Creative Class

There have been a series of articles lately about the relative values of “intelligence,” creative thinking, and sustained effort. Two of the pieces are from David Brooks, who is becoming my favorite columnist because of his wide-ranging subjects.

It occurred to me that this relates directly to Richard’s goal of making every job creative. I don’t have answers, but this raises questions like, “What do we need to be teaching?” and “What do we need to be doing as a society?” to birth the creative economy. It may be something entirely different than the organizing that helped make manufacturing jobs pay middle class wages.

Brooks wrote about the Harlem Children’s Zone charter school, which offers stability and high expectations. Harvard economist Roland Fryer studied the school and…

They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.

In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.

Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying – literally and figuratively.”

In another recent column, Brooks talks about genius or extraordinarily high achievers. He says that the scientific view is moving from the idea that people are born with great talent to the idea that they earn it (maybe they’re born with the ability to practice).

In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.

What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had – the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

The latest research suggests a more prosaic, democratic, even puritanical view of the world. The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it’s deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

The issue of the value of I.Q. struck me because of a good friend who had an I.Q. of 170. She took three languages and college classes in high school, and cruised through Berkeley while working and raising two kids. Not only smart but social, good people skills. She died broke last year, never having translated that potential into success. Interestingly, in our group of hippies, she was the Ayn Rand devotee. What she may have lacked was concentration.

The relative value of intelligence and effort is borne out in all sorts of quotes and examples we see and forget:

• “If you have a 150 I.Q., sell 30 points to someone else. You need to be smart, but not a genius.” Warren Buffet on investing at this year’s annual Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting.
• “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” –Thomas Edison
• “Golf is a game of luck. The harder I work, the luckier I get.” — Ben Hogan (legendary golfer)
• In Positively Fifth Street, a book about the world series of poker, James McManus says that to get good at Texas Hold ‘Em you need to play 10,000 hands (or hours, I forget).

In the current New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has an article called “How David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules.” It moves from junior high basketball to warfare to computer modeling, but the main idea is that creatively changing the game gives an advantage to the underdog who is willing to work harder, and includes this gem:

“We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability because relentless effort is in fact something rarer that the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination” (a basketball reference.)

So how do we change the game in the new economy?

So says New York Times’ David Brooks:

The 1980s and 1990s made up the era of the great dispersal. Forty-three million people moved every year, and basically they moved outward — from inner-ring suburbs to far-flung exurbs on the metro fringe … If you asked people in that age of go-go suburbia what they wanted in their new housing developments, they often said they wanted a golf course. But the culture has changed. If you ask people today what they want, they’re more likely to say coffee shops, hiking trails and community centers. People overshot the mark. They moved to the exurbs because they wanted space and order. But once there, they found that they were missing community and social bonds. So in the past years there has been a new trend. Meeting places are popping up across the suburban landscape.There are restaurant and entertainment zones, mixed-use streetscape malls, suburban theater districts, farmers’ markets and concert halls. In addition, downtown areas in places like Charlotte and Dallas are reviving as many people move back into the city in search of human contact…

Barack Obama has said that he would start an infrastructure project that will dwarf Dwight Eisenhower’s highway program. If, indeed, we are going to have a once-in-a-half-century infrastructure investment, it would be great if the program would build on today’s emerging patterns. It would be great if Obama’s spending, instead of just dissolving into the maw of construction, would actually encourage the clustering and leave a legacy that would be visible and beloved 50 years from now.

To take advantage of the growing desire for community, the Obama plan would have to do two things. First, it would have to create new transportation patterns. The old metro design was based on a hub-and-spoke system — a series of highways that converged on an urban core. But in an age of multiple downtown nodes and complicated travel routes, it’s better to have a complex web of roads and rail systems.

Second, the Obama stimulus plan could help localities create suburban town squares. Many communities are trying to build focal points. The stimulus plan could build charter schools, pre-K centers, national service centers and other such programs around new civic hubs… A stimulus package may be necessary, but unless designed with care, its main effect will be to prop up the drying husks of the fall.

More here.

