By Richard Florida
Printed with permission from the Washington
Monthly
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Last March, I had the opportunity to meet Peter Jackson,
director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, at his film
complex in lush, green, otherworldly-looking Wellington,
New Zealand. Jackson has done something unlikely in
Wellington, an exciting, cosmopolitan city of 900,000,
but not one previously considered a world cultural capital.
He has built a permanent facility there, perhaps the
world's most sophisticated filmmaking complex. He did
it in New Zealand concertedly and by design. Jackson,
a Wellington native, realized what many American cities
discovered during the '90s: Paradigm-busting creative
industries could single-handedly change the ways cities
flourish and drive dynamic, widespread economic change.
It took Jackson and his partners a while to raise the
resources, but they purchased an abandoned paint factory
that, in a singular example of adaptive reuse, emerged
as the studio responsible for the most breathtaking
trilogy of films ever made. He realized, he told me,
that with the allure of the Rings trilogy, he could
attract a diversely creative array of talent from all
over the world to New Zealand; the best cinematographers,
costume designers, sound technicians, computer graphic
artists, model builders, editors, and animators. When
I visited, I met dozens of Americans from places like
Berkeley and MIT working alongside talented filmmakers
from Europe and Asia, the Americans asserting that they
were ready to relinquish their citizenship. Many had
begun the process of establishing residency in New Zealand.
Think about this. In the industry most symbolic of
America's international economic and cultural might,
film, the greatest single project in recent cinematic
history was internationally funded and crafted by the
best filmmakers from around the world, but not in Hollywood.
When Hollywood produces movies of this magnitude, it
creates jobs for directors, actors, and key grips in
California. Because of the astounding level of technical
innovation which a project of this size requires, in
such areas as computer graphics, sound design, and animation,
it can also germinate whole new companies and even new
industries nationwide, just as George Lucas's Star Wars
films fed the development of everything from video games
to product tie-in marketing. But the lion's share of
benefits from The Lord of the Rings is likely to accrue
not to the United States but to New Zealand. Next, with
a rather devastating symbolism, Jackson will remake
King Kong in Wellington, with a budget running upwards
of $150 million.
Peter Jackson's power play hasn't been mentioned by
any of the current candidates running for president.
Yet the loss of U.S. jobs to overseas competitors is
shaping up to be one of the defining issues of the 2004
campaign. And for good reason. Voters are seeing not
just a decline in manufacturing jobs, but also the outsourcing
of hundreds of thousands of white-collar brain jobs--everything
from software coders to financial analysts for investment
banks. These were supposed to be the "safe"
jobs, for which high school guidance counselors steered
the children of blue-collar workers into college to
avoid their parents' fate.
But the loss of some of these jobs is only the most
obvious--and not even the most worrying--aspect of a
much bigger problem. Other countries are now encroaching
more directly and successfully on what has been, for
almost two decades, the heartland of our economic success
-- the creative economy. Better than any other country
in recent years, America has developed new technologies
and ideas that spawn new industries and modernize old
ones, from the Internet to big-box stores to innovative
product designs. And these have proved the principal
force behind the U.S. economy's creation of more than
20 million jobs in the creative sector during the 1990s,
even as it continued to shed manufacturing, agricultural,
and other jobs.
We came up with these new technologies and ideas largely
because we were able to energize and attract the best
and the brightest, not just from our country but also
from around the world. Talented, educated immigrants
and smart, ambitious young Americans congregated, during
the 1980s and 1990s, in and around a dozen U.S. city-regions.
These areas became hothouses of innovation, the modern-day
equivalents of Renaissance city-states, where scientists,
artists, designers, engineers, financiers, marketers,
and sundry entrepreneurs fed off each other's knowledge,
energy, and capital to make new products, new services,
and whole new industries: cutting-edge entertainment
in southern California, new financial instruments in
New York, computer products in northern California and
Austin, satellites and telecommunications in Washington,
D.C., software and innovative retail in Seattle, biotechnology
in Boston. The economic benefits of these advances soon
spread to much of the rest of the country, as Ohio-born
MBAs in Raleigh-Durham built credit-card call centers
in Iowa, and Indian computer whizzes in Chicago devised
inventory software that brought new profitability to
car factories in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee.
