Richard Florida, author of "Flight of the Creative Class" on C-Span Book 2 now.

I read his book and I strongly support his reasoning. The glorier days supported by the creativity of the talenteds are slowly chased out of America, by paranoid Corporate CEOs whose brains are oly clogged with corrupted ways to make $$. Check out cities, like wellington, NZ, there's a flow of talented Americans already headed to them. Creative talented had brought economic and social wealth to America, more than other sources.

I would strongly agree with Florida that creative talent is not something inherited as with land and other properties. It knows no social, class or gender barrier. And, for any of you with creative talent fight hard to let those who are dead set at stiffling the importance of creative talents in today's culture.

I mentioned something similar in another thread SL. Basically, once you start losing this creative aspect of human beings and the rich cultural diversity of society by either political suppression or oppression, which is happening in the current climate, not only does it destroy that society and cause a decline in its ability to be innovative or educated, but you will see a brain drain....people who leave or emigrate to other countries.

All of this can be viewed not only contemporarily, but if the decline becomes severe, we can also relate it historically to the decline of other great civilizations.
If you also factor in privitization or outsourcing of everything from jobs to the military we can find some early comparisons with the Roman Empire .

Good program on C-span 2

DW04, I must have missed your post. It's not so much about brain-drain, but the drain of those who actually are born with creative talents - so vital to innovations.

I've become a strong fan of Florida, since attending and meeting him at one of his book-signing event. This is an issue that has disturbed me when I visited NZ, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea in 2001, and when two young very talanted and creative neighbors (one orinated from W. Virginia, and the other from Illinois) who have never set foot abroad until they chose to visit NZ, finally decided to migrate to Wellington 1 1/2 years ago. And when I keep hearing about the deductions of funding by the Bush admistration towards the Arts, my sixth sense tells me that we are unwisely exporting one of America's most valuable resources that had kept America so comfortably secured in the past - economically and socially, and had helped America attracted the best World's creative talents to live here and promoted the best innovations - hungrily welcomed into practically all homes in cities here, and abroad. We were winners in Made in America products in those years. Our priorities - no doubt the crazy Rev. Moon and his Fundamentalist false Christians setting a tone to connect creativity to liberal culture, with their preference for America's population and the world's, to be merely brainwashed, unthinking and lacking imagination type of robots to suit their purposes for their continuous manipulation of power and financial gain, are very much to be blamed. I was at Richard Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life" book signing event in 2002, and had a very nice discussion with him - I posted a comment of this book, and about America's shortsightedness for killing creativity and artistic inspirations in its talented population, at the old Kerry's forum and repeated the same on this site last year - having read the posts of some here crucifying celebrities and their artistic work. It's never easy to accept that real talented people are never afraid of exploring to the sense of becoming way out from the norm - if we ourselves are not born with specific creative talent.

I commented to the author that, as a result of my trip, I had seen so many countries setting out to compete against us for this very specific and important American resource... especially in the area of artistically creative talent, especially those who dare go against the norm to arrive at something new. I believe I had also mentioned that so many of these nations had in the past cloggedthe minds of their youths with formulated science and maths, and had never had much patent and copyrights to any innovative creations to call their own - in other words, the minds of their youths and students had been trained - with rote learning - to learn up already created and formulated existing experiences without opening them up for imagination and creativity. But these nations have become smart today, realizing that there's nothing more profitable than innovations vs. mass production (which our dumb corporations are today churning out with their employment of cheap automated-thinking laborers !)

I'm very glad for my copy of Florida's new book and strongly share his current views and analysis. I'm so glad that he had taken the opportunity to step out of America and see with his own eyes, hear with his own ears, and weigh the heavy loss once we resouce out our greatest creative talents. Once these talents settle comfortably abroad, it'd not be easy to draw them back.

Sadly, our economic and Wall Street analysts are too naive to see the relevance of America's greatest resouce that's fast slipping out of America's borders. I guess most of their employees are so stressed out aplying rules and strategies set out by their Employers, they lack the time to observe and comphrehend what it really means by creative energy. And if we do lose our film industry, boy, the quality of our products will become the level of those nations, like Russia, or Mongolia, depleted of, or never had a history of owning a film industry on their own soil.

The antiscience Bush administration does not help. We forget at our own risk that America used to be an open society where ideas could floursh and grow free of undue influence. That is what really made us great. Now stemcell reasearch and global warming is not allowed serious study in America. Remember the development of the atomic bomb was the result of contributions from foreign talent not just American brains. If we lose that talent and some of our own we will be in a real decline as a nation.

SL I'm not quite sure how I misinterpreted you. Creativity is not the sole venue of artists and so called "creative" people but exists in everyone to varying degrees. When I said brain drain it means the best and the brightest in respective fields like the arts, sciences etc.

If you take a look at innovations, it's a merge of creative minds. Specifications and drawings is a merge and combined efforts of diversed creative minds. Take Da Vinci for example - he has artistic, creative imagination, and a scientific mind. My "so-called creative others" is meant to cover other fields of talent, besides art. The Renaissance Era is one of the most beautiful eras and my favorite era for study and explore because it was an era that truly promoted individual thinking, enquiry, and creative inspirations. I think people are born with different talents. Manipulations, greed, lies. and deceptions can be learnt, but true creative talents are inborn, I believe. Scientific innovations can't be reached without its origination from someone creative and imaginative enough to dream and draft out the initial 'picture' of it.