Tag Archives: Creative class

Virginia Scores No. 5 in Creative Class Ranking

Economic geographer Richard Florida has published a new book, “The Rise of the Creative Class, Revisited,” and now that he’s blogging for The Atlantic, he’s publishing a lot of his data on his blog. Good news for fans of his creative-class analysis.

I was pleased to see that the Old Dominion ranks fifth in the country as measured by the creative-class share of the workforce. The creative class, by Florida’s definition, includes professionals in the fields of science and technology, design and architecture, arts, entertainment and media, and healthcare, law, management and education. Comprising one third of the national workforce, the creative class contributes disproportionately to innovation and economic growth.

Virginia, where 36.4% of the workforce falls into the creative category, owes its high ranking to inclusion in the Washington metropolitan statistical area. Washington, D.C., where the creative professions account for 57.8% of the workforce, took the top spot on the list. In Maryland, ranking third nationally, the share is 38%. Also in the Top 10 were Massachusetts (39% share), Connecticut (37%), Colorado (35.9%), New Hampshire (34.8%), New York (34.7%), Washington (34.7%) and Minnesota(34.6%).

Florida’s ranking of the top creative “counties” in the country is dominated by Northern Virginia jurisdictions. (Florida includes small independent cities such as Fairfax and Falls Church as counties.)


But the story is not all Northern Virginia. Albemarle County ranks 15th in the country. That distinction can’t be attributed solely to the University of Virginia. You don’t see any other college towns on the list, do you? (It would be interesting to know how Albemarle would have ranked if its numbers had been combined with the independent city of Charlottesville, making it truly comparable to counties outside Virginia.)

And then there’s York County in Hampton Roads. York County? Who would have figured it as one of the nation’s creative-class hotbeds?

All things considered, not a bad showing.

— JAB

Bottom-Up Intellectual Ferment in Richmond

Ibrahim Abdul-Matin

by James A. Bacon

Is religion a positive force for solving environmental challenges? That was the topic of a friendly debate last night between Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, a former sustainability advisor to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Scott Wayne, a former British diplomat and now founder of the Frontier Project creativity consulting firm.

The debate, which was moderated by Roberta Oster Sachs, a CBS producer, took place in the Frontier Project’s office in Shockoe Bottom. It was an intimate gathering. Wine and cheese was served before, during and after the debate. Every one of the 30 or so members of the audience had a chance, if they wanted, to make comments and ask questions.

Abdul-Matin, author of “The Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet,” took the position that religion is a positive force. The major threats to the environment are driven by excessive consumption, a vice that the spiritual values taught by major religions act to temper.

Scott Wayne

Wayne countered that the biggest threat to the environment wasn’t consumption per se but the extraordinary growth in the number of consumers worldwide. What the world needs is fewer people, which can be accomplished by more widespread practice of birth control. But some of the world’s religions, most notably the Catholic Church, are hostile to birth control.

OK, that’s a gross oversimplification of their viewpoints, but it conveys the tenor of the discussion. What was remarkable about the session was not that it took place between world-renowned religious scholars or literary figures but that it took place between two ordinary Richmonders. Well, perhaps I shouldn’t say “ordinary.” Abdul-Matin and Wayne are far more accomplished than the average Joe. Indeed,  Abdul-Matin has written a book that broaches the topic. Yet neither of them enjoys any great celebrity.

What struck me is that nothing like this ever took place in Richmond when I first moved here some 25 years ago. The Richmond region is far more intellectually vibrant today than it once was. The love of ideas is no longer confined to the campuses of the region’s three universities, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond University and Virginia Union University. The thirst for intellectual stimulation is ubiquitous.

Richmonders have always prided themselves as patrons of the arts and culture. We have a symphony. We have a ballet. We have one of the finest art museums in the country. We have a lecture series, the Richmond Forum, that brings in luminaries from around the world. But that’s old-school patronage of the arts. You go to the event, you sit, you listen, and then maybe you talk about it with your spouse on the drive home.

People today aren’t content to simply sit and listen. They want to be engaged. They want to participate in the interchange of ideas. Events like the Frontier Project’s discussion series appeal to this craving.

