Creative Class

That’s the way they see it over at MTV.com:

Barack Obama’s hot streak in recent
primaries has caught many people by surprise, and has led many to wonder
just how he’s managed to mobilize such a large percentage of the population so
quickly and so thoroughly. Two strong factors include his popularity on the
Internet, and his ability to motivate not only young people, but also a voting
bloc that other candidates thus far have not: the so-called “creative class.” …

Matt Yglesias, a 26-year-old political blogger for the Atlantic Monthly,
has dubbed the Illinois senator “The Cool Candidate.” “The people who support him want to talk about supporting him [and] want to link up with people who are also into Obama — that’s why you’re seeing such large rallies,” Yglesias told MTV News. “And some of his user-generated viral
content … Hillary Clinton supporters are older and less inclined to make a Web site about
something they’re into, whereas Obama has a critical mass of creative-class-type
people.”

Richard Florida, a professor of business economics at the University of
Toronto’s Rotman School of Business and author of the book, “The Rise of the Creative
Class,” agreed. “I think this is the first creative-class election in
American history,” he said. “The creative class is an online class; it’s
YouTube, it’s MySpace, it’s music.” Based on his research, Florida estimates
that 40 million Americans are members of this group. “They’re inventors, they’re
entrepreneurs, they’re people who work in arts and culture fields. They design,
[they're] musicians, artists. Certainly you might think that more young people
have these values, but all age groups are members of this class of people.”

Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas, who wrote a song and made a video (with
guest appearances from John Legend, Common, Scarlett Johansson, Nick Cannon and
others) inspired by Obama’s New Hampshire
primary speech, said he feels the presence of this class too.

“When people come up to me on the street, they say, ‘Yes We Can,’ ” he told
MTV News. “It’s consumed people and inspired people so much that nothing else
seems to matter as far as any other songs I’ve written.”

Indeed, many experts that MTV News spoke with in recent days believe that
Obama’s campaign has tapped into a new category of voters.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the creative class is a new voting bloc,”
Florida said. “The Republicans appeal to them on individualism, economic
opportunity and keeping the finances in order. Democrats appeal to them with
social liberalism, treating women with respect, treating the environment well
and valuing the gay-and-lesbian community.”

The rest, here.

Chris Bowers argues that there is “no need for the progressive working, creative class divide.”

[T]here are opposing reasons for the grassroots activist
uprising in the Democratic Party and the creative class vs. working
class divide among progressives being pushed by Buffenbarger and the
Clintons. The grassroots activist uprising in the Democratic Party
seeks to more widely distribute power within the Democratic coalition,
and to pursue a strategic course where no geographic area or
demographic group is either dismissed out of hand as unwinnable, or is
taken for granted because it supposedly has nowhere else to go. To put
it a different way, the activist uprising is ultimately a struggle over
expanding and forming new coalitions versus maintaining a narrowly
targeted status quo. By contrast, helping to foment and further a
divide between working class and creative class progressives causes
nothing but stagnation. We should not be preventing the creation of new
and surprisingly effectively alliances.

There were surely farmer-worker alliances before.  I think the key will lie less in taking the industrial age framework of unions and extending it the the creative class (whose members are very individualistic and entrepreneurial) and more in expanding creativity and the capacity for self-expression and greater individual development to the working class. And, what about the service class – the largest of the them all? It would seem like a new broadened politics would have to include them. The service class is to the creative economy, what the working class was to the industrial one.

This future is not likely to wear well on suburban housing. Many of the
inner-city neighborhoods that began their decline in the 1960s consisted of
sturdily built, turn-of-the-century row houses, tough enough to withstand being
broken up into apartments, and requiring relatively little upkeep. By
comparison, modern suburban houses, even high-end McMansions, are cheaply built.
Hollow doors and wallboard are less durable than solid-oak doors and
lath-and-plaster walls. The plywood floors that lurk under wood veneers or
carpeting tend to break up and warp as the glue that holds the wood together
dries out; asphalt-shingle roofs typically need replacing after 10 years. Many
recently built houses take what structural integrity they have from
drywall—their thin wooden frames are too flimsy to hold the houses up.

