Rise of the Creative Class

[lizzie]

Reading a really interesting book at the moment - although it could take a while being a rather heavy tome - called "Rise of the Creative Class" by Richard Florida.

In a nutshell, it investigates and studies how society has changed in the last 50 years - and most significantly in the last 10. The change from a factory based society where you went to where the jobs were to an innovative and creative based society where the jobs move to where the creative population is.

A bit like buying real estate - follow the artists and gays (creative).

It studies and discusses how the innovative/creative people in society - around 15% of workers in the western world at the core, and 30% if you include the fringe occupations - with the rest of the occupations made up of service and factory.

The most interesting factor is that those who are part of the core creative class are becoming (or have become) the new wealthy ... with service and factory (production line) falling further behind.

The increasing divide between the haves and have nots.

The creative/innovative either invent or work with what is, but manipulated/create to their advantage - whereas the service/factory tend do things by rote.

Now, this is a very difficult concept to get across in a short post ... but the concept does go a long way towards explaining what is happening in many parts of the world (riots etc) - the have nots are falling further behind, but do not necessarily have the ability the pull themselves up into this new era of "thinking outside the box".

 

[josko]

The creative/the innovative...the entrepreneurs.....

Sounds like a great book. Personally, I think it has been there all along. To be an entrpreneur...you have to be creative. Whether with your mind, your hands or both...thinking outside the square.

Makes alot of sense and yes I think where the riots are concerned in England, the lower socio-economically challenged - the have nots...want what the "have-gots" have , yet don't understand or comprehend why that could almost NEVER be.

There are leaders and followers and as your book probably points out- the creative and uncreative.

You can't teach a guy or girl to dance if they just aint got rythem.

Regards JO

 

[MangoMadness]

Interesting, a couple of thoughts I had whilst reading the OP

- The factory class would continue to diminish as a portion of the population due to industrial modenization which would leave a larger portion of the population to do 'other things'

- The internet provides instant information and support for people to explore their creativity whereas previous generations could have had that creativity stifled due to not being able to research their creative element or had any local support to follow up on their designs etc.

Overall I think the Internet is the one single reason for an emergence of creativity, there is (almost) instant response when posting your work/creation, there are support groups for like minded individuals.

Traditionally if you wanted to paint something and the teacher didnt like it and your family or friends wernt really supportive then these creative elements could have been crushed but now with millions of people to share those ideas with and support your creations that creativity is easily nurtued. Also the internet provides as easy way to exhibit and also sell your creations, you just have to be careful that people dont steal your ideas and use them for themselves

 

[UrbanPlanner]

great book! I used it throughout much of my research at uni as well as in my thesis where I looked at the night time economy and how the creative class/knowledge economy is a contributing factor to its success

 

[lizzie]

- The factory class would continue to diminish as a portion of the population due to industrial modenization which would leave a larger portion of the population to do 'other things'

- The internet provides instant information and support for people to explore their creativity whereas previous generations could have had that creativity stifled due to not being able to research their creative element or had any local support to follow up on their designs etc.

Spot on.

The factory class diminished from 40% in 1950 to around 25% today - whereas the service class has grown from 30% in 1950 to 45% today.

The creative class has doubled in volume since 1980 largely, I suspect, to the influence of computers and the internet and more people in the workforce - but has not increased as a percentage of the working population.

However, what is shown that rather than make the shift from factory to creative - the shift in numbers has been largely from factory to service ... both classes on similar levels of both pay and innovation.

Interesting reading ... I assume 99.9% of those on here are in the creative.

 

[topcropper]

Interesting reading ... I assume 99.9% of those on here are in the creative.

You'd assume wrong then.

Surely the reason that three quarters of the workforce can work in services industries is due to the ever increasing and productive primary and secondary/manufacturing industries? It has to be the case, because if you not a farmer or miner, and if your not manufacturing stuff in secondary industry, then you must be employed in service industries? We can have lots of teachers, nurses, builders, policemen, politicians, retail workers, etc, etc.


Info from the world fact book.

In Ethiopia, 85% of the workforce are peasant farmers.
..................5% work in secondary industry.
.................10% in services.

In China it's 45% of the workforce are farmers and falling rapidly.
..................28% work in industry.
..................34% in services.

