For a class to exist – the working class, the capitalist class – it has to inherit something to continue from one generation to the next. Money, or the lack of, was usually the thing that helped define a class. Titles and status also worked pretty well. If a class is defined by intangibles – like drive, character, education, creativity – can it be inherited and, if it cannot, can it be a class?
Think of entrepreneurship. If one cannot inherit the “claw with the prey,” how does the class continue? What holds it together from one generation to the next? This has interesting public policy implications. What should public policy support? Are we still in the Schumpeterian world where the capitalist class invites in the gifted few to revitalize the system from time to time? We seem to invite immigrants and they seem to perform rather well.
September 8th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
I have studied this as a hobby for many years as I do not have a structure to that I can publish research. And there is a large clue to the answer.
Why is it that every really great Violin was made over a very few years by a few folk who knew each other? Did nobody else make violins? Was there a marketing gimmick?
How many other areas of human endeavor is it that the great lions of that endeavor all lived near each other and at the same time period?
Many such lions of Art were not even economically successful in their lifetime, and yet in that “school” was just such incest.
Do a linear study of all the Famous “In” places, particularly in the arts, but other things too. Malibu, The Village, the Haight, Montrose in Houston,French Quarter, Coconut Grove in Miami almost every vital city has one.
Start with a run down backwater with cheap rents, but nice amenities that draws Bohemians concerned more with engaging their brains than making a fortune. The Bohemians create an artistic culture that makes it very fashionable. Being fashionable means that nobody can afford the time to be creative and all the creative folks are forced out, leaving a sales pitch selling a fantasy image of what was for many years.
The Tech and Industrial spikes are more complicated but similar in that early on there was a local opportunity at productivity, followed by more turf protection and certification than creativity. By the very act of certification alternatives are suppressed and creativity grinds to a halt.
Almost to a person all the great lions of nearly everything were not certified in what they were lions of, mostly it was the students of their students that begin to be certified. It is at this time they become a Class, often the children of those lions because they are first in line to be certified, but the golden age of that endeavor will have gone, and folk will wonder at the “geniuses” and how they could have been so great.
I do think that there is something to creating ferment of many outlooks, but I think more is that you could start a random “institute” with just the folk that happened to be nearby, and create an opportunity for daring, accomplishment, and reward, and a great explosion of “genius” would result.
It kind of make you mourn for all the discoveries and accomplishments the entire civilization might have gathered but are forever lost
September 8th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Excellent piece Bob Danforth!
Cultural values such as appreciation of diversity and tolerance can be passed-down; as can high IQ’s genetically. But true creative brilliance grows out of societal momentum and not from the kitchen table. History is replete with periodic examples including the Renaissance, of course, and, politically, the era that led to the birth of America with new thinking and implementation on political theory that produced our founding fathers (the “original creative class”). Our society is best poised to enter into one of these great periods with the emergence of the internet and the access to information and people it affords. It brings people together, and not just to online communities. The internet allows like-minded creative people to discover each other; and reveals where to go to meet these people. So the internet brings people together in the flesh. Facebook, for example, enhances personal interactions by greasing social networks with photos, resumes, and overall personal preferences before the face-to-face meetings take place; and between meetings. So the creative class can sustain itself, but, via much less conventional ways.
September 9th, 2008 at 5:03 am
Such cultural values as tolerance may not be passed down, and in fact may flourish in a place and/or time when all about is very actively hostile, even crushing everyone eventually. Renaissance followed by Inquisition often the case.
Austin thrives where recently there was desert, and all about still is in terms of such tolerance. Penland School is also a world class location in an area that makes backwoods Texas seem cosmopolitan.
Indeed the case of Penland is so stark that the economic umbilicals are more clearly seem. Built as a project to support advancement in a backwater it flourished and became world class. But what has happened is that the rest of the infrastructure has not followed up, and the barriers to local access have increased in that time.
But always it is structure and power, and not creative people that enable the explosion. The spikiness of third world countries also illustrate the point, as I think research will show that each one was a “project” that took and exploded. If there were a blossoming of such “projects” everywhere the entire culture would leap.
The Internet has created a cloud world, still only available to a tiny few (and fewer still with the time to use that access). In that is has the same implications as all those 18th century tobacco farmers suddenly wealthy enough to have the time and money to read books and correspond a lot and create such a cloud community.
Such communication heightens political and mental ferment but without a structure to create actual stuff little happens in that realm till happenstance or political change creates that structure.
Mapping such interactions by age and locations would make very interesting research, if it did not become a road map For the inquisition.
