“The argument, it’s worth clarifying, is not simply that cheap housing makes a metro area attractive; if that were true the Midwest would be booming. It is that a very elastic housing supply in the face of steady demand will allow for massive population growth.

“We argue that the shift from being a goods-producing, manufacturing-based economy to a service economy—what some have termed “deindustrialization”—is causing the pace of economic recoveries to slow. As is typical of economies recovering from the bursting of an asset bubble and a financial crisis, the recovery from the 2007 recession would be longer than usual. But our research suggests that the rise of the service sector has made it even longer than in the past.

“rigid pyramids of power are collapsing. Micropowers are learning how to frustrate macropowers. Bigwigs are finding it harder to wield power and harder to hold on to it. The barriers that used to protect insiders, such as economies of scale and long-established relationships, are crumbling.

“

“the canary in the coal mine is the decoupling of gains in productivity and in wages. “Productivity since 2000 has grown faster than in the ’70s, ’80s or ’90s…But starting in the late 1990s, we’ve had this decoupling of wages from productivity.”

“There have been big economic changes in the past, but productivity and jobs tracked each other pretty closely,..It is only since 1997 that they decoupled. There is no economic law that says they go together.”

“The so-called “urban renaissance” brings some great sandwiches and microbrews, and I love bike lanes as much as anyone, but the creative class is not a solution for creating community in the face of crisis.

“Low-wage, temporary jobs have become so widespread that they threaten to become the norm.

“Whenever you see some business person quoted complaining about how he or she can’t find workers with the necessary skills, ask what wage they’re offering.

“In a recent study, the Boston Consulting Group noted that, outside a few small cities that rely on the oil industry, there weren’t many places where manufacturing wages were going up and employers still couldn’t find enough workers. “Trying to hire high-skilled workers at rock-bottom rates,” the Boston Group study asserted, “is not a skills gap.” The study’s conclusion, however, was scarier. Many skilled workers have simply chosen to apply their skills elsewhere rather than work for less, and few young people choose to invest in training for jobs that pay fast-food wages.

“the income gap in Manhattan, already wider than almost anywhere else in the country, rivaled disparities in sub-Saharan Africa.