As the residents of inner-city neighborhoods did before them, suburban
homeowners will surely try to prevent the division of neighborhood houses into
rental units, which would herald the arrival of the poor. And many will likely
succeed, for a time. But eventually, the owners of these fringe houses will have
to sell to someone, and they’re not likely to find many buyers; offers from
would-be landlords will start to look better, and neighborhood restrictions will
relax. Stopping a fundamental market shift by legislation or regulation is
generally impossible.

Of course, not all suburbs will suffer this fate. Those that are affluent and
relatively close to central cities—especially those along rail lines—are likely
to remain in high demand. Some, especially those that offer a thriving, walkable
urban core, may find that even the large-lot, residential-only neighborhoods
around that core increase in value. Single-family homes next to the downtowns of
Redmond, Washington; Evanston, Illinois; and Birmingham, Michigan, for example,
are likely to hold their values just fine.

On the other hand, many inner suburbs that are on the wrong side of town, and
poorly served by public transport, are already suffering what looks like
inexorable decline. Low-income people, displaced from gentrifying inner cities,
have moved in, and longtime residents, seeking more space and nicer
neighborhoods, have moved out.

But much of the future decline is likely to occur on the fringes, in towns
far away from the central city, not served by rail transit, and lacking any real
core. In other words, some of the worst problems are likely to be seen in some
of the country’s more recently developed areas—and not only those inhabited by
subprime-mortgage borrowers. Many of these areas will become magnets for
poverty, crime, and social dysfunction.

Urban designer David Lewis long ago said the greatest urban revitalization of all time will be our rickety post-war suburbs, with their in-human transportation systems, lack of parks and green space, and miles upon miles of cheap strip malls.  By contrast, our cities have great parks, great architecture, and central locations on their side.  My own sense is this stretch-out sprawled to the max spatial structure – which served fordist expansion oh so well – is a dead-weight cost on innovation, productivity and wealth generation in the creative economy.

What say you?

He writes (h/t: Alison Kemper):

Readers who’ve come to know me through my column may not be aware that one of my big
academic interests has been economic geography — the study of where stuff gets located and how the location decisions of different players in the economy interact to produce things like cities and industrial belts. Anyway, there’s a nice WSJ article today about the interesting case of
the fashion chain Zara.

What makes Zara interesting is that its strategy, which is based on using IT
to make its stores extremely responsive to changes in consumer taste, has
actually worked against globalization:

Stores are stocked with new designs twice a week. Collections are small and
often sell out, creating an air of exclusivity and cutting down on the need for
markdowns. The company ships clothes straight from the factory to stores. Unlike
competitors who manufacture most of their wares in Asia, Inditex makes
two-thirds of its goods in Spain and nearby countries such as Portugal, Morocco
and Turkey. The retailer says the higher labor costs are offset by the
flexibility of having production close to its warehouses and distribution
centers, which are all in Spain.

No big moral here. I just think it’s interesting.

Very much so. Also interesting that Zara came up during our visit to Spain where some Spanish business contacts (the really in-the-know kind) said that Zara founder and CEO is worried to death about the decline of exactly this production infrastructure in the face of global cost competition.

So just when you think homeland security mania is causing the USA to close off its borders, along comes this little nugget. A survey of America’s military in Foreign Policy shows that nearly 8 in 10 support the idea of trading citizenship for military service. But on the question of gays and lesbians… not so much.  Matt Yglesias sees shades of declining Rome, but they may have been more tolerant.

Larry Kudlow says it’s over (h/t: Kevin Stolarick):

Please allow me a dose of hardened market realism concerning Obama’s landslide
victory in Wisconsin. The race is over. Hillary is finished. The Clinton
Restoration is over. President Bill Clinton’s political invincibility is over.
Hillary’s electability is over.

Obama got to the far Left faster than she did. He out organized her in the precincts. He out fundraised her. He out speechified her. He out-hustled her. He out-dressed her. He out-presidentialed her. He outdid her and he outbid her for votes, one promised government check at a time.

A 15-point margin in Wisconsin is incredible. Wisconsin is a lot
like Ohio except for the wacko ultra-Left Madison college population, which is
even worse that Columbus’s Ohio State. But there are so many campuses in Ohio
that will go for Obama that it is no matter. Think faculty voters, grimly
determined for a left-wing takeover of America ” from the bottom up” to use the
former Saul Alinsky community organizer’s phrase. As goes Wisconsin, so goes
Ohio.

