Cover of Revise of the Creative Class (Revisited)
Richard Florida tells an anecdote at the beginning of Rise of the Creative Class (Revisited) about competing in a pinewood derby when he was a child. He’s given the basic materials—a block of wood, some axles, a few little wheels—and the rest is up to him. Poor Richard put essentially no effort into his little car, and he lost badly. His father, who held some kind of supervisory role at a glasses factory, enlisted the skilled machinists working under him to build his son’s car the following year. And the year after that, and the year after that, and so on. Every year that young Richard was eligible for the competition his entry was professionally designed and machined, so he of course won. Florida tells the reader this as a heartwarming tale about the triumph of teamwork and creativity, but really it’s just a story of a kid using his privilege to cheat. He’s just another kid born on third base who thought he hit a triple. The entire book is that same blend of arrogant and oblivious.
I have neither the time nor the desire to take the whole book apart, but a few issues jumped out at me. First, Florida offers no coherent definition of creativity. He builds his entire argument around the idea that there is a large class of people who possess this quality, but does not—probably cannot—tell us what this quality actually is. Second, his definition of the “creative class” is so broad as to … [continue reading] “The Rise of the Creative Class (Revisited), by Richard Florida”