Why do supposedly serious people embrace such ideas?

These folks (and this organization appears to be Hillary's baby) clearly have an agenda of their own, but the criticism of Florida is not without some merit, even if they have oversimplified his thesis.

Blarg. This article is pure political garbage from start to finish. The reason that he can't understand why supposedly serious people would embrace "such ideas" is because they don't. He is buring a straw man. The path to building one of Florida's cool havens isn't by attracting tolerant people as a starting point. You do it by building intellectual property and employment laws that prevent incumbent companies from squashing startups, cultivating local universities and allowing work done there to flow into the economy, promoting local angel and venture capital investor groups, making it easy for people to form businesses, and creating a community thats attractive in terms of providing a safe, secure urban environment with decent public services. However, if you do all of this and you still have the local police performing raids on gay bars you can assume that the kind of people you are interested in attracting to your city aren't going to want to live there.

People aren't flowing out of places like San Francisco because they don't like San Franciso and they think Des Moines is where the economic future lies. They are moving because they don't have a choice because the tech economy contracted. Taking the fact that the "dot com" economy contracted as a general indictment of an innovation driven economy, as it appears Congress did with their idiotic options expensing change, is the fast path to irrelevancy, a.k.a throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

The purpose of this article is to reach out to conservative, red state voters by showing that good "centrist" democrats don't like gay people either, and think young, urban, tolerant people are silly and irrelevant. Des Moines is where its at, baby. The swipe at teachers unions is particularly entertaining. Are we supposed to beleive that these people are now also economic conservatives?

This is why I don't support Hillary Clinton or Joe Liberman. They pander to the fucking authoritarian people in this country. Moderate Republicans are greatly preferable in that they don't have to seek out some scape goat to punish in order to demonstrate their social conservativeness.

Like smokers seeking a cure from their deadly habits, city politicians and economic development officials have a long history of grasping at fads to solve their persistent problems and rebuild middle class cities.

Today, a new fad is bewitching urbanists and pols alike. Known as the "creativity craze," it promotes the notion that "young creatives" can drive an urban revival.

...

The "creative solution" pointedly avoids such hurdles [good schools, good zoning policies, a city not beholden to unions], suggesting that the key to urban resurgence lies in attracting the diverse, the tolerant, and the gay. Having such a population is well and good, but unlikely by itself to produce a revival, let alone a diversified economy.

This is an urban strategy for a frictionless universe.
Why do supposedly serious people embrace such ideas?

...

San Francisco, according to economist David Friedman, has actually lost employment at a rate comparable to that of the Great Depression. It is increasingly a city without a real private-sector economy.

These folks (and this organization appears to be Hillary's baby) clearly have an agenda of their own, but the criticism of Florida is not without some merit, even if they have oversimplified his thesis. As Florida points out:

The US should not be worried about losing out on the low-cost, low-skilled end of the global labor market; it should be worried about other countries slowly chipping away at its ability to grow, attract, and retain top creative talent.

When I asked a group of my students whether they would prefer to work in good, high-paying jobs in a machine tool factory or lower-paying temporary jobs in a hair salon, they overwhelmingly chose the latter.

Going back to David Friedman for a moment:

Professor Friedman is also a longtime member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, where he is known as Duke Cariadoc of the Bow. He also founded the largest and longest-running SCA event, the Pennsic War.

His comment about SF job loss:

Since late 2000, Bay Area employment has plummeted by as much as 18%, a near-Depression rate of decline. Yet, the region is remarkably devoid of pro-growth sentiment. Few of its elected officials display even a passing interest in job creation. Meanwhile, the rest of the state has been doing markedly better.

It should be noted that this article is nearly three years old now, and the data is surely even older. Besides, the statistic and the Depression reference are misleading, particularly in the way Kotkin and Siegel use it. It suggests people are out of work and homel... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]