1. Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
2. Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
3. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
4. Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
5. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
6. Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

These clear-eyed and crystalline words were written over 2,000 years ago by one of ancient Rome’s most revered and influential legislators. I often muse on these six points and try to embellish his simple litany of human blindness and stupidity…to no avail. The “Art Not Hate” project is a response to point five— it attempts to refine and develop our perception of both others and ourselves in the mix and mayhem of life. But, ironically, creative people can be as prejudiced and spiteful as those who do the world’s more mundane work (think Michael Richards [aka Kramer] on African Americans, and Mel Gibson on Jews). Nonetheless, when we create with others who are different from ourselves, there are inexplicable moments of empathy when we know that the person next to us shares our feelings and fate…and we are changed for the better.

Some scientists believe that our planet is entering another cycle of dramatic climate change. We could be facing a protracted period of sweltering summers, raging hurricanes, and erratic weather patterns. Many people also believe that this dire situation will be intensified by the industrial world’s addiction to fossil fuels.

Whether or not the bad news about the weather is true remains to be seen. But our precious world remains a place of changing beauty. Mountains rise up and erode; islands emerge and submerge; rivers flood and go dry…

The Mundo Caliente print series and video explore the aesthetics of global warming through paint, pixel, and hot latin music. I hope that my media stimulates your thinking about this global conundrum.

We are proud to be part of the www.blogactionday.org experience.

Click on the links below for some surprising sights and sounds —

http://www.creativeledge.com/video/mundo-caliente.php

http://www.bobcreates.com/artwork/prints/

I enjoy big picture creativity conferences that promote art, design, and broad themes of personal and social transformation…it is so much better than the gritty and grubby grind of real life. Clever, accomplished, and basically well-meaning people have center stage rather than the peripheral roles of wise/fool, crazy/genius, or expendable expert.

There were five things that distinguished this conference from the other more glamorous gatherings like TED and PopTech:

1. No over-hyped celebrity presenters repeating their pet cosmic theories ad nauseum. (Even the keynote talk delivery by best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert was punctuated by gentle self-deprecating humor, and stories of her life as a diner waitress in Philly and under-achieving and least favorite child in a family of Connecticut uber-achievers)


2. Limited to two days at a highly accessible location.


3. No-frills registration for $75 that is nearly identical in experience to the full $225 registration — minus two mediocre lunches.


4. Focused on practice rather than just blue-sky possibilities.


5. Was in a city that was genuinely on the ropes for decades but has transformed itself into America’s #1 creative economy metro area. (I say this because Philly has very affordable housing, a considerable number of well-paying creative jobs, stellar academic, cultural, and nonprofit sectors, and a $10 Bolt bus ride to NYC.)

The following items are my personal highlights from the summit. They include intriguing web links and some of the more memorable ideas that went in one ear and did not go out the other.

• Civic Innovation Lab in Cleveland
  Their creative ventures start-up funding model is astounding!


• Jane McGonigal (director of game R&D at the Institute for the Future)
  The institute has been key creative player in Silicon Valley for over 35 years. The presentation was made via Skype from California. Although Jane was sick, she made a marvelous impression.
  
  Institute slide shows:
  Epic Win (Why Gaming is the Future of Learning)
  http://www.slideshare.net/avantgame


• Favorite thinkers and designers and communities for learning more about happiness hacking, alternate realities, and game design:
  
  Nicole Lazzaro
  
  Clay Shirky – "Cognitive Surplus"
  
  Edward Castranova – Synthetic Worlds & Exodus from Reality
  
  Tara Hunt
  
  BJ Fogg
  
  Gamasutra
  
  Alternate Reality Gaming Network
  
  DIGMA (Design Industry Group of Mass)
  Promoting the Massachusetts design economy
  The Design Industry Group of Massachusetts (DIGMA) is an initiative of the statewide design industries to organize and promote the Massachusetts design cluster as integral to the state's economy. DIGMA enables diverse design industries – including advertising, architecture, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, landscape design, and specialized design services such as fashion, textiles and lighting design – to speak with one powerful and influential voice.
  
  Piedmont Triad Partnership
  Marketing our region to the world
  These tar heels have a lot to teach us about integrating and scaling up creative economy programs.

