The lead paragraph from a smart piece in The New York Times Magazine that explains why the old jobs are never coming back, and why any politician who says they are is a liar:

As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it’s all tidy and digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay. There’s Newark and Trenton and the heroic wreckage in parts of Philadelphia, block after block of hulking edifices covered in graffiti, the boarded-up ghost neighborhoods of Baltimore made familiar by “The Wire” — all on the line that connects America’s financial center and its booming capital city.

What’s really scary is that the relatively new jobs are disappearing, too. An interesting era we’re in, transitioning from old-style capitalism to a version that’s a lot like feudalism.