But now the rest of the world has taken notice of our
success and is trying to copy it. The present surge
of outsourcing is the first step--or if you will, the
first pincer of the claw. The more routinizable aspects
of what we consider brainwork--writing computer code,
analyzing X-rays--are being lured away by countries
like India and Romania, which have lower labor costs
and educated workforces large enough to do the job.
Though alarming and disruptive, such outsourcing might
be manageable if we could substitute a new tier of jobs
derived from the new technologies and ideas coming out
of our creative centers. But so far in this economic
recovery, that hasn't happened.
What should really alarm us is that our capacity to
so adapt is being eroded by a different kind of competition--the
other pincer of the claw--as cities in other developed
countries transform themselves into magnets for higher
value-added industries. Cities from Sydney to Brussels
to Dublin to Vancouver are fast becoming creative-class
centers to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. They're
doing it through a variety of means--from government-subsidized
labs to partnerships between top local universities
and industry. Most of all, they're luring foreign creative
talent, including our own. The result is that the sort
of high-end, high-margin creative industries that used
to be the United States' province and a crucial source
of our prosperity have begun to move overseas. The most
advanced cell phones are being made in Salo, Finland,
not Chicago. The world's leading airplanes are being
designed and built in Toulouse and Hamburg, not Seattle.
As other nations become more attractive to mobile immigrant
talent, America is becoming less so. A recent study
by the National Science Board found that the U.S. government
issued 74,000 visas for immigrants to work in science
and technology in 2002, down from 166,000 in 2001--an
astonishing drop of 55 percent. This is matched by similar,
though smaller-scale, declines in other categories of
talented immigrants, from finance experts to entertainers.
Part of this contraction is derived from what we hope
are short-term security concerns--as federal agencies
have restricted visas from certain countries after September
11. More disturbingly, we find indications that fewer
educated foreigners are choosing to come to the United
States. For instance, most of the decline in science
and technology immigrants in the National Science Board
study was due to a drop in applications.
Why would talented foreigners avoid us? In part, because
other countries are simply doing a better, more aggressive
job of recruiting them. The technology bust also plays
a role. There are fewer jobs for computer engineers,
and even top foreign scientists who might still have
their pick of great cutting-edge research positions
are less likely than they were a few years ago to make
millions through tech-industry partnerships.
But having talked to hundreds of talented professionals
in a half dozen countries over the past year, I'm convinced
that the biggest reason has to do with the changed political
and policy landscape in Washington. In the 1990s, the
federal government focused on expanding America's human
capital and interconnectedness to the world--crafting
international trade agreements, investing in cutting
edge R&D, subsidizing higher education and public
access to the Internet, and encouraging immigration.
But in the last three years, the government's attention
and resources have shifted to older sectors of the economy,
with tariff protection and subsidies to extractive industries.
Meanwhile, Washington has stunned scientists across
the world with its disregard for consensus scientific
views when those views conflict with the interests of
favored sectors (as has been the case with the issue
of global climate change). Most of all, in the wake
of 9/11, Washington has inspired the fury of the world,
especially of its educated classes, with its my-way-or-the-highway
foreign policy. In effect, for the first time in our
history, we're saying to highly mobile and very finicky
global talent, "You don't belong here."
Obviously, this shift has come about with the changing
of the political guard in Washington, from the internationalist
Bill Clinton to the aggressively unilateralist George
W. Bush. But its roots go much deeper, to a tectonic
change in the country's political-economic demographics.
As many have noted, America is becoming more geographically
polarized, with the culturally more traditionalist,
rural, small-town, and exurban "red" parts
of the country increasingly voting Republican, and the
culturally more progressive urban and suburban "blue"
areas going ever more Democratic. Less noted is the
degree to which these lines demarcate a growing economic
divide, with "blue" patches representing the
talent-laden, immigrant-rich creative centers that have
largely propelled economic growth, and the "red"
parts representing the economically lagging hinterlands.
The migrations that feed creative-center economies are
also exacerbating the contrasts. As talented individuals,
eager for better career opportunities and more adventurous,
diverse lifestyles, move to the innovative cities, the
hinterlands become even more culturally conservative.
