This really ought to be called 'The Horror of the American Workplace', given the description of how exploitative American companies appear to be of the very essence of their employees and the organisations with whom they work. According to this book, there is no part of the human being that cannot be put to the service of business. This point aside, Florida's work, despite its profound and irredeemable flaws, is not without interest as a social document demonstrating the intellectual tangle that is created as a means of studying an apparently simple question. Florida's definition of the very class he seeks to identify and call to community action struggles because it simply does not have enough in common with one another to justify the definition. His interpretation of creativity includes anyone with an education and the opportunity to make a living from it, and this is simply too broad: heart surgeons, IT people (whoever they are) and artists are all lumped in as having common cause, but the argument fails because, quite simply, they don't. What they do have is the capacity to make choices for themselves, and in a society transformed by technology and determined by loose social ties they vote with their feet.
The creation of a wage-slave class in the US since the Reagan years is the real problem here, as it entirely wastes the potential and investment in a broad swathe of American society. They are excluded from decision-making (and not from creativity, which they are expected to employ in dealing with their customers), and as such this looks a lot like a straightforward Marxist division of labour. The problem for Americans is that they can't acknowledge this deep split in their social arrangements for two reasons. The first that that the National Story insists that the US is a meritocracy, and the second is that it is the attraction of this story that continues to draw large numbers of immigrants to depress the cost of wages in the service sector. In the end, Florida has missed the point, and obliquely uncovered that those, like himself, with money, possibilities and imagination show no loyalty to anyone when it comes to furthering their self-interest. My astonishment is that it took him so long to find it out, and that so many people needed him to point it out for them.
