Book excerpt: We are now at a point where 'analytical advances' permit researchers to theoretically and empirically formulate, model, and test many of the ideas pertaining to the working of Richard Florida's 'creative class' in interesting and new ways. The kind of advances we have in mind include, but are not limited to, recent developments in growth theory in economics, improvements in statistics and in regional science that permit researchers to analyze data in novel ways, and progress in computer science that allows researchers to take advantage of, for instance, natural language processing. The objective of this book is to demonstrate how new analytical advances permit one to have a richer and more nuanced understanding of the ways in which the creative class has functioned and the ways in which its abilities can be harnessed for the betterment of society at large.