There’s a larger lesson here for readers of Bacon’s Rebellion and others who share our passion for building more prosperous, livable and sustainable communities. I have written extensively about the importance of the so-called “creative class” to driving artistic, scientific and entrepreneurial innovation in a region. Creative-class people are doers, not watchers. They don’t gravitate to communities that support what economic geographer Richard Florida calls the SOBs — symphony, opera and ballet. They gravitate to communities where they can get engaged.

Thus, to members of the creative class (as opposed to the corporate class), the coolest things about Richmond bubble from the bottom up. The French Film Festival. The James River Writers Festival. The Folk Festival. The First Fridays art walk. The C3 speaker series on innovation. To that list, perhaps, we can add the Frontier Project discussion series.

(In a similar vein, while Richmond may be one of the biggest cities in the United States lacking a pro-sports franchise, it has a active and impassioned amateur sports community. Rather than watch someone else play sports, Richmond’s creatives prefer to go mountain biking, do open-water swimming in the James River or join Seal Team outdoor fitness training on Belle Isle.)

There is no metric that I know of to measure the intellectual vitality of a region. The average level of education in Richmond may have increased somewhat during the years that I have lived here but that doesn’t begin to account for the quantum leap in curiosity, excitement and engagement that I have witnessed. I love this town, and with each passing year I know I made the right decision to make it my home.

Making High-Brow Art Accessible to the Masses

Wintergreen's musical stage

by James A. Bacon

When you think of symphony, modern dance and other high art forms, Nelson County, Va., is not the first locale that normally leaps to mind. Bluegrass, maybe. Not Beethoven. But Nelson County is home to the Wintergreen Resort, and  Wintergreen Performing Arts puts on one of the most marvelous music festivals in Virginia. That festival, which encompasses more than 200 events over five weeks, is one of the state’s great treasures.

My wife and I visited friends in Wintergreen this weekend to escape the sweltering Richmond heat (only 92° on the mountaintop, not 102°), do a little hiking (with a emphasis on “little,” given the temperature) and expand our cultural horizons. Saturday morning we took in a lecture, Film and Postmodernism, learning to appreciate for the first time in our Philistine lives the difference between “modernism” and “post modernism.” That evening, we listened to  Symphony No. 7 of the late-19th century Austrian composer Anton Bruckner. The next morning my wife and friends enjoyed a “coffee concert” of contemporary classical music.

Had we been so inclined, we could have taken cooking lessons or embarked upon tours of Nelson County’s burgeoning organic and artisanal foods community.

Wintergreen pulls in artists from around the country to perform in a wide range of classical genres. The organizers like artistic diversity. This year the festival is entitled “Innovation 2012.” By way of explanation, Artistic and Executive Director Larry Alan Smith cites the insight of Steve Jobs:

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

I loved the fact that I could attend the symphony wearing shorts, Topsiders and a short-sleeved shirt while sipping on white wine. Beats getting dressed up. One  take-away lesson is that the high-brow arts should break out of the concert halls and be performed in venues where the plebs and riff-raff can partake. Another is that Virginia needs more events like this.

The Wintergreen festival stretched my mental boundaries, which I need to do more often. As Jobs said, engaging in new experiences fosters creativity. That’s true for individuals, and it’s true for entire communities. The Charlottesville and Richmond metro regions are fortunate to have Wintergreen in their back yard.

Hardware, Software and Heartware

Big-time heartware in downtown Richmond

Dan Slone spends a lot of time thinking about how to build more prosperous, livable and sustainable communities (see previous post). His thinking integrates bodies of thought from the green movement, which is all about creating sustainable communities, and New Urbanism, where the main emphasis is creating livable places. Dan is a visionary but he’s acutely aware that we live in a society of finite resources and that our ability to implement cool ideas is constrained by the private sector’s need for profits and the public sector’s fiscal capacity.

Elected officials and planners expend most of their mental energy on what Slone figuratively calls municipal hardware and software. Hardware refers to physical infrastructure like transportation, public works, utilities and public buildings. Software refers to things like zoning codes and the rules of governance. But there is a third, relatively neglected element that’s just as important when it comes to creating livable communities — what he terms heartware.

Heartware considers the beauty and aesthetics of the built environment, Slone said this morning in a C3 address in Richmond. It integrates biophilia, or the love of the living environment. It encompasses the sense of community and belonging, and it is informed by the sense of “place” that makes a neighborhood special, unique and authentic.

