I was a bit skeptical about buying Richard Florida's "Rise of the Creative Class" but decided I should read it before cementing an opinion. One of the deciding aspects for Florida determining if an area is open to the creative class is a Tolerance Index. Basically if an area is tolerant to gays, bohemians, immigrants, etc; then it is attractive to the highly mobile and prosperous thought workers.

Another index he came up with is the Creativity Index which is based on a mix of technology, talent and tolerance. Florida writes:

Keep your eyes on countries and the regions within them that seek to attract all sorts of people and nurture creativity: that is now the key element of global competition, more than flows of goods and services or capital. Regions like Toronto and Vancouver already have concentrations of immigrants and bohemians that surpass all US regions. Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, would rank sixth and seventh among US regions on my Creativity Index.

The city on top of his US Creativity Index, Austin, TX, was one of the areas that my wife and I thought to moving to. When I wanted to move out of Virginia I looked at Phoenix, Denver, Portland, San Francisco, southern Texas and Tampa Bay.

Current social conservative politics have led to a welfare state that is increasingly focused on working families with children. This is true of the Howard Government and more recently in the US the $300 rebate (to keep the economy strong or some rubbish) was an extra $300 per child. Richard Florida argues the inverse is true:

Furthermore, one group that has been neglected by most communities, at least until recently, is young people. Young people have typically been thought of as transients who contribute little to a city's bottom line. But in the creative age they matter for two reasons.

First they are workhorses. ... [and] Second, people are staying single longer.

He argues that young people are a driving force behind dynamic creative economies, and are more important economically than the traditional suburban nuclear family to economic wealth and success for a region.

Not exclusively however, and the aspects of a city that attracts the educated youth worker, also attracts the aging worker with a family. Lifestyles do not stop because of child birth. This returns to Florida's main argument where the quality of life in a city or region is a deciding factor in attracting 'the creative class' to the local economy, which inevitably attracts in turn creative companies who want to employ their labor.

Politically I think young people are under-represented and I do believe that there is an element of the world having changed on many of the old politicians that inhabit our political structures such that they are endemically out of touch. The responses to terrorism were not the ones of the abundant libertous age, they were a cold war response. The same with the social welfare of the Howard years, it was typical big-government social engineering.

The Westminster System helps entrench the career politician, Howard being a good example. I don't see that issue changing soon. On the Liberal benches the nearest one to having a real job of the potential leaders is Turnball. The current Prime Minister is another careerist having moved through a professional career in diplomacy to electoral politics.

Richard Florida writes that creativity, and hence innovation, flourishes best where there is sufficient stability to allow continuity of effort, along with political openness to allow creative subversive in all its forms. Modern democracies are geared toward economic innovation that has stemmed from British liberalism in the 18thC. Technological innovation is fragile and heavily dependent upon social and political order; Japan and China are good studies on how it can quickly be dampened and even squashed into stasis by restrictive political and social policies.

Florida writes:

One final cautionary note is in order. Joel Mokyr notes that technological creativity has tended to rise and then fade dramatically at various times in various cultures, when social and economic institutions turn rigid and act against it.

Spectacular fade outs occurred, for instance, in late medieval times in the Islamic world and in China. Both societies, which had been leaders in fields from mathematics to mechanical invention, then proceeded to fall far behind Western Europe economically.

The 19thC Australian Republicans believed that greater liberty and limited government allowed for increased individual moral expression. It also allows for greater economic, technological and creative expression as well.

Richard Florida would argue the opposite. Tech startups are in California as that is where the tech entrepreneurs and the VCs are. Central to Florida's argument is that companies are beholden to talent and will locate themselves where the labor market is supplying them with what they need, not vice versa. Wall Street probably exists because that is where all the traders and bankers are. Silicon Valley exists because that is where all the tech entrepreneurs are.

The arguments are not absolute, but I have more empathy for Richard Florida's case in this instance than Lunn's. Like many other techies I deserted the US North-East to come to the US South-West.

The WSJ notes that migration around America has stalled with the dropping property markets. The areas hardest hit were the boom property markets; Phoenix being one of them.

The Census data show that the biggest falloffs were in the worst housing markets. In 2007-2008, the Phoenix area gained a net 51,000 domestic migrants, about half as many as two years ago.

And:

The migration slowdown, if it persists, could further delay the economic recovery in depressed housing markets such as Phoenix and Las Vegas. These places generally have a larger amount of unsold homes, and a disproportionate share of the economy is dependent on construction and other real estate-related trades.

Richard Florida also chimes in on the issue. I am part of the internal migration to Phoenix, so I find it all interesting, though I came for the sun and the tech work.

It is interesting to compare the internal migration of the US to Australia. Most of Western Australia's gains were not skilled Australian hands heading out west, instead the state's growth came from direct immigration and births.

Richard Florida notes that the burden of upside down mortgages means that internal migration in the US has dropped and that this is coupled with decreased immigration into the US; making for a very immobile labor market.

IIRC Florida noted in his book that companies travel to where the skills are, not vice versa, I wonder what pressures this will place on the market in skills that companies compete for.

Another issue that I was not aware of is the effectively carteled professions; such as law and union manufacturing jobs that are effectively immobile courtesy of their 'guildlike' structure.

