What if cities are no longer the land of opportunity for low-skilled workers? | World News, The Indian Express

What if cities are no longer the land of opportunity for low-skilled workers? | World News, The Indian Express

By New York Times |Updated: January 14, 2019 3:08:05 pm

What if cities are no longer the land of opportunity for low-skilled workers?

Workers, whether with a college degree or not, could long count on earning more in denser urban areas than in rural ones.

A handout photo provided by the Library of Congress shows a worker at Baxter Laboratories, a manufacturer of medical supplies outside Chicago, in 1942. Dense cities have long promised higher wages, but now that is primarily true for workers with more education, a new analysis finds. (Library of Congress via The New York Times) — EDITORIAL USE ONLY —

By Emily Badger and Quoctrung Bui

For decades, workers migrated to big cities in America that promised abundant jobs and decent wages — in clerical offices in New York, at shipbuilding yards in Oakland, California, on auto assembly lines around Detroit.

Big, dense cities offered not just better pay for lower-skilled workers; cities offered them better kinds of jobs.

This is much less true today, as workers hurt by the decline in manufacturing know. Because of this, cities no longer offer low-skilled workers the economic advantages they once did, according to new analysis by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor.

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Workers, whether with a college degree or not, could long count on earning more in denser urban areas than in rural ones. Today, that pattern holds for highly educated workers — and has in fact grown much stronger. For workers without any college education, the added wage benefits of dense cities have mostly disappeared in Autor’s data.