“Heartware elements don’t fall within our fiscal analysis but they have fiscal consequences,” he said. Business leaders take into consideration a region’s hardware and software when considering where to invest their capital. But they also consider the heartware. They ask themselves, “Will I like being here? Will my employees want to come here?”

I think it’s a useful taxonomy. In the knowledge economy, in which people are quite literally an organization’s most important assets, intangible “heartware” will influence how easily companies attract and retain executive, managerial and creative talent they need to prosper. Richmonders have gotten the message. What they will do with that insight is not yet clear.

— JAB

Virginia and the “Creative Food Economy”

Evrim Dogu stands in front of his bakery Sub Rosa, which is still under construction.

by James A. Bacon

Evrim Dogu had a simple idea: He wanted to start a bakery that used locally grown and milled grains for his bread. But as he researched his business plan, he discovered that simple didn’t mean easy. The consolidation of grain farming, milling and baking into industrial combines serving national markets has left little local infrastructure to support artisanal bakers.

A century ago, every Virginia county had a mill, says Dogu, a spindle-thin man with heavy stubble and a mop of unruly hair.  Some had 20 or 30. Now there’s only one stone mill in the state that grinds grains in small amounts but it can’t produce enough for the bakery he has in mind. Rebuilding that infrastructure to serve the burgeoning locally owned foods movement won’t be easy. “A miller will laugh at you if you come to him with 5,000 pounds [of grain]. …A lot of knowledge has been lost.”

But Dogu is forging ahead, even if it means milling the grain himself. Thanks to a Supporting East End Entrepreneurship Development (SEED) grant from the Bon Secours Richmond Health System, he’s acquiring a mini-stone mill from Austria that will allow him to grind wheat, rye and corn on the premises of his Church Hill bakery. Meanwhile, he’s been reaching out to Virginia farmers willing to supply grains according to his demanding — some might say fanatical — specifications. When he opens, Richmond foodies will be able to buy bread for which the grain was grown, cleaned, milled and baked locally.

The locally grown food movement is catching on nationally, and the Richmond-Charlottesville region is in the forefront. In a trend that parallels the consumer shift from national beer labels to locally grown breweries (see “Hoist a Mug to Win-Win-Win Economic Development“), an increasing number of Virginians are seeking out locally grown wines, cheeses, meat and produce. It part, the shift reflects a quest for food that is tastier and healthier. In part, it represents a backlash against standardized products produced by distant corporations. Many Richmonders like to know the people who are putting food on their table, and they like supporting local enterprises.

From a regional economic development perspective, the locally grown food movement is a healthy trend. As Urbanist Jane Jacobs argued in “Dark Ages Ahead,” import replacement — the local manufacture of products formerly imported from outside the region — can really boost a metropolitan economy. An additional reason to encourage locally grown foods is that they appeal to members of the so-called “creative class” who propel economic progress in the knowledge economy.

Writes economic geographer Richard Florida: “The demand for higher-quality food – both from individual consumers and from restaurants – is already leading to a tighter, more organic, higher-quality food supply chain. Adding creativity, so to speak, to food production will increase its value; we’ll pay more for it, and that will make this kind of food production economically more viable. Who knows? Perhaps the economics will someday enable the remaking and reuse of declining ex-urbs as centers of more vital, higher-end, creative farming communities.”

Such considerations are probably far from the mind of Evrim Dogu, who is driven by a passion all his own. The son of a successful Northern Virginia restaurateur, Dogu came to Richmond to attend Virginia Commonwealth University. (Dogu, by the way, is a Turkish name and the “g” is silent.) After graduating in 2006, he swore off the restaurant business, where he’d been working since age 14, because he wanted to teach. But the food bug bit him and he started baking artisan bread for Richmond-area subscribers, using his father’s wood-fired ovens in Northern Virginia.

Now he has set the bar higher. It’s not enough just to grow grains locally. He wants to use “heirloom” grains — grains that trace their genetic heritage to Virginia’s pre-industrial era. That means persuading farmers to switch from the super high-productivity seeds distributed by industrial combines to the likes of Turkey Red, brought to the United States by Mennonites from the Ukraine, and Triumph 64, a modern grain whose genetics haven’t been altered in 50 years. “Part of the challenge,” he freely concedes, “is convincing people to grow these things.” But he’ll do what it takes, including spending all day with the farmer cleaning the seed.

