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Justin Fox

Not All the High-Tech Jobs Are in California

Advanced industries spread the wealth to the Midwest and South.
Jobs and cool chandeliers.

Jobs and cool chandeliers.

Photographer: Julie Denesha/Bloomberg

Early last year, researchers at the Brookings Institution started tracking the progress of what they dubbed "advanced industries." The idea was to go beyond just the tech sector to other industries that spend a lot on research and development and require lots of scientific and technical knowledge.  The 50 industries they selected, ranging from basic chemical manufacturing to shipbuilding to software publishing, also tend to pay pretty well, with average annual compensation in 2015 nearly double that of other sectors. So if a metropolitan area has a lot of advanced-industry jobs and is adding them at a rapid pace, that's a pretty good sign of economic health.

Today, Brookings added two more years of data, covering 2014 and 2015. I used it to sort out the metro areas where advanced-industry employment makes up an above-the-national-average share (it's 8.7 percent) of total employment and has been rising rapidly since 2010: