Since Richard Florida’s influential book The Rise of the Creative Class everybody (including me) has been convinced that creative people make cities more liveable, first socially and consequently also economically. The former seems self-evident, the latter somewhat comes with disruptions (creative class moving in a poor neighbourhood –> becoming attractive –> luring professionals –> rents rising –> gentrification –> pushing away creative class –> looking for next neighbourhood). However, not everybody agrees that the creative class stands at the beginning of an economic upturn. Take Enrico Moretti, professor for economics at the University of California, Berkeley. I called professor Moretti when I was in Berkeley this summer, sipping watery latte macchiato in the Café Strada, facing the university campus. “The creative class as a job machine is a myth, it’s the tech companies”, he told me. Florida got the causation backwards. Moretti had recently published an excellent booked called The New Geography of Jobs. Although the critic of Florida’s claim is just a small episode, it didn’t pass unnoticed. To prove his point he takes the city of Berlin as an example:
“But after twenty years of Berlin coolness, the supply of well-educated creatives vastly exceeds the demand”.And later
“Glamour is not enough to support a local economy. Ultimately a city needs to attract jobs.”Florida countered Moretti later. “When it comes to Berlin, Moretti is simply misreading the facts. Berlin is an extreme outlier“, he wrote in an article on The Atlantic Cities. According to Florida, time will prove Moretti wrong.
(#60 is a strong supporter of Florida’s position, but causation is always a tricky one)