Richard Florida, a professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University and a columnist for Information Week, arrives at some surprising conclusions in his article: "The Rise of the Creative Class" . He started out researching why initiatives to improve the economic lot of Pittsburg had come to naught and discovered an interesting demographic trend and set of markers for determining the economic success of a city. He offers a "Creative Index" for cities. Tulsa, by the way, made the top 10 (barely) of medium sized metro areas (500K-1MM pop.) DesMoines (!?) is number 2 in small sized metro areas (250K-500K). Austin and SanDiego are numbers 2 and 3 in the large sized metro areas (1MM+). This is great food for thought.