Why Some Cities Get All the Good Jobs

Over the past few decades, the U.S. job market has been pulling apart. Lots of new high- and low-wage jobs have been created, while middle-wage ones have become scarcer. Much of this divergence has been along geographical lines. I’ll let economist Enrico Moretti, of the University of California at Berkeley, explain:

A handful of cities with the “right” industries and a solid base of human capital keep attracting good employers and offering high wages, while those at the other extreme, cities with the “wrong” industries and a limited human capital base, are stuck with dead-end jobs and low average wages. This divide — I will call it the Great Divergence — has its origins in the 1980s, when American cities started to be increasingly defined by their residents’ levels of education. Cities with many college-educated workers started attracting even more, and cities with a less educated workforce started losing ground.

That’s from Moretti’s 2012 book, “The New Geography of Jobs,” which I’ve been reading this week. The book explains a lot about our current economic situation, and perhaps something about today’s politics as well. Wonder why voters are so resentful of elites and the establishment? Maybe it’s because that elite establishment has become increasingly concentrated in a few prospering metropolitan areas while much of the rest of the country struggles. Read More…

Why Some Cities Get All the Good Jobs