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White Paper: Harnessing the Power of a Knowledge-Based, Technology-Driven Economy
The Creative Compact: An Economic and Social Agenda for the Creative Age
Richard Florida, author of Rise of the Creative Class and one of the world's leading social theorists and public intellectuals, believes that human creativity is the engine of economic growth. In this final installment of Professor Richard Florida’s Creative Compact, Florida concludes his argument for a new social compact that will ensure our future economic success. Florida reasons that although the United States faces real security issues, it is imperative that we maintain an open society. Florida concludes that the United States must take the lead is forging a Global Creativity Initiative that would focus on developing new approaches to investing in people.
Professor Florida is a keynote speaker at the National Conference on the Creative Economy, hosted by Fairfax County, October 24-25, 2007, where he will present his latest thinking on how the Creative Economy will affect companies and communities. To register for the conference, visit this link.
[Principle 1: Every Human Being is Creative, Principle 2: Encourage Entrepreneurship Across the Board, Principle 3: Expand Innovation, Principle 4: A Social Agenda for Creativity, Principle 5: Restructure Education for Creativity, Principle 6: The University as Creative Hub, Principle 7: Make Every Community a Creative Community, Principle 8: Leverage the Local]
Principle 4: A Social Agenda for Creativity
The Industrial Era evolved a social compact oriented around big companies and big government based on a combination of productivity-based wages, employer provided benefits, and targeted subsidies or entitlements to overcome disadvantage. In doing so, it provided material benefits to workers, but neglected other dimensions of human development and well being.
A new social compact must start from the organizing principles of the Creative Age. First, our system is increased levels of employment mobility, benefits needs to be affordable, mobile and portable. There will always be a need for a social safety net for the truly disadvantaged. But that system cannot be based solely on government subsidies to address material need. A new social compact would be based around a simple organizing principle: it recognizes the ability for individuals to develop and utilize their talents and to self-express as fundamental human rights. A Creative Age social compact would ensure that people can define their human identity and utilize their full skill sets and capabilities.
Principle 5: Restructure Education for Creativity Everyone agrees that education is important, but our definition of education must be broadened. The most important investments we make are not in road, highways, and other physical assets, but in our human assets.
Like earlier efforts to build canals, railroads, highways, and other physical infrastructure to power industrial growth, the United States today needs to massively increase its public and private investments in human infrastructure. The scale of the effort required will need to dwarf the public education system, land grant colleges, and GI Bill of a previous generation. Investments in human capital are the single most important investments we make. We need a massive increase in our ability and capacity to educate and train people from primary and secondary education through the most advanced stages of higher education.
Our current system of K-12 education, as Bill Gates has said, is “broken”. What is need is in fact a full-scale overhaul in the way we think and deliver education. We can no longer succeed - or even tread water - with an education system handed down to us from the industrial age, since what we need is no longer assembly line workers. We need one that instead reflects and reinforces the values, priorities, and requirements of the creative age. Education reform must, at its core, make schools into places where human creativity is cultivated and can flourish. Americans revel in the legendary stories of young creators like Michael Dell building new businesses in dorm rooms or in the garage in their spare time. The question to ask ourselves is: Why are they doing these things in their spare time? Isn’t this the real stuff of education in the creative age? Schools need to be vehicles for enhancing and mobilizing the creative capacities of all our children, so that the tinkering of today can be translated into the creative advancement of tomorrow. Expanding education in this country is not only a matter of basic human rights; it is an economic imperative.
Many venues for alternatives to our industrial age educational system have already sprung up. The MET schools in Providence, RI, have created a new model of education around the idea of real practice. Children are taught not just to think, but to do, a welcome change from a system in which arts, music, and physical education classes are always the first to go. In a similar move, companies such as SAS have instituted onsite schools that offer upon a more well-rounded and in many ways more practical education for the creative age. The Gates Foundation has stepped up as another leading private proponent of small schools and experientially-based education.
We need to think beyond schools. Technology allows for a massive expansion of home-schooling and learning outside of classrooms. Humans have always essentially “learned-by-doing.” Our system of learning in schools is a relatively recent development, necessitated by the limits of technology. Our investments need to be focused on what’s best for learning and creativity, not real estate.
Parents also need to be recognized and rewarded more fully for their role in the educational process. Study after study has shown that, in the end, parents are what make or break a child’s ability and desire to become lifelong learners. Hilary Clinton was right: it takes a family and a village to educate a child, not just a school. Unfortunately, as Phillip Longman’s research shows, parents face wickedly perverse disincentives to educate their children. Longman deems it a “curious truth about American politics today” that “elected officials love to talk about ‘family values’ and ‘investing in our kids,’ but shy away from proposing anything big or new that would actually help them.” On the
contrary, the system is configured such that raising a child - let alone sending him or her to a good school - is an enormous economic burden.
Teachers are also critical. A recent Gallup study shows that engaged teachers, like engaged employees, make a huge difference in student performance.
At the systemic level, too, there are disincentives for cities and local governments to invest heavily in education. The mobile nature of the creative economy has broken the age-old connection between where people are educated and where they work. As we used to say about Pittsburgh: “The region’s key export is no longer steel, but its talent.”
This creative-region dynamic injects into the already tenuous public education system an added disincentive for investment in primary and secondary schools. Leading creative regions like Austin import many of their top workers by winning the regional talent exchange, in effect plucking them after they're fully educated. Regions with top-flight universities such as Stanford and MIT also draw the best and brightest high school grads from everywhere and hold onto many of them after graduation.
Either way, mobility has broken the connection between local investment in education and regional economic growth. In fact, some regions can do quite well without anteing up a big investment in homegrown talent. Talent-importing hotbeds like the Bay Area and San Diego have thrived in California, home of tax revolt, where public funding shortfalls often have held back local public-education upgrades. An obvious long-term danger looms: If too many regions begin to rely too heavily on imported talent rather than growing their own, the whole process will peter out. Our national economic competitiveness will decline.
We need an overall system that values human creativity - from our children to the people who raise and educate them.
Richard Florida, Professor of Business and Creativity at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, is a keynote speaker at the 2007 National Conference on the Creative Economy, hosted by Fairfax County, October 24-25, where he will present his latest thinking on how the Creative Economy will affect companies and communities. Sponsored in part by FORTUNE magazine, the conference will examine the role that a strong, creative workforce plays in the growth and success of businesses and communities in an information-based economy. To register for the conference, visit http://www.creativeeconomies.org.
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