Now, the demographic dynamic which propelled America's
creative economy has produced a political dynamic that
could choke that economy off. Though none of the candidates
for president has quite framed it that way, it's what's
really at stake in the 2004 elections.
Yankees doodle
Roger Pederson is one of the leading researchers in
the field of stem cells. But in 2001, he left his position
at the University of California, San Francisco, to take
up residency at the Centre for Stem Cell Biology Medicine
at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. His departure
illustrates how the creative economy is being reshaped--by
our competitors growing savvy and by our own cluelessness.
Pederson bolted because the British government aggressively
recruited him, but also because the Bush administration
put heavy restrictions on stem-cell research. "I
have a soft spot in my heart for America," he recently
told Wired magazine. "But the U.K. is much better
for this research.... more working capital." And,
he continued, "they haven't made such a political
football out of stem cells."
Stem cells are vital to the body because of their ability
to develop any kind of tissue. Scientists play a similar
role in the economy; their discoveries (silicon circuitry,
gene splicing) are the source of most big new industries
(personal computers, biotechnology). Unfortunately,
Roger Pederson's departure may be among the first of
many. "Over the last few years, as the conservative
movement in the U.S. has become more entrenched, many
people I know are looking for better lives in Canada,
Europe, and Australia," a noted entymologist at
the University of Illinois emailed me recently. "From
bloggers and programmers to members of the National
Academy I have spoken with, all find the Zeitgeist alien
and even threatening. My friend says it is like trying
to research and do business in the 21st century in a
culture that wants to live in the 19th, empires, bibles
and all. There is an E.U. fellowship through the European
Molecular Biology Laboratory in Amsterdam that everyone
and their mother is trying to get."
But the bigger problem isn't that Americans are going
elsewhere. It's that for the first time in modern memory,
top scientists and intellectuals from elsewhere are
choosing not to come here. We are so used to thinking
that the world's leading creative minds, like the world's
best basketball and baseball players, always want to
come to the States, while our people go overseas only
if they are second-rate or washed up, that it's hard
to imagine it could ever be otherwise. And it's still
true that because of our country's size, its dynamism,
its many great universities, and large government research
budgets, we're the Yankees of science. But like the
Yankees, we've been losing some of our best players.
And even great teams can go into slumps.
The altered flow of talent is already beginning to
show signs of crimping the scientific process. "We
can't hold scientific meetings here [in the United States]
anymore because foreign scientists can't get visas,"
a top oceanographer at the University of California
at San Diego recently told me. The same is true of graduate
students, the people who do the legwork of scientific
research and are the source of many powerful ideas.
The graduate students I have taught at several major
universities -- Ohio State, Harvard, MIT, Carnegie Mellon
-- have always been among the first to point out the
benefits of studying and doing research in the United
States. But their impressions have changed dramatically
over the past year. They now complain of being hounded
by the immigration agencies as potential threats to
security, and that America is abandoning its standing
as an open society. Many are thinking of leaving for
foreign schools, and they tell me that their friends
and colleagues back home are no longer interested in
coming to the United States for their education but
are actively seeking out universities in Canada, Europe,
and elsewhere.
It would be comforting to think that keeping out the
foreigners would mean more places for home-grown talent
in our top graduate programs and research faculties.
Alas, it doesn't work that way: We have many brilliant
young people, but not nearly enough to fill all the
crucial slots. Last year, for instance, a vast, critical
artificial intelligence project at MIT had to be jettisoned
because the university couldn't find enough graduate
students who weren't foreigners and who could thus clear
new security regulations.
Nor is this phenomenon limited to science; other sectors
are beginning to suffer. The pop-music magazine Tracks,
for instance, recently reported that a growing number
of leading world musicians, from South African singer
and guitarist Vusi Mahlasela to the Bogota-based electronica
collective Sidestepper, have had to cancel their American
tours because they were refused visas, while Youssou
N'Dour, perhaps the globe's most famous music artist,
cancelled his largest-ever U.S. tour last spring to
protest the invasion of Iraq.
