“This is much more though a forced migration that is coming and I think that is the tone that has really upset the neighborhood,” Ricardo Herrera, executive director of the Buffalo Federation of Neighborhood Centers.

The Rust Belt is full of Detroits. The Sun Belt is full of Houstons. What is wrong with the Rust Belt? What is right with the Sun Belt? That’s about the extent of our policy geography. The scale of analysis is too coarse. Mesofacts muddle the picture.

I advocate for pulling apart the Rust Belt, revealing the variation within the megaregion. However, even that finer grain may not be sufficient. New research (which has strangely vanished) from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland takes a closer look at a small group of Rust Belt cities (cache version):

This Commentary describes the reverse gentrification process and its consequences in four cities—Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, and Pittsburgh—from 1970 to 2006. While reverse gentrification occurred to some degree in all four cities, there are distinct differences across them. In addition, to show how neighborhood dynamics in the central city influence the surrounding suburbs, the Cleveland-Akron metropolitan area is explored more closely, focusing on changes in the inner-ring and outer-ring suburbs.

Buffalo and Pittsburgh trend together, with some neighborhoods gentrifying. Cleveland and Detroit trend together, with “reverse gentrification” dominant. There are parts of Pittsburgh more like Cleveland and Detroit than the gentrifying neighborhoods of Buffalo. According to the Fed, higher education institutions inform gentrification of nearby neighborhoods.

Which brings this post back to Buffalo and the above story about “forced migration” from the neighborhoods around the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. “Buffalo gentrification” is an oxymoron.  It’s also real, close to the centers of talent production. We should pay more attention to this emerging economic geography hidden in the stereotypical Rust Belt.

What does a dying city look like? Brains are draining. The population is shrinking or aging, or both. Vibrant, creative class cool Portland is the antithesis of dying. Yesterday, journalist Annalyn Kurtz tweets: “See! The Portland labor force lost 25,000 workers in the last year. http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LAUMT41389006.”

What in the name of Richard Florida is going on here? The link will take you to the Bureau of Labor page with a bunch of employment data for Portland (select data recreated below). You can see the boom, the fuel for Portlandia. More recently, the labor force number plateaus. Recession. Financial crisis. You know the drill. What comes next? Will the boom pick back up?

As Kurtz notes, the year-over-year drop is dramatic. You might expect such a dive for a Rust Belt city, say Pittsburgh. But Pittsburgh’s labor force is growing, setting historical records seemingly every month. Pittsburgh is thriving. Portland is dying.

As the economy recovers, I argue that Pittsburgh is the place to be. Portland is the darling of the pre-recession economy. Talent production Pittsburgh is where we are headed.

Portland helped write the talent attraction playbook. The approach works as long as there are only a few winners, a short list of tech towns. Knowledge workers hail from somewhere, likely a Rust Belt birthplace. Why compete with Austin, San Francisco, and Los Angeles for software engineers when you can set up shop cheaply in Pittsburgh? Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) graduates are in high demand. The mountain is moving to Muhammad. Portland doesn’t have a CMU.

Some places are less connected across space than others. North Korea is an extreme example. Robert Guest, author of Borderless Economics, explains:

Because North Korea shuts out people, it shuts out ideas. That’s one big reason why it is a starving backwater. Its more open cousin, South Korea, which welcomes foreigners and sends hordes of students and businesspeople abroad each year, is 17 times richer.

People connect places. Migration is how ideas move. Another cost of isolation:

Two recent papers by Filipe Campante of Harvard’s Kennedy School and Quoc-Anh Do of the Singapore Management University argue that geographically isolated capital cities are more prone to corruption.  (This certainly fits with the anecdotal evidence of countries like Myanmar, Kazakhstan, and Nigeria, that have moved their capitals to more isolated locations.)

I theorize that the lack of churn (migration in and out of the community) allows social capital to accumulate. Ironically, the problem isn’t a paucity of trust. The circle of power is too small to facilitate knowledge exchange with the rest of the world. You will deal only with people whom you have known for decades. Autarky is institutional poverty, the hoarding of a shrinking pie.

Time to put the above lens to work in order to solve a social science mystery. Big trouble in Little Portugal:

From the very beginning, and with unusual persistence, the Portuguese community in downtown Toronto set about recreating its motherland on Canadian soil. “They never really left home,” proclaimed the headline of a 1973 Weekend magazine article. Although many Portuguese have since spread throughout the Greater Toronto Area, Little Portugal remains the community’s spiritual center, and a strikingly realistic miniature of its namesake: squat, modestly sized houses, often with glazed tiles of the Virgin Mary beside the doors; little paved-over front yards; the alternately sweet and sea-salty smells of bakeries and fish markets; fado, the plaintive Portuguese folk music, booming out of storefront stereos and filling the streets.

But Toronto’s Portuguese brought something else with them: miserable academic performance. Although the high dropout rate among black students has grabbed headlines in recent years, prompting the creation of two Africentric schools in Toronto, it’s Portuguese who, according to a 2006 Toronto District School Board report, have the highest rate in the city: 42.5 percent. (Another report puts the number at 34 percent, but these estimates vary wildly over time, and the historical mean is closer to 40 percent.) That’s nearly 20 percent higher than the municipal average, and almost four times the rate for Chinese students. The Toronto Catholic District School Board doesn’t keep track of dropout rates by language group, but, according to a source in the TCDSB, their Portuguese students have the same problem.