It’s a tough business, says Rick Grossberg, managing director of The Farm Table, a 750-member co-op that distributes locally grown produce in the Richmond area. Despite all the work it takes to produce, locally grown bread does not command a large price premium in the market. But, he says of Dogu, “If he’s going to mill his own flour, he’s the only one I know of who’s doing it. That’s very cool.”

The Creative Class Meets New Urbanism

by James A. Bacon

WEST PALM BEACH, FLA–Richard Florida, the author of the “Rise of the Creative Class,” has long remarked upon the creative class’ penchant for living in certain cities rather than others. He has devoted much of his energy over the past 10 years to illuminating the importance of a community’s tolerance for cultural diversity and its openness to newcomers as a trait valued by the creative class. But there has always been as sub-theme in his writing. Creatives also are drawn to cities with a vibrant urban fabric.

In my own Virginia-centric writing about economic development in knowledge economy, I have drawn upon Florida’s insights about the creative class to argue that one of the  challenges facing Virginia’s metro regions is creating an environment where creatives want to live. And I have turned to the work of the New Urbanists for insight into how to create more livable and sustainable communities.

Thus, it was a source of great delight to hear Florida address the 2012 Congress for New Urbanism this afternoon here in West Palm Beach. Florida and various New Urbanism luminaries had crossed paths before, but this was the first time he ever participated in a CNU event. Most  of his remarks were vintage Florida, familiar to anyone who has read his books. But he threw out fresh meat to creative class junkies like myself by sharing the results from some of his recent research.

Florida’s original insight was that corporations are not the key drivers of economic growth and development. Members of what he calls the “creative class” — those artists, scientists, educators, entrepreneurs, professionals and solvers of complex problems who comprise roughly 30% of the workforce and account for the vast majority of innovation in our society and economy — drive economic development. Corporations follow the talent. They do business where they can gain access to people with the skills they are seeking. Additionally, when creative people  mix, mingle and combine ideas, they ferment entrepreneurial opportunities, generating new enterprises from the ground up.

The moral of the story: Rather than recruit corporations and corporate investment directly, regions should focus on creating an ambiance that attracts and retains the creative class. For the most part, creatives aren’t looking for the traditional cultural status symbols like stadiums, convention centers, symphonies and ballets. They are looking for cool neighborhoods with vibrant street culture and “authenticity,” an urban fabric rooted in the city’s unique history and culture, as opposed to the sterile mall culture of chain stores and restaurants.

Florida identifies three primary things that give people purpose, meaning and happiness in life. First is family, friends and social relationships. Second is the ability to perform creative work. And third is the place where they live. Sure, everyone wants low crime, good schools, a clean environment and the presence of arts and culture. But two traits drive strong emotional attachment to a region. According to Florida’s recent research, the second most important factor is tolerance — openness to diversity regardless of race, religion, ethnicity and sexual preference. The most important is the community’s aesthetics, beauty — what he calls the “quality of place.”

The quality of place is something that the New Urbanists think about day and night, and their influence upon Florida’s thinking is clear. In Florida’s mind, quality of place is influenced by a number of factors: (1) the degree to which a city (or region) has valued and preserved its history and heritage; (2) the extent to which neighborhoods are walkable, have mixed uses and offer transportation alternatives, (3) the depth of community investment in arts and culture, including popular art and music, not just the high-brow stuff, and (4) the integration of the natural and built environment in a way that’s accessible to the population. Thus, things like parks, rivers and tree canopy assume far more importance than traditional economic developers would ever imagine.

As I consider my home town of Richmond, these things all ring true to me. That’s why I’ve been blogging recently about building murals, indie bands and art districts as a sign of Richmond’s cultural renaissance and eventual entrepreneurial rebound. There will always be a role for recruiting corporate headquarters, back offices and manufacturing facilities. But, as Richmond has discovered the hard way, corporations come and go. Traditional economic development must be accompanied by community development — creating the “great places” that attract and retain society’s wealth creators. Richmonders are making that transition in thinking, but they are not fully there yet. I’ll do what I can to nudge them in the right direction.

