Attempts to turn cities outside of Silicon Valley into superstar cities by making them tech hubs have met with mixed success. . . The internet can’t yet replace the face-to-face communication required for rapid-fire innovation.
A tech-driven concentration of talent since the 1980s has helped the rich get richer. But it has also sharpened an urban-rural divide that, some say, threatens growth
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Did he create a Mass Migration to so-called "Super-Star Cities"?
Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
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Appeared in the December 15, 2018, print edition as 'America’s Top Digital Cities.'
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As U.S. 'superstar' cities thrive, weaker ones get left behind
WHERE THE GROWTH IS ... AND ISN’T
The U.S. economy entered a second decade of growth this month, marking the longest expansion on record.
In many ways the country has seemingly recovered from a 2007-2009 recession that was the worst downturn since the 1930s. Unemployment is near a 50-year low, household income has been rising, and the country is at a point in the business cycle when workers typically see their most robust gains.
But a Reuters analysis of federal data shows just how unevenly the spoils of growth have been divided.
In a ranking of 378 metropolitan areas by how their share of national employment changed from 2010 to 2017, 40% of the new jobs generated during that time went to the top 20 places, along with a similar share of the additional wages.
Those cities represent only about a quarter of the country’s population and are concentrated in the fast-growing southern and coastal states. None were in the northeast, and only two were in the “rust belt” interior . . .
The 40 top job-generating metro areas saw employment expand 23% during those years. Jobs in other metro areas grew around 11%, and in counties outside of metro areas the job growth rate was around 4.5%.
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". . . When economists talk about “superstar” anything, they’re referencing a phenomenon first described in the early 1980s. It began as the product of mass media and was put into overdrive by the internet. In an age when the reach of everything we make is greater than ever, members of an elite class of bankers, chief executives, programmers, Instagram influencers and just about anyone with in-demand technical skills have seen their incomes grow far faster than those of the middle class.
In this winner-take-all economy, the superstar firms—think Apple, Google and Amazon, but also their increasingly high-tech equivalents in finance, health care and every other industry—appear to account for most of the divergence in productivity and profits between companies in the U.S.