These may seem small signs, but they're not. America's
music industry has been, for decades, the world's standard
setter. The songs of American artists are heard on radio
stations from Caracas to Istanbul; their soundtracks
are an integral part of the worldwide appeal of American
movies. The profits earned from American music exports
help keep America's balance-of-payments deficits from
getting too far into the red zone. Yet part of what
makes American music so vital is its ability to absorb
and incorporate the sounds of other countries--from
American hip-hop picking up Caribbean Reggae and Indian
Bhangra beats, to hard rock musicians using industrial
instrumentation from Germany. For American artists and
fans, not being able to see touring foreign bands is
the equivalent of the computer industry not getting
access to the latest chips: It dulls the competitive
edge.
Our loss of access to high-level foreign talent hasn't
drawn much attention from political leaders and the
media, for understandable reasons: We seem to have bigger,
more immediate problems, from the war on terrorism to
the loss of jobs in the manufacturing, service, and
creative sectors to China, India, and Mexico. But just
as our obsession with the Soviet Union in the last years
of the Cold War caused us to miss the emerging economic
challenge of Japan, our eyes may not be on the biggest
threat to our economic well-being.
For several years now, my colleagues and I have been
measuring the underlying factors common to those American
cities and regions with the highest level of creative
economic growth. The chief factors we've found are:
large numbers of talented individuals, a high degree
of technological innovation, and a tolerance of diverse
lifestyles. Recently my colleague Irene Tinagli of Carnegie
Mellon and I have applied the same analysis to northern
Europe, and the findings are startling. The playing
field is much more level than you might think. Sweden
tops the United States on this measure, with Finland,
the Netherlands, and Denmark close behind. The United
Kingdom and Belgium are also doing well. And most of
these countries, especially Ireland, are becoming more
creatively competitive at a faster rate than the United
States.
Though the data are not as perfect at the metropolitan
level, other cities are also beating us for fresh new
talent, diversity, and brainpower. Vancouver and Toronto
are set to take off: Both city-regions have a higher
concentration of immigrants than New York, Miami, or
Los Angeles. So too are Sydney and Melbourne. As creative
centers, they would rank alongside Washington, D.C.
and New York City. Many of these places also offer such
further inducements as spectacular waterfronts, beautiful
countryside, and great outdoor life. They're safe. They're
rarely at war. These cities are becoming the global
equivalents of Boston or San Francisco, transforming
themselves from small, obscure places to creative hotbeds
that draw talent from all over--including your city
and mine.
Catch the waves
The sudden stalling of our creative economy threatens
to undermine two decades of progress. Twenty years ago,
America's economy had hit a crisis point, with record
unemployment, stagnant productivity, a rusting industrial
base, and an oil crisis that highlighted a dangerous
dependence upon raw materials whose supply it could
not necessarily guarantee.
But underneath the surface, some interesting things
were happening. Previous investments in scientific research
by both government and industry were yielding new technologies,
from inexpensive computer chips to fiber optics. New
financial instruments and practices were making capital
more available for innovative new ventures. American
film, television, and music were finding new export
markets. U.S. corporations, spurred by competition from
Japan and guided by best-selling books like Tom Peters's
In Search of Excellence, were restructuring, pushing
decision-making down the chain of command and into the
hands of high-initiative line employees. And everywhere,
economists and managers were talking about the need
for more "human capital"--the buzz phrase
meaning educated workers who could think on their feet.
Eventually, supply met demand thanks to two great migrations:
first, a wave of foreign immigrants, following a loosening
of immigration laws in the late 1960s. By the 1980s,
more than six million immigrants settled in the United
States, the greatest number in half a century. In the
1990s, 12 million more arrived. Most were unskilled
and found work in factories, restaurants, and construction.
But many came with good schooling and went into our
universities and leading industries. Today, 11 percent
of foreign-born adults in the United States have a graduate
or professional degree, compared to only 9 percent of
natives. Most of these educated immigrants originally
congregated in a handful of big vibrant cities such
as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles,
but many have since moved to smaller hotspots like Tucson,
Chapel Hill, and Colorado Springs.
Without these immigrants, our high-tech economy would
be unthinkable. Intel, Sun Microsystems, Google: All
were founded or co-founded by immigrants from places
like Russia, India, and Hungary. Nearly a third of all
businesses founded in Silicon Valley during the 1990s
were started by Chinese- or Indian-born entrepreneurs,
according to the detailed statistical research of Annalee
Saxenian of the University of California at Berkeley.
