Enrico Moretti > Quotes

“Apple, for example. It employs 12,000 workers in Cupertino. Through the multiplier effect, however, the company generates more than 60,000 additional service jobs in the entire metropolitan area, of which 36,000 are unskilled and 24,000 are skilled. Incredibly, this means that the main effect of Apple on the region’s employment is on jobs outside of high tech.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Attracting a new scientist, software engineer, or mathematician to a city increases the demand for local services.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“More than any other sector, innovation has the power to reshape the economic fates of entire communities, as well as their cultures,”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“reaches the American consumer, only one American worker has physically touched the final product: the UPS delivery guy.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“the innovation sector has the largest multiplier of all: about three times larger than that of manufacturing.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“In innovation, a company’s success depends on more than just the quality of its workers—it also depends on the entire ecosystem that surrounds it.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Despite all the hype about the “death of distance” and the “flat world,” where you live matters more than ever.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“The same attractive forces that fuel the rapid rise of clusters when things are good cause an accelerated collapse when things turn bad.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Thus the growing gap in education and income between the brain hubs and the rest of the country is a probable driver of the divergence in life expectancy.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“We will meet a color scientist at Pixar and a bookbinder in San Francisco. We’ll walk the streets of Seattle’s up-and-coming Pioneer Square, once known for its methadone clinics and now home to companies such as Zynga and Blue Nile. We will visit Berlin, Europe’s sexiest city but still surprisingly poor, and Raleigh-Durham, which is relatively dull but increasingly prosperous.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“This divide—I will call it the Great Divergence—has its origins in the 1980s, when American cities started to be increasingly defined by their residents’ levels of education”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Although the relocation of Microsoft from Albuquerque to Seattle seemed insignificant at the time, it helped turn Seattle into one of America’s most successful innovation hubs.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“stars are more important than proximity to venture capital firms or the effect of government funding.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Visionaries have been trying to build thriving cities from the time that people started living in them. Utopian communities have always ignited people’s imaginations, with their promise of curing social ills through enlightened planning and strong values.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“success in high technology, especially in its formative years, comes down to a small number of extraordinary scientists with vision and a mastery of breakthrough technology.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“An experienced software engineer in India makes $35,000. The same person in Silicon Valley makes $140,000. Why would U.S. firms keep hiring in Silicon Valley when they could save so much by outsourcing?”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“with well-educated professionals increasingly marrying other well-educated professionals. Economists have a decidedly unromantic term for this trend: assortative mating.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Shenzhen’s rise is truly remarkable because it parallels almost perfectly the decline of U.S. manufacturing centers.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“While innovation will never be responsible for the majority of jobs in the United States, it has a disproportionate effect on the economy of American communities.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“cities are not just a collection of individuals but complex, interrelated environments that foster the generation of new ideas and new ways of doing business.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“with an estimated 15.8 million people who practice yoga regularly, up from 4 million only ten years ago. This industry is generating yearly revenues of about $6 billion in classes, retreats, private instruction, and even yoga cruises.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“economists have long used the concentration of patents as a proxy for the creation of new products and ideas.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“This book examines the long-term trends that really matter to our lives—the vast changes that have taken place in the American labor market over the past three decades and the economic forces underlying these changes.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“The growing divergence of American communities is important not just in itself but because of what it means for American society. While the divide is first and foremost economic, it is now beginning to affect cultural identity, health, family stability, and even politics.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Today we immediately associate Los Angeles with movies, New York with finance, Silicon Valley with computers, Seattle with software, and the Raleigh-Durham area with medical research.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“good predictor of a community’s economic success was its openness to gays.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“It is in our own interest to subsidize other people's education, as it ends up indirectly benefiting us.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“American factories produce the same output as China, more than double that of Japan, and several times that of Germany and Korea.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“this process of “creative destruction” is capitalism’s greatest strength and its engine of growth.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs

“Consider another important industry whose success depends on stars: motion pictures.”
― Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs