A new analysis of where “innovation” jobs are being created in the US paints a stark portrait of a divided economy where the industries seen as key to growth cluster in a narrowing set of places.
Divergence in job growth, incomes and future prospects between strong-performing cities and the rest of the country is an emerging focus of political debate and economic research.
It is seen as a source of social stress, particularly since US President Donald Trump tapped the resentment of left-behind areas in his 2016 presidential campaign.
Photo: Bloomberg
Research from the Brookings Institution released yesterday showed that the problem cuts deeper than many thought.
Even cities that have performed well in terms of overall employment growth, such as Dallas, are trailing in attracting workers in 13 industries with the most productive private sector jobs.
Between 2005 and 2017, industries such as chemical manufacturing, satellite telecommunications and scientific research flocked to about 20 cities, led by standouts San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Boston and San Diego, the study found.
Combined, these mostly coastal cities captured an additional 6 percent of “innovation” jobs — about 250,000 positions.
Companies in those industries tend to benefit from being close to each other, with the better-educated employees they target also attracted to urban amenities.
Brookings Institution economist Mark Muro said he fears the trend risks becoming “self-reinforcing and destructive” as the workforce separates into a group of highly productive and high-earning metro areas and everywhere else.
Even though expensive housing, high wages and congestion have prompted some tech companies to open offices outside of Silicon Valley, those moves have not been at scale.
Most US metro areas are either losing innovation industry jobs outright or gaining no share, Muro wrote.
Over this decade, “a clear hierarchy of economic performance based on innovation capacity had become deeply entrenched,” Muro and coauthor Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, wrote in the report.
Across the 13 industries they studied, workers in the upper echelon of cities were about 50 percent more productive than in others.
For much of the post-World War II period labor was more mobile and the types of industries driving the economy did not cluster so intensely, a trend that started reversing in about 1980.
Concerns that the US is separating effectively into two economies has sparked support for localized efforts to spread the benefits of economic growth.
The US Federal Reserve has flagged it as a possible risk to overall growth, and some of the presidential candidates running for office next year have rolled out proposals to address it.
One aim of Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on imports from China and elsewhere is to revive ailing areas of the country.
Muro and Atkinson propose a concerted push involving federal research grants, tax breaks and loosened regulations to encourage research into areas such as autonomous vehicles.
They suggest focusing on about 10 inland cities with a large-enough population and existing tech expertise to contribute.
The Burmese junta has said that detained former leader Aung San Suu Kyi is “in good health,” a day after her son said he has received little information about the 80-year-old’s condition and fears she could die without him knowing. In an interview in Tokyo earlier this week, Kim Aris said he had not heard from his mother in years and believes she is being held incommunicado in the capital, Naypyidaw. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was detained after a 2021 military coup that ousted her elected civilian government and sparked a civil war. She is serving a
China yesterday held a low-key memorial ceremony for the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) not attending, despite a diplomatic crisis between Beijing and Tokyo over Taiwan. Beijing has raged at Tokyo since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last month said that a hypothetical Chinese attack on Taiwan could trigger a military response from Japan. China and Japan have long sparred over their painful history. China consistently reminds its people of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which it says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in what was then its capital. A post-World War II Allied tribunal put the death toll
‘NO AMNESTY’: Tens of thousands of people joined the rally against a bill that would slash the former president’s prison term; President Lula has said he would veto the bill Tens of thousands of Brazilians on Sunday demonstrated against a bill that advanced in Congress this week that would reduce the time former president Jair Bolsonaro spends behind bars following his sentence of more than 27 years for attempting a coup. Protests took place in the capital, Brasilia, and in other major cities across the nation, including Sao Paulo, Florianopolis, Salvador and Recife. On Copacabana’s boardwalk in Rio de Janeiro, crowds composed of left-wing voters chanted “No amnesty” and “Out with Hugo Motta,” a reference to the speaker of the lower house, which approved the bill on Wednesday last week. It is
FALLEN: The nine soldiers who were killed while carrying out combat and engineering tasks in Russia were given the title of Hero of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea North Korean leader Kim Jong-un attended a welcoming ceremony for an army engineering unit that had returned home after carrying out duties in Russia, North Korean state media KCNA reported on Saturday. In a speech carried by KCNA, Kim praised officers and soldiers of the 528th Regiment of Engineers of the Korean People’s Army (KPA) for “heroic” conduct and “mass heroism” in fulfilling orders issued by the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea during a 120-day overseas deployment. Video footage released by North Korea showed uniformed soldiers disembarking from an aircraft, Kim hugging a soldier seated in a wheelchair, and soldiers and officials
RSS