America Is Undergoing a Creative Brain Drain

Newswise — As the outsourcing of U.S. jobs continues, America is also experiencing the exodus of many of its most creative business, research, and academic minds to other countries, according to the cover story of the latest issue of Across the Board, The Conference Board’s bimonthly magazine.

Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Ireland are among the newly favored hotspots for creative talent in business and other sectors.

The Conference Board is a leading not-for-profit research and business membership organization connecting more than 2,000 companies in more than 60 nations.

In the article, “America’s Best and Brightest are Leaving … and Taking the Creative Economy With Them,” author Richard Florida, a Hirst Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, says that as a result of this creative exodus, high-end, high-margin creative industries that used to be the United States’ province and a crucial source of prosperity have begun to move overseas. Other countries, such as Ireland, are becoming more competitively creative at a faster rate than the United States.

“For the first time in modern memory, top scientists and intellectuals from elsewhere are choosing not to come to the U.S.,” Florida says. “The altered flow of talent – aided by more stringent security measures – is already beginning to show signs of crimping the scientific process.”

Cities in other parts of the world are outscoring American cities on measures of new talent, diversity, and brainpower. Brussels is fast becoming a creative-class center to rival Boston, Seattle, and Austin. Vancouver and Toronto are also set to take off; both city-regions have a higher concentration of immigrants to help drive their creative economies than New York, Miami, or Los Angeles do. As creative centers, Sydney and Melbourne rank alongside Washington and New York.

Many of these countries also offer to highly mobile creative talent such further inducements as spectacular waterfronts, beautiful countryside, and great outdoor life. They’re also safe, as they are rarely at war. They’re becoming creative centers that draw talent from all over the world.

What should alarm U.S. economists and legislators, according to Florida, is that metropolises from other developed countries are transforming themselves into magnets for higher value-added industries through a variety of means: from government-subsidized laboratories to partnerships between top local universities and industry. Most of all, they’re attracting foreign creative talent, including American – from graduate students to established intellectuals and top scientists. The best young creative minds are no longer flocking to America, as they did for decades – most recently when they came to Silicon Valley in the ‘90s to begin the dot-com explosion. So future cultural and industrial revolutions are less likely to begin in the United States.

“To strengthen our creative economy so that it produces more jobs to replace the ones we’re losing, the U.S. desperately needs economic, cultural, and political leadership with enough savvy to bridge ideological, geographical, and international gaps,” Florida concludes. “Until politicians on both sides of the aisle catch on, the responsibility will surely fall to American economic leaders to create business and trade environments that are increasingly diverse, tolerant, and inclusive, and to draw on the immense reservoir of foreign and domestic talent that will pull the American creative economy out of its current stall.”

Source: “America’s Best and Brightest are Leaving … and Taking the Creative Economy With Them,” Across the Board September/October 2004