[tpk-nyc]

Of course every municipality should foster a livable, efficient and sustainable environment for all its citizens. Furthermore, what a community regards as "livable" varies from place to place. It's subjective and based on aesthetics, politics, history, climate, etc.

However Florida, Valk and Romell are not writing about livability in the abstract but economic growth. Growth is subject to market forces, geographic advantages and the whims (a carefully chosen word) of entrepreneurs.

A city can't easily change its geographic advantages/disadvantages, but it can manipulate market forces (by offering tax credits) and play to the whims of entrepreneurs (by creating lifestyle amenities). The entrepreneur is key here. Valk quotes Russell "Indeed, it may not be graduates that you want, necessarily, but migrants. Migrants are especially entrepreneurial, and the further they’ve come to get to your city, the better."

There's a difference between being "human capital" (an ugly phrase) and being an entrepreneur. Human capital sells his or her labor. An entrepreneur (either an individual or a company) hires other people. An entrepreneur creates growth.

Any large business has both "front-office" and "back-office" personnel. Front-office people actually bring in the business and create work-product whereas back-office people provide support (often highly specialized and valuable support) like accounting, billing, human resources, marketing, clerical, &c. An individual business may be entirely service-oriented, like a law firm, but the front-office personnel (the attorneys) create a work-product (legal advice) that people buy. It doesn't matter how good of an accountant you are in the back-office. If the attorneys aren't bringing in fees from clients, you won't have a job.

To extend the metaphor to a city, entrepreneurs and their employees are the front-office personnel and service industry workers (including very highly compensated workers like doctors and lawyers) are back-office personnel. It doesn't matter how good of a doctor you are. If there aren't a lot of front-office personnel in your city, you're not going to have a lot of patients. The same applies to teachers and auto mechanics, &c.

This can be illustrated most dramatically by Detroit. The city lost vast numbers of its front-office personnel (the auto companies and autoworkers) and it sent the city and the back-office personnel (nearly everyone else) into a tailspin. I'm sure there are many wonderful auto mechanics in Detroit but, irony of ironies, many people in the Motor City are so poor that they can't afford a car.

On a personal level no job is inherently better than any other job. A job may be emotionally fulfilling, or not. It may be highly remunerative, or not. A job is a personal choice. However, on the macro-economic level some jobs are inherently more valuable because they create other jobs. What's more, conventional notions of prestige have nothing to do with it. In Detroit, an autoworker's job is far more economically important than a doctor's job.

For a city to maintain its economy it has to maintain its number front-office jobs. For a city to grow its economy it has to attract front-office jobs (and the people who create them). If not, it runs the risk of turning into another Detroit.

The auto industry is based in Michigan partly because it's half-way between the iron mines of Minnesota and the coal mines of Pennsylvania and West Virginia (a geographic advantage). Today's entrepreneurs are no longer as tightly bound by geography. They can live almost anywhere, according to their whims. Are these whims silly? Pretentious? Capricious, even? Perhaps. But is designating an arts district in an underused part of town any more egregious than offering a $10 million tax credit to a multi-billion-dollar corporation? Which is more beneficial to the community at large?

Florida, Valk and Romell create unnecessary confusion when they write about attracting college graduates. What they're really writing about, as Russell correctly notes, is attracting potential entrepreneurs, i.e., the people who create front-office jobs. Of course, some of the greatest inventors and entrepreneurs in our history dropped out of college (or even high school), but the concern is in "potential" and college grads best are most likely to generate growth in the information economy.