Culture Cash
This story in the Tennessean says the Nashville area is Tennessee's most affluent region. Ever wonder why we're so far ahead of Memphis and the rest of the state? One reason may be Nashville's abundance of creativity.

An academic who has studied how culture and creativity impacts economic development has concluded that cities with more creative-type people are doing better in economic development.

The "creative class" - which includes includes scientists and engineers, university professors, poets and novelists, artists, entertainers, actors, designers, and architects, as well as the "thought leadership" of modern society: nonfiction writers, editors, cultural figures, think-tank researchers, analysts, and other opinion-makers - is "a profound new force in the economy and life of America," writes Richard Florida, professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in this article in Washington Monthly.

I wrote about Florida's research and his "Bohemian Index" more than a year ago in this article for Nashville City Paper: "A researcher in Pittsburgh had a crazy notion that young high-tech professionals just might be drawn to the same kinds of urban communities as authors, artists, photographers, musicians, dancers, performers, designers and gay people - and the data supports it."

Nashville ranked highly on that index, which augured well for Nashville's economic growth.

Since then, Florida has developed a broader and more sophisticated set of measures collectively called the "Creativity Index," which you can find at CreativeClass.org.

Nashville doesn't rank as highly - the city is ranked 38th among major regions and 66th among all cities - but it outranks Memphis (49th among major regions and 132 overall). Florida's data also shows that 8.9 percent of Nashville-area workers are working in a "super-creative" role, which could be anything from songwriter to scientist or architect to programmer. In Memphis, it's 8.3 percent.


"Florida calls this driving economic force the Creative Class. Its members make their livings composing, designing, problem-finding and problem-solving. They are engineers and musicians, scientists and actors, software writers and novelists. They are the graduate students who once waited tables and guarded buildings after-hours," reports the Austin American-Statesman in this May 12 special report on the rise of the "creative class" and how it affects the economic development of a city. Austin, incidentally, has 16 percent of its workforce employed in "super-creative" roles.