Richard Florida's Creative Class and the 21st Century Brain Drain

Here's professor Richard Florida, then of Carnegie Mellon University, speaking in San Diego, California early in his promotion of his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class.

In 1987, the same year I moved to Huntington Beach, California, a young professor named Richard Florida took up a position at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  As many of you know, Pittsburgh was a major industrial city in the U.S. throughout the late 1800's and most of the 20th century.  It was the steel capitol of the country, as any football fan knows.  But, like so many other industrial cities, Pittsburgh took a huge hit as manufacturing jobs began to be lost to technology and outsourced to foreign countries in the 1970's and 1980's.  Professor Florida, specializing in urban studies and economic development, became part of the group trying to figure out how to get Pittsburgh's economy going again.

At that time, the standard, Industrial Age way of growing an economy was to give major corporations a huge pile of money in the form of tax incentives, infrastructure improvements and similar things.  Then the corporation would build a huge plant in your city.  That plant would create lots of good paying jobs and that money would ripple through the city, creating more jobs, and the economy would grow.  So that was the basic idea when professor Florida landed in the city.

As he states in the clip above, everything he thought he knew about economic development was challenged while he was on a sabbatical year in Boston.  Early search engine start-up Lycos spun off from Carnegie Mellon and everyone there thought it would take off and help form a cluster of high tech businesses which would help Pittsburgh become a vibrant part of the tech world.  That would jump start the city's lagging economy and bring Pittsburgh back to national prominence.

Then one morning, at his visiting professor's office in Boston, professor Florida opened up the newspaper and saw that Lycos, the pride of Pittsburgh's tech scene, was moving to Boston.  As he tells the story above, that started a long period of research about why Lycos would move out of Pittsburgh.  Then the answer eventually came, Lycos moved to a city that already had a huge pool of talented tech and creative people.  As he did the due diligence, Richard Florida found that tech companies were clustering in a handful of places.  The main ones were Silicon Valley (San Francisco Bay Area), Boston, Seattle, Austin, Texas, the Raleigh Research Triangle in North Carolina, as well as New York City, Washington D.C. and a few other places.  The companies were moving to where the talented people were, not the other way around as they had throughout the Industrial Age.  Things had changed in a major way.  No one could understand why some of the most talented tech graduates coming out of Carnegie Mellon were moving to Austin.  Really?  "You can get a high paying job anywhere in the world and you're going to Austin?"  The economic development experts couldn't understand it.

The next area of research was to figure out why the talented people were going to this small group of cities and largely ignoring the rest of the country, and much of the world.  So Richard Florida and his grad students dove into the research.  He first published his findings in his revolutionary 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class.  The talk above explains his initial findings.

The basic themes of his findings were that tech people are highly creative people, and they wanted to move to places that had lots of tech jobs, but also places that already had great creative scenes, like art and music scenes.  These people wanted to move places that were tolerant of all kinds of people, places where the often weird, geeky tech people could be themselves.  In short, creative people wanted to be around other creative people.  So at the same time emerging technology was allowing people to work from anywhere, creative people were still clustering in a few areas.  

Another great finding of Richard Florida's research was that there has been a huge growth in the number of creative people working in the U.S., and the world at large.  He discovered that what he termed as the Creative Class has become the dominant economic driving force in the U.S. economy, and this group makes up about 35% of the total workforce.  I highly recommend listening to Richard Florida's lectures if you're interested in these ideas.  

He started speaking to promote his book at a time when cities all over were struggling economically.  Florida's Creative Class book took off and became really popular among civic leaders and creative leaders in communities around the world.  He's followed that original book with three others, The Flight of the Creative Class, Who's Your City?, and The Great Reset.  There's another book on the way, as well.  

In "Flight," he documented a brain drain, a migration happening in the U.S. and other countries.  The "best and brightest" tech workers and highly creative people coming out of college have been migrating largely to a handful of regions, primarily Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Southern California, New York City, and Washington D.C..  So not only are most of the towns and cities across the U.S. dealing with the loss of manufacturing jobs, but they're also losing many of the smartest and most talented tech people in their areas as well.  To put it mildly, much of the U.S. is atrophying while a few regions are thriving.

In The Great Reset, Florida describes the U.S. as being in a turbulent period, which will last decades, where our workforce  is resettling into the new normal of the Creative Age.  His findings in the last several years echo those of Ravi Batra and the Tofflers before him.  All three of these groups of thinkers came to similar ideas from different directions.  I don't see any of these theories as being perfect, but rather each describes a part of the whole scenario playing out.

While all this change is going on, most towns and cities are still trying to re-build their economies and put people back to work using Industrial Age ideas, and those ideas simply don't work well anymore.  Most average people aren't aware of these changes either.  Average, everyday working people are working hard to make ends meet, they don't have the interest or time to read all the books about these changes we all are going through.

To get millions of people back to work and to get economies going again, people everywhere need to learn about these changes going on, and they need to tap into the creativity of their own people to start solving the problems facing each town, city, or region.  In short, civic leaders need to start making the most of the creative scenes already in their areas, and then build from there.

There are at least 20 million Americans who can't find a good paying job right now.  Personally, I'm creating my own job.  Check out the process on my new main blog, Create Your Own Dang Job.