Miscellaneous musings and factoids:

No one believes advertisements anymore — that is the power of social media — but we tend to believe our friends and relatives.

There is creativity without drama and reward — in fact, it is the norm, not the exception.

Celebrate the creative spirit, not the creators.

Entrepreneurship equals prosperity for a region.

You don’t need to outdo your every achievement.

To break a writer’s block, take an acting or drawing class.

Follow your curiosity — not your passions or bliss.

Beware your pitch/robot mode of talking to another human being. Everyone wants to be a person, not a client.

Money for any start-up venture is as much a burden as it is a blessing.

Never give away free food or booze to attract potential members to a group.

Yes, there can be double bottom lines — one for profit/loss and the other for social good.

Ancient Greek dice games were created by the ruling class to distract the starving masses from their hunger in times of famine.

All games have well defined rules and boundaries; a cooperative community; a shared space for competition; time to play and experiment.

It is okay to screw up, but don’t lie about it online — you’ll get caught.

Grammar, spelling, and syntax still matter.

Make something that is genuinely hard to copy.

Attention span is 2.7 seconds for a young person, which translates into a 140 character text message.

People who take digital photographs for fun are more likely to visit a museum than the average citizen.

Senior corporate management extols the virtues of creativity but does not like to hire people with fine art backgrounds for staff positions.

If you only listen to your own voice, you’ll drown.

Privacy died 30 or 40 years ago.

Be a niche marketer/producer/provider to get rich — the generalist is seldom missed.

An artist’s book art and print project by Bob Barancik that explores gut reactions to the made-in-America financial meltdown. It is part of the CreativeLedge traveling exhibitions program.

View art folio at bottom of entry

The color red has a variety of immediate associations. They include anger, embarrassment, passion, robust health, warning, and war.

Red Tape makes us think of mammoth, convoluted bureaucracies that define our post-industrial society. This can include the department of motor vehicles, health insurance claims departments, the post office, the Pentagon, most social welfare programs, the juvenile justice system…

Red Ink means financial insolvency and bankruptcy typified by the state of California, the “Big 3” Detroit automakers, investment banks like Bear Stearns that are no more, virtually all airlines except Southwest...

Red Light indicates big trouble ahead. If you see it on an ambulance, fire truck, police squad car, traffic signal, or on a car dashboard, your adrenalin and blood pressure shoot way up. We prepare to act as if it is a matter of life or death.

Red Faces mean someone got caught red-handed with their fingers in the cookie jar, or in an adulterous erogenous zone. The number of supposedly respectable legislators caught figuratively and literally with their pants down is too lengthy for my simple blog entry.

When I think of the American financial meltdown at the end of W’s second presidential term, all I see is red. I am furious at Wall Street, Congress, Alan Greenspan, Phil Graham, Robert Rubin, Angelo Mozilo, Henry Paulson, and the rest of the incompetent government/corporate kleptocracy…and a mass media that abetted and glorified all the “masters of the universe” before their inevitable fall from grace and public adulation.

But most of all, I am angry at myself for not seeing the red warning lights sooner.

The wildly inflated home prices and the promiscuous availability of credit cards were strobe lights that should have alerted us to the dark night of an impending economic collapse.

Any functioning, gainfully employed adult knows that there is no free lunch, and that even giant redwood trees don’t grow into the stratosphere. Most of us should have taken most our chips off the roulette table (aka American stock and real estate markets) before the final spins of the wheel of misfortune.

But few of us did.

My “Seeing Red” art box and print series is something of a creative Rorschach ink blot that explores my mental state — and tries to reach some sort of catharsis or closure.

The artistic release of pent-up emotions has provided me with some (temporary) peace of mind amid the financial wreckage. And the bound-and-boxed images provided a sense of closure and control.

Everything is manageable. All the rough edges, wild brush strokes, agitated emotions, fit perfectly inside a sturdy and economically crafted box. When closed, the wild things are out of sight and conveniently out of mind.

Creativity has transformed threatening external events into some amusing visual stimuli.

I hope that these red visions will stimulate your thinking about your personal finances and strategies for coping with a world of both great economic uncertainty and surprising creative opportunities.

