"Like Jon Kay, I find it ridiculous that Richard Florida has gotten fantastically rich for, essentially, writing over and over again that gay people are the secret key to wealth creation. On the other hand, I can't prove it's not true..
No, but Steve Sailer can! Richard Florida's weird idea is that places with diversity and tolerance produce innovation. Diversity means multicultural immigration, tolerance means public indecency, and San Francisco, for example, has a lot of both. But while young people with tattoos are hanging out downtown, the actual innovation is being done by nerdy white guys in the suburbs.
Florida: "Gays predict not only the concentration of high-tech industry, but also its growth,"
Steve Sailer: "Bunk. These research high technology centers are not actually located in the cities of San Francisco, Boston and New York at all, but in their much less diverse suburbs. The authors' methodological blunder is obvious: they use overly expansive definitions of "metropolitan areas." Thus, they label "San Francisco" both the Gay Capital and the Tech Capital, even though Castro Street in San Francisco and Sand Hill Road in Palo Alto might be 90 minutes apart - in normal traffic.
All across the country over the last 45 years, the pattern has been unmistakable: the techno-innovators congregate out in the far suburbs, a long, long way from what is normally called "diversity."
Generally, high-hip equals low-tech. I used to live in the extremely diverse Uptown neighborhood on the North lakefront of Chicago, where about 100 languages are spoken in two square miles. My wife used to live in the New Town neighborhood, complete with a 6'-4" transvestite hooker on her corner. Both neighborhoods were high in tolerance - but not high in technology. In Chicagoland, the tech firms are way out on the Silicon Prairie in the sprawling high-tech low-hip suburb of Naperville. "
