The Dangers of High Status, Low Wage Jobs
9th February 2022
There are many reasons why an industry can become concentrated within a narrow geographic region. Externally generated increasing returns to scale i.e. a firm becomes more productive simply by being near other firms producing the same thing, is an observation that goes all the way back to Alfred Marshall. That’s the story of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, not to mention a million other micro-industries. The story of journalism, however, is different, because it is not the capital or labor market opportunities, but specifically the labor itself that is concentrated in a narrow location. The “Writer living in Brooklyn” Twitter/LinkedIn/Muckrack bio is a cliche at this point for a reason. But why are they all in Brooklyn? And why do I get the sense that I can summarize at least half of them as White children of the upper-middle class who paid full-freight for an English-adjacent degree from an expensive liberal arts college?