TLP Weekend Edition (April 5-6, 2025)
What we're reading and checking out.
📊 "Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?" by Gordon Hanson and Enrico Moretti. Very interesting National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) paper with lots of good data to chew over.
We examine changes in the spatial distribution of good jobs across US commuting zones over 1980-2000 and 2000-2021. We define good jobs as those in industries in which full-time workers attain high wages, accounting for individual and regional characteristics. The share of good jobs in manufacturing has plummeted; for college graduates, good jobs have shifted to (mostly tradable) business, professional, and IT services, while for those without a BA they have shifted to (non-tradable) construction. There is strong persistence in where good jobs are located. Over the last four decades, places with larger concentrations of good job industries have tended to hold onto them, consistent with a model of proportional growth. Turning to regional specialization in good job industries, we find evidence of mean reversion. Commuting zones with larger initial concentrations of good jobs have thus seen even faster growth in lower-wage (and mostly non-tradable) services. Changing regional employment patterns are most pronounced among racial minorities and the foreign-born, who are relatively concentrated in fast growing cities of the South and West. Therefore, good job regions today look vastly different than in 1980: they are more centered around human-capital-intensive tradable services, are surrounded by larger concentrations of low-wage, non-tradable industries, and are more demographically diverse.
🇯🇵 “The Town Where Journeys End,” by William Lambert. The Metropolitan Review is a new literary and cultural review Substack started by Ross Barkan and his colleagues. So far, it’s been a crackerjack read including this long essay on Japan and the famous English-language travel book about the country, The Inland Sea, by Donald Richie.
After a brief stop at a shrine in the middle of the island, we continue to the northern town of Miyakubo. Our goal is the Murakami Pirate Museum, dedicated to the clan of pirates who controlled the Inland Sea for hundreds of years. Reaching the museum requires a brief detour from the cycling route that will take us down Miyakubo’s beachfront and offer another panoramic view of the Inland Sea. Once we reach Miyakubo we stop and roll our bikes onto a patch of sidewalk to confirm the route. A heron putters around in a canal emptied by low tide while a falcon lazes through wind currents only a few meters above our heads. Despite the fact that we appear to be in the center of the village, these two birds are the only living things in sight.
Our detour down the beach is a procession of darkened storefronts, their dusty windows gone the color of snakeskin. A Coca-Cola sign above one of them is barely recognizable beneath the grime and rust, a symbol of international recognizability turning vague with little but earth, wind, and sun to erase it. A traffic light runs through its course with no one to obey it. There are boats in the harbor, but even though it is a fine day no one stands in their hulls. I have been down similar streets many times before, but this one in Miyakubo is meticulously free of life. The bare minimum—a snack bar, one of the major convenience store chains, a basket of freshly-picked fruit set out beside the front door—is promised around every slight bend of the bay, but these never appear. Aidan, who rides ahead of me, looks around, glances over his shoulder in search, no doubt, of the same signs I am looking for. He shakes his head and furrows his brow in a mixture of unease and bewilderment. Whoever lives here, they must live inland.
The pirate museum, when we reach it, is well-kept, bright, even new, in utter contrast to what we have just seen. It looks out on the two islands where, hundreds of years before, the Nohshima branch of the Murakami clan built their fortresses. The faux-ramparts of its architecture hail back to this now-vanished wonder. The museum houses all the expected artifacts—armor, swords, scrolls. The Murakami pirates, the placards inform us, were far from swashbuckling villains. They composed collaborative renga poetry, sat for portraits, and enjoyed tea and incense like proper gentlemen, and their succession seems to have been orderly enough that it has continued into the modern day. In the early 20th century, the head of the Nohshima branch donated his family’s collection of artifacts to found the museum.
There is something else remarkable about the museum, something which has little to do with poetry or piracy. What qualifies as “busy” on an island like this it is hard to say, but there are certainly groups of people. And my fellow museumgoers are all, without exception, elderly. Come to think of it, so were the people who sold us our tickets. Between 2003 to 2023, the population of Miyakubo decreased by a third from roughly 3,000 to a little over 2,000 today. As is the case with however many of these withering towns, most of the people living here are in their final years.
Fantastic travelogue and critical review of the book. And be sure to subscribe to The Metropolitan Review—it’s a good one!
🏀 NCAA Final Four on CBS. The most exciting college basketball tournament in the country is nearing its end. With just four teams left, today's games in San Antonio will decide who moves on to the championship. At 6:09 pm ET, Florida vs. Auburn tips off, followed by Houston vs. Duke at 8:49. It's just the second time ever that the final four teams are all the #1 seeds from the start of the tournament. And if the last time (in 2008) is any indication, these matchups could be barnburners.
🎧 “Can An Abundance Agenda Rescue Democrats?” TLP Podcast w/ Derek Thompson. Our new podcast this week dives into the hot topic of “abundance” with The Atlantic’s, Derek Thompson, a longstanding expert on the subject and co-author with Ezra Klein of a new book about this policy framework. What is “abundance” and why has the center-left been so slow to embrace these ideas? Can abundance appeal to moderates and conservatives as well as liberals? Why is deregulation such a bad word in left-of-center circles? Listen in and find out the answers!
🎸 "Sky Pilot" by Eric Burdon and The Animals. Among the greatest Vietnam era anti-war songs, this 1968 anthem reached #14 on the U.S. pop charts:
He blesses the boys as they stand in line
The smell of gun grease and the bayonets they shine
He's there to help them all that he can
To make them feel wanted he's a good holy man.Sky pilot...Sky pilot
How high can you fly?
You'll never, never, never reach the sky.He smiles at the young soldiers tells them it's all right
He knows of their fear in the forthcoming fight
Soon there'll be blood and many will die
Mothers and fathers back home they will cry.Sky pilot...Sky pilot
How high can you fly?
You'll never, never, never reach the sky.
There are not even enough "good jobs" for the credentialed. There is a reason why the barista with a BA has become a stereotype. But what to do about it is the rub. One thing for sure is what we have been doing for the last 30 years isn't working.
E. Burdon autographed my Sky Pilot 45. He was performing at one of the Indian Casinos and stuck around after the (terrific) show to sell some copies of his book.