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Is the Creative Class Engine Sputtering?
Geoffrey.landis writes "The 'creative class' was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, but according to Scott Timberg, writing in Salon, that engine is sputtering. While a very few technologists have become very wealthy, for most creative workers, the rise of amateurs and enthusiasts means that few are actually making a living. The new economy is good for the elite who own the servers, but, for most, 'the dream of a laptop-powered "knowledge class" is dead,' he says."
it's called "patent trolling," "eternal copyright," and "software patents."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
." Book editors, journalists, video store clerks, musicians, novelists without tenure". A lot of the 'jobs' he's talking about are radically changing or weren't worth anything to begin with. The article doesn't really have a concrete, well laid out argument. It sounds like yet another generalized complaint I've kept hearing for the past couple years: the elite are taking all my money and I'm a poor starving average joe. Except here it is some ill defined "creative class". Adapt to the world around you and use your money wisely. Same age old problem, same age old solution.
The author puts "book editors, journalists, video store clerks" into that creative class. It's hard to see why a video store clerk (what is a video store?) is a creative persona. He is merely shining the scanner on your purchases. He can be illiterate for all practical purposes.
Musicians? Well, those that are good are doing OK. The rest... perhaps they are in the wrong business. Same applies to "aspiring novelists" - there is always ten graphomaniacs for one semi-decent writer. Good writers are even more rare.
Computer programmers are also like that. Those who write simple, boring code - but lots of it - will lose to their Chinese and Indian competition. Those who write difficult code remain in business. I personally specialize in microcontrollers, hardware, FPGA, real-time and high speed stuff. There is plenty of work in this area.
To summarize, if you are truly creative in what is in demand then there will be always someone willing - and desperate - to pay you.
No-one makes money from 'creativity'. You make money from what economists call 'rent-seeking' from creative output, be it yours or someone else's. The people who get rich (or even just make a decent living) are those who are good at rent seeking, and those people aren't necessarily the same people who are good at 'creating'. Hence Disney inc still aggressively rent-seeking from the creative output of illustrators, animators, voice artists etc 70 years after the creative act, and you can bet those creatives or their descendants aren't making any ongoing money from it.
Being able to work at home or from your local cafe on your laptop doesn't magically free you from the need to either have a lot of capital to promote and exploit your creative output, or alternately the need to sell your creative labor to someone who does, it just frees those with that capital from the need to supply the infrastructure of an OSHA-compliant workplace.
The creative class as a driver of the local economy was always a big stretch. If a guy (or girl) sitting in a coffee shop in Seattle can do something for $X, it's likely that a guy (or girl) sitting in a coffee shop in Estonia can do the same thing for a fraction of $X. Smart people that make up the creative class are evenly distributed across the planet. There will be places where you can support yourself on a creative class income, but it's not likely to be most of the places that people read /.
Until recently the 'creative class' would be distributed between struggling (70%), getting by (25%) and going great (5%). This applied to photographers, artists, writers, glass workers, a whole swathe of people. But with the rise of the internet all but the last one are being undermined financially by virtually free distribution of material from amateurs, as well as the effects of digitial copying.
Economics suggests that the price of an item will tend towards the marginal cost of production, particulaly with large scale production. So, for all those items which can be reproduced digitally at almost no cost, the price will tend towards zero.
So, the 'creative classes' need to think about new ways of making money from their skills. These days I see many top notch photographers are running workshops, which I think shows more forward thinking. Instead of bemoaning the way digital reproduction has undermined their art, they have started teaching others how to produce great images. This benefits them (we pay $$$) as well as improving the overall body of photographic work.
Maybe some of the other 'creative classes' need to re-assess how to make a living from their skills.
It's easier (and more lucrative) for existing companies to use lawyers to bankrupt anyone with a creative idea that might threaten those companies.
The moment you try to capitalize on your idea, you'll be looking at cease-and-desist letters and lawsuits claiming some kind of infringement.
The entire system needs an overhaul.
The true creative class is the people who are willing to put forth the hard work to study particle physics, microbiology, colloid science, differential equations, managerial accounting, and parallel algorithms. Their dedication is what makes carrying out their creative dreams possible. As the article states, they're doing well, as there's still scarcity in that market. Their competition in overseas diploma mills that teach to the test do not produce the same results.
