Thread by @Noahpinion

I like this Krugman column, but I think it could do more to remind people of WHY cities and universities are now the engines of economic growth: nytimes.com/2018/11/19/opi…

It's not govt. policy choices, it's technology + clustering effects. Not something Trump can reverse.

If you want to understand the forces shaping the geography of American economic activity, you need to read this book:
amazon.com/New-Geography-…

If you haven't read "The New Geography of Jobs", you should read it before you ask any of the following questions:
1) "What if we disperse government offices?"
2) "What if we bring manufacturing back from China?"
3) "What if we valued service workers more?"

The truth is that we should do all those things, and yet none of those things constitutes an alternative to the knowledge-industry-clustering forces that Moretti describes in "The New Geography of Jobs".

We must work WITH those forces. We can't work against them.

Knowledge-industry-clustering forces are the fundamental driver of:
A) Rising rent in big cities
B) Declining old-line manufacturing regions
C) Declining rural areas
D) The rise of the liberal-minded urban educated elite
E) Cities and inner suburbs turning blue

These forces are behind everything Trumpism is a reaction against.

Yet they're not things Trump can stop without turning us into a third-world country.

And they create their own sets of challenges that Trumpism will never be able to deal with.

Knowledge-industry-clustering forces are also the reason we need increased skilled immigration (see this book: amazon.com/Gift-Global-Ta…).

China's rise means we can't be the world's workshop anymore (for a while, anyway). We need to be the world's research park.

Practically everything is being driven by the shift to knowledge industries that strongly tend to cluster in big cities with lots of talent and near good research universities.

You can't understand America without understanding this shift. It's the big picture.

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