And thousands upon thousands more constitute the technical
core of our high-tech economy.
The second great migration was an internal one: Millions
of young, energetic and talented Americans from traditional
industrial centers, small towns, and rural areas, packed
up their Hondas and moved to more-thriving metro areas--generally
the same ones that the immigrants came to. These native-born
migrants helped to design and then feed the emerging
creative industries that during the 1990s would come
to define the age.
This influx of talent turned America's creative centers
into boomtowns. Salaries skyrocketed, followed by housing
prices--especially those in the funky inner-city neighborhoods
and gracious close-in suburbs favored by the product
designers, video editors, hedge-fund analysts, and marketing
consultants who made up this emerging new creative class.
The rising living costs and go-go lifestyles engendered
by the incoming creative class in turn drove out some
of the lesser-educated natives, and even many of these
creative migrants eventually had their fill and returned
to their hometowns. The statistician Robert Cushing
has come up with telling evidence of the economic impacts
of these reciprocal migrations. Using Internal Revenue
Service data, he found that families moving from Austin,
a high-tech boomtown, to slower-growth Kansas City in
the 1990s earned an average of $25,912 a year. Those
going in the other direction, from Kansas City to Austin,
earned over $65,000. He found similar disparities between
Austin and other older cities: Cleveland, Louisville,
Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh.
But it's not as if the Clevelands and Kansas Cities
didn't advance at all. Most added some jobs thanks to
local nodes of creativity, such as university-connected
medical centers, or managed not to lose as many jobs
in their existing companies as they might have absent
the help of innovations--primarily information technology--that
the creative centers gave birth to. Average incomes
in these places rose more slowly, or in some cases declined,
but people's purchasing power generally increased, again
thanks to creative-center innovations. Patrons of 7-Elevens
in Moberly, Mo., could pick up a Motorola cell phone
designed by Chinese-born engineers in suburban Chicago
for $30, or order any number of ever-lower-priced goods
from Seattle-based Amazon.com (founded by the son of
a Cuban immigrant) using ever-cheaper computers purchased
at CompUSA, headquartered in Dallas.
The big sort
These migrations had not only economic consequences
but cultural ones. The last 20 years has seen the rise
of the "culture wars"--between those who value
traditional virtues, and others drawn to new lifestyles
and diversity of opinion. In truth, this clash mostly
played out among intellectuals of the left and right;
as sociologist Alan Wolfe has shown, most Americans
manage a subtle balance between the two tendencies.
Still, the cleavages exist, roughly paralleling the
ideologies of the two political parties. And increasingly
in the 1990s, they expressed themselves geographically,
as more and more Americans chose to live in places that
suited their culture and lifestyle preferences.
This movement of people is what the journalist Bill
Bishop and I have referred to as the Big Sort, a sifting
with enormous political and cultural implications, which
has helped to give rise to what political demographer
James Gimpel of the University of Maryland calls a "patchwork
nation." City by city, neighborhood to neighborhood,
Gimpel and others have found, our politics are becoming
more concentrated and polarized. We may live in a 50-50
country, but the actual places we live (inner-ring v.
outer-ring suburbs, San Francisco v. Fresno) are much
more likely to distribute their loyalties 60-40, and
getting more lopsided rather than less. These divisions
arise not from some master plan but from millions upon
millions of individual choices. Individuals are sorting
themselves into communities of like-minded people which
validate their choices and identities. Gay sales reps
buy ramshackle old houses in the city and renovate them;
straight, married sales reps purchase newly-built houses
with yards on the suburban fringe. Conservative tech
geeks move to Dallas, while liberal ones are more likely
to go to San Francisco. Young African Americans who
can write code find their way to Atlanta or Washington,
D.C., while whites with the same education and skills
are more likely to migrate to Seattle or Austin. Working-class
Southern Californian whites priced out of the real estate
market and perhaps feeling overwhelmed by the influx
of Mexicans move to suburban Phoenix. More than ever
before, those who possess the means move to the city
and neighborhood that reinforces their social and cultural
view of the world.