I’ve had my share of tiffs with David Brooks, but he nails this one:

Granting immortality to Detroit’s Big Three does not enhance creative destruction. It retards it. It crosses a line, a bright line. It is not about saving a system; there will still be cars made and sold in America. It is about saving politically powerful corporations. A Detroit bailout would set a precedent for every single politically connected corporation in America. There already is a long line of lobbyists bidding for federal money. If Detroit gets money, then everyone would have a case. After all, are the employees of Circuit City or the newspaper industry inferior to the employees of Chrysler? …

If ever the market has rendered a just verdict, it is the one rendered on G.M. and Chrysler. These companies are not innocent victims of this crisis. To read the expert literature on these companies is to read a long litany of miscalculation. Some experts mention the management blunders, some the union contracts and the legacy costs, some the years of poor car design and some the entrenched corporate cultures … A federal cash infusion will not infuse wisdom into management. It will not reduce labor costs. It will not attract talented new employees. As Megan McArdle of The Atlantic wittily put it, “Working for the Big Three magically combines vast corporate bureaucracy and job insecurity in one completely unattractive package.”

In light of all the terrific comments to my original post, here is the original unedited version of my column.

Two years ago almost to the day, I sat at a coffee shop in Washington, D.C. talking about the upcoming U.S. election with a good friend who was an editor at a major political monthly. Having never been a fan of George W. Bush, I said nonetheless that the president might be a transitional figure, his administration essentially holding back a tectonic populist, rightward shift in American politics. I told my friend I was fearful of what could come next. He looked me squarely in the eye and said simply: “That’s not what frightens me. What has me terrified is the right-wing backlash that will come when a more liberal, left-leaning administration takes office in January 2009.”

I’ve since come round to his way of thinking. Barring some unusual unforeseen event, Barack Obama can count on victory in next week’s election. He is running a considerable lead in the national polls and even in the electoral college, and he appears to have mobilized huge numbers of younger and African American voters who will push him to victory in the key swing states he needs to win the Electoral College. He has the money – more than $150 million dollars raised just in September – to counter virtually any negative advertising. But his job once in office will be harder than he could have anticipated.

When people like Colin Powell say Obama is a “transformational figure,” they’re suggesting that an Obama administration can somehow heal the deep divisions within the American electorate and move the country forward, the way Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression. And certainly projected Democratic majorities in Congress make that kind of transformation appear plausible.

I wish that would happen. But I doubt it will, and the reason is simple: the divisions run too deep. The realignment that propelled and kept FDR in office is not happening today. American politics is distinguished today by shifting electoral coalitions, candidate-centered elections, and what some political scientists call de-alignment. America isn’t just suffering from political polarization but a burgeoning economic divide and class war.

Since 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was first elected, the U.S. economy has been undergoing a shift more thorough and massive than the rise of industrial economy a century and a half ago. Since then, 20 million jobs in the creative sector have been created, and the ranks of what I call the creative class has grown to 40 million – nearly a third of the workforce. That group has become a powerful force in American politics, and they are squarely behind Obama. New York Times columnist David Brooks recently reported that Republicans have all but lost creative professionals working in law, medicine, and high-tech. Obama leads McCain among those with a post graduate education 59 to 36 percent; and among those with a college education 50 to 44 percent. And the Democratic candidate leads younger 18-29 year old votes, 65 to 31 percent.

Up to this point, Republican party strategists have exploited this shift to their party’s advantage, beginning with the ever prescient Kevin Phillips’s identification of the “silent majority” of white working-class voters in 1968. The rise of the creative economy generated not just a new class, but a shift in social values. Tolerance, diversity, and self-expression became prized, and not just because of the hippies, student movement, or even what Christopher Lasch called the culture of narcissism. Diversity and self-expression are necessary for the creative economy to flourish and function. It’s little wonder than that Silicon Valley, ground zero of the high-tech revolution, grew up in the shadow of San Francisco.

As the creative economy grew and became more concentrated in locations like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C. – what we now know as blue America – the working class fell further and further behind. Globalization was shipping jobs overseas and the main institutional supports that led to higher working-class incomes during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s – powerful U.S. companies and powerful unions – were simultaneously being undercut. The great genius of Karl Rove was to seize upon the church as the one remaining constant in the lives of working Americans, and use it to his political organizational advantage.

