Stephen Straker has sent me an article from Wired magazine, "The Aesthetic Imperative Why the creative shall inherit the economy" by Virginia Postrel, where she appears to be running on similar lines to mine. Stephen writes

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I found this piece on A&L Daily and thought that even though it is a bit of a puff, it does speak directly to your thesis. The author, Virginia Postrel (why have I heard of her?), is saying that people want pleasure and so those who bring pleasure will make the economy go. But from the examples she cites, it's plain enough that what is bringing pleasure is anticipated status enhancement.

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I'll append the whole article because it does, indeed, contain some very interesting examples of the role of status in many of the modern jobs that are arising in developed countries, so this will go into my database for future consideration. But, for now, I would like to dwell on her first paragraph because it contains the seed of something that may become extremely important -- explosively so, literally and metaphorically -- in future years as our society becomes more technological, requiring an increasing minority of highly skilled people.

Here's her first paragraph again

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A decade ago, pundits were declaring that the future held two kinds of jobs computer programming and hamburger flipping -- or, in the highfalutin language of Robert Reich, those held by "symbolic analysts" and "in-person service providers." Paleoconservative Crossfire host Pat Buchanan warned we were headed toward a "two tier" society. His left-wing guest Jeremy Rifkin agreed, plugging a book that announced The End of Work.

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Let me very quickly review the three main ways and a fourth, minor one, in which the evolution of a species occurs

1. A particular set of environmental circumstances bears down upon a species and individuals with slightly different genetic make-ups (due to the random exchange and rearrangement of genes at the instant of fertilisation) respond to this individually, some more successfully than others. Gradually, be it ever so slightly each generation, the unsuccessful ones are automatically culled, and the mutations go in the direction of those that are more successful;

2. In animal species, where the female, rather than the male, is usually the decision-maker in the matter of partner choice and mating, she may decide on some quite trivial aspect of the male's appearance and behaviour which appears (unconsciously!) to be related to outstanding fitness. This is called sexual selection. This can produce what biologists call "runaway" evolution by which mutations take place very rapidly, and the triviality builds up to the point where it becomes a liability. At that stage evolution stops. There are many examples of this including the peacock's tail, the ram's horns, etc. This may well have been the case in the human species, in which the females began to choose qualities such as intelligence, and/or dependability, and/or imagination and creativeness in the males of her group. These qualities are very much in the province of the frontal lobes, so this sexual choice might well have enhanced their normal survival benefits, thus accelerating the evolutionary trend already taking place. (It is possible also there there might have been a slightly more cosmetic factor in the evolution of our species. The more versatile male would also have had a slightly more vertical forehead due to larger-than-normal frontal lobes. This would have been barely discernable but perhaps females tended to prefer this rather than the raked-back forehead.) Anyhow, for whatever the reason they were selected, our frontal lobes certainly were a case of runaway evolution because the enlargement took place only over about two or three million years which was very rapid indeed in evolutionary terms.

3. If a species becomes divided geographically for one reason or another (floodings, earthquakes, landslides, migrations to distant islands or continents) then either the environmental conditions are slightly different in the new habitat and accidental drifting of mutations takes place. In time, the main bunches of genes on the chromosomes drift to different locations and therefore, if individuals of the two groups meet and copulate, the genes can't match up at the point of (attempted) fertilisation, and the two groups have in fact become separate species.

4. Finally, a species may divide even in the same environment due to separations in habits which gradually become more pronounced until different groups no longer breed together and then become mutually infertile in due course. The best example has occurred in the case of cichlid fish in Lake Tanganyika where there are 19 different species, all intermingling in the environment and can hardly be told apart but have slightly different feeding habits and food and are mutually infertile. Many similar examples occur in the case of birds, where slight differences in bird song become successively more pronounced within one environment, by means of young birds tending to mate with those with similar song. In time, two new species of almost identical appearance and similar feeding habits emerge.

Having established these, there are two more items to throw into the melting pot before we can get to grips with the possibility that's implied by Virginia Postrel's first paragraph.

Firstly, there is absolutely no reason to think that evolution has stopped in the case of human evolution. When man migrated out of Africa, his brain expanded when compared with those who remained. When man migrated to the far shores of Asia, his brain size became larger still.

Intelligence, ability, talent, versatility, survivability, call it what you will, is not based upon a few genes. There are some crucial ones, of course, but high general ability depends on many genes, so the combinatorial possibilities at fertilisation are immense. This means that most of the most highly gifted and creative individuals arise from the general mass of the population. In terms of IQ tests (which tends to correlate with success in living standards in modern life) highly intelligent parents tend to produce children who are not quite as intelligent as themselves but are more intelligent than the average population. Conversely, less intelligent parents tend to produce children who are slightly more intelligent than themselves and nearer to the average. This is called Regression to the Mean and was first observed by Galton.

All this means that there is a great mixing of intellectual abilities in each generation. However, in modern society in which there is a premium on high ability a slight separation according to point 4 above is a possibility. Indeed, Michael Young, in his famous book, The Rise of the Meritocracy, was the first to point out what he saw as the dangers of this in an era of high selectivity for jobs. Such a meritocracy could not become permanent, however, unless the speed of technological change and/or complexity of society, with associated increased selectivity occurs at a fairly high pace. So it's a "race" between the pace of change of modern society and the redistributive effects of genes for intelligence that occurs at every instant of fertilisation.

