Richard Florida
The Rise of the Creative Class
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[xiv ("preface to the paperback edition")]

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Great economic shifts like the one we are going through with them bring massive tensions and disruptions. The shift from an agricultural to a capitalist industrial economy generated incredible disruption and social turmoil- huge flows of people from farm to the factory, from the rural hinterlands to great urban centers and brought social problems ranging from workplace injury to crime, congestion and disease. We are going through a similar period today. Our workplaces are changing. Stress is ris- ing as creativity and mental labor have become the force of production. My preliminary research with the psychiatrists Roberto Figueroa and Kenneth Thompson shows that stress of all sorts from mood and anxiety disorder to substance abuse is considerably higher in the creative centers of the U.S. economy like San Francisco, Austin and Seattle than in other city-regions. People are more mobile. We are postponing marriage. Our family structures are morphing. The kinds of communities we need to support us are changing, as we replace a small number of strong-tie relationships with a much greater number of weak-tie relationships. These transforma-

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tions are wrenching, and they will continue for the foreseeable future. The broad social impacts of the creative age are just beginning to be felt.

The real challenge of our time is to compete the system we have given rise to-to build the broader creative society that can harness the creative energy we have unleashed and mitigate the turmoil and disruption that it generates. That's a very tall order. New kinds of social institutions and policies will be needed to complete the system and make it work well. We can't know what these will look like in advance. It will take a long time to figure this out. Adapting to the industrial age took long decades, with lots of give and take, lots of experiments that didn't work. But finally after the New Deal and World War Il era, we built a broader industrial society able to support and harness the tremendous productive capacity of the great industrial engine that had emerged decades earlier. And as we completed that "system," we embarked on a golden age of rising productivity and liv- ing standards. The challenge before us today is even greater. And already, in America and around the world, danger signs loom.

One is rising inequality. This has been tied to many factors. I had a strong hunch while writing The Rise of the Creative Class that inequality in our society was being exacerbated by the rise of the creative economy. Kevin Stolarick and I developed an Inequality Index that essentially com- pares the wages of creative sector workers to those in the manufacturing and service sectors (see Table 1). We found that inequality is highest in the creative epicenters of the U.S. economy.

What's more, this inequality has insidious dimensions. Not only do cre- ative workers earn much more, on average, than the large numbers of peo- ple who do low-end service work or rote manufacturing; they also get to do more enjoyable work and they contribute more by adding creative value (that's why they are paid highly). The stark reality is that the rise of cre- ative work also brings with it a great deal of work in the service sector. Those of us who work long days and nights at the computer rely on those office cleaners, delivery people and many others in the service economy. But there is no reason why all of this work has to be rote work and no rea- son why it shouldn't pay much better than it does. The service economy is the support infrastructure of the creative age.

Some of this work can be improved and made more creative. Certainly, a lot of it--like work in the hair salon, in construction or landscaping or in the spa- is already creative work. We need to recognize and reward it as such. Sometimes I think the reason so many people are fixated on the loss of good paying manufacturing jobs is because those jobs are essentially

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"men's work." But today, as this book will show, legions of young people prefer to take jobs in the hair salon. These kinds of jobs are growing at a rapid pace, while manufacturing work is being eliminated or shifted over- seas. I cannot help but think that the reason we fail to consider employ- ment in hair salons or day spas as good jobs is because those jobs have typically been thought of as "women's work."

As many of these jobs in the service economy as possible--in this support infrastructure of the creative age have to be made to pay better. Just as we increased the pay and improved the working conditions in once hellish steel mills and auto assembly plants, so too must we improve the pay and more fully tap the creative talents of the legions of people who work in hair salons

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and other service economy positions. While there is no magic bullet here, sooner or later some place will figure out how to more fully tap the creative talents of much broader segments of its people-_and it will get a huge com- petitive edge as a result. Think for a moment about the tremendous compet- itive edge Japanese manufacturers achieved by tapping the knowledge of shop-floor workers. Employing the creative talents of people whose jobs presently ask for none will dwarf this by comparison. Relegating vast numbers of people to do rote work is a dreadful waste of human capabilities. For the creative age, it is both morally and economically inefficient. The real need is to bring more people into creative work--to create more markets and op. portunities to tap the creative capabilities of far greater numbers of people.

Seems wrong. Rote-ness does not necessarily point-less. Even the "creative" jobs aren't "meaningful!" The proof of that is right in the very first except above re: "stress."

My theory of economic growth has generated considerable controversy. Social conservatives have gone apoplectic over my finding that places with high concentrations of gays and bohemians tend to have higher rates of innovation and economic growth. On talk shows and in articles, I have been accused of being biased because I'm gay (I am not) and of advocat- ing the end of Judeo-Christian civilization (I don't). I am a student of eco- nomic growth. I deal in hard data and empirical research. But often when I talk about the correlations I'm finding between cultural factors and eco- nomic health, people start shouting moralisms at me.

Conservative critics have accused me of opposing "family values." They contend that economic growth today is occurring in traditional suburban areas with traditional family values, while urban centers with high num- bers of, in the words of one commentator, "singles, young people, homo- sexuals, sophistos and trendoids," are in trouble. What's insidious here is the implication that you can be family-friendly or gay-and-bohemian- friendly, but not both. This is divisive thinking and it's also inaccurate. Many popular lists of America's most family- or child-friendly cities turn out to be loaded with cities that also score high as homes for gays and artists. As this book shows, the top five child-friendly major regions on one such list were Portland (Oregon), Seattle, Minneapolis, New York and San Francisco. All but one of the top five ranked well above average on our Gay Index (the relative concentration of gays). All five were in the top seven on our Bohemian Index (the relative concentration of artists, writ- ers, musicians and other artistic professionals).

I'm not suggesting that gays and bohemians literally cause regions to grow. Rather, their presence in large numbers is an indicator of an under- lying culture that's open-minded and diverse-_-and thus conducive to cre- ativity. My interviews and focus groups all over this country have confirmed

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height of the boom, when it seemed that American high-tech ruled the world the U.S. Council on Competitiveness issued a report warning that the country was letting its "innovation infrastructure" decay, while "other nations are accelerating their own efforts" Since then the creativity gap has closed even further. The economic leaders of the future will not neces- sarily be emerging giants like India and China. They certainly won't be countries that focus on being cost-effective centers for manufacturing and basic business processing. The competitors to watch will be a host of smaller countries, such as Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand that have built dynamic cre- ative climates and are turning out creative products ranging from Nokia cell phones to the Lord of the Rings movies.

Keep your eye on countries and the regions within them that seek to at- tract all sorts of people and nurture creativity: that is now the key element of global competition, more than flows of goods and services or capital. Regions like Toronto and Vancouver already have concentrations of immi- grants and bohemians that surpass all U.S. regions. Sydney and Mel- bourne, Australia, would rank sixth and seventh among U.S. regions on my Creativity Index. European regions from Dublin and London to Helsinki, Amsterdam and Copenhagen are fast making inroads as well. New creative centers can emerge and surpass established players very quickly. Recall how quickly regions like Austin and Seattle rose to the top of the pack within the U.S. The same thing can happen, and is happening, globally.

Meanwhile, the United States appears to have thrown its gearshift into reverse. At all levels of government and even in the private sector Ameri- cans have been cutting back crucial investments in creativity_-in educa- tion, in research, in arts and culture--while pouring billions into low-return or no-return public projects like sports stadiums. In the zeal to ensure homeland security, the nation also has placed tighter restrictions on immigration, foreign students and the flow of scientific information. If these trends continue, the U.S. may well squander its once-considerable lead. Consider this thought: The real threat to American security is not terrorism, it's that creative and talented people may stop wanting to come here.

And consider this. The rise of the creative economy is ushering in a shift of social and cultural values throughout the world. Ronald Ingle- hart of the University of Michigan and director of the long-running World Values Surveys has summarized the process as follows. As nations'

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economies advance, the values favored by their people tend to shift along two scales. They move from "traditional" values (marked, for instance, by respect for civil and religious authority) toward more "secular-rational" (free-thinking) values, and from "survival" values (favoring financial and social stability) to "self-expression" values favoring the rights of individuals to express themselves. Inglehart's charts and graphs comparing survey results from 65 countries show a striking pattern. The countries that are most highly developed economically cluster at the progressive end on both value scales. The United States, however, is a statistical outlier. It hangs back at the "traditional" end of the first scale, and has a "self-expression" rank that's higher but not commensurate with its economic rank. The Northern European countries- especially the Scandinavian and Nordic countries--appear to have a distinctive competitive advantage, in Inglehart's formulation, in their tolerant and open attitudes. In comparative research, Irene Tinagli and I found much the same thing: The top ranked countries on our Euro-Creativity Index are Sweden, Finland, Denmark and the Netherlands-_all of which rank closely to the United States.

A final concern for the United States is that it is becoming a divided na- tion. There is growing evidence from many sources that the U.S. is split- ting into two separate and distinct nations, economically, culturally and politically. The picture doesn't precisely fit the oft-cited red-state/blue- state split--many regions and sub-regions defy such analysis- but one can see two distinct nations emerging. Some parts of the country are in- creasingly traditional, often having older-style industries and slow growth, and showing rising anger. Other parts are more secular, cosmopolitan and wealthy- and, in the eyes of many, increasingly shallow, self-absorbed and hedonistic. The people in these different nations read different newspa- pers, watch different television shows, vote for different leaders, go about their work differently, and hold mutually incompatible views on almost every subject. Each side sees itself as the repository of the nation's best and truest self, and the other as a hypocritical minority trying to impose its values on the rest. If allowed to proceed unchecked, this divide could make it virtually impossible for the country to address critical economic and so. cial issues in any fashion that makes sense for the emerging creative age.

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PREFACE




This book describes the emergence of a new social class. If you are a scien- tist or engineer, an architect or designer, a writer, artist or musician, or if Th t you use your creativity as a key factor in your work in business, education, health care, law or some other profession, you are a member. With 38 mil- e lion members, more than 30 percent of the nation's workforce, the Cre- ative Class has shaped and will continue to shape deep and profound elast shifts in the ways we work, in our values and desires, and in the very fabric of our everyday lives.

As with other classes, the defining basis of this new class is economic. Just as the feudal aristocracy derived its power and identity from its hered- itary control of land and people, and the bourgeoisie from its members' roles as merchants and factory owners, the Creative Class derives its identity from its members' roles as purveyors of creativity . Because creativity is the driving force of economic growth, in terms of influence the Creative Class has become the dominant class in society. Only by understanding the rise of this new class and its values can we begin to understand the sweeping and seemingly disjointed changes in our society and begin to shape our future more intelligently.

Like most books, this one did not spring to life fully formed. Rather, my ideas evolved gradually from things I saw and heard that seemed to be at odds with conventional wisdom. In my work on regional economic devel- opment, I try to identify the factors that make some cities and regions grow and prosper, while others lag behind. One of the oldest pieces of conventional wisdom in this field says the key to economic growth is at- tracting and retaining companies--the bigger the company, the better- because companies create jobs and people go where the jobs are. During the 1980s and 1990s, many cities in the United States and around the world tried to turn themselves into the next "Silicon Somewhere" by building high-tech office parks or starting up venture capital funds. The game plan was to nourish high-tech startup companies or, in its cruder



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to technology as the driving force of broad social change, I became con- vinced that the truly fundamental changes of our time had to do with sub- tler alterations in the way we live and work- gradually accumulating shifts in our workplaces, leisure activities, communities and everyday lives. Everything from the kinds of lifestyles we seek to the ways in which we schedule our time and relate to others was changing. And yes, there was a common thread: The role of creativity as the fundamental source of eco- nomic growth and 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 Creative Economy was a dynamic and turbulent system- exciting and liberating in some ways, divisive and stressful in others. My thinking was reinforced by earth- shaking events that occurred while I was writing this book. First came the bursting of the stock-market bubble, the rapid fall of technology stocks and the subsequent recession. This put an end to the naive optimism of the so-called New Economy and to the always unfounded notion that new technology is a magic elixir that will make us rich, eliminate our economic problems and cure pressing social ills. The NASDAQ's plummet was 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 a potent wake- up call. In addition to showing us how vulnerable we are, it brought home the message that too many of us, particularly the members of the Creative Class, had been living in a world of our own concerns--selfishly pursuing narrow goals with little regard for others or for broader social issues. We had grown complacent, even aimless, but also discontent at having be- come so.

Here I found myself confronting a great paradox. Even as I was chronicling their rise and impact, it struck me that the members of the Creative Class do not see themselves as a class- a coherent group of people with common traits and concerns. Emerging classes in previous times of great transition had pulled together to forge new social mechanisms and steer their societies. But not this group. We thus find ourselves in the puzzling situation of having the dominant class in America--whose members oc- cupy the power centers of industry, media and government, as well as the arts and popular culture--virtually unaware of its own existence and thus unable to consciously 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



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The Force Behind the Shift

What caused this transformation? What happened between the 1950s and today that did not happen in the earlier period? Scholars and pundits have floated many theories, along with a range of opinions on whether the changes are good or bad. Some bemoan the passing of traditional social and cultural forms, while others point to a rosy future based largely on new technology. Yet on one point most of them agree. Most tend to see the transformation as something that's being done to us unwittingly. Some complain that certain factions of society have imposed their values on the rest of us; others say that our own inventions are turning around to re- shape us. They're wrong.

Society is changing in large measure because we want it to. Moreover it is changing neither in random chaotic ways nor in some mysterious collective- unconscious way, but in ways that are perfectly sensible and rational. The logic behind the transformation has been unclear to this point because the transformation is still in progress. But lately a number of di- verse and seemingly unconnected threads are starting to come together. The deeper pattern, the force behind the shift, can now be discerned.

That driving force is the rise of human creativity as the key factor in our economy and society. Both at work and in other spheres of our lives, we value creativity more highly than ever, and cultivate it more intensely. The creative impulse--the attribute that distinguishes us, as humans, from other species- is now being let loose on an unprecedented scale. The pur- pose of this book is to examine how and why this is so, and to trace its ef- fects as they ripple through our world.

Consider first the realm of economics. Many say that we now live in an "information" economy or a "knowledge" economy. But what's more fun- damentally true is that we now have an economy powered by human cre-



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leisure and recreation, efforts at community-building-then organize themselves around this process of identity creation.

Furthermore, when we think about group identity in this new world, we must rethink our notions of class. We often tend to classify people on the basis of their consumption habits or lifestyle choices, or, more crudely, by their income level. For instance, we often equate middle income with mid- de class. Though I view these things as significant markers of class, they are not its primary determinants. A class is a cluster of people who have common interests and tend to think, feel and behave similarly, but these similarities are fundamentally determined by economic function--by the kind of work they do for a living. All the other distinctions follow from that. And a key fact of our age is that more of us than ever are doing cre- ative work for a living.

The New Class

The economic need for creativity has registered itself in the rise of a new class, which I call the Creative Class. Some 38 million Americans, 30 per- cent of all employed people, belong to this new class. I define the core of the Creative Class to include people in science and engineering, architec- ture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose eco- nomic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or new creative content. Around the core, the Creative Class also includes a broader group of creative professionals in business and finance, law, health care and re- lated fields. These people engage in complex problem solving that involves a great deal of independent judgment and requires high levels of educa- tion or human capital. In addition, all members of the Creative Class- whether they are artists or engineers, musicians or computer scientists, writers or entrepreneurs- share a common creative ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference and merit. For the members of the Cre- ative Class, every aspect and every manifestation of creativity--technolog- ical, cultural and economic--is interlinked and inseparable.

The key difference between the Creative Class and other classes lies in what they are primarily paid to do. Those in the Working Class and the Service Class are primarily paid to execute according to plan, while those in the Creative Class are primarily paid to create and have considerably more autonomy and flexibility than the other two classes to do so. There are gray areas and boundary issues in my scheme of things, to be sure. And while some may quibble with my definition of the Creative Class and the



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The Experiential Lifestyle

Because we identify ourselves as creative people, we increasingly demand a lifestyle built around creative experiences. We are impatient with the strict separations that previously demarcated work, home and leisure. Whereas the lifestyle of the previous organizational age emphasized conformity, the new lifestyle favors individuality, self-statement, acceptance of difference and the desire for rich multidimensional experiences. David Brooks has argued in his clever book Bobos in Paradise that the new culture represents a blending of bourgeois and bohemian values,13 But we have done more than blend these two categories; we have transcended them completely so that they no longer even apply. Spurred on by the creative ethos, we blend work and lifestyle to construct our identities as creative people. In the past, people often literally "identified themselves through several basic social categories: occupation, employer and family status (husband, wife, father, mother). Today, the people in my interviews identify themselves through a tangle of connections to myriad creative activities. One person may be simultaneously a writer, researcher, consultant, cyclist, rock climber, electronic/world music/acid jazz lover, amateur gourmet cook, wine enthusiast or micro-brewer. The people in my interviews report that they have little trouble integrating such multiple interests and personae. This kind of synthesis is integral to establishing a unique creative identity,

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It's almost impossible to be a nonconformist today because conformity is no longer an issue. But at the same time, this more open attitude toward lifestyle forms a deep and growing division between the Creative Class and the more traditional classes.

