Think of coal in West Virginia or cars in Flint, Mich. But their incomes are so high compared with everyone else’s that they account for about 20 percent of the city’s economy and most of its export base.Īnd the trouble with having a one-industry economy is that bad things happen if something undermines that industry. Just looking at employment numbers can be misleading: Only about 8 percent of New York’s workers are employed in finance and insurance. As Harvard’s Ed Glaeser has pointed out, in economic terms the city is pretty much a monoculture: It sells financial services to the rest of the world and not much else. But the base is what drives the city’s growth.Īnd New York’s base is remarkably narrow for a city its size.
This base normally has a large “multiplier”: Much of the money earned in the base is spent locally, supporting restaurants, shops, gyms and more. But a city’s economic fortunes are largely driven by its “export base” - the things it produces that are sold elsewhere. That may seem a strange thing to say about a city that is incredibly diverse in so many ways - including the jobs people have. But the larger issue, I’d argue, is New York’s lack of economic diversity. What’s behind this underperformance? Some of it reflects the effects of the pandemic on tourism and business travel - Times Square was just starting to become intolerable again (normally nobody goes there because it’s too crowded) before Omicron hit. New York City’s job losses, however, were much bigger in percentage terms than the national average, and as the national economy has recovered New York hasn’t made up the lost ground. That last point, however, is a problem, and it lies behind the city’s lagging economic recovery.Īll of America suffered steep job losses in the early months of the pandemic. Indeed, New York is a great place to live - if you can afford the cost of housing. The Omicron wave also hit New York first but appears to be receding fast. And thereby hangs a tale that’s relevant not just to New York, but to blue America in general.Ībout the pandemic: During the Delta wave, the combination of high vaccination rates, widespread mask-wearing and public health precautions - you can’t do much indoors in the Big Apple without showing your vaccine card - helped make New York one of the safer places in America, suffering a far lower Covid-related death rate than rural counties or sprawling, car-dependent cities like Dallas. It has not, however, done nearly as well on the economic front. Since then the city has done pretty well on the health front.
#PAUL MASSE HOW TO#
New York suffered badly at the beginning because it’s still America’s leading gateway to the world, so it got heavily infected first, at a time when we didn’t know much about how to protect ourselves from the coronavirus.
And many commentators asserted that it was New York’s lifestyle - in particular, its uniquely high population density and reliance on mass transit - that made it so vulnerable.Īs it turned out, however, this was all wrong. Remember when New York City was doomed? The first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hit the city like a hammer, killing more than 20,000 New Yorkers over the course of a few months.
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