The annual party described below did not survive the pandemic, which was perhaps just as well. It had been going on forever and was already showing its age before the plague hit.
You can find Gelman's comments here. Our follow-up post from 2014 is scheduled for tomorrow.
A holiday message from the creative class to Richard Florida -- screw you
Last Saturday was the big party of the year for the LA hot jazz/country
blues scene. Droves of musicians, actors, writers and directors converge
on a small house in Venice Beach, along with a smattering of historians
and engineers (sound and software). Every year, numerous people make an
allusion to the
stateroom scene
in Night at the Opera (and with this crowd, everyone gets the
reference). There weren't any famous faces (unless you're really into
jazz or roots music), but it was an accomplished crowd with Grammys,
Broadway credits, glowing NYT, WSJ and NPR reviews and numerous
impressive collaborations.
A few hours in, it struck me that almost all of the people at this party
fell squarely into Richard Florida's creative class. In fact, most of
the people I associate with on a regular basis fall into Florida's
rather broad definition. What I heard last night further reinforced some
things I've been observing for years now about the disconnect between
the picture painted by pundits and social commentators and what it
actually means to make a living through creativity in today's economy.
It's a complicated situation but I think I can boil the gist down into
the following fairly brief statement:
Screw you, Florida.
The super- creative core of this new class includes scientists and
engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists,
entertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as the "thought
leadership" of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural
figures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion-makers.
From "
The Rise of the Creative Class" by Richard Florida
Florida paints a bright picture of these people and their future, with
rapidly increasing numbers, influence and wealth. He goes so far as to
say "Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class
people prosper; those that fail don't." It wass hard to read something
by Florida and not envy that rising class, at least it was until it hit
me that he was talking about me and people I knew and our lives weren't
going nearly as well as he suggested. As Thomas Frank
put it "The creative class has never been more screwed."
Except for a few special cases, this may be the worst time to make a
living in the arts since the emergence of modern newspapers and general
interest magazines and other mass media a hundred and twenty years ago
(even in the depression you had the WPA -- “Artists have to eat too”).
Though we now have tools that make creating and disseminating art easier
than ever, no one has come up with a viable business model that
supports creation in today's economy.
With the exception of a few select areas where you can find lots of
wealthy patrons, it's just not a reasonable career path. At the party
this weekend, out of dozens of nationally and internationally recognized
musicians, perhaps three or four were making a middle-class or better
living at their craft; most were either getting by on very modest means
and/or had day jobs. Artistic professions used to have teaching to
fall back on but those jobs have been getting crappier and yet harder to
find over the past thirty or so years.
The picture is somewhat brighter on the STEM side, but not that much
brighter. The collapse of teaching has hit us too. In the private
sector, it's hit-or-miss if you're not flavor of the month and even if
you are among the lucky few:
Companies (including the hungry ones) have gotten surprisingly picky;
You'll probably need a graduate degree (and the debt that goes with it);
There's little security even while you're hot;
The specialists who get the most money are also the most vulnerable to changes in tech and taste.
In other words, it's a lottery ticket and, considering the odds, the pay-off isn't all that great.
Florida's framework has
rather publicly come crashing down lately,
but, even at its peak, it never stood up to serious scrutiny. Like most
of the utopian urbanists, his collection of anecdotes, cherry-picked
statistics and wildly unjustified causal inference was only convincing
because people wanted to be convinced.
