I'm depressed by this creative view of economics

Here at last is some excellent news for gays and bohemians. According to a new study that is being taken rather seriously in America, they hold the key to growth and prosperity in the future. In The New York Times, a commentator has made the semi-serious suggestion that industrial towns with relatively stagnant economies – Pittsburgh, say – should consider marketing themselves as gay-friendly and encourage the latte-set with tax breaks for those working in the creative industries.

The cause of this new line of thinking is a book, snappily entitled The Rise of the Creative Class: and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, which, even before it is officially published, has risen high in the Amazon bestseller list. Its author, Richard Florida, a professor of regional economic development, has meanwhile become a surprise celebrity on the reading and talk-show circuit. Civic leaders across America are clamouring for his services as a consultant, offered at $10,000 a pop.

Professor Florida's argument is that what he calls "the creative class" is now the powerhouse of the American economy, comprising 30 per cent of the workforce – double what it was 20 years ago. Ideas, technology, information and the media have become central in our lives and, as a result, it has become important for towns and regions to attract members of this new élite with agreeable restaurants, intimate arts cinemas showing foreign films, bookshops with coffee bars and so on.

It is also essential – and here is where the gays and bohemians come in – that they conform to "the three Ts – tolerance, talent and technology". According to the professor, "you cannot get a technologically innovative place unless it's open to weirdness, eccentricity and difference". Apparently, the most reliable indicator of a community that is acceptably open is not a racial mix – there are ghettos, after all – but social and sexual tolerance.

So San Francisco, a town where the weird, eccentric and different feel entirely at home, rates high on his "creativity index". It is no coincidence, apparently, that Silicon Valley is nearby, a place "where the geeky engineer with hair down to his waist and no shoes walks into a bar and no one blinks". More surprisingly, the Texas city of Austin, which is said now to be "a mecca for gays and bohemians", also has one of the fastest records of economic growth in America.

Doubtless, the creative class is rising here every bit as quickly as in America. But when Chris Smith, the then Secretary of State for Culture, boasted five years ago about Britain's "creative industries", it came as a bit of a shock to discover that he was including record company executives and accountants in publishing firms.

Since then, it has turned out that virtually everyone is creative. With Professor Florida's three strata of creativity – the technological, the economic and the artistic – the creative class can be said to include lawyers, accountants, engineers, entrepreneurs, disc jockeys, stockbrokers and virtually anyone who is obliged to think at work.

Apart from sensing a thoroughly reprehensible twitch of personal snobbery – some of the entrepreneurs I know are fine enough people, but hardly creative – I find myself oddly depressed by Professor Florida's theory. Not so long ago, bourgeois bohemians, sometimes known as "bobos", were joke figures, people who talked loudly and pretentiously about a Coen brothers film or a Michel Houellebecq novel in the wine bar after work and had passionate beliefs about precisely the right kind of coffee to drink.

Now the bobos are in charge. If Florida's argument is accepted, then local authorities will have to think twice about their plans to build a new football stadium or shopping complex, and consider investing instead in a creative-friendly environment, full of arts centres. The central criterion for economic and social health will be whether an engineer with long hair and no shoes can walk into a bar without being laughed at. I can see why the theory appeals – after all, it flatters almost everyone into believing that they are a creative innovator – but I wonder whether all this talk of tolerance, talent and technology is not just an excuse for bobos to take control and create a community that suits their own particular tastes.

For this is essentially a return to the Sixties idea that pleasure, leisure and what Richard Neville called "playpower" are not only personally desirable but social and political goods, too. Only this time, it is no longer the creed of the scruffy outsiders but of the moneyed mainstream.

Now everyone can be a weekend hippy, enjoy a safe, bohemian, creative lifestyle while being squeakily tolerant to others who conform to their way of seeing things. For some mysterious reason, this idea brings out the redneck in me.

terblacker@aol.com