No mention of mass migration. The degree to which the modern left has bought into the magic of mass migration is really something. It’s been long known since Karl Marx that mass migration depresses wages of the working class.
Then you factor housing costs and the working class is simply cleansed from certain cities.
56
Readers claiming immigration drives wages down or does not affect wages are asserting opinions that are not reflected in the research on this issue. There are competing opinions from various researchers, all of whom seem to be competent in their work, and at best we have to say that the evidence is currently inconclusive. One could argue, legitimately, that recent inquiries into this matter tend to suggest a growing consensus that finds no substantial effect of immigration on wages. But there is still disagreement on this issue among experts and skepticism regarding various claims is legitimate.
23
This article compares high and low wage workers and their relative wealth. What a red herring! The gap between income acquired through wages and wealth acquired through capital investments like land ownership and stocks is the real story. Wages alone even at the highest end will never keep up with the costs being driven by land accumulation, investments and technology.
60
I wish these authors and others would try and look beyond the usual narratives here. I have a graduate degree and my husband has an undergraduate degree. We have real-world experience, have stayed up-to-date on our technical skills, yet opportunity for good paying, stable employment has become increasingly elusive for us here in Boston. And I know we aren't alone. The way I see it, pushing for more college educated people will only further the effect of degree inflation to the point where someday in the future you'll be required to have a Bachelor degree in order to get a barista job at Starbucks regardless of whether it's necessary to perform the actual work. That requirement won't come with a significant increase in wages either. So what then? It's time to start thinking a little more critically about the nature of work and education because our best thinking has gotten us to this point.
155
Ciao! Upward Mobility replaced by Nowhere To Go. Ciao.
26
It’s quite telling how few comments there are in the NYT on this subject. @Somsai’s comment sums it up nicely. Any politician who can dump the identity politics and come up with an economic/taxation program that addresses income inequality and insures a decent retirement for my children will have my vote.
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Continuing to promote cities is undercut by the issue that Badger and Bui gloss over in the last paragraph. Costs of living (and quality of life at the low end of the cost scale) are bad and getting worse. If low-skilled workers can earn the same outside cities, and more easily afford to live there, why should they migrate to urban areas? As often reported, even middle class, college-educated workers (think teachers, some health professionals, etc.) cannot afford a reasonable life in big cities. Maybe we need another model.
68
This is not a big surprise. Everyone should read The Once and Future Worker by Oren Cass for some reasons for this dilemma and solutions for those that do not go to college.
7
Although immigration was not mentioned in the article it definitely plays a part. Allowing unskilled immigrants into this country will increase supply which naturally will lower wages. Many of the low wage and low skill service jobs are not able to be outsourced out of the country and wages would increase dramatically if there were no low skill immigrants in certain parts of the country. Any policy which advocates for increasing immigration of unskilled immigrants is class warfare as it hurts poorer people much more than the wealthy.
61
Lots of workers in high-wage industries like finance and tech are immigrants. The author of the study, who is a leading labor economist, knows rather a lot on this topic. He attributes the change primarily to the disappearance of middle-skill jobs. You could write to him and tell him your theory.
25
Big Agriculture and Big Food companies employ massive work forces in their fields and processing plants. Look at meat packing, etc. A large percentage of those work forces are undocumented and that’s one reason our borders aren’t as tight as they could be. Those companies paid pols for the immigration system we have today. They get higher profits and a non-union work force.
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@David Schatsky Hopefully he will read our comments and respond.
5
If you consider the fact that urban workers cost of living is much higher than rural workers then the 2015 (no college graduation) worker is actually much better off in less dense area. This argues for a higher minimum wage in cities to try to compensate for the higher cost of living.
15
@Richard
Exactly how does a higher minimum wage in a city not directly drive higher costs of living there?
10
@Bob Krantz Study the Seattle stats. We have one of the first higher minimum wage laws. Studies have shown no to minimal effect on already high cost of living. It was absorbed into the chain of prices. And people didn't get fired either.
19
There are plenty of good jobs but they require education and training. Education up through the high school level has failed us. Just look at math and reading test scores. Not everyone is cut out for college but with a basic education in math and reading they can learn a skill that pays well. Education and training are the keys. Let’s fix the first 12 years so graduates can have a chance at these jobs.
41
With the loss of manufacturing and unions, so went wages, and as the economy became more service oriented there was no collective action that could have forestalled the loss in income parity. Although this looks like it only pertains to low wage workers, it is likely also true for the higher end, but not for the top few percent. Wages at even the 90th percentile, while certainly better than everyone else's, don't grow at the same rate as the wealth in general, so that every level of workers' income is decreasing under are regressive plutocratic economic structure.
