Creativity is history’s great leveler, annihilating all of our self-imposed social categories, from gender and race to nationality and sexual orientation. It is a collective resource, shared and cultivated by all. The key to a better future lies in unlocking and stoking the creative furnace that lies within each and every one of us.

But the longer they stayed in their new homes, the more each time-traveler would become aware of subtler dimensions of change. Once the glare of technology had dimmed, each would begin to notice their respective society’s changed norms and values, the different ways in which everyday people live and work. And here the tables would be turned. In terms of adjusting to the social structures and the rhythms and patterns of daily life, our second time-traveler would be much more disoriented.

Individuality and self-expression would be valued over conformity to organizational norms—and yet these people would seem strangely puritanical to this time-traveler. His ethnic jokes would fall embarrassingly flat. His smoking would get him banished to the parking lot, and his two-martini lunches would raise genuine concern. Attitudes and expressions he had never thought about would cause repeated offense. He would continually suffer the painful feeling of not knowing how to behave.

Many say that we now live in an information economy or a knowledge economy. But what’s more fundamentally true is that for the first time, our economy is powered by creativity. Creativity—“the ability to create meaningful new forms,” as Webster’s dictionary puts it—has become the decisive source of competitive advantage. In virtually every industry, from automobiles to fashion, food products, and information technology itself, the long-run winners are those who can create and keep creating. This has always been true, from the days of the Agricultural Revolution to the Industrial Revolution. But in the past few decades we’ve come to recognize it clearly and act upon it systematically.

Dean Keith Simonton, a leading scholar of the subject, describes creativity as the act of bringing something useful, that works, and is non-obvious into the world, or as he succinctly puts it, that is the “conjunction of novelty, utility and surprise.”

In today’s economy, creativity is pervasive and ongoing: it drives the incremental improvements in products and processes that keep them viable just as much as it does their original invention.

Capitalism has expanded its reach to capture the talents of heretofore excluded groups of eccentrics and nonconformists. In doing so, it has pulled off yet another astonishing mutation: taking people who would once have been viewed as bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe and placing them at the very heart of the process of innovation and economic growth.

I strongly believe that the key to improving the lot of underpaid, underemployed, and disadvantaged people lies not in social welfare programs or low-end make-work jobs, nor in somehow bringing back the factory jobs of the past, but rather in tapping their innate creativity, paying them appropriately for it, and integrating them fully into the Creative Economy.

 The creative process is social, not just individual; forms of organization are necessary. ... Whereas one person can write brilliant software, it takes large organizations to consistently upgrade, produce, and distribute that software.

The emerging Creative Economy will not magically alleviate poverty, eliminate unemployment, overcome the business cycle, and lead to greater happiness and harmony for all. In some respects, left unchecked and without appropriate forms of human intervention, this creativity-based system may well make some of our problems worse.

Although intelligence—the ability to deal with or process large amounts of data—favors creative potential, it is not synonymous with creativity. ... Creativity involves the ability to synthesize. Albert Einstein captured this nicely when he characterized his own work as “combinatory play.” It is a matter of sifting through data, perceptions, and materials to come up with combinations that are new and useful. A creative synthesis might result in such different outcomes as a practical invention, a theory or insight that can be applied to solve a problem, or a work of art that can be appreciated aesthetically.

“Chance favors only the prepared mind.” Louis Pasteur

Creativity flourishes best in a unique kind of social environment: one that is stable enough to allow for continuity of effort, yet diverse and broad-minded enough to nourish creativity in all its subversive forms.

Mokyr, a historian, notes that technological creativity has tended to rise and then fade dramatically at various times and places, when social and economic institutions turn rigid and act against it. ... A continual outpouring of creativity “cannot and should not be taken for granted,” Mokyr warns—even today. Creativity doesn’t automatically sustain itself over long periods, but requires constant attention to and investment in the economic and social forms that feed the creative impulse.

If workers control the means of production today that is because it is inside their own heads; they are the means of production.

“My role is unclear, and that’s how I like it.”

Peer recognition and reputation provide powerful sources of motivation for open-source software developers, who have evolved a complex, self-organizing, self-governing system of peer review that works much like that in academic science.