The Time Warp

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"The Dinosaurs Are Doomed"

A related myth is that the age of large corporations is over--that they have outlived their usefulness, their power has been broken, and they will even- tually fade away along with other big organizational forms, like Big Gov- ernment. The classic metaphor is the lumbering dinosaur made obsolete and usurped by small, nimble mammals--the usurpers in this case being small, nimble startup companies.I2

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The death-to-the-dinosaurs fallacy has been fed by diverse streams of thought: the small-is-beautiful movement of the 1960s, the culture of en- trepreneurship that emerged in the wake of Silicon Valley and of course the great New Economy hype of the late 1990s, which promoted the no- tion that any twenty-six-year-old with a good idea could start a company, make a mint and retire by forty. This pipe dream is an old one with deep roots in American culture. From the outset, we have seen ourselves as a nation of entrepreneurs and self-created individuals. We are steeped in the myth of Horatio Alger. Note how the ideal of the self-made person toiling away in the "garage"~-from the garage startup to the garage band--per- meates our popular culture today. It is as important for a modern enterprise to have been born in a garage as it was for a nineteenth-century presidential candidate to have been born in a log cabin.

But big companies are by no means going away. Microsoft and Intel continue to control much of the so-called information economy, along with Oracle, Cisco, IBM and AOL Time Warner. Big industrial concerns, from General Motors to General Electric, General Dynamics and General Foods, still turn out most of the nation's goods. Our money is managed not by upstarts but by large financial institutions. The resources that power our economy are similarly managed and controlled by giant corpo- rations. Mega-mergers among mega-corporations have if anything accel- erated in recent years. A September 2000 cover story in Business Week raised the question:" "Too Much Corporate Power?" The answer according to most Americans was a resounding yes. According to a Business Week/Harris Poll featured in the story, nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of Americans said "business had too much power over many aspects of American life."13 Nor as far as I can tell, is government being replaced by some newer, smaller form of organization.

The economy, like nature, is a dynamic system. New companies form and help to propel it forward, with some dying out while others carry on to grow quite large themselves, like Microsoft and Intel. An economy composed only of small, short-lived entities would be no more sustainable than an ecosystem composed only of insects. And the mere fact that an organization has existed for a long time or is engaged in a long-standing business does not make it "Old Economy" and therefore obsolescent. The key point is that organizations of all sizes and types have distinct roles to play in a creative economy. Small firms, big firms, the federal government, and nonprofit research universities all come into play in interlocking ways

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to develop and refine ideas and bring them to market. To borrow a con- cept from my colleague Ashish Arora, it is this very "division of innovative labor" that has spurred so much of our recent creativity. I4

"Power to the People"

A related myth is the "power to the people" fantasy. This too goes back a long time and achieved wide currency in the 1960s. An increasingly influ- ential view, associated with Daniel Pink, is that of the so-called "free agent."15 In this view, more and more workers are becoming independent agents, blissfully hopping from one short-term engagement to the next in pursuit of the top dollar and the hottest projects. Free agents, so the argu- ment goes, are able to break free from the stranglehold of large organiza- tions and take control of their lives. Companies are accepting and helping to promote this state of affairs, since they no longer have to carry as many long-term employees, the result being freedom and prosperity for all.

There is some truth in this view. Creative people are indeed the chief currency of the emerging economic age. And these people tend to be mo- bile and change jobs frequently. But the upshot is complex. First, it's cer- tainly not true that all leverage and bargaining power devolves to the free-agent worker- more likely, the balance of power shifts back and forth with supply and demand for particular talents. The free agent assumes more risk and responsibility along with more freedom. While the system looks lovely during good times, these risks and their consequences can be quite dire when the economy turns down. Furthermore, people are com- plex. Their motivations are many and varied, and not all creative people want to be self-employed or job-hopping free agents. The one consistent quality I detect among creative people is that they seek opportunities to exercise their creativity. If they can find these opportunities by becoming free agents they will do so, and if they can find them by joining a firm and staying with it for a good while, they will do that.

"Going Hollywood"

In the view of many evangelists of the new world of work, much of the economy is coming to operate on the same principles as the Hollywood movie industry, with the fundamental shifts reflecting what has happened in Hollywood itself.16 Hollywood once was ruled by big studios that em-

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ployed actors and production crews under long-term contracts, and cranked out movies in assembly-line fashion, much like the factories of the old corporate world. Then in the 1950s the studio system broke down and Hollywood began to run on a more fluid model. Typically, a producer today will sell a group of investors on a script idea, then pull together an ad hoc team of actors, technicians and others to make the film. Once the project is done the team dissolves, and its members re-form in new com- binations around other ideas.

Now, so the argument goes, the rest of our economy is emulating Holly- wood. Entire business firms are often pulled together on an ad hoc basis- with an independent "producer" (i.e. an entrepreneur) selling investors on a "script idea" (a business plan)- only to dissolve soon after, with the' "tal- ent" (skilled professionals) moving on to mobilize around new ventures. In a sense, the Hollywood model is similar to the free-agent approach. As Dan Pink has written,' "Large permanent organizations with fixed rosters of individuals are giving way to small flexible networks with ever changing talents." There is some truth in the Hollywood model. Companies are cer- tainly coming to demand flexibility. And there are some strong similarities between the way Hollywood operates and the workings of high-tech areas like Silicon Valley.

But the Hollywood model suffers from several overblown claims. Clearly large organizations still matter a lot--both in Silicon Valley, where Stanford University was and still is a key hub, and in Hollywood, where corporations like Disney, Sony and Universal play key roles. In some ways a Hollywood-like system may well benefit large organizations-_-which can attract and shed labor at will--more than it does the majority of the peo- ple who work under it. But as the business writer James Surowiecki pointed out in a stinging New Yorker critique, the Hollywood model may not always be the most efficient way of doing business. Noting the dreadfully low rates of return at most Hollywood studios, Surowiecki writes: "Without a cadre of in-house performers studios lurch from movie to movie, wasting enormous amounts of time and money assembling the tal- ent for each project. Hollywood needs to look more like a business and less like a crapshoot"17 Likewise in high-technology industry, many re- searchers have noted the high cost of "churn"-the inefficiency, for in- stance, of constantly having to replace people who leave just after they've learned their way around the firm and become truly valuable,18

Yet in other senses the Hollywood analogy is, ironically, more potent

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than its advocates may realize. It actually applies- is valid, and useful and provocative in two ways that most people have overlooked. Perhaps the most salient point is the fact that Hollywood is a place. Business gets done there because creative people congregate there, network with one another and are readily available. Ditto Silicon Valley or any other booming cre- ative economy center. These places are talent magnets and talent aggrega- tors. Their key economic function is to provide a regional talent pool into which, firms can dip as needed, and from which new ideas and firms bub. ble up. The real economic sense in which we're' "going Hollywood" is that places have replaced companies as the key organizing units in our econ- omy. That's why much of my research, and much of the latter part of this book, has been devoted to learning what makes such places work and what makes them more or less attractive to creative people.

The other salient point is that we're also going Hollywood in a social sense. Hollywood is a place where social ties are notoriously tenuous and contingent. Similarly, many Creative Class people I study prefer loose ties, quasi-anonymous communities and shifting networks of social alliance. Does this mean we're turning into a nation of stereotypical Hollywood rats, hugging and kissing our associates before we stab them in the back? I don't believe so. But it's clear that our society is coming to look quite dif- ferent from that of the past. We need to develop a clearer picture of where the new creative society seems to be taking us--so we can decide if we want to go there.

Dimensions of Creativity

Creativity is often viewed as a rather mystical affair. Our understanding of it has grown, however, through systematic study over the past few decades. Researchers have observed and analyzed creativity in subjects ranging from eminent scientists and artists to preschoolers and chimpanzees. Oc- casionally but notably, they have studied its workings across entire human societies. They have pored through the biographies, notebooks and letters of great creators of the past; modeled the creative process by computer; and tried to get computers to be creative.!' From the existing body of liter- ature 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 creative ethos is emerging in our lives today.

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Let's start with a couple of basics. First, creativity is not the same as "in-telligence." Says one scholarly review:

Many studies recognize creativity as cognitive ability separate from other mental functions and particularly independent from the complex of abilities grouped under the word intelligence. Although intelligence the ability to deal with or process large amounts of data-_favors creative potential, it is not synonymous with creativity,20

Creativity involves the ability to synthesize. Einstein captured it nicely when he called his own work "combinatory play." It is a matter of sitting through data, perceptions and materials to come up with combinations that are new and useful. A creative synthesis is useful in such varied ways as producing a practical device, or a theory or insight that can be applied to solve a problem, or a work of art that can be appreciated. 21

Creativity requires self-assurance and the ability to take risks. In her comprehensive review of the field, The Creative Mind, Margaret Boden writes that creativity

involves not only a passionate interest but self-confidence too. A person needs a healthy self-respect to pursue novel ideas, and to make mistakes, de- spite criticism from others. Self-doubt there may be, but it cannot always win the day. Breaking generally accepted rules, or even stretching them, takes confidence. Continuing to do so, in the face of scepticism and scorn, takes even more 22

Small wonder that the creative ethos marks a strong departure from the conformist ethos of the past. Creative work in fact is often downright sub- versive, since it disrupts existing patterns of thought and life. It can feel subversive and unsettling even to the creator. One famous definition of creativity is "the process of destroying one's gestalt in favor of a better one.?" And to the economist Joseph Schumpeter, the "perennial gale of cre- ative destruction" was the very essence of capitalism:

in capitalist reality as distinguished from its textbook picture, it is not (price] competition which counts but the competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization . competition which commands a decisive cost or quality advantage and

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which strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives,23

The economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it even more bluntly in the preface to his landmark book The Lever of Riches, a sweeping study of technological creativity from classical antiquity through the Industrial Revolution. Drawing upon Schumpeter's famous distinction between the typical "adaptive response" and the disruptive and innovative "creative re- sponse," Mokyr writes:

Economists and historians alike realize that there is a deep difference be- tween homo economicus and homo creativus. One makes the most of what nature permits him to have. The other rebels against nature's dictates. Tech- nological creativity, like all creativity, is an act of rebellion.24

Yet creativity is not the province of a few select geniuses who can get away with breaking the mold because they possess superhuman talents. It is a capacity inherent to varying degrees in virtually all people. According to Boden, who sums up a wealth of research: ' "Creativity draws crucially on our ordinary abilities. Noticing, remembering, seeing, speaking, hear- ing, understanding language, and recognizing analogies: all these talents of Everyman are important."25 While the capacity to synthesize vast amounts of information and wrestle with very complex problems can be an advan- tage, Boden argues, genius can also cut both ways. "These rare individuals, then, can search- and transform high-level space much larger and com- plex than those explored by other people. They are in a sense more free than us, for they can generate more possibilities than we can imagine. Yet they respect constraints more than we do." Later, she adds:

The romantic myth of "creative genius" rarely helps. Often it is insidiously self-destructive. It can buttress the self-confidence of those individuals who believe themselves to be among the chosen few (perhaps it helped Beethoven to face his many troubles). But it undermines the self-regard of those who do not. Someone who believes that creativity is a rare or special power cannot sensibly hope that perseverance, or education, will enable them to join the creative elite. Either one is already a member, or will never be. Monolithic notions of creativity, talent, or intelligence are discouraging in the same way. Either one has got "it" or one hasn't. Why bother to try if one's efforts can lead only to a slightly less dispiriting level of mediocrity?..A very different

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attitude is possible for someone who sees creativity as based in ordinary abil- ities we all share, and in practised expertise to which we can all aspire, 26

Even though much about the creative process seems strange and elusive, there does appear to be a consistent method underlying it. Many re- searchers see creative thinking as a four-step process: preparation, incuba- tion, illumination and verification or revision.27 Preparation is consciously studying a task, and perhaps trying to attack it logically by standard means. Incubation, the "mystical" step, is one in which both the conscious mind and the subconscious mull over the problem in hard-to- define ways. Illumination, the "Eureka!" step, is seeing a new synthesis; and verification and revision include all the work that comes after. Anyone who's done creative work of any kind will recognize the steps. Indeed more of us today do precisely this sort of work, and that, for instance, is why so many of us are moving to irregular work schedules: The alternating peri- ods of different kinds of mental activity require it.

Creativity is multidimensional and experiential. The psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, a leading scholar in the field, writes,' "creativity is favored by an intellect that has been enriched with diverse experiences and per- spectives."28 It is "associated with a mind that exhibits a variety of inter- ests and knowledge." Thus, the varied forms of creativity that we typically see as different from one another--technological creativity (or inven- tion), economic creativity (entrepreneurship) and artistic and cultural creativity, among others--are in fact deeply interrelated. Not only do they share a common thought process, they reinforce each other through cross-fertilization and mutual stimulation. And so through history practi toners of the different forms of creativity have tended to congregate and feed off one another in teeming, multifaceted creative centers--Florence in the early Renaissance; 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 work. Both Thomas Edison (a paragon of technological creativity) and George Bernard Shaw (a cultural creative) liked to say that genius is 90 percent perspiration and 10 percent inspiration.2° Or as the journalist Red Smith once said of the demands of his craft: "There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.?" Here we have an inventor, a playwright and a sportswriter sounding a common theme: The creative ethos is built on discipline and focus, sweat and blood. As Boden observes,

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a person needs time, and enormous effort, to amass mental structures and to explore their potential. It is not always easy (it was not easy for Beethoven). Even when it is, life has many other attractions. Only a strong commitment to the domain--music, maths, medicine- can prevent someone from dissi- pating their energies on other things. 30

Creativity can take a long time--there are many stories of great mathe- maticians and scientists mulling a problem for months or more, to be finally "illuminated" while stepping onto a bus or staring into a fire- place-_and even this apparent magic is the result of long preparation. Thus Louis Pasteur's famous dictum: "Chance favors only the prepared mind." Or as Wesley Cohen and Daniel Levinthal have put it in their stud- is of firm-based innovation: "Fortune favors the prepared firm." 31

Moreover, it has been observed that because of the all-absorbing nature of creative work, many great thinkers of the past were people who "formed no close ties": They had lots of colleagues and acquaintances, but few close friends and often no spouse or children. In fact, muses the psychiatrist An- thony Storr, "if intense periods of concentration over long periods are required to attain fundamental insights, the family man is at a disadvan- tage." Quoting the famous bachelor Isaac Newton on his process of dis- covery- "I keep the subject constantly before me, and wait till the first dawnings open slowly by little and little into the full and clear light'. Storr notes that "If Newton had been subject to the demands of a wife for companionship or interrupted by the patter of tiny feet, it would certainly have been less easy for him."32

Creativity is largely driven by intrinsic rewards. Surely some creative people are driven by money, but studies find that truly creative individuals from artists and writers to scientists and open-source software developers are driven primarily by internal motivations. In a study of motivation and reward, Harvard Business School psychologist Teresa Amabile observed, "Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity, but extrinsic motivation is detrimental. It appears that when people are primarily motivated to do some creative activity by their own interest and enjoyment of that activity, they may be more creative than when they are primarily motivated by some goal imposed upon them by others."33

Although creativity is often viewed as an individual phenomenon, it is an inescapably social process. It is frequently exercised in creative teams. Even the lone creator relies heavily on contributors and collaborators. Successful creators have often organized themselves and others for system-

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atic effort. When Edison opened his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, he called the lab an "invention factory" and announced his intention to produce "a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so."34 The artist Andy Warhol similarly dubbed his Manhattan studio The Factory, and though Warhol liked to cultivate a public image of bemused indifference, he was a prolific organizer and worker-_mobilizing friends and colleagues to publish a magazine and produce films and mu- sic, all while pursuing his own art.