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@James Igoe Correct! The point I don't see is that wages in general don't make anyone rich anymore. Only capital investments and stocks. Wages can't come close to catching with the wealth from these other sources.
44
I don't see the word "immigration" in this article, even though that is a major explanation of why working class Americans can no longer boost their pay by moving to a big, expensive city.
43
@Steve Sailer - It shouldn't since immigrants actually boost our pay and economy...
14
The reason that low skill jobs pay so little is that the country has been flooded with low skill immigrants, both legal and illegal. This always benefits the rich and hurts the poor. The one percent want millions of desperate workers willing to take jobs at slave wages - mass immigration achieves this and keeps working class citizens in their place. All of this news about worker shortages is fake. What is actually happening is a shortage of employers that:
1) don't pay enough
2) don't improve benefits
3) don't provide any job training
4) don't improve working conditions
5) will not hire older workers
116
To robot repair technician: "And what will you do when they replace your job with a robot?"
7
Wow, the NY Times manages to imply that making medical supplies doesn't take any skill with that photo of the guy working for Baxter.
Do the editors just think that sterile gauze comes off the loom that way?
26
Cities are the the land of opportunity for low skilled workers children. Emily mentions this point, but it bears repeating.
If your wages are the same in a rural area and an urban area, but the changes that your children will move from the bottom 2 quintiles to the top 2 quintiles of income triples just by re-locating. That is huge!
I find the article great, because it has some awesome data. But Also frustrating, because the title implies that cities don't have opportunity. They do. It's just primarily for the next generation.
14
Actually I see so called "middle skill" jobs being done all the time. They require math, as well as a fair amount of time being skilled with the tools of the trade. It takes five years or so to make a good carpenter, electrician, plumber, drywaller, and so on. And those jobs are not being done by robots, or shipped overseas, they are being done by low wage workers from south of the border. Wealthy elitists of both parties have decided they don't care about working class people any more, so they open our borders. Low skilled immigration is one place where Ronald Reagan and Third Way Democrats agree. The Chamber of Commerce, Club for Growth, and wealth so called liberals.
54
@somsai If these jobs require middle skilled workers, how can they be done by low skilled immigrants?
17
@somsai
Right, and there a plenty of skilled tapers who have less than legal status for work. Hanging drywall is easy by comparison.
3
When the government imposes credentials and licensing on an occupation, wages go up—because fees go up. It’s a public choice.
7
The cost of living (mostly housing) is obviously the big issue: even low-skilled New Yorkers earn a lot of money compared to many places in the country, and certainly compared to most places in the world (and I’m not just talking about third world countries). The problem is that when half (or more) of your salary gets to your landlord’s pocket, there is not much left to live comfortably, let alone buy any kind of property to raise a family with a bit of stability or save for retirement.
Get property prices closer to the actual cost of building housing (and there is no reason why we couldn’t do that) and suddenly New York becomes a very interesting proposition for people coming from areas with little job prospects. People used to raise families on a single waiter income, and the economy was much less productive at that time.
20
I see the NY Times is yet again pretending things like elevator repair, welding, or even waiting tables are low skill jobs.
Very few corporate lawyers could do any of the 3 sans training. I'd like to see someone from Google NYC last 3 weeks sewing in the Garmet District.
I don't dispute for a second that lawyers and engineers get real training, not sure how much skill the former access during their careers.
35
The future is San Francisco, where low skill workers literally can't afford to live close to work.
36
My coworker is educated to a graduate level but her husband is a proud mook who works in the Midwest's largest remaining oil refinery. Try telling her that robots are coming to displace her beautiful husband. Try telling her that her beautiful 14-year old son, suffering from a terrible genetic syndrome that has him appearing with a Frankenstein forehead at a weight of 400#, needs to develop some intellectual capital to find an eventual job. The family "supplements" its fortunes by the husband's compulsive trips to our 2 local casinos and whatever home equity lines of credit they can get from the bank with a foreclosed house. The child, devoid of intellectual curiosity, prefers to game all night on power drinks and Cheetos, sleep all day in lieu of school and is effectively ineducable. How many other kids are similarly afflicted by parental stupidity?
