THE VISIONARY & THE FUTURIST

American Demographics, Oct 1, 2004

So, materials and dematerialization - and the people who oversee all of these processes - go together. They are not diametrically opposed, as people often worry. We are not all going to be taken over by robots and automation, because people are even more essential than ever to the processes that make our lives hum, whether you're talking about making steel or semiconductors.

The punch line here is the following: because it takes less people to produce the material portion of the economy, more and more people and their productive efforts are freed up to go into the improving portion - the experiential, the aesthetic, the world-saving problem-solving. The Big Issues, we'll call them. This strikes some people as elitist or shallow, but it's not just yuppies with luxury time in sushi bars in New York. It's more time to spend with kids in Pittsburgh, or more time to cook meat and potatoes, or worship God, or start a jazz quartet, or travel to other lands, or go bass fishing, or do any one of the million different things that human beings all across the world like to do with their free time. And the best thing is that advances in luxury time tend to eventually produce economic advances, too. Most parents today would say that their kids have greater opportunities than they did. And, in my opinion, it's a great thing that more of us can focus on solving the world's health-care or disease or geopolitical problems, for instance, because not as many of us are tied up with purely material or survival concerns. It's not that the need for food, water and shelter disappears with dematerialization; on the contrary, dematerialization is predicated on a certain level of material well-being. The two are mutually beneficial and reinforcing.

ZOLLI: The stereotype of a creative - black turtleneck, French cigarette, etc. - seems out of touch with the normative values of many U.S. communities. Is there chafing around the creative class? Or is this stereotype just that, a stereotype? If there is chafing, how do you see this trend playing out?

FLORIDA: Ha! Well, of course there's a tiny little grain of truth behind most stereotypes. But beyond anything except the most superficial level, this particular stereotype is cute, but silly. When I interviewed people, creative workers, for The Rise of the Creative Class, they themselves chafed at the idea of black turtlenecks and geeky software engineers. Not that those people aren't nice people, but just that the creative class - and, indeed, human creativity, inherent in all of us - is so much more expansive than any caricature could ever get at.

Now, in all times of great economic and social change, there's bound to be some chafing. Some of that chafing has been exacerbated by the creative class, and by the people trying to "lure" these types to their city. But communities make a terrible mistake, I think, when they pronounce themselves "hip" or "with it," or when they start up a neighborhood district with latte bars and Frisbee fields. I don't think there are many of them actually doing this, really, they're too smart to think that would have much of an effect on creative class people anyway.