September 9th, 2008 at 6:34 am
Both of you are ignoring discourse in the creation of “creativity” – it’s left to the already privileged elite to define what is “creative” and what isn’t.
Richard Florida’s work takes pains to point out that it’s not just high-brow art that is “creative”. The entrepreneurial spirit of petty criminals remains an entrepreneurial spirit, even if it’s illegal. Didn’t you read Freakonomics? There are endless papers on the human capital of the black market.
I think both of you are being seduced by the image of the creative class as “artists” who paint pretty pictures. When was the last time you or anyone you know bought a painting? Exactly. If you want wall-art just go to ebay or chuck some paint on a canvas, or go to IKEA and grab a nice print.
And you need to be careful by saying such naive statements as High IQs are genetic. 1) wasn’t IQ dismissed as a useful indicator decades ago? and 2) Aren’t you ignoring a myriad of social/economic and environmental factors that would suggest why intelligence would appear to be passed on from generation to generation when in fact it’s simply a product of other causes? Yes I’m sure an element of “intelligence” (or at least a propensity to creativity) is genetic but if you accept that it’s only genetic then you’re on the road to eugenics, so let’s stop here.
Discussion about class is rather like analysing your own dreams – as we’re each a member of a class, it’s impossible to discuss class without bringing our own prejudices to the table, as the above two posters illustrate. For what it’s worth, the creative “class” is not a class, just a grouping of occupations. There’s no homogenous criteria, there’s not even an awareness that people are a member of it (so no class consciousness in Marxist terms).
But the “creative group of occupations” doesn’t sound as good as the creative class….
September 9th, 2008 at 7:27 am
Actually in answering I stuck with the points made. However I do think that there is a lot less “entrepreneurial spirit” and a lot more about opportunity to succeed no matter whether we are talking high minded or low.
You might find “pretty paintings” on ebay but actual painters would starve because there is no structure of discernment beyond price. Creativity can only follow what is measured, as long as volume per hour is the only measure only finding way to increase volume will be measured.
To the point that the system is corrupt, then crime will pay, and great creativity in that field will result. If you have to belong to the ruling party, then they will.
My point is that structure drives creativity, not the reverse. Provide a place for positive creativity and that will flourish, if negative then that will. Mostly and historically it has been happy accidents (Or very unhappy for the bad cases) but it is possible to create positive structure and get very positive results.
The Chicago school of economics drives competition in ways that narrows options and most folk cannot participate. That creates greater spikes in whatever landscape is measured.
By building structures that shelters new players and ideas and does not exclude, it threatens those at the top of the spikes, but advances the entire culture in that path. Since those individually threatened are also the ones defining the structure is also why it is usually accidents that start the spikes.
I would also agree that IQ is much more about opportunity, and abuse than genetics. As I pointed out at the first, with proper nurturing there is a rush of “genius” where there was none before.
September 9th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Here is the quote from Schumpeter’s lost chapter from TED. He clearly points out the a class cannot exist on creativity alone.
It is not only an economic, but also a social process of reorganization that takes its origin from him. The social pyramid does not consist in economic building blocks….His position as entrepreneur is essentially only a temporary one, namely, it cannot also be transmitted by inheritance: a successor will be unable to hold on to that social position, unless he inherits the lion’s claw along with the prey….One cannot speak in the same sense of a class of entrepreneurs and not ascribe to it quite the same social phenomena as one can of those groups, where one finds the same people and their successors remaining in the same position for a long time. Certainly, all those who are entrepreneurs at a certain point of time, will find themselves in situations which have so much in common with entrepreneurial challenges that it suggests alignment of behavior of their self consciously and coherently acting together. But in the case of the entrepreneur this alignment of behavior is much less emphasized and it leads much less to the formation of common dispositions and to a common set of customs and general cultural environment than in the case with other “classes.”… Then we can pose the question as to how it can be explained – according to our conception – that the social culture of a nation is at any point in time a unity and that the social development of culture of any nation always shows a uniform tendency?
September 10th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Actually, the conclusion of Freakanomics was that genetics trumps environment by almost every measure. Controversial. Subject to debate of course. But just pointing that out since someone cited Freakanomics.
September 10th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
Zoltan and co. – Most interesting discussion. Let me try to clarify my point of view.
Marx saw class in relation to the means of production. The proletariat or working class was a class who transformed the material world through its physical labor; and Marx argued it was engaged in social or intersubjective production – that is it takes cooperation among a lot of workers to actually produce stuff. But the economy has changed and intellectual labor has become more important, thus the dramatic rise in the creative class since the 1980s. Marx also noted that intellectual labor could become important; in The Grundrisse he noted that in could in fact become a force of production.
