THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC has offered a poignant reminder, as if we needed one, that the United States is a profoundly unequal country. Over the past year, the The Washington Post recently reported, nine tech billionaires saw their net worth increase by a total of $360 billion. Eight of the nine men made their fortunes at companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area or Seattle, where most of them still live. (The biggest winner, Elon Musk, recently decided to ditch California for Austin, the tech boomtown of Texas.) Their runaway wealth reflects not just the divide between the top earners and everyone else but the geographic clustering of prosperity in America.
Things used to be different. From 1930 to 1980, per capita income in most metro areas converged toward the national average. The richest cities in the country included places like Cleveland and Milwaukee. In the 1980s, though, that pattern reversed. As both political parties embraced a hands-off approach to antitrust enforcement and competition policy, the national economy grew increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer corporate hands, based in fewer and fewer places. This—along with other factors, including restrictive land-use policies and the decline of American manufacturing—helped get us to where we are now: a country in which housing prices spiral out of control in superstar cities like Seattle and New York, while vacant buildings crumble in places like St. Louis and Detroit. Meanwhile, the political and cultural divisions between regions grow ever wider.
In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis, a senior reporter for ProPublica, describes the on-the-ground consequences of this regional divergence, focusing on perhaps the biggest overall winner of the winner-take-all economy: Amazon. The company’s economic clout has only increased since MacGillis began his reporting. Since the pandemic began, its value has grown by more than 50 percent—leading, MacGillis notes, to a hiring spree that has put Amazon on pace to become the country’s largest employer by next year. In Baltimore, where MacGillis lives, it is already a dominant presence, with massive fulfillment centers at what used to be the site of the Bethlehem Steel works at Sparrows Point. In Fulfillment, MacGillis explores how the company has become both a symbol and a driver of regional inequality through its treatment of workers, its impact on small businesses, and its ability to influence the political process. We spoke earlier this week. (This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
