GROWING CREATIVELY

The latest measurement of Maine’s creative economy, to be released today, gives the state a reasonable baseline from which to watch how this portion of the economy is performing. But before it gets too focused on the size of the creative sector or the amount of money it generates, Maine should notice that all parts of the economy are potentially creative and that it would do well to encourage more creative thinking.

The new report is modest in scope. Part of the reason for this, according to Muskie School Professor Richard Barringer, a member of the research team that wrote the report, “The Creative Economy in Maine,” is that time limits forced the team to use existing data.

This was difficult, he said, because government sources have yet to shift from measuring a manufacturing-based economy. That makes economic categories “something of a misfit.” The team looked at four ways of measuring the economy, from a strictly art-based model to the expansive definition used by Richard Florida, an economics professor who got the country to start thinking about the economy in terms of its creative value.

The report, written for the New England Foundation for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission, arrived at the conclusion that the creative economy workers here have more education but earn less money than average. The lower-income measure, however, is not true for New England, where incomes are about the same. This difference is worth more examination.

The report was conceived as a rural measuring stick for what is essentially an urban economic phenomenon, and it would be interesting to see whether the difference holds for other rural states. Another difference: In places such as Santa Fe, Dr. Barringer observes, the arts are drivers in the local economy; here, the Legislature told the re-searchers to include the economic effects of forestry and agriculture, which increasingly rely on the creativity of technology.

Dr. Florida regularly uses a timeline to demonstrate the sector’s growing importance. In 1900, he says, 10 percent of the economy worked in creative fields, which he defines as including scientists, engineers, artists, musicians, designers and knowledge-based professionals. A half century later, that number had crept up to 15 percent. It gained another five percentage points over the next 30 years, but between 1980 and 2000 grew an additional 10 to account for 30 percent of the economy.

This exponential rise not only makes the creative portion of the economy important now, but makes it’s potential the definition of success in the future. “Think for a moment,” Dr. Florida writes, “about the tremendous competitive edge Japanese manufacturers achieved by tapping the knowledge of shop-floor workers. Employing the creative talents of people whose jobs presently ask for none will dwarf this by comparison.”

That is the key to understanding the creative economy: It is not a fixed entity, made up of certain industries and excluding others. It is a way of doing all work that some fields have embraced and some have yet to grasp. The more of Maine’s businesses that can figure out how to use the creative talents of their employees to the greatest effect, the better off the state’s economy will become.

Measuring this is a useful exercise because it helps tell policy makers where to put their efforts. Measured or not, however, the creative economy is growing in importance in Maine. What remains is the question of whether it grows to full health or struggles along weakly.