More on City Life

This weekend I parsed through a rather interesting new book by Richard Florida entitled Who's Your City?. Florida's perspective provides a nice balance to Kunstler's rather extreme one posted previously. In this book, Florida essentially argues that choosing where one lives has become the most important decision a person can make, as it affects so many life outcomes. The book outlines Florida's understanding of the economy of place and the importance of place in shaping both one's identity and one's opportunities. Additionally, Florida presents lists of preferable locales for people of various ages with the financial and social mobility to move where they choose and even provides a guide to choosing the best city for oneself. More or less, this book convinced me that living in a city isn't such a bad thing after all, as it presents enormous social benefits not often present in small towns. Living in a city also gives one the most opportunity to absorb and try new ideas in a way that can have large-reaching impact.

Here's an excerpt I found especially compelling:

...When I asked a group of my students whether they would prefer to work in a reliable, high-paying job in a factory or a lower paying, temporary job as a hair stylist, they overwhelmingly chose the latter-it was more creative and therefore seemed more rewarding. The market appears to reflect this psychology. Vocational training programs for machinists are in dire need of students, while cosmetology classes are routinely over-enrolled.

This hit home for me in the spring of 2005, when I visited a local health spa. I tend to feel awkward at such places,so I decided to make small talk with the attendant. I asked her where she was from.

"Connecticut," she replied.

"How did you end up in D.C.?"

"For college."

"Where did you go to school?"

"The University of Maryland."

That's a very good school, I thought. What had she studied there?

"Economics."

Hold on, how had economics led her to taking a job in a spa?

"Well, after college I went to work for the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

My jaw dropped.

"The BLS?" I asked. The government source of nearly all my best data? The basis for the arguments of my previous books?

"Yep."

So I asked her why she'd switched jobs. I told her that, quite frankly, moving from the BLS to a spa didn't sound like a shrewd career move for someone in her twenties with her educational background. She didn't care about that, she said.

"I was bored. I sat in a cubicle all day and looked at spreadsheets. It was tolerable only because I could go out with my friends every night, since I didn't have to think too hard during the day. But after a while I just couldn't take it. It was just so boring."

A career change was in order. "I wanted a purpose."

She enrolled in cosmetology school. She took a job in a plastic surgeon's office and got to know the work better. Now she works in the Four Seasons in Georgetown and another spa in the Virginia suburbs.

I asked her whether her salary was steady, did she get good benefits, things that we're all supposed to want. "None of that matters," she said, without a moment's hesitation.

She makes great money-based on commission-and can work as much or as little as she wants. She loves her job. She's excited every day. She likes the freedom; she's mobile. She wasn't looking for job security-at least not yet. Still, I had to imagine that at some point she would want-and need-the assurance that she could continue to do what she loved without risking her financial well-being.

In her old life, this woman had been wat the late Peter Drucker called a "knowledge worker." She'd gotten a good education and scored a job in high-level information with a reputable agency of the federal government. And she ended up hating it. The key to her professional happiness, she realized, was not in applying the knowledge she had learned in school but in using her innate creative abilities. (emphasis mine) My point is ot that her current line of work is objectively better than her old one-or the factory job my father held for so many years, for that matter-but that its in our society's best interests to make sure that these creative service jobs are stable and well paying because, among other things, they are the ones least likely to be outsourced.

(Florida, 104-106)

This excerpt raises a lot of points that I want to draw out at greater length, but we'll save that for another time.