Economy
What Critics Get Wrong About Creative Cities
Economic development, innovation and creativity are undoubtedly connected. Squabbling about which comes first misses the point.
Last week, a post over at Forbes blared the headline “Richard Florida is Wrong About Creative Cities." The post, written by Adam Ozimek of the Modeled Behavior blog, reviews University of California Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti's book The New Geography of Jobs.
Moretti’s book devotes several hundred pages to the roles that clustering and concentration play in innovation, firm formation, and job creation, echoing observations made by Michael Porter, Edward Glaeser, and me. Then, in about two or three pages, he criticizes my alleged theory that, as Ozimek puts it, “making a city an interesting place to live is a good prescription for economic development.”