Cause and Effect: Cultural Decadence
23rd October 2018
The Other McCain looks at the ‘creative class’ cargo-cult mentality.
One of the Bad Ideas of recent years that bothers me most — because it is both widely believed among the elite and easily demonstrable as wrong — is Richard Florida’s theory of the “Creative Class” … The problem is that this is a reversal of cause and effect. Prosperity attracts artists and intellectuals to a city, but they are not the ones who create the basis of prosperity. Ancient Athens was famed for its architecture and philosophy, but its prosperity was due to the success of the Athenians in commerce and in war. Through the Aegean port of Piraeus, the ancient Athenians developed a vast merchant empire, establishing colonies throughout the region, as far as modern-day Turkey and Italy, and the wealth obtained by trade enabled the Athenians to equip a powerful army and navy. The Athenians were an adventurous, enterprising and warlike people, and it was these qualities that made their city wealthy, thus attracting the artists and philosophers. Richard Florida’s “creative class” theory gets this causation exactly backwards, confusing certain traits of wealthy places (especially tolerance of homosexuality) as the reason those places became wealthy.