Many would not even consider taking jobs in certain cities or regions—a stark contrast to the Organizational Age, when people gladly let firms shuttle them from one backwater to another as part of the price of climbing the corporate ladder.

“Those in authority,” Barley writes, “no longer comprehend the work of their subordinates.”

“geek chic.” 

“Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” Jane Jacobs

Ideal interactions occur among people whose roles are different enough to give them different perspectives, but who have enough common knowledge and common interest to know what would be mutually useful.

...that in the quest to elicit creativity, the typical workplace tends to become both more stressful and more caring. The result could be called a “caring sweatshop,” but as oxymoronic as it sounds, there’s not really any contradiction.

interweaving as a natural way of operating

Rather than being groomed slowly for advancement, they [college grads] are thrown quickly to the front lines to see what they can do. And they set to it with a vengeance. They do so partly because they relish the challenge but also because, in a fluid market, this is the time to make your mark.

And that might be what it’s all about—not just leisure, but work masquerading as leisure.

“facilitates a state of mind that allows some but not too much of the unconscious to bubble up. As someone who believes that much of the source of his work and creativity is to be gleaned from those bubbles, it’s a reliable place to find that connection.”

As you focus on pedaling you get into a rhythm and flow, losing track of whatever was on your mind, dumping the garbage.

Much of it is native and of-the-moment, rather than art imported from another century for audiences imported from the suburbs.

It is not just a scene but many.

Big-ticket, high-art events are strictly scheduled on a limited number of evenings, whereas the street-level scene is fluid and ongoing. ... The street-level scene is often the best place to find seldom-performed or little-known works of the past.

But even if experiencing culture is truly your goal, you are inevitably going to pick up a lot of chaff along with it. You run the risk of becoming chaff yourself: a dilettante, a poseur, a gallery gadfly, a coffee-shop talker.

As Thomas Frank and others have noted, the commercialization of experience can empty it of its original creative content. 

Many Creative Class people thus tend to shun the heavily packaged commercial venues they call “generica”—the chain restaurants and nightclubs, the stadiums with bells and whistles—or they patronize them but with a conscious sense of irony and camp, as in the obligatory trip to a business conference in Las Vegas.

What began as an organic development from the street has become a Disneyland facsimile of itself—safe, secure, and predictable—trafficking not in a series of unique experiences but in the same generic experience night after night.

The final pitfall is that in the attempt to avoid packaged-and-sold experiences, we may pack our lives so full that we overdo it. While we scorn the couch potatoes hooked on TV, the desire for constant stimulation and experiences can come close to an addiction itself.

When the old markers that distinguish one type of person from another begin to fade and blur, it is a clear sign that profound social change is afoot.

The Protestant work ethic supposes that meaning is to be found in hard work. ... The bohemian ethic is more hedonistic. It says that value is to be found in pleasure and happiness—not necessarily in gross indulgence or gluttonous excess, but in experiencing and appreciating what life has to offer. ... But now the bohemian and the bourgeois are all mixed up. ... Neither outsider nor insider, bohemian nor bourgeois, the geek is simply a technologically creative person.

The engineering culture tends to be meritocratic—you are what you produce—and this was, after all, the West Coast, where previous generations had come to escape the traditional norms of more established society.

Even in works of science fiction, the hero typically was the pilot who flew the spaceship, not the engineer who designed it.

... what struck me most forcibly at the time was the spectacle of yet another talented young person leaving Pittsburgh.

There are lots of young people, he explained, and a tremendous amount to do, a thriving music scene, ethnic and cultural diversity, fabulous outdoor recreation, and great nightlife. That’s what mattered—not the symphony or the opera, which he enjoyed but would not feel comfortable attending. What’s more, Austin was affordable, unlike Silicon Valley, another place that offered the kind of work he desired.

The reality is that globalization has two sides. The first and more obvious one is the geographic dispersion of routine economic functions such as straightforward manufacturing or service work (for example, making or answering telephone calls). The second, less obvious side to globalization is the tendency for higher-level economic activities such as innovation, design, finance, and media to cluster in a relatively small number of locations.

