Where the Brains Are

Amanda's review of Bill Scher's Wait! Don't Move to Canada! put me in mind of Richard Florida's Flight of the Creative Class:

The creative class, 38 million strong in the U.S., produces a disproportionate share of wealth., accounting for nearly half of all wages and salaries earned - as much as the manufacturing and service sectors combined. Though the raw numbers are impressive, the U.S.'s current percentage of creative class employees already ranks only 11th worldwide on Florida's Global Creative Class Index.

To meet the economic challenges of the new century, America must continue to be open to foreign talent, while at the same time developing educational, cultural, scientific, and entrepreneurial opportunities that tap the creativity of a greater segment of its own population. Unless the U.S. can attract, retain, and grow top-notch creative talent, the increasingly intense competition will continue to weaken its economy.

What talent America currently has is undergoing a migratory shift. According to a new article [PDF] featured in the October edition of The Atlantic Monthly, Florida argues that America's great wealth and intellect  --more greatly distributed throughout the country before the 1970s-- is becoming increasingly concentrated in a few select cities:

Today, a demographic realignment that may prove just as significant [as previous migrations] is under way: the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americas to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, as a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places. Such geographic sorting of people by economic potential, on this scale, is unprecedented. I call it the "means migration."

 

[click on map for larger view]

Like other maps we've all been obsessed with since the 2004 elections, the one above has interesting political, social and economic implications ...especially if the "means migration" is exacerbated by new flight of corporations dependent on innovators to these very same centers of influence. Chicken, meet egg.

Comments

[Elliot Essman]

When I lived in Albuquerque, which rated number one in cities its size in Florida's creative index, I attended a special symposium on how to make the most of the designation. I came out of the event with the conviction that the "Creative Class" is only a guideline: Florida's book is valuable not as a standard, but as a thought provoker.

So much of that which is creative today is not site-dependent but virtual. Hey, I'm certainly part of it, and I live in a tiny but beautiful town in the middle of nowhere.

[Roxanne]

I certainly agree with much of that, Elliot. But I still think that even creatives who work virtually are attracted to certain urban centers because of their

-high tolerance for eccentricities
-educational opportunities for children
-access to Thai food