Digifesto

I’ve start reading Enrico Moretti’s The New Geography of Jobs and finding it very clear and persuasive (though I’m not far in).

Moretti is taking up the major theme of What The Hell Is Happening To The United States, which is being addressed by so many from different angles. But whereas many writers seem to have an agenda–e.g., Noble advocating for political reform regulating algorithms; Deenan arguing for return to traditional community values in some sense; etc.–or to focus on particularly scandalous or dramatic aspects of changing political winds–such as Gilman’s work on plutocratic insurgency and collapsing racial liberalism–Moretti is doing economic geography showing how long term economic trends are shaping the distribution of prosperity within the U.S.

From the introduction, it looks like there are a few notable points.

The first is about what Moretti calls the Great Divergence, which has been going on since the 1980’s. This is the decline of U.S. manufacturing as jobs moved from Detroit, Michegan to Shenzhen, Guangdong, paired with the rise of an innovation economy where the U.S. takes the lead in high-tech and creative work. The needs of the high-tech industry–high-skilled workers, who may often be educated immigrants–changes the demographics of the innovation hubs and results in the political polarization we’re seeing on the national stage. This is an account of the economic base determining the cultural superstructure which is so fraught right now, and exactly what I was getting at yesterday with my rant yesterday about the politics of business.

The second major point Moretti makes which is probably understated in more polemical accounts of the U.S. political economy is the multiplier effect of high-skilled jobs in innovation hubs. Moretti argues that every high-paid innovation job (like software engineer or scientist) results in four other jobs in the same city. These other jobs are in service sectors that are by their nature local and not able to be exported. The consequence is that the innovation economy does not, contrary to its greatest skeptics, only benefit the wealthy minority of innovators to the ruin of the working class. However, it does move the location of working class prosperity into the same urban centers where the innovating class is.

This gives one explanation for why the backlash against Obama-era economic policies was such a shock to the coastal elites. In the locations where the “winners” of the innovation economy were gathered, there was also growth in the service economy which by objective measures increased the prosperity of the working class in those cities. The problem was the neglected working class in those other locations, who felt left behind and struck back against the changes.

A consequence of this line of reasoning is that arguments about increasing political tribalism are really a red herring. Social tribes on the Internet are a consequence, not a cause, of divisions that come from material conditions of economy and geography.

Moretti even appears to have a constructive solution in mind. He argues that there are “three Americas”: the rich innovation hubs, the poor former manufacturing centers, and mid-sized cities that have not yet gone either way. His recipe for economic success in these middle cities is attracting high-skilled workers who are a kind of keystone species for prosperous economic ecosystems.

References

Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press, 2018.

Gilman, Nils. “The twin insurgency.” American Interest 15 (2014): 3-11.

Gilman, Nils. “The Collapse of Racial Liberalism.” The American Interest (2018).

Moretti, Enrico. The new geography of jobs. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press, 2018.