THE VISIONARY & THE FUTURIST

American Demographics, Oct 1, 2004

Above and beyond anything else, the most crucial characteristic a place can and should foster - and, not coincidentally, the most difficult one to foster - is diversity. What I call Tolerance in my Three Ts of economic growth. [Talent and Technology are the other two.] Openness. An openness to new ideas, and therefore to new cultural, social, political and economic opportunities. We never know where the next Big Idea will come from, and for that reason, beyond just the moral imperative, of course, it's important to welcome the input of all parts of a population, regardless of age, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, family structure, geographic location, socioeconomic class, etc. Every human being is creative; it's part of what makes us human beings. The cities that figure that out early on and embrace tolerance, openness, inclusiveness and diversity as economic growth strategies are the ones that will go far in the Creative Age.

ZOLLI: Aren't creatives highly mobile? If they are, how are cities and towns supposed to hold on to them? Aren't some cultural creatives intrinsically nomadic?

FLORIDA: People are highly mobile, period. Especially in the U.S. People in this country move at a phenomenal rate, and in this day and age they don't just move across state borders. People will move now across international borders, whether to pursue better economic opportunities, higher standards of living or whatever.

But, yes, people whose creative skills are in high demand are especially mobile; their skills and the basic laws of supply and demand allow them to be. And with this willingness to move on an international scale, the question becomes how to compete globally. Again, this is what my next book will focus on, these trends.

So the point is not exactly to "hold on" in a paternalistic sense, because the nature of today's creative economy is such that people will always move in and out. But if you grow the kind of open and inclusive place I mentioned before, there's a much better chance, statistically, that several things will happen. People who left your place to go explore the world, which is a very healthy thing both culturally and economically, will come back. People who hear about your place and wish to seek economic opportunities will do so, if the corresponding quality-of-life factors - everything from education and environment to music scene and cinema, depending on which demographic you're talking about - are in place.

Perhaps the most difficult task to undertake, though, and I say difficult because it's a much more long-term strategy, one which takes patience and a committed community, is to home-grow talent. Not just to encourage and inspire young creative talent, but then to go a step further and make sure that talent, from day one, has an outlet to plug that encouragement and inspiration into. To create more smart kids - and I use smart in the very loose sense of the term, to describe everything from accountants to opera singers to innovative floor managers - and then to create more smart jobs for those kids, because those are the people who will stick around.