"If Madi­son was such a Cre­ative Class hotbed over­flow­ing with inde­pen­dent, post-industrial work­ers like myself, we should have fit in."

"Yet our pres­ence didn’t seem to mat­ter to any­one, cre­atively or oth­er­wise. And any­way, Madison’s economy was hum­ming along with unem­ploy­ment around four per­cent, while back in fun, cre­ative Port­land, it was more than twice that, at eight and a half per­cent. This was not how the world accord­ing to Florida was sup­posed to work. I started to won­der if I’d mis­read him. Around town I encoun­tered a few other trans­plants who also found them­selves scratch­ing their heads over what the fuss had been about. Within a cou­ple years, most of them would be gone."

From "The Fall of the Creative Class," by Frank Bures. "Florida" is Richard Florida, author of "The Rise of the Cre­ative Class," who theorized that artists (and gay people and immigrants) cause economic growth, so a city that wants economic expansion ought to adopt a strategy of attracting artists.

Via Ernst Stavro Blofeld.