Salon.com Books | The gay/hipster index

"The United States of America is on the verge of losing its competitive advantage," economist Richard Florida wrote last fall in a Harvard Business Review article based on his new book, "The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent." "It is facing perhaps its greatest economic challenge since the dawn of the industrial revolution." Even more provocatively, he later declared that "Terrorism is less a threat to the U.S. than the possibility that creative and talented people will stop wanting to live within its borders."

Lots of interesting stuff at Salon lately. This book by Richard Florida, "The Flight of the Creative Class," is about the most fundamental motivator of our economy in the U.S., the coalescence and utilization of smart and creative people.

Cities and States need to think not just about how much their services and infrastructure benefit their people, but how those things will impact the decision of someone somewhere else when he considers where he wants to live and work. People only make this decision a few times in their life. Once before college, once after college, and maybe a few more times throughout life as their career or the economy of their particular location changes.

So cities and States should create infrastructures and promote, or at least create tax incentives and reduce regulatory hurdles to those activities that bring in smart and creative people.

I really don't think it would take too long for a city to become cool, if it really wanted to. It would be difficult politically to get support from locals, but in the end it would be much better for them. Some of this backward mentality can be seen in Georgetown, in Washington D.C., where locals have prevented the establishment of a subway station for years. Out of the three biggest 'cool' areas of D.C., Georgetown, Adams Morgan, and Dupont Circle, only Dupont is easily reached by the subway. Makes for a pretty un-cool city, in my opinion...

This also touches on the national aspect of the problem -- we need to continue bringing in the smartest people from overseas. First we got the German physicists because of the Nazis, and kept up the flow by having the best universities and the most open society. Now, even if it's a necessity, a stricter immigration policy threatens to derail that flow. This should be a critical issue on the minds of every person involved in immigration policy, and it should be recognized that it may even be in the best interests of the U.S. to allow a terrorist in rather than to deny a scientist.

The scientist may create hundreds of thousands of jobs, bring new products, and improve our standard of living, whereas the terrorist will have a hard time even killing even a few thousand people. (To keep this in perspective, 31,904 people died in passenger car crashes in 2003.)

After reading Joi Ito's mention of this book, I decided to pick it up and read it. I must say, I read this book faster than I've read any book in recent memory. It doesn't even look like anyone's read it yet. I could probably even return it still ;) Anyway, I liked it. There are many points lacking throughout, but all in all, I think it's high time this book was written, and people begin to try to understand that Japan has serious chronic and systemic problems. Many of these are almost impossible to see even within Japan; many of them are invisible precisely because they are always in plain sight.

There is so much to talk about with regard to this book, it's truly overwhelming. Just quoting the facts and figures that shocked me would take pages and pages. I know a lot about Japan, but I honestly can't imagine how Mr. Kerr managed to find out about some of the more sensitive issues without resorting to 'watergate' methods... ;)

If you can overlook the author's sometimes repetitive aesthetic judgements and prejudices, in the end you will see a picture difficult to swallow. Difficult, mostly because it is a sad state of affairs, and it is hard to see any easy way out. Well, there is no easy way out for Japan — the nation will at some point have to face these issues and change the way it does business.

I'll be writing more about the interesting things I found in this book, but for now, I'll just say this. The author at one point raises the specter of the failure of the Japanese movie industry. The industry is currently bleeding cash, and there is no real hope of a renaissance soon. Mr. Kerr talks about how one of the big three Japanese movie companies depended for so long on the proceeds from endless sequels of "Otoko wa tsurai yo." Japan is in a state of stagnation partially because of this mentality — the obsession with riding cookie-cutter scripts for success to their grave, then beating them to get up for years before realizing they're actually dead.

All is not lost for Japan. Anyone that would say so would have to be fantastically short-sighted. But the first step to fixing problems is always opening them up to the light of public scrutiny.

It is a serious drag not having DSL anymore. I've been dealing with this mind-numbing situation for about 6 months. But soon, soon my friends, I will have DSL once more... And then I won't have to abstain from using the web on the weekends...

But, no, this is not germane to the post at hand, my brothers... I am posting to share with all of you a couple of interesting reviews of books and films that I found, which perchance you may go see, and be entertained.

A film called Satin Rouge is discussed on Salon, about a pudgy middle-aged woman in Tunisia who finds herself through belly-dancing. It sounded really interesting earlier today, but now, I'm about to crack up. No! Maybe it's cool! Maybe! No, I can't be serious right now... ;)

A book review on Salon about Cicero — just the thing I would love to read if I had the cash to blow on more books. Looks cool. I do want to read this one sometime. Hopefully it's more entertaining than Plutarch.

And on Shift, a film that really looks neat — Hotel, by Mike Figgis... Yes. Looks to be a good film to see sandwitched between espressos and pseudo-intellectual conversations! :) I love that. (BTW, I use that term self-mockingly, although I actually believe that 'pseudo-intellectual' is a term coined by pseudo-intellectuals to cement their egos and their tenuous status. Hmmm.)