The Aesthetic Imperative – Why the creative shall inherit the economy. & The Memphis Manifesto: How To Attract The Creative Class

A decade ago, pundits were declaring that the future held two kinds of jobs: computer programming and hamburger flipping – or, in the highfalutin language of Robert Reich, those held by "symbolic analysts" and "in-person service providers." Paleoconservative Crossfire host Pat Buchanan warned we were headed toward a "two tier" society. His left-wing guest Jeremy Rifkin agreed, plugging a book that announced The End of Work.

By Virginia Postrel Wired.com

Five years later, that pessimistic conclusion had taken on a wildly optimistic tone (not least in this magazine). Matter and manufacturing were passé. On the Internet, nobody knew you were a dog or a teenager, or a guy who hadn’t changed his clothes in several days. Symbolic analysts were indeed the future.

In today’s economic slowdown, it has become clear that both the early-’90s pessimists and the late-’90s boosters misunderstood the true source of economic value. Manufacturing and technology generate wealth only when they make matter and information serve human desire. Desire is the true source of economic value.

Competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that few manufacturers can survive on performance and price alone. To produce value, they must give customers something to please their sensory side. Aesthetics is the killer app.

Public policy professor Richard Florida recalls serving on a Pennsylvania economic development advisory panel. "At one of our meetings," he notes in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, "the state’s Secretary of Labor and Industry, a big burly man, banged his fist on the table in frustration. ‘Our workforce is out of balance,’ he steamed. ‘We’re turning out too many hairdressers and cosmetologists, and not enough skilled factory workers’ like welders and machine-tool operators."

For several years afterward, Florida queried audiences, asking which career they’d choose: machinist with higher pay and job security, or hairstylist with lower pay and no job security. "Time and again, most people chose the hair salon, and always for the same reasons" – flexibility, freedom from supervision, stimulation, creativity, and the immediate satisfaction of their customers. The aesthetic imperative has spread new economy values beyond just knowledge workers.

These days, dotcommers are searching for new jobs, but the entrepreneurial kids from shop class and cosmetology school are doing all right. They’re leaving the factories – or never entering them in the first place – and confounding conventional expectations about what it means to be a blue-collar worker or a service provider. For instance, the number of manicurists has tripled in a decade, to nearly 350,000, while the number of nail salons doubled. What’s more, stone fabricators, who turn granite and marble slabs into countertops, are opening thousands of new businesses a year, and sales appear recession-proof.

Car customizers now roam the Las Vegas Specialty Equipment Market Association trade show, four times the size of Comdex, checking out the latest in engines, wheels, accessories, and hot, hot cars. Sales grew 46 percent from 1996 to 2001, to about $26 billion. The purely aesthetic part of the market tops $10 billion.

The number of graphic designers in the US has grown tenfold in a generation, to an estimated 150,000. Membership in the American Society of Interior Designers has more than doubled since 1992, rising to over 33,000. Creative individuals no longer need to be isolated, romantic souls who’ve given up worldly success for the sake of their art.

And all of us must give up the cultural baggage we’ve inherited from the romantics, who set art against tech, and feeling against reason; from the modernists, who treated ornament as crime and commerce as corruption; and from the efficiency experts, who valued function while disdaining form.

We must abandon our prejudices regarding the sources of economic value. The production of wealth comes not simply from labor or raw materials or even intellectual brilliance. It comes from new ways to give people what they want. By matching creativity and desire, the economy will renew itself.

Virginia Postrel (http://www.dynamist.com) is the author of The Substance of Style, due in September from HarperCollins.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/view.html?pg=1

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The Memphis Manifesto: How To Attract The Creative Class

The product of a three-day summit attended by 100 young professionals, the "Memphis Manifesto" articulates strategies that cities can use to become more vibrant places and spark new and varied economic activity.

Contributed by Abhijeet Chavan

"ideas take root where creativity is cultivated and creativity thrives where communities are committed to ideas. Creativity resides in everyone everywhere so building a community of ideas means empowering all people with the ability to express and use the genius of their own creativity and bring it to bear as responsible citizens. This manifesto is our call to action. "

For the report: http://www.creativeclass.org/acrobat/manifesto.pdf