In Australia 3% of the workforce are farmers and 1.5% miners.
.................20% work in industry.
.................75% in services.


There's plenty of farmers and miners post on here, primary industries.
Surely there's a lot who manufacture stuff?

So I'm not in the so called 'creative class' I think that's a dumb name anyway, what's wrong with it being called service industries?

The creative class has doubled in volume since 1980 largely, I suspect, to the influence of computers and the internet and more people in the workforce - but has not increased as a percentage of the working population.
.

Wouldn't the creative class have increased so much because efficiency gains in primary and secondary industries has allowed everyone else to work in services. And by having 75% of the workforce working in services, we have a wonderfull high standard of living that's not enjoyed in say Ethiopia where most of the population slaves all day in a vege patch.


See ya's.

 

[tom32]

In Australia 3% of the workforce are farmers and 1.5% miners.
.................20% work in industry.
.................75% in services.

I suspect you have included construction in the services above as 20% would only be enough for manufacturing? Or have we fallen so far from actually making stuff that now only 10% of the population is involved?

I understand construction is just shy of 10% of the population when I have looked at it before?

Does the world book not count pen pushers above in those industries? realistically workers still need bosses so I would include them in on the production side even if they are not hands on themselves? That said if only 1.5% are workers then it would be fair to say it is a bit top heavy...

As you say in conclusion the creative class is only allowed when you have enough of a surplus in production to allow it.

First economies as they develop can only feed themselves so live a subsistance lifestyle, then they industrialise as people move into cities to make the means of production and farm equipment etc then they go high tech and most people get to push a pen rather than pull a plough.

 

[tom32]

Actually anotehr thing to note, in Australia with the exception of manufacturing we do look after our workers.

Often when we get expats here from parts of western europe and especially asia they cannot believe what workers get relative to staffers. They ask why does anyone work behind a desk in this country?

I usually say well the jobs are there if you want them, go have a crack but you migth find working in production is not as easy as it might look at first. You have to have both practical insight and physical ability not as prevalent in our society as they once were... We instead have a glut of creative class (never used the word before but it sounds very apt thanks to the op!) people who unless they are top of their game generally earn less than those in construction / mining etc.

 

[topcropper]

I suspect you have included construction in the services above as 20% would only be enough for manufacturing? Or have we fallen so far from actually making stuff that now only 10% of the population is involved?

I understand construction is just shy of 10% of the population when I have looked at it before?
...

I would have included construction in service industries.

Secondary industries, or manufacturing industries only involve taking the raw materials provided by primary industries and value adding them into manufactured goods. Construction involves taking the bricks, cement, steel, plasterboard, glass, wood that was manufactured in secondary industry and building stuff.

There really needs to be a few more catagories doesn't there? And this idea of a creative class is really a bit up itself. Everyone can't just sit around and create ideas all day, think they're a bit superiour, and not actually produce anything? The creative industries are really just a sub class of services, jobs like advertising, architecture, art, crafts, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, R&D, software.

This whole idea probably goes a little way in explaining why western economies are starting their decline compared to Asia that's on the rise. Too much unproductive service industries, and not enough productive. You can't eventually have 100% of workers in services, and certainly not this new wanky 'creative class', it's not possible.


See ya's.

 

[Ms Jade]

^Couldn't agree more, TC.
I recently had a heated discussion with the VCEC about this, as they are looking into the future if manufacturing in Vic (yeah, i know...). My main contention was that the desire to become a "knowledge-based services economy" (which seems to be what we're aspiring to) is daft for 2 reasons:
a) the individuals in our (& others') factories are not capable of being software programmers nor green energy researchers et al, and
b) without anyone being productive and actually creating things, where are the customers for these services going to come from??

Someone needs to PRODUCE some actual value to create wealth. Otherwise the financial services just invent derivatives and create wealth from arbitrage. We've already seen the results on the world economy from that game.

 

[topcropper]

^Couldn't agree more, TC.
I recently had a heated discussion with the VCEC about this, as they are looking into the future if manufacturing in Vic (yeah, i know...). My main contention was that the desire to become a "knowledge-based services economy" (which seems to be what we're aspiring to) is daft for 2 reasons:
a) the individuals in our (& others') factories are not capable of being software programmers nor green energy researchers et al, and
b) without anyone being productive and actually creating things, where are the customers for these services going to come from??

