This weekend, after having to explain to way too many people what Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class was about, I started thinking about the (as-yet, I'm only halfway through the book) unexplored relationship between the rise and fall of the agricultural, industrial, and "creative" revolutions.

First of all, pages 151-152 of Rise really jumped out at me. If you have it, take a second to read from after page 151's bullets to the end of the section on 152. If not, it's basically about how real wages continue to increase for the so-called Creative Class. He even uses Brad Templeton's Bill Gates Wealth Index -- a measurement of how large a denomination a bill on the ground must hold for it to be worth being picked up by The Bill. In 1986, $5 would have been too small to bother with. By 1998, it needed to be greater than $10,000.

Now, I know (and you do too) that knowledge work creates value -- or at the very least, shifts costs to lesser amounts. Sending emails helps productivity and uses less resources; a good blog network or collective, if properly trained, could theoretically put The New Yorker or The Economist to shame.

But how do we properly measure that value? I'm not the first asking that question, Post, and I know I won't be the last. People pay to get financial reports drawn up by high-priced, well-respected firms (many of which, by the way, allegedly outsource a lot of the grunt-work) when they can realistically be done by a couple of well-trained employees for a fraction of the price. Where does the Creative value-add end and the value-vacuum begin?

Ryan Holiday wrote something today about this that got me really riled up, and it's one of the few posts I'm actually ever going to link you to - today's When I See. He writes about how, with a little previous know-how (or at least the time to develop it), it's actually not that hard to start a company that'll beat out most of the hacks already there, blurring the line between value-add and value-vac. But you'd still be blurring the line yourself.

So where does this fit in with the whole agricultural/industrial revolution bit? Well, I'm no historian, but there was probably some sort of gold rush back then, what with all of these new technologies people were adapting to. I would be shocked (and, to be honest, really pleased with human nature) if people weren't taking advantage of others who were overwhelmed with the rapid advances, the new technologies, and the general volatility of the market.

But then something interesting happened: things calmed down. I mean, sure, there are still major movements in agriculture and industrial processes (think about vertical farming and lean manufacturing). But the snake oil has stopped selling. And, with the dust settled, it's a lot easier to tell what a fair price is.

Perhaps the next 5, 10, 15, 50 years are about being part of the settling dust. You and I will (hopefully) not end up fleecing some and completely screwing others. We'll look for real ways we can help people, solve problems, and be a productive part of society.

See, when the dust finally settles, it'll be people like you and me who have solid reputations. We'll be worthy of others' trust. People remember the names of Henry Ford and Seth Godin. They came in with ideas, and their ideas proved valuable.

So if that's the value of knowledge/creative work, what we need to do now is tinker around with how we measure it. The current financial instruments and measurements, though, don't seem to be cutting it. They were made for industrial production, and were probably retooled from ones developed for agricultural production.

Time to get back to the drawing board. Ironically, all because we're spending more time at the drawing board.

--Aidan