The Rise of the Creative Class

In the information economy, creative content is a nation’s most important natural resource. “The wealth creation in an economy of ideas is dependent on the capacity of a nation to continually create content or new forms of widely distributed expression, for which they will need to invest in creative human capital throughout the economy and not merely gadgets and hardware.” (Venturelli 14). We may assume then that in the 21st century, artists will finally be able to earn a living.

Industrial Age à Information Age

As in all philosophical shifts much of the 20th century was spent applying the ideas of the industrial age onto the increasingly visible information age. At the dawning of the 21st century we are still relying on the Research and Development model of the industrial revolution which asserts that artists are valuable because they are involved in unorthodox activities which lead to innovations in the cultural sector and can sometimes even be applied to other sectors. This model values the artists’ final products, or “deliverables”, if it generates change and growth in the marketplace of ideas.

In the information economy innovation is still celebrated but the process itself of investigation and creation is valued in its own right because it adds to the cultural capital of a people. It is the content with which we do business. People participating in unorthodox activities is revered not because it may lead to something, but because it is something in its own right, a natural resource, it adds to the stockpile. Documenting these investigations and releasing them into the environment is the duty of anybody who wants to contribute.

Since humans will spend increasing amounts of time consuming information “Nations ...

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...nals in the creative sector, which have been identified as major economic catalysts. These two decisions are often at odds, especially in situations such as my current residence of Syracuse, New York where the decisions to further subsidize the burgeoning cultural district downtown was superceded by the decision to give a major tax break to a corporation in order to expand a shopping mall/entertainment unit on the outskirts of town.

[2] “Mechanisms of cultural revival include, for example: lottery systems to subsidize film production (UK), taxes on cinema receipts (France), differential postal rates to encourage domestic magazine content (Canada), tax levies on commercial publishers to subsidize small-scale independent publishers (Germany), and structural funds and tax breaks to encourage private investment in content enterprises (Canada, France Australia, India)