And while there are no hard and fast rules--some liberals
prefer suburbs of modest metro areas with lots of churches
and shopping malls, some conservatives like urban neighborhoods
with coffee shops--in general, these cultural and lifestyle
preferences overlap with political ones (which the political
parties have accentuated with computer-assisted redistricting).
In 1980, according to Robert Cushing's detailed analysis
of the election results, there wasn't a significant
difference between how high-tech and low-tech regions
voted for president; the difference between the parties
still depended upon other factors. By 2000, however,
the 21 regions with the largest concentrations of the
creative class and the highest-tech economies voted
Democratic at rates 17 percent above the national average.
Regions with lower levels of creative people and low-tech
economies, along with rural America, went Republican.
In California, the most Democratic of states, George
Bush won the state's 14 low-tech regions and rural areas
by 210,000 votes. Al Gore took the 12 high-tech regions
and their suburbs by over 1.5 million.
Mutual contempt
Bill Clinton was, in many ways the midwife of the new
creative economy. Present at the birth of the '90s boom,
he recognized it quickly for what it was and helped
spur it by such projects as wiring poor and middle-class
school classrooms around the country for the Internet
and beating back Republican efforts to cut immigration.
For this, he was beloved not only by creatives, but
also by many of those in Red America whom he convinced
would benefit from the new economy. But he also personally
symbolized the creative-class archetype--its libertine
character, its cleverness, its global-mindedness. For
this, he drew the lasting enmity of many millions of
those in the "other" America. It's often been
said that Clinton was the embodiment of the '60s, and
one's position for or against him revealed one's attitude
towards that era. It's perhaps more precise to say that
with his constant hyping of new technologies and "bridge
to the twenty-first century" rhetoric, Clinton
was the embodiment of what the '60s became--the creative
class '90s, hip but pro-growth, open-minded and progressive
but ambitious.
While Clinton and the Democrats increasingly drew their
support from the high-tech parts of the country, the
Republicans increasingly came to represent the low-tech
areas. Republican leaders like Tom DeLay and Dick Armey
were beginning, during the early 1990s, to articulate
the cultural and political antagonism Red America felt
towards the emerging creative-class culture. But the
politician who most skillfully spoke to these grievances
was George W. Bush.
Clinton's whole life is a testimony to the power of
education to change class. Bush prides himself on the
idea that his Yale education had no effect on how he
sees things. Clinton was a famous world traveler, appreciative
of foreign cultures and ideas. Bush, throughout his
life, has been indifferent if not hostile to all of
that. Clinton, especially in the early years of his
administration, had the loose, unstructured management
style of an academic department or a dot-com--manic
work hours, meetings that went on forever, lots of diffuse
power centers, young people running around in casual
clothing, and a constant reappraising of plans and strategies.
The Bush management style embodies the pre-creative
corporate era--formal, hierarchal, with decision-making
concentrated in the hands of only the most senior executives.
Clinton was happy in Hollywood and vacationed in Martha's
Vineyard. Bush can't wait to get back to Crawford. Clinton
reveled in the company of writers, artists, scientists,
and members of the intellectual elite. Bush has little
tolerance for them. Clinton, in his rhetoric and policies,
wanted to bring the gifts of the creative class--high
technology, a tolerant culture--to the hinterlands.
Bush aimed to bring the values and economic priorities
of the hinterlands to that ultimate creative center,
Washington, D.C.
As president, Bush chose a group of senior advisors
whose economic backgrounds have a century-old flavor.
His vice president is an oil man. His treasury secretary,
John Snow, is a railroad man. The White House's economic
and fiscal policies have been similarly designed to
provide life support for these aging red-state industries:
$190 billion in subsidies for farmers; tariffs for steel;
subsidies, tax breaks, and regulatory relief for logging,
mining, coal, and natural gas. Even Bush's tax policy
shows the same old-economy preference. His dividend
tax cut was supported by mainstream, blue-chip companies,
which stood to gain, but opposed by high-tech executives,
whose company stocks seldom pay dividends.
