With his rock-star looks and positions as senior editor of The Atlantic, head of the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, and visiting professor at New York University, Richard Florida is the highest-profile urbanist in the country—and has been for over a decade. In all my travels, he and his creative-class theory are nigh universally cited. To the extent that civic leaders across America understand the criticality of human capital and talent in the 21st-century economy, it’s because of him.
In his 2002 bestseller, The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida described how the world economy was being transformed by high-performing workers who specialize in innovation. Though he originally distinguished this creative class from white-collar knowledge workers generally, today the two terms are largely synonymous in the public mind and Florida’s analyses. In effect, he developed a sexy way to talk about the increasing criticality of talent to economic success—and it catapulted him to superstardom.
The problem for Florida is that the economic transformation he once celebrated has a dark side that he failed to predict. His newest book, The New Urban Crisis, is Florida’s attempt to grapple with the downsides of the trends he popularized. Among the negative aspects of these changes are an economy that disproportionately rewards “superstar” cities like New York and San Francisco (something he calls “winner-take-all urbanism”), rising income inequality, persistent racial segregation, increasing suburban poverty, and the decline of urban middle-class neighborhoods, resulting in a barbell-shaped economy of rich and poor.
Read the entire piece here at The American Conservative
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Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The American Conservative