Furthermore, creativity flourishes best in a unique kind of social envi conment: one that is stable enough to allow continuity of effort, yet di- verse and broad-minded enough to nourish creativity in all its subversive forms. Simonton finds creativity flourishing in places and times marked by four characteristics: "domain activity, intellectual receptiveness, ethnic diversity, (and] political openness." In a study of the history of Japanese culture- a culture that has been "highly variable in its openness to outside influences"_-Simonton found that "those periods in which Japan was re- ceptive to alien influx were soon followed by periods of augmented cre- ative activity."35

One final cautionary note is in order. Joel Mokyr notes that technologi- cal creativity has tended to rise and then fade dramatically at various times in various cultures, when social and economic institutions turn rigid and act against it. Spectacular fade-outs occurred, for instance, in late me- dieval times in the Islamic world and in China. Both societies, which had been leaders in fields from mathematics to mechanical invention, then proceeded to fall far behind Western Europe economically. When one takes the long view of human history, Mokyr writes, one sees that

technological progress is like a fragile and vulnerable plant, whose flourish- ing is not only dependent on the appropriate surroundings and climate, but whose life is almost always short. It is highly sensitive to the social and eco- nomic environment and can easily be arrested. 36

Thus a continued outpouring of creativity "cannot and should not be taken for granted," Mokyr warns--even today. Sustaining it over long pe- riods is not automatic, but requires constant attention to and investment in the economic and social forms that feed the creative impulse. All the more reason to study the institutions of our emerging Creative Age closely, so that we can understand their inner workings and nourish them appropriately.



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fruits or artifacts of the creativity, but human creativity itself is being widely harnessed on a truly massive scale and promulgated as never before.

Today we like to think that we clearly understand creativity as a source of economic value. Many commentators, for instance, trumpet the point that "intellectual property - useful new knowledge embodied in com- puter programs, or patents or formulas--has now become more valuable than any kind of physical property. It's no surprise that we often litigate over intellectual property, and argue about the proper means of protecting it, as fiercely as miners in the California Gold Rush battling over a claim. But as Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessing has powerfully argued, our penchant for overprotecting and overlitigating intellectual property may well serve to constrain and limit the creative impulse.40 In the long run, we cannot forget what the fundamental cornerstone of our wealth is. Though useful knowledge may reside in programs or formulas, it does not originate there. It originates with people. The ultimate intellec- tual property- the one that really replaces land, labor and capital as the most valuable economic resource--is the human creative faculty.

To some degree, Karl Marx had it partly right when he foresaw that workers would someday control the means of production. This is now beginning to happen, although not as Marx thought it would, with the proletariat rising to take over factories. Rather, more workers than ever control the means of production because it is inside their heads; they are the means of production. Thus, the ultimate "control" issue is not who owns the patents that may result, nor is it whether the creative worker or the employer holds the balance of power in labor market negotiations. While those battles swing back and forth, the ultimate control issue--the one we have to stay focused on, individually and collectively- is how to keep stoking and tapping the creative furnace inside each human being.

The Creative Factory

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century, and particularly since 1950. Professional artists, writers and performers- so-called "bohemians" •_increased from some 200,000 in 1900 to 525,000 in 1950 and to 2.5 million in 1999, an increase of more than 375 percent since 1950 (see Fig. 3.3). There were roughly 250 bohemians for every 100,000 Americans in 1900, a figure that increased to roughly 350 by 1950. That number crossed 500 in 1980, before reaching 900 for every 100,000 Americans in 1999.5

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1996 study, Stephen Barley of Stanford University emphasized the grow- ing importance and influence of this group of workers.5 In fields such as medicine and scientific research, technicians are taking on increased re- sponsibility to interpret their work and make decisions, blurring the old distinction between white-collar work (done by decisionmakers) and blue-collar work (done by those who follow orders). Barley notes that in medicine, for instance, "emergency medical technicians take action on the basis of diagnoses made at the site," while sonographers and radiology technicians draw on "knowledge of biological systems, pharmacology, and disease processes to render diagnostically useful information" -all of which encroaches on turf once reserved for the M.D.

Barley also found that in some areas of biomedical work, like the breeding of monoclonal antibodies, labs have had increasing difficulty duplicating each other's work: They might use the same formulas and well-documented procedures but not get the same results. The reason is that although the lead scientists at the labs might be working from the same theories, the lab technicians are called upon to make myriad inter- pretations and on-the-spot decisions. And while different technicians might all do these things according to accepted standards, they do them differently. Each is drawing on an arcane knowledge base and exercising his or her own judgment, by individual thought processes so complex and elusive that they could not easily be documented or communicated. Though counterproductive in this case, this individuality happens to be one of the hallmarks of creative work. Lest you think this sort of thing happens only in the rarefied world of the biomedical laboratory, Barley notes a similar phenomenon among technicians who repair and maintain copying machines. They acquire their own arcane bodies of knowledge and develop their own unique ways of doing the job.

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"quirky" artists to "eccentric" scientists. But it has now become far mor pervasive. In this sense, the increasing nonconformity to organizationa norms may represent a new mainstream value. Members of the Creative Class endeavor to create individualistic identities that reflect their creativ- ity. This can entail a mixing of multiple creative identities.

Meritocracy. Merit is very strongly valued by the Creative Class, a qual- ity shared with Whyte's class of organization men. The Creative Class fa- vors hard work, challenge and stimulation. Its members have a propensity for goal-setting and achievement. They want to get ahead because they are good at what they do.

Creative Class people no longer define themselves mainly by the amount of money they make or their position in a financially delineated status order. While money may be looked upon as a marker of achieve- ment, it is not the whole story. In interviews and focus groups, I consis- tently come across people valiantly trying to defy an economic class into which they were born. This is particularly true of the young descendants of the truly wealthy--the capitalist class--who frequently describe them- selves as just "ordinary" creative people working on music, film or intellectual endeavors of one sort or another. Having absorbed the Creative Class value of merit, they no longer find true status in their wealth and thus try to downplay it.

Hard to take this seriously!

There are many reasons for the emphasis on merit. Creative Class peo- ple are ambitious and want to move up based on their abilities and effort. Creative people have always been motivated by the respect of their peers. The companies that employ them are often under tremendous competi- tive pressure and thus cannot afford much dead wood on staff: Everyone has to contribute. The pressure is more intense than ever to hire the best people regardless of race, creed, sexual preference or other factors.

But meritocracy also has its dark side. Qualities that confer merit, such as technical knowledge and mental discipline, are socially acquired and cultivated. Yet those who have these qualities may easily start thinking they were born with them, or acquired them all on their own, or that others just "don't have it." By papering over the causes of cultural and educa- tional advantage, meritocracy may subtly perpetuate the very prejudices it claims to renounce. On the bright side, of course, meritocracy ties into a host of values and beliefs we'd all agree are positive--from faith that virtue will be rewarded, to valuing self-determination and mistrusting rigid caste systems. Researchers have found such values to be on the rise,

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not only among the Creative Class in the United States, but throughout our society and other societies.

Diversity and Openness. Diversity has become a politically charged buzzword. To some it is an ideal and rallying cry, to others a Trojan-horse concept that has brought us affirmative action and other liberal abomina- tions. The Creative Class people I study use the word a lot, but not to press any political hot buttons. Diversity is simply something they value in all its manifestations. This is spoken of so often, and so matter-of-factly, that I take it to be a fundamental marker of Creative Class values. As my focus groups and interviews reveal, members of this class strongly favor organi- zations and environments in which they feel that anyone can fit in and can get ahead.

Diversity of peoples is favored first of all out of self-interest. Diversity can be a signal of meritocratic norms at work. Talented people defy classi- fication based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference or appearance. One indicator of this preference for diversity is reflected in the fact that Creative Class people tell me that at job interviews they like to ask if the company offers same-sex partner benefits, even when they are not them- selves gay. What they're seeking is an environment open to differences. Many highly creative people, regardless of ethnic background or sexual orientation, grew up feeling like outsiders, different in some way from most of their schoolmates. They may have odd personal habits or extreme styles of dress. Also, Creative Class people are mobile and tend to move around to different parts of the country; they may not be "natives" of the place they live even if they are American-born. When they are sizing up a new company and community, acceptance of diversity and of gays in par- ticular is a sign that reads "nonstandard people welcome here." It also reg- isters itself in changed behaviors and organizational policies. For example, in some Creative Class centers like Silicon Valley and Austin, the tradi- tional office Christmas party is giving way to more secular, inclusive cele- brations. The big event at many firms is now the Halloween party: Just about anyone can relate to a holiday that involves dressing up in costume.

While the Creative Class favors openness and diversity, to some degree it is a diversity of elites, limited to highly educated, creative people. Even though the rise of the Creative Class has opened up new avenues of ad- vancement for women and members of ethnic minorities, its existence has certainly failed to put an end to long-standing divisions of race and gen- der. Within high-tech industries in particular these divisions still seem to

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hold. The world of high-tech creativity doesn't include many African- Americans. Several of my interviewees noted that a typical high-tech com- pany "looks like the United Nations minus the black faces." This is unfortunate but not surprising. For several reasons, U.S. blacks are under- represented in many professions, and this may be compounded today by the so-called digital divide-_black families in the United States tend to be poorer than average, and thus their children are less likely to have access to computers. My own research shows a negative statistical correlation be- tween concentrations of high-tech firms in a region and nonwhites as a percentage of the population, which is particularly disturbing in light of my other findings on the positive relationship between high-tech and other kinds of diversity--from foreign-born people to gays.

There are intriguing challenges to the kind of diversity that the members of the Creative Class are drawn to. Speaking of a small software company that had the usual assortment of Indian, Chinese, Arabic and other em- ployees, an Indian technology professional said: "That's not diversity! They're all software engineers." Yet despite the holes in the picture, distinc- tive value changes are indeed afoot, as other researchers have clearly found.

The Post-Scarcity Effect

Ronald Inglehart, a political science professor at the University of Michi gan, has documented the powerful shift in values and attitudes across the world in more than two decades of careful research. In three periods over the past twenty years, researchers participating in Inglehart's World Values Survey administered detailed questionnaires to random samples of adults in countries around the world. 'O By 1995-1998, the last survey period, the number of nations studied had grown to sixty-five, including about 75 percent of the world's population. Along with specific issues like divorce, abortion and suicide, the survey delved into matters such as deference to authority versus deciding for oneself, openness versus insularity (can strangers be trusted?), and what, ultimately, is important in life. Inglehart and his colleagues have sifted the resulting data to look for internal corre- lations (which kinds of values tend to go together) and for correlations with economic and social factors such as a nation's level of economic de- velopment, form of government and religious heritage. The researchers compared nations to one another, mapping out various similarities and differences--and they also looked for changes over time.



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That assumption was wrong. Writing at the apex of the New Economy, 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 will 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 at all. ... Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers. When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers' greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and social power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners.'

As this chapter will show, even dramatically changing economic condi- tions seem to have little effect on what most people, particularly creative people, want out of their work. Motivating creative people has always re- quired more than money. It depends on intrinsic rewards and is tied to the very creative content of their work.

What Money Can't Buy

Of course people work to make money: It's necessary but not sufficient. During the NASDAQ crash, when mass layoffs were rampant at high-tech firms, I received the following e-mail from someone who had survived a round of head-cutting at the high-tech consulting company Sapient Sys- tems: "Many of those I knew (who were laid off] have had little problem getting new jobs," he explained--but "we had a lot of really good people who wanted to work at Sapient because of the culture, and when they were let go it was like losing family.?" Then he added: "One of the most impor- tant things at Sapient is culture and hiring only the best people. Sapient does not pay the best, intentionally, because if you pay top dollar, then you get mercenaries and mercenaries don't help develop culture." 2 This was an astounding statement. Here was an employee writing at the darkest hour, with heads rolling all around him, and he was praising his employer for having the wisdom not to pay too highly. He also hints at another key point. For many people, the big worry during the high-tech downturn was not the loss of stock-option value or job security. It was that they might



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commitment to them. The extra sacrifice of missed family birthdays because of long hours at the office no longer makes sense, and maybe never did. As the old saying goes, people on their deathbeds never wish they had spent more time at the office. 16

Or as Stanford's Pfeffer likes to say: Loyalty isn't dead. Companies have driven it away.

This too is less a moral issue than a hard-nosed economic calculation. For companies, it's more efficient to exercise greater flexibility in staffing decisions. In fact some companies have reduced costs by terminating em- ployees and then promptly hiring them back as independent contractors. The company no longer has to provide benefits, and doesn't have to promise, even implicitly, continued employment once a project is done.

But people also perceive advantages from this new system. To a large degree, it is what we "want." I have come across few who hanker for a return to the old one-company-for-life arrangement. Most believe that it's better to move around: They get more options that way, and it is easier to move up by moving on. They understand that their only real job security comes from their capabilities and continued productivity.

The new reality also is a result of people trying to take greater control over their work. The people in my interviews and focus groups cited this as their primary motivator. They get fed up with the office politics and bu- reaucracy of corporate life. Those in smaller, entrepreneurial companies grow tired of the stress and the management-by-chaos. People in both set- tings tire of worrying about losing their jobs. And while no person can achieve total control, many choose this route to take more control-in whatever areas may matter most to them. The following excerpt from an on-line dialogue on Fast Company's website expresses it well.17

I never did fully understand the workaholics who put in 60+ hour weeks, working on weekends, and basically ignored the fact that some people have lives. How many of them wound up with worthless options, marriages on the rocks, and lost jobs when their companies decided to downsize... I worked for one company where it was not unusual for the CEO to call a triv- ial meeting for 6 PM on the Friday of a holiday weekend, and first an- nounced the meeting at 2 PM while the family was already loading the car for a weekend trip. People were also called back from their vacations for mi- nor matters that did not need immediate action. Folks were required to travel on their own (weekend) time to get cheaper airfares for the company.

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There was no respect for the employees' own time or their families. Many of the corporate officers were based overseas, and would come to the states for two or three week stints, during which time they were living in hotels and thought nothing of calling long, evening meetings. Why not? It's not like they had a life. Just after my daughter was born, I decided that I wanted to be home for dinner on more than just 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.

By branching out on my own, I was able to meet my financial needs, de- cide how much is enough, and be able to say no to too much work. I don't have to "maximize" everything or answer to investors. I don't have to worry because the twenty-something workaholic urban dweller in the next cubicle thinks I'm a slacker because I start my one-hour drive home at 5 PM or 6 PM and resent a phone call during family time on Friday night or Saturday morning. It's just a job.. it's what I do to pay my bills.

Note here says:
NOT what we "want."

.... Sure, my rev- enues have slowed to a trickle too and being old enough to remember the 80s and 90s, I think things will get a lot worse before they get better next year. I'll just have to try to tough it out.

The people I have come across in my research say that they leave jobs for the same sorts of reasons that the cartoon strip character Dilbert chroni- cles. It's not the amount of their salary or the number of stock options. It's management- inconsistent, incompetent or capricious. A big complaint is that management doesn't "get it' or fails to appreciate employee efforts. Even worse are major changes of direction that cause employees to think that all of their hard work has been for naught. This will drive even the most loyal of employees to abandon ship. I hear such comments not just from discombobulated "coolies" working in small high-tech companies, but from people in stable corporate jobs with good pay, and in nonprofit and government work, and from people who themselves have managerial duties. One person sent this e-mail after reading one of my Information Week columns:

Once again, I am working late, taking care of another disaster in my job as a biomedical engineer. The management here is atrocious (I'm sure that you have heard it all before). The amazing thing to me is that valued, long- time employees are leaving my company at a frightening rate and the owners don't even seem to notice or care. As a middle manager, I have learned a con- siderable amount about how to (and how not to) treat one's employees. Un-



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wrong reasons. "I was getting the project done not for the goals of the pro- jest but for the goals of the people above," noted one participant in the study. And again, while striking out on one's own does not guarantee complete freedom, at least you become the person setting the goals and deciding how to play the cards. As a software developer put it, "I don't work for free anymore."

Life in the Horizontal Labor Market

The new labor market shaped by these trends has three chief characteris- tics. First, people today tend to pursue their careers horizontally rather than vertically. Climbing the corporate ladder is no longer so popular, per- haps partly because there isn't as much of a ladder in many of today's leaner, flatter firms--and it is liable to shift or vanish before you're halfway up. Instead, more of us swing from tree to tree in search of various fruit.

The early career of one young man I met is a good example. This man had come to the United States from Belarus. His first job, as a software de- veloper, was in Norfolk, Virginia. He liked the work, but being young, he wanted to live in a bigger, more exciting city. New York and Miami, two popular havens for Russian émigrés, were among the options. But he judged Miami too hot and New York too expensive. So he settled on Pitts- burgh-a city with a temperate climate, low cost of living, and big enough to provide the cultural stimulation he wanted. He took a full-time job with a growing young high-tech firm. After about a year he left to work for one of the city's old-line, industrial corporations-_-not as an employee but as a dedicated independent contractor. Now he was a free agent of sorts. Soon he became more of a free agent: As the work for the big firm tapered off a bit, he took on consulting for his previous employer. Then, having tired of the independent life, he went back to that employer full-time- less than a year after he left. That's a lot of moving in a short time, with a lot of different motivations. I could tell many similar stories. The point is that people like this young immigrant and Hayes Clement defy simple la- bels as free agents or job-hoppers. They are simply navigating the new re alities of the horizontal labor market.

