Thread by @AlecMacGillis

Thanks to @brianstelter for having me on @reliablesources today to talk about FULFILLMENT (on sale Tuesday!) Such good questions. cnn.com/videos/busines… 1/n

I talked in the intvu about FULFILLMENT being about the "places that a lot of us, a lot of our families come from, places that we still live in, and we feel the pain of watching the cities we come from fall behind these rich-get-richer cities." I've been thinking about this bc...

...I've been so struck by responses I got to this short preview of the book, focused on the growing Baltimore-Washington divide. So many readers wrote about the pain of watching what has happened to their own hometowns and regions as other cities soar. 3/n nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opi…

One man writes from Syracuse: "When I was growing up here in the 1980's, there were numerous, large employers. Carrier, GE, GM, Smith-Corona, Miller Brewing, Crunch bars were made here, New Venture Gear transmissions. All large employers, paying union wages and benefits..." 4/n

"...All gone now. I have young children, and as I do the things I used to take pleasure doing with my parents, it's sad. The population is far smaller, and far more poor. Old Forge, in the Adirondacks is dumpy and worn out...."

"...My local ski hill Toggenburg, where my classmates and I spent hours skiing, dumpy and run down. Rarely is the second cash register in it's cafeteria ever on. The population and wealth isn't there to support these activities..." 6/n

"...Schools in Onondaga County suburbs are down double digits in enrollment. Some of the rural areas have half the enrollment from when I was young. School districts combine their enrollments to get enough kids to field athletic teams that used to compete against each other."

Another reader writes from Iowa: "I grew up in Mason City, Iowa, a wonderful town of 32,000; and, my father was a boiler engineer in the power plant of a large Armour meat packing plant. In addition, the two largest cement plants in the world were located in Mason City..." 8/n

"...In 1975, when my father was 55, the plant was closed & bought by another company & my father lost his union salary and benefits accrued since 1949. He was devastated, and the town began to go downhill. For those residents who go back to Mason City now, it's very depressing."

FULFILLMENT tells the story of these places and of the winner-take-all cities that are flourishing to excess today. More TK on that, on publication. But for now, here are two recent articles I highly recommend on the question of what can be done about our regional disparities...

One article is by @robertmanduca, a young sociologist who is doing some of the best academic work on the interplay between monopoly and regional inequality, and is quoted prominently in FULFILLMENT: equitablegrowth.org/place-consciou…

And the other is this recent @newrepublic article by @ZephyrTeachout on the anti-trust battles to come. newrepublic.com/article/160646…
And that's all for now, until publication day, March 16!