The rise of ”hockey moms,” of “Joe Six-Pack,” and “Joe the Plumber” in this election cycle testify to this growing sense of unease. This is the kind of economic split that Obama tried to capture with his now infamous “bitter-gate” statement, which he now says he regrets. But what can we expect from people who know that the economic system is leaving them behind?

This class divide is overlaid on America’s economic and political geography. The rise of the creative class and its geographic centers which form the innovative engines of the U.S. economy, are also reshaping its politics. This goes beyond traditional Democratic bastions like big city New York, Chicago, and L.A. and, high-tech centers like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and Washington D.C.; or university districts like Austin, Boulder, and Raleigh-Durham.

My team and I looked at the state-by-state polls and compared them to our measures of the creative economy – a broad index of technology, talent, and tolerance. Blue states had a median creativity index score of more then red states (.68 versus .38), with purple swing states in the middle. Virginia and Colorado, two former staunchly red states that Obama is currently winning by six or seven percent, have seen significant increases in their college-educated populations in recent years.

As these states have become more highly educated, more urbanized, more high-tech, and more diverse, notes Financial Times columnist Edward Luce, they have moved from Republican red to Democratic blue. As Republican congressman Tom Davis recently opined, U.S. politics, including his own district of Northern Virginia, is being reshaped as high-tech economies lean more Democratic. As he put it simply: “Economic development works.” He decided not to seek reelection.

Political scientist Andrew Gelman show that economic geography now outweighs personal income as the key faultline in American politics. Richer Americans continue to vote Republican and poorer ones are overwhelmingly Democratic, but upper-middle class, richer states like California, Massachusetts, and New York vote and perhaps now Virgina and Colorado vote blue, because richer more creative class voters there are more open-minded and no longer simply vote for their immediate pocketbooks.

And both states are microcosms of the deeper class divide across America. Outside of high-tech, highly educated, ultra-professional and diverse Northern Virginia and away from the creative class Denver-Boulder corridor, both are hot-beds of socially conservative populism – where anti-gay, anti-immigrant, and anti-urban sentiments run high. Colorado after all is home to the ultra-conservative Focus on the Family, while Virginia Beach is the headquarters to the Christian Coalition originally founded by Pat Robertson.

These class divides will only deepen as the economy worsens, and America’s economic geography becomes ever more polarized and unequal. And a strange kind of reactive populism, much worse than anything we’ve seen before, is likely to rise. McCain’s defeat in 2008 at the hands of Obama will shift the balance of power toward the conservative wing of the Republican party – toward figures like Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin who combine social populism with uncanny media skills and the ability to project themselves onto America’s popular culture. Unless Obama can fashion a broad inclusive appeal that extends the benefits of the creative economy to working and service economies, the bitterness he himself acknowledged, in a moment of uncanny candor, will only grow deeper and America will grow more divided and ever more polarized.

If you think the stock market has been volatile, we are in uncharted political waters. Get ready for an extended period of volatility and conflict in American politics. You heard it here first.

Wil Wilkinson takes David Brooks’ – and John McCain’s – “country first” calls for a new collectivism apart.  Individualism, Wilkinson reminds us, is in sync with the great march of human progress. Individualistic societies grow faster and their people are happier than collectivist ones.

Wealth, which produces all sorts of hugely desirable human goods, also weakens orientation toward pre-assigned roles and their obligations and strengthens the orientation toward individual fulfillment, resulting in more fulfillment. Collectivist moral cultures do serve an important function in the typical human condition. But we are lucky when that function has become unnecessary

He cites a study by  Aaron Ahuvia in the Journal of Happiness Studies which finds that:

Rather [than increasing happiness directly through increased consumption], economic development increases SWB [subjective well-being] by creating a cultural environment where individuals make choices to maximize their happiness rather than meet social obligations (Coleman, 1990; Galbraith, 1992; Triandis, 1989; Triandis et al., 1990; Veenhoven, 1999; Watkins and Liu, 1996). This cultural transformation away from obligation and toward the pursuit of happiness is part of a broader transition away from collectivism and toward individualist cultural values and forms of social organization.

Collectivism is a hallamark of backwardness, closure, and fear. To my mind, the value of individualism and individual self-expression is something I thought both liberals and conservatives could agree on. And while I respect John McCain as a individual, his country-first calls for a new collectivism frankly scare me.