Brewed Fresh Daily

This influx of talent turned America's creative centers into boomtowns. Salaries skyrocketed, followed by housing prices � especially those in the funky inner-city neighborhoods and gracious close-in suburbs favored by the product designers, video editors, hedge-fund analysts, and marketing consultants who made up this emerging new creative class. The rising living costs and go-go lifestyles engendered by the incoming creative class in turn drove out some of the lesser-educated natives, and even many of these creative migrants eventually had their fill and returned to their hometowns. The statistician Robert Cushing has come up with telling evidence of the economic impacts of these reciprocal migrations. Using Internal Revenue Service data, he found that families moving from Austin, a high-tech boomtown, to slower-growth Kansas City in the 1990s earned an average of $25,912 a year. Those going in the other direction, from Kansas City to Austin, earned over $65,000. He found similar disparities between Austin and other older cities: Cleveland, Louisville, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh. But it's not as if the Clevelands and Kansas Cities didn't advance at all. Most added some jobs thanks to local nodes of creativity, such as university-connected medical centers, or managed not to lose as many jobs in their existing companies as they might have absent the help of innovations � primarily information technology � that the creative centers gave birth to. Average incomes in these places rose more slowly, or in some cases declined, but people's purchasing power generally increased, again thanks to creative-center innovations.