“The more things are mobile, the more decisive location becomes.” Michael Porter

The key to our new global reality lies in understanding that the world is both flat and spiky at the same time.

Companies come under extraordinary pressure to specialize—to do things more cheaply, efficiently, and uniformly. But cities are host to a wide variety of talents and specialties, the broad diversity of which is a vital spur to creating things that are truly new.

Labor, capital, and technical knowledge are all well and good, he [Robert Lucas] allowed, but none of those would amount to anything significant if people could not combine their talents, ideas, and energy in real places.

When talented and creative people come together, the multiplying effect is exponential; the end result is much more than the sum of the parts. Clustering makes each of us more productive—and our collective creativity and economic wealth grow accordingly.

Firms concentrate to reap the advantages that stem from common labor pools—not merely to tap the advantages from linked networks of customers and suppliers, as is more typically argued.

... a doubling of population resulted in more than twice the creative and economic output. They called this phenomenon “superlinear” scaling: the larger a city’s population, they concluded, the greater the innovation and wealth per person.

Even deeper in our past, the congregation of populations into progressively larger, denser, and less isolated groups may have been what enabled humanity’s rise. Archaeologists and anthropologists have been aware of the incredible flowering of artistic and material creativity that occurred roughly 40,000 years ago in Europe, reflected in everything from cave paintings, figurines, and jewelry to the complex tools that allowed our ancestors to begin to transform nature. Some scientists have attributed this leap to evolutionary advances in cognition and memory alone. But more recent research puts communities—not genes—at the center of this evolutionary watershed.

... the interaction across varieties of Creative Class work creates greater “knowledge spillovers” and higher rates of innovation, ultimately leading to higher wages.

This clustering of social-intelligence skill increases the quality of the combinations and recombinations that drive innovation and economic growth. In this sense, cities are like brains: their growth and development require the development of an increasingly dense web of synaptic connections.

...the 3T’s of economic development: technology, talent, and tolerance. Each is a necessary but by itself insufficient condition for prosperity; for real innovation and sustained economic growth a place must offer all three.

Economists have long recognized that diversity is important to economic performance, but they have usually meant the diversity of firms or industries. ... Jane Jacobs was among the first to highlight the role of diversity of both firms and people in powering innovation and city growth.

New ideas are generated most efficiently in places where different cognitive styles are tolerated—and different cognitive styles are linked to demographic diversity, as University of Michigan economist Scott Page has shown.

Giovanni Peri of the University of California at Davis have found that immigrants add rather than detract from American prosperity for the simple reason that “the skill composition of immigrants is complementary to that of natives.” ... At the low-skill end of the spectrum, immigrants specialize in “manual intensive tasks such as cooking, driving, and building” that their American counterparts tend not to do, specializing instead in “in language-intensive tasks such as dispatching, supervising and coordinating.” At the high-skill end of the spectrum, immigrants bring scientific, technical, and entrepreneurial skills that are in short supply and vital for America’s innovative and entrepreneurial engine.

Places with large bohemian and gay populations possess low barriers to entry, allowing them to attract talent and human capital across racial, ethnic, and other lines.

They’ve had to build networks from scratch, mobilize resources independently, and create their own organizations and firms. ... For all of these reasons, regions in which artists and gays have migrated and settled are more likely than others to provide an environment that is more open to innovation, entrepreneurship, and new firm formation.

... unlike most other kinds of diversity, racial diversity is not associated with high-tech growth, innovation, and economic development. ... my statistical research consistently found a negative correlation between concentrations of high-tech firms and the percentage of the nonwhite population, a particularly disturbing finding in light of the positive role that other dimensions of diversity play.

But psychology identifies another key factor over and above the level of education or the kinds of work people do. Personality involves the capacity to acquire and perform certain tasks competently and effectively. The type of skills economists are interested in, Rentfrow notes, “implies something that can be acquired with proper training, talent, motivation, and resources.” But, he adds, “it’s more consistent with personality theory to argue that personality traits predispose people to acquire certain skills. For example, highly conscientious people have a disposition to be detail oriented, plan ahead, or stay organized. Openness influences people’s ability to acquire new skills relatively quickly.”