12
Actually, it didn't used to be only about the economy. People left th flyover states & came to the big coastal cities because they were 'where it was happening'. The ecomy did play a role, which only became apparent more recently. During the 60s & 70s it was really easy to get a job, leave it & get another when your money began to run out. It could be 'Oh wow, my rent is due next week. I better get a job!'. & you could go out & get a job that day. If you liked the job, you might keep it for a few months. If not, maybe a couple of weeks. That lifestyle, of course, is history.
35
"What if Cities Are No Longer the Land of Opportunity for Low-Skilled Workers?"
Why limits the question to "Cities" only? By and large, this has been true, cities or otherwise. Put it another way, if you're low/no-skilled, your prospect of upward mobility or even just daily sustenance is increasingly hampered in recent decades. As a matter of fact, it's the same not just in US, but around the world as well. These workers have become collateral damage to globalization and the oncoming wave of AI + robotics.
For those countries (hello, Latin America) and regions (yes you, Africa and South Asia) who can't or won't keep up, they'll get left further behind. You can't just expect to export your weakest and poorest to other richer countries (as evident in the migrant crisis in Europe and migrant caravan pushing at US). To survive and thrive, you really have to up your game, as China has done in the past three decades with tremendous success.
Given the increasingly fierce competition from more educated workers from lower cost countries like China and India, what's the chance of those low/no-skilled workers within the US borders (regardless of their skin colors)?
63
While low skill jobs may vary in need, they will always be there.
You need somebody to do the lower skilled/blue collar ish. type jobs like nannies, cleaners, cab drivers, cooks, sanitation worker, bus drivers etc. etc.
Also, where you have dense high tech jobs like NYC, you will need more low skill workers than Podunk, Iowa.
Common sense tells us this.
6
A lot of this is true because illegal immigration which clusters in and around big cities prices down the value of low skill work. Additionally even large corporations break the law by hiring these people who are "technically" forbidden to work while in the US. Companies are as much as fault as the illegal aliens who will work for below minimum wage as long as they can get away with it.
64
@Yaj It's also highly true.
5
@somsai:
You really don't know many immigrants is all I can say to that.
4
@Tom it's the legal immigrants too and even more so.
10
Globalization has matured . As many semi skilled direct labor jobs as possible, and even important digital support task, are gone, and gone for good. Our cities have a specific place for so called low skilled service jobs. When you take a trip by air, starting with our airports, look around who is employed. When you arrive in a city, take note who does the bulk of the jobs in your hotel, or who waits on you at a restaurant. Point I make, as this border wall political fiasco goes no , the bulk of Americans benefit from legal and more so illegal immigrants. These caravans of desperate refugees know jobs await them. They focus on their kids going to school and learning something.
7
This is a major change and cuts both capitalism and socialism as obsolete detritus.
Our politics and finance are like items from the civil war era. And the next election to come seems to be no different in tone.
1
@Mike R
How does any of this vitiate socialism?
1
It's sad that the prospect of finding well paying work in the city has been replaced with the hope of finding welfare. America needs to reindustrialize. Just because Trump advocates an idea, it's not necessarily bad or undoable. NAFTA, did we hafta?
12
how about having people do things machines excel at, we have people go into research and solve things like climate change, hunger, or cancer.
3
Low-skilled employment in the US has been exported overseas.
11
@5barris
High skilled employment has been exported overseas.
ALL employment has been exported overseas.
If it doesn't HAVE to be done HERE and can be done for a fraction overseas, it's being done overseas. As a result, the rich are richer than ever and American who used to be middle class are declining.
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire: How We Exported All Our Good Jobs OverSeas and Didn't Invest in Anything for 50 Years.
38
It’s difficult for me to articulate in a few words my experience with this phenomenon but here goes. Non-unionized home construction was my field. All men, for all intents and purposes, it wasn’t that well payed but I could get by. One observation over the years was that every time downsizing in the larger economy happened the ranks of my co-workers started to include more and more men who were coming into the field who had no experience or training, they thought they could do the job because they were handy, manly or thought it was an occupation anyone could do. Some truth to that but I only saw them as placeholders who were waiting until their better jobs came back. The employers loved it, the more people looking for work, they less they could pay. Then illegal and legal immigration continued the erosion of wages. The better jobs never came back, the wages stayed low and forget benefits. Hint: the underground economy is alive and well and 1099 employee classification allows businesses to skate on contributing to SS, something millions of people will rely on in this “gig” economy.
I’m lucky, I paid in and I’m no longer bitter about “they took our jobs”. I am disgusted that businesses are allowed to run roughshod over people who don’t know any better. Two issues that are extremely important to me are instituting E-verify with harsh penalties for employers and a rebirth of the union movement.
