Why Some Cities Are More Creative

The clustering of creativity is purely by chance. Certain forms of art are produced in some small villages and nowhere else. As some experts on arts and culture have pointed out, this means that good art, the rest of the world values, can come out of small groups of people. This also means that creativity is random, and need not always have strong foundations. It is not necessary that we can always easily attribute creativity to prosperity, cultural heritage or even freedom. It is not always easy to explain why some parts of the world are more creative.

Some cities are more creative. According to Martinprosperity.org, when adjusted for population, three times as many people work in creative occupations in Singapore than in Mumbai. Only 14 per cent of the people are engaged in creative occupations in India. In China, only 7.37 per cent of the people are engaged in creative jobs, while this is 35.22 per cent in the United States, 41.27 per cent in the United Kingdom, 47.30 per cent in Singapore, 44.52 per cent in Australia and 17.54 per cent in Japan.

This, of course, depends on lot on how creative occupations are defined. If the study had looked at extraordinarily creative individuals, the US would have been on the top as the country has produced 353 Nobel Prize winners so far, but the number of Nobel laureates per 10 million people is only 10.97. India has produced 0.076 Nobel laureates per 10 million people. This means, when compared to the US, India needs 144 times as many people to produce a Nobel laureate.  It may be argued that India is a developing country. But when compared to the US, Japan needs 5.78 times as many people to produce as a Nobel laureate. Japan has produced only 1.896 Nobel laureates per 10 million people. This cannot be attributed to poverty, because Japan is one of the most prosperous countries on earth.

Creativity cannot be fully attributed to genes either. By 1933, Germans had won more Nobel prizes than the British and Americans put together. The spread of National Socialism led to the fall of Germany, though, in the early phase of the 20th century, German artists, thinkers, writers and scientists were among the very best in the world.

This is no longer true, even though Germany has produced 11 Nobel laureates per 10 million people. In a sense, this is better than the performance of the US. Of course, a few other countries do better than US too like Norway, the UK, Switzerland, Denmark and Australia, when it comes to the number of Nobel Prize winners that have emerged from a group of 10 million people. This does not necessarily prove anything. Naipaul's success was enough for Trinidad and Tobago to produce 7.352 laureates per 10 million people, and one person was enough for Faroe Islands to produce 207.47 Nobel laureates per 10 million people.

Even though enough people are engaged in creative occupations in parts of the east like Singapore, still not many great works of art, science or literature have not come out of the east. Geography is part of the reason. Some parts of the world have better climate and land that is more fertile. Institutions and the political climate are very important. The west obviously have had better institutions for a very long time. But, the foundations of the prosperity of the west were laid much before the onset of industrial revolution.

Western societies are also more liberal. But this again begs the question. It may be true that New York has more breathtakingly creative people than Mumbai, But why are some societies more liberal and open? The interaction between genes and the environment seems to be the best explanation so far. Africa, for example was sparsely populated, with low agricultural productivity. So, people did not have the resources to build an advanced civilisation, or even private property right. As Africa was sparsely populated, trade was not viable. So, people did not develop the necessary skills for trade. In Europe, however, the geography allowed independent states. The dense population also allowed greater trade. The relatively weak powers of local leaders were also a factor. China, though prosperous once, had autocratic rule. The interaction between genes and the environment does not explain everything, but this is not a reason to think that it is not the most important factor.