“The New Geography of Jobs” Enrico Moretti, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (294 pages, $28)
“The New Geography of Jobs” is a persuasive look at why some U.S. cities have prospered in recent decades while others have declined. The short explanation for these diverging fortunes is that towns such as Seattle are teeming with college-educated workers in high-tech positions.
Tune out, for a minute, the grim news about student-loan debts reaching $1 trillion and graduates struggling to find jobs. Investing in a four-year degree produces an inflation- adjusted annual return of more than 15 percent, according to research from the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Moretti, a professor specializing in labor and urban economics at the University of California, Berkeley, has combed through U.S. census data and teased out a secular trend. Over the past three decades, education has become a great divider, he says. Even as communities desegregated racially, they became more segregated scholastically.
Conurbations with many college graduates, including Boston, San Jose and the Raleigh-Durham research triangle in North Carolina, have become “brain hubs.” They offer higher wages and longer life expectancy. At the other extreme are traditional manufacturing centers such as Flint, Mich. In between, cities could flip either way, he says. James Pressley, Bloomberg News
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