Schumpeter tried to revise Marx with his emphasis on the entrepreneur For Marx, class struggle was required to reset the balance between the forces and relations of production.
Schumpeter, building on Marx’s fundamental insights, argued that entrepreneurs could continuously recast capitalism by bringing new technology to the market, ushering in powerful “gales of creative destruction,” and recasting industries and markets as a result.
The creative class is a class because of its relationship to the means of production. Any sense of shared values, or consumption habits or what not are a consequence. To paraphrase Gramsci: Hegemony comes directly from the factory floor – or laboratory, or studio.
The key contribution of the concept of the creative class, say beyond the knowledge worker or information society or post-industrialism, or post-fordism for that matter is that it specifies this new class in relation to the means of production. It is not knowledge or information or services or human capital that is the key input. It is innate human creativity itself.
In many ways it always has been, but it was masked by the “heavy” raw material inputs and physical labor required for agricultural and industrial production.
And creativity is quintessentially intersubjective. More so than physical labor. We stand on the shoulders of giants, don’t we.
September 10th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
Richard hits the nail on the head, as usual. High entry barriers to production often blocked creative genius from shining upon new and shattering existing paradigms. The printing press allowed people to express their thoughts, experiences and impart knowledge without all of those scribing monks. Similarly, technology allows creative workers in service sectors to compete much more easily with less overhead and start-up costs. In music, no longer does the artist need to convince the record executive that his or her music is worthy of production; he, she or the band can produce their own music and bring it to market online. The radio play is less important because sites like Pandora will bring the music to the listener organically along with the word-of-mouth (or online chats) exchanges between people who appreciate great music or simply the same genres. We see this across the board. Online advertising allows companies to clearly define their brands and reach their specific target markets surgically. Like the smart weaponry made famous during the first Iraq conflict, companies and people can reach their target markets without having to carpet-bomb the masses via mass media. So, as Richard points out, the dichotomy between ‘the working class’ and the factory owners (metaphorically) have been blurred. So what’s left as vitally important: capital, in non-service sectors where something still must be produced or built; and creative brilliance, without which, no product or service will succeed. We’ve reached a new competitive zenith where products and services must be state of the art (pun intended) and artfully crafted or delivered to survive. When they do, the products and services self-brand and self-market as word of the new product or service spreads virally and near instantly. Thus we hear about the new iPod Nano, for example, before we see it or an ad and before someone else describes it to us. This will not lead to bubbles so much as it accelerates the business cycle. Yahoo is hot one day, the next day it’s Google. Ditto with the Razor phone and then the iPhone; and myspace and facebook. But also to a lesser extent with traditional household items, the old toaster gets replaced with the stainless steel version, for example; and by people all across the country. News of the trend gets out quicker. In any event, we could all write for weeks on this, very fascinating.
September 11th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
There are two things here that are being conflated. One related to Marx, John Nash, Milton Friedman, and a host of others dance all about a rather simple fact. That to accomplish almost any goal many people have to work together, each doing their part correctly and no parts left out lest the goal fail.
Defining the goal and the path to achieve it is the very nature of leadership, but such defining grants power to organize the actions of others, and it is not uncommon for the leader to have a different outcome in mind than the one expressed to others. Or worse threatens to unleash unpleasantness upon the others if they do not obey.
How the Others Socialize that leadership (as in socialized dog) is the major(only?)relevant question. If the leadership in all types of enterprise(any business, organization, government or group, formal or not) is honest and accountable if they are not, then any creative idea could compete for best idea and Utopia would be reached
Unfortunately such Socialization of Society is very difficult to accomplish, but it is only made more so by clouding the issue, particularly by leaders seeking to avoid Socialization.
The other quite different problem is that if there is to be actual freedom in the market place of ideas the actual number of great ideas will be vanishingly small in comparison to the number of ideas, and the ones everyone sees are usually the least interesting.
Historically we have had gatekeepers of various sorts, but as they usually pick their cousin or other crony, the method is not very efficient
The most creative moments occur when the situation is so chaotic that no gatekeeper is effective. However luck and strategy in promoting the idea often wins out over the quality of the idea itself
Like so much else a defined structure or group of structures, with proscriptions against gaming them could advance society amazingly.
The X-Prize and SBIR are good models, though much more collaboration and much less “winner take all” attitude would be beneficial. There is more than enough reward available not to leave a trail of bones of thoss who contributed behind.