This shift is the product of powerful economic trends besides those al- ready noted. As Barley observed in his 1996 study The New World of Work, the entire economy is moving toward "a more horizontal division of la- bor?20 In the old days, bosses were people who knew their business better than the subordinates did, so both the typical organizational structure and

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the typical career path were vertical. As you stuck around and presumably learned more about the business, you moved up. But today, with growing specialization, this no longer holds: "[T]hose in authority," Barley writes, "no longer comprehend the work of their subordinates." Even the eminent research scientist can't boss the lab technicians around: They have knowl- edge and skills that he doesn't. Thus what we used to think of as jobs or occupations, Barley argues, devolve into "clusters of domain-specific knowledge." For things to go well in any organization, these clusters must interact on equal footing. This is why the vertical hierarchy and traditional career ladder have been replaced by a horizontal division of labor, side- ways career moves between companies and a horizontal labor market. Once again, what appears to be self-indulgence (to conservatives) or new tactics of corporate oppression (to liberals) in fact turns out to be the re- sult of the rational evolution of economic forces.

The second characteristic of the new labor market is that people have come to identify more with their occupation or profession than with a company. This is partly the product of the move to domain-specific knowledge. My focus groups and interviews show people increasingly defining themselves both by the creative content of their work and by their lifestyle interests: biker, climber, musician. In search of greater challenge, autonomy or satisfaction, people once again tend to move horizontally rather than vertically.

Third, people bear more responsibility for every aspect of their careers. We not only assume the risks of our job moves, we assume the task of tak- ing care of our creativity_-investing in it, supporting it and nurturing it. For instance, creative workers spend tremendous amounts of time and money on education, They go through basic port-of-entry education, edu- cation for a career-track change, and ongoing learning and upgrading of skills. People in my interviews and focus groups report that they, not their employers, have the responsibility for making sure their skills are current. This is particularly true for workers in rapidly changing high-technology fields. According to the study by Batt and Christopherson, new media pro- fessionals in New York City spent an average of 13.5 hours per week obtain- ing new skills-all of it unpaid,? That is one-third of a 40-hour workweek invested in taking care of their creativity. The report concludes that skill ac- quisition has become an individual responsibility, "both because the inter- active nature of computer tools allows new media workers to learn new skills at their own pace and within their own learning styles and because formal learning programs have not kept pace with skill needs in this fast-

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changing industry." Moreover, in the new labor market it no longer pays for companies to invest significantly in developing their people's skills and ca- abilities, when people frequently leave for better opportunities and greater challenge. Just 30 percent of 262 "network professionals" in a Lucent Tech- ologies survey of job satisfaction said that their company's formal training programs met their needs, even though nearly three-quarters (73 percent) said their careers required them to learn and grow.22

Perhaps the biggest change is that people now expect to manage their working lives in these ways. Fewer of us can even imagine a long-term ca- reer with one firm. When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, two years was considered the minimum acceptable tenure in a job. My focus groups and interviews, as well as the available statistics, suggest that the norm to- day is to bail out as quickly as possible if unhappy: Why waste your time and the firm's? Moreover, the new reality of chronic job changing has be- come internalized in the psyche of work. People have come to accept that they are on their own-_-that the traditional sources of security and entitle- ment no longer exist, or even matter. This is a sea change.

In the past, large-scale layoffs were met with outrage and horror. As re- cently as the late 1980s and early 1990s, corporate downsizings generated a national outcry, with waves of magazine cover stories and TV specials in which corporate spokesmen were called out to defend their actions. There were even street protests. Fast-forward to 2001: The jobless rolls num- bered in the millions, their highest total in a decade or more. Thousands of people were thrown out of jobs not just by fly-by-night high-tech firms but in established companies like Ford, Lucent, Motorola, Merrill Lynch, Cisco and many others. And what was the reaction? Not much. Some scat- tered incidents of "white-collar rage,;" with laid-off people sabotaging the company computer or taking things home from work. But no picket signs, no demonstrations, not a peep from the politicians. "Protest does not even occur" to people who get fired anymore, wrote the New York Times in Au- gust 2001, quoting a woman who lost her job in Cincinnati: "If you talked to me a couple of months ago you might have heard some outrage, but now it's a matter of biting the bullet and going forward."23

This is perhaps the best indicator of how thoroughly we have come to terms with the new labor market. Like this woman, we simply accept it as the way things are and go about our busy lives. We acknowledge that there is no corporation or other large institution that will take care of us—that we are truly on our own.



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Has Overwork Been Overhyped?

When Juliet Schor's The Overworked American was published in 1991, her findings seemed to resonate with what many people intuitively felt. In re- cent years, the average American had been working increasingly longer hours, and we were finding it the main source of stress in our lives. Blue- collar people, as usual, were taking it on the chin hardest.

Let's now take a closer, updated look at the story. It does appear that Americans on average work more hours per year than people in other ad- vanced nations. Led by the Creative Class, the United States surged ahead of even Japan, long thought to be a nation of workaholics, in average hours worked. A 2001 report by the International Labour Organization showed us taking an unenviable first place in this regard among the ad- vanced industrial nations. American workers averaged 137 more hours (almost 3 1/2 more weeks) per year than their Japanese counterparts, 260 hours (6 1/2 weeks) more than British workers, and nearly 500 hours (12 1/2 weeks) more than German workers.+ We're more willing to put in a longer day, and we take shorter vacations. An American private-sector professional who asked for a month off from work- the norm for many Europeans--would generally be told to take a hike.

Meanwhile, a detailed time-use survey has challenged many of Schor's original findings. John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey's book Time for

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Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time, published in 1993 and reissued with updated figures in 1997, paints a more complex picture. The book summarizes the findings of a four-decade research study, the Ameri- cans' Use of Time Project. At ten-year intervals between 1965 and 1995, re- search teams at the University of Maryland, University of Michigan and elsewhere asked thousands of Americans to keep detailed time diaries for extended periods. Schor in fact used research from the 1975 and 1985 sur- veys in her book, along with other data, to show a hefty run-up in average hours worked from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. But Robinson and God- bey argue that she mishandled the data in numerous ways,5 From their work and other studies and data, the following conclusions can be drawn:

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In his foreword to Time for Life, Harvard's Robert Putnam noted the irony of these findings:

The most worrisome social trend in America over the last several decades has been the widening gap in wealth and income between the social classes. Robinson and Godbey report a less noticed counterpart trend: Less well-ed- ucated Americans appear to be enjoying more free time, whereas their col- lege-educated counterparts, for the most part, are not. Paradoxically, as the authors put it, the "working class" is spending fewer hours at work, while the erstwhile "leisure class" has less leisure.?

For avoiding overwork, the real winners appear to be people in higher- paid Working Class jobs, like skilled workers in factories and the building trades. They can put in their standard 40-hour week, go home at the end of each day, and take down a decent wage. Higher-end Service Class peo- ple also can do this. For lower-paid people in both classes, earning a de- cent wage is the problem: thus the tendency of many low-wage workers to moonlight on a second job. The real losers, in terms of overwork, are those holding two full-time minimum-wage jobs to support a family. They work an 80-hour week, still don't earn much, and are a modern-day equivalent of the nineteenth century's burned-out factory laborers.

As for creative workers: Why do these people work so much?

Why the Creative Class Works Long Hours

In the Creative Economy, time is the only nonrenewable resource. The three big factors driving this economy, along with the need for creativity, are the prevalence of change, the need for flexibility and the importance of speed. We are all familiar with the stories of companies racing around the clock to turn out a new computer or piece of software. But more than just the occasional race is at work here. The pressures of change and speed are pervasive. Every product from sneakers to software is constantly being up- graded, and everything from mutual funds to potato chips now comes in an ever-proliferating variety of types -because the Creative Economy is

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largely based on selling novelty, variety and customization. A lot of people need to put in a lot of time doing all of that upgrading and product-differ- entiating.

So why can't these things be done in standard 40-hour weeks? If con- stant change and speed are so important, why don't companies hire enough people to spread the work and get it done fast? One reason is that some fast-growing and still-emerging fields, like computer programming, face shortages of qualified people. Note also that creative workers tend to be salaried workers. The Americans' Use of Time surveys and other studies have found that people on salaries are much more likely than hourly-wage workers to put in long weeks. The BLS figures also show that among salaried people, average hours worked rise dramatically as salary goes up. Certainly one explanation may be that high-salaried people like executives have many responsibilities. Work can be delegated, but in any business unit or on any project there is usually one person in the lead, and a lot of bucks are going to stop at that person's desk.

But simple economics likely comes into play here as well. If you are an employer, you must pay your hourly workers a premium for overtime. With "exempt" people on monthly salaries, the overtime is essentially "free." Why not get as much as you can out of each one? If someone regu- larly works a 50-hour week, that amounts to a donation of 25 percent in extra time. Over the course of a full year, this person is working the equiv- alent of three months for free. If you regularly work a 60-hour week, it's like throwing in an extra 50 percent.

Workers put in longer hours for a wide variety of reasons. As earlier chapters have shown, many creative people do it because they are intrinsi- cally motivated and like their work. When the researchers in the Time for Life study asked people to rate how much they enjoyed various activities, seven of ten scored work as average to above-average. Work in fact was one of the most enjoyable activities people cited. Others put in long hours be- cause they are '"ambitious." Many observers, too, have noted the power of peer pressure--you don't feel right punching out at 5 P.M. if your cowork- ers are still there, hunkered down for a long evening. Still others may work hard to make contributions that will gain the respect and recognition of their peers.

There are also more insidious factors. In a fascinating study of engineers at a leading electronics high-tech company, Leslie Perlow of the University of Michigan pointed to a number of factors that help enforce long hours among creative workers. Not surprisingly, for instance, she found a good

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bit of work being done inefficiently. The crisis mentality-_don't deal with it until it's a crisis--was a noticeable time-waster, 10 Some of the best peo- ple had trouble getting work done during normal hours because they were interrupted frequently by others turning to them for help. And perhaps the most insidious factor of all: With creative work often being hard to measure and manage, supervisors turn to time on the job as a visible, eas- ily quantifiable measure of whether their people are doing all they can. In one research paper, Perlow quoted Rosabeth Kanter's book Men and Women of the Corporation on this topic.

Question: How does the organization know managers are doing their jobs and that they are making the best possible decisions?

Answer: Because they are spending every moment at it and thus working to the limits of human possibility.'l

In her own book Finding Time, Perlow tells the story of an engineer at the electronics firm she studied. This woman, a project leader and a rising star at the firm, had struck an arrangement whereby she would work from home one day per week. It seemed to pay off splendidly. The woman was able to do her own work uninterrupted. Her long commuting time was cut down so she could spend more time with her family; her team mem- bers enjoyed added autonomy on her days away; her six-month perfor- mance review was her best yet. Then suddenly she was reassigned to what coworkers agreed was a much lesser job-one that required her to be in the office every day. After further difficulties, such as not getting an ex- pected raise, she transferred to another division and said she was consid- ering leaving the firm. Perlow notes that workers at this firm were generally granted "ad hoc flexibility" to do things like run personal er- rands at midday. But overall, the pressure to put in a great deal of visible time on the premises was so strong that some "resorted] to tricks, leaving a coat in the office, say, or a car in the parking lot to give the appearance of "being present."

Yet another factor is the relentless march of technologies that extend the workday. While many have noted how cell phones, laptops and wireless networks allow our work to follow us wherever we are, they also invade our time: Our work can follow us whenever we are. Then too, creative work tends to follow you around in the sense of inhabiting your head. At the end of each day there are usually problems remaining unsolved or de- cisions waiting to be made. These things may not occupy the foreground

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of your time off, but they linger in the background, to be mulled over. Are you "working" at such times? If you mulled while riding a bike or eating dinner, would you record it as work in a time diary? Creative workers may actually "work" more than statistics show.

Many factors, then, conspire to make creative people work long hours. If they are made to do so unwillingly, then surely they quality as "over- worked Americans." But many of us are more than willing to put in the time. Few people in my focus groups and interviews complained of work- ing long hours. Many took on new time-consuming challenges even when they didn't have to: leaving a settled routine to join a time-eating startup firm, or piling volunteer work on top of their paid work. They complained that there wasn't enough time to do all they wanted- -quite different from feeling that one works too much- or they complained when they put in the time but were frustrated with the results because of management in- competence or other reasons.

The Time Famine

Time-use scholars agree on one overwhelming fact about today's world. It is not so much that we are "overworked," but that we suffer from a constant feeling of being rushed—of generally not having enough time in our lives. "Time has become the most precious commodity," write Robinson and Godbey, "and the ultimate scarcity for millions of Americans," I2 They cite a 1996 Wall Street Journal survey that found that 40 percent of Ameri- cans believe that lack of time is a bigger problem for them than lack of money. Robinson and Godbey describe this as the "time famine?" Looking at a variety of surveys done between 1965 and 1995, they note an across- the-board increase in people saying they felt "hurried" or "rushed' in their daily activities. The number reporting they "always feel rushed" increased from 24 percent of working age (18-64 years old) respondents in 1965 to 38 percent by 1992.13 And the people most likely to feel rushed are the col- lege-educated members of the Creative Class. Consider the following:



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tired of changing in and out of their business attire. Moreover there are times in the interwoven day when parallel worlds collide. It can happen in the coffee shop or at home with the children: You want to work, but some- one is standing before you who demands something else. Do you get that tight, edgy feeling in 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 trying to make it to scheduled events: The meeting is at 4 P.M., the soccer game is at 6, the plane leaves without you if you're not there. I think the stress is exacer- bated if, like many creative workers, you spend much of the day working at a self-dictated pace and schedule, and then suddenly have to switch to a mode dictated by the clock, This may be the most jarring transition of all. It reflects, in the realm of time, the ongoing tension between creativity and organization. Finally, the flexible life of creative workers helps to create a demand for a 24/7 corps of service workers. The all-night restaurant is wonderful for the code writer who wants a hamburger at 3 A.M. It may not be wonderful for the waitress. She isn't on a flexible schedule, just the night shift.

The Front-Loaded Career and the Deferred Life

In most Creative Class occupations, people manage their careers by "front-loading" -working excruciatingly long and hard at the outset of their professional lives in the hopes it will pay off in greater income, mar- ketability and mobility later. Granted, young people often have worked hard in the past. Young executive-track hopefuls in the organizational age were certainly expected to be diligent, but in those days the responsibilities and the time demands grew as you climbed the ladder. Besides, you wanted to start a family early because it showed the company that you were a stable person and a belonger. Today that has all been turned upside down. Indicative of the trend, the median age for marriage among men has risen to twenty-seven from twenty-two a generation ago, and to twenty-five from twenty for women, I8 The growing number of women in the professions--along with the fact that a lot of employers still don't care to see their young professional women on the mommy track--surely has been one factor driving the trend to front-load work and defer the rest of life, but it runs deeper.

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Think of the forks in the career track facing any young creative person, man or woman. In the universities, post-docs and assistant professors have long been noted for working fiendishly at their research. Often they forego family aspirations and other nice things in life through their twen- ties because they are aiming for the tenure track. Academic tenure pro- vides more than a secure lifetime position. It puts you in the ranks of the privileged. You get choice teaching assignments, a higher salary, a nicer of- fice. As you build your reputation, it becomes easier to secure research funds, to generate novel findings and to publish. Other universities bid for your talent. Something similar has long been the case with artists. A musi- cian, painter, writer or actor may not aim for academic tenure at a univer- sity, but for all of these people, it makes a big difference if you can come barreling out of your youth tagged as a star or at least a comer. You still have to keep working hard, but the returns on your early investment are high. Now that you are noticed, you can get the choice commissions, the savvy agents, the nice gigs. I would submit that a similar phenomenon is taking hold today in the private sector. It is particularly true in the so- called "up-or-out professions like law or consulting, where great advan- tages accrue to those who make partner status, while 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 work- horses of many sectors of the Creative Economy. Often they have the most up-to-date skills in fields like computing, or consulting or turbo-finance, and being young and unattached they are able to work ridiculous hours. Rather than being groomed slowly for advancement, they are thrown quickly to the front lines to see what they can do. And the young people set to it with a vengeance. They do so partly because they relish the chal- lenge but also 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 bidding for you rather than screening your résumé--you need to be on the star track. Whereas if you acquire a reputation as just another hacker, you may spend the rest of your days on the hack track.

