
Half of America hasn't recovered from the last recession - spking
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/half-of-america-hasnt-recovered-from-the-recession/
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aeternus
This seems like a somewhat unexpected result from the growth of the internet.

At first glance, it seems like the internet should allow for a more
geographically distributed economy, and make it easier to get a job regardless
of where you live. Instead, the internet has concentrated jobs in cities by
making it easier for a few companies to sell services to 'everyone'.

Instead of going to a local store or even a local Walmart, people purchase
from Amazon. Instead of doing taxes with a local accountant, more people use
TurboTax. Instead of a local lawyer, there are services like legalzoom.

This centralization is likely a big part of what is causing this. This effect
will probably continue unless the large internet companies move to a more
geographically distributed workforce.

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thatoneuser
Well if we’re waiting on a geographically distributed workforce then I can see
two extremes which will force that. 1 The tech giants need to many
employees/tech giant cities become too overpopulated for the move to Bay Area
it similar isn’t feasible even for software engineers, causing the tech giants
to submit to remote work. 2 We get to a point of automation where we have way
fewer jobs than people.

Don’t mean to be absolutist or anything, but as long as the tech giants can
afford to fly candidates on site and throw buckets of money at them to move to
ever increasingly high COL areas, I only see this trend continuing. Despite
the technical ability to work remotely, most companies seem like they’d rather
perish (or shove their talent into tighter and tiger corrals) than have people
work from their own location. And I don’t see these giants trying to create
new hubs in places that aren’t already established, as that’s a long term
wager and why delay gratification like that?