While that 42.5 percent figure includes some Portuguese speakers from Brazil and Angola, the current generation of dropouts is, by and large, second- or third-generation Portuguese. According to the TDSB, just 17 percent of the children of Portuguese immigrants have a BA or higher level of education—the lowest number among second-generation Torontonians. In an Ontario-wide math test, 14 percent fewer Portuguese-language students reached the expected level of proficiency than the average Toronto student. Other studies indicate that only about one in 20 Portuguese Torontonians has a university degree, compared to the city average of one in four. Just six percent of Portuguese work in the professions, compared to 18 percent of all Toronto residents. And, defying the timeworn stereotype of upward mobility, the children of Portuguese immigrants do not make significantly more money than their parents.

Experts are perplexed. What explains the remarkable dropout rate? I think the answer is in the first paragraph of the quoted passage. Little Portugal is exceptionally parochial. The neighborhood is isolated, suffering from too much social capital. The situation is akin to the immigrants stuck in the Parisian suburbs. Higher education isn’t worth much if you can’t leave.

Without immigration, Silicon Valley is dying. Without immigration, a lot of cities are dying, including New York. Mesofacts aside, migration is ephemeral, particularly international migration. Here today, gone tomorrow. Entire regional economies depend on the influx of talent. There are exceptions to this rule. Case study Montreal:

If Montreal’s tech industries aren’t getting their workers from neighboring regions, that leaves one option: education. It seems clear that Montreal’s higher education system is doing a good job of meeting this area of market demand by training workers for in-demand occupations. With a large number of universities, colleges, and other institutions in the Montreal area, it’s not surprising that Montreal’s tech industries are well-supplied with workers. Other cities looking to boost their economies should take note.

Legacy assets such as universities are money in today’s world. Your city doesn’t have to be cool or put a bird on economic development. Talent attraction is a zero-sum game.

Silicon Valley is the talent magnet of all talent magnets. When it puts a bird on something, you call it Twitter. Hijinks in Egypt ensue. But the same laws of migration apply. Other places can attract talent, too.

More and more cities, and towns, and even rural counties are competing for talent in an age of demographic decline. If your farm needs bodies, good luck finding willing employees. Workers are the world’s dearest commodity.

Silicon Valley can’t just flip a switch and do a Montreal. Few communities can. Get used to it. The Innovation Economy is dying. The Talent Economy is ascendant. Marx is turning over in his London grave.

Stacey Kalivas should be celebrating her graduation from college later this week. Instead, the 22 year-old is getting ready to move back home with broken dreams and in debt. Kalivas is a member of the class of 2013, the fifth successive wave of students to enter into a stubbornly weak U.S. labor market—marked by high unemployment, a large number of part-time workers, and many who have given up the hunt for jobs. “It’s kind of tough to be graduating and not having anything,” said Kalivas. The finance major will graduate from Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island, on May 18.

It has been nearly four years since the end of the worst U.S. economic downturn since the Great Depression, but the recovery has been too spotty to patch up the deep scars. Growth has struggled to rise much above two percent on a yearly basis, with quarters of relatively strong expansion typically followed by lulls. Employers have been reluctant to ramp-up hiring, leaving unemployment at 7.5 percent—nearly three percentage points above its pre-recession level. Employers plan to hire only 2.1 percent more new college graduates this year than in 2012, according to a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers. Last fall they thought the increase would be 13 percent.

A separate survey by staffing firm Adecco found that about 58 percent of 500 hiring managers across the country have no plans to hire new graduates. Of those hiring, more than two thirds said they would take only one or two candidates. These grim statistics resonate with Kalivas. In her search for a job as a financial analyst, she has applied for seven positions. “It’s frustrating because I feel like I will be more than qualified for the job description, but I am not even making it past the first stage,” she said.

Similar tales are recounted by other students.

“Nobody is hiring or accepting interns,” said Brian Dobson, who recently graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a degree in political science. The 29-year-old Iraq war veteran has submitted resumes to 15 companies hoping to find employment in either public affairs, marketing, or as a lobbyist. All have been met with rejections.

A study by the EPI found that 52 percent of employed college graduates under the age of 24 were working in jobs that did not require a degree last year. That was up from 47 percent in 2007.

HIGH GRADUATE UNDEREMPLOYMENT
The Class of 2013 is competing with four other groups of graduates going back to 2009, many of whom are still struggling to get a job or find full-time work.

Brian Hackett graduated in 2010 with a political science and public policy degree. “I am working part-time at a research company, but it’s not enough hours, it’s not enough pay and it’s not my career path. That’s the type of rut a lot of people like myself are falling in,” said Hackett.

In April, unemployment among workers under the age of 25 was at 16.1 percent, more than double the national rate.

While the unemployment rate for young college graduates between the ages of 21-24 who are not enrolled in further schooling is 8.8 percent, the underemployment rate, a gauge of those only working part time or who want a job but have given up looking, is at 18.3 percent. The jobless rate for this group was 5.7 percent in 2007; the underemployment rate was 9.9 percent.

