Already Richard Florida has become a kind of academic celebrity, and so far as I can perceive it is not owing to a wealth of original thought.
I am always keen to hear new ideas on favorite topics, but I honestly have to say I haven't heard or read one from Mr. Florida, despite a good deal of exposure.
Since coming to Toronto with fanfare, Mr. Florida has been interviewed many times of CBC Radio, sometimes at length, and he has contributed columns to the Globe.
After repeating many times why he came here, stuff about Canada's promise and opportunities - rather disingenuous, I think, since it was a plum academic appointment that brought him here - he talked at length about the late Jane Jacobs.
I was, along with so many, a great admirer of Jane Jacobs, and her classic book I devoured forty years ago. But her ideas are definitely not new and are widely known in Canada, and constantly associating yourself with her seems both a bit presumptuous and rather unpleasantly ingratiating.
One wanted to say, if you have something new to say, please, just get on with it.
Now he has written a much-advertised report for the Circus Ringmaster of Queen’s Park, Dalton the Magnificent, and I have heard him in several interviews discussing it, including one interview by the incisive Kathleen Petty with which he expressed great satisfaction.
God, I’m sorry, but he was vacuous. To make a point about today’s financial crisis and not dumping money into declining industries, he talked about people at an earlier period not stimulating agriculture but encouraging industry, the coming great sector.
Mr. Florida attributed the successful transition to the importance of the industrial sector in terms of employment in part to government’s not dumping money on an old sector.
Industry came to absorb the people leaving farms because of naturally occurring economic forces, including the industrialization of agriculture itself and increasing reductions in the demand for farm labor. The transition had nothing to do with government policies or the lack of policies. There were simply irresistible new forces at work owing to technological change.
Indeed, the fact is that today, although agriculture only now employs a small fraction of the labor force, government subsidies to agriculture remain one of the world’s great economic problems, the U.S. and the E.U. spending many tens of billions on this old sector every year.
Mr. Florida’s stuff about creativity in our economy is not new. Many names stand out from Schumpeter writing about creative destruction to Deming’s studies on continuous improvement.
Mr. Florida points to places like California and Massachusetts as centers of creative new industries, and indeed they are, but a government like Ontario’s cannot just make this happen. A major part of the reason these developments have occurred in those two places is that they each have constellations of great academic institutions attracting great minds from many places.
Boston, for example, has a half dozen major universities, at least two of which rate among the greatest in the world. You cannot just replicate that kind of intellectual infrastructure, at least not in anything less than decades of committing major resources.
And no one is going to prevent governments like Ontario’s from dumping billions in stimulus into declining industries: that is the stark reality of politics. Even a Northern Neocon like Harper has been boxed politically into spending tens of billions he did not want to spend.
Saying they shouldn’t isn’t wisdom so much as shouting against a hurricane.
RICHARD FLORIDA, SERIOUS ACADEMIC OR TENT-PREACHER PITCHMAN?