Even those who do not turn workaholic feel a strong pressure to front- load their careers and defer at least the more time-consuming aspects of personal life. The pressure reached its height in the boom days of the New Economy. The explosive growth of the Internet created the sense of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a chance to be part of building something



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Deepening the Moment

With so many people feeling chronically pressed for time, a new set of mo- ment-to-moment strategies has emerged. The intent is what scholars call "time deepening" -if one cannot elongate time, perhaps one can deepen or intensify it, getting more from each bit. To me this is the key difference in our use of time, and it can be far more insidious than long hours. Be- cause we are unable to physically extend the day, we pack each moment full. In Time for Life, Robinson and Godbey were notably dry-eyed about this trend:

Time-deepening fools people into thinking they can avoid sacrificing one ac- tivity for another. We instead seek to do it all, and see it all, and to do it and see it now. In eftect, time has become a commodity, and time viewed as a commodity seems to have made people's lives shorter and less tranquil, The experience of life is increasingly catalogued in terms of a patternless check- list of "been there, done that."20

The authors suggest that there are four basic strategies for time deepening :

In general, write Robinson and Godbey, we are shifting from the "con- sumption of goods" to the "consumption of experiences. ." This is a theme that takes us from the sphere of work to the sphere of life as a whole. In the next part of this book, I will describe how a key facet of the Creative Class litestyle is a quest for experiences that are in themselves rich and multidi mensional. In this classic creative view, time is truly deep not when it is rushed or crammed, but rather when it fully engages every faculty of one's being in every waking moment.



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DotCom Guy's über-virtual lifestyle provoked two kinds of reactions. Some reveled in the prospect of the new world it represented. New Econ- omy pundits had preached the virtues of business going virtual, and to true believers, much of life would be better that way as well: We would come together in on-line communities of like-minded individuals. New technologies and business models were converging to link everyone in a gigantic virtual global village, with virtual storefronts, virtual offices, vir- tual playgrounds and even virtual singles bars. When DotComGuy left his house at the end of the year 2000, he announced that he planned to marry a woman he had "met" in his website chat room.

Then there were the cynics. Salon called DotComGuy the "Poster Child for Internet Idiocy."1 Other critics worried that the virtual lifestyle would tear apart an already fraying social fabric and bring an end to real commu- nity. In this dark view, we were becoming isolated and divided into a na- tion of lonesome cowboys, hunkered down with our PC screens.

Both perspectives miss the point. Virtual community is not replacing real community. Chat rooms have proliferated, but so have real coffee shops. And while DotComGuy's entrepreneurial spirit may be admired by many, his virtual lifestyle is not at all what vast and growing numbers of people want. Members of the Creative Class are not looking for a life de- livered through a modem. They want one that is heart-throbbingly real.

Creativity and Experience

On many fronts, the Creative Class lifestyle comes down to a passionate quest for experience. The ideal, as a number of my subjects succinctly put it, is to "live the life"-a creative life packed full of intense, high-quality, multidimensional experiences. And the kinds of experiences they crave re- flect and reinforce their identities as creative people. My interviews and fo- cus groups indicate that they favor active, participatory recreation over passive spectator sports. They like indigenous street-level culture-_a teem- ing blend of cafes, sidewalk musicians, and small galleries and bistros, where it is hard to draw the line between participant and observer, or be- tween creativity and its creators. They crave creative stimulation but not es- cape. As one young man told me, explaining why he and his friends favored nonalcoholic hangouts: "We can't afford the recovery time." Moreover, while many members of the Creative Class actively use computers, shop online, participate in chat rooms and even have virtual personas, I repeat- edly find that the most computer-savvy people of all--high-technology

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professionals and computer-science-oriented students at schools like Carnegie Mellon- have interests extending well beyond the virtual. More than anything, they crave intense experiences in the real world.

In their insightful book The Experience Economy, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore observe that consumers are coming to favor the consumption of experiences over traditional goods and services.

Experiences are a fourth economic offering, as distinct from services as ser- vices are from goods. ... Experiences have always been around but con- sumers, businesses, and economists lumped them into the service sector along with such uneventful activities as dry cleaning, auto repair, wholesale distribution, and telephone access. When a person buys a service he pur- chases a set of intangible activities carried out on his behalf. But when he buys an experience, he pays to spend time enjoying a series of memorable events that a company stages- as in a theatrical play-_to engage him in a personal way.

The newly identified offering of experiences occurs whenever a company intentionally uses services as the stage and goods as props to engage an indi- vidual. While commodities are fungible, goods tangible, and services intan- gible, experiences are memorable. Buyers of experiences -we'll follow Disney's lead and call them guests--value being engaged by what the com- pany reveals over a duration of time. Just as people have cut back on goods to spend more money on services, now they also scrutinize the time and money they spend on services to make way for more memorable--and highly valued--experiences.?

But Pines and Gilmore are talking here mainly about pre-packaged ex- periences of the sort Disney provides. Members of the Creative Class pre- fer more active, authentic and participatory experiences, which they can have a hand in structuring. In practical everyday terms, this means run- ning, rock climbing or cycling rather than watching a game on TV; it means travel to interesting locations that engage one physically or intellec- tually; it means the purchase of unique antique pieces or original "mid- century modern" furniture as opposed to just buying something to sit on.

The quest for experiences extends far beyond the point of purchase. Some commentators suggest that anticipation is more important than the actual consumption of experiences, dubbing this "imaginative hedon- ism?3 Ben Malbon's book on the British club scene, Clubbing, highlights the role of such "experiential consuming." For the young people he studied,

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the actual visit to a dance club is only part of the scene, Malbon notes. He describes, in detail, the lengthy and intricate processes of clubbers debat- ing where and when to go, laying out clothes for the event, and discussing and creating "histories" of their experiences afterward.* However one views it, this much is certain: Experiences are replacing goods and services because they stimulate our creative faculties and enhance our creative ca- pacities. This active, experiential lifestyle is spreading and becoming more prevalent in society as the structures and institutions of the Creative Economy spread.

Writing in the 1950s, the psychologist Carl Rogers called attention to the relationship between creativity and experiences. At one point in his well-known book On Becoming a Person he criticized the overly rigid, bu- reaucratic society of his day for its stifling effect, arguing for the "desperate social need" for creativity.

In our leisure time activities, passive entertainment and regimented group action are overwhelmingly predominant while creative activities are much less in evidence. .. In individual and family life the same picture holds true. In the clothes we wear, the food we eat, and the ideas we hold, there is a strong tendency toward conformity, toward stereotypy. To be original, or dif- ferent, is felt to be "dangerous."5

The creative or experiential lifestyle is a direct reaction to this predica- ment, as the economic need for creativity has grown. After outlining the dimensions of the creative process and offering his basic theory of creativ- ity, Rogers went on to detail what he saw as the necessary connection be- tween creativity and experiences.

It has been found that when the individual is "open" to all his experience then his behavior will be creative, and his creativity may be trusted to be es- sentially constructive. ... In a person who is open to experience each stimu- lus is freely relayed without being distorted by any process of defensiveness. Whether the stimulus originates in the environment, in the impact of form, color, or sound on the sensory nerves, or whether it origi- nates in the viscera.. it is available to awareness. This last suggests an- other way of describing openness to experience. It means lack of rigidity and permeability of boundaries in concepts, beliefs, perceptions, and hypotheses. It means a tolerance for ambiguity where ambiguity exists. It means the abil- ity to receive much conflicting information without forcing closure upon the

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situation. . This complete openness of awareness to what exists at this mo- ment is, I believe, an important condition of constructive creativity.6

All of which brings us to the role that experiences play today in stimulat- ing creativity. The old conformist lifestyle that Rogers disparaged has given way to a more creative one based on the eyes-wide-open pursuit of wide-ranging, highly engaging activities and stimuli.

Some might say the appeal of this lifestyle will necessarily diminish in the wake of the World Trade Center tragedy of September 11, 2001--that these pursuits were the markers of a self-centered, fun-chasing and essen- tally aimless mindset, and that people are now becoming more serious and no longer so interested in such frivolities. I do not think that is the case. The new lifestyle is not mainly about "fun" Rather it complements> the way members of the Creative Class work and is a fundamental part of the way they go about their lives.

Let me tell you a personal story that may help put this in perspective. The events of September 11 affected me powerfully. For two weeks I was unable to concentrate on my work or focus on my writing. I canceled a number of speaking engagements, because literally I could not speak. Like millions of Americans I sat in front of the television for hours on end watching news broadcasts. But there was one thing I wanted to do that I was pulled to do. And that was to ride my bicycle. I am an avid road cyclist, and I took several hours each day to just go out and ride . .. and ride. and ride. It had little to do with my passion for cycling or an ef- fort to stay fit. The pull toward my bike came from the release it afforded, the ability to stop thinking and let go, to stop my brain from turning, to do something physical, to just ride. And I suspect that much the same im- pulse drives the new lifestyle and the new leisure. As a way of both dis- connecting and recharging, it is part of what we need to do as creative. people.

Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, the iconoclastic economist VAT Thorstein Veblen outlined his famous theory of the wealthy "leisure class.?7 Calling attention to the "conspicuous consumption" of the nou- veaux riche capitalists and their families, Veblen found the new elite dis- playing their power and values through what their money bought. As the historian Gary Cross shows in his comprehensive review of consumption in the twentieth century, the consumption habits of this new elite revolved around giant mansions and estates, "vicarious consumption" through their wives purchases of luxuries, and participation in "ostentatious time- $二

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killing activities" like golf,& Thus they were a leisure class indeed, flaunting not only their goods but their indolence.

The members of the Creative Class are less a leisure class in Veblen's sense of the term and more an "active class." Their consumption is not so crudely conspicuous and they certainly do not participate in time-killing activities of any sort, for as the last chapter has shown they do not have the time to kill. Moreover, status and identity for these people come not so much from the goods they have, but from the experiences they have. As Julie Blick, a Wharton School graduate, retired Microsoft engineer and au- thor of a 1995 book on her experiences, wrote: "Conspicuous consumption isn't the style. People don't have jets or huge vacation homes. They have a cabin in the woods furnished by Ikea." There are good economic reasons for this shift. As economic historians have shown, average American living standards have risen to such an extent that material goods no longer con- fer the status they once did. In her detailed survey of American living stan- dards in the twentieth century, the University of California-Berkeley labor economist Clair Brown wrote:

By the late 1980s, daily material life had improved in ways that could not have been imagined in 1918. Working-class families had a richer material life in 1988 than the salaried class had in 1918. Their food, transportation, med- ical care, and home comforts provided a material quality of life that was not attainable even by the elite in any previous era. ... [L]eisure time activities became an important part of life. Working-class families owned sports equipment and toys, attended sporting and cultural events, and even took vacation trips.10

The Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert Fogel sums up the situation this way: "Today, ordinary people wish to use their liberated time to buy those amenities of life that only the rich could afford in abundance a century ago. ... The principal cost of these activities is not measured by cash outlays, but by outlays of time.?" I And with life itself having become the scarce and precious commodity, many increasingly define the quality of their lives by the quality of experiences they consume.

The Active Life

"In the early 1960s, there was no such thing as a middle-aged man jogging on the street," writes the journalist Andy Sheehan in Chasing the Hawk, a

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book about his father, Dr. George Sheehan, the physician-turned-author and well-known "running guru" of the 1960s and 1970s.12 The elder Shee- han, a successful doctor in Red Bank, New Jersey, began running in 1963 at the age of forty-five. At the time, grown men simply did not exercise in public; doing so meant one was frivolous or even "subversive." So Sheehan ran in his backyard. "It was with no small amount of wonder," his son writes, "that I stood on my back porch one day. and watched my father running the perimeter of our backyard. The backyard covered two acres, and I watched as he ran the length of the house, trotted down a small slope, turned right at a neighbor's fence." When his father eventually took to the streets he did so "despite the honking horns and the sounds of laughter from the cars that passed him.' The jibes were sometimes directed at the younger Sheehan and his siblings: "Why does your father run around town in his underwear?' we children were asked?" But through it all, according to his son, running helped establish George Sheehan as a cre- ative person. "My father attributed a whole host of astonishing personal transformations to running. It made him stop drinking, freed him from anger, got him in touch with himself, and made him a creative being.

Few of us, of course, achieve such a radical makeover from running or any other single activity. But we are engaging in many new behaviors that add up to a radical makeover of leisure in our society. And while 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 thus identify ourselves as "creative beings," pursue pastimes and cultural forms that express and nurture our creativity.

The ensuing decades have witnessed a virtual revolution in active recre- ation. In 1964, when Sheehan entered his first Boston Marathon, there were just 225 runners. Today the event is limited to 15,000 qualifiers. Ac- cording to a 2000 Roper Starch survey, 67 percent of all Americans partic- ipated in active outdoor recreation on a monthly basis in 1999, up from 50 percent in 1994. The study also noted that an increasing number of peo- ple, some 30 percent, participate in more than five different active recre- atonal activities per year.13 Figures from the Outdoor Recreation Coalition of America highlight the shift to so-called adventure or extreme sports. Counting people who engage in an activity nine or more times a year, it found 300 percent increases in snowshoeing and telemark skiing, and more than 50 percent increases in rafting and kayaking from 1998 to 1999.14 According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Americans spent approximately $535 billion on recreation in 1999.15 Buried in this

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staggering figure is the extent to which people- -particularly Creative Class people- have come to participate in active sports and physical exer- cise. It is increasingly normal and even expected that Creative Class peo- ple, well into middle age and beyond, will engage in these activities once deemed juvenile or deviant. The average age of customers of the sporting goods retailer REI is forty-four. Health club memberships in the United States grew from virtually nothing in the early 1960s to more than 15 mil- lion by the mid-1980s, reaching 32.8 million by 2000.16 Many larger com- panies provide on-site physical exercise facilities. Some even reduce the employee contribution for health care benefits for those who engage in regular exercise.

As noted in the last chapter, the Americans' Use of Time surveys show that on average we now have roughly as much free time as work time- nearly 40 hours per week-_and enjoyed an average free time gain of 6.2 hours between 1965 and 1995. Interestingly, women picked up 4.5 hours of free time over that period while men gained 7.9 hours. '7 Though much has been made of the increase in television viewing, active sports and exer- cise registered the largest percentage increase of all free time activities, tripling over the period (see Table 10.1).

Reliable data sources on the varied lifestyle activities of Americans in general and the Creative Class in particular are very hard to come by. But using data collected from a nationwide survey of some 15.3 million Amer-

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can consumers by Equifax, some interesting trends are apparent. Al- though these data are by no means definitive, some intriguing patterns in the lifestyle and leisure preferences of the Creative Class can be inferred. 18

My focus groups and interviews with Creative Class people reveal that they value active outdoor recreation very highly. They are drawn to places and communities where many outdoor activities are prevalent--both be- cause they enjoy these activities, and because their presence is seen as a signal that the place is amenable to the broader creative lifestyle. The Cre- ative Class people in my studies are into a variety of active sports, from traditional ones like bicycling, jogging and kayaking to newer, more ex- treme ones like trail running and snowboarding. My favorite, bicycling, has grown dramatically in the past few decades. While people in other na- tons regularly use bicycles for commuting and errand-running, most people in the United States long thought of bicycles mainly as children's toys. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, old-line American makers like Schwinn and Huffy targeted their products heavily to children. Today we

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have a host of new manufacturers- -Cannondale, Trek, Gary Fisher and many others-_plus new genres of the sport and new types of bicycles, everything from road bikes and mountain bikes to cross-bikes and BMX bikes, along with other even more specialized types. Mountain biking, the off-road form pioneered by Gary Fisher in California, has skyrocketed and split into genres such as single versus dual suspension, downhill and cross- country. For the creative people and high-tech professionals in my field studies, riding a mountain bike has become almost a de rigueur social skill much as horseback riding was for the members of the old elite. And this is not just among the young. I have come across countless forty- and fifty-somethings who are avid mountain bike riders. Quite a cultural transformation: forty years ago the bicycle was a childish symbol of small- town squareness; today it is cool.