Thanks to the GOP takeover of Washington, and the harsh
realities of the Big Sort, economically lagging parts
of the country now wield ultimate political power, while
the creative centers--source of most of America's economic
growth--have virtually none. Democrats Dianne Feinstein
and Barbara Boxer speak for Silicon Valley and Hollywood.
New York's Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, also
Democrats, represent New York's finance and publishing
industries. Washington State, home to Starbucks and
Microsoft, has two Democratic senators, Patty Murray
and Maria Cantwell. Boston's Route 128 and Washington's
high-tech Maryland suburbs are also represented by Democratic
senators. It's hard to understate how little influence
these senators have with the Bush White House and in
the GOP-controlled Congress.
The new Ellis Island
You don't have to be a Democrat to recognize that the
political polarization of America and GOP dominance
of Washington are not necessarily good news for America's
economic future. Yet it's clear that Democrats themselves
don't quite get it.
All the current Democratic aspirants to the White House
have whacked Bush for undermining our alliances and
diplomatic capabilities through his unilateralism. A
few, including Sen. John Kerry, have criticized the
president as "anti-science." But none seems
to have understood--or at least articulated--the disastrous
economic consequences of these Know-Nothing views. In
the post-1990s global economy, America must aggressively
compete with other developed countries for the international
talent that can spur new industries and new jobs. By
thumbing our nose at the world and dismissing the consensus
views of the scientific community, we are scaring off
that talent and sending it to our competitors.
If there is any candidate who speaks for the creative
class right now, it is Howard Dean. His educated, tech-savvy
supporters and grass-roots, non-hierarchal campaign
structure perfectly represent the creative economy.
Yet his economic message has so far focused on luring
swing-state unionists--criticizing Bush, for instance,
for not extending steel tariffs.
America must not only stop making dumb mistakes, like
starting trade wars with Europe and China; it must also
put in place new policies that enhance our creative
economy. Here, too, neither party quite gets it. Most
of the Democratic candidates for president have rightly
sounded the alarm about rising college-tuition costs
and offered ideas to expand college access. That's well
and good, but we need to think far, far bigger. Our
research universities are immigrant magnets, the Ellis
Islands of the 21st century. And, with the demand among
our own citizens for elite education far outstripping
the supply, we should embark on a massive university
building spree, for which we will be paid back many-fold
in future economic growth. Building some of these top-flight
universities in struggling red-state regions might give
their economies a shot at a better future and help bridge
the growing political divide.
Democrats have understandably seized on the corporate
outsourcing of jobs as a campaign issue. But let's get
real: Demanding higher labor and environmental standards
in trade agreements--the Democrats' favorite fix--is
not going to keep software jobs from migrating to Eastern
Europe. Our only hope is to strengthen our creative
economy so that it produces more jobs to replace the
ones we're losing. That will require taking on the Washington
lobbyists who put the fix in for established industries
at the expense of emerging ones. Millions of new jobs
in the wireless networking field, for instance, could
be created if unused broadcast spectrum, currently controlled
by TV networks and the military, could be freed up.
When's the last time you heard a presidential candidate
talk about that?
It is a sad irony: America's creative economy sparked
a demographic shift and a political polarization that
now threaten to choke that economy off. What America
desperately needs now is political leadership savvy
enough to bridge that gap. To his credit, President
Bush has made the Republican Party much more immigrant-friendly.
But his talk about diversity seems almost entirely pitched
to win the working-class Hispanic vote; he seems uninterested,
to say the least, in changing other policies that are
driving away the high-end immigrants and generally undermining
the creative economy. To his credit, Howard Dean has
tried to speak to his party of the need to put forth
policies that appeal to citizens in both blue and red
parts of the country. But as he showed with remarks
about reaching out to guys with rebel flags on their
pickups, he seems, to say the least, not to have found
the language to do so.
The challenge for the GOP, if it wants to avoid running
the economy into the ground, is to stop sneering at
the elites, the better to win votes in their base, and
to start paying attention to economic policies that
might lift all boats. The challenge for Democrats, if
they want to win, is to find ways of reaching out to
the rest of the country, to convince at least some of
its many regions that policies which operate to the
interests of the creative class are in their interests
as well.
Richard Florida is the Heinz professor of economic
development at Carnegie Mellon University and the author
of The Rise of the Creative Class.
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