Florida resetting our economic default status

Economic-development guru Richard Florida has a new book out. Called The Great Reset – with a nod, I hope , to Kurt Andersen’s 2009 work about the current economic crash, Reset — it’s Florida’s look at what this enormous change in our national financial circumstances  could bring about in our terms of economic-development trends such as home-ownership and geographic fluctuations in population. To get a taste, take a look at this interview of Florida by Conor Clarke in the Atlantic.

Mini-summit with maxi blinders

Change is hard. And it’s hard because people – especially people in public positions – have so much trouble getting at, and acknowledging, the truth.

The difficulties were vividly demonstrated last week at the Restoring Prosperity to Cleveland Mini-Summit sponsored by the nonprofit, nonpartisan organization Greater Ohio and held June 8 at Cleveland State University’s Wolstein Center. I attended, not as a member of the media, but as the small-business owner that I also am.

The five-hour meeting was part of a series of discussions about economically reviving Ohio that are being held in cities around the state as part of a research and policy-development collaboration between Greater Ohio and the Brookings Institution. Elected officials, including City of Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, Cuyahoga County Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones, Ohio House Speaker Armond Budish and Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher, were joined by members of the Greater Cleveland business, philanthropic, NGO and community-development sectors to hear the Brookings Institution’s findings about the state economy and take part in panels and workshops.

What the sponsors apparently hoped to accomplish was not just to reveal that Ohio is ineffectively using its federal stimulus money by giving equal amounts to all counties instead of concentrating it on the state’s job-and-industry powerhouses, its major cities. Greater Ohio Director Lavea Brachman and Brookings Institution Vice President Bruce Katz indicated that they also wanted participants to cast aside old patterns of rhetoric and thinking and evaluate Ohio’s problems with truly fresh eyes.

Tough assignment. And, judging from what was said and what was offered as solutions, none of the speakers and panelists even came close to accomplishing it.

Here’s why:

Ohio’s leaders in general and Cleveland’s leaders in specific have what seems like an unbreakable habit of looking around to see what other communities are doing and whatever the trend is nationwide, adopting that policy. Sometimes these policies are necessary and good, but many times, they don’t address this community’s specific needs and problems. It’s the trickle-down theory of  change: We copy other cities and states instead of inventing our own fresh solutions to our own unique problems. And by the time Ohio and Cleveland get around to embracing ideas from elsewhere, often they’ve become copies of copies – diluted, out of date and no longer effective.

Maybe even worse, hand-me-down solutions reinforce  popular wisdom, and popular wisdom - because it takes a long time and a lot of simplification to become widely accepted – often amounts to deeply entrenched bias. It’s a shallow, knee-jerk, easy response to complex and ever-changing situations whose effective resolutions actually require new  insight and creative approaches.

Ohio and Cleveland have copied many, many ideas from other places to try to solve the deeply rooted and horribly tangled messes that are our economy, educational system and other vital processes. All any of us here have to do is look around to see clearly that this doesn’t work.

It doesn’t work.  And we all know it doesn’t work. But at the Mini-Summit, as is typical of big gatherings of established community leaders, participants maintained a smooth, smiling, we’re-on-it attitude as they urged worn-out policy trends and a bland civic optimism on listeners as cures for the community’s cancerous ailments.

The copied policy that got to me the most was the one about technology – specifically IT and biomedical technology – being the answer for the state and Cleveland economies. It’s an idea that’s been talked about all around the nation, as if this were 1958 again and the World of Tomorrow gadgetry that hard sciences can provide were all our society needs to be prosperous and fulfilled again. Ohio and Greater Cleveland have joined this parade of venture capitalists and government grantors by creating a slew of business resources and programs – the Third Frontier, JumpStart, MAGNET, the Cuyahoga County New Product Development & Entrepreneurship Loans, etc. - for technology manufacturers and, essentially nothing for any other kind of entrepreneur.    

To hear this technology bias offered as a truism at the same time that panelists were paying lip service to economic diversity and full use of our human capital made my blood boil. The world has uncountable needs that cannot be met purely by inventing and manufacturing new technologies – needs from nourishment and clothing to news, knowledge and, yes, government - that have given rise to enormous numbers of successful businesses, both for-profit and nonprofit.  Cleveland and Ohio have many talented, creative, hard-working people whose skills do not lie in developing scientific or technological products, people who can and must be included in our economic future if we’re to have an economic future.

That means that Ohio and Cleveland can’t create opportunities and funding only for technology-making companies. That’s putting all the eggs in one basket – a  failed policy of the past.  Has Ohio learned nothing from the collapse of the steel industry? There must be moral and material encouragment for entrepreneurs of all kinds, support for creative and productive people of all kinds.  

It’s time to grow a spine, throw out all the borrowed junk we’re hoarding, and think for ourselves. We must do things differently and better. And right now.

It’s already almost too late.

From the arts hearing: signs of progress and one epiphany

The numbers are grim. Artists suffering unemployment at twice the rate of other workers. Ten thousand nonprofit arts organizations nationwide in real danger of closing and taking 260,000 jobs with them. Arts and artists losing more of their tiny piece of the nation’s 40-percent-smaller philanthropic pie to other causes such as health, while ticket-sales drop, forcing severe cost reductions including lay-offs.

