From The Daily Beast, Richard Florida Concedes the Limits of the Creative Class:
Urbanists, journalists, and academics — not to mention big-city developers — were easily persuaded that shelling out to court ?the hip and cool? would benefit everyone else, too. … Florida himself, in his role as an editor at The Atlantic, admitted last month what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members — and do little to make anyone else any better off. The rewards of the ?creative class? strategy, he notes, ?flow disproportionately to more highly-skilled knowledge, professional and creative workers,? since the wage increases that blue-collar and lower-skilled workers see ?disappear when their higher housing costs are taken into account.? His reasonable and fairly brave, if belated, takeaway: ?On close inspection, talent clustering provides little in the way of trickle-down benefits.?