What accounts for the interest in active recreation? Part of it is the changing nature of work itself. Members of the traditional Working Class spent the day engaged in physical labor and thus were inclined to relax in their time off. Creative work is largely intellectual and sedentary; thus Cre- ative Class people seek to recharge through physical activity. If you spend your workday in front of a computer screen or an artist's canvas, you probably are not eager to spend your leisure in front of a TV screen. You are much more likely to want to get out and be active. As one person I in- terviewed put it, "Recreation is stress relief away from everyday work." 19 Time and again, when people in my interviews and focus groups speak of active sports, they use the word "release." Climbing a rock face or pedaling a bike releases the physical energy pent up through long hours of sitting, and is also a form of mental release. As the wife of a high-powered execu- tive put it: "He is compelled to engage in these kinds of activities simply to release the incredible energy he has."20

Similar reasoning may help explain why motorsports today have blue- collar appeal, whereas the Creative Class favors active sports. A friend who canoes the rivers in Pittsburgh tells me of his frequent encounters with motorboaters. Many will slow down or stop to chat with him. Often the people aboard the motorboats turn out to be blue-collar individuals such as steelworkers or construction workers, and my friend says that as he paddles toward them, the greeting they call out is almost always the same; "Looks like work!" Meanwhile, many of these modern-day Working Class people are enjoying themselves much as Veblen's leisure class once did: re- laxing in a deck chair on a big, well-appointed boat that will roar into ac- tion, at their command, with a touch of the throttle.

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Another curious reversal is apparent. Generally, the active sports most popular with the masses in the early and mid-1900s were competitive, highly structured game sports. Working Class neighborhoods then were full of the bowling leagues whose passing is so lamented by Robert Put- nam; and they were also full of amateur baseball teams and sandlot football teams, boxing gyms and public swimming pools. They had church-league basketball and local track and field clubs for women and men alike. Most of the fast-growing active sports for adults today are the less structured ones. In running, for instance, there are organized races, but most people, most of the time, run informally. The same is true of rollerblading, moun- tain cycling and many other such sports. One might say this is a classic case of the creative impulse coming to the fore, as growing numbers of people wish to set their own pace and create their own rules.

Few of my Creative Class subjects show significant interest in spectator sports. They want to participate directly. While they may take in an occa- sional game, in dozens of focus groups and countless interviews, not one Creative Class person ever mentioned being drawn to a city for the profes- sional sports teams it offers. A 2000 survey by Bear Stearns highlighted the shift toward individual over team sports. The study forecasted a 44 percent increase in active outdoor exercise by adults over the ten-year period 2000-2010, with much of the growth driven by active individual sports such as jogging, aerobics, swimming and weight training. 21 Among the spectator sports, members of the Creative Class appear to favor continu- ous-action sports like basketball and even hockey over football or base- ball. Part of the reason is that continuous-action sports are more packed with experience. But beyond this, an even broader reason-_-highlighted in a fair number of my interviews--is that basketball and hockey games are played in the evening during times of year when the weather is cold and daylight ends early. These people say that they can simply not afford to '"sacrifice" a warm summer evening to watch baseball, or an entire Sunday afternoon to attend a football game. In his irreverent 1983 book Class- full of barbed but often perceptive comments on everyone from the 'pro- les" to the "out-of-sight" wealthy--Paul Fussell of the University of Pennsylvania noted that obsession with spectator sports tends to be a marker of Working Class status for two reasons:

One is their need. to identify with winners, the need to dance and scream "We're number one!" while holding an index finger erect. One hockey player says: "The whole object of a pro game is to win. That is what we sell. We sell

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it to a lot of people who don't win at all in their regular lives?.. In addition to this appeal through vicarious success, sports are popular for middles and proles to follow because they sanction a flux of 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. The World Series and the Super Bowl give every man his opportunity to. play for the moment the impressive barroom pedant, to imitate for a brief season the superior classes identified by their practice of weighty utterance and informed opinion. If the prole doesn't know what might cause Union Carbide to go up or down, as a master of "the fine points of the game" he can affect to know why the Chargers or the Dodgers are go- ing to win this time, and that's a powerful need satisfied.22

Of course we are dealing here in generalities. Some Working Class people have no interest in spectator sports or motorsports. Some wealthy and Cre- ative Class people love them; think of Malcolm Forbes on his motorcycle, or Spike Lee in his courtside seat at New York Knicks games. The sociology of sport and class contains many nuances. Nonetheless, as we have seen, there is considerable evidence that the more active, individual forms of recreation are most popular at the high end of the socioeconomic ladder. There are other logical reasons why spectator sports are less popular among the Creative Class. High levels of mobility are one. When people move frequently to pursue careers and lifestyle interests, it becomes harder to sustain the home-team allegiances built in youth. Also, as we have seen, more and more of the Creative Class are immigrants. Those who grow up with cricket or field hockey or soccer may not take to American-style sports. The campus at Carnegie Mellon is built around a wide green lawn called the Cut. For generations it has been common to see students out on the Cut playing touch football or tossing a baseball, but the games are changing. Growing activities now are impromptu soccer games, led by for- eign students, and Ultimate Frisbee, an American-invented game that, like soccer and unlike American football or baseball, features nonstop action.

The Body as Art

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He was meticulously careful to avoid the mud, and if it was raining, hopped on the pointed toes of his pumps. ... He wore a soft collar of snowy white that could be seen above the collar of his cloak.26

In today's Creative Class we are seeing a similar phenomenon, the main difference being that presentation is now extended to the body beneath the clothing. Modern clothes are more revealing-_Baudelaire never had to think about how his arms would look in a tank top, nor his mistress Jeanne Duval how her legs would look in shorts- and thus the creative impulse addresses the body.

The Efficient Use of Leisure

There are more factors involved in this shift in leisure activities and they run even deeper. Asked why he and his peers favor highly active forms of recreation, one young member of the Creative Class gave a succinct reply: "You get more entertainment value per unit of time." The young man went on to explain that in his view, even a relatively tame pastime like hik- ing or simply going for a walk is more continuously engaging, on more levels, than watching baseball or playing a sport like golf. You are in mo- tion every minute. The scenery is varied and changing; the world is un- folding around you. You can stop to sightsee or window-shop or talk with people along the way, or get deep into conversation with a walking com- panion, or just walk solo and let your mind range.

Extreme sports like rock climbing offer the same catalog of benefits, al- beit in a much more demanding form. Climbing gives you continuous en- gagement on both the physical and mental planes. You get variety and novelty, and the possibilities expand as you grow more skilled, because you can try new and more difficult climbs. The mental engagement of climbing, intense as it may be, is a profound release from work: One does not think about tomorrow's meeting while clutching for a piton a hun- dred feet in the air. Yet once you reach a secure perch, you can indulge in sightseeing and reverie as well. All told, a lot of experience per unit of time.

Many outdoor pursuits favored by the Creative Class are adventure-ori- ented. The essence of climbing, hiking and a host of similar sports is to en- ter some other world, away from your workaday world, and explore it and experience it while performing a task that is often challenging in itself. In short, the idea is to have an adventure. Game sports like baseball are fun-

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damentally different. Baseball also offers an other-world to enter, whether you are playing or watching, but the other world in this case is a highly structured one: four bases ninety feet apart, three strikes and you're out. And while rock climbing has its own rules and limits-_you can't, for in- stance, violate the law of gravity- there are thousands of ways to apply the basic skills in picking your way up any given rock face; it's more of a free- lance thing. Game sports are competitive: It's you against the opponent. Adventure sports are you against the task; you against nature; you against your own physical and mental limits.

Well...except for the mental limit that is the aversion to competition. But sure, we can find some other limits to test.

My sport of choice is the traditional form of bicycling, touring on a skinny-tired road bike. Summer evenings are a delight, because they give me a couple hours' daylight after work to put on my helmet, head for the hills and ride until dusk. And it has struck me that the demographics of my sport are almost obscenely skewed. Nearly every rider I meet on my journeys is a graduate student, professor, transplant surgeon, corporate lawyer, engineer, entrepreneur or something similar. Why is the sport so Creative Class? It can't be the expense. Although some bikes, like my tita- nium model, are pricey, an adequate machine can be had for much less. Bicycles cost little to maintain and nothing to ride. They are far less expen sive than motorcycles.

Again I think the answer lies in aspects of the sport that appeal to the creative ethos. Bicycling is multidimensional. A long ride combines physi- cal exertion and challenge, release, exploration and communing with na- ture. As you focus on pedaling you get into a rhythm and flow, losing track of whatever was on your mind, dumping the garbage. The mind's shelves are cleared for restocking while the body, the crucial infrastructure that sustains the mind, is reinvigorated. Sensory inputs are exquisite, for with- out the speed and roar of a motorized vehicle, you can really see and hear the world. Because you're breathing deeply, you can smell the world- damp earth in the countryside, fresh leaves and grass. There is also the "I'm doing it factor: The joy for instance of moving as fast as it is possible for a human to move under his or her own power, upward of 30 mph on level ground, 50-plus downhill; the joy of conquering one of Pittsburgh's long hellish hills. Think too of the nature of the act of powering a bicycle. The up-and-down pumping of the legs, translated into the smooth rota- tion of the wheels, is very similar to the mesmerizing, almost mystical mechanism by which our beloved internal-combustion engine works: the explosive, up-and-down motion of the pistons flowing out through the crankshaft as rotary power. Except on a bicycle, it's you making it happen

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and feeling it happen. Certainly motorcycles offer thrills of their own, To sit astride a motorcycle and control the powerful engine between your legs can be gratifying, I'm sure. But to climb onto a bicycle and become the en- gine is a fundamentally transforming experience- a creative experience.

The Hegemony of the Street

For more than a century, the mark of a cultured city in the United States has been to have a major art museum plus an "SOB'-the high-art tri- umvirate of a symphony orchestra, an opera company and a ballet com- pany. In many cities recently, museums and the SOB have fallen on hard times. Attendance figures have declined and audiences are aging: too many gray heads, not enough purple ones. Consultants have descended to iden- tify the problems and offer solutions. One problem is static repertoire. In a museum, for instance, the permanent collection is, well, permanent: It just hangs there. A typical solution is more packaged traveling exhibits, prefer- ably interactive multimedia exhibits, with lots of bells and whistles. In the SOB, not a lot of new symphonies and operas are being written and fewer are performed, because staging them is expensive. One solution is to aug- ment the experience. It's not just a night at the symphony; now it's Singles Night at the Symphony. At other times, orchestras bring in offbeat guest performers- a jazz or pop soloist, or a comedian for the kids. Or musi- cians are sent out to play in exotic locales- the symphony in the park, a chamber group at an art gallery, the symphony playing the 1812 Overture at the Fourth of July fireworks. All this is reminiscent of the efforts of old- line churches to fill seats by augmenting the experience-_how about a gui- tar and drumset with the organ?- -or the efforts of many professional sports teams, with their mascots and exploding scoreboards.

Meanwhile, the Creative Class is drawn to more organic and indigenous street-level culture.27 This form is typically found not in large venues like New York's Lincoln Center or in designated "cultural districts" like the Washington, D.C., museum district, but in multiuse urban neighbor- hoods. The neighborhood can be upscale like D.Cis Georgetown or Boston's Back Bay, or reviving-downscale like D.C.'s Adams Morgan, New York's East Village, or Pittsburgh's South Side. Either way, it grows organi- cally from its surroundings, and a sizable number of the creators and pa- trons of the culture live close by. This is what makes it "indigenous." Much of it is native and of-the-moment, rather than art imported from another century for audiences imported from the suburbs. Certainly people may

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come from outside the neighborhood to partake of the culture, and cer- tainly they will find things that are foreign in origin or influence, such as German films or Senegalese music. But they come with a sense that they are entering a cultural community, not just attending an event. I think this is a key part of the form's creative appeal. You may not paint, write or play music, yet if you are at an art-show opening or in a nightspot where you can mingle and talk with artists and aficionados, you might be more cre- atively stimulated than if you merely walked into a museum or concert hall, were handed a program, and proceeded to spectate. The people in my focus groups and interviews say they like street-level culture partly be- cause it gives them a chance to experience the creators along with their creations.

The culture is "street-level" because it tends to cluster along certain streets lined with a multitude of small venues. These may include coffee shops, restaurants and bars, some of which offer performance or exhibits along with the food and drink; art galleries; bookstores and other stores; small to mid-sized theaters for film or live performance or both; and vari- ous hybrid spaces--like a bookstore/tearoom/little theater or gallery/stu- dio/live music space- often in storefronts or old buildings converted from other purposes. The scene may spill out onto the sidewalks, with dining tables, musicians, vendors, panhandlers, performers and plenty of passersby at all hours of the day and night. Ben Malbon provides a vivid description of the late-night street scene in London's Soho drawn directly from his 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 appears happy. Some are in groups, bustling their way along noisily--others are alone, silent and walking purposefully on their way.... Cars crawl down narrow streets which are already impossibly full of cars, Vespas, people, thronging crowds. This wasn't "late night" for Soho- the night had hardly started.28

It is not just a scene but many: a music scene, an art scene, a film scene, outdoor recreation scene, nightlife scene, and so on--all reinforcing one another. I have visited such places in cities across the United States, and they are invariably full of Creative Class people,29 My interview subjects tell me that this kind of "scene of scenes" " provides another set of visual and aural cues they look for in a place to live and work. Many of them also

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visit the big-ticket, high-art cultural venues, at least occasionally, as well as consuming mass-market culture like Hollywood movies and rock or pop concerts. But for them, street-level culture is a must.

Consider just the practical reasons for this. Big-ticket, high-art events are strictly scheduled, often only on certain nights of the week, whereas the street-level scene is fluid and ongoing. As a large number of my inter- view subjects have told me, this is a big benefit for creative types who may work late and not be free until 9 or 10 P.M., or work through the weekend and want to go out Monday night. Moreover, creative workers with busy schedules want to use their cultural time "efficiently." Attending a large- venue event, be it a symphony concert or a professional basketball game, is a single, one-dimensional experience that consumes a lot of recreational resources: It is expensive and takes a big chunk of time. Visiting a street- level scene puts you in the middle of a smorgasbord; you can easily do sev- eral things in one excursion. The street scene also allows you to modulate the level and intensity of your experience. You can do active, high-energy things--immerse yourself in the bustle of the sidewalks or head into an energized club and dance until dawn- or find a quiet cozy spot to listen to jazz while sipping a brandy, or a coffee shop for some espresso, or retreat into a bookstore where it is quiet.

Everything Interesting Happens at the Margins

Consider, too, the nature of the offerings in the street-level smorgasbord. In culture as in business, the most radical and interesting stuff starts in garages and small rooms. And lots of this creativity stays in small rooms. Aside from Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray, for instance, not many se- rious monologue artists have hit it big in the United States; you've got to go to the street-level venues to find them. These venues in Austin, Seattle and other cities offer a dense spectrum of musical genres from blues, R&B, country, rockabilly, world music and their various hybrids to newer forms of electronic music, from techno and deep house to trance and drum and bass. Nor is everything new. The street-level scene is often the best place to find seldom-performed or little-known works of the past. Recent offerings in Pittsburgh alone have included a small theater company staging Richard Brinsley Sheridan' eighteenth-century play The Rivals;, a gallery specializing in historic photography; a local jazz-rock group performing old American political songs such as "For Jefferson and Liberty' "and "The Farmer Is the Man Who Feeds Us All"; and a street musician who plays

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violin pieces you won't hear on the classical radio programs that endlessly recycle the equivalent of the symphonic "Top Forty.

The street scene is eclectic. This is another part of its appeal, Consider that eclecticism is also a strong theme within many of today's art forms. Think of DJs in Harlem nightclubs of the 1970s who started the technique known as "sampling" -frenetically mixing snatches of music from differ- ent records, on different turntables, for the crowd to dance to. Think of the proliferation of hyphenated music genres like Afro-Celt. Think of Warhol, Rauschenberg and a host of visual artists after them appropriating images from news photos, comic strips, food packages, wherever. Eclectic scav- enging for creativity is not new. Picasso borrowed from African art as well as Greco-Roman classical forms; rock and roll pioneers melded blues and R&B; and one could argue that the literary D] who really pioneered sam- pling was T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, a poem built largely by stringing together, and playing upon, quotations and allusions from all corners of the world's literature. Today, however, eclecticism is rampant and spread- ing to a degree that seems unprecedented. It is a key element of street-level culture-_and eclectic taste is a social marker that can usually be counted on to distinguish a Creative Class person. Eclecticism in the form of cul- tural intermixing, when done right, can be a powerful creative stimulus.

Marginal note here says:
eclecticism ≠ superficiality
coarse granules

Furthermore, street-level culture involves more than taking in staged performances and looking at art. It is social and interactive . One can meet people, hang out and talk, or just sit back to watch tonight's episodes of the human comedy. To many the social milieu is indeed the street's main attraction. If that sounds a bit vapid and superficial , sometimes it is.

uh...YEAH

This uh is not high art; it admits amateurs. Hanging in a sidewalk café does not de- liver the exquisite and carefully crafted artistic intensity of Beethoven's PEAN Ninth. It is also true that for some people, hitting the street-level cultural scene devolves into little more than cruising the singles scene. And even when experiencing culture is truly the goal, if hanging out in nightspots frequented by artists and aficionados is how you choose to pick up your creative stimulation, you are going to pick up a lot of chaff along with it. You run the risk of becoming chaff yourself: a dilettante, a poseur, a gallery gadfly, a coffee-shop talker.

