Warren Seen

Sick of economic turmoil? Do something drastic about it!

Coincidence is a funny thing. I’ve just finished reading Richard Florida’s Flight of the Creative Class, and it’s scary how timely this book is right now. The US is coming to the climax of an election year where (AGAIN!) the politics of class is playing a central role. Meanwhile, their economy has seen fit to start collapsing, which has a knock-on effect being felt in the rest of the world.

In the book, Florida talks about what the US can do to secure its future as an economic leader, and where it currently fails in retaining members of what he calls the “creative class” (a superset of the more well known knowledge workers).

Opportunities
As an Australian, I had a tendency whilst reading the book to look at the opportunities where Florida perceives “threats” to the US. In particular, I noticed that for a country of 20-odd million, we seemed to rate consistently well on many of Florida’s criteria for supporting the creative class. I suspect that a lot of our Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s policies are driven by this kind of research (he is, after all, an arch-policy wonk), he loves to waffle on about the need for developing Human Capital, and the correlation of things like literacy improvements to GDP growth.

So, assuming that we’re heading in the right direction here, and again, assuming that Florida is right and the US isn’t, now seems to me to be the perfect time to aggressively recruit US citizens to move on out here to the land of Oz.

Reason the First – Economy
While our economy isn’t bullet-proof, we proved 10 years or so ago during the Asian Financial Crisis that we are well placed to weather downturns compared to some of our trading partners. In networking terms, our economy is “dual-homed” on both Wall St, and China. The resource boom has seen a lot of capital flowing from China into Australia, and while the Chinese economy may be momentarily slowed by what’s happening now, I think it’s going to recover a lot faster than the US and pull us along with it.

Reason the Second – Florida’s Three T’s, Talent, Technology, Tolerance – We have it
At the risk of sounding like a bad TV show, Australia’s got Talent. We’ve got some world leading researchers in biotechnology, clean renewable energy and other high tech growth industries. Australia is becoming a hotspot for international students, a factor that Florida identified as playing a part in increasing the quality and depth of the talent pool.

In terms of technology, we compare favorably with the US in terms of broadband market penetration, speed, etc. Major cities like Sydney and Melbourne have nearly ubiquitous 3G cellular coverage (soon to be 21Mbps in the case of Telstra), and while the pricing may not be spectacular, it’s heading in the right direction. We’re of course, also on the doorstep of SE Asia, home to the world’s semiconductor manufacturing industry.

Tolerance is Florida’s third T, and I have to say I think we do pretty well here too. The fundamentalist right doesn’t have its hooks deep into our political system and I feel fairly confident in saying that in terms of social equality, many Australians just don’t care about what people do in the privacy of their own homes these days.

Reason the Third – lifestyle
So maybe I’m a tad biased here, but compared to the European nations listed in Florida’s book that match or exceed Australia in terms of the creativity index, Australia is going to produce the least culture shock for a US “refugee” moving here. I mean, most of what’s on TV comes from the US, most of the music you’ll hear played on local radio comes from the US, fast food franchises, the list goes on.

The climate is milder too, we think snow should stay where it belongs – on mountains and not on the streets where it’s just frankly in the way. As a bonus, if you move here now, you’ll get two summers in 12 months, how great is that?

This concludes our presentation…
OK, so you might think I’m, to use a local expression, pushing shit uphill, trying to convince Americans to move halfway around the world in the middle of an economic downturn. I certainly do. But while the premise of this post is a little bit tongue-in-cheek, maybe it will serve as a reminder that if you’re not considering doing something drastic, then things probably ain’t as bad as you think?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 10:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.