Richard Florida: Want Job Stability? Get Creative.

The main message of my work over the past decade or more has been a fairly basic message, and that’s that every single human being is creative. But then, as with anything, one has to put statistical parameters around what that means. What I’ve found is that in the United States and around the world, our society is really divided into people who are principally paid to use their creativity at work and those who may be quite creative but they’re principally paid to use their physical labor, or they’re involved in low-skill service work.

In any event, there are about 40 million Americans who are privileged to be members of what I call the creative class. There are people in science and technology. There are people who are entrepreneurs who work in research and development. They are architects, they’re designers; they work in arts and culture, the entertainment and media. And then the kind of classic knowledge-based professionals that great management thinkers like Peter Drucker taught us about, people in business and management, healthcare, and law and education.

Now, right now in the United States, it's about 35 percent of the workforce. But what’s interesting is through the terrible economic crisis we’ve had, while rates of unemployment for manufacturing workers went over 15 percent, and in some cases over 20 percent, for people who do low-skill service work like food preparation or personal care, that kind of work went well over ten percent. The rate of unemployment amongst the creative class never went higher than five percent. And we’re on track to generate another seven million of these jobs over the course of the next decade.

One thing that’s really interesting, when I first looked at the creative class in the original version of the book in 2002, in the most advanced regions of the countries, places like San Francisco, the Silicon Valley, Boulder, Colorado, Austin, Texas, Seattle, or Boston, Raleigh-Durham, Washington, D.C., there might have been 35 or 40 percent. Now, in some of these regions, almost 50 percent of the workforce – we’re sitting in Manhattan today, and in New York County, which is Manhattan, it’s nearly half of the workforce is already in this creative class.

We have been able to look around the world, and I added a whole new chapter on that in this book. You know, in some countries like Singapore or in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands, already more than 45 to 50 percent of the workforce is doing this kind of creative class work. So, in my view, it’s the growth force of our time, and the real challenge ahead of us is how do we get more and more people involved in creative class work, using their minds, using their creativity, because it will afford them a better salary, it’ll improve productivity, and it’ll hopefully begin to address the terrible inequality we face in our country.