Someone needs to PRODUCE some actual value to create wealth. Otherwise the financial services just invent derivatives and create wealth from arbitrage. We've already seen the results on the world economy from that game.

Yeah, I thought the 'knowledge-based services economy' went out in 2000, with the dot com bust? Remember when Australia was stuffed because we didn't have much of an IT/computer/softwhere industry. Of course someone forgot that people still need food, oil, energy, steel, cement, and everything else, and Australia went on to boom like never before and our wealth increased and overtook all these high tech countries. We had all the 'old economy' wealth.


See ya's.

 

[Dazz]

Someone needs to PRODUCE some actual value to create wealth. Otherwise the financial services just invent derivatives and create wealth from arbitrage. We've already seen the results on the world economy from that game.

...and yet every time there is an RBA announcement or a stockmarket jitter, we see row after row of useless twats simply sitting there surrounded by banks of up to 6 screens per person...mammaries on bovines the lot of 'em.

 

[MangoMadness]

I think we would need to define the phrase 'Creative Class' as I dont think I have the same definition as you guys.

To me a 'Creative Class' arnt procedure/routine job people, to me they are the independent thinkers, the graphic artists, designers, web designers, IT problem solvers, Manufacturing design teams, business owners, generally people whos job makes them think outside the box.

That would be my definition of how I think the term should be used, but I am sure you guys might think the phrase means something different

 

[lizzie]

I knew a short explaination wouldn't explain fully.

Construction is included in manufacturing, and the figures are "western society" wife, not Australia ... but the creative class are not just sitting in a corner thinking. They include IT, architects, scientists, artists, designers (who design everything from your clothes to your furniture to your food packets) etc who do produce ... but creative is not necessarily a set occupation ... it is a way of thinking.

I would also suggest TC is in the creative class because he doesn't operate his farm "by rote" - the same way as he did 5, 10, 15 years ago - and the same way as a large portion of older farmers are doing ... but rather he is pushing the boundaries, trying new ways of doing things, innovating, expanding.

The rise of the creative class is a social change rather than a manufacturing change (which occured with advancements such as improving the car and plane etc) - so is difficult to classify as the changes are in small increments.

Think about how a person coming from 1900 to 1950 would feel - total physical change to how things operate and their surrounds (cars, planes, automation of factories etc) - now think about the change from 1950 to 2000. We still have cars, planes and automation ... but the social changes have been huge (no longer white, blue collar, wife at home, never move outside town of birth etc), yet in many way more subtle.

It is a change to innovation and flexibility ... and those that don't innovate and flex are being left behind.

A full explaination would be 2 pages long ... I suggest you read the book.

 

[lizzie]

I think we would need to define the phrase 'Creative Class' as I dont think I have the same definition as you guys.

To me a 'Creative Class' arnt procedure/routine job people, to me they are the independent thinkers, the graphic artists, designers, web designers, IT problem solvers, Manufacturing design teams, business owners, generally people whos job makes them think outside the box.

That would be my definition of how I think the term should be used, but I am sure you guys might think the phrase means something different

Mango's "got it"!

When I said 99.9% on here are creative is because their jobs are creative, their thinking is creative, and/or they are creative in their property investing (reno's, developments etc) beyond the usual buy one property only, pay it off, retire ... and even that is only a small percentage of the population.

The very factor that they are on this website tells me that they are thinking outside the block - which we know is a small minority.

 

[tom32]

I would have included construction in service industries.

Secondary industries, or manufacturing industries only involve taking the raw materials provided by primary industries and value adding them into manufactured goods. Construction involves taking the bricks, cement, steel, plasterboard, glass, wood that was manufactured in secondary industry and building stuff.

There really needs to be a few more catagories doesn't there? And this idea of a creative class is really a bit up itself. Everyone can't just sit around and create ideas all day, think they're a bit superiour, and not actually produce anything? The creative industries are really just a sub class of services, jobs like advertising, architecture, art, crafts, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, R&D, software.

This whole idea probably goes a little way in explaining why western economies are starting their decline compared to Asia that's on the rise. Too much unproductive service industries, and not enough productive. You can't eventually have 100% of workers in services, and certainly not this new wanky 'creative class', it's not possible.

See ya's.

