The Decline of Middle America and the Problem of Meritocracy
6th February 2010
Read it.
Richard Florida has hopefully labeled this trend “the rise of the creative class.” Florida reports that over the last thirty-odd years we have witnessed an ever-increasing concentration of college graduates around “superstar cities” or “means metros”-San Francisco, Washington, Denver, New York, Seattle, and the like. Thus, while 20 percent of the adult population holds an advanced degree in cities like San Fran and DC, the numbers are 5 percent in Cleveland and 4 percent in Detroit. Florida’s maps show in graphic imagery the hiving of college grads around certain metropolitan areas, a hiving that has emerged most clearly since 1970. Save for a few isolated exceptions, those hives are not located in Middle America, including our many mid-sized middle American cities.
Florida describes this trend as “the mass relocation of highly skilled, highly educated, and highly paid Americans to a relatively small number of metropolitan regions, and a corresponding exodus of the traditional lower and middle classes from these same places,” primarily because of the high cost of living that results from the Migration of the Talented. The reasons behind this phenomenon, he says, are economic; if you’re very smart, educated, and talented, it pays to live near others like you. “The most talented and ambitious people need to live in a means metro in order to realize their full economic value,” he writes. Florida foresees a future in which the most talented and creative live among themselves in select city cores, and in which they are “catered to by an underclass of service workers living in far-off suburbs.” “Accommodating” this new geographically based cognitive sorting, he maintains, “will be one of the great political and cultural challenges of the next generation.”