146
@Thomas
Right, you're also getting at the implication here by the NY Times that "trades", plumbing, welding, repairing a subway track don't take real skills.
Wages have stayed flat for everyone who is not a Google employee or working for an ibank; this a the fundamental reason Trump won.
47
@Thomas E-verify would lead to some resolution but quick. It would also do a lot more than any wall or fence to stop the flow workers. E-verify terrifies corporate America as well as the upper middle class who no longer know how to clean up after themselves or mow their own lawns.
90
Makes you wonder who will clean the streets, pick up trash, make the falafel, or stock the shelves at Whole Foods for all those well to do, highly educated folks, if lower end earners can't afford to live nearby. And, as these wealthy metropolitan centers expand, the adjoining real estate also becomes prohibitive...even now, try living within an hour of San Francisco, Boston, DC or New York if you don't earn six figures. It's not easy, and will probably become less so over time.
22
It is just certain urban areas. Plenty of urban areas in the Midwest, Southwest and South offer the same historical opportunities. Simply stay out of the dense, expensive coastal areas and you will do fine.
9
The single best thing you could do to revive rural communities is nationwide fiber-optic broadband as a public utility. It's no harder than electrification was in the early 20th century-- easier in fact, as you could probably piggyback on a lot of that same infrastructure. This would allow people and businesses that don't want to be in the city but have to purely for broadband (and there are a lot, including me), to get out. A flight of skilled knowledge workers to rural areas would both bring wealth into rural areas, and lower housing costs in the city, as all those newly-vacated houses and apartments would drive prices down. People could gravitate to the place that best suited their desired lifestyle, and economic diversity (especially in rural communities) would increase. The city may be like oxygen for social butterflies, but it's just an employee warehouse to others (like me).
88
This explains, in a nutshell, why the blue-collar heartland (WV, Ohio, PA) went for Trump in 2016.
Hillary said "we're going to put a lot of coal miners out of work". The Democratic answer is either retraining, or, the more cold-hearted ones say "why don't these people move to the cities".
For one thing, you're not going to retrain a coal miner or auto assembler into a web developer. And, if they do move to LA, NYC or Austin, there are no blue-collar jobs there. They all went to China.
86
@Jim-Agreed instead of coming up with innovative ideas to address blue collar job losses or common sense immigration policies that Trump demagogued, she ran an identity obsessed campaign of women must get 50% of everything whether they deserve it or even want it, anoint me president because I put my dues in and I am a woman, and today's man must atone for five million yrs. of existence.
Her supporters can rationalize, intellectualize, scapegoat, finger point ax grind but the above was lethal to her.
If she turned around 80k total voters in Wisc., Mich., and Pa. she would be president and we would not have the demagogue Trump in the WH.
Americans hate identity politics including women.
24
@Paul
I daresay you reveal more about yourself than HC. Your view in a nutshell is that she wishes to punish all men because they are creeps who have kept women down, and you wimp out by calling it identity politics.
Maybe the women around you have that attitude, but I think it's your fear of having a woman in the top spot and what it means to your imagined place in this world.
34
In many cities, housing costs are so high it doesn't make sense to live there unless you can make at least $150K. That is not possible even for many so-called 'college graduates'. If you have to take a job as a barista at Starbucks with your BA, then you'll end up sleeping on somebody's couch for $700 a month.
If you have low skills and can't make much money, it is definitely better to live out in the country. At least you can grow vegetables and have a chicken coop.
81
@Jonathan, $150k is a STEM field job + experience. College degree is the new high-school-diploma. If you don't have the relevant skills, it means nothing. In the bygone era, companies are willing to take in fresh college grads and train them. These days, it's all about time-to-market; Wall St and fierce competition demands it. Companies would rather spend $150k on someone with the skills who can come in and hit the ground running on day 1; they can't afford to spend 2 years to train up an intern, even if it's at a cheaper price tag of, say, $50k, hoping that he or she would come through AND stay around to be productive.
13
This is not really new. It is trendy in the media to talk about the city/rural divide in politics and economics, but inequality has been increasing everywhere for a long time. Real wages basically stopped rising by 1973, and most of those concerned worked in cities, where most people live. As blacks migrated from the rural South to cities through the 20th century, the "country" became more white and more racist. Republicans exploit racism to get the rural vote and wage-earning non-whites in cities necessarily vote Democratic, although they are essentially falling behind as much as those in the "country".
19
"We don’t have many proven strategies for how to revive communities battered by changes in the economy."
