Letters to the Editor
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David Brooks vs. David Brock
Perhaps Hannaham confused David Brooks with David Brock, author of "The Real Anita Hill," who did indeed do a 180 and wrote "The Republican Noise Machine" and founded Media Matters.
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Limited study = limited value
"He limits his consideration to American cities, though he has chosen to emigrate to Toronto himself."
This to me says exactly why you'd be a sucker to buy this book. We live in a global economy, and even the American economy is powered not just by so-called native "creative Bohemians" but artists, scientists and entrepreneurs from other countries.
Likewise, one might make an argument that some "creative" Americans have been completely ignored by Florida: expatriates. For 8 years I have lived and worked in Europe (London and Amsterdam) by choice and that has meant:
- good wages (in Pounds Sterling or Euros), generous vacation allowance (5 weeks min.)
- affordable and available healthcare
- avoidance of the domestic consequences of the George W. Bush regime
It may not even constitute a large part of the answer to Florida's question, but it's an important part that he's ignored nevertheless: for some of us, Our City, isn't to be found in our Country (of origin). And for non-Americans in the global economy, this is probably even more true -- it's one of the reasons why if you're looking for a plumber, electrician or carpenter in big western European cities, you're more likely to find a Pole or other East European "economic migrant" doing the work than a "native".
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Where? To Starbuck's
Bohemianism has been commodified; used as a marketing tool by corporate giants such as Apple, Whole Foods, and Starbucks; and installed into suburbs across the country.
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Andrew O'Hehir said it best
In his review of Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City by Richard Lloyd (http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2005/11/17/lloyd/index.html)
"Basically, the problem with David Brooks and Richard Florida, the twin Jedi knights of the neoliberal end-of-ideology thesis cited above, is that they don't know what the hell they're talking about. Lloyd puts it a little more politely, but that's what he thinks. Both Brooks' "Bobos in Paradise" and Florida's "The Rise of the New Creative Class" now read like utopian manifestoes of the late-Clinton-era economic boom, seeking to justify the sudden ascendancy of an unstarched managerial class that combined software-IPO millions with a taste for fresh-baked baguettes, extra-virgin olive oil and Velvet Underground reissue CDs. . .
Brooks and Florida were investigating a real phenomenon; there is no question that over the last 30 years or so mainstream American taste has become substantially infected by Euro-American elite influences, in one direction, and bohemian underground influences in the other. But their deductions about this are based primarily on sweeping ZIP code generalities and reprocessed infobytes from the mainstream media, rather than original research or reporting. Florida apparently bases his conclusion that artists are no longer alienated from society, Lloyd says, on the fact that Bruce Springsteen and Madonna work out at the gym. His "creative class" category is defined so broadly that it encompasses virtually the entire professional sector of the American workforce (some 38 million people, he says), including doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists and engineers."
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What the....?
This article makes not sense. The title is only tangentially related to the piece, and Hannaham can't decide whether people will use this book or not.
Go-getters who don't know what they want to do become lawyers, criminals or something in between. Nobody reads a book to decide where to live. People who can't find work won't pay $26.95 to figure out where to get a job. Anyone who can leisurely contemplate switching cities for work purposes probably has the resources to visit.
Not one of these assumptions is valid. They aren't even accurate as generalizations.
And what's with the weird
None of this surprised many urbanites, though some Americans, unaware of trends in popular culture and oblivious to the Internet, may have been shocked to find that queers and quasi-bohemians do anything other than sin.
The flattering of "urbanites" is offensive, but someone should clue Hannaham that there's already a pretty pervasive stereotype that "fags have great fashion sense and make up a lot of the artistic population." Maybe he should have written that it will shock some Americans that "queers and quasi-bohemians" are making up a sizable part of today's business culture, as well.
What a waste of space.
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It's more spiky than you think out there
This 'Flat Earth' idea is getting way too much traction. For capital, the earth may be flat, but that doesn't mean you can up sticks and move to Europe on a whim (and hope to find a job, that is).
On a recent visit home (from London, where I have gone through years of red tape to obtain the simple right to live and work in the same country as my wife), hipsters kept wandering up to me, 'hey, I hear it's pretty cool in foreign countries, I'm thinking of getting some of that ...' Good luck, you'll need it, and a good lawyer would help too.
This is what frustrates people about globalization cheerleading: the enormous disparity between the flatness afforded to companies and capital and that which is given to individuals.
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I don't agree that Gladwell "reassured" readers
Having read Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, I don't agree with this writer's assertion that the book was somehow a scam to make people feel like all their snap judgments are correct.
The points that Gladwell was making throughout the book had to do with the fact that there are decision-making processes going on constantly in us, many of them without our conscious awareness or guidance, and that it's important for us to understand this process in order to not make costly mistakes.
As I recall, his examples of successful snap judgments fell largely into the category of people with great expertise and experience being able to make correct instinctive judgments without being able to articulate them, and other people with an almost freakish, more random abilities (such as the fellow who could predict double-faults in tennis).
Along with the examples of success were other examples of when snap judgments go terribly wrong, as in the case of the NYC police officers' mistaken shooting and surveys of instinctive reactions to those of different ethnic groups. Examples like those were included with the specific intent of showing that snap judgments are in no way always correct--but that we're making them constantly, and we should understand what factors influence them.
The message I took away from the book was that we're all wired with our own sets of unconscious assumptions, associations, and decision-making shortcuts that are informed by our individual histories, backgrounds, environmental prejudices, and training (or lack thereof). Depending on that unqiue mix, our snap judgments can be uncannily accurate, woefully wrong, or somewhere in between. To read the book as an unqualified reassurance would be to ignore most of its contents.