In his own words, “conventional political involvement and social capital seem to relate negatively to technological development and higher economic growth.”

... on the other hand, there are also a large number of countries—mostly Scandinavian and Northern European nations, along with Japan—where high levels of creativity combine with much lower levels of inequality. ... US inequality appears to be at least in part driven not just by globalization, technology, and changes in the skills required of knowledge-based and creative jobs, but by concentrated poverty.

Where strong ties among people were once important, weak ties are becoming the norm. ... Where old structures were once nurturing, they have become more and more restrictive and exclusionary.

Weak ties are critical to the creative environment of a city or region because they allow for rapid entry of new people and rapid absorption of new ideas.

The desire for such quasi-anonymous communities is not limited to urban enclaves. William Whyte identified it as a primary motivator behind the great migration of middle-class professionals from closely knit urban neighborhoods to the more transient suburbs in the 1950s.

Companies are disloyal, and careers are increasingly horizontal. To be attractive, a place needed to offer a job market that is conducive to a horizontal career path.

Authenticity comes from several aspects of a community—historic buildings, established neighborhoods, a distinctive music scene, or specific cultural attributes. It especially comes from the mix—urban grit alongside freshly renovated buildings, the commingling of young and old, longtime neighborhood characters and yuppies, fashion models and street people.

Technology and music scenes go together because they reflect a place that is open to new ideas, new people, and creativity. It is for this reason that I like to tell city leaders that finding ways to help support a local music scene can be just as important as investing in high-tech business and far more effective than building a downtown mall.

Twenty years ago, people were likely to ask, “Where do you work?” Today it’s “Where do you live?”

...many Creative Class people also express a desire to be involved in their communities. This is not so much the result of a do-gooder mentality as a reflection of their desire to establish their own identities in places, and to build places that reflect and validate those identities.

The most highly valued attributes of cities weren’t basic services or economic opportunities, but a place’s social and cultural amenities, its friendliness, and its natural and physical beauty. ... Most people expect their communities to provide basic services, and most communities do. Because we expect basic services to be provided, we end up valuing aesthetics a little higher.

This is not to say that great schools, good jobs, and safe streets do not also matter. Quite the contrary. But those who continue to frame the issue as an either-or between quality and basic services offer a false choice. ... Just as we want more from our lives than the mere basics of bodily subsistence, we also desire more from our communities.

Openness costs nothing.

Whereas companies that get financial incentives—and sports teams, for that matter—can pull up and leave at virtually a moment’s notice when an even more attractive inducement materializes somewhere else, investments in broad amenities like urban parks last for generations while benefiting a broad swath of the population.

I certainly think it is important for cities and communities to be good for children and families, and I am fully supportive of better schools and parks. But as we have seen, less than one quarter of all American households consist of traditional nuclear families. Communities that want to be economically competitive need to cast their nets wider, to appeal to all the diverse groups of people that make up both the Creative Class and American society at large.

Young workers have typically been thought of as transients who contribute little to a city’s bottom line. ... Young people are workhorses: they are able to work longer and harder and are more prone to take risks, precisely because they are young and childless. In rapidly changing industries, it’s often the recent graduates who have the most up-to-date skills.

The mathematics of this do not bode well for cities and regions that are content to watch their young people move away in search of fun and adventure, complacently believing that they will be able to lure them back once they hit their thirties and are ready to settle down and start families. ... The winning places are the ones that establish an edge early on, by attracting and retaining residents in their mid-twenties.

When they put their children in child seats or jogging strollers, amenities like traffic-free bike paths become more important than ever.

Some things that benefit young people are even supported by those old enough to be their grandparents. When a colleague of mine spoke to a group of senior citizens in Pittsburgh about the importance of lifestyle amenities like bike paths, he got a fascinating response. The seniors were enthusiastic about the idea, because the bike lanes would keep the cyclists off the sidewalks, where the seniors were frightened by them and sometimes even knocked down.

The demography of urban America resembles a barbell, with singles and empty-nesters bulging at both ends of the age spectrum.

The university is indeed a key institution of the Creative Economy, but what’s not so widely understood is the multifaceted role that it plays. It doesn’t simply crank out research projects that can be spun off into companies. To be an effective contributor to regional growth, the university must play three interrelated roles that reflect the 3T’s of creative communities.