What this article is referring to is the so-called "creative class" who thought they could start a grunge band by learning power chords, buy a Canon EOS and become a professional photographer, or become a psychologist because they were interested in their bad teenage relationships. They are the types who thought they'd win the lottery and become rock stars without the serious learning required to invent, build, and deploy something new.
Those people in the so-called "creative class" locked in an entitlement mentality are a dime a dozen.It may have worked in the 1990s when they and their friends were given unlimited subsidy by coddling baby boomer parents, but these days, you're on your own and actually have to know your shit. Universities today aren't full of ambitious engineers who will take full advantage of their $50K in student loans, they're full of future waitresses and customer service reps with a piece of paper.
A better article would be "Why did 17 million people go to college?" -- http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634
So, the problem highlighted is that 'creative' people - and lets for the moment give them the benefit of the doubt on the level of their creativity - cannot find paid employment that allows them to produce new the new ideas and culture that keeps a society from stagnating.
My question is, why does everyone have to work?
We are trapped by absurd, outdated Protestant work ethics. Failure to bust your gut 50 hours a week is a sign of moral weakness, according to our leaders (most of whom have only ever worked through choice, not necessity) and our newspapers - sometimes even our teachers and parents.
This ethic is reflected in a society that is structured in a way that survival is next to impossible without work. Don't fool yourselves - even social safety nets here in Europe are specifically designed to make lack of full time employment unsustainable over the long term. What we need is to provide people with a decent living regardless of what they do, and make anything earned through work a bonus.
Maybe its time to stop blindly forcing the square pegs of our society (and everyone else) into the round hole of clock punching, just to serve some ancient disgust at the supposed 'fecklessness' of those who don't like the 8-6 run (I think its safe to say 9-5 is mostly a fantasy in the west now)
Its a valid question of how to pay for this; but not actually a difficult one. The simplest is to go after the rent-seekers; money earned by not doing anything can't possibly be created due to an incentive for the person earning it to do anything, so lets have it. Start with the Earth's natural resources - I have always considered the notion of a creature with a maximum lifespan barely over 100 years claiming that part of a 4 billion year old planet is his and his only to exploit.
Might it not work? Sure. But considering the current economic order is grinding to a halt, it is certainly worth a shot.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Yes, you know something is wrong when educated people can't find a job coming out of college. It is one thing to go,"Get an education so you don't work at Mcdonalds." And quite another thing to go,"Get an education, but work at Mcdonalds anyway, and maybe by the time you're 50 you can finally pay off your student loans and move out of your parents house."
God spoke to me
In the old days, most new ventures failed. Only a very few people could be at the top when an idea exploded. That wasn't a big problem. Fully exploiting those ideas required hiring lots of people. And thats how most people made their living. They didn't have to make a big win themselves. They just needed to be useful those who did.
Enter the economy of today. Most new ventures still fail. Occasionally, one still wins. But when it comes time to hire all those people to exploit the idea, they don't. Either the need for large numbers of employers never materializes due to automation and the non-physical nature of the work or, if they really must hire, they hire overseas.
The myth of the creative class was created out of need to believe we had an out. It was obvious to anyone that the American dream could no longer be supported by manufacturing. And I don't think anyone really believed that retail and burger flipping was an option. There needed to be something that was productive but different from what goes on in the emerging world and, therefore, safe. Well, it isn't all that different and it isn't safe. Employment security in the info economy didn't even survive beyond the business cycle in which it was born.
The problem is the new markets don't always fulfill the economic needs of the country as well as the old ones.
One trend with technology is that it allows more to be accomplished with less labor. But the labor force is still there and needs something to sustain it. We no longer need a factory worker to put a door on a car, and another to put the hood on, and another to do the windshield. We just need one to supervise the robot that does all of this. You can't just expect a large portion of the population to commit suicide because there's no longer an economic use for them. Or maybe, as you suggest, they should just 'get the fuck over' the fact that they have no job and no money and are only alive because of food stamps.
If only someone had warned us. Oh, wait, Kurt Vonnegut did when he wrote Player Piano half a century ago. Bill Joy did when he wrote Why The Future Doesn't Need Us a decade ago. Ray Bradbury with Fahrenheit 451. Each of these warnings were brushed aside as implausibly dystopian. Of course, there are no easy solutions and none of them involve 'getting the fuck over it.'
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."