Creativity, the economy and politics

A post on Karen Mahony’s blog alerted me to an important article by Richard Florida, “Creative Class War” – there?s also a slightly different version, with a diagram, on one of his sites CreativeClass.org. It gives you a whole different take on what is stake in the current US elections and has lessons for the rest of us where ever we are. Essentially the argument is that creative people are the key to economic prosperity and that the places and countries who can attract the mobile creatives are those that will do well. But as Karen points out the argument for individual creatives maybe different from that of cities and countries. As she points out, “If we really are moving more towards a “do it yourself” kind of cultural collage, then things are going to come out of the places that support small, free and inexpensive. Like Berlin. Like Prague. Like Yalta even?”