Although many places generate new knowledge, relatively few of them can absorb and apply it. The surrounding community must also have the capacity to exploit the innovation and technologies that the university generates.

To turn intellectual property into economic wealth, the creative communities surrounding the universities must be able to utilize it within a social structure of creativity.

Recent studies show that, far from producing wealth, stadiums actually reduce local incomes. 

“The problem is not that most towns kill start-ups. It’s that death is the default for start-ups and most towns don’t save them,” he [Paul Graham] explains. “Instead of thinking of most places as being sprayed with start-upicide, it’s more accurate to think of start-ups as all being poisoned, and a few places being sprayed with the antidote.”

... today’s key drivers and revivers of economic growth are not massive government programs aimed at reviving old industries, but rather community-based efforts to cultivate diversity and harness human creativity from all possible quarters.

For many people who grew up as I did, the decline of manufacturing and of America’s great urban centers signaled the end of this country’s golden age.

Cities are cleaner than they were—there are no more coal-fired furnaces and incinerators and fewer smokestack industries; they are also greener and more environmentally efficient, as David Owen and others have shown. Multifamily dwellings that share walls are easier to heat than detached single-family houses; density discourages car use and promotes mass transit and walking.

But density does in fact have its limits. Giant buildings and massive skyscrapers can, and often do, function as vertical suburbs where it’s much easier to conduct your business and life inside, muting the spontaneous, freewheeling encounters that give cities so much of their energy.

... “street-level serendipity.” This kind of density, in their words, maximizes the “potential informal contacts of the average person in a given public space at any given time.” ... Density of this sort not only provides the all-important “eyes on the street” and facilitates networking and informal exchanges of knowledge and information, it actively creates demand for local products.

Car-based suburban models necessarily become less effective at larger scales, but that doesn’t mean that they cannot work.

A 2009 study by urbanist Joe Cortright analyzed the sales of 90,000 homes in fifteen major metros. In twelve out of fifteen of them, walkability commanded premiums—of as much as hundreds of thousands of dollars in some DC suburbs.

Walkable suburbs offer many of the features of great urban neighborhoods but with much less of the hassle. Many move to them from the city when they have families, hoping to gain safety and access to good schools without giving up the amenities they left behind. Whether they move to these suburbs specifically because of their walkability, their urban virtues of mixed use and generally medium-scale density ensure that the innovation and productivity-enhancing effects of clustering continue to be available to them.

... the best urban and suburban neighborhoods look strikingly more similar than different.

Even as many inner city areas are being gentrified, blight and intransigent poverty are moving out to the suburbs, where one-third of the nation’s poor now reside—1.5 million more than in cities.

As Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution says, “the real America isn’t found in cities or suburbs or small towns, but in the metropolitan areas or ‘metros’ that bring all these places into economic and social union. We are not a nation of cities vs. suburbs but a metro nation.”

Suburbs no longer draw most of their populations from inner cities, according to the research findings of the Brookings Institution’s Audrey Singer, but grow by attracting people from small towns and rural areas further out, as well as immigrants from foreign countries, more than 50 percent of whom bypass cities and settle directly in the suburbs of larger metro areas.

First, the basic idea of recruiting technology companies and entrepreneurs was extended to the artistic and cultural scene of actors, writers, and musicians. [Dublin]

The second step revolved around building true quality of place, grounded in history and authenticity. [Dublin]

... “corporate neo-urbanism”—a way of “reviving, in an interesting new form, a kind of intimate relationship between corporations and cities.”

As a result, Pittsburgh has moved from a laggard to a leader in locally oriented creativity and quality of place. Its architecture and urban design community has become much more vocal about the need to preserve historic buildings, invest in neighborhoods, and institute tough design standards. And it has developed exemplary initiatives for green building and the conversion of old rail lines to bike trails.

On the economic development front, Pittsburgh has shifted its attention from downtown to the universities and has embraced start-ups, innovation, and creativity. It worked hard to attract and retain the Creative Class.