“In addition to the substantial share who are officially unemployed, a large swath of these young, highly educated workers have either a job but cannot attain the hours they need or want a job but have given up looking for work,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington. The tough labor market is forcing college graduates to settle for jobs that do not require a degree, a trend economists refer to as cyclical downgrading.

Lauren Hughes, a double major in theater and English, is heading in that direction. After graduating from Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, she will work as a waitress in her home town of Huntley, Illinois. But she hopes it will be only for a few months. Hughes will make about $4.95 an hour, but with tips she figures she can take home between $45 and $110 a day—money she will save for a job hunt in New York’s theaters in the fall. Hughes is also looking at secretarial work, copy editing, and teaching as a back stop. “I am not very optimistic,” she said.

Emily Savage is looking to go the same route after a frustrating search for jobs in the fields of conservation biology, genetics, and molecular biology. “It’s kind of disappointing. I am probably going to get a job that’s not in my field to survive for the next six months and apply to grad school,” said the Penn State University biology major. “A minimum wage job might be my only option.”

Dobson, who did two tours in Iraq between 2003 and 2006, is not far behind. He and his wife moved in with his parents when he enrolled in college after four years of active duty in the Army. He has tried jobs that give veterans preference. “I need to get back into the workforce. My plan is to find any employment that is possible, whether it is at Applebee’s or Lowe’s, whoever is hiring,” he said.

A study by the EPI found that 52 percent of employed college graduates under the age of 24 were working in jobs that did not require a degree last year. That was up from 47 percent in 2007.

In the fight for jobs, the young graduates are also up against a large group of older Americans forced to work beyond their retirement age to rebuild nest eggs shattered during the recession. The share of Americans aged 65 years and older with either a job or looking for one is at a 51-year high.

LIFETIME OF LOW WAGES
The combination of unemployment and menial jobs puts young workers on course for a life of low wages and earnings. “For the young who are getting out of school, studies show a lot of their earnings growth comes in the first 10 years after they get out of school,” said Keith Hall, a senior research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center.

According to the EPI, young college graduates with full-time jobs earned an average hourly wage of $16.60 last year, roughly $34,500 a year. That is down 7.6 percent from 2007. Benefits are also a problem. Between 2000 and 2011, the share of young graduates whose jobs provide for retirement plans dropped to 27.2 percent from 41.5 percent, EPI said. The trend is troubling given that most students are graduating from college with huge debts.

Dobson is fortunate. The government took care of his tuition costs through the Post-9/11 GI-Bill, which provides financial support to service personnel. But Kalivas and Savage are not so lucky. Each owes about $30,000 in student debt. According to the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the share of 25-year-olds with student loan debt has risen to more than 40 percent from about 25 percent in 2004. The non-profit Institute for College Access & Success says students who graduated last year had average debts of $26,600.

“The next generation will find it hard to buy their first home or finance other large purchases,” said Julia Coronado, chief North America economist at BNP Paribas in New York.

Kalivas, the would-be financial analyst, will take a break from her job search for a month after graduating. “A lot of companies have been telling us to look for positions opening up in the second and third quarter. They are starting to advertise some positions,” said Kalivas. “I am going to move back with my parents, unfortunately, but I do plan on getting out as quickly as possible,” she said, with a laugh.

Ah, Rust Belt Chic Paris. It’s authentic. Daring. On the edge, a place of experimentation. Welcome to the suburbs:

“Things are changing,” said Majid El Jarroudi, a consultant of Moroccan origin, who grew up in the Paris banlieue of Montreuil.

Mr. Jarroudi, 36, started his career operating a small restaurant. He founded an organization, Adive, to assist banlieue entrepreneurs after visiting the United States and marveling at how much easier it seemed for minorities to move ahead.

Attitudes have shifted slowly in France, he said, but these days, “there is a growing recognition that the banlieues should not be seen as a place to fear, but as a source of dynamism, full of people who are eager to work and to succeed.”

Welcome to Cleveland. Last weekend, I’m walking around a pop-up market in a neighborhood where Slovenian immigrants used to roost. The ethnic mix of the marginalized is much more diverse. Many buildings had seen better days.

St. Louis champions Jeff and Randy Vines are in town to check out the scene. The energy is entrepreneurial. The urban landscape is authentic. Cleveland is on the edge, a place of experimentation.

The night before, David C. Barnett (National Public Radio) and I were at a Brazilian expat party in Lakewood. Lakewood is an old suburb with a city feel. I ran into Barnett again at the pop-up and we chatted about the suburban frontier, the new inner city. Could the burbs be cool like the core neighborhoods of Cleveland?

I paused before answering David’s question. I smiled. He was on to something. Rust Belt Chic Paris in Cleveland.

I cultivated an interest in talent migration via human rights advocacy. How could I get American voters to support the ratification of United Nations conventions? I settled on matters of citizenship. Non-citizens didn’t enjoy the same constitutional protections as citizens. In fact, I learned that where you are located determines the force of international treaties. Geography and sovereignty impact international human rights law. Places, not people, have rights.

Not all migrants fall into legal spatial loopholes such as Guantanamo. Cosmopolities above the fray hop from global city to global city. Geographic mobility is power. The most willing to move make the most money. Which brings me to a second preoccupation of mine, the relationship between migration and economic development.

