Creative Class

Here’s a really terrific summary of my Q Gathering talk last week in Chicago courtesy of Tim Schraeder.

• Every single human being is creative.
• The real challenge of our time is figuring out how to harness that creative energy so that creative furnace inside of each human being is growing.
• The social categories we impose on ourselves [race, religion, gender ,etc] undermine creativity.

The Great Reset

• The most important event of our time is collapse of our financial institutions.
• We are living through the most momentous opportunities in human history.
• It’s not a depression, recession, crisis or panic… it really is a reset.
• We are in a resetting point.
• “It’s a raw emotion reset…”

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Richard Florida was on NPR’s Morning Edition today to talk about why owning a home is not always better than renting. In his new book, The Great Reset, Richard quotes Edmund Phelps who said, “America needs to get over its house passion. Listen to the interview below to hear Richard and Steve Inskeep talk about new ways to live and work post-recession:

Here’s a new video that’s being released today over at The Wall Street Journal online.

I had a great chat with Dan Gross, one of my favorite economics correspondents, last week about resets and American adaptive capabilities. Dan wrote a terrific Newsweek story and we got to team up for a nice segment on Newsweek Radio 9.

“We are the most adaptive, inventive nation, and have proven quite resilient,” says Richard Florida, sociologist and author of The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity. If these impulses are embraced more systematically and wholeheartedly, the U.S. can remain an economic superpower well into the current century.

One thing that struck me was how my working-class father instinctively understood the power of America’s capacity to rebound and reset its economy and society. Here is how I described his words in my book Flight of the Creative Class:

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From today’s The Washington Post story on how the economic crisis is shifting Americans’ attitudes toward housing and consumption:

“Our attitudes, particularly toward homeownership and housing, are changing, and they are changing quickly,” said Richard Florida, an urban studies professor at the University of Toronto, who explores the phenomenon in his book The Great Reset, which will be released April 27 by HarperCollins…

Florida is among a growing number of researchers who think that these are signs that the United States is becoming a nation of renters, and that the shift could be good for our pocketbooks, the economy and even our happiness. It’s a radical idea, one that goes against nearly a century of tax policy, not to mention the fact that owning a home has long been central to middle-class American identity.

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This graph is from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota via Mark Thoma. The current Great Recession, or what I like to call The Great Reset, is longer and deeper. Or, as Thoma puts it: “One of these things is not like the others.”