Finding A Place Under The Sun

from here:
Florida’s enormously influential first book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” laid the sociological foundation for an idea many of us in the Bay Area had already understood intuitively: that creative people like artists, scientists and entrepreneurs – not big corporations, government offices, or generic infrastructure – fuel economic development.
The statement speaks for itself, but a little googling would show us that countries in general but specifically cities and technology hubs/areas are constantly trying to “move up” the technology output ladder.
Why is this?
Simply put the economic rewards of different rungs in the technology ladder is not linearly distributed. This is because of the productivity per rung is quite different. This makes evident the force multiplier that technology is, and with it the fact that even though we are all given 24 hours a day people from technologically superior places can do more work and earn more money with their 24 hours.
Take my country the Philippines as an example. Based on my personal experience (If the NSO published this in the web then I wouldn’t need to base this on my own experience, and yes I tried googling it ) NSO published statistics the wages of Filipino workers have been essentially stagnant (adjusting for inflation at 5.4%, NSO ). This would be very strange to anyone who has heard of call centers and BPO but the fact is Filipino “knowledge” workers are at the low end of the knowledge spectrum and are thus replaceable cogs in the knowledge sweatshops of “the Man”. The only way for the Philippines to get more revenues from the call center and BPO industries is to throw more people at it.
Why? As the early call center employees are finding out, positions for non executive, management work prefers people with some experience but are not too expensive. Put in another way: BPO if you do not have leadership skills or are not into teaching/training is simply not a career.
What then is a possible way out for my country in to this sideways movement? The highlighted qoute tells us this. You must foster artist, scientist, entreprenuers or creators in general. Only through the constant creative output of these people will we find ourselves out of the lower rungs of the tech ladder.
A positive effect of a relatively large group of young people with a relatively large disposable income is the fact that it tends to foster creative persuits such as bands, films, and the like. It has always been my belief that the resurgance of the local pop-rock, punk-rock or rock scene in general is due to call centers who give money to the fans who thus transfer these to the musicians. Not enough for the dream life, but enough for our artist to survive.
The final cog would probably be to internationalize the creative output of our artist, in the same way that the english speaking public is subsidizing the english rock bands, the chinese speaking public are subsidizing Chinovelas,Koreanovelas,Japanovelas. We must try to make south east asian countries along with the US,England etc all the countries where we have similarities with subsidize our artist and musicians specifically.
This has been a longish post and I salute your persistence in reading some musings.