American Academy in Berlin at ESMT

FULFILLMENT: Winning and Losing in One-Click America

The country is growing increasingly divided between a handful of hyper-prosperous cities, mostly on the coasts, and countless left-behind cities and towns. Regional inequality helped give rise to Donald Trump and is making different parts of the country incomprehensible to each other. It’s not only causing resentment and despair in the left-behind places, but also driving the affordability crisis in the winner cities. How did we get here, and what can be done about it? In this talk, Alec MacGillis takes on those questions through the frame of one of the forces driving the divergence: Amazon.