With Maine’s economy, creative is as creative does

In the spring of 1605, after suffering a winter of starvation, disease and death on St. Croix Island, the remaining members of the first significant European settlement in North America – the French settlers who would be among Maine’s creators – went south, temporarily to Massachusetts, thereby establishing a pattern of outmigration that has lasted 400 years.

Pierre Du Gua de Monts and Samuel de Champlain eventually led their expedition north again to Nova Scotia, but Maine knows the type: some rough weather, substandard culinary choices, little to do but wait for spring and they’re gone. Though the phenomenon has been with Maine, with rare exception, longer than Maine has been a state, it’s gotten worse as fewer people find ways to make a living out of what Maine has in abundance, its woods and water.

If Maine’s old economy turned on trees, trucks and trawlers, its new one, according to the keynote speaker yesterday at the first Blaine House Conference on Maine’s Creative Economy, could turn on talent, technology and tolerance. Economist Richard Florida, who spoke at the conference in Lewiston, is credited with being the first to segment the economy into a creative portion, but is more accustomed to addressing Boston and Austin than Bangor and Augusta. His description of the blossoming of the creative economy should be instructive to Maine: “Millions of young, energetic and talented Americans from traditional industrial centers, small towns and rural areas, packed their Hondas and moved to more-thriving metro areas … These native-born migrants helped to design and then feed the emerging creative industries that during the 1990s would come to define the age.”

They also define two challenges for Maine. First, how does Maine describe a creative economy that it believes is worth pursuing? Second, how does it nurture a portion of one of the most metropolitan economies – of short-story writers and software writers, engineers and violinmakers, drug researchers and sculptors – to one of the most rural states?

The creative economy is an exciting idea because its appealing image is of clean industry run by bright-eyed entrepreneurs whose brain power is matched by their originality and their devotion to high-end coffee and the countless other value-added items that fuel their lives. That is, at least, the image from a distance; Maine, in the early stages of this relationship, has yet to grow closer.

The first problem is partly one of definition. A news story the other day claimed that, depending on how one measured the creative economy, it either accounted for 7,500 jobs and $210 million in wages in Maine or 56,000 jobs and $2.3 billion in wages or both combined. The chasm between these two – the fact that both have been measured – means that no definition has yet stuck.

And while this matters, the current size of the creative economy actually doesn’t. The many parts of Maine’s current economy are simply what they are, cumulatively making the state something like the 10th worst place in North America to try to find financial success. What matters is the creative economy’s potential for growth and Maine’s commitment to doing something about it.

Almost unfortunately, the state learned of the creative economy through its state Arts Commission and has treated it as an arts-driven enterprise, which it certainly is but is not only. (Maine’s own Felicia Knight, director of communications at the National Endowment for the Arts, also speaking at the conference, said of the economic reasons for supporting the arts: “We at NEA believe that that should not be the primary argument” for the arts. “Communities should embrace the arts for the sake of the art, for what it can do to enhance and enrich our lives.”)

You’ll hear a similar message from Peter Hoff, president at the University of Maine, the institution this region will depend on absolutely if the creative economy is going to work here. The arts, he wrote recently, “can provide social environments to attract the people Dr. Florida wants and Maine needs. … But the heavy economic lifting comes from those high-tech people who seek to live in such settings.” This need for both arts and industry was noticed repeatedly at the conference yesterday, a sign, I think, that the discussion is moving in the right direction.

As Maine’s understanding of a creative economy broadens it will find that it has been unknowingly supporting this economy for the last seven or eight years by putting money into research and development at UMaine and supporting private R&D at places such as The Jackson Lab. The public support and the return on these investments have been encouraging, but, according to Dr. Florida, they are just the beginning.

Tax cuts, reduced business costs and deregulation aren’t the answers to success anymore, Dr. Florida says. What counts is more money for universities, more for arts and culture and a higher value placed on diversity, including making Maine a gay-friendly state. These are a problem. Maine is among the cheapest states for funding its university system; its arts and cultural organizations are known for being inventive with the few scraps the Legislature gives them. The state competes with Vermont for being the least diverse in the nation.

Can you imagine the Legislature staying in session an extra week to add both another $30 million or $40 million and greater accountability for higher education and related R&D, a Legislature that can’t even fund the state’s highly successful school-laptop program? I can’t either, not yet anyway. But if it is serious about the creative economy, that’s the price of admission. And if it is not serious, the Legislature ought to suggest an alternative, one that ends a 400-year tradition of departures.

Todd Benoit is the editorial page editor of the Bangor Daily News.