Richmond’s Creative Class and the Indie Music Scene

Source: Wonkblog, Washington Post

Richmond is no one’s idea of a cultural trend setter. I often joke that the last cultural innovation that originated in my fair city and spread beyond its borders was the festival flag (an adornment whose allure has long since peaked and faded). Perhaps I could add the Geico Gecko and Cave Man commercials that emanate from the creative geniuses at the Martin Agency.

But it turns out that Richmond registers on the map of independent music, a sign of its emergence as a regional center of artistic creativity. (See “Art as Richmond’s Future.“) A new paper, “The Geographic Flow of Music,” tracks which cities around the world have the most influence over musical trends by analyzing listening habits on Last.fm, a musical website that pinpoints users by geography. By this measure, as shown in the graphic above, Richmond ranks fifth — right below L.A. and Boston — in influencing the indie music world.

Carbon Leaf, one of Richmond's best known indie bands.

Sums up Brad Plumer at the Washington Post: ” The largest cities aren’t always the most influential adopters of new music (or snubbers of stale music). New York and Los Angeles don’t appear to have nearly as much influence over listening trends as, say, Montreal, even though those areas are presumably home to many more local bands and musical groups.”

Too bad the Post didn’t take note of the awesomeness of Washington’s smaller, neighbor to the south. That’s OK, the people who live in Richmond know what we’ve got. And many welcome the transformation of this old southern town focused on the past into a vibrant creative center with an eye to the future.

Meanwhile, notes the Times-Dispatch, the Chamber of Commerce is leading a delegation of 150 business, government and civic leaders to Boston to learn what they can from that city’s success. The message from Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino:  It’s all about public-private partnerships.

Dudes, it’s the 21st century. Top-down doesn’t work any more. Bottom-up does work. Forget copying other cities and see how you can stimulate the creativity that’s already here. There’s lots of it, if you know where to look.

Hat tip to “FreeDem.”

— JAB

Art as Richmond’s Future


by James A. Bacon

Art in Richmond is busting out of the museums, universities and galleries and into the streets. The latest efflorescence occurred Saturday when a dozen nationally known street artists gathered to create an outdoor gallery along the James River Power Plant Building and Floodwall along the canal walk. Hundreds of people came on down to see the artists in action.

Jon Baliles... with beer cup in hand

The event was organized by Jon Baliles, who was inspired by seeing something similar in Venice, and Ed Trask, a musician and mural painter who recruited the other artists. Although Baliles works for the City of Richmond, he and Trask pulled off this event on their own initiative. It took about one year from conception to execution.

Craft booth.

Once upon at time, it’s fair to say, Richmond was a pretty stodgy place. It had some beautiful neighborhoods, most notably Church Hill and the Fan, and a fairly vibrant downtown. It had more than its share of Fortune 500 and other corporate headquarters, along with a good number of law firms, financiers and marketing/advertising professionals and a smatter of manufacturing. But the city was nobody’s idea of a center for innovation.

Chilling out at the art festival on a Saturday afternoon.

Richmond may never make it as a leading center of technological innovation. But it could become a respectable center for creative arts and the businesses that intersect with the arts. The Virginia Commonwealth University art program, rated the best of any public university in the country, lures a lot of artistic talent to the city. And many of those artists, like Trask, wind up staying.

Artists don’t tend to launch the kind of fast-growth companies that turn metropolitan areas into growth dynamos. But they do create an ambiance that other educated and creative people like to share. They create the conditions for entrepreneurial vitality by making Richmond the kind of place where executives from Capital One, Philip Morris or other corporate behemoths like to live when they get tired of working for the Man and want to start their own businesses.

Economically, Richmond is going through a difficult time right now. But it is reinventing itself from the ground up. Between the James River, the canal walk and the artistic community, the old Capital of the Confederacy is morphing into something very 21st century, something very exciting.

Art for Economic Development’s Sake

Artists as Percentage of State Workforce. Click on map for more legible image.

by James A. Bacon

Forget about art for art’s sake. Let’s talk about art for economic development’s sake.

A couple of days ago I lauded the City of Richmond’s efforts to create a downtown arts district. (See “Richmond’s Wine-and-Brie Path to Community Development.”) I was thinking mainly in terms of the effect that a cluster of artists would have in improving the region’s quality of life, making Richmond city a fun — dare I say it, even a cool  — place to live. It turns out that I may have sold the arts district short by neglecting to observe that artists also make decent money and contribute to innovation.

