Blue collars fading

The Daily Dish has been featuring a variety of guest bloggers this week as main man Andrew Sullivan is on vacation. One of them is Richard Florida, an economist I often cite, who wrote “The Rise of the Creative Class.” He argues that traditional social class structures are breaking into profession-oriented classes (working class, service class and creative class). Any place without an active creative class is struggling, Florida argues. Though Florida’s ideas are not universally accepted I was particularly fascinated by this one.

Florida shares a Margaret Wente column excerpt in which the decline of traditional blue collar professions is forcing cultural change, especially along gender lines. Burly beer drinking male factory workers aren’t being retrained for service or creative jobs, their wives and children are. Take a minute and think about the implications for the stereotypical Iron Range worker and the rough-around-the-edges (though often misunderstood) Iron Range culture. What kind of culture can endure here or across the Rust Belt over the next 100 years?

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