I am not alltogether comfortable with considering construction a services industry but if thats what it is I guess I can live with it.

I agree about asia rising as well. We point and laugh at China at all the airports and trains and excess capacity they are building into their economy while we sit in grid lock in our advanced economy where it increasingly costs more and more to move things from A to B.

Ultimately infrastructure brings wealth as it allows a larger portion of your society to work in these service industries by providing a larger surplus. It is the surplus which gives your population their standard of life they have come to expect.

whether it be irrigation, water storage, roads, bridges, airports, ports, rail or even telecomunications it is the thing that provides us with a surplus along with human capital.

You can educate your population all you like but if you do not invest in the hard economic assets your economy than it does not grow in real terms per person.

If we in Australia lost all the roads, water storage irrigation etc than we would all have to go back to toiling on our little patches carrying water to our own personal patch of food production and spending all day fridays walking it to market. That is after about half of us died.

Infrastructure and Human capital is the only reason we are any more advanced than ethiopia. Without either we are finished. Why I was not real impressed with Labor's ideas of what fiscal stimulous is all about... There is so much more productive uses it could have been put to. I would sooner have too many roads and railroads for the economies current position like China and develop rapidly than not have enough...

 

[Rolf Latham]

I would have included construction in service industries.

Secondary industries, or manufacturing industries only involve taking the raw materials provided by primary industries and value adding them into manufactured goods. Construction involves taking the bricks, cement, steel, plasterboard, glass, wood that was manufactured in secondary industry and building stuff.

There really needs to be a few more catagories doesn't there? And this idea of a creative class is really a bit up itself. Everyone can't just sit around and create ideas all day, think they're a bit superiour, and not actually produce anything? The creative industries are really just a sub class of services, jobs like advertising, architecture, art, crafts, design, fashion, film, music, performing arts, publishing, R&D, software.

This whole idea probably goes a little way in explaining why western economies are starting their decline compared to Asia that's on the rise. Too much unproductive service industries, and not enough productive. You can't eventually have 100% of workers in services, and certainly not this new wanky 'creative class', it's not possible.


See ya's.

Hi TC

I hear words of Kerry Packer there : )

ta
rolf

 

[Belbo]

I think there might be a bit of confusion coming into the discussion here with the loaded term 'class'. Like it or not, in the language of political sociology it harbours the fundamentally Marxist conotation that 'class = power'.

So, to speak of a 'creative class' is invariably going to set off alarm bells for anybody who has an opinion on the political importance of the allegedly creative class (eg. interior designers, etc) vs the materially contributive class (eg. factory workers, etc).

Of course, Marx got it completely wrong in almost every respect. Most relevantly here, his regarding intellectual capital - entrepreneurialism and management - as simply parasitic upon manufacturing capital - workers and machinery - is simply idiocy through and through.

Yet no-one has systematically invalidated his core proposition that structural wealth = structural power, and that's why 'class' remains such a loaded political gun. In this sense modern political sociology is still intellectually struggling - more or less unsuccessfully, so far as I can see - to supercede Marx's paradigmatically political definition of 'class'. (As equally, a term like 'elite' still resounds inescapably with the political sociologies of Pareto and Weber, which correlate power more specifically to competence).

 

[lizzie]

The use of the word "class" in this instance does not mean heiracial class as in elite versus working.

Rather class means "group of people" who, in this instance, think and behave similarly - but do not think or behave "the same" as everyone else in the class, but are grouped together due to the innovative and flexiability in their thinking. That is why the group ncludes as diverse a people as struggling artists and world renound architects.

As opposed those who go thru the identical and unchanging process day after day, week after week - until they retire and repeat.

 

[Belbo]

The use of the word "class" in this instance does not mean heiracial class as in elite versus working.

Rather class means "group of people" who, in this instance, think and behave similarly - but do not think or behave "the same" as everyone else in the class, but are grouped together due to the innovative and flexiability in their thinking. That is why the group ncludes as diverse a people as struggling artists and world renound architects.

As opposed those who go thru the identical and unchanging process day after day, week after week - until they retire and repeat.

I haven't read the book yet myself, but it sounds fascinating and now will, entirely thanks to your suggestion, Lizzie.

Nonetheless, 'group' sounds like a less troublesome category as you suggest, unless there is a political agenda implied (which could possibly make the book even more interesting).