Categories:
Labor Market
I assume that David’s title was partly tongue-in-cheek. Anyway, consider what Kay Hymowitz writes.
Between 1950 and 1980, Brooklyn lost half a million residents. And the blue-collar decline continues in the new millennium, with the borough losing more than 9,000 manufacturing jobs between 2005 and 2010.
Read the whole thing. It tells the story for one city that I tell for the whole country. After WWII, we become a nation of clerks. Now even the clerks are losing their jobs to machines. Hymowitz writes,
For all their energy and creativity, Brooklyn’s young entrepreneurs tend to have few employees, and they’re not likely to be hiring large numbers in the future.
Again, read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
Foobarista
Nov 29 2011 at 4:24am
One other “takeaway” is that local laws matter. A partial counterexample to the above is Austin, Tx, where local startups are hiring significant numbers of non-elite workers.
The problem in New York (as well as CA) is hugely expensive labor laws have made it so expensive to hire anyone that companies only hire senior staff at “HQ”, while everything else is outsourced, offshored, or done in cheaper “red states” if kept “in house” (see Amazon’s vast operations in Nevada, etc). Given that most labor laws and regs cost the same whether you hire a $30K worker or a $300K exec, this is to be expected.
fundamentalist
Nov 29 2011 at 9:59am
Speaking of ZMP for workers makes no sense. Workers don’t have a set MP or an intrinsic MP; they only have MP in relationship to a particular job. For some jobs the same worker will have very high MP and for others negative MP.
The MP of a worker has meaning only in relation to a particular job. If an industry loses a lot of jobs, those workers will have ZMP for that industry, but they will have some MP for other jobs and greater MP if they get retrained.
Becky Hargrove
Nov 29 2011 at 10:05am
Austin was also contrasted this morning in a WSJ blog “Brain Hub Cities Attract Jobs”, as being one of the few affordable cities in this group. This post emphasized the growing ‘hourglass’ nature of cities in the present. However, the post I want to provide the link to gave one person’s solution for breaking high skilled jobs into middle class jobs that sounds as if it could restore some of the middle. Imagine this solution applied to health care:
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/11/29/how-to-create-middle-class-jobs-in-435-steps
Becky Hargrove
Nov 29 2011 at 10:08am
sorry about that, am still learning to post links!
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