politicians not getting the point of Rise.
...
For my complete review of this book and for other book and movie
reviews, please visit my site [...]
Brian Wright
Copyright 2007
21 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
Don't Waste Your Time and Money, 2006-06-21
While I appreciated and generally agreed with the thesis Richard Florida puts forward that creativity is important for society, there were many times when I found his writing `style' to be annoying. I had almost put the book down after completing the first third of it. Mr. Florida's sensitivity to criticism and unabashed need to respond to every negative comment he received from his first book made me wonder just how narcissistic this man was. His ego flows onto each page and sometimes, in my view, gets in the way of his work and feeds a perception that he is not completely objective.
There are many points that get overlooked in his analysis. Why are people gravitating to Austin, Texas? Mr. Florida postulates it is because the city is open to new ideas and diverse. While I am certain that there are people who choose to relocate based on perceptions of how open and diverse a given area is, it makes more sense to look at more practical motivators such as taxes, real estate prices, crime rates, or climate. Tangible factors such as these get little mention. The assumption made by Mr. Florida is that a heterogeneous, open society is more creative than a homogenous, closed one. I guess that Japan and South Korea don't count.
I could go on, but I would not recommend this book.
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