The legal profession is highly carteled due to the bar exam. Other than Louisiana which has a continental legal basis, the remainder of the US states are common law, so passing one bar exam is more than sufficient. Especially as the bar is a made up and imaginary legal system. The bar exam forces lawyers to remain put in a place and raises the cost of intra-state migration.

Since I work in Software my mobility is more determined by living circumstance such as housing and being in upside down mortgages. My mobility is flexible enough, and my profession sufficiently commodified that I can work anywhere on the planet; Australia, America, Europe, India if need be.

Richard Florida argues that capital has been over invested in housing in Canada to the detriment of labor mobility. This is a similar argument to Western Australia having a booming economy and no-one from the Eastern States wanting to move out there. All of Western Australia's population growth has been from immigrants and in-state births. Florida writes:

... cities with higher rates of home ownership also have higher unemployment - in Europe, a 10-per-cent rise in the former corresponds with a 2-per-cent rise in the latter.

What's the link? The simple fact that anyone who has invested in a house is less likely to pack up and leave when times get tough.

In 2008, fewer Americans moved, as a percentage of the population, than in any year since the U.S. Census Bureau started tracking changes of address in the late 1940s: less than 12 per cent versus more than 20 during suburbia's golden years. ...

Yet this is the absolute worst time for people to lose the ability to move around.

This is more the classical economic argument that people should move to where the jobs are. Florida's argument in his book the Creative Class is the opposite. His research suggests that people choose a location for reasons other than work and then business has to move to find this creative class and use their intellectual capital.

Florida argues that people choose a city for its art, culture, hiking, cycling, schools, etc with its economy as an after thought. However, the areas that have a lot of the former, like New York City, Washington DC, San Francisco, also tend to have interesting high tech economies.

So it is kind of contradictory to read Florida's housing argument in opposition to his Creative Class thesis.

Arizona recently passed 1070, a law on policing immigration on the Arizona-Mexico border that has caused a great deal of division in Arizona and the United States because of its demand for a form of profiling and how it allows arbitrary policing of the law. An additional issue is that it requires papers to be carried proving immigration or citizenship status by nearly all who will be profiled - which includes Australian permanent residents with funny accents.

I have been stopped by Border Patrol on Rt.8 and asked to prove I am here legally. The Border Patrol are normally of Hispanic decent anyway and do not care if being Australian has a romantic flair to it in America. An Australian ex-pat is just another suspicious non-American to deal with. I think 1070 is a bad law that directly attacks freedom of movement. It should be repealed in its current form.

Arizona solved the people staying put in their houses and dealt with a booming construction market through illegal immigration and temporary workers from Mexico. Most of those that came across during the boom have gone home now that Arizona is in the dumps of recession. It was done with a wink and nod, it was known that it was happening, and the construction and landscaping companies were happy for the regular flow of cheap, skilled labor to meet demand in construction projects.

It seems like a good way to deal with the issue of people not moving from their community once they become invested in it with the purchase of a house and their labor becoming immobile. Immigration is important, both of unskilled and skilled, as it will more readily move to the current hot-spot economy in the country than those who have settled down and taken out a mortgage.

When I was living in Virginia there was a push to bring a baseball team to Washington DC. North Virginia being newly wealthy of the largesse of the US Federal Government as a huge employer and giver out of contracts, decided it, rather than Washington DC, should have the baseball team. It came with tax increase, a new stadium and so forth.

I did not want it. I thought it a horrible use of public money. In the end, a revitalization scheme at Anacostia in Washington DC won the team and the contract to build a new stadium. Supposedly it would revitalize that district which was run down and scary at night. A lot of studies were shown that big programs like that did not work, but the DC Council went ahead with it anyway.

Richard Florida writes on how declining rustbelt cities are trying to regenerate themselves notes;

Instead of spending millions to lure or bail out factories, or hundreds of millions and in some cases billions to build stadiums, convention centers, and hotels, use that money to invest in local assets, spur local business formation and development, better employ local people and utilize their skills, and invest in improving quality of place.

One leading economic developer, who has extensive experience in economic revitalization in the United States, Canada, and Europe, explained the shift in economic development toward older industrial regions this way: "Urban revitalization based on luring so-called big game projects no longer has a place in the advanced countries," he said. "If economic developers want to do that today, they should move to China. That's where all the big corporate projects are or are heading."

It is interesting that big government in China is still building out in that manner, though they have the goal of national prestige equated along with it. Especially considering that Chinese quality is still lacking in manufactured goods, so the big nation building tasks which can be done by a strong government probably are important in China.

Richard Florida has an interesting run down on gun violence at the state level. Poverty, economic class and high schools that have a high incidence of guns being brought to school are positively correlated with gun violence. Immigrants, education, and high economic development were negatively correlated. There was also this controversial statement;

What about politics? It's hard to quantify political rhetoric, but we can distinguish blue from red states. Taking the voting patterns from the 2008 presidential election, we found a striking pattern: Firearm-related deaths were positively associated with states that voted for McCain (.66) and negatively associated with states that voted for Obama (-.66). Though this association is likely to infuriate many people, the statistics are unmistakable. Partisan affiliations alone cannot explain them; most likely they stem from two broader, underlying factors - the economic and employment makeup of the states and their policies toward guns and gun ownership.

The political divisions between Republican and Democratic voters in the US have been socio-economic. So I am not surprised that if socio-economic factors are driving a higher incidence of gun violence, then that is reflected in voting patterns as well.