Enrico Moretti's new book is The New Geography Of Jobs 0547750110
Arnold Kling loves it. Without referring to Charles Murray, Moretti blows Also, Bryan Caplan should be worried. Moretti comes down very hard in favor of the benefits of education, notably College Education, and those of us who are on the skeptical side of that debate will have to pay attention to his analysis. Many service jobs are embedded only in local trade. Every city needs to have an export sector. You can think of this export sector as providing the "foreign exchange" that enables the city to import and the profits with which to support the local service sector. Moretti sees a pattern in American geography. Cities that export innovative products and services are thriving. They also have more jobs and higher-paying jobs in the non-locally-tradable sector. Meanwhile, cities that (used to) export manufactured products are declining. Also, the way he goes about illustrating his points is captivating. He takes on Richard Florida's "cultural creatives" theory by describing Berlin, where the culture is avant-garde but the economy does not produce enough exports to sustain itself (it gets by on tourism and government transfers). Moretti describes the change in job structure through the lens of a Philip Roth novel, and this approach works well.
Coming Apart totally out of the water, replacing Murray's moralistic sociology with solid economics.