The Necessity of Creative Industries

Rob Horning joins the debate about the kinds of industries which are desirable and the kinds which aren't:

it seems a fair question to ask whether the fashion industry's "value added" is more socially useful than a Las Vegas construction worker's. Florida argues that the Sun Belt building boom, frighteningly efficient and innovative and "highly metabolic" as it was during the bubble, was built on a kind of lie, but I wonder if the same isn't true of the dubious innovation coming from the media and fashion industries favored by the creative class. It all seems vulnerable to a more rigorous accounting of what is truly socially necessary...
Is haute couture any more necessary than McMansion developments in Mesa, Arizona?

I think necessity is entirely the wrong criterion to use here; I'm much more interested in the systemic dangers posed by certain industries. A housing bubble -- or any bubble, for that matter -- is dangerous because it is unsustainable and built on the idea that after you buy a certain asset, you will be able to sell it in the future for more than you paid for it.

The media and fashion industries, by contrast, have never worked on that kind of principle. No one buys couture frocks as an investment, nor does anybody ever commission a magazine article with the intention of selling it on to a higher bidder before it's published. The money in the fashion and media industries is real, it's never speculative. And although the end products of those industries might look ridiculous to Rob Horning, one can say much the same of CDO-squareds, or McMansions, or sports memorabilia.

The creative industries are real industries, and should be respected as such; in fact, if you do the calculations, they add more pure economic value than low-margin manufacturing. We should embrace them as holding the key to the country's future; otherwise, we'll just enter a race to the bottom against countries with just as many smarts and much lower costs. Ask Mexico how that story ends.