THE VISIONARY & THE FUTURIST

American Demographics, Oct 1, 2004

A new Brookings Institution study confirmed just this trend. The study broke the 100 largest metros in the U.S. down into several categories. A rarefied few are high-income havens [my own designation], but many more are places like St. Louis, Buffalo and Louisville, that are stressed cities where low-income wage earners predominate. Only 13 metros in the U.S. are "balanced," with equal proportions of high- and low-income households.

So, while in most suburbs and most cities, we may be more ethnically mixed than ever before, the real dividing line in the U.S. - as people like William Julius Wilson long ago said - continues to be economic class. This is the divide we must overcome, because, as I mentioned earlier with the example of the Indian biotech engineer, nobody likes to live in a place that is too horribly divided in one way or another. Some kind of "flight," whether white, black, brown, or creative, is inevitable, and will always be an issue so long as we live in a free market system. What we should really be concentrating on is how to better the lives of a greater number of our country's citizens, so that we can all live in the kinds of places that inspire us to be and think and live and work to our fullest potentials.

ZOLLI: Outsourcing is on everyone's mind these days. Are creative jobs and industries more or less outsourceable? What happens if America loses it's creative class edge? Is it already doing so?

FLORIDA: This is in part what my new book The Flight of the Creative Class is about. Outsourcing, pardon my blasphemy, is a "same old, same old" issue. We live in a global economy, and as economists like David Ricardo said centuries ago, companies will locate their companies where they can gain the best comparative advantage. Textiles move from Massachusetts to the South to Mexico to China. Cars moved from the industrial heartlands of the U.S. and even Europe to Eastern Europe and Mexico and so on. Virtually every disk drive we use is made in Singapore. This is nothing new. And, in the long run, it is good for all of us, especially those countries whose standards of living are boosted as a result.

Now, that's hard to say to a middle-class family like the one I grew up in. But we have to admit to ourselves that these same forces that seem to hurt us in some ways are also what allow us to continue to thrive as a country, and be on the cutting edge of all industries.

I say this because the root of American advantage has always been this country's ability to in-source. We attract, and have always attracted, the best and the brightest in culture, finance, media, design, etc. from around the world. We complain about the outsourcing of jobs to India for good reasons that hit close to home. But without these same dynamics that shift some jobs away from our country's shores we wouldn't reap the enormous benefits of the flip side of that coin: the energies of entrepreneurs like Vinod Khosla, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, etc. This single individual has created unimaginable amounts of wealth - tens of billions of dollars, by even conservative estimates. And our population benefits from this.