In 1980, highly paid workers in Binghamton, N.Y., earned about four and a half times what low-wage workers there did. The gap between them, in a region full of I.B.M. executives and manufacturing jobs, was about the same as the gap between the workers near the top and the bottom in metro New York.
Since then, the two regions have diverged. I.B.M. shed jobs in Binghamton. Other manufacturing disappeared, too. High-paying work in the new knowledge economy concentrated in New York, and so did well-educated workers. As a result, by one measure, wage inequality today is much higher in New York than it is in Binghamton.
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