A gender analysis of mobility from geographer Susan Hanson:

Location and the nature of locally available employment opportunities is believed to shape labor force participation, job type, and wages. Analysts investigating this issue have encountered problems in operationalizing the concept of “locally available employment opportunities.” We first review the grounds for expecting a relationship between local context and employment outcomes for women and then critically assess the methods and measures that analysts have used to explore the relationship. Finally, we describe a new approach for measuring local employment context that consists of a fine-scaled measure individually tailored for each woman in the sample. Using discriminant analysis we ask whether the spatial variables measuring local employment context are important determinants of women’s employment in female-dominated occupations. The results suggest that for most groups of women (defined by city or suburban residence and by sociodemographics) the spatial variables are not important. For well-educated, part-time employed women with young children, however, living in an area rich in female-dominated job opportunities increases the likelihood of having a job in a gender-typical occupation; for these women, the local employment context does affect labor market outcomes.

Children restrict the geographic mobility of working mothers. Employers exploit these constraints via lesser wages. The labor pool is captive, driving down pay. Now back to a recurring theme for this blog, declining geographic mobility within the United States:

Whatever the explanation, [the authors find] that the wage gains associated with switching jobs have fallen over time, suggesting that workers now have less to gain from moving to a different company or job. If true, that’s a huge deal, they note, since for a long time “economists have surmised that changing employers is a main channel of individual-level wage growth.” Increasingly, it appears, that’s no longer true.

Labor is becoming more captive, more like part-time employed women with young children. For the working class, migration used to be a great asset. Now, the best educated are the most mobile. The gulf between rich and poor gets wider. Move or die.

Pittsburgh is dying. Residents are fleeing the city. Via Chris Briem, immigrants will save the Rust Belt:

“We’ve had neighborhoods decimated by population loss, and the only way we rebuild is by bringing new people here,” said Pittsburgh City Councilman Bill Peduto, a mayoral candidate who includes attracting immigrants in his campaign platform.

The efforts are most evident in the Rust Belt, a region historically strong in manufacturing that a century ago was a leading destination for immigrants. During the fresh immigration surge in recent decades, however, newcomers largely bypassed Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis as manufacturing there—and other cities in the region—dwindled. They opted instead for cities such as Phoenix and Dallas.

Between 2000 and 2011, the Rust Belt, stretching from western Pennsylvania to the Mississippi River, was home to 18 of the 25 fastest-shrinking cities in the U.S. Their proportion of foreign-born residents, moreover, lagged well behind the national average of about 13 percent, with less than five percent in some cities. So while Pittsburgh and Dayton, Ohio, for instance, bled residents, they also missed out on a national immigrant boom that saw the population of foreign-born residents in the U.S. grow by 25 percent over the last decade, compared with an eight percent rise in native-born residents.

Pittsburgh bled residents. Yes, way back in the 1980s there was an impressive exodus. Between 2000 and 2011, Pittsburgh did not bleed residents. The population loss was mainly an issue of more deaths than births, the demographic legacy of outmigration that occurred decades ago.

Rust Belt population woes tend to be a lack of inmigration: “newcomers largely bypassed Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis.” When the numbers go down, the assumption is brain drain. The problem is lack of brain gain. But locals won’t hear of it despite the preponderance of data stating the contrary.

Another factor is sprawl. Braddock, near Pittsburgh, is the poster child for population decline. The typical story starts with shuttered steel mills and ends with workers relocating to the Sun Belt in search of jobs. Braddock lost 90 percent of its population. Ironically, the steel mill in town is still running. Where did the people go? To the suburbs:

These days most consider population loss in Braddock the result of industry decline which isn’t really the core. If you look longer term at the numbers, Braddock’s population loss was well entrenched while the local Steel industry was doing well. Local workers were able to move out into newer suburbs as their wages went up and did so long before the 1980s. I’d say the bulk were long gone from Braddock itself by the time the steel related job losses accelerated. It just highlights how difficult the problems in Braddock are being both an inner suburb losing population to further suburbs, and being at the center of the steel industry’s implosion.

Couples have fewer children. Families took their blue collar wages to the suburbs. No one wants to move to Shittsburgh. That all considered, are more immigrants really the answer to shrinking city problems? The focus should be on economic development, not population numbers. Job creation is a good reason to attract immigrants.

In the foodie universe, Pittsburgh was a culinary cul-de-sac. On the other hand, Cleveland has sported a vibrant restaurant scene for quite some time. Regardless, both cities suffered from a Rust Belt reputation. What could be worth eating in a dying backwater? A recent New York Times article to the rescue:

Until recently, the American food revolution seemed to bypass this region, leaping from Chicago to Philadelphia without making stops in places like Toledo, Cleveland, Akron, and Pittsburgh.

These cities of the Rust Belt, which edges around the Great Lakes from Buffalo to Detroit, are linked in many ways: by a shared history of industry, by a network of defunct canals and decaying railroads, and by thousands of acres of farmland.

Now, the region is linked by a group of educated, ambitious chefs who are building a new kind of network. Its scale is tiny compared with the steel and shipbuilding empires of the region’s past. But they are nonetheless convinced that an interdependent web of chefs, butchers, farmers, millers, bakers, and brewers will help bring the local landscape back into balance.

