September 13, 2004

Retro vs. Metro?

Joel Kotkin takes the "Retro v. Metro" concept to task, and points out:

"These core Kerry constituencies, the technical and professional intelligentsia, increasingly show signs of seeing themselves as a new social elite, what urban guru Richard Florida has anointed as the nation' s 'creative class.' Most make their homes in the peculiarly elitist economies of post-industrial metropolises such as greater Boston, Manhattan, San Francisco and the west side of Los Angeles, where the definition of middle class often comes with a million-dollar-plus mortgage, a PhD and, often enough, more than a few pence handed down from the parents."

There is a divide, and Kotkin has started to pinpoint it. It's between the "paragraph" vs. the "spreadsheet" people, or "poets vs. counters," as we used to called in the UCLA Anthropology Department.

Liberalism tend to be supported by people who are paid by government, or who have their milieu as their "reference group." There's a lot more to this, and one day we'll address it.

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