12/10/2017 Por qu las ciudades grandes prosperan, y las ms pequeas se estn dejando atrs - The New York Times

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ECONOMA

Por qu las ciudades grandes prosperan, y

las ms pequeas se estn dejando atrs
Eduardo Porter

ESCENA ECONMICA OCT. 10, 2017

Usted no quiere ser golpeado por una recesin en una ciudad como Steubenville,
Ohio.

Ocho aos despus de la recuperacin econmica, hay miles menos empleos en

el rea metropolitana que se une a Steubenville con Weirton, W.Va., que en el inicio
de la Gran Recesin. Los salarios por hora son ms bajos de lo que eran hace una
dcada. La fuerza de trabajo se ha reducido en un 14 por ciento.

El desempeo triste no es sorprendente. Construidos sobre carbn y acero,

Steubenville y Weirton no estaban preparados para sobrevivir a las transformaciones
provocadas por la globalizacin y la economa de la informacin. Han estado
perdiendo poblacin desde los aos ochenta.

Pero lo que los hizo tan mal lugares para salir de una recesin no era slo su
mezcla industrial. Con slo unas 120.000 personas, eran demasiado pequeas para
adaptarse a la conmocin. Y pueden ser demasiado pequeos para sobrevivir.

Steubenville y Weirton estn en el lado perdedor de otra divisin que divide a

los que tienen de los que no tienen a travs de los Estados Unidos: la desigualdad
geogrfica.
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12/10/2017 Por qu las ciudades grandes prosperan, y las ms pequeas se estn dejando atrs - The New York Times

Ya sea que dependan de las aceras o las minas de carbn, o un hospital o una
planta de fabricacin, las pequeas reas metropolitanas estn teniendo dificultades
para adaptarse a las transiciones econmicas.

This inability has not only slowed their recovery. As technology continues to make
inroads into the economy transforming industries from energy and retail to health
care and transportation it bodes ill for the future of such areas.

They can be dangerous places for working people, said Mark Muro of the
Brookings Institutions Metropolitan Policy Program.

To prove his point, Mr. Muro compared the 100 largest metropolitan areas in
the country, those with populations above 550,000, with the 182 smallest, which
have populations ranging from 80,000 to about 215,000. On average, the big ones
got out of the recession faster than the small ones.

To get a sense of the future, he selected big and small metropolitan areas only in
the 10 states most subjected to economic disruption as defined by the penetration
of automation and job displacement as a result of foreign trade to tease out the
effects of these transformative forces.

The difference in performance widened: Private employment grew almost twice

as fast in large metropolitan areas as it did in small ones from the trough of the
recession, in 2009, to 2015. Income grew 50 percent faster. And the labor
participation rate the share of the working-age population in the labor force
shrank only half as much.

Economic transitions work against smaller America, Mr. Muro told me. This
is a period demanding excruciating transitions.

By now, most Americans live in big metropolitan clusters. Still, the stagnation of
small cities is hardly inconsequential. In the presidential election last year,
frustrated voters in metropolitan areas with fewer than 250,000 people chose
Donald J. Trump over Hillary Clinton by a margin of 57 percent to 38 percent, by
one reckoning. Mr. Trump took 61 percent of rural voters and 52 percent of voters in

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12/10/2017 Por qu las ciudades grandes prosperan, y las ms pequeas se estn dejando atrs - The New York Times

midsize cities. This offset Mrs. Clintons advantage in Americas prosperous big cities
in critical states.

The frustration that helped deliver the presidency to Mr. Trump is a bad guide
for policy. Mr. Trumps promise to relieve the pain by reviving the coal and steel
industries, by keeping immigrants out of the country and by raising barriers against
manufactured imports is only a rhetorical balm to satisfy an angry base seeking to
reclaim a prosperous past that is no longer available.

Yet it is unclear what should be done to slow the decline of small-city America.
For what is driving the decline is the flip side of the forces powering the success of
large metropolises: the accumulation of human talent that is spurring investment
and driving innovations that are fueling the prosperity of the nation as a whole.

Some of the advantages of big-city living are not hard to find. For starters, big
cities have a greater variety of employers and thus more job opportunities in a richer
mix of industries than do small cities, whose fortunes are often tied to those of just a
small number of employers.

Bigger cities are more productive. They are more innovative. They draw better-
educated workers by offering them higher wages. They develop a richer variety of
industries. It should not be surprising that they are growing faster.

It was not always so. In the decades after World War II, the share of jobs in big
metropolitan areas actually declined, as employment growth spread to smaller cities.

But that was a different economy. Unlike with manufacturing, which took root
in cities large and small, and in exurban industrial parks, opportunity in the
information era has clustered in dense urban enclaves where high-tech businesses
can tap into rich pools of skilled and creative people.

The thickness of a labor market is crucial in the innovation industries that are
drivers of economic success today, said Enrico Moretti, an economist at the
University of California, Berkeley. This applies to the biotech engineer but not to
the welder, who has more replaceable skills.

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12/10/2017 Por qu las ciudades grandes prosperan, y las ms pequeas se estn dejando atrs - The New York Times

Elisa Giannone of the University of Chicago pointed out that the wage gap
between rich and poor cities was in fact closing from 1940 to 1980. But then regional
convergence stopped, as the wages of college-educated workers started to rise faster
in the big cities that were plugged into the digital economy. The cities where people
were quickest to adopt the personal computer saw wages increase the fastest.

Twenty years ago I would never have predicted that urban concentration would
be so strong, said Richard Florida, an urban studies expert at the University of
Torontos Rotman School of Management. What has happened is significant, and it
is not going away.

There are a couple of forces that could stop the rise of big cities. Congestion
costs traffic jams, and any rise in urban poverty and crime could turn them into
less attractive places for the smart young men and women who have been critical to
their success. Rising real estate prices could also put a brake on their growth. Some
economists argue that housing restrictions hamper economic growth by slowing the
flow of talent.

Mr. Muro worries that geographic concentration may ultimately hurt the
nations prosperity, by concentrating innovation in a very small cluster of mega-
metro areas. And yet the forces that favor larger cities may be too powerful to save
the nations Steubenvilles and Weirtons from inexorable decline.

As Mr. Florida noted, the United States economy isnt even that geographically
concentrated by international standards. London produces a third of Britains gross
domestic product. The output of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago combined
doesnt add up to even 17 percent of the American economy.

A recent paper by economists from the University of Illinois, the University of

Quebec, the University of Lausanne and the University of Utah suggested that there
were too many American cities and that they were inefficiently small.

Adapting to these sorts of changes will require something different from

reviving the industries of old. Smaller metropolitan areas might try plugging into the
economic orbit of more successful larger cities. They might try to become innovation
hubs by, say, drawing large teaching hospitals.

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12/10/2017 Por qu las ciudades grandes prosperan, y las ms pequeas se estn dejando atrs - The New York Times

And yet the future for the residents of small-city America looks dim. Perhaps the
best policy would be to help them move to a big city nearby.

Email: eporter@nytimes.com;
Twitter: @portereduardo

A version of this article appears in print on October 11, 2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the
headline: Small Cities Are Wilting As Larger Ones Flourish.

2017 The New York Times Company

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