(2002-06-04) a

Emily Eakin on the Creative Class (members of The Craft? not necessarily) model of Richard Florida. "You cannot get a technologically innovative place unless it's open to weirdness, eccentricity and difference." As the article notes, this group was identified decades ago. NYC placed 9th on his index: I think per-capital measures are biased against huge cities - I think there's a need to hit a critical mass of a group, but that's in either portion-of-population or in raw numbers. Robert Cushing was hired by the Austin American-Statesman to test various models. (See series and list of researchers.) He found the creative model performed better than the Robert Putnam Social Capital model (see rebuttal by Putnam) and the Edward Glaeser Human Capital model. But his summary of the human-capital problem seems lame: "There are more than 100 university communities, and only 20 cities stand out as places in which it would appear that high-tech development (Silicon Valley) is quite outstanding." Do all 100 of those universities have strong tech departments, or are some of them fuzzy Lit-Crit towns? The latter would probably have a negative economic outcome ("oh, why bother excelling, it's just a social construct"). Can't find enough detail yet. But his points about cities which fail to embrance the Creative Class seems to echo my Two Economies concerns.