In one of the coolest parts of his new book, “Who’s Your City?”, creative-class guru Richard Florida argues that regions, like people, can have personalities. He identifies five standard personality types — openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion (sociability), agreeableness and neuroticism — and, based upon 600,000 survey responses from individuals around the country, plots the responses geographically.
In a nutshell, it’s possible to construct a personality profile of a region. The obvious question then arises. What is Virginia’s personality profile? And, following the line of reasoning that Florida lays out in his book, what are the implications for building more prosperous, livable and sustainable regions?
The good news is, Virginia is not a hot-spot of “neurotic” personalities — that distinction is reserved for New York and environs, and parts of the Midwest. The bad news, the “open to experience” personality type also eludes Virginia. Florida associates this category with creativity, innovation and economic growth. You’ll find it most prevalently on the West Coast and the Northeast, although there are pockets in Colorado, Texas and Florida.
Virginia is relatively devoid of the “extrovert” personality type — that’s found mostly in the Midwest and large swaths of the South. But that’s no big deal because the category is economically neutral.
The two personality types that most define Virginia are “agreeable” and “conscientious.” Combine the two together, and you get what Florida refers to as a “conventional” or “dutiful” personality cluster. On the positive side, people tend to be more pleasant and more trustful. They get along. But they don’t challenge authority, don’t rock the boat, and they’re not terribly innovative. And innovation, remember, is one of the keys to prosperity in a globally competitive economy.
If Virginians aren’t temperamentally suited to be cutting-edge innovators, what path is there to prosperity? Well, I have always emphasized two paths to prosperity: innovation and productivity. If we aren’t especially well suited to be innovators, we are suited to excel at productivity. As Florida himself notes, “agreeable” personalities more easily form bonds of trust, and they tend to work together in teams and collaborative situations — a prerequisite for high-performance business organizations today. Similarly, Florida notes that conscientious types “work hard and have a great deal of self discipline. They are responsible, detail-oriented, and strive for achievement. They tend to be better-than-average workers on almost any job.”
Virginia has two broad alternatives: Try to compete for more “open-to-experience” personality types, a daunting task given the fact that the “opens” tend to migrate to regions where others like themselves reside. Or, we can make the best of what we’ve got and build productivity-enhancing institutions that play upon our strengths.
Such speculation is so far beyond the level of most thinking about economic development in Virginia today that it will fall on deaf ears initially. But I sense that Florida is on the right track. (Read my column, “Personalities and Prosperity” for a fuller treatment.) If Virginians take to his latest theories as enthusastically as they greeted his earlier discussion of the “creative class,” we may be having that conversation sooner than later.