Brewed Fresh Daily

Depending on your appetite for duels among policy analysts, you�ll either love or hate two recent pieces about the so-called �creative class� that appeared in the liberal Washington Monthly and the conservative City Journal. In Washington Monthly, ubiquitous Carnegie Mellon professor Richard Florida argues that the Republican Party�s anti-elitism threatens to stifle creative work product and ruin America�s economy. He throws this partisan zinger comparing the last president with the current occupant of the Oval Office: �Clinton's whole life is a testimony to the power of education to change class. Bush prides himself on the idea that his Yale education had no effect on how he sees things. Clinton was a famous world traveler, appreciative of foreign cultures and ideas. Bush, throughout his life, has been indifferent if not hostile to all of that. � Clinton reveled in the company of writers, artists, scientists, and members of the intellectual elite. Bush has little tolerance for them. Clinton, in his rhetoric and policies, wanted to bring the gifts of the creative class � high technology, a tolerant culture � to the hinterlands. Bush aimed to bring the values and economic priorities of the hinterlands to that ultimate creative center, Washington, D.C.� But in a City Journal piece entitled �The Curse of the Creative Class,� writer Steven Malanga argues that Dr. Florida�s theories about the creative economy have a big problem: The basic economics behind his ideas don�t work. �Far from being economic powerhouses, a number of the cities the professor identifies as creative-age winners have chronically underperformed the American economy,� Mr. Malanga writes. �And, although Florida is fond of saying that, today, �place matters� in attracting workers and business, some of his top creative cities don�t even do a particularly good job at attracting � or keeping � residents.