To that end, they are cooking sustainably, supporting agriculture, and raising families—all while making world-class food with a strong sense of place. One hundred and thirty miles northwest of Pittsburgh, in Cleveland, the chef Jonathon Sawyer has nudged along a transformation since he and his wife, Amelia, opened the Greenhouse Tavern in 2009. The imaginative, approachable, precisely flavored dishes he pulls off there have helped Cleveland make the transition from bratwurst and braciole to broccoli escabeche, duck zampone and Ohio-raised strip steaks with shallot mignonnette.

Mr. Sawyer lived and cooked in New York City for five years, working for the chef Charlie Palmer, before he and his wife decided to raise their children back in their hometown.

Knowledge and expertise do not travel well. Migration is the vehicle for the diffusion of innovation. Talent leaving Chicago would skip over the Rust Belt and land in a coastal metro. Over the last decade, that pattern has changed as native daughters and sons returned home after cutting their teeth in a Big City:

Hoon Kim, owner of Fukuda in Bloomfield, also cited strong relationships among restaurant folks as a reason to open his first place last fall.

Mr. Kim, 38, moved to Pittsburgh from New York seven years ago with his wife, a Pittsburgh native, to start Pittsburgh Prep, an East Liberty-based tutoring company.

This past year, with a little extra money and an entrepreneurial spirit, Mr. Kim decided to pursue a lifelong ambition to open a restaurant inspired by his Japanese upbringing. Before opening, Mr. Kim said he “did a hearty bit of research,” and was pleased to find the restaurant community “warm and inviting.”

Boomerang Bob Broskey, sous chef at the recently reopened Notion in East Liberty, said he knew few people in the restaurant community, but gained footing after staging in restaurants for two months. Mr. Broskey returned from Chicago because “it was the right move at the right time,” he said.

Working under Dave Racicot at Notion appealed to him because he is passionate about fine dining and hopes to see more of it in the area.

For cities a few pegs down the urban hierarchy, a talent influx from a global gateway such as New York, Chicago, or D.C. is vital. Pittsburgh’s burgeoning dining scene is particularly ironic. Recently, a Burgh restaurant was able to lure a world class sommelier from Washington. Usually there is some sort of connection. Few people would pick up and move to Pittsburgh or Cleveland without some extensive knowledge of the place. The negative stereotypes deter most migrants, save expats who have some first-hand experience.

Return migration has fostered enough of a restaurant culture to warrant mention in the New York Times. The stereotypes, or mesofacts, are eroding, opening the door for newcomers with no ties to Pittsburgh:

Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.

Our perception of place impacts migration, either impeding or facilitating knowledge transfer. The best way to get out of the downward spiral is brain drain. The brightest young adults network in an alpha global city. Some return home, bringing with them sorely needed expertise and often a trailing spouse. Ben Winchester has studied this kind of brain gain in rural communities. Towns fret over high school graduates leaving while ignoring the college graduates who have moved back. Perhaps the population is declining. The workforce is getting smarter. Tastes are more cosmopolitan. The world is flatter. One doesn’t need to be in New York to eat New York.

The Economist just posted a chart—as they do every day in a relevantly-named “Daily chart” feature—comparing cities with the world’s most millionaires. The axes organize between cities with the most millionaires per thousand people and what percentage of the country’s millionaires live in that city. Tokyo has the most millionaires, but Frankfurt, by far, has the most millionaires-per-thousand with 218.

But what about billionaires? [Insert that Facebook quote.] The Economist also lists the cities by number of billionaires, and New York City comes out on top. USA! USA! USA! Here are the top five:

01. New York City: 70 billionaires (8.3 million people)

02. Moscow: 64 billionaires (11.5 million)

03. London 54 billionaires (8.2 million)

04. Hong Kong: 40 billionaires (7 million)

05. Beijing: 29 billionaires (20.7 million)

And here are some other statistics:

• New York City: Over 1.7 million people live in poverty.

• Moscow: The average monthly salary in Russia is around $746.

• London: 430 neighborhoods in London have become poorer since 2004.

• Hong Kong: The median home price is almost 13 times the median household income.

• Beijing: Air pollution levels were 35 times the suggested standard earlier this year.

The United States is unusual among developed countries in guaranteeing exactly zero weeks of paid time-off from work upon the birth or adoption of a child. Japan offers 14 weeks of paid job-protected leave, the U.K. offers 18, Denmark 28, Norway 52, and Sweden offers 68 (yes, that’s over a year of paid time-off to take care of a new child).

The U.S. does guarantee that new parents receive 12 weeks of non-paid leave, but only for parents who work in companies that employ 50 workers or more and who have worked there at least 12 months and accrued 1,250 hours or more in that time. These rules translate to about 1/2 of women. The other half are guaranteed nothing.

Companies, of course, can offer more lucrative benefits if they choose to, so some parents do get paid leave. This makes the affordability of having children and the pleasure and ease with which one can do so a class privilege. A report by the U.S. Census Bureau documents this class inequality, using education as a measure. If you look at the latest data on the far right (2006-2008), you’ll see that the chances of receiving paid leave is strongly correlated with level of education:

Looking across the entire graph, however, also reveals that this class inequality only emerged in the early 1970s and has been widening ever since. This is another piece of data revealing the way that the gap between the rich and the poor has been widening.

