How Amazon exposed the great US divide
Tomorrow’s technologies are flocking to hubs of innovation on east and West Coasts of the US, while everyone else is being left behind
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.
The Tech giant’s decision coincides with America’s political tumult. Its main headquarters are in Seattle, one of the most liberal cities in Washington, the most liberal of US 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 the United States today.
Take a closer look at Amazon’s business and you see it’s not just a big retail operation selling stuff over the internet. Its real business is to get consumers anything they want, faster and better than anyone else can. To accomplish this, Amazon depends on a continuous flow of great new ideas that reveal what people want, how they consume and the most efficient ways of connecting them to the objects of their desire.
In other words, like the other leading firms of the world economy, Amazon produces and acts on new ideas rather than standardised products or services. And the best way to generate new ideas is to get talented people to interact with each other continuously and directly — keying off one another’s creativity, testing new concepts, quickly discarding those that don’t work, and building cumulative knowledge.
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 in, 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.
Catering to new wealth
As money pours into these places, so do service jobs that cater to the new wealth — pricey lawyers, wealth managers and management consultants, as well as cooks, baristas and pilates instructors. Between 2010 and 2017, according to Brookings, nearly half of America’s employment growth centred in just 20 large metro areas that are now home to about a third of the US population.
Relative to these booming mega-cities, America’s heartland is becoming older, less educated and poorer.
Another consequence is a more distorted democracy. California (now inhabited by nearly 40 million) and New York (close to 20 million) each get two senators, as do Wyoming (573,000) and North Dakota (672,591). Even though Democratic Senate candidates in the midterm elections received 12 million more votes than Republican Senate candidates, Republicans still gained at least one more Senate seat.
The biggest talent centres — such as San Francisco, Seattle and Washington — also harbour large and growing populations of poor who have been stranded by the turbo-charged gentrification. These gleaming cities are becoming the most Dickensian locales in America, where homelessness and squalor mix with luxury high-rises and tony restaurants.
So as the American middle class disappears, the two groups falling perilously behind are white, rural, non-college Trump supporters, and the very poor inside America’s trendiest mega-urban centres, who are disproportionately black and Latino. Amazon doesn’t know or care. That responsibility falls on the rest of the nation. ■ Robert Reich is an acclaimed writer. His book is The Common Good, and his latest documentary, now on Netflix, is Saving Capitalism.