Richard Florida created buzz a few years ago with his book The Rise of the Creative Class, which was about how wealth was being created by ideas people.

In his new book, The Flight of the Creative Class, he talks about how the U.S. is losing its advantage as a destination of choice for the world's brightest people -- something that could both benefit and hurt Canada.

He spoke with Salon recently. Some excerpts:

Your first book, "The Rise of the Creative Class," was so optimistic about the potential of what you termed the "creative economy," but this new book is almost alarmist in nature. You argue that the U.S. is facing a potentially crippling economic crisis if it doesn't improve the ways in which it attracts and retains creative workers.

I've studied competitiveness for 25 years and the current economic threat is by far the gravest competitive threat to ever face the United States. It's far more significant than the challenge posed by Japanese or Asian competition in the '90s because it's aimed at the crux of our advantage, which is our ability to attract the best and brightest talent. Everyone is frightened of letting terrorists into the country when it's actually more likely that they're keeping out the next Einstein. Look at the amount of attention given to Social Security, look at the attention given to building football stadiums -- and you can't even get a conversation going about attracting and retaining talent!

How did this book come about? At first glance it seems so different from the domestic focus on the American cities in your first book.

After I finished "The Rise of the Creative Class" I was invited to the Knowledge Wave conference in New Zealand. The speakers were Robert Putnam [author of "Bowling Alone"], [Stanford professor] Paul Romer, and me, plus all these heavyweights from around the world. Later they arranged a lunch with the director Peter Jackson [of "Lord of the Rings" fame] and a tour of his Wetta Studios.

When I asked him why he chose New Zealand to build his state-of-the-art studio instead of L.A. or elsewhere in the U.S., he said, "I decided I could build this incredible digital film production complex in Wellington. And not only could I attract talent from around the world because we have a great project and great people and a great location -- there's the sun and the beautiful surroundings and the beautiful city -- but it's small enough so there weren't the kind of distractions you would find in L.A." Distractions like a lot of congestion, people who don't come to work, people who don't have to work all day to afford a house ...

He said, "What we could do here is build a team, while in L.A. everyone is moving from project to project. What I'm trying to do is build an actual company that's around for a long time. It's for people who want to work for a company that has a continuous stream of employment." And he said he could get people from Australia, from Germany, from France, from the Soviet Union or the former East European block and from the United States. They all wanted to work at the studio.

And so I put that into my head and I started to think and I started to travel around a little more and it just dawned on me that the competition between Pittsburgh and Austin, Cleveland and Seattle, St. Louis and San Francisco, wasn't just a national competition. In fact, the competition for talent was global.

In your first book you state that diversity and especially the presence of a large gay community in a city indicates a level of tolerance that is a prerequisite for urban redevelopment in the creative era. In this book focused on the global creative economy you write that the concentration of foreign students is a leading indicator.

I call students the canaries of the global talent flow. The United States has the largest single number of foreign students, and we actually are very, very, very significantly concentrated among Indian students and Chinese-speaking students. But, for example, only 4 percent of our total student population is made up of foreign students, while in Australia 22 percent of the student population is composed of foreign students.

And in particular, the recent U.S. restrictions have hit hard at foreign students who compose the critical backbone of our high-tech industries. We couldn't have high-tech industries in the United States -- no matter how much we want to say we would -- without foreign-born engineers and computer scientists. We just wouldn't have them. We couldn't run them because we don't produce enough talent of our own. Fifty percent of the computer scientists in the United States are foreign-born, which is a huge number. But it makes sense. If you have a billion kids in India and China and a billion kids are trying to learn engineering and math and computer science, there are going to be a lot of really talented and smart kids, even if they're distributed at the same ratios as U.S. kids. And in the past that gave the U.S. a great advantage because we were able to attract the lion's share of the brightest, most technically sophisticated, entrepreneurial, motivated kids in the world.

So are you saying that a country like China or India might supplant the U.S. in terms of attracting talent sometime in the future? I told a friend about your Peter Jackson moment and he laughed and said, "It's not like a few hive workers from the film industry leaving for New Zealand is going to impair the U.S. economy."

No, it's not that any one country is going to emerge as the next great superpower and attract all the best talent. It's not like "It's going to be the EU" or "It's going to be China." That's silly. But if these increasingly competitive countries take 2 to 3 to 4 to 5 percent of the talent that used to come here, when you add that up over 10 to 20 countries, that's a huge loss.

And what's happening, of course, is that India and China and the Chinese-speaking countries are focusing on retaining their kids and attracting back their expatriates. And at the same time, Canada and Australia, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Sydney, Stockholm, Melbourne, London and Dublin are all trying to get a toehold on attracting really talented people from all over the world. So the global competition for talent is escalating just as the global competition in automobiles or electronics escalated two decades ago.

We've never seen labor markets on this scale that are so strongly global. And the United States is at a tipping point where we might lose our historical advantage. This book sounds the alarm. We better wake up because we can no longer take this for granted.