Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Michael Winslow Czeiszperger <michael AT czeiszperger.org>]

On Wednesday, October 9, 2002, at 01:54 PM, Christina Dyrness wrote:

> A colleague of mine is working on a story about this Creativity Index
> phenomenon. (I did a quick search on google and found the following,
> just for folks like me who were out of the loop on this:
> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html)

I was going to try and debunk this until I saw that my home town rated 
#5 :-)


> It seems that (a) economic prosperity of a particular region is heavily
> tied to the number of creative types that live here and that (b) Chapel
> Hill ranks in the top ten of creative meccas (that is, high on
> creativity but not so hot on diversity...)

For me this type of reporting is in the same class as stories of how 
generation Q (which is arbitrarily made up ) is somehow different from 
general R (also arbitrarily made up). Almost all are just anecdotal, 
with no research at all. Anyone can make up a theory and reinforce it 
with selective interviews, but that doesn't have anything to do with 
social science.

As an example, the first story doesn't make any sense at all:

"I noticed one member of the group sitting slouched over on the grass, 
dressed in a tank top. This young man had spiked multi-colored hair, 
full-body tattoos, and multiple piercings in his ears. An obvious 
slacker, I thought, probably in a band. 'So what is your story?' I 
asked. 'Hey man, I just signed on with these guys.' In fact, as I would 
later learn, he was a gifted student who had inked the highest-paying 
deal of any graduating student in the history of his department, right 
at that table on the grass, with the recruiters who do not "recruit."

[...] When I called the people who had recruited him to ask why, they 
answered, "That's easy. We wanted him because he's a rock star."

The implication here is that companies are hiring "creative" types, 
here defined as people who have piercings, as if creativity was somehow 
related to the way you dress. The company in question, Trilogy writes 
e-Business software for Christ' sake, and would have no reason at all 
to hire a "rock star", yet this reason is presented at face value.  A 
more likely scenario is the person in question was simply a good 
software engineer and happened to dress the same as many people his age.

"What a change from my own college days, just a little more than 20 
years ago, when students would put on their dressiest clothes and 
carefully hide any counterculture tendencies to prove that they could 
fit in with the company."

The writer is a Professor of Regional Economic Development, and so may 
not have been aware that good software engineers haven't had to follow 
a dress code for as long as there's been software engineers. I've seen 
lots of people hired after interviewing wearing past favorites such as 
T-shirts and jeans.

"The Research Triangle lacks the hip urban lifestyle found in places 
like San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Chicago, laments a 
University of North Carolina researcher: 'In Raleigh-Durham, we can 
always visit the hog farms.'"

In my opinion the differences the author describes are largely age 
based rather than based on a separate class.  Younger workers go out 
more, and are less likely to care about the ability to purchase 
property. As workers get older, get married, and start families, they 
start paying more attention to cost of living, the cost of real estate, 
and naturally go out less to spend more time with children. During this 
transition the desirability of different cities naturally changes.

San Francisco, for example, tends to attract people right out of 
college because of the perceived hipness of the place. But at least 
when I was working there in the software industry most people didn't 
make any use of anything hip, but just went to bars and restaurants, 
the same as they'd do in any other city. Ask any young person who lived 
there how many times they went to a museum, or the opera, or the 
symphony, or any other cultural event, and I don't see how it would be 
any different from similar profile individuals in the Triangle. And in 
my opinion it was probably less than most cities because of the large 
cost. How many times can you spend $600 a night to take a date to a 
cultural event when your living in a place with the highest cost of 
living in the country? (Cost estimate based on the cost of opera 
tickets, and doesn't include the cost of dinner or parking.)

I'd love to see any figures that backs up the author's assertions, and 
maybe the book presents some of this research. Unless any of these 
assertions are backed up with some hard research, this story is just 
that, a story.

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michael at czeiszperger dot org
Chapel Hill, NC