Just to emphasize how perverse this is:

People with more education, who on average have higher incomes, are often able to take paid time off; but less-economically advantaged parents are more likely to have to take that time unpaid. During the post-birth period, then, the economic gap widens.

There’s more:

Many less-advantaged parents can’t afford to take time off unpaid, so they keep working. But even this widens the gap because their salary is lower than the salary the richer person continues to receive during their paid time off of work. So the rich get paid more for staying home than the poor get for going to work.

We often use the minimizing word “just” when describing what stay-at-home parents do. “What are you doing these days?” asks an old friend at a class reunion. “Oh, just staying home and taking care of my kids,” a parent might say, as if raising kids is “doing nothing.” We trivialize what parents do. But, in fact, raising children is a valuable contribution to the nation. We need a next generation to keep moving forward as a country. Unfortunately the U.S. continues to treat having kids like a hobby (something its citizens choose to do for fun, and should pay for themselves). Without state support for early parenting, being present in those precious early months is a class-based privilege, one that ultimately exacerbates the very class disadvantage that creates unequal access to the luxury of parenting in the first place.

This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site.

We live in a world of global brands but local tastes. Arabs tend to drink their tea slowly; Indians load theirs with spices and sugar. So Lipton ships a different optimized formula to each, under its standard yellow label. The Earth may seem united by loyalty to Coca-Cola, but Coke famously tailors sweetness to different regions. The world of consumption is still a Balkanized place.

If you want to see these divergent proclivities in all their finely segmented glory, spend some time at the Dubai International Airport. The world’s third busiest air hub, Dubai boasts the most lucrative and perhaps most sophisticated duty-free shop on Earth. Its total retail space is more than one and a half times the size of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and its sales reached $1.6 billion in 2012. With its constantly circulating clientele, Dubai Duty Free is the global retail market collapsed into a few sleek airport terminals.

Dubai Duty Free hangs its name on luxury goods, but two of the retailer’s biggest selling items are Nestlé powdered milk and Tang.

THE GOLD NONSTANDARD
One of Dubai Duty Free’s biggest sellers is gold. Finely worked 18-karat necklaces and bracelets gleam in the retailer’s display cases, meant to lure Europeans, East Asians, and Americans. But Indians—the world’s largest consumers of the metal—disdain the 18-karat kind. At Dubai Duty Free, they pretty much exclusively buy 22-karat gold, often in the form of bricks.

NOT BLING, BUT TANG
Dubai Duty Free hangs its name on luxury goods, but two of the retailer’s biggest selling items are Nestlé powdered milk and Tang, the orange drink mix. How big? In 2012, the airport sold 1,417 metric tons of Tang. The two powdered mixes are sold mostly to South Asian laborers flying home from Persian Gulf work sites.

THE CHINA SYNDROME
Chinese travelers make up just four percent of the Dubai airport’s total traffic, but 12 percent of Dubai Duty Free’s sales. That’s because luxury products like high-end liquor, watches, and perfumes are still relatively expensive in China. In response, Dubai Duty Free has recruited 573 Chinese salespeople, dispensed Chinese phrase books to everyone else, and started accepting China’s most popular credit card.

CONTACT BUY
On a special first-class-only floor in the airport, Dubai Duty Free markets a $200,000 bottle of whiskey called Royal Salute Tribute to Honor. The bottles don’t exactly fly off the shelves, but the liquor creates a “halo effect” for the shop: business elites are more likely to break out their wallets in the presence of aspirational goods.

HERSHEY’S MISS
Americans love Hershey’s chocolate, but most of the rest of the world finds it horrid. Nonetheless, the airport retailer markets Hershey’s in large displays, even though few Americans pass through Dubai. Why? According to journalist Kristoffer Garin, the target audience is Filipinos; they developed a taste for the stuff under American occupation in the early 20th century.

Brain drain is economic development. Exporting talent is a smart strategy. The return on investment for Cuba:

So what might Cuba’s latest foray into medical diplomacy entail? In return for physicians and other health workers, Brazil is expected to fund infrastructure projects in Cuba and direct a $176 million loan toward Cuban airports. Cuban medical personnel, meanwhile, will fan out to rural areas of Brazil that are typically underserved by doctors.

Reciprocity. Rural Brazil gets doctors. Cuba gets airports. Talent is the new oil.

Really, talent is the new gasoline or diesel fuel. People are the raw material, refined through education. Better to export a value added product than be a banana republic. One big difference: the migrant, the talent export, also benefits. Migration is economic development.

Thanks to Robert Putnam, we tend to think amassing social capital is a good thing to do. Thanks to Sean Safford, we know that too much of a good thing can do a world of harm. Can a community have too much trust? Europe’s geographic mobility problem:

According to documents seen by the Financial Times, the E.U. is working on plans to combat the problem by extending the period during which economic migrants can receive unemployment benefits from their home country from three months to six months.

This, it is hoped, will make it easier for citizens to move around the bloc in search of work, a development Patrick De Maeseneire, Adecco’s chief executive, said would be crucial to a European economic recovery.