At the same time, let's not be too quick to belittle the social aspect of the street. Conversation, to begin with, is a valid art form. Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde are quoted more from their repartee than from their writing. Few people today read what Samuel Johnson wrote, but many have read Boswell's Life for its accounts of Dr. Johnson shooting the breeze with



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cluded in this genre were young pulp-fiction heroes like Tom Brown and Nancy Drew, many of the movie characters played by Jimmy Stewart, the Cleaver parents in TV's Leave it to Beaver, and real-life pop heroes such as Eisenhower. The heroes on this side were builders and problem solvers: exemplars and upholders of the Protestant ethic, welcome in any living room or boardroom. And then, in a unique and unprecedented role, came the geek. Neither outsider nor insider, neither bohemian nor bourgeois, the geek is simply a technologically creative person.

A New Mainstream

Moreover, whether people define themselves as geeks or not, they are com- ing to see themselves as having a deeply fused identity. This was brought home to me rather forcefully as I was working on this book. I noticed that the Creative Class people I was interviewing, particularly the younger ones, did not like to be called Bobos-_and they bridled at the suggestion that they were in any way bohemian.33 A product of the sixties who always liked to consider myself a bit edgy or cool, I had thought the term a com- pliment. Not so, I quickly learned. Many of these people hated the word: Some urged me to find another one to use in the book.

Wounded vanity!!

At first I thought the problem was that bohemian sounded passé to them, conjuring up old images of beatniks with bongos or spaced-out hip- pies strumming acoustic guitars. Perhaps they wanted something more with it, something that belonged to their generation. But that wasn't it. They also disliked terms like "alternative." Thus the real issue came out. Bohemians are alienated people, living in the culture but not of it, and these people didn't see themselves that way- not even the immigrants who really were aliens. What they liked, 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 all, open to new ideas and rediscovering old ones, too? Yes. Youthfully inventive and at times youth- fully rebellious, walking into a situation and wondering why it has to be that way? Absolutely. At a fall 2001 meeting in Providence, organized to help the city become more of a Creative Class center, one young man stood up in front of the 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 questions; so by our very nature, we're trouble-makers."34 The point is that these peo- ple want to contribute; they want to be heard. They are not drifters in our midst, nor by any means are they barbarians at the gates. They see no need



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conversation-starter has changed. Ten 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 is becoming an important source of status. To some extent, this has always been true. Places like Paris, London and New York City have always been high on the status or- der. Elsewhere, people were content to substitute the economic status that came from a good job with a prestigious company for the status of place. But now the people in my focus groups and interviews tell me they are likely to move to places that convey high status.

Many Creative Class people I've studied also express a desire to be in- volved in their communities. This is not so much the result of a "do-good" mentality, but reflects their desire to both actively establish their own identity in places, and also to contribute to actively building places that re- flect and validate that identity. In Pittsburgh, for instance, a group of young people in creative fields, ranging from architecture and urban de- sign to graphics and high-tech, has formed a loose association that they dubbed "Ground Zero" (the group was formed and took its name before the World Trade Center tragedy). The group emerged on its own out of a series of brainstorming sessions that I organized in early 2000 to gain in- sight into the lifestyle and other concerns of young Creative Class people. While the initial impetus for the group was to combat a redevelopment plan that would have replaced an authentic downtown shopping district with a generic urban mall, they quickly began to focus their efforts on shaping the creative climate and identity of the city. Their initial "mani- festo" speaks so directly to the nexus of creativity, place and identity that it is worth reproducing here in full.

Creative Friends,

Now is the time for us to come together to Speak Up and Act Up. We the people who make things, who make the culture of this city, need to connect and engage. We want you to come and join us. We all hear about how to make Pittsburgh a better place to be a consumer or a sports fan or an entrepreneur. We hear about strategies to suck in the young suburban consumers so they can park their cars, shop and leave.

This isn't us. We are already here. We are actively creating, whether it be food, stories, photographs, music, video games, paintings, buildings, performance or communities. We are making the culture



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draws from the more recent work of two sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman.? Bourdieu used the term social capital to explain the ad- vantages and opportunities that accrue to people through their member- ship in groups, while Coleman used it to refer to the advantages that social ties afford individuals. For Putnam, social capital essentially means reci- procity. If you do something for someone, they are more likely to do something for you. To some degree, it hinges on mutual respect, trust and civic-mindedness. Declining social capital means that society becomes less trustful and less civic-minded. Putnam believes a healthy, civic-minded community is essential to prosperity.

The looming social capital deficit is thus rattling many aspects of our society, weakening our neighborhoods, affecting our health, making us less happy, damaging our educational system, threatening the well-being of our children, eroding our democracy and threatening the very sources of our prosperity. Putnam singles out four factors as the main culprits in our growing civic malaise and disconnectedness. First, longer working hours and increasing pressures of time and money mean we have less time to spend with one another. Second, rampant suburban sprawl has left us farther apart from family and friends and made it harder to get to activi- ties. Third, television and other electronic mass media take up more of our time, leaving less of it for more active pursuits and volunteer efforts. Fourth and most important, according to Putnam, is the "generational shift" from the "civic-minded generation of World War II° to subsequent "me-oriented" generations.

Much of his account initially resonated with me. I grew up in just the sort of community whose decline Putnam laments, a tightly knit Italian- American community surrounded by relatives and friends. My father be- longed to the Italian-American Club; he was the manager of my Little League team, and my mother was a den mother for my Cub Scout troop. My brother and I played in our own rock band made up of friends from our Catholic school, frequently entertaining neighborhood kids in the basement of our family home. Pittsburgh, where I now live, is filled with strong ethnic neighborhoods and community pride of the sort Putnam describes, and this strong sense of community helped to keep the region intact in the wake of the near total collapse of the region's steel industry and other heavy industries.

But as much as I would have liked to buy into Putnam's thesis, my own research led me to strikingly different conclusions. The people in my focus groups and interviews rarely wished for the kinds of community connect-

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edness Putnam talks about. If anything, they were trying to get away from those kinds of environments. Sure, they wanted community, but not to the extent that they were inhibited from living their own life and being them- selves. They did not want friends and neighbors peering over the fence into their lives. Rather, they desired what I have come to call quasi- anonymity. In the terms of modern sociology, these people prefer weak ties to strong.

This leads me to an even more basic observation. The kinds of commu- nites that we desire and that generate economic prosperity are very differ- ent from those of the past. Social structures that were important in earlier years now work against prosperity. Traditional notions of what it means to be a close, cohesive community and society tend to inhibit economic growth and innovation. Where strong ties among people were once im- portant, weak ties are now more effective. Where old social structures were once nurturing, now they are restricting. Communities that once attracted people now repel them. Our evolving communities and emerging society are marked by a greater diversity of friendships, more individualistic pur- suits and weaker ties within the community. People want diversity, low en- try barriers and the ability to be themselves. This is also what the statistics seem to bear out.

All of this raises deep questions that run to the very core of community and society. The life we think of as uniquely American- close families and friends, tight neighborhoods, civic clubs, vibrant electoral politics, strong faith-based institutions and a reliance on civic leadership_-is giving way to something new. What's more, the very life that Putnam wants to bring back is no longer a source of economic growth, rising populations, tech- nological innovation and higher incomes. The ways that communities cre- ate economic growth have been transformed.

Social Capital Dilemmas

Putnam's argument is not without its holes, as his critics have pointed out. The jury is still out on whether social capital is actually declining. A num- ber of commentaries suggest that Putnam finds the answers he looks for. In a trenchant review of Putnam's work, Nicholas Leman argues that his results are an artifact of the kinds of organizations he observes.3 Putnam is right in one sense, Leman suggests: Participation has fallen off in old- style organizations like bowling leagues and Elks Lodges. But new-style organizations continue to come on the scene two prime examples being



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The problem of inequality in access to social capital is, it turns out, greatly exacerbated in ethnically diverse communities. More than size or wealth or education, it is ethnic diversity that distinguishes communities in which dif- ferences in community involvement are greatest. In ethnically diverse places like Los Angeles, Houston, or Yakima, Washington, college graduates are four to five times more likely to be politically involved than their fellow residents that did not get past high school. In ethnically less diverse places, like Mon- tana or New Hampshire, the class gaps are less than half that large. In terms of civic activity, there is not much difference between a high-tech executive in Houston and a high-tech executive in Nashua, New Hampshire, but there is a substantial difference between an auto mechanic in Houston and an auto mechanic in Nashua,5

A related study of social capital in Silicon Valley comes to a similar conclu- sion, finding that members of ethnic groups are less likely to participate in politics or in civic affairs than their white counterparts.

There is much to criticize here, but let me start by saying this line of thinking badly confuses cause and effect. In their zeal to attribute virtually all problems to the "social capital gap," these studies neglect obvious alter- native explanations. For instance, many ethnically diverse communities are full of people working hard to gain a foothold in a new country, which leaves them little free time for civic affairs. Language or cultural barriers may further limit their ability to participate. They are also more likely to be excluded from or perceive that they are excluded from traditional av- enues of political and civic participation. Perhaps many of them do not even hold U.S. citizenship or permanent resident status. Moreover, these studies simply assume that the social capital deficit somehow dooms eth- nically diverse communities to slow growth. Yet, as the last chapter has shown, ethnic diversity as measured by the Melting Pot Index is positively associated with high-tech industry and population growth.

Some of Putnam's critics suggest that the very concept of social capital has become a tautology. As the sociologists Alejandro Portes and Patricia Landout write in their comprehensive review of social capital theory: "If your town is civic' it does civic things; if it is uncivic; it does not."'7 Fur- thermore, social capital can and often does cut both ways. While it can re- inforce belonging and community, it can just as easily shut out newcomers, raise barriers to entry and retard innovation. Adam Smith long ago noted this dilemma in his Wealth of Nations, lashing out at merchants who

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formed tightly knit cliques for precisely such reasons: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public?* Mancur Olson later applied much the same thinking to show how tightly knit communities can insulate themselves from outside pressure and sow the seeds of their own demise.? Or as Portes and Landout put it: "The same strong ties that help members of a group often enable it to exclude outsiders?

The exclusionary side of social capital remains with us today. I hear about it all the time in my interviews and focus groups in older, tightly knit communities-_places like Wilkes-Barre or Fargo or even Pittsburgh, where people say they find it hard to be themselves and do things outside the norm. In a recent newspaper interview Putnam said: "If you map so- cial capital in the United States by where it is high and where it is low- like a weather map- there is one high in America, which is centered somewhere over Minneapolis-St. Paul. Minnesotans go bowling together. They have friends over to the house. They play cards, join groups, and be- long to civic institutions." 10 But as the newspaper points out, the Twin Cities region works far better for insiders than it does for outsiders. "It will be six years in October and we still feel like we're newcomers," the paper quotes Emmett Carson, an African-American transplant from New Jersey who heads the Minneapolis Foundation. "In other communities," Carson continues, "co-workers and other people say, Hey why don't you come over? Let me take you to my church, my barber, my hairdresser. You got a problem with your car? Let me introduce you to my mechanic." People are much less likely, he says, to extend such invitations in Minneapolis. In fact, my own visits to and consulting work in Minneapolis shows me that re- gional leaders are working hard to open up the community and encourage lower barriers to entry and greater diversity.

High levels of social capital can also dampen the entrepreneurial spirit, as Portes and Landout write:

In the Andean highlands of Ecuador, many successful businessmen are Protestant (or "Eyangelical," as they are known locally) rather than Catholic. The reason is not that the Protestant ethic spurred them to greater achieve- ment or that they found Evangelical doctrine to be more compatible with their own beliefs. Rather, by shifting religions, these entrepreneurs removed themselves from the host of obligations for male family heads associated with the Catholic Church. The Evangelical convert becomes, in a sense, a "stranger" in his own community, which insulates him from demands for



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capital and political involvement but low on diversity, innovation and high-tech industry.

Organizational Age Communities-_These are older, corporate-domi- nated communities like Cleveland, Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Kalama- 200. They have average social capital, higher than average political involvement, low levels of diversity and low levels of innovation and high- tech industry. They score high on my Working Class Index. In my view, they represent the classic corporate centers of the organizational age.

Nerdistans- These are fast-growing regions like Silicon Valley, San Diego, Phoenix, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Houston-_lauded by some as models of rapid economic growth but seen by others as plagued with sprawl, pollu- tion and congestion. These regions have lots of high-tech industry, above average diversity, low social capital and low political involvement.

Creative Centers- These large urban centers, such as San Francisco, Seat- tle, Boston, Chicago, Denver and Boulder, have high levels of innovation and high-tech industry and very high levels of diversity, but lower than av- rage levels of social capital and moderate levels of political involvement. These cities score high on my Creativity Index and are repeatedly identi- fied in my focus groups and interviews as desirable places to live and work. That's why I see them as representing the new creative mainstream.

In the winter of 2001, Cushing extended his analysis to include more than three decades of data for one hundred regions. Again he based his analysis on Putnam's own data sources: the thirty-year time series col- lected by DDB Worldwide, the advertising firm, on activities such as churchgoing, participation in clubs and committees, volunteer activity and entertaining people at home. He used these data to group the regions into high and low social capital communities, and found that social capital had little to do with regional economic growth. The high social capital communities showed a strong preference for "social isolation" and "secu- rity and stability" and grew the least— their defining attribute being a "close the gates" › mentality, according to Cushing. The low social capital communities had the highest rates of diversity and population growth.

Finally, Cushing undertook a systematic comparison of the effect of the three theories-_social capital, human capital and creative capital- on re- gional economic growth. He built statistical models to determine the ef- fect of these factors on population growth (a well-accepted measure of regional growth) between 1990 and 2000. To do so, he included separate measures of education and human capital; occupation, wages and hours



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In fact, the movement from communities of strong ties to communities of weak ties is an important long-run trend in modern life. It is given fur- ther impetus by the rise of creativity as an economic force and the massive geographic sorting of the Creative Class.

New Divides

These trends point toward deep and troubling divides in American soci ety. I fear we may well be splitting into two distinct societies with different institutions, different economies, different incomes, ethnic and racial makeups, social organizations, religious orientations and politics. One is creative and diverse- a cosmopolitan admixture of high-tech people, bo- hemians, scientists and engineers, the media and the professions. The other is a more close-knit, church-based, older civic society of working people and rural dwellers. The former is ascendant and likely to dominate the nation's economic future. Not only are these places richer, faster grow- ing and more technologically savvy, they are also attracting people. The reason is simple: These places are open and easy to enter. They are where people can most easily find opportunity, build support structures and be themselves. And they also provide the habitat that is conducive to creativ- ity in its many varied forms.

This change cuts both ways. While it is positive that people can more easily live the lives they want on the terms they desire, I think many would agree that the ability to up and leave at virtually a moment's notice sug- gests a breakdown of serious belonging. I have a hard time promoting places like Silicon Valley that fit the mold of the classic high-tech, low so- cial capital community, full of excessively individualistic people uninter- ested in politics, community or virtually anything outside their own lives. A shift to this kind of community concerns me.

But neither do I think it is desirable _or even possible_-to bring back the kind of community we used to have. It just doesn't fit the way people live and work in the Creative Economy. What is really needed, and what growing numbers want, is a new model. More and more people in my in- terviews and focus groups are leaving places like Silicon Valley to build what they envision as real lives in real places. They yearn for some balance between being themselves and having some sort of community, not the old-style community Putnam romanticizes, but a new and more accepting kind. I think that places like Chicago, Seattle or Minneapolis, which score high on the Creativity Index and also possess a richness of history and a

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reasonably strong sense of community--have the potential to combine in novation and economic growth with authentic community and a better way of life. Outside the United States, cities like Dublin and Toronto are able to balance openness and tolerance against a strong sense of commu- nity. The real issue is how well we understand the driving forces at work in our society today and use them to build the more cohesive and equally open and tolerant communities we desire.



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neighborhoods or retail districts, replacing the old and authentic with the new and generic-_and in doing so drive the resident Creative Class away.

At a time when genuine political will seems difficult to muster for virtu- ally anything, city after city across the country can generate the political capital to underwrite hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in professional sports stadiums. The ostensible economic goal of these facili- ties is one to which they are sublimely irrelevant. The most recent studies show that stadiums do not generate economic wealth and actually reduce local incomes,27 And ponder, for a moment, the opportunity costs of these facilities. Imagine what could be accomplished if the hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on university research or other things that actually generate economic wealth-_or even on more fine-grained neighborhood improvements and lifestyle amenities that attract and retain talented peo- ple. Not once during any of my focus groups and interviews did any mem- ber of the Creative Class mention professional sports as playing a role of any sort in their choice of where to live and work. Why are most civic lead- ers unable even to imagine devoting those kinds of resources or political will to pursue the things that really matter to their economic future or to people?

