Why the gaps between richer and poorer regions continue to widen.
 | By Sarah Wildman Staff Editor, Opinion |
I first met the journalist Alec MacGillis about a decade ago, in Washington, D.C. We quickly learned that we shared something in common: roots in Pittsfield, Mass. |
Alec grew up in Pittsfield, and his father was, until his death late last year, a newspaper man at The Berkshire Eagle. My grandfather settled in the town after fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna. At the time, Pittsfield was a bustling headquarters for General Electric, with white- and blue-collar jobs a plenty. |
But my grandparents' Pittsfield, and even my father's, was not the same as the one Alec came to know. That's because by the 1980s and 1990s G.E. had begun to pull up stakes, eventually shifting production — and thus jobs — away from the town that it had dominated since 1903. |
Pittsfield is still beautiful, nestled in the bucolic Berkshire mountains and home to gorgeous turn-of-the-last-century architecture. But the loss of an anchor industry has changed the town. |
In an Op-Ed this morning, Alec explores how prosperity, industry and investment from tech giants like Amazon have been unequally distributed across the country. Once, wealth and prosperity were spread out across the country, in cities like Cleveland, Des Moines and Milwaukee. Now, it's largely concentrated on the coasts. The piece is born out of research Alec did for his new book, "Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America," which will be published on March 16. |
Alec's piece explores how much power a company like Amazon can have on regional prosperity through one case study: Washington and Baltimore, twin cities just 40 miles apart that have diverged radically as investment came to one and drained out of the other. |
"Over the past four decades, deindustrialization, the rise of the tech economy and the weakening of antitrust enforcement have sorted the country into a small number of winner-take-all cities and a much larger number of left-behind cities and towns," Alec writes. "The imbalance is unhealthy at both ends of the spectrum. In one set of places, it produces congestion and unaffordability; on the other, blight and stagnation." |
As the story of Baltimore — and Pittsfield — demonstrates, regional inequality has been deepening for decades. Alec's Op-Ed highlights some of the industries accelerating and widening its effects today — and the impact those forces have on the people left behind. |
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