And yet, scary as the information was that emerged from yesterday’s House Education & Labor Committee hearing on the impact of the arts on the economy and employment, it may not impress an American public that’s been listening to the sound of the world collapsing for months now. Bad news is everywhere – with banks failing, the stock market falling down a mine shaft, the newspaper industry dying and real estate worth about as much as Confederate dollars, the arts industry’s plight probably doesn’t seem any more important than the retailers’ or automakers’ or the airlines’. All of us are, or have friends, in trouble.

In fact, the American public may never fully understand just how stunning this hearing was – not because it revealed an arts industry in financial crisis, but because it revealed one with an economic, social and political clout that artists and their supporters could hardly have imagined even 10 years ago.

For generations – centuries, really - artists in the Western world have been despised as vagrants and low-order servants, shiftless eccentrics, dreamers, emotional basket cases and addicts, at best impractical and at worst morally dangerous. Their work may have been enjoyed, even prized, but they themselves seemed permanently marked as a kind of untouchable class by both the wealthy holders of power and the starchy keepers of bourgeois industry and respectability.

In 20th-century America, the public’s perception of artists as elite beggars, drains on the public and private coffers of prosaic, hard-working citizens, kept artists and their enterprises largely exiled from the circles of civic and economic influence – as generally disregarded as women by the bluff, tough, masculine money-makers and political power brokers.

And now? In the last decade or so, through the hard work of advocates, agencies and artists themselves, arts and culture  have begun to be more widely recognized as the vital economic and social forces they are. Giant money-generators and employers, irreplaceable educators, international ambassadors, community unifiers amd developers - the arts have been discovered to be all of these. And more: the key, along with all other creative professions, to our economic future.

How did they get to this point and how they should go on? The answer to both is education – not just the formal education of our children, which is indeed crucial, but the education of the public. Research, from RAND reports on the value of arts in schools to the economic-development studies of “The Rise of the Creative Class” author Richard Florida, has provided the tools; indefatigable public-awareness campaigns by leaders from Americans for the Arts down to local arts-council directors have provided the force. Slowly for a long time and now, at last, rapidly, they have been wearing away the blinders and barricades that have kept Americans from seeing the truth about the arts.

After perhaps a thousand years of advocates trying to persuade Western societies that art was valuable because it was good for the spirit, we’re seeing  two completely practical themes – the job-training benefits to children and the financial benefits to local economies - completely change how community leaders think about the arts.

Artists need not be afraid that positioning their work as a kind of grease for the wheels of capitalism will result in art losing its true value. Those capable of being moved by art always will be. But it’s absolutely essential that the very many who believe art has nothing whatever to do with them come to understand that art is, at least, important to their own prosperity. Their education must progress.

Luckily for advocates whose job it will be to continue that education, actor Tim Daly has discovered the next significant tool: technology.

America is in love with technology as an economic driver and as entertainment. And as Daly pointed out during his testimony at yesterday’s hearing,  ”Without art, there’s no iPod.”  It was a moment of head-smacking epiphany for some of us – what he meant was, without design, without artistic content, our beloved music players, computers, flat-screen TVs, CDs and DVDs would never have come about. No one would be scrambling to get cell phones with camera, game and internet entertainment functions or satellite radio with a zillion music stations or Wiis with their lifelike sports experiences or endless other products that those with artistic and creative skills have made more imaginative, exciting, effective, comfortable or beautiful.

Daly’s is a message that the American public – and American businesspeople and politicians - will understand: The arts create the cool, money-making products we want. Other ideas will likely emerge from the Education & Labor hearings this spring, but even if none did, this one might be powerful enough to take the arts movement to a whole new level.

Virtual networks for actual economic development

I made a recording today.

No, I wasn’t singing, although I’ve made those kinds of recordings, too, and boy, can that process be tedious.

This was a lot easier because all I had to do was talk about what’s important to me professionally: my business; helping the world value and practice creativity; and building a happier future by inventing better solutions to our problems.

A woman named Betsey Merkel was behind the camera. A member of the Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-OPEN, www.i-open.org), she’s been instrumental in helping Northeast Ohioans form themed virtual networks to promote idea-sharing and more productive, collaborative efforts among people trying to solve community problems and/or build business.

Merkel was recording my words for the Women’s Enterprise Network (www.womensenterprisenetwork.net), a group made up of women interested in empowering themselves, helping each other and contributing to economic development and civic leadership. WEN isn’t just a virtual network: Its members regularly meet for dinners, coffees and face-to-face discussion. But with Merkel’s help, the network has also begun building a virtual video library of community knowledge gleaned from those of us who are out there working, being entrepreneurial and trying to improve the world around us.

Betsey wanted me to answer three questions for the video: What do I feel passionate about right now; what do I want other people to know, think, feel and do; and what do I envision for the future?

I’m not sure how much I added to Northeast Ohio’s store of knowledge, but I came away encouraged that someone wanted to know what I think and what I’m trying to do. More important, I was heartened to discover that so many talented people in my region are working valiantly to change our collective luck by thinking innovatively and supporting each other. That’s the kind of network we all need. And it just gets better as more of us join it.