Such a separation in talent is therefore a possibility and it may be enhanced by an element of geographical separation if the offspring of two slightly different groups attend different universities and therefore tend to marry like with like. An evolutionary separation of our species can't be discounted. It may be occurring and we may be at the beginning of it. But this is a highly subjective judgement at the present time. I am certainly impressed by some evidence in this country -- such as the distinct difference between the "quality" newspapers in England and the "tabloids" and, of course, the nature of their respective readership. In recent years there are increasing gaps occurring between the best and worst results in school examinations.

But if our technological society continues to proceed at a high enough pace, and high educational selectivity continues, then I cannot see how we can avoid a separation. This sort of species brachiation has occurred millions of times in the evolution of life on earth and there is absolutely no reason to imagine that man is somehow immune from the normal processes. Only extreme and detailed genetic engineering, far beyond anything that can be achieved today, would be able to reverse this evolutionary change, if it is occurring.

None of the above bears directly upon my main thesis but I have a mind to discuss this in my book because an apparent cultural separation already appears to have happened during the course of the industrial revolution and this may presage something more permanent in due course. This is quick-sand territory, however, and I must express myself very carefully in my book in order to avoid vituperation.

Bu coincidence, immediately after writing this during my dogwalk I came across an article in the Financial Times, "Parts of Britain facing 'skills poverty' ", which perfectly illlustrates a geographical talent separation which is occurring in this country. I'll post this separately.

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"The Aesthetic Imperative Why the creative shall inherit the economy," Wired (11 July 2003)

by Virginia Postrel

A decade ago, pundits were declaring that the future held two kinds of jobs computer programming and hamburger flipping -- or, in the highfalutin language of Robert Reich, those held by "symbolic analysts" and "in-person service providers." Paleoconservative Crossfire host Pat Buchanan warned we were headed toward a "two tier" society. His left-wing guest Jeremy Rifkin agreed, plugging a book that announced The End of Work.

Five years later, that pessimistic conclusion had taken on a wildly optimistic tone (not least in this magazine). Matter and manufacturing were passé. On the Internet, nobody knew you were a dog or a teenager, or a guy who hadn't changed his clothes in several days. Symbolic analysts were indeed the future.

In today's economic slowdown, it has become clear that both the early-'90s pessimists and the late-'90s boosters misunderstood the true source of economic value. Manufacturing and technology generate wealth only when they make matter and information serve human desire. Desire is the true source of economic value.

Competition has pushed quality so high and prices so low that few manufacturers can survive on performance and price alone. To produce value, they must give customers something to please their sensory side. Aesthetics is the killer app.

Public policy professor Richard Florida recalls serving on a Pennsylvania economic development advisory panel. "At one of our meetings," he notes in his book The Rise of the Creative Class, "the state's Secretary of Labor and Industry, a big burly man, banged his fist on the table in frustration. 'Our workforce is out of balance,' he steamed. 'We're turning out too many hairdressers and cosmetologists, and not enough skilled factory workers' like welders and machine-tool operators."

For several years afterward, Florida queried audiences, asking which career they'd choose machinist with higher pay and job security, or hairstylist with lower pay and no job security. "Time and again, most people chose the hair salon, and always for the same reasons" flexibility, freedom from supervision, stimulation, creativity, and the immediate satisfaction of their customers. The aesthetic imperative has spread new economy values beyond just knowledge workers.

These days, dotcommers are searching for new jobs, but the entrepreneurial kids from shop class and cosmetology school are doing all right. They're leaving the factories or never entering them in the first place and confounding conventional expectations about what it means to be a blue-collar worker or a service provider. For instance, the number of manicurists has tripled in a decade, to nearly 350,000, while the number of nail salons doubled. What's more, stone fabricators, who turn granite and marble slabs into countertops, are opening thousands of new businesses a year, and sales appear recession-proof.

Car customizers now roam the Las Vegas Specialty Equipment Market Association trade show, four times the size of Comdex, checking out the latest in engines, wheels, accessories, and hot, hot cars. Sales grew 46 percent from 1996 to 2001, to about $26 billion. The purely aesthetic part of the market tops $10 billion.

The number of graphic designers in the US has grown tenfold in a generation, to an estimated 150,000. Membership in the American Society of Interior Designers has more than doubled since 1992, rising to over 33,000. Creative individuals no longer need to be isolated, romantic souls who've given up worldly success for the sake of their art.

And all of us must give up the cultural baggage we've inherited from the romantics, who set art against tech, and feeling against reason; from the modernists, who treated ornament as crime and commerce as corruption; and from the efficiency experts, who valued function while disdaining form.

We must abandon our prejudices regarding the sources of economic value. The production of wealth comes not simply from labor or raw materials or even intellectual brilliance. It comes from new ways to give people what they want. By matching creativity and desire, the economy will renew itself.

Virginia Postrel is the author of The Substance of Style, due in September from HarperCollins.

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