Richard Florida writes:

The critical feature of the creative economy is that it makes place the fundamental feature of politics, culture, and economics.

This isn’t literally true, at least not in Alabama and Mississippi, where whites went 8 to 1 for McCain and blacks went something like 25 to 1 for Obama. But I think what Florida means is that place is more important than it used to be within demographically defined subgroups of the population (in particular, upper-middle-class whites).

The question is: how to state this hypothesis carefully, how to test it, and how to understand where (in space and time) it’s largely true and where it’s not. This is an important research project, I think.