Technical Credits:
Box and binding / Scott Mullenberg
Digitial Print and Photoshop Consultant / Brad Erickson

To close, here are some intriguing web links:

Reversal of Fortune
Vanity Fair

Subprime Banking Mess
YouTube

This American Life: The Giant Pool of Money
NPR

8 really, really scary predictions
Fortune

A field guide to economics and finance blogs
The Boston Globe

Finessing a Recession!
CreativeLedge

Bankers Reaped Lavish Bonuses During Bailouts
The New York Times

Let’s start with some ridiculous riddles:

How do you make a small fortune in Florida real estate?
(Start with a big one.)

Why is Florida a large part of the American Dream?
(You have to be asleep to believe it’s real.)

Where do you find Floridians with the biggest smiles?
(In North Carolina.)

Why is Tallahassee located in Florida’s panhandle?
(Because the rest of the state is in the frying pan.)

What is the new official state song of Florida?
(The Tennessee Waltz.)

Why won’t an alligator ever bite a member of the Florida State legislature?
(Professional courtesy.)

These days it is really hard to be an optimist about Florida’s prospects, and very easy to write cynical humor about the sunshine state.

Most of the current mainstream images about Florida conjured up by the national media are of the “big bang” and “barely audible whimper” variety.

The former evokes images of a devastating hurricane with ensuing urban looting, followed by droughts and raging wildfires and more home foreclosures and homeless families.

The latter vision is less cinematic but equally distressing. It includes a slow but steady deterioration of civic virtue, public services and infrastructure…coupled with a continuing exodus of both educated young people and affluent 50-something professionals.

As a person who currently lives about four months of the year in New England and the Mid-Atlantic, I can assure my fellow Floridians that these regions are also in a hell-in-a-hand-basket mode. But the Sunshine state is paramount to the American Dream even when we are not asleep…while much of the northern tier of the country is in the American nightmare of seemingly permanent economic decline.

When Ohio factory workers become unemployed, or young college grads from Indianapolis get diplomas but no suitable job offers, or retiring white- and blue-collar workers in Chicago get access to their retirement accounts, many head down here.

It is inevitable that Florida has become a land of disenchantment. Like the failed and disillusioned Ponce de León and his doomed quest for the mythical Fountain of Youth, dreams quickly evaporate under a harsh and unrelenting sun.

As Lily Tomlin may have said, “Reality is the leading cause of stress among those in touch with it.”

All the problems of 21st century America are writ large in Florida. If these national conundrums cannot be solved here, it is unlikely that they will be resolved anywhere else in the country over the long term.

Are Florida’s political, academic, media, and business elites up to the job of effectively restructuring just about everything in the state to be competitive in a global economy?
(This is a rhetorical question without a written answer.)

That is why ordinary taxpaying citizens and authentic grassroots organizations will be vital to the prospects of our state. There is really no one else to keep our decision maker’s feet to the fire and eyes focused forward. This is especially true now that Craigslist has permanently crippled our daily newspapers and decimated its cadre of hard-nosed investigative reporters.

The key challenges facing Florida can be arbitrarily grouped into a number of categories, but they really form a single mishmash. That is why I’ve run them all together without bullet points or commas:

Preservation of our aquifers and wetlands Revamping of building codes in response to global climate change Affordable hurricane insurance premiums The reversal of negative demographic trends Improving race relations Mass transit Dedicated funding of education on all levels Development of a “new urbanism” in response to sprawl Public healthcare and insurance options Crime control Humane juvenile justice system Better child welfare Tax reform Homelessness and Affordable housing

In this blog entry, I hope to explore the emerging role of Cultural Creatives (CCs) in the creation of positive and doable scenarios for our state’s future.

I start with four reasonable (but depressing) assumptions:

1. Health insurance will cost the independent creative business person as much or more two years from now…and the cost will continue to escalate over the next decade.


2. There will be no meaningful reform or regulation of Wall Street…and one can expect another, but far more serious financial meltdown, within the next decade.


3. Urban sprawl will continue to spread over much our remaining wetlands and precious undeveloped coastal areas…this is all that the entrenched and politically potent business interests know how to do.


4. The Pentagon will be fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the foreseeable future and beyond…while a demoralized and resigned public diverts its attention to spectator sports and video games.

