The Rise of the Creative Class

     Arguably one of the most meaningful socioeconomic books over the past decade is Richard Florida's "The Rise of the Creative Class" For those who haven't had a chance yet to read it, read it. This book details the rise of intellectual creativity a la the Rennasance in the digital world across a spectrum of tech niches; from coding to 3D printing to design and even real estate.

     The vast majority of the world's population aren't landed aristocrats controlling huge swaths of land, but as Florida identifies, the creative class is leveraging their skills via technology, and especially the virtually limitless power of the cloud. A huge trend going forward of course is going to be voice/verbal commands, and Amazon.com's Echo Dot is perfectly positioned to take advantage of that creative wave.

     Frequent readers of this blog know that this author believes all wealth ultimately springs from the land, in one form or another (beauty of physical location, underlying minerals like Gold, or even clustering of talent.)  Along those lines, the demographic shift into "hipster" cities has concentrated that very creative ability now amongst multi-hubs which have become in their own rights extremely valuable physical locations for manufacturing cloud-based services and products. I see no end in sight for this trend, especially as it fosters efficiency and meritocracy.

     An interesting area of ongoing and future development will be the utility combining the power of both verbal and AI commands into increasingly "smart" machines that will derive significant advantages from just-in-time manufacturing, idle time swaps, and latent repairs. In essence, manufacturing facilities that have largely become redundant or obsolete could once again rise to compliment the creative class production model. Labeled the "internet-of-things," this mechanical evolution hopefully has a long and promising future.

Jobs Purge

The Wall Street Journal published one of the most meaningful and visually interpretive surveys of the employment picture in the United States today. Coinciding roughly with the passage of NAFTA and the widespread adoption of the Internet in the early 1990s, it portrays the massive disruption of technology, management, and political policy in shifting this country from a manufacturing base to a software-centric service hub.

As anyone who has worked in Silicon Valley for the past several decades will tell you, the Valley has shifted from hardware to software. This megatrend has resulted in massive job losses to cheap overseas manufacturing; spun with rose-hued glasses one could say the United States has spurred global growth and prosperity on an unequaled basis for the past 20 years.

For those wishing to Invest Like A Farmer, the trend of service-based employment and out-sourced manufacturing may have reached its pinnacle, especially as 3D printing and the very machinery has negated the cheap labor rates which caused massive job flows to countries like China, India, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian labor markets.

With lean-inventory and production-on-demand now commonplace, I predict former manufacturing hubs like Detroit, St. Louis, Cleveland, and other "left-for-dead" traditional manufacturing cities making a strong comeback on the heels of (literally) dirt-cheap land prices, a workforce educated on demand, and the massive shipping moat known as the Pacific Ocean.

As Amazon.com has successfully proven, consumers embrace the concept of sacrificing a little time to get a great product cheaper. An educated, mobile, fluid USA workforce with 3D printing, manufacturing-on-demand, and a diverse skill-set can successfully leverage the Pacific Ocean, dirt-cheap land, and hopefully a political climate that supports them via an "America-first" mentality.