The size of our cities affects income inequality. Richard Florida has arguedmany times here at CityLab about how the “skills clustering” that happens in the nation’s largest cities—people with high education levels moving into a small number of highly specialized jobs—tends to produce greater income inequality:
… [H]igh-skill clustering is associated with higher returns and high wages for high-skilled workers—but rising tides don’t necessarily raise all boats. Instead, they find that wage gaps increase and there are fewer jobs for unskilled workers in larger cities. Indeed, their results suggest that city or metro size accounts for a whopping one-third of the increase in wage inequality nationally since 1980.
By contrast, in smaller cities, people make less on average—and the gap between the highest and lowest earners is smaller. The Brookings Institution has produced some of the best research on the “big city” effect, and today, it released an interactive chart that compares household income distribution in some 575 cities nationwide.
[For more of this story, written by Laura Bliss, go to http://www.citylab.com/politic...middle-class/395462/]
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