A wonkish note about economic shocks and regional economics, inspired by a conversation I had with David Autor, co-author of the famous "China shock" paper 1/ chinashock.info
Here's the background: we know that in aggregate many more jobs end up being displaced by technology than by trade. David argued, however, that trade shocks are more likely to be geographically concentrated in their impact 2/
So for example, containerization destroyed a lot of longshoremen jobs, but these were scattered across multiple big cities, and didn't cut out the core of communities the way that, say, the surge of furniture imports from China did 3/
He's probably right for the most part. But I think there are some counterexamples. Coal employment really collapsed between 1980 and 2000, and it was all technology — coal output was flat or rising 4/ 
Clearly, the geographical effects of this shock were very concentrated in WV and eastern KY. So some techno shocks are also regional shocks 5/
Oh, and by the way: Yangish cries that the robots are coming miss the point that the robots have always been coming. None of the things we're seeing now are bigger than what happened to port workers and coal miners in decades past 6/
