The New Geography of Jobs Quotes

“Apple, for example. It employs 12,000 workers in Cupertino. Through the multiplier effect, however, the company generates more than 60,000 additional service jobs in the entire metropolitan area, of which 36,000 are unskilled and 24,000 are skilled. Incredibly, this means that the main effect of Apple on the region’s employment is on jobs outside of high tech.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Attracting a new scientist, software engineer, or mathematician to a city increases the demand for local services.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“More than any other sector, innovation has the power to reshape the economic fates of entire communities, as well as their cultures,”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“reaches the American consumer, only one American worker has physically touched the final product: the UPS delivery guy.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Glamour is not enough to support a local economy.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“good predictor of a community’s economic success was its openness to gays.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Visionaries have been trying to build thriving cities from the time that people started living in them. Utopian communities have always ignited people’s imaginations, with their promise of curing social ills through enlightened planning and strong values.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Today we immediately associate Los Angeles with movies, New York with finance, Silicon Valley with computers, Seattle with software, and the Raleigh-Durham area with medical research.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Consider another important industry whose success depends on stars: motion pictures.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“success in high technology, especially in its formative years, comes down to a small number of extraordinary scientists with vision and a mastery of breakthrough technology.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“stars are more important than proximity to venture capital firms or the effect of government funding.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Constraining new high-tech office buildings amounts to reducing the number of jobs that a city can create, because it is quite unlikely that factories will open in the urban core of cities like San Francisco and Santa Monica.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“this process of “creative destruction” is capitalism’s greatest strength and its engine of growth.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Knowledge flows are invisible; they leave no paper trail by which they may be measured and tracked, and there is nothing to prevent the theorist from assuming anything about them that she likes.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“with well-educated professionals increasingly marrying other well-educated professionals. Economists have a decidedly unromantic term for this trend: assortative mating.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Thus the growing gap in education and income between the brain hubs and the rest of the country is a probable driver of the divergence in life expectancy.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“economists have long used the concentration of patents as a proxy for the creation of new products and ideas.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Although the relocation of Microsoft from Albuquerque to Seattle seemed insignificant at the time, it helped turn Seattle into one of America’s most successful innovation hubs.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Despite all the hype about the “death of distance” and the “flat world,” where you live matters more than ever.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“cities are not just a collection of individuals but complex, interrelated environments that foster the generation of new ideas and new ways of doing business.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“In innovation, a company’s success depends on more than just the quality of its workers—it also depends on the entire ecosystem that surrounds it.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“An experienced software engineer in India makes $35,000. The same person in Silicon Valley makes $140,000. Why would U.S. firms keep hiring in Silicon Valley when they could save so much by outsourcing?”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“the innovation sector has the largest multiplier of all: about three times larger than that of manufacturing.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“While innovation will never be responsible for the majority of jobs in the United States, it has a disproportionate effect on the economy of American communities.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“In essence, from the point of view of a city, a high-tech job is more than a job. Indeed, my research shows that for each new high-tech job in a city, five additional jobs are ultimately created outside of the high-tech sector in that city, both in skilled occupations (lawyers, teachers, nurses) and in unskilled ones (waiters, hairdressers, carpenters).”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Shenzhen’s rise is truly remarkable because it parallels almost perfectly the decline of U.S. manufacturing centers.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“What used to be tiny, barely visible dots on the map have turned into thriving megalopolises with thousands of new companies and millions of new jobs.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“The growing divergence of American communities is important not just in itself but because of what it means for American society. While the divide is first and foremost economic, it is now beginning to affect cultural identity, health, family stability, and even politics.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“This divide—I will call it the Great Divergence—has its origins in the 1980s, when American cities started to be increasingly defined by their residents’ levels of education”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“They may be nerds to an outsider’s eyes, but they are exceedingly creative and entrepreneurial.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs