Post-industrial Production

As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience [..] The weirdness [..] is hardly acknowledged anymore, because we’ve all had a few decades to get used to it. But for most of the 180 or so years of the train line’s existence, the endpoints of this journey — New York and D.C. — were subordinate to the roaring engines of productivity in between. The real value in America was created in [these regions].

This model was flipped inside out as Wall Street and D.C. became central drivers, not secondary supports, of the nation’s economy. Now, on its route between them, the train passes directly through or near 8 of the 10 richest counties in the United States, but all of this wealth is concentrated near the endpoints of the journey [..]

Why? For the past 30-plus years, through Republican and Democratic administrations, there has been much lip service paid to the idea that the era of big government is over. Long live free enterprise. And yet in the case of those areas surrounding the capital, wealth has gravitated to the exact spot where government regulation is created. Why? Because many businesses discovered that renegotiating the terms between government and the private sector can be extraordinarily lucrative [..] Wilmington, Del., has become wildly successful as the place where Wall Street and D.C. meet. In 1981, Gov. Pierre S. du Pont[..] pushed through the Financial Center Development Act, which led to the state’s new economic engine: regulatory arbitrage.

[But there are now new kinds of automated  industrial production in the in-between regions]

There are some workers [in these factories] — there to make sure the machines keep running — but not many. These jobs, which go to people with advanced, post-high-school training, typically offer a good-enough wage to afford a house in the suburbs, far from the industrial zones that hug the rail line. The people who do make their lives right next to these factories — in Elizabeth, N.J., or Chester, Pa., say — generally can’t afford the technical schooling that would qualify them for jobs inside [..] The Boeing plant making Chinook helicopters outside Philly, the Johnson & Johnson campus in New Brunswick [..] — they all tell the same story: a handful of highly trained workers guiding machines that return huge value to shareholders while all the time finding ways to produce more goods with fewer workers [..]

But one more look out the Amtrak window reveals something else: the shiny new buildings that are actually filled with workers have nothing to do with manufacturing. They’re in the broad service sector, in the anonymous office centers that bloomed out of nowhere.