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July 9, 2020 - 7:00am
In The Times, Daniel Finkelstein argues that there’s a fundamental flaw in the government’s ‘levelling-up” agenda. He begins with the premise that, in order to level-up, “non metropolitan areas need to become… more metropolitan.” In other words, if the Tories want to help their socially conservative red wall voters then they must re-embrace the socially liberal values of the so-called “Creative Class”.
It’s a thought-provoking piece, but also profoundly wrong in a way that only the cleverest arguments can be. In fact, there are so many different levels of wrongness that it would take a much longer piece to explore them all. So, for now, I’m going to focus on just one weakness — which is the mismatch between the importance placed on the Creative Class and what they’ve actually managed to create.
If these highly-educated, open-minded metropolitan types really are the key to prosperity then where is it? On all the most important metrics — GDP, productivity, wages and innovation — the progress made in the last few decades has been lacklustre. Compared to the thirty or forty years after the Second World War, the neoliberal era has underperformed.
How did the grey-suited, corporate clones of the post-war era achieve so much more than their supposedly liberated children and grandchildren?
I don’t make the comparison to discount the value of tolerance and diversity. Indeed, quite the opposite — I’m lamenting the fact that the knowledge economy of the 21st century has done so little with the big advantage of a wider talent pool. The same could be said about the massive expansion of higher education — not to mention the vast store of knowledge made available through the internet.
And that’s not all. The creatives have dazzling global cities in which to work, live and play. Unlike previous eras, they can continually interact with one another wherever in the world they go. And they’ve been unshackled from the stifling social conventions of the past — free to be who they want to be. And what’s more they’re constantly celebrated for it, their cultural status elevated as that of the working class has fallen.
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SubscribeA clever riposte, but also, I think, wrong in its central premise: that the creative class have underperformed relative to how another class might have done. I yield to few in my admiration for the postwar settlement; I’m not sure there’s been a happier fate in all of human history that to live through the first thirty years after World War II in democratic Western Europe. But surely we need to remember that this situation was a product of a particular era with particular demographic and social determinants. A steadily increasing population with relatively few dependents created the condition for growing prosperity; and the conditions for growth were also produced by the fact that people in 1945 had hardly any consumer goods, even those which discharged what most of us nowadays think of as fairly essential household functions, e.g., washing machines, refrigerators, telephones. The problem in recent decades is surely that most of have most of what we need; that’s the main reason economies in developed countries have stagnated. Witness the desperate efforts to keep us consuming – i.e., companies selling us ever more advanced models of mobile phones every two years, when we all lived quite cheerfully without any mobile phones at all a quarter of a century ago. What was the last invention that really implemented a dramatic improvement to our quality of life?
Secular stagnation is the norm for highly developed countries. Whether it’s the creative classes or others who achieve it, we need to find ways of living with low-growth economies. Japan’s done so with the minimum of social disruption during the last thirty years, so maybe that’s where we should start learning. In turn, the rest of the world will end up having to learn from us.
Did Japan really dodge a bullet through xenophobia? I don’t think so. Their population demographics are now dangerously skewed toward the elderly. It now has the world’s oldest population. Another 20 years of steady state and they are in deep, deep trouble.Young people are essential to any country. If you cannot create them organically then you have to acquire them. As we in the UK did through immigration. Without the young any country will eventually run out of road. Japan is way out front of those countries set to find out just what that means.
It is a good point…if robots don’t come galloping to the rescue there could be a pretty rushed, and therefore possibly chaotic, charge to get in young people from elsewhere, and that would take some managing….
But immigration is only a temporary answer to this.
and what about when the immigrants get old?
Very well said. And the last thing the non metropolitan areas need is to be more metropolitan, with all their endless BS and stabbings etc.
sham meritocracy = low productivity.
Peter, the simple answer is that peak science and technology happened in the mid twentieth century. As scientific progress has slowed and big tech has used “intellectual property rights” to take control of the little progress that persists, it has become harder to be creative and innovative.
Yes, when did everyone get so pathetic
“So why are the results so disappointing? Whether in economics, politics,
the arts or the sciences, this is an age of stagnation in which the
exceptions (because there always are some) prove the rule. And, make no
mistake, the creative class ” broadly defined ” is the ruling class. The
failures in our nation, and of the western world general, are their
failures.“
I think that’s too broadly defined to be useful. If the “creative class” are the ruling class, then their ruling class is surely the financial class.
“I’m lamenting the fact that the knowledge economy of the 21st century has done so little with the big advantage of a wider talent pool. The same could be said about the massive expansion of higher education ” not to mention the vast store of knowledge made available through the internet.“
Perhaps it’s intrinsic to the new technologies themselves, and their ownership.
“The creatives have dazzling global cities in which to work, live and
play. Unlike previous eras, they can continually interact with one
another wherever in the world they go. And they’ve been unshackled from
the stifling social conventions of the past ” free to be who they want
to be. And what’s more they’re constantly celebrated for it, their
cultural status elevated as that of the working class has fallen.”
So what’s wrong with spreading those benefits to all? That was the thrust of the Times article. Social democracy is not incompatible with social liberalism – in fact they tend to go together. And the real problem is that talented/educated people simply leave socially conservative towns – so how are you going to stop this?
Very well stated, but I think that you need look no further than the central banking structure that has been imposed on the reserve currency of the globe. Capital is now tightly held and innovations that require its use (most all) are only sanctioned for development when the fruits of said innovation can be identified and gleaned in advance of production. It is essentially the fully developed model of Mayer Amschel Rothschild.
The creative classes have been up themselves for decades, ever since singers decided to call themselves recording artists.
Going
on the assumption that freedom and risk-taking are vital to creativity, an
already risk-averse culture, coupled with the knowledge that nobody is more than
one wrong thought, tweet or misstep away from losing their livelihood, might have something to
do with the lack of creativity.
Those who can’t *do*, waffle on and on and on about *doing*.
The fashionable whiney, dimpling about how much of a waste of time meetings are doesn’t happen when you’re putting a new roof on a building or replacing the central heating…you have the meetings walking from the door to where the work’s happening…..
You don’t have a weekend away at events camp to sharpen the company focus when the company business is making stuff…the focus is sharpened a hundred times a week at all levels.
There is one very easy way to level up…just go to Sunderland and see the Nissan plant (which Nissan say is the best outside Japan and right up with the best in japan) , see the cluster of companies around it (that also sell to Mercedes, Audi etc) and find a report on how Margaret Thatcher’s government got them to come, become established and go on to become a globally improtant car manufacturer in a country where car manufacturing had fallen off a cliff just a decade earlier.
Then rinse and repeat in Nth Tyneside, Teesside, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Manchester and the Midlands……. manufacturing these days is digital, computerised, AI , robotic intensive…and demands high levels of creativity at all levels…. Maidstone and Andover if you like…
When have we ever had a creative Liberal or Socialist?
I genuinely don’t understand this worship or condemnation of either the metropolitan, middle class or working class. People are people. I have met people from metropolitan areas who I thought were very good, productive members of society and I have met people from there who were absolutely vile. The same goes for people from rural areas, middle class or working class. The same goes for culture, I have met good/vile people who have conservative cultural views as well as those who had liberal views. And also how do you define them? I have lived in both Rutland and London. Does someone from Rutland who goes and lives in London suddenly become ‘metropolitan’? Does someone from London who decides to live in outside become working class? I have never thought class or culture to be good predictor of a person’s character.