On a somewhat rosier note:

I posit that CCs will soon have a collective epiphany via social networking technology. Many will realize elections are relatively easy to win with savvy branding and a catchy tagline, but that does not automatically translate into effective governance and public policies. Apparently, quite the contrary.

CCs will finally step away from their computers and become real political grassroots players in both political parties.

Virtually all of the state’s problems require both real community dialogue (that includes deep listening rather than mob rants) and practical design solutions. For too long, the only voices behind the closed doors of power have been lawyers, lobbyists, and one-issue political ideologues. Unfortunately, most of these people represent the most divisive, inflexible, and wrongheaded minds in the state.

Conversely, many creative professionals are eager problem solvers with an appetite for ambiguous situations, a penchant for paradox, and a strong desire to give coherent form to the chaotic cacophony of life. Most CCs can do what the body politic cannot…

We can flexibly play with different points of view in changing circumstances without cracking-up (most of the time), create things and experiences of real economic value (at least on our good days), and have a global outlook (especially in food).

In terms of some practical ideas, here is an array of personal and collective items for your consideration:

• Volunteer to do creative stuff in the public schools.
  
  The combination of direct experience and real role models will start to create a future constituency for a homegrown creative economy in Florida. The stark reality is that there is currently not enough political will or public money to adequately fund widespread art, design, music, dance, and theater education for our young people.


• Support objective science education in public schools.
  
  If theocrats eliminate the study of evolution (or water it down as just another faith-based theory), a majority of our young people will not be educationally equipped for the global economy. Also, the most advanced and dynamic bio-tech corporations and research institutes will avoid our state like the plague. It is commercially applied innovative technology that generates real wealth, rather than bogus bucks found on Wall Street and cookie-cutter strip malls and condo development.
  
  It is these genuine profits that can sustain high-quality cultural institutions and creative professionals. And it looks like the biological sciences will be driving force of the 21st century.


• Think both nationally and globally in your personal marketing efforts.
  
  The web has made the successful promotion of independent creative services a viable online option. You might be surprised to find that other places will pay more for your applied talents than Tampa Bay. It is a far better bet than a state lottery ticket.
  


• Create a “Florida League of Cultural Creative Voters.”
  
  The proposed FLCCV would provide a simple and objective “scorecard” of each state legislator’s voting record on key cultural and creative economy issues. Each year, a lawmaker would receive an annual overall numerical rating on his or her support of the league’s written agenda…and many of us would cast our votes accordingly.
  
  CCs would be a highly visible political block, and politicians of both parties would think twice before cutting critical arts, education, and environmental funding in closely contested elections.
  
  Organizationally, it could be modeled on the Maine League of Conservation Voters.
  


• Read the last two chapters and epilogue of Dr. Gary Mormino’s “Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.”
  
  Gary is the distinguished director of the Florida Studies Program at USF/St.Pete. He understands the state as well as anyone and how it became what it is.

I am ending this blog entry with one of Gary’s key ideas about our particular peninsula and peculiar brand of paradise:

“But Florida has always been more about tomorrow’s possibilities than today’s realities.”

This post is a sequel to my last entry, Degrees of Creativity.

We all harbor images of the future in our heads. It tends to make some of us either worriers or cockeyed optimists, and it leaves others perpetually confused and ambivalent.

But it is our ability to envision alternative scenarios that makes us self-aware and self-directed human beings. When we ignore our imaginative abilities, we become slaves to our base instincts and cultural conditioning. Our lives become rudderless sailboats in a choppy sea of choices.

Vaclav Havel, former president of Czech Republic and gifted playwright, hit the nail on the head when he wrote this:

Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.

I suspect that many Americans of all ages and walks of life would thoroughly agree with that!

The following 10 fearless forecasts are offered as provocative grains of sand that might grow some pearls of wisdom in your mind. Whether you agree or disagree with these prognostications is beside the point. The act of evaluating assumptions about the future will give you a more mindful and considered approach to your decision making in the present.

1. More young people will enter higher education in their early 20s after military or national service. The 18-year-old college freshman will become the exception, not the rule.
   
   That is how it works in Israel, and their college students are among the most mature and focused in the world. American WWII vets are still lionized as the “greatest generation.” At many non-elite campuses like the University of Southern Maine, a typical undergrad is in his or her late 20s.
   