The answer is simple. These cities are trapped by their past. The econo- mist Mancur Olson long ago noted that the decline of nations and regions is a product of an organizational and cultural hardening of the arteries that he called "institutional sclerosis."28 Places that grow and prosper in one era, he argued, find it difficult, oftentimes impossible, to adopt new organizational and cultural patterns regardless of how beneficial they might be. Consequently, innovation and growth shift to new places, which can adapt to and harness these shifts for their benefit. This phenomenon, he contends, is how the United States surpassed England as the world's great economic power. It also accounts for the midcentury shift in eco- nomic activity from the old industrial cities to newer cities in the South and West. Olson's analysis presciently identified why so many cities remain trapped in the culture and attitudes of the bygone organizational age. Cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh were the stars of that age. The cultural and attitudinal norms that drove their success became so power- ful that they have prevented the new norms and attitudes of the Creative Age from becoming generally accepted. This process stamped out much of the creative impulse, causing talented and creative people to seek out more congenial and challenging places. Their departure, in turn, removed much of the impetus for change.



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CHAPTER 17

The Creative Class
Grows Up






History is not over.
—Carlos Fuentes



Class is a dirty word in America. Many commentators and political leaders like to pretend it doesn't exist and are quick to condemn anyone who even talks about class differences or uses the phrase "class conscious- ness." But for the Creative Class and society as a whole, a little more class awareness would be a healthy thing. It would help us to see more clearly who we are and how we stand in relation to others, and help us plan for the tuture more systematically.

Sweeping periods of transformation--like the one we are going through today--have always been marked by new economic classes growing and taking center stage. When the people in those classes were able to pull to- gether as a class, they did great things. They helped their societies navigate the difficult transition into a new age, at times improving the conditions for all. The early bourgeoisie of Western Europe led the movement away from monarchy and the old feudal order. The Working Class in the late 1800s and early 1900s led efforts to win better wages and working condi- tions for huge numbers of people.

The members of the Creative Class today need to see that their eco- nomic function makes them the natural-_-indeed the only possible--lead- ers of twenty-first-century society. But being newly emergent, the Creative Class does not yet have the awareness of itself, as a class, that is needed. For the most part, Creative Class people persist in defining themselves by their differences : They are engineers or artists, boomers or X-ers, liberals or conservatives, urbanites or suburbanites. Or they think only of number one. Members of the Creative Class have been widely criticized as unin- volved and me-oriented. The journalist Paulina Borsook coined an apt

Stephenson explains that EVERYONE "defines themselves by their differences." That cannot be a very meaningful distinction between this "class" and others.



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Some people find the very notion of the Creative Class elitist. But the existence of a large and growing new class of highly paid creative workers is not the problem; rather, I submit, it is a healthy sign. What is elitist- and inequitable, inefficient and even dangerous is the persistence of a social order in which some people are considered natural creators, while others exist to serve them, carry out their ideas and tend to their personal needs. Keeping creativity as the province of a select few is the real pre- scription for trouble of all sorts, from injustice to inefficiency. The good news is that creativity has been spreading broadly across our society and will continue to do so. New forms of organization that are more con- ducive to creativity have been evolving and taking root, from the no-collar workplace and the creative factory to emerging Creative Communities around the country. The task ahead is to build on these efforts, carrying them forward into all spheres of society. And to do so will require new forms of social cohesion in line with the new realities of our age.

Building Social Cohesion

Many have noted the general decline in social cohesion in our society. They bemoan the breakdown of the nuclear family, the decline of core in- stitutions like churches and civic groups and a host of other signs that they say mark the end of civil society.

While such concerns are serious and legitimate, they are not necessarily harbingers of disaster. Social disruption is quite natural in periods of eco- nomic transformation. History shows that the biggest mistake is to try to forestall change or reverse it. When the nature of the economy has changed, old institutions stop working. People and social groups can't re- late to each other as they once did because their economic roles are differ- ent. The strong social capital communities that Robert Putnam and his many followers advocate won't pass muster, because people work differ- ently today and desire very different kinds of lives. 12

One thing, however, is certain: We cannot hope to sustain a strong Cre- ative Economy in a fractured and incoherent society. Thus our economic and social challenges are inextricably intertwined. As we have seen, diverse and open communities have compelling competitive advantages in stimu- lating creativity, generating innovations and increasing wealth and eco- nomic growth. The key is to create new mechanisms for building social cohesion in an era defined by diversity, high rates of mobility, weak ties and contingent commitments. Here again, we have mostly been looking in

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the wrong place. Groups like the Rotary Club and bowling leagues provide ways to build and measure a certain kind of social cohesion but they are not the thing itself. And what we need to build today is very different from what worked when I was growing up in the 1960s.

Strong communities, not any institutions within them, are the key to social cohesion. As group attachments break down, the community itself must be the social matrix that holds us together, much as it is now the economic matrix that matches people to opportunities and companies to people. With everything else in flux- companies, careers, even families- our communities are often the only real constants in the social equation. Being geographically rooted, they are social units that persist. Each of us lives in one, even if only temporarily. And with communities playing this central role, it behooves us to make each as strong and cohesive as it can be_-while also, paradoxically, accommodating the mobility and change that define so much of our lives.

As Jane Jacobs noted long ago, communities generate social stability by mixing more permanent residents with people who come and go,13 Those who stay for extended periods provide the continuity, while newcomers provide the diversity and interplay that generate the creative mix. In to- day's era-_with more people moving more often it is imperative for any community to attract talented people to begin with. As I've noted, Cre- ative Class people especially are very selective, and shy away from places that do not reflect their values or allow them to validate who they are. But bringing people in is only the first step. Harnessing the talents of those who want to contribute to civic life, while they are there, is another. Al- though they may stay for only a few years, many have a lot to offer. If it takes several years for them to be accepted or connected, their potential may well be lost. Thus communities need to make it easier for people of all sorts to become involved. They essentially need to complement low barri- ers to entry with low barriers to effective participation.

Communities can no longer attract and retain people simply by offering a high-paying job, an affordable place to live and a fast way to get between the two. People are more likely to personally commit to selecting and main- taining a community if it is a diverse, desirable, authentic and cohesive place to live and work. In Toronto, a thriving multidimensional Creative Center, Creative Class people from all walks of life live side-by-side with new immigrants (who are roughly half of the city's population) and less af- fluent groups with whom their children share the same schools. But true intermixing of this nature is very hard to find in the United States.

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Affluent Creative Class people who move into racially, ethnically or eco- nomically diverse neighborhoods cannot simply assume that their presence automatically "revitalizes" these places. For many Working Class and Ser- vice Class residents, it doesn't. Instead, all it usually does is raise their rents and perhaps create more low-end service jobs for waiters, housecleaners and the like. While the classes may be living in close physical proximity, they do not intermix in any meaningful way. They might as well be occupy- ing separate universes. Such neighborhoods and communities must be- come proving grounds for the idea that people of all types and backgrounds can truly live and work together. It needs to happen at the community level and spread from there across the nation as a whole if we are to achieve the social cohesion and economic vitality on which long-run prosperity depends.

Creativity to What End?

By now it should be clear that just triggering creativity in great salvos won't automatically solve our problems. Creativity is not an unmitigated good but a human capacity that can be applied toward many different ends. The scientific and technical creativity of the last century gave us wonderful new inventions, but also terrible new weapons. Massive, cen- tralized experiments in new forms of economic and social life led to fias- cos like the Soviet Union, while here in the United States, free-market creativity has turned out a great deal that is trivial, vulgar and wasteful.

Why, then, should promoting creativity everywhere be a main theme of our policies and our lives? Why not focus on promoting some attribute that seems to be more universally positive and beneficial--say, spiritual growth, or civility? Wouldn't that, over the long run, make us better people who can more wisely direct the creative impulse that flows so naturally? My answer is that of course, we should cultivate both of those virtues. But neither of them is an economic force that increases the resources with which we may do good in the world. Creativity is.

We must carefully consider the ends to which we direct our creativity. It is a precious asset not to be squandered trivially, and a powerful force to be harnessed and directed with careful consideration of all its possible consequences. Which brings us back to the question posed at the very out- set of this book: What do we really want? What kind of life--and what kind of society-_do we want to bequeath to coming generations?



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APPENDIX C
The Memphis Manifesto*





Building a Community of Ideas

Creativity is fundamental to being human and is a critical resource to individual, community, and economics life. Creative communities are vibrant, humanizing places, nurturing personal growth, sparkling cultural and technological break- throughs, producing jobs and wealth, and accepting a variety of life styles and cul- ture.

Creativity resides in everyone everywhere, so building a community of ideas means empowering all people with the ability to express and use the genius of their own creativity and bring it to bear as responsible citizens.

This manifesto is our call to action.

Principles:

1. Cultivate and reward creativity. Everyone is part of the value chain of cre- ativity. Creativity can happen at any time, anywhere, and it's happening in your community right now. Pay attention.

2. Invest in the creative ecosystem. The creative ecosystem can include arts and culture, nightlife, the music scene, restaurants, artists and designers, innovators, entrepreneurs, affordable spaces, lively neighborhoods, spiri- tuality, education, density, public spaces, and third places.

3. Embrace diversity. It gives birth to creativity, innovation, and positive economic impact. People of different backgrounds and experiences con- tribute a diversity of ides, expressions, talents and perspectives that enrich communities. This is how ideas flourish and build vital communi- ties.

4. Nurture the creatives. Support the connectors. Collaborate to compete in a new way and get everyone in the game.

5. Value risk-taking. Convert a "no" climate into a "yes" climate, Invest in opportunity-making, not just problem-solving. Tap into the creative

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talent, technology, and energy for your community. Challenge conven- tonal wisdom.

6. Be authentic. Identify the value you add and focus on those assets where you can be unique. Dare to be different, not simply the look-alike of an- other community. Resist mono-culture and homogeneity. Every commu- nity can be the right community.

7. Invest in and build on quality of place. While inherited features such as climate, natural resources, and population are important, other critical features such as arts and culture, open and green spaces, vibrant down- towns, and centers of learning can be built and strengthened. This will make communities more competitive than ever because it will create more opportunities than ever for ideas to have an impact.

8. Remove barriers to creativity, such as mediocrity, intolerance, discon- nectedness, sprawl, poverty, bad schools, exclusivity, and social and envi ronmental degradation.

9. Take responsibility for change in your community. Improvise. Make things happen. Development is a "do it yourself" enterprise.

10. Ensure that every person, especially children, has the right to creativity. The highest quality of lifelong education is critical to developing and re- taining creative individuals as a resource for communities.

We accept the responsibility to be the stewards of creativity in our communi- ties. We understand the ideas and principles in this document may be adapted to reflect our community's unique needs and assets.
_______________

* The Memphis Manifesto Summit was the first gathering of the creative class and it was held in Memphis, Tennessee, April 30-May 2, 2003. The Creative 100-selected from nominations from across North America-_and their Memphis host creatives represented the creative class in all its diver- sity and multiplicity. Coming from 48 cities in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico, the Cre- ative 100 wrote this manifesto for their own communities and for all communities seeking to compete in today's economy.




florida creative in:unread
PREFACE TO THE RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS, REVISITED (2012)

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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 in the power of markets, I assure you that neither is the case. The key thesis of my argument is as simple as it is basic: every human being is creative . That the Creative Class enjoys vast privileges is true, but to acknowledge that fact is not to endorse it. The essential task before us is to unleash the creative energies, talent, and potential of everyone—to build a society that acknowledges and nurtures the creativity of each and every human being. Creativity is truly a limitless resource; it is something we all share. Scientists like to say that they "stand on the shoulders of giants." So do we all. As a species, we build on the collective creativity not just of those in our own time but of those who have come before us. Marx long ago said that what made the proletariat a universal class was the collaborative nature of physical labor. But what sets us apart from all other species is our collective creativity, something that is innate in 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 are economic necessities. Creativity requires diversity : it is the great leveler, annihilating the social categories we have imposed on ourselves, from gender to race and sexual orientation. This is why the places that are the most open-minded gain the deepest economic advantages. The key is not to limit or reverse the gains that the Creative Class has made but to extend them across the board, to build a more open, more diverse, more inclusive Creative Society that can more fully harness its members'—all of its members'—capacities.

This is worse than neo-liberal .

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... Prosperity in the Creative Age turns on human potential. It can only be fully realized when each and every worker is recognized and empowered as a source of creativity—when their 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 between higher-skilled, higher-wage Creative Class jobs and lower-skilled, lower-pay Service Class jobs in fields like food preparation, home health care, and retail sales, where more than 60 million Americans work, 45 percent of the labor force. This stark divide in economic prospects has been exacerbated by the demise of so many once high-paying Working Class jobs. The only way forward is to make all jobs creative jobs, infusing service work, manufacturing work, farming, and every other form of human endeavor with creativity and human potential. We forget that manufacturing jobs weren't always good jobs. ...

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CHAPTER 13
Global Reach

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Many argue that the shift to a knowledge-intensive Creative Econmy exacerbates levels of inequality as once high-paying, family-supporting manufacturing jobs inevitably decline and the labor market splits into higher-pay, higher-skill knowledge and professional jobs, on the one hand, and lower-pay, lower-skill service jobs, on the other. There is clear evidence that this is happening in the United States. But is this the case everywhere? Must more innovative and Creative Economies necessarily bring greater levels of economic inequality? ... Although it may come as a surprise to those familiar with the case of the United States, we found that the GCI is in fact systematically associated with lower levels of socioeconomic inequality—and hence

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greater equality—across the nations of the world. The correlation between inequality and the GCI is actually negative.

... On the one hand, there are countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and to a lesser extent, Australia and New Zealand, where high levels of creativity, productivity, and economic competitiveness go hand in hand with higher levels of inequality. But, on the other hand, there are also a large number of countries—mostly Scandinavian and Northern European nations, along with Japan—where high levels of creativity combine with much lower levels of inequality. In fact, this pattern appears to be the more general one, with the United States and Singapore appearing more as outliers. As Chapter 16 will show, US inequality appears to be at least in part driven not just by globalization, technology, and changes in the skills required of knowledge-based and creative jobs, but by concentrated poverty.

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CHAPTER 14
Quality of Place

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At the root of these changes is the distinction between two types of social bonds--strong versus weak ties. Strong ties are of long standing, 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 you have strong ties with someone, you know each other's personal affairs and do things like trade visits, run errands, and do favors for one another. Practically all of us have at least a few such relationships; most people can manage between five and ten of them, according to sociologists who study such things . These are the friends you can confide in, the neighbor who watches your house while you're away, perhaps the uncle who gets you a job. The advantages 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's classic research on how people find jobs. When it comes to finding work, Granovetter discovered, weak ties matter more than strong ones. Other research on social networks has shown that weak ties are the key mechanism for mobilizing resources, ideas, and information, whether for finding a job, solving a problem, launching a new product, or establishing a new enterprise. The key reason that weak ties are so important is that we can manage so many more of them. Strong ties, by their nature, consume much more of our time and energy. Weak ties require less investment, and we can use them more opportunistically. Weak ties are critical to the creative environment of a city or region because they allow for rapid entry of new people and rapid absorption of new ideas. The idea that proximity

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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 same circles. You know the same people, frequent the same places, and hear about the same opportunities. Weak ties allow us to admit new people and new information into the equation, which exposes us to a larger set of novel and potentially unforeseen opportunities.

I am not advocating that we abandon our strong ties and opportunistically structure our lives around weak ones. That would be a lonely and shallow way of life, indeed, and it is the fate that Putnam fears we are facing. But most Creative Class people that I've met and studied do not aspire to such a life and don't seem to be falling into it. Most maintain a core of strong ties. They have significant others; they have close friends; they call Mom. But life in modern communities revolves around a larger set of looser ties, and interestingly enough, most people seem to prefer it that way . ...

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... The sociologists Richard Lloyd and Terry Nichols Clark of the University of Chicago note that "workers in the elite sectors of the postindustrial city make 'quality of life' demands, and increasingly act like tourists in their own city." One reason is the nature of modern creative work. Of course, people still go away at times, but given their flexible and unpredictable work schedules, they want ready access to recreation on a just-in-time basis. They may need an extended break in the middle of a long, grueling workday to recharge their batteries and go for a bike ride or a run. For this, a beach house or country getaway spot doesn't do them much good. They require trails or parks close at hand.