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The New Geography of Jobs

Enrico Moretti · 3 HN comments
HN Books has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention "The New Geography of Jobs" by Enrico Moretti.
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Amazon Summary
“A timely and smart discussion of how different cities and regions have made a changing economy work for them – and how policymakers can learn from that to lift the circumstances of working Americans everywhere.” — Barack Obama We’re used to thinking of the United States in opposing terms: red versus blue, haves versus have-nots. But today there are three Americas. At one extreme are the brain hubs—cities like San Francisco, Boston, and Durham—with workers who are among the most productive, creative, and best paid on the planet. At the other extreme are former manufacturing capitals, which are rapidly losing jobs and residents. The rest of America could go either way. For the past thirty years, the three Americas have been growing apart at an accelerating rate. This divergence is one the most important developments in the history of the United States and is reshaping the very fabric of our society, affecting all aspects of our lives, from health and education to family stability and political engagement. But the winners and losers aren’t necessarily who you’d expect. Enrico Moretti’s groundbreaking research shows that you don’t have to be a scientist or an engineer to thrive in one of the brain hubs. Carpenters, taxi-drivers, teachers, nurses, and other local service jobs are created at a ratio of five-to-one in the brain hubs, raising salaries and standard of living for all. Dealing with this split—supporting growth in the hubs while arresting the decline elsewhere—is the challenge of the century, and The New Geography of Jobs lights the way.
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This book does a good job of explaining why: https://www.amazon.com/New-Geography-Jobs-Enrico-Moretti/dp/...

Pretty much it is a networking effect issue. The same reason why you are posting this on hackernews instead of reddit. Physical proximity matters a lot, even when work is digital.

⬐ bpicolo
Ordered a copy. Thanks for the suggestion! I've been looking to read a bit more non-fiction :)
Small town in Italy? If you're talking about Balsamiq and Peldi, near as I can tell, he/they are in Bologna:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna

I suppose that compared to Tokyo, most anything could be considered a small town, but in Italy, Bologna isn't.

Quibbling about details aside, I think your point is a good one, although I also believe there are definitely two sides to it. The case made in this book is convincing that cities are a lot better for the sort of "spontaneous idea contamination" that can lead to big things:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Geography-Jobs-Enrico-Moretti/dp/0...

Things get even more complicated when families come into the picture: a beach town in Morocco is not my own idea of the place I'd like to live with mine, although I certainly wouldn't mind an extended vacation there.

There are a lot of things I don't care for about my hometown in Oregon (THE WEATHER!), but I do find that I'm pretty partial to the mid-sized (which for me is something like 100K-400K, depending on various factors) university town like that where I grew up. I like being able to chat with people about programming over drinks from time to time, or talk about business, or have a variety of local businesses. On the other hand, with a family and not wanting to work for a BigCo, I'm not really interested in big cities any more.

There's a great book exploring this: The New Geography of Jobs

http://www.amazon.com/The-Geography-Jobs-Enrico-Moretti/dp/0...

He talks about why things have not gone 'flat'.

⬐ netcan
Care to do a spoiler?

Does he have an interesting reason why not?

⬐ davidw
Because proximity to other people still matters a lot, especially in terms of "cross-pollination", in the sense of more random interactions than you might get if you just hired a few people to work remotely on a specific project. You could even call it an 'ecosystem' despite the word's abuse.

It's been a while since I read it, but I didn't think it was all that revolutionary... it just mostly made sense.

http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2012/10/the-new-geogr...

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