2. Work-Study Programs like those offered by Drexel University in Philadelphia and Northeastern University in Boston will become mainstream. Their approach addresses both the need for students to get real on-the-job experience in conjunction with book learning and a sustained exposure to the workplace before making a final commitment to a field or career.
   
   I see so many creative college grads from good schools without any well-honed job skills or any real idea of what they want to do with their lives. With so many educated and clueless creative 20-somethings, it might be time to ask exactly what is going on and why.
   
   If medical and engineering students were so psychologically ill prepared for the rigors of their disciplines, it would be a national scandal with a Congressional investigation. But society does not really care about individuals in the fine and performing arts, communication, or design. For the most part, they are viewed as fungible cultural fluff. Even if 40 percent of BFA and MFA grads leave their chosen careers by the age of 35, there is always a surplus of creative cogs to staff organizations.
   


3. Dual degree programs between private institutions like Tufts University and Berkeley School of Music, and the Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University, will continue to expand and proliferate. The large state universities will probably develop additional dual majors between departments to attract multi-talented students.
   
   This is an obvious solution for a professionally directed creative young people with strong academic abilities who want to hedge career bets.
   


4. Both the BFA and BA will become three-year rather than four-year programs. If you factor in the “Junior Year Abroad” schemes (which provide the world’s most expensive teen travel tours with easy academic credits), many four-year college degree programs are already in reality just three-year programs.
   
   This straightforward three-year degree curriculum benefits both the student and institution. It saves the former 25 percent of the cost and time of a four-year degree and makes the latter a tempting option for a young person who might have opted for just a two-year Associates degree at a community college.
   


5. Any high-profile organization that is esteemed and trusted by the marketplace can potentially offer carefully defined technical/professional certification — much of it online.
   
   I can imagine Apple, Adobe, big city art directors clubs, big city symphony orchestras, big city ballet companies, the ever hip Second City Theater Company in Chicago, Pixar, L.L. Bean, Disney, and Electronic Arts offering respected certificate programs — and making a tidy profit in the process.
   


6. Independent art schools and music conservatories will get into the online distance learning business after much acrimonious faculty debate and furor.
   
   If these small institutional players don’t use their brand names to reach deeply into a national and international applicant pool, they will probably not remain relevant or financially viable for much longer. But if they do rise to the challenge, their offerings could be among the most innovative and appealing — and profitable.
   


7. The predictable 40-something midlife crisis will be replaced by an official year-long sabbatical sanctioned by business, government, and nonprofit organizations.
   
   Middle-aged people can look forward to a paid interval of self-examination, redirection, and retraining for the second half of life. This will likely spell disaster for Porsche dealerships, divorce lawyers, bartenders, and anti-depressant manufacturers.
   
   I suspect that these freshly rejuvenated and rebooted “encore” careerists will be viewed by employers as desirable as the currently coveted young and restless folks in their 20s and early 30s. But many of the grayheads will opt for some type of flexible part-time jobs or entrepreneurship. This will tend to ease intergenerational conflict in the workplace.
   


8. A degree from a brand name New York school will not be a first-class ticket to either a big time career or even a middle class income.
   
   The Big Apple will simply be one of several first tier global creative culture hot spots. I expect London, Singapore, Berlin, Prague, and LA to give NYC a real run for its creative money. Places like Julliard, Manhattan School of Music, Parsons, Pratt, Cooper Union, NYU, The New School, Columbia, and Hunter will still have a huge cachet; but so will Oberlin, Curtiss School of Music, University of Indiana, USC, UCLA, San Jose State, Art Institute of Chicago, Syracuse University, University of Iowa. Brigham Young University, Full Sail University, Brooks Institute, and others.
   
   Having a Gotham credential in one’s bio will be most helpful for the first five years of a creative career, but it is not a big a deal after that. The playing field flattens for just about everyone after 30. It comes down to what you can actually do right now.
   


9. Healthcare tech degrees or certifications will be the preferred “day jobs” for creative people. This includes nurse’s aide, dental hygienist, radiology tech, lab tech, medical records tech, and personal trainer.
   
   All of these jobs can pay between 30 and 80 dollars per hour, are available on part-time or weekend schedules, are in high demand in all economic conditions and geographic locations, and usually come with health insurance benefits.
   
