Big Think co-founder Peter Hopkins sat down with bestselling author and urban theorist Richard Florida the other week to talk about the new psyche of the American workforce. Florida sees the economic crisis as an inflection point from which a new class of thinkers will arise.

Florida also thinks our education system needs to be revamped at its very core. Florida says: "It’s almost as if everyone is stuck in the same place.  It seems to me that the mental models and frameworks of the Fordist economy, of the mass production economy, are so powerful and so deeply engrained in the way we think, it’s hard to think in other terms." And it's not just America, argues Florida. No other country, be it China or Brazil, is redesigning their institutions right now.