Justin Fox, Columnist

New York City Already Has Lots of Jobs, Thank You

How the city’s spectacular 21st-century jobs boom may have shaped its reaction to Amazon.

February 20, 2019 at 1:00 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

New York is chugging along.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Amazon.com Inc.’s decision to pull the plug on locating a big new sort-of-second-headquarters complex in New York City has generated so many takes that by this point they should probably count as their own form of job creation. I’m not going to add to the supply! But I do have some context to offer.

After treading water for almost half a century, New York City employment has taken off since the late 1990s, with the most spectacular gains since 2010. And yes, cutting off the y-axis at 3 million does accentuate the spectacle, so in case that bothers you (it needn’t), here it is with the y-axis set to zero: