Sorry to besmear those who suffer from actual schizophrenia by associating them with economists. I’ve just read an article for class, “The New American Dream: The economy will prosper again when more Americans can do the work they love”. Written by Richard Florida, it was published in the Washington Monthly, March, 2003. Florida is an urban economic policy guru. I have to get this out of my system because I feel a little dirty after reading it, so profound was its lack of lack of substance or logic. What makes it worse, is Florida isn’t some minor neoliberal crank. Toronto just gave him a 100 million dollar school to run and an annual pay check of 350 000$. Did I say school? I meant a lab, to manufacture crack pipe dreams.
I have to give credit where credit is due. Florida has spun what Hollywood calls High Concept (ideas that can be completely summed up into a few simple phrases, or one line) into a stack of books and papers and an international industry. Florida’s entire snake oil song and dance rests on two words: creative class. That’s it, there isn’t much else to the story. He preaches sinking all resources into enticing, supporting and subsidizing the wealthy elite as a sure fire formula for utopia. These are some magic beans.
He calls it a new kind of capitalism and differentiates it from that old one where lots of people had good secure jobs running the nitty gritty of day to day life. His new economy is that little patch of the city that has granite-countertop million dollar condos, high rise office towers, and the boutique glamour zone that the well-to-do play in. He describes creativity as the central force in the economy and offers up a non sequitur that 70% of the population are not engaged in it. Drat, I knew there was a catch.
Florida says worker expectations are changing: the old American dream was a job with which to feed your family, but the new American dream is a job you love, with which to feed your family. Luckily he doesn’t have to reconcile this pronouncement with the reality that wages are down, unemployment is up, job security is down, cost of living is up, social services are down, and requests for emergency food and housing are up. I think in a lot of places, the American dream is a job, period. Or maybe a waterproof cardboard box.
But wait, we’re still in Kansas. Florida is going to bring us all the way to Oz. He cites outsourcing labour and reducing manufacturing capabilities as positive factors in the new creative economy. Twanging his one string banjo, he tells us “creativity – the ability to come up with and implement a new idea” has always been the prime source of economic growth and advantage. So, I wasted a lot of money at school learning about the functions of ample supplies of energy, resources, cheap labour pools, and complicated market tools. Substantiating his claim with images of a post WWII America, he claims they changed from “perennial creativity to constant creativity”. I got lost at this point, because again, I couldn’t find the part about them being the wealthiest nation on the planet, after making buckets of money on a war that left the rest of the civilized world bombed into the stone age.
He made no mention of the use of economic and military clout to dominate global economics and trade agreements. And there was still no mention of all that cheap oil and steel, or the advantages of migrant workers in the agriculture industry I guess, when you get right down to it, Florida didn’t really make much connection between his idealized world of designers, artists and marketers and the post war baby-boom economy of Fordist production-wage protection-consumption models. I'm not unfair, I am willing to admit that fanning a multigenerational cold war under your arms industry can be construed as creative.
Just when you might be ready to laugh at the article, he just starts to get really disturbingly bizarre. Concerning Americas “golden age”, among his praises are union empowering laws and federal projects like mortgage guarantees, the GI education bill and highway construction. Then, in a surprise sucker punch, Florida says we shouldn’t keep doing archaic social projects if we want our cities to thrive. We’re not sure what is creative, but spending money to ensure a resilient diverse functional community is not creative.
He does encourage “creative education” so everyone can get in on the creative wealth. He never wonders who will clean the sewers once everyone is fully engaged in the creative economy. The creative economy doesn’t have much patience for the people who answer phones, clean teeth, keep records or any of the thousands of vital jobs that make up a city(lots of these people don’t want creative jobs, they want living wages, dental benefits and a well defined job description). He doesn’t wonder where the creative education will come from or what it will look like(except that it isn’t government subsidized).
Next, we get this brain frying powerhouse: “inequality is bad”. Skipped, is the part explaining how lowering wages and then hyper educating the population that will still be stuck with those “tedious” jobs helps cushion the inequality in any way. (It’s not really a question, Russia in the late 19th century enjoyed a sense of pride about a creative elite and ended up producing what they called The Superfluous Man. This man was smart and capable and sophisticated and expected to be made use of in some way befitting his talents. But there really wasn’t anything all that creative or cerebral for him to do. They still needed plumbers and farmers and clerks, but that wasn’t his job so he was idle. It kind of went downhill in Russia after that. Social inequality, raised expectations and lowered rewards are a nasty combination).
One little note, Florida make lots of references to painters and performers and plucky inventors in his creative class sleight of hand, but when you look up his sleeve, he is referring to the powerhouses of advertising and finance behind corporations like Apple and Sony, and the pharmaceutical firms that bring us Viagra and acid reflux pills. So, his range of creativity is getting pretty narrow at this point.
The real prize still to come, the Shoot-Yourself-In-The-foot Prize goes to the massive article space Florida devotes to statistics correlating cities with the biggest “creative class” to cities with the highest economic inequality. He also relates a causal relation between busy wealthy creative class types and the rise of low paid service sector jobs(servants). Hey, whose side is this joker on? Does he conclude that stripping public money from real civic works and giving it to an economic elite might not be good for a city? Does he insightfully note that that small segment of high earners skew income curves and cost of living. Does he make the leap connecting the deconstruction of the manufacturing sector with the desperate plight of income-insecure service workers. Nope. Creative cities, he insists, are winners.
Florida, confident, beaming big white teeth, pulls that one string banjo back out. What these cities need is still more creativity. We need to douse these cities in pure, virgin cold-pressed creativity, until we can “catch” those mired masses and “teach them right” (honest, I am not making this up). Then and only then, can they share in the limitless creative wealth out there just waiting for clever people to come along and pluck.
Anyway, you might want to roll up your sidewalks and fasten the shutters if Mr. Florida comes knocking. You shall know him by his one string banjo (and like Walmart and the corn-into-fuel guy, he may be riding a pale horse).
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Magic Beans
A couple of weeks ago, my cell phone died and I’ve been left deprived of an extraordinarily useful tool in navigating my day, namely, a clock. I have a busy life and have never had much luck with watches. Before I had a cell, I used to check payphones for the time when I was out. Phones have always been my sundials. But as far as the actual communication technology goes, I rarely use it.
I never bothered with a cell until I had a job that required me to carry one, and stay on call 24 hours a day. I’ve long since freed myself of that job, but not before I was habituated to my phone. It’s a curious thing about technology. We are so nonchalant about embracing new technology even though once we do, our lives tend to adapt around it and make it very difficult to let go of if we later find it is costly in some way that may outweigh the benefit.
When a city wants to open a new landfill, it commissions an environmental impact statement. You would think, in a similar way, it might be prudent to create a psychological or social impact statement before unleashing a technology. It’s a nice thought, but generally new technologies have unforeseeable consequences, what are sometimes called ‘higher order consequences’. These may take generations to evolve, and may be so many steps removed from the technology that they are difficult to trace back to it.
The term higher order consequences has such a dramatic flair to it, that I again wonder why we are not more wary. But we aren’t wary. We are impulsive and wide-eyed at most new gadgets and gizmos. “New” is often the best marketing strategy. New doesn’t tell you anything about how a gadget will affect your lifestyle, your livelihood or even whole social structures.
Sometimes it seems a technology doesn’t so much change social structure, as illustrate it. After reading a few books on primate studies, I gather that apes, when not busy gathering food, boinking or knocking each others teeth out, just like to hang out, gossip, tell jokes and strategise ways to move up the social ladder. Primates like to be amused. They play pranks. Generally they like to laugh and immerse themselves in silly pastimes. Coming full circle back to my question of whether or not to replace my phone, I have become acutely aware of how people use their phones. I see them everywhere, and usually I see people typing on them, rather than talking into them. It makes me think of the old saw about what an uncountable number of monkeys will pound out at typewriters. Well we know: Paris Hilton jokes. We are spacemonkeys and we still mostly like to horse around. We type out celebrity gossip, puns, and gags. We share funny pictures and generally immerse ourselves in silly pastimes. People ask whether television, videogames, and the internet have made us stupid. I think we were always stupid, or at least really easily distracted by amusements.
I'm being flippant here, when it could easily be argued that a lot of bad things go on in the world because people are too absorbed in mindless pastimes. Or perhaps worse, people are so aware of big slowly converging complex crises, that the resulting high anxiety pushes them into ever more stress relieving amusement retreats. That’s what monkeys do when they are nervous: they grin and try and defuse things. Or, to put it another way, what looks endearing in a tribe of fifty apes, begins to look nightmarishly cancerous in a global village of nearly 7 billion people who have consciously committed to a rejection of limits
I could mention also, there are, I think, severe personal and interpersonal consequences to shifting the bulk of social experience out of physical face to face environments and recreating them in buffered layers of communication technologies.
I do wish we were more selective about technology, or that we could put it back in the box once it started to show negative gains. Cell phones and microwave ovens largely seem to help facilitate a way of life that denigrates personal time, family, and community in favour of production, and maintaining a busy frantic pace. Cars, well the big ugly picture with cars is still rolling in. A lot of technology can be boiled down to increases in speed, efficiency and intensity when maybe that isn’t really in anyone’s best interest.
We’ve all read about the Manhattan Project scientist who casually remarked on the possibility of igniting the atmosphere with the detonation of the bomb. Now you might think someone who takes that kind of risk should have been in jail. But he was only a part of a culture that decided the best thing in life was to churn out as many different machines, as fast as possible, to play with and make money from. And this orgy has, in its use of energy, now had a higher order consequence you could describe as “igniting the atmosphere”. All that, while we retained our basic ape natures. It makes me feel that despite an awful lot of consequences, our obsessive love affair with technology hasn’t been terribly revolutionary in any meaningful way. It’s kind of sad to think how much we will keep trading for more magic beans.
I never bothered with a cell until I had a job that required me to carry one, and stay on call 24 hours a day. I’ve long since freed myself of that job, but not before I was habituated to my phone. It’s a curious thing about technology. We are so nonchalant about embracing new technology even though once we do, our lives tend to adapt around it and make it very difficult to let go of if we later find it is costly in some way that may outweigh the benefit.
When a city wants to open a new landfill, it commissions an environmental impact statement. You would think, in a similar way, it might be prudent to create a psychological or social impact statement before unleashing a technology. It’s a nice thought, but generally new technologies have unforeseeable consequences, what are sometimes called ‘higher order consequences’. These may take generations to evolve, and may be so many steps removed from the technology that they are difficult to trace back to it.
The term higher order consequences has such a dramatic flair to it, that I again wonder why we are not more wary. But we aren’t wary. We are impulsive and wide-eyed at most new gadgets and gizmos. “New” is often the best marketing strategy. New doesn’t tell you anything about how a gadget will affect your lifestyle, your livelihood or even whole social structures.
Sometimes it seems a technology doesn’t so much change social structure, as illustrate it. After reading a few books on primate studies, I gather that apes, when not busy gathering food, boinking or knocking each others teeth out, just like to hang out, gossip, tell jokes and strategise ways to move up the social ladder. Primates like to be amused. They play pranks. Generally they like to laugh and immerse themselves in silly pastimes. Coming full circle back to my question of whether or not to replace my phone, I have become acutely aware of how people use their phones. I see them everywhere, and usually I see people typing on them, rather than talking into them. It makes me think of the old saw about what an uncountable number of monkeys will pound out at typewriters. Well we know: Paris Hilton jokes. We are spacemonkeys and we still mostly like to horse around. We type out celebrity gossip, puns, and gags. We share funny pictures and generally immerse ourselves in silly pastimes. People ask whether television, videogames, and the internet have made us stupid. I think we were always stupid, or at least really easily distracted by amusements.
I'm being flippant here, when it could easily be argued that a lot of bad things go on in the world because people are too absorbed in mindless pastimes. Or perhaps worse, people are so aware of big slowly converging complex crises, that the resulting high anxiety pushes them into ever more stress relieving amusement retreats. That’s what monkeys do when they are nervous: they grin and try and defuse things. Or, to put it another way, what looks endearing in a tribe of fifty apes, begins to look nightmarishly cancerous in a global village of nearly 7 billion people who have consciously committed to a rejection of limits
I could mention also, there are, I think, severe personal and interpersonal consequences to shifting the bulk of social experience out of physical face to face environments and recreating them in buffered layers of communication technologies.
I do wish we were more selective about technology, or that we could put it back in the box once it started to show negative gains. Cell phones and microwave ovens largely seem to help facilitate a way of life that denigrates personal time, family, and community in favour of production, and maintaining a busy frantic pace. Cars, well the big ugly picture with cars is still rolling in. A lot of technology can be boiled down to increases in speed, efficiency and intensity when maybe that isn’t really in anyone’s best interest.
We’ve all read about the Manhattan Project scientist who casually remarked on the possibility of igniting the atmosphere with the detonation of the bomb. Now you might think someone who takes that kind of risk should have been in jail. But he was only a part of a culture that decided the best thing in life was to churn out as many different machines, as fast as possible, to play with and make money from. And this orgy has, in its use of energy, now had a higher order consequence you could describe as “igniting the atmosphere”. All that, while we retained our basic ape natures. It makes me feel that despite an awful lot of consequences, our obsessive love affair with technology hasn’t been terribly revolutionary in any meaningful way. It’s kind of sad to think how much we will keep trading for more magic beans.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
a stick in the mud
ok, cuz we are hip deep in h1n1 or whatever, I've heard some crap that pushes me, like a burrito bowel movement to comment on needles.
my national radio released a report on a study(i.e. shitheads spent a lot of money in the name of being smart) on the repercussions of folk being afraid of getting shots. Apparently, a significant portion of the population will forgo shots, not cuz they are canny lefties, but simply cuz they pee their pants at the sight of a needle.
if you are one of these folk, pass this by, or be offended.
The people of north america are at risk of all kinds of boogies because they are too afraid to get needles.
now, remember, your average shot wouldn't even register on your hyper sensitive radar if you didn't see it going in.
remember too, a lovely walk down memory lane, to your grandparents era. they waltzed into the trenches of shots cuz their kids kept being crippled by polio, not to mention being knocked off by diphtheria and tetanus.
so, for those of you who are nervous of needles or those who have a boner for big pharma conspiracies, let's just welcome smallpox back (it's not dead, it's simply homeless).
my national radio released a report on a study(i.e. shitheads spent a lot of money in the name of being smart) on the repercussions of folk being afraid of getting shots. Apparently, a significant portion of the population will forgo shots, not cuz they are canny lefties, but simply cuz they pee their pants at the sight of a needle.
if you are one of these folk, pass this by, or be offended.
The people of north america are at risk of all kinds of boogies because they are too afraid to get needles.
now, remember, your average shot wouldn't even register on your hyper sensitive radar if you didn't see it going in.
remember too, a lovely walk down memory lane, to your grandparents era. they waltzed into the trenches of shots cuz their kids kept being crippled by polio, not to mention being knocked off by diphtheria and tetanus.
so, for those of you who are nervous of needles or those who have a boner for big pharma conspiracies, let's just welcome smallpox back (it's not dead, it's simply homeless).
Saturday, October 31, 2009
One good plug deserves another
A brief word about one of my oldest friends.
Tim Moerman is an Urban Planner by profession and Renaissance man by nature. Not only that, but he cooks a pretty good oatmeal. He’s kind of a rockabilly sustainability superhero and my go-to guy when I have a question about pretty much anything complex. He’s also virtually the only person I know that you can rant at about some fucktarded aspect of the state of the world who won’t then just bitch at you for “being depressing”, but instead will engage you in a meaningful conversation. Anyway, he has an enviable way with words and has staked out his own little patch of interspace, so, for anyone who has accidentally found themselves on this page, I hereby redirect you to a blog worth following: Tim J. Moerman
Tim Moerman is an Urban Planner by profession and Renaissance man by nature. Not only that, but he cooks a pretty good oatmeal. He’s kind of a rockabilly sustainability superhero and my go-to guy when I have a question about pretty much anything complex. He’s also virtually the only person I know that you can rant at about some fucktarded aspect of the state of the world who won’t then just bitch at you for “being depressing”, but instead will engage you in a meaningful conversation. Anyway, he has an enviable way with words and has staked out his own little patch of interspace, so, for anyone who has accidentally found themselves on this page, I hereby redirect you to a blog worth following: Tim J. Moerman
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