Live From New York: It's Dickie Miami

Thanks to a Chris Briem post, I was forced to be aware that erstwhile CMU professor Richard Florida was on The Colbert Report hawking a former research assistant's gay index his 2005 book. The cover looks less pretentious now, although that's a bad way to judge the book.

Interesting to hear that he recently relocated to the University Toronto from George Mason University, which is still probably still too close to Pittsburgh for our own good, but probably means that the endowment for the P.T. Barnum Economics chair at GMU dried up.

My longstanding animosity with Dr. Oakland* is well known. Basically the disagreement boils to this: Florida believes that the "Creative Class" is a local and national economic generator to be supported by governments, whereas I believe that Economists should be spending more time researching and less time mugging for the cameras.

You can see the conflict.

On the plus side, my degrees of separation from Steven Colbert is way down.

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*From Gertrude Stein: The trouble with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn't any there there. Pretty much sums up my feelings around Dr. F's theories.