Digifesto

I’m continuing to read Moretti’s The new geography of jobs (2012). Except for the occasional gushing over the revolutionary-ness of some new payments startup, a symptom no doubt of being so close to Silicon Valley, it continues to be an enlightening and measured read on economic change.

There are a number of useful arguments and ideas from the book, which are probably sourced more generally from economics, which I’ll outline here, with my comments:

Local, artisanal production can never substitute for large-scale manufacturing. Moretti argues that while in many places in the United States local artisinal production has cropped up, it will never replace the work done by large-scale production. Why? Because by definition, local artisinal production is (a) geographically local, and therefore unable to scale beyond a certain region, and (b) defined in part by its uniqueness, differentiating it from mainstream products. In other words, if your local small-batch shop grows to the point where it competes with large-scale production, it is no longer local and small-batch.

Interestingly, this argument about production scaling echoes work on empirical heavy tail distributions in social and economic phenomena. A world where small-scale production constituted most of production would have an exponentially bounded distribution of firm productivity. The world doesn’t look that way, and so we have very very big companies, and many many small companies, and they coexist.

Higher labor productivity in a sector results in both a richer society and fewer jobs in that sector. Productivity is how much a person’s labor produces. The idea here is that when labor productivity increases, the firm that hires those laborers needs fewer people working to satisfy its demand. But those people will be paid more, because their labor is worth more to the firm.

I think Moretti is hand-waving a bit when he argues that a society only gets richer through increased labor productivity. I don’t follow it exactly.

But I do find it interesting that Moretti calls “increases in productivity” what many others would call “automation”. Several related phenomena are viewed critically in the popular discourse on job automation: more automation causes people to lose jobs; more automation causes some people to get richer (they are higher paid); this means there is a perhaps pernicious link between automation and inequality. One aspect of this is that automation is good for capitalists. But another aspect of this is that automation is good for lucky laborers whose productivity and earnings increase as a result of automation. It’s a more nuanced story than one that is only about job loss.

The economic engine of an economy is what brings in money, it need not be the largest sector of the economy. The idea here is that for a particular (local) economy, the economic engine of that economy will be what pulls in money from outside. Moretti argues that the economic engine must be a “trade sector”, meaning a sector that trades (sells) its goods beyond its borders. It is the workers in this trade-sector economic engine that then spend their income on the “non-trade” sector of local services, which includes schoolteachers, hairdressers, personal trainers, doctors, lawyers, etc. Moretti’s book is largely about how the innovation sector is the new economic engine of many American economies.

One thing that comes to mind reading this point is that not all economic engines are engaged in commercial trade. I’m thinking about Washington, DC, and the surrounding area; the economic engine there is obviously the federal government. Another strange kind of economic engine are top-tier research universities, like Carnegie Mellon or UC Berkeley. Top-tier research universities, unlike many other forms of educational institutions, are constantly selling their degrees to foreign students. This means that they can serve as an economic engine.

Overall, Moretti’s book is a useful guide to economic geography, one that clarifies the economic causes of a number of political tensions that are often discussed in a more heated and, to me, less useful way.

References

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