It does not seem to have struck Florida as relevant that the vast majority of these creative workers are federal bureaucrats, and the ones who don’t work for the feds are employed in universities and colleges, or at best in the local tech industry that is largely dependent on federal contracts. Ottawa’s economy is not post-industrial, it’s parasitic, entirely dependent on tax dollars from regions of the province and the country where people actually make things or provide services that other people want to consume.
What this underscores is just what a pile of nonsense all of this Creative Age stuff really is. Richard Florida’s theories of the role of bohemians and gays, and of the importance of promoting density within mega-regions, is the sort of stuff interventionist-minded governments like to hear, but their effect on growth is negligible. As a number of economists have been pointing out, once you crunch the data and control for relevant variables, Florida’s “creativity” is nothing more than human capital, and the creative class just the segment of the population that has some form of higher education.
In the end, Martin and Florida have done little more than restate Bertrand Russell’s witticism about work being of two kinds: “First, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.”
Nothing much has changed since Russell wrote that in 1932; the only difference now is that creative elaborations on that basic insight sell for millions of dollars.
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