Pittsburgh’s story is inspiring and impressive. It was a rusting steel-making behemoth that, through struggle, pain and creativity, retooled itself as a surprisingly vibrant, 21st-century leader in education, computer science, medical research, sports entertainment and boutique manufacturing. By most measures—unemployment and foreclosure rates, to name two—Pittsburgh is an island of calm in the raging recession.

The combination of globalization and the shift of manufacturing to lower-wage counties like China, dubbed the world’s factory, new technologies of robotics and automation, and increases in productivity and efficiency have eliminated millions of formerly low-skill but high-paying jobs. As the middle has disappeared, the job market has literally been split in two. On one side are higher-paying, professional, knowledge and creative jobs that require considerable education and skill. On the other are an even larger and faster-growing number of more routine jobs in fields like personal care, retail sales, and food service that pay much lower wages.

So which among the factors we analyzed appear to play the biggest role in income inequality? Unions, race, and poverty.

In fact, the least-skilled and lowest-paid workers—the members of the Working and Service Classes—are actually economically better off in more affluent and knowledge-based regions with higher concentrations of the Creative Class, even if the wage gap is wider.

Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, Andrew Gelman of Columbia University helps unpack this phenomenon: whereas rich voters trend Republican, rich states trend Democratic.

... as our cities were becoming increasingly sorted and divided, place itself was coming to supplant the factory and workplace as the fundamental site of class conflict.

But in contrast to the physical divides and segregation that you see in most American cities, London’s rich and poor often live right on top of each other in rapidly gentrifying enclaves. Rising housing costs, the concentration of wealth, and divergent life prospects are there for all to see.

... our greatest cities are not bland monocultures; some of the very features that make them so dynamic also contribute to their instability.

Although many people presume fitness goes along with warmer locations, we found just the opposite. Each of the top five fitness metros is pretty chilly, and the top-ranked Twin Cities are among the coldest locations in the United States—certainly compared to warm and sunny LA, which languishes in forty-first place.

Frequency of dental office visits tracked closely with class, being much higher in Creative Class states and those with more college grads and much lower in Working Class states, and even more so where inequality is highest.

Visits to the dentist were negatively associated with both smoking and obesity. And not surprisingly, more frequent dental visits are associated with higher levels of overall happiness and subjective well-being.

... the costs of dental care far outpacing both the rate of inflation and overall medical cost increases.

Despite the incredible outpouring of innovation, productivity, and wealth the Creative Economy has produced to date, most of its benefits have been enjoyed by a privileged economic and geographic cohort. It doesn’t have to be this way. The challenges we face today may be different in their specifics, but they are by no means new. We have been through this before.

This industrial society did not emerge on its own but was gradually spurred into existence, over the emphatic and sometimes violent objections of entrenched groups, by a broad social compact—the creation of new institutions and policies that coped with and mitigated its most onerous and divisive aspects, extending the benefits of its productivity to blue-collar workers, turning once terrible low-paying manufacturing jobs into good family-supporting ones, allowing workers to organize and collectively bargain for their rights, and ultimately linking wage increases to productivity gains. It also established Social Security for older people, provided benefits for the disabled and basic social welfare for the truly needy, while protecting health and safety in the workplace. It spurred human capital accumulation by massively expanding the system of higher education, while providing federal investments for scientific research and development, a cornerstone of the innovation economy.

This new social compact squared the circle, turning the once-divided industrial economy into a middle-class society by allowing the broad base of the population to participate in it, while enabling its tremendous expansion. Far from undermining business and subverting capitalism, by making home mortgages more available and investing in the development of the interstate highway system, this social compact encouraged the expansion of key mass production industries, from cars to appliances.

Efforts to overthrow capitalism—either from the right or the left—devolved into chaos and unprecedented disasters. Efforts to temper capitalism—to harness its innovative Schumpeterian engines while spreading its benefits more widely—certainly didn’t solve all of its problems or inequities, but they led to unprecedented prosperity and freedom. If Fordism was ultimately unsustainable, the foundational principle of this social compact—that workers must receive a level of compensation that allows them to participate in the economy—underpinned what we still look back on as the golden age of economic prosperity.