A research update to a study by the National Endowment for the Arts, “Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005,” suggests that artists aren’t all of the starving variety. Indeed, the median wage/salary for artists — a group ranging from architects, producers and writers on the high end to dancers, photographers and “other” entertainers on the bottom — averages out to be $43,230. That’s 10% higher than the average wage.

Artists are highly entrepreneurial: they are 3.5 times more likely than the total United States workforce to be self-employed. They also are better educated — more than half have a bachelor’s degree. However, they also are less likely to have full-year or full-time employment, which accounts for their having lower median incomes than workers with similar education levels.

Not surprisingly, New York and California have among the largest concentrations of artists in the country, although the top honors goes to Washington, D.C., with 3.1% of the population. (That’s “artist,” not “con artist.”) The home state of Broadway counts 2.3% of its residents as artists, while artists comprise 2% of the workforce in LaLa Land. Virginia lags the national average: only 1.3% of its workers are classified as artists. Virginia stands out artistically speaking only in one way: It has a high concentration of writers and authors. (Ironically, Virginia ranks way below average in the book publishing occupational cluster.) Richmond, for what it’s worth, has a high concentration of dancers.

As economic geographer Richard Florida has observed, artists are a key component of the “creative class” that contributes disproportionately to innovation and entrepreneurial activity. In the case of Richmond, the artistic cluster seems to be tied closely to the advertising/marketing industry segment. We’re not talking “high tech” here — a will ‘o the wisp for a region like Richmond.  But encouraging the growth of Richmond’s artistic community strikes me as a sound economic development strategy that builds upon existing assets (the Martin Agency, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the VCU arts department) and contributes to the growth of a robust creative class.

Virginia’s Brain Drain

by James A. Bacon

California has a lot of problems, including a dysfunctional political system, structural budget deficits and a lousy business climate. But it’s still a magnet for some of the world’s most talented scientists and engineers. According to a new Milken Institute study, “What Brain Drain? California among the Best in the U.S. at Retaining Skilled Workers,” the Golden State had nearly the best record among the 50 states for retaining skilled workers. Between 2000 and 2009, roughly 35% of skilled (college educated), native-born Californians lived outside the state, compared to 50% for the average state.

And how did Virginia fare? Not very well. Roughly 53% of skilled native-born Virginians lived outside the state during the same decade. Bottom line: Skilled Virginians are more likely to leave their home state in search of opportunity and a better life than other Americans are.

California’s Achilles heel has been its ability to lure skilled, native-born Americans into the state. But it has more than compensated by its ability to attract skilled, foreign-born workers — and to retain them at a much higher rate than the national average. (It’s not clear from the numbers how many move back to their own countries, as opposed to other states in the U.S.) Virginia, conversely…. not so good. We retain skilled, foreign-born workers at a lower level than the national average.

The Milken study warns that California must avoid complacency. Technology clusters are developing in other regions of the country — Texas, in particular, has an even better track record of attracting and retaining skilled workers.

Californians also should be alarmed by the mounting dissatisfaction of many businesses, a problem highlighted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published today by Steve Malanga. California perennially ranks near the bottom of “business climate” surveys, and nobody’s perceptions seem more negative than those of California businesses themselves. He writes:

According to a poll by a California coalition of businesses and industries, 84% of executives and owners said that if they weren’t already in the state, they wouldn’t consider starting up there, while 64% said the main reason they stayed was the difficulty of relocating their particular kind of business. For several years in a row, California has ranked dead last in Chief Executive magazine’s poll about states’ business environments.

Despite their unhappiness, most businesses stay. And the access to human capital is undoubtedly a major reason why.

Meanwhile, Virginia may revel in its “best state for business” awards but outside of Northern Virginia, the state’s economic performance plods ahead roughly in line with the national averages. We may excel at traditional, ’70s-era corporate recruitment, which may account for 20% or so of new job creation, but Virginia still has no coherent policy to recruit and retain top scientific, technical and entrepreneurial talent — the so-called creative class so critical to economic growth.

At least we can look forward to the completion of the Longitudinal Data System that will allow researchers to track the movement of Virginians of varying levels of educational achievement into the workforce and in/out of the state. One day we’ll be able to routinely conduct the same kind of analysis as the Milken Institute, though at a far greater level of detail.  Maybe we can start thinking seriously then about our own Brain Drain.