Institute For The Future

Starbucks and the rise and fall of nations

There's a long interview with Richard Florida, of the "creative class" argument, in Salon magazine. Florida's latest book, The Flight of the Creative Class, might best be thought of as combining the sensibilities of Oswald Spengler and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy: it argues that competition for the creative class-- or rather, competition to create places that are attractive to the creative class-- has gone global, and the U.S. is not doing too well:

There are two factors interacting here [and working against the U.S.]. The first, which would have happened anyway, is that other countries realized how important talent is and cities in those countries have become really effective in competing for talent. So the playing field has been leveled. In the past, people would have said, "Absolutely, my first choice is to move to New York or Boston or San Francisco or Seattle or Chicago ..." Now cities like London, Dublin, Amsterdam and Stockholm have become extremely attractive to talented people, not because of any particular public policy but because of the way they've developed over the past decade....

The second factor is that -- obviously spurred by this so-called threat of terrorism -- we've become far more restrictive in our ability to absorb and attract foreign talent. The numbers are all there, showing the decline of foreign students in the U.S. and the decline in the number of visas issued.... Not surprisingly, there's a general sense in the world that the United States isn't as welcoming....

[I]t's not that any one country is going to emerge as the next great superpower and attract all the best talent. It's not like "It's going to be the EU" or "It's going to be China." That's silly. But if these increasingly competitive countries take 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 percent of the talent that used to come here, when you add that up over 10 to 20 countries, that's a huge loss.

And what's happening, of course, is that India and China and the Chinese-speaking countries are focusing on retaining their kids and attracting back their expatriates. And at the same time, Canada and Australia, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Sydney, Stockholm, Melbourne, London and Dublin are all trying to get a toehold on attracting really talented people from all over the world....

We've never seen labor markets on this scale that are so strongly global. And the United States is at a tipping point where we might lose our historical advantage.

Florida has been developing this argument for a while: it popped up our radar almost a year ago, when Florida noted in Washington Monthly that "high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States' province and a crucial source of our prosperity have begun to move overseas."

There's a more specific argument that resonates with Florida, but is specific to the global migration and distribution of scientific and technical talent. It's one we're working through in some of our datasheets, and in a new project we've just signed a contract on-- about which more later.