I never made any remarks about this group not wanting to dirty its hands and this group looking down on other people. Please read the main post. Here’s what I said:

It’s an interesting concept, which assumes that sometime in the recent past people who made tangible things, like food, airplanes, cars, and do-it-yourself furniture stopped “creating”, a term which can now only apply to artistes. I think it’s a concept which can only exist where the existence of things is taken for granted so that we no longer regard their creation as remarkable. Assured prosperity creates strange attitudes. There’s a story about a London bum who went up to a Duchess during the Depression. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Why don’t you eat?” was her reply. Bertolt Brecht wrote in words whose original intention are ironically reflected back on his own ideology.

This is not an attack on programmers. I’m a programmer for Pete’s sake. But why Kotkin should think this group of people should “triumphant” or should now constitute a class separate from “military contractors, manufacturers, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals, suburban real estate developers, energy companies, old-line remnants on Wall Street” is beyond me. People in pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and in military contracting are pretty creative.

So what distinguishes them from others? He gets his concept from a book written in 1973.

In contrast, the creative class comes to power with the wind at its back. Its ascendancy was first predicted by Daniel Bell in his 1973 classic The Coming of Post-Industrial Society as a natural product of the rise of science-based industry. Shortly afterward California’s Jerry Brown became the first politician to recognize this shift, embracing Silicon Valley and Hollywood as a counterweight to the industrial, aerospace and agribusiness establishment that had supported both his father, former governor Pat Brown, and Ronald Reagan.

The title of Kotkin’s article, BTW, is “The Triumph Of The Creative Class”. How do we get from this to being “off base” and “nuts”?