Amazon HQ2, America's Great Divide & Those Left Behind, Robert Reich

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- The Long Island City waterfront in Queens, New York.

What Amazon HQ2 Tells Us About America's Great Divide, Robert Reich. Tomorrow’s technologies are flocking to hubs of innovation on the east and west coasts, while everyone else is left being left behind. The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2018. <EXCERPTS>

Amazon has decided that its much-vaunted “second headquarters” will be split between Long Island City in Queens, and Crystal City, across the Potomac from Washington DC. Amazon’s decision coincides with America’s political tumult. Its main headquarters is in Seattle, one of the most liberal cities in the most liberal of states. Its picks- New York and metropolitan Washington- are liberal, too.

Amazon could easily have decided to locate its second headquarters in, say, Indianapolis, Indiana. After all, Indianapolis was one of the finalists in Amazon’s search for a second headquarters, and the city vigorously courted the firm. Not incidentally, Indianapolis is a Republican city in a bright red Republican state. Amazon’s decision wasn’t based on political partisanship, but it does expose the real political and economic divide in America today.

Technology isn’t a thing. It’s a process of group learning. And that learning goes way beyond the confines of any individual company, like Amazon. It now happens in geographic clusters. In America, those clusters are now mostly along the east and west coasts – in places like Seattle, New York, metropolitan Washington, Boston and Los Angeles. Indianapolis may be a nice place to live, but it doesn’t have nearly as big a cluster of talent as do these others.

The result is widening inequalities of place. Increasingly, bright young people from all over America, typically with college degrees, are streaming into these places, where the sum of their individual capacities for invention is far greater than they’d be separately. The ideas sparked there are delivering streams of new designs and products to the rest of the world. In return, the money pouring into these places from the rest of the world is delivering high wages, good living conditions (museums, restaurants, cafes, recreation) and unbounded wealth.

Relative to these booming mega-cities, America’s heartland is becoming older, less educated and poorer. The so-called “tribal” divide in American politics, which Trump has exploited, is better understood in these economic and cultural terms: on one side, mega-urban clusters centered around technologies of the future; on the other, great expanses of relatively open space inhabited by people left behind. - Read More...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/14/amazon-hq-what-bezos-choice-says-about-us-society

Related: 'It's Obscene and Wrong': Amazon HQ2 gets typically warm New York welcome. Residents wonder if company will be ‘good corporate citizen’ as governor hails decision to put headquarters in Long Island City.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/13/amazon-hq2-second-headquarters-new-york-long-island-city-response