You Are Smarter, More Creative And Better Looking Than The Rest Of The World - Now Give Me $5.95

The October issue of the Atlantic Monthly is on newsstands now and on its cover are the words "America's Smartest Cities." Please, nothing draws a Seattleite to a magazine faster than a tagline that indicates his intellectual ego is about to receive some much needed stroking. On the other hand, we've seen articles with this kind of headline on the internet and they're generally disappointing. Yeah, yeah, we have a lot of college graduates and bookstores - Give us our World's Smartest ranking and go away.

Luckily "America's Smartest Cities," is a terrible description of the actual article, which turns out to be a tiny and dense piece by Richard Florida. You remember Florida - He's the guy who wrote The Rise of the Creative Class a few years ago. You may have read so many excerpts that it feels like you read the book, but you didn't. Why would you need to? You are the Creative Class. A quick scan (note: includes no actual reading) of his website tells us that he's turned the Creative Class into a quite a little industry, which is besides the point here, maybe.

The article jumps right into his favorite topic of demographic realignment; explaining the shift of the highly educated, skilled and paid to metropolitan areas like San Fran, San Jo, Boston, L.A. and, of course, Seattle and he uses housing cost as an indicator of a metro area's desirability to the highly educated/skilled/paid set. Our mean housing value has increased x amount in y years while over the same period our percentage of college graduates as compared to the national average percentage of college graduates has increased some similar amount and, voila! Something has been proven! Actually the numbers are completely uninteresting. Florida's numbers are rarely interesting. Where he does get interesting is when he starts talking about why the highly educated/skilled/paid class has been flocking to these particular cites. He says we need each other; that smart, diverse, creative types flourish when they're in the presence of lots of other smart, diverse, creative types and, in fact, the primary determinant of our success is our proximity and access to other highly educated/skilled/paid peeps.

You may have noticed the use of "we" in that last paragraph in place of any number of really cool-sounding descriptions like "Creative Class" "highly educated, skilled and paid" and "smart, diverse, creative types." That's us, at least, as Florida would have us believe. It feels good to believe that stuff and people who feel good will have a tendency to want to keep that ball rolling so maybe they'll go attend a Richard Florida (Creative) Enrichment Seminar down in Tacoma or something (although, if you're trying to make someone out to be some uber human who lives at the center of all things important in the world, do you really want to make him go to Tacoma?) At the very least you're bound to sell a lot of magazines in Seattle if you put "America's Smartest Cities" on the cover. We're never quite sure, though, if Florida is talking about everyone we know or some mythical brainiacs.

There are a lot of zippy passages in the article that we could type out for you here (the article isn't available online) like this one:

America's most successful cities may increasingly be inhabited by a core of wealthy workers leading highly privileged lives, catered to by an underclass of service workers living in far-off suburbs.

but we can't really show you how, in the context of the article, that sentence comes off more as a dream than a nightmare. Personally, it's the passages like these that resonate the most:

Significantly, young graduates are flocking in ever-greater numbers to the "means metros," where they live in penury until either making it or being forced out by the high cost of living.

Well, now that describes everyone we know.