   Basically, you become your own lifetime patron. Lots of creative professionals burn out in their 40s and go back to healthcare school for a steady paycheck. It makes more sense to do this highly analytic training while young, single, and mentally agile rather than when one is older and often burdened by life responsibilities like teenage children, mortgages, aging parents, etc.
   


10. Apprenticeship is the new BFA and MFA. Until the 20th century most of the arts were learned in the studios and workshops of older master artists, craftsmen, and performers. If you go to Florence, Italy, you will see that it was a sound approach to both training and credentialing creative and energetic young people.

I would be most curious to know what your “fearless forecasts” are concerning professional creative education. Please submit them below or email them to creativeledge@gmail.com for my webmaster to post.

This blog entry was precipitated by a visit that my wife Amy and I made to our mutual alma mater a few weeks ago.

I had only been back to RISD four times since graduating in 1972. After art school, I traversed the country as a freelance graphic designer and illustrator for about 11 years.

My creative sojourns included Portland (Oregon); Palo Alto/Stanford; Berkeley; New York City; and finally, meeting Amy in Manhattan when she was interviewing me for a job. We then moved to Philadelphia. Our time currently unfolds in Portland (Maine), Philly, and St. Pete.

My wife and I ran a successful design studio together while our daughter was growing up. In early 1991, I was in a serious accident in the high mountain country of Telluride. Personal health stories are usually distressing bores, but suffice it to say that it changed everything for me.

The upshot of the experience brought me to the new digital video production and giclée printmaking. As far as I know, Blake+Barancik was among the first design studios to embrace both the Apple computer and the web in the Philadelphia metro area.

The creative flexibility of my undergrad years at RISD and graduate education at Stanford made this leap possible. It instilled an appetite for both cultural and technological innovation, plus a confidence that one could always learn what was needed.

Unfortunately, the late 1960s and early ’70s also came with a super-sized portion of wrong-headedness that has become institutionalized in most of our academic diploma mills.

The following musing on the absurdity and harmfulness of the status quo is my desire to save creative young people a lot of unnecessary grief and failure.

Hopefully, the following ideas will provoke some decisions in the present that might pay real dividends in your future.

As I see it, these are the three key facets to successfully adapting to the emerging Creative Economy:

1. Individuals must continually learn new skills and mindsets to prosper in an advanced global economy.
   


2. That which cannot be economically sustained, will not be sustained.
   


3. Any technology that can greatly optimize a given task will be applied, regardless of prevailing standards, protocols, and sentiments.

1. Individuals must continually learn new skills and mindsets to prosper in changing times.

It is ludicrous to imagine that the exact skills acquired as a teenager or young adult will be the same ones that will allow a person to be successful twenty years later.

A skeptic might say that this is true for industrial designers, digital animators, urban planners, and other techie types; but potters, furniture makers, ballet dancers, musicians, singers, novelists, landscape architects, actors, and other creatives will just keep on doing what they have always done…dream on.

I suspect that the more traditional art forms will continue to evolve technically and will seek new markets and venues. For instance, potters who successfully combine their knowledge of ceramics with other materials will no doubt garner new customers and increased income — or they might combine their skills with art therapy and service the psychological needs of a gargantuan aging population.

Conversely, young computer wiz-kids will eventually be middle-aged. It would be nuts to imagine that key software of the future will look or function anything like today’s Final Cut Pro, After Effects, and CreativeSuite. And remember, there will be another generation of ambitious young geeks just out of school who will be ready, willing, and able to leapfrog to the next new app.

In many ways the ballet dancer has it easier. She or he knows that it is over by 35 and one must move into choreography, open a ballet studio, or change careers altogether.

In any event, an individual in every creative profession will have to reinvent both oneself and one’s career. It all comes down to lifelong learning that will stretch easily into one’s mid to late seventies.

2. That which cannot be economically sustained, will not be sustained.

This point takes aim at the unsustainable escalation of tuitions at art schools, music conservatories, state colleges and universities. To my eye, these institutions are exactly where Detroit automakers were ten years ago; largely asleep at the wheel. Their insular execs and boards, bloated benefits packages, and inflexible tenured senior labor force are not competitive. And this whole wasteful process sustains a product of increasingly dubious social utility.

Just as the government has continued to bail out American carmakers, the feds continue to bail out the consumers of greatly inflated higher education.

