Arnold Kling is skeptical that New York City will ever be as important as it was over the past decade because of the prominence of finance. He is responding to Richard Florida's new piece in The Atlantic, How the Crash Will Reshape America. Kling declares:
But I think that a lot of my attitude is that, notwithstanding Virginia Postrel's Substance of Style case for aesthetics, I don't think that the arts are all that important. To me, creative innovation that matters is somebody in a lab at MIT coming up with a more efficient battery or solar cell. It is somebody at Stanford coming up with a way to make computers smarter or cancer more preventable. I just can't get excited about some frou-frou fashion designers and the magazines that feature their creations.
Kling would perhaps get less grief if he qualified that aesthetics is not that important for economic ...