We can’t simply write off the tens of millions of workers who toil in low-wage service jobs. The United States and other nations will have to find ways to bring the service and manufacturing sectors more fully into the Creative Age. The more creative they become, the more productive they will be. This means enabling and tapping the intellectual and social skills of each and every worker.

The manufacturing jobs that pay best today look a lot more like knowledge work than traditional factory work.

Every job can and must be creatified; every worker must be able to harness his or her own inner entrepreneur.

If we paid more for cars and consumer goods, why can’t we pay a little bit more collectively to the people who prepare our food, look after our homes, and take care of our children and aging parents? Doing so will build a stronger middle class, enhance social cohesion, and create the demand that can help drive the economy forward. The service sector is the last frontier of innovation in our economy; it needs to be brought up to date, and upskilling its workers and upgrading their jobs is key to that. Creativity is our most precious resource; we can’t afford to waste it in any sector of the economy.

If industrial age schools readied our children for the workforce, Creative Age schools must prepare them to manage their careers and build businesses of their own. The goal can no longer just be to get a job but rather to create a job—and to create more jobs for others. A huge percentage of new businesses fail, but we can help increase the odds of their success. We provide all sorts of assistance to technology-based entrepreneurs, so why not extend this to all new businesses? Instead of just building incubators for high-tech companies, why not for neighborhood restaurants, mom-and-pop shops, and hair and nail salons? Why not extend support to personal trainers, dieticians, therapists, musicians, artists, and lawn service providers? The list goes on and on. What kills new business is poor management, inattention to cost control, lack of marketing and sales skills. We need to offer all Americans, young and old, rich and poor, the tools they need to survive and thrive as creative entrepreneurs.

“All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think,” he [Sir Ken Robinson] told the Guardian. “Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests. … Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn.”

Not only must today’s creatives and freelancers provide their own health care, disability insurance, and pensions, or do without, as Sara Horowitz of the Freelancers Union notes. There is “no unemployment during lean times; no protections from age, race, and gender discrimination; no enforcement from the Department of Labor when employers don’t pay; and the list goes on.”

It no longer makes sense to tie benefits to a single employer. The reality of employment today is mobility. A new social compact must start from the flexible, hyper-individualized, and contingent nature of work. That means health benefits that move with workers, and retirement accounts that do the same. This is good for workers, good for companies, and good for society as a whole. Canada, for example, has a higher rate of self-employment than the United States; this is one of the key things that has helped bolster its economy over the course of the economic crisis. One thing that helped make this possible is that every Canadian has health care; workers do not need to depend on employers to provide it.

Some will counter that such a system will promote slacking, as it has in some societies. But here is the bargain I envision: society will invest all that is needed to enable you to develop your talents and passions. But you as an individual must keep your part of the bargain.

We can no longer count on companies to create the millions of new jobs that are needed; job generation increasingly comes from cities.

At the local level, cities and communities need to stop subsidizing stadiums, convention centers, and other mega-projects that add little to their economies and stop encouraging bland, generic development. They need to invest in people climates as well as business climates; cultivate all 3T’s; promote density, transit-oriented development, and walkability; create green spaces and other public spaces; encourage diversity; and build real quality of place.

The most important policy innovations no longer come from national legislatures or federal bureaucracies, but from cities and mayors crafting pragmatic, nonideological solutions to pressing social and economic problems.

Mayors, council people, economic developers, business leaders, union officials, and laypeople are the ones who know the most about their economies. Just as the best companies decentralize decision making to work groups on the factory floor, we must give cities and neighborhoods the tools and resources they need to build their economies and in doing so help rebuild the broader economy from the bottom up.

Choices between promoting GDP and protecting the environment may be false choices, once environmental degradation is appropriately included in our measurement of economic performance. So too, we often draw inferences about what are good policies by looking at what policies have promoted economic growth; but if our metrics of performance are flawed, so too may be the inferences that we draw.

... “the failure of modern growth theory to emphasize adequately that people are fundamentally social creatures. They evaluate their welfare based on what they see around them, not just on some absolute standard.” Kenneth Rogoff

Sooner or later, some city or nation is going to figure out what it takes to fully engage the full creative potential of its people.