“To create new jobs in Europe, European governments need more flexible labor markets, and to push reforms of education systems. With three million open jobs in Europe, there is a clear need for young people to become internationally mobile in their job search,” he said.

A talent shortage in Germany and an unemployment crisis in Spain should inform a migration from Spain to Germany. For some reason, such a relocation isn’t happening often enough. The above policy aims to fix that. Economist Enrico Moretti contrasts Europe with the more mobile United States:

In Italy, where I grew up, most people spend their entire lives in the city where they were born, which is often the city where their parents were born. Young Italians are particularly immobile. In a study published in 2005, I calculated that Italians tend to live with their parents until quite late in life: 83 percent of Italian males 33 or younger still live at home. And when they do leave the parental nest, they don’t move far away. Young people commonly get an apartment in the same neighborhood as their parents, often in the same building. Though Italians may be an extreme case, Europeans are generally much more geographically rooted than Americans. Compared with people in most other developed nations, Americans are outliers. The Great Recession has temporarily slowed Americans’ mobility, but once the economy rebounds, people will start moving again.

In the United States, people are starting to move again. But the population boom isn’t boosting the economy like it used to do. An aging nation may have something to do with it. Again, Moretti with interesting observations about migration:

Among Americans, however, there are large differences, with some groups much more willing to move than others. At the time of the Great Migration in the 1920s—when more than two million African-Americans abandoned the South for industrial centers in other regions—less-educated individuals were more likely to migrate in search of better lives. Today, the opposite is true: The more education a person has, the more mobile he or she is. College graduates have the highest mobility of all, workers with a community-college education are less mobile, high-school graduates are even less, and dropouts are the least mobile of all.

Compared to the Great Migration, the contemporary relationship between geographic mobility and education has flipped. As I argued yesterday, migrants make cities great. You didn’t need a high school diploma to help build Chicago. For the poor in the rural South, there was considerable opportunity in the urban North. When more people move, more people benefit economically. The economy benefits, too.

Disturbing findings about how home-ownership affects mobility:

Second, we show that, both within states and across states, high home-ownership areas have lower labor mobility. Importantly, this is not due merely to the personal characteristics of owners and renters. We are unable, in this paper, to say exactly why, or to give a complete explanation for the patterns that are found, but our study’s results are consistent with the unusual idea that the housing market can create dampening externalities upon the labor market and the economy.

Why does home ownership lower labor mobility? That’s an open question. I have a theory: too much social capital.

Europe suffers from too much social capital, too much trust. The rooted are parochial, risk averse. Greater density or cheaper housing won’t help. Hence the need for the European Union to catalyze more labor movement between member countries.

Owning a home deepens your ties to the community. Home-ownership is promoted as a means to revitalize a neighborhood, make it more safe. Home owners are better neighbors than renters. More home owners generate more social capital. Less people are bowling alone. Less people are moving to where the jobs are.

A reminder about what Thomas Dyja said about Chicago:

Very few people in the book are from Chicago, or born there. Not Studs Terkel. Not Muddy Waters. Not Nelson Algren. So many people who are really important look at Chicago as a place to try out new ideas. You went west and started afresh in Chicago. That pioneer spirit, that entrepreneurial edge, has always been built into Chicago.

Chicago, like other global cities, is a place with low social capital. That pioneer spirit comes from bowling alone, moving to a place full of outsiders. Less social capital, not greater density, means more innovation.

In January 2010, a year after taking office, President Barack Obama unveiled a singularly ambitious idea for boosting the economy. “Tonight, we set a new goal,” he said in his State of the Union address. “We will double our exports over the next five years, an increase that will support two million jobs in America.” Under the banner of a National Export Initiative, the president pledged to support new trade missions overseas, offer export assistance to small and medium-size businesses, and step up enforcement of trade agreements. “Because the more products we make and sell to other countries,” he said, “the more jobs we support right here in America.”

In response, governors from Washington State to Kentucky started launching their own export initiatives. California, which had unceremoniously shut down its ineptly managed trade-and-commerce agency in 2003, was scheduled to open a commercial office in Shanghai this spring. In February, Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam announced the opening of offices in Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, and China.

In this year’s State of the Union, Obama renewed his call for boosting exports, arguing that fair trade “supports millions of good-paying American jobs.”

Implicit in all this soaring talk of export promotion is a vision: that shipping higher volumes of made-in-America goods abroad will reverse the decline of the nation’s middle class. With more exports, we’ll create hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new factory jobs, replenish our public treasuries, and enjoy the sort of dignity and standard of living our parents did. And to get the exports flowing again, we just need to massage a few foreign relationships and better enforce our trade agreements.

In dollar terms, diamonds are one of California’s biggest exports—three times bigger than wine. Job impact: employment for a handful of trusted couriers.

It’s a lovely vision. It just doesn’t make much sense. In any number of ways, promoting exports as a means to rebuild American manufacturing is like pushing on a string. In fact, even relying on export statistics as a means to gauge the health of America’s economy is, for mundane but powerful reasons, a terrible idea.

