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Why Some Cities Get All the Good Jobs (chicagotribune.com)
New submitter Ericmesrr writes with a link to a Bloomberg story (as carried by the ChicagoTribune) about geographic trends in job creation in the U.S, from which he excerpts this quote from U.C Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti: "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."
I find this trend quite strange as well. In the late 90s everyone was going on about how technology would allow us to work from anywhere so we could spread out around the country. Things like cramming into an urban area, and flying to conferences were going to become unnecessary.
Instead what I've observed is that the rise of 'thinking' jobs, which only require a desk, have made it more and more viable for people to live in concentrated urban centres. Contrast this with industrial jobs where you needed large amounts of land for a factory which naturally led to suburban developments. Similarly the rise of cheap air travel has raised the expectation that you'll just turn up at a conference, so I find I have to attend more now.
I think this trend will continue until driverless cars are ubiquitous. These will open up huge amounts of land around urban centres (it will be like adding tube lines everywhere), and will probably cause a significant decline in central city density as people are freed from existing rent/transport monopolies.