The “gay/hipster index”

Salon has a new interview up with Richard Florida, the guy who wrote The Rise of the Creative Class. His current book focuses on the competition for these folks from around the world, and one of his main points is that

"what really drove the United States to its position of greatness wasn't the fact that we had a big market or lots of raw materials or our American ingenuity. What really made America great for the better part of a century and a half has been our openness to people from all over the world. That's what built our textile industry, that's what built our railroad industry. It was because we accepted people like Andrew Carnegie in the steel industry, David Sarnoff in the electronics industry, Adolphus Busch in the beer industry, and so on.

And according to analysts' statistics for the high-tech revolution, 30 percent of the companies in the Silicon Valley area were founded by an Indian or someone born in a Chinese-speaking country. Whether it's eBay or Yahoo or Google or Hotmail, what drove America's high-tech revolution and other industries was the ability to attract the world's best talent."

I'm not sure that Andrew Carnegie or Adolphus Busch are "heroes" we ought to be emulating. But I certainly agree that openness to diversity and engagement with difference are important values.

I don't pretend to understand economic theory. I should, frankly, begin to figure it out and I've yearned FOR YEARS for something like the slide show that Women's Action for New Directions used to do about nuclear weapons. I'd like something like that oriented towards understanding global economics. In the meantime, I try to puzzle my way through interviews such as this one, and I cling to any evidence that openness to diversity supports the flourishing of communities.