then a lot of us have no future. There are 382 metro areas in the United States. From 2005 to 2017 just five of them accounted for 90% of the tech jobs that were created, reports the Wall Street Journal:
Just five metropolitan areas—Boston; San Diego; San Francisco; Seattle; and San Jose, Calif.—accounted for 90% of all U.S. high-tech job growth between 2005 to 2017, according to the research by think-tank scholars Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution and Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
The nation’s 377 other metro areas accounted for 10% of the 256,063 jobs created during that period in 13 high-tech industries such as software publishing, pharmaceutical manufacturing and semiconductor production. Among the smaller cities that gained tech jobs were Madison, Wis.; Albany, N.Y.; Provo, Utah; and Pittsburgh. Some prominent cities— including New York and Austin—lagged in tech job creation, according to the study.
Over that period Chicago and Los Angeles have actually experienced a decline in the number of tech jobs.
I would speculate that the reason for the phenomenon is two-fold: nameplates and money. Most of the increase in tech jobs has been concentrated in a handful of companies—Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc.—and those companies are concentrated in those metro areas and it’s easier to get financing for your start-up if you are located in one of those metro areas.
Those five cities are some of the most desirable places to live in the whole country. Each of them has severe social problems, but people in high tech earn enough that they don’t encounter the problems.