Export promotion has long been a staple of economic policy at the federal level. In the 1980s, when America’s economy seemed to be under siege from Japanese and European imports, states leapt into the game as well, opening trade offices overseas and sending representatives around the globe. It’s hard to say whether such efforts had any meaningful effect on the nation’s merchandise export trade, which grew in real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) terms by 123 percent between 1980 and 2008. What’s clear, however, is that American manufacturing jobs did not increase correspondingly. In fact, during that same period, about 5.3 million American manufacturing jobs vanished.

How about our success in the years since Obama launched his National Export Initiative? Well, exports of goods in that interval have increased by just over 35 percent, which is fairly decent. But again, jobs have not mirrored that rise. Despite Obama’s recent boast that 500,000 new manufacturing jobs have been created over the past three years, as of February about 579,000 fewer Americans hold manufacturing jobs than when he took office; and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics expects that manufacturing employment in 2020 will actually be lower than in 2010, by a margin of 73,100 jobs.

Factory jobs have continued to disappear not because Obama has done something wrong, but because manufacturing has gotten more efficient. As many analysts have pointed out, making widgets simply requires fewer and fewer employees. This is the biggest reason the number of jobs supported by manufactured exports represents at best about five percent of all private-sector employment in this country.

But even if we ignore the effect of increased productivity, there’s another problem with viewing our manufacturing sector through the lens of exports: our current export statistics are misleadingly robust. Each month, the Census Bureau publishes detailed figures on merchandise exports. These numbers are puffed up by a category called “re-exports”: goods that are imported from abroad and then shipped abroad without any value added during their time in this country. For example, a trading company in Miami might import a consignment of phones from Taiwan in anticipation of landing an order from a retailer in Argentina.

Re-exports are on the rise across the nation—accounting for 12.5 percent of America’s merchandise export trade last year, up from 8.7 percent in 2000. But they don’t create a lot of jobs. Instead, they produce overly sunny numbers. Exclude re-exports from New York’s merchandise export trade since 2000, and what appears to be about a 40-percent increase in exports over that period is really half of that. Exclude re-exports from California’s merchandise export trade, and what emerges is that exports of goods declined by 7.4 percent between 2000 and 2012.

By the way, care to guess what California’s leading re-export was in 2011? Non-industrial, worked diamonds. Value: $4.8 billion. In dollar terms, that makes diamonds one of the state’s biggest exports—three times bigger than wine. Job impact: employment for a handful of trusted couriers.

If export promoters truly wanted to focus on the most promising areas of export growth, they would turn their attention to the service sector. Service exports encompass a wide range of transactions: from money spent here by foreign business travelers, tourists, and students; to fees earned by American architects, engineers, lawyers, business consultants, and financial managers; to royalties claimed by American entertainers. Even digitized-music, -video, and -print sales fall into this category, because digitization is transforming one-time goods into services. (Read the small print, and you’ll find that you do not own the song you just downloaded; you’re leasing access to it.) Nationally, service exports in 2012 were valued at more than $630 billion, or about 40 percent of the size of our merchandise export trade. But of course, promoting such exports is a little more challenging and a lot less photogenic than, say, announcing the sale of 50 jets.

SO IF EXPORT PROMOTION is a hollow concept, how can government leaders create the conditions for more good jobs in the medium and long term? By actually helping to make America’s economy more competitive.

Most economists agree that competitiveness rests on these basic building blocks: high-quality public education, a transportation infrastructure that permits the efficient movement of goods and people, a workforce trained in skills commensurate with the needs of local industry, and a business climate that is attractive to prospective investors, both foreign and domestic.

Regrettably, on the education front, we’re doing poorly. The U.S. invests more in public education per capita than all but a few other nations, but U.S. high-school students rank 14th in reading and 25th in math, according to the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment. In 2010–2011, some 44 percent of high-school graduates who took the Florida College System’s entrance exam failed the math section.

In transportation, much of our infrastructure is outdated and poorly maintained, and our electronic highways are increasingly vulnerable to hackers who mean us harm.

Then there are our workforce-development issues. A 2011 study by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute found that manufacturers across the nation were unable to fill as many as 600,000 vacant positions, ranging from machinists and welders to maintenance technicians. Many of the job descriptions for these unfilled positions required education in the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math. Unfortunately, by failing to provide solid secondary education, failing to encourage more college students to pursue the STEM fields, and failing to craft an immigration policy weighted toward high-skill workers, we’re undermining our ability to remain competitive in a global economy. Of course, on the bright side, we’ve left lots of room for improvement.

That leaves the business climate. Here’s where some states and cities have had some success. Most of them have achieved this by focusing less on finding overseas markets for existing manufacturers and more on creating conditions attractive to foreign businesses.

Case in point: Alabama. In a September 2012 report, the Los Angeles-based Milken Institute chided the state of California for lacking a coherent export strategy. It underscored the complaint by noting that Alabama had a much higher rate of export growth.

What seemed to elude the report’s authors, though, is that Alabama’s surging export growth has not been the product of an export strategy. Rather, it stems from an industrial-development strategy dating back to the 1990s, when Alabama managed to lure an automobile company to Tuscaloosa County. The company built a plant that now employs 3,200 workers and exports two-thirds of the vehicles it makes. The name of this powerhouse behind Alabama’s exporting success?

Mercedes-Benz.