Ouch. That guy sure can write. I taught for three years at Ohio State. Woody Hayes was on the faculty … talk about “wacko” (wink, wink) …

Question: When did professors become a critical voting block?

Michael Lind says the Republicans have a long-run structural advantage in presidential politics.

According to the conventional wisdom, the
odds are in favour of the Democrats win­ning back the White House this
year. With the country mired in an unpopular war in Iraq and perhaps in
a prolonged recession, voters will treat the November election as a
referendum on George W. Bush and punish his party … That is one
possibility. But it is worth considering the possibility that US
politics has not changed much at all. The era of Republican
presidential hegemony that began with Richard Nixon may not be over …

The enduring Republican presidential majority originated in 1968, when the
populist Democrat George Wallace won 13.5 per cent of the popular vote
as an independent who drew his strength from the white working-class
backlash against the civil rights revolution and cultural liberalism. By
welding white, working-class Wallace Democrats (later called Reagan
Democrats) to the Republican party, Nixon created the GOP lock on the
White House that has been broken only by freakish circumstances in
1976, 1992 and 1996. Deprived of the white working-class voters that
were the mainstay of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, the
Democrats by 1980 became what they remain today – a party of socially
liberal white professionals allied with blacks and Latinos on the basis
of targeted racial patronage policies, such as affirmative action, and
race-based congressional districts for blacks and amnesty for illegal
immigrants from Latin America.

To win back the White House this year,
the Democratic presidential nominee, whether Barack Obama or Hillary
Clinton, must win the votes of millions of Webb Democrats – the heirs
to the Wallace and Reagan Democrats. If many voters return to the
practice of dividing their votes for president and Congress between the
two parties, then the future may hold Republican presidents facing
Democratic Congresses, as in most of the period from 1968 to 1994 …As long as the Republicans appeal more
than Democrats to the white working-class populists whom George Wallace
led out of the Democratic Party in 1968, then even in disarray they may
be able to shut Democrats out of the White House for the eighth time
out of 11 elections.

I wouldn’t dispute this historically. And certainly, this election turns on class – as well as race and gender. But I do think the nature of class politics, if you will, is shifting. Since 1980, the creative class has grown enormously, while the working class has shrunk.  Back to the election: my hunch is that the working class vote will prove less critical this time around simply because it is smaller. The key factor is more likely the competition for creative class independents: Can McCain siphon off enough of them to vault him into the White House.

Here’s the question: Should Obama take Webb has his veep in order to broaden his appeal to working class voters, or someone like Republican Chuck Hagel to bridge the partisan divide. And what about McCain. Feel free to suggest other people and strategies.

A comprehensive review of American education finds that:

[A] record number of Americans are going to university – while an increasing number are dropping
out of high school. This poses major social challenges for the United States.

Not good.

French researchers Karine Lamiraud and Henry Saffer examine the effects of work, human capital, and other factors on declining social interaction (via Mark Thoma).

People have fewer friends and visit them less often than in the
past. A popular explanation suggests that we’re working longer and have
less time for friends, but recent research finds little tradeoff
between working hours and social hours. The relevant tradeoffs, this
column suggests, are between types of social interaction…

The effect of human capital, as
measured by education and age, is positive for membership activities but
negative for visiting relatives and friends … One possibility is that this effect results from the
productivity-enhancing aspect of education. Membership activities, like
employment, are goal-oriented. Education increases productivity both at work and
in membership activities. However, education has little effect on the
productivity of time spent visiting. Thus, an increase in education results in
greater productivity in membership activities and greater utility for the
individual. To put this more intuitively, education makes membership activities
more interesting and visiting less interesting. This shifts social interaction
to membership activities and away from visiting…

Higher income increases memberships and decreases visiting, which
seems consistent with the education effect. Marriage tends to reduce all social
interactions, which suggests that a spouse is a substitute for other social
interactions. Children have a positive effect of membership in school and church
groups, which is probably the result of complementarity between these activities
and child care. Males tend to have less of all social interactions…

His lead is widening in both the Iowa Electronic Markets and the Gallup Poll.