The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent
by Richard Florida
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard FloridaEdition: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2005-04-12
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 320
Book Reviews of The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent
Book Review: Building On His Thesis, But With A Warning
Summary: 4 Stars
In the first portion of this book, Richard Florida recaps and defends the major ideas in his first book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. He addresses some of his critics and reasserts his thesis, which proposes that the ascendancy of a powerful class of creative, talented workers is making PLACES more important than companies. The Places that this new class will be attracted to display an abundance of what Florida calls the 3 T's: Technology, Talent, and Tolerance.
Florida expands this thesis to a wider canvas in this second book: In the Global economy, as the world becomes more "flat," American cities won't just be competing against other American cities for talent. They will be they will be competing against cities in Australia, India, Ireland, Sweden, etc. In other words, a city like Pittsburgh won't just be looking to keep talented grads from Carnegie Mellon from migrating to Austin; those grads may decide they want to go to Dublin, Ireland to live and work.
Florida outlines how important immigration has been to our nation's economic development and how two major factors with regards to immigration are beginning to make some erosive headway. The first is outsourcing, which is moving up the skill scale from customer service to application development. While certainly a difficulty, Florida thinks that outsourcing is a manageable problem, and that the jobs we lose from outsourcing can be replaced with new jobs created by innovative companies.
However, the second "pincer of the claw" is the increasing difficulty that the United States experiences in attracting and retaining the talented, super-educated knowledge workers who will be the innovators. If the erosion of that class of workers continues, eventually we will not be creating the new jobs to replace the outsourced ones.
Rather than a doomsday now scenario, Florida admits that the United States still holds a Technological edge and probably will hold that dominance for a little while yet. However, he shows that there is no doubt that other countries have made at least some headway with patents in certain areas where America held sway uncontested.
It is the other T's that Florida focuses on in the latter half of the book. Where is the Talent going? And how can we create a more diverse, open society? Using studies and statistics, his research tracks where people are moving globally, and he examines how our immigration policies and our increasing class divisions may be contributing to our difficulties in retaining talented innovators and entrepeneurs.
Flight of the Creative Class has more focus than Rise of the Creative Class, and the benefit is a more compelling read. There are still some issues I think holdover from the first book. For instance, it is very hard to pin down exactly who is the Creative Class, and Florida seems to avoid any significant discussion of how unions will play out in this mix.
Contrary to many criticisms I have seen here on Amazon and elsewhere, Florida does look at factors such as housing affordability, and he is extremely sensitive to the inequalities the Creative Class itself can create.
My paperback edition includes the essay, "The World is Spiky," which is Florida's Atlantic Monthly article responding to the growing acceptance of Thomas Friedman's idea that "The World Is Flat." Florida argues that the while globalization is helping to economically develop some areas, the peaks and valleys created by the "spikyness," of that world map are making it more treacherous for those in the lows than it has ever been.
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The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talentby Richard Florida
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