The understatement of the day. taking the "m" out of "many" improves its accuracy. Economically dying places, whether cities or not, will die. Except for a few special success cases, which are not the results of a national or even regional "strategy," nothing can be done for the places. The relevant policy issue is: what can be done for the people?"
I don't have the answer to that one either, but at least it's the right question.
45
@joel bergsman - One answer, hard to admit, is what Trump is trying to do, albeit in a heavy-handed fashion.
Free trade has been a one-way street. We buy many things from China. They make it hard for us to sell airliners and cars there. They force our manufacturers to turn over the intellectual property to them, then they use it in competing brands.
We have minimim wage laws here to prevent exploiting workers. Theirs is 1/10 ours, so how can our workers compete.
One way to solve the problem is to encourage Made in America / Buy American.
31
@Jim
that train has soooo left the station . In the '80's I used to decry the lack " Made in the USA " goods in the hardware store , electronics were already Japanese , in New England most towns and cities are littered with buildings that have outlasted the industries they were used for .
and so it's gone
13
@Jim Why would anyone think that Trump offers a solution to the "No Longer Made in America" problem? It's not as though his products -- or those peddled by Ivanka -- are made here.
22
Cities are the great engines of liberal society, traditionally because of the social opportunity and intellectual mixing they can encourage. As this article mentions, due to the exorbitant cost of living in our large cities there is no real opportunity for the immigration to occur that supports this culture-creation function. Most of our large cities have become homogenous developments devoted to white collar office life served by an underclass that will never be socialized into the upper echelons due to lack of access to meaningful employment or expensive education systems. As a result, the culture of cities has been degraded into a sort of un-walled gated community that is really not a cultural improvement on the suburbs. Economic segregation is a losing proposition for cities and for liberal society.
47
@Concerned Reader
Taxes on the wealthy are used to keep a large underclass at bay through generous social services, but are insufficient to ever boost anyone out of their "hereditary" caste. Meanwhile, the middle class is left to compete with the wealthy for the same resources and will inevitably lose. Now we seeing this once again with de Blasio's subsidized Metrocard. The wealthy are ubering, the poor are given a helping hand and the middle class will bear the brunt of yet another fare hike, but when a "millionaires tax" was suggested to pay for subway repairs, Cuomo ran the first 3 minute mile to assure his backers it would never happen. Instead, he - and this paper BTW - is pushing for congestion pricing, yet another tax on - you guessed it - the middle class.
48
There’s no doubt that there are fewer opportunities for low skilled workers everywhere. But the title of this piece strongly suggests that urban areas are now LESS likely places to find such jobs. Less than where? Rural areas? I see zero evidence of that here. While fewer opportunities exist overall for unskilled workers, urban areas are still a more likely place to find them than other areas.
10
Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio were crowing about the 25,000 high-paying jobs that Amazon would be bringing to New York, whereas their real concern should have been what to do with the hundreds of thousands of students in their public schools who will never grow up to be code monkeys. What are these people supposed to do with their lives? Michael Bloomberg boasted the same blind spot when he envisioned the "hospitality industry" as where the refuse of his schools could spend the rest of their existence folding sheets, and be thankful for the opportunity.
Assuming automation doesn't replace us all, boutique manufacturing is one possible source of well-paying jobs for the urban poor but does require on-the-job-training (which used to be a given of course) and apprenticeship programs. It's fairly high-tech and there's no reason a motivated young person can't acquire the necessary skills. Finally, you actually have the satisfaction of producing something tangible as opposed to the numbing void that defines most service jobs. De Blasio, however, seems just as unmotivated in this regard; he'd rather polish Jeff Bezos' skull to a mirror finish. In addition, making this goal even more difficult to achieve in NYC is another of Bloomberg's legacies. By rezoning the entire swath of the East River waterfront from manufacturing to residential, an unbroken wall of luxury glass towers, Amazon's landing pad, stretches from the Brooklyn Bridge to Long Island City.
53
Did/can they control for minimum wages rates across the density zones? Lower wage jobs (orange dots) even if above minimum wage are often still affected by it, certainly more so than the higher-end wages (grey dots). Noting that minimum wages are *often* higher in urban areas, but have not kept pace with inflation generally for the last 30-40 years may be a confounder here.
Also, repeat this study after 2-3 years when many recent minimum wage increases, disproportionately in liberal and thus more urban (dense) areas, take effect and see how much is explained by the changes (and then the recent selective/regional improvements) in minimum wage over time.
Also, the decline in private sector unions.
7