By: The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent By Richard Florida HarperBusiness, April 2005 336 pages, $25.95 Part reporting, part public- policy plea, Carnegie Mellon Professor Florida warns that the U.S. is in danger of losing its most important resource: creative people. The causes of the problem are many, but two jump out. First, other countries - think India and Ireland - are making a concerted effort to capitalize on new technologies. (New Zealand, of all places, now makes a lot of movies.) All this gives Americans a reason to work overseas. The second problem? A tighter immigration policy in the aftermath of Sept. 11 has made it more difficult for creative foreigners to move here. And immigrants have always been a major source of U.S. creativity. The net result, Florida warns, could be dire.