Through readily available government-financed loan schemes, virtually anyone with the good fortune to be born into the middle or professional classes can come up with the cash for four years of art and design training. Even for young people of modest and disadvantaged financial backgrounds, money can be found. Massive personal debt has truly been democratized.

That translates into about $120K to $170K for room, board, and tuition for private education; and about $40K to $70K for state schools.

If parents were asked to pay these bills directly out of pocket, most of them couldn’t and wouldn’t invest in their children’s creative careers.

This reduction in the number of people entering the creative fields from college would both shrink programs to more sustainable sizes and improve standards. And it would raise both the entry salaries of graduates and their career prospects.

It is hardly a deep dark secret that most of the creative economy is a “winner take all” game — with a relatively few stars garnering the bulk of money and attention. With fewer young adults entering the field, more people would get a bigger slice of the pie.

Things were different for creative college students 35 years ago. In 1971, Amy had a whopper of an argument with her father about going to art school. It resulted in her paying her own RISD tuition, room, and board for the next three years.

She did this by using her training as an illustrator and graphic designer. She worked at multiple jobs while taking a demanding class load. This was possible not just because she is very talented, smart, and incredibly hard working — but also because the total cost for tuition, room, board, and art supplies was well under $4K a year.

Incidentally, Amy left RISD with $1,300 in the bank, which is the equivalent to at least $7,000 in today’s inflated greenbacks. Contrast this with the current legions of debt-burdened creative college kids with no savings — only onerous unpaid loans.

3. Any technology that can greatly optimize a given task will be applied, regardless of prevailing standards, protocols, and sentiments.

The third point concerns the necessary embrace of online learning. Even my most opened-minded, middle-aged academic friends go berserk when I bring up this subject.

But the only way to drop the cost of professional art and design training is through technology. Everything that the digital domain touches, it makes more cost-effective and democratic. It crushes old elites and hierarchies. That is why traditional academics are justifiably terrified of electronic learning.

What jobs in the global economy offer guaranteed lifetime employment, increasing salary as you age on the job, and 70% of your working salary in retirement with generous medical benefits for both you and your spouse?

Of course, this is a rhetorical question — tenured academia.

The reality is that four-year degree-granting programs in the creative/expressive domains are vocational. Students go there to get their tickets punched for jobs. The pretense that higher education is producing more “well-rounded” and literate creative professionals is, well…just pretence.

A great many liberal arts programs at mid-level colleges and universities can’t produce graduates who can actually write coherent (and non-plagiarized) essays, much less grasp the dynamics of history, math, science, and the canons of Western civilization. Many of my college professor friends admit (in private) that today’s college students are in general academically inferior to the middle-class high school grads of thirty, forty, or fifty years ago. That goes a long way in explaining the necessity of a MA or MS degree for many entry-level jobs.

On a practical level, here are three “Rules of Thumb” that might provide some useful guidance or at least conversation points between tuition-paying parents and their children:

Big name schools are worth it if you can get the bulk of the expenses paid by the school. If the institution wants you that much, they intend to groom you for the big time.

Don’t underestimate the hometown advantage. If you are a “homie” who wants to stay put, just do it. Your uninterrupted network of human connections will be valuable as your career develops over the decades. Longtime flesh-and-blood friends are far more valuable to our sustained well being than the engaging ersatz digital buddies found on Facebook and Linkedin.

I don’t regret my life as a peripatetic cosmopolitan, but in terms of career, things would probably have been much more lucrative if I just stayed in Chicago — a city that has been the home of both sides of my family since the early 1900s.

I know that this flies in the face of prevailing wisdom of such creative economy gurus like Richard Florida. Their point is that the fleet of foot and exceptionally nimble of mind must run to the next creative hot spot.

Ironically, some of the most successful and sophisticated creative professionals that I have known either stayed in state or came back home in their 30s and 40s. In my opinion, the ever-expanding digital revolution will make any metropolitan area with a major university and international airport a potential creative hot spot.

Stay out of debt if you can. If you cannot avoid college loans, try to keep it to what you think you can reasonably repay in 10 years.

Below are links to three provocative articles from The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times for your consideration:

Tell the Truth About Colleges

What's Wrong With Vocational School?

In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History