Bulletproof Monks and Richard Florida – A Solution for Europe?

Anticipation ran high when one of today’s most sought after speakers, Richard Florida of Carnegie Mellon, was invited to an event held in Stockholm's City Hall, were the Nobel Prize dinner is held once a year for the prize-winners.

Everyone important in Stockholm was invited to listen to Florida's speech. This was going to be the big show for the ruling social democrats in the city of Stockholm who were going too take the credit for Florida's praise of the city. Surrounded by meditating Buddhist monks on television screens, the guru-like Florida delivered a speech that is one of the most interesting I have heard for many years.

My curiosity was piqued when I learnt that Sweden is ranked as the most creative and open societies in the world in his recent book "The Flight of the Creative Class." The ranking made me wonder about creativity's role in Europe and the connection to the centralized managerial tradition that has characterized Sweden. The question is why are Florida's ideas so popular here?

The paradox is that Sweden becomes the good example in Florida's book of how creativity should be handled. I have always had the notion that Sweden has many problems with promoting creativity and personal liberty.

Talk to any native Swede and he starts complaining of Sweden's high taxation that actually inhibits creativity and entrepreneurship. This is of course not the only problem in Sweden; the integration of many of our immigrants is a big issue with unemployment for immigrants as the highest in the OECD. It is a problem for the whole of Europe.

Florida gave the example of one successful story in the new creative economy in the making of the Lord of the Rings trilogy by Peter Jackson. The New Zealand–born director worked very hard on his dream of making Tolkien's fantasy books a film. To achieve this dream he realised that he needed both talented and creative people in his hometown Wellington. He realised that he needed to lure a lot of talented people to the far side of the world. The main idea that he realised has both to do with the opportunity to meet likeminded and good working environments. This was the winning combination. It is said that New Zeeland missed the latest world economic recession thanks to this movie project.

What Jackson realised and Florida writes about is that the new competition of global talent is going to be the new reality in the post-industrial world and even the U.S. is going to have its fair portion of this new reality. This is what Florida calls the greatest economic paradigm shift in all human economic history, the shift from the agricultural economy to the industrial economy under the late 18th century was nothing compared to this development.

Sweden had under the turn of the last century about 50 percent of its population in the agricultural sector. There was less than 5 percent of the whole population involved in the creative area of the economy. About one hundred years later the numbers are 22.93 percent of the whole workforce, with less than 2 percent involved in agriculture. Many countries never had the same development and we are going to see a great shift to see more and more of the workforce going in the same direction.

The winners in this economic reality are the societies that are open, tolerant and diverse.

All of the creative people that used to be in the old days the bohemians, artists and gays are now seeing their old domains taken over by the virtual creative artist who mainly works with the flexibility of computers. Where this development is going is very hard to predict. One thing is clear: the virtual economy is here to stay and the old industrial workplace is going to be marginalised.

Social conservatives (including the ruling social democrats of Sweden) are scared to death of this development. When social conservatives see in which direction their old liberal allies are developing, and that their powerbase is eroding, we are going to see a backlash.

Florida gives the examples of how the U.S. post 9/11 has lost many opportunities in the race for creative people, but Europe is not any better handling the same issues. The old notions of nationality, gender and race, notions so dear to social conservatives, are crumbling. An excluding notion of nationality is not the winning strategy. We can only see what happened in France recently and right now many young people see they have no future in a society that is too static. The same feelings exist also in Swedish youth.

The other big challenge is how to make every job more creative. A workplace that gives people the right challenges in their lives. It is nothing new that the average industrial job is not that challenging for their workforce. If we are able to make even these jobs more creative we are going to have more opportunities for many more people in the future. In the long run creativity does not care about borders, and the hopeful message that Florida gives us is the winning types of societies are open, tolerant and diverse societies. Sweden may be number one on his list but we have a long way to go before Florida's vision is realised here.