The correlation between growth and the creative class is by far the strongest

From The Metro-covery and the Limits of Growth Without Growth by Richard Florida. Talking about which cities are recovering and why - basically those cities with high productivity via a strong human capital base.

Let’s start with what’s not associated with regional economic growth. The economic growth of metros between 2007 and 2010 had little or no relationship to population size, density, levels of innovation, wages or places with warmer summers. It had only a weak relationship to high-tech industry and a weak negative association with housing prices.

Several factors clearly do stand out. Many commentators, from Peter Drucker and Daniel Bell to me have charted the shift from an industrial to a more knowledge-based, creative economy. The crisis appears to have accelerated this shift, as evidenced by the fact that the economic growth of metros has been most closely associated with the share of the workforce in knowledge, professional, and creative industries. The correlation between growth and the creative class is by far the strongest of any in our analysis (about 0.4). Education or human capital levels – measured as the share of adults with at least a college degree, another way of measuring knowledge-intensity – also plays a strong role (with a correlation of about 0.3). Despite the strong showings posted by some metros with traditional manufacturing economies, economic growth was much less likely to occur in metros where the working class makes up a greater share of the workforce. Metro GDP is negatively associated with the share of working class jobs in a metro (with a correlation of -0.2).