Thompson discrete hierarchy of skill (education), wage level (income) and employment growth (vocational opportunity)? Can this dynamic variation on the more static theme of central place theory be accepted with mild interest as a theoretical or empirical curi-osity, as seems to be true of so much of regional economics, or are there important normative and policy ramifications here? If industries do in fact filter down through the national system of cities, then human resources would tend to filter up in a complementary way. The textile and apparel towns of the Piedmont area have been able to maintain full employment of a rapidly expanding labor force -- have been able to absorb the exodus from agriculture in that region --by capturing an ever larger share of these slow-growing industries. But tight local labor markets have not produced an average per capita income, as the more ambitious and talented young adults of that region have migrated out (filtered-up) to various larger places. Worse still, this trading of high talent for low skill work has compromised the long run development potential of that region. This is, moreover, a double-edged sword in that the larger, more industrially sophisticated urban areas of the North struggle with heavy unemployment that leads to near unemployability and, in large measure, for lack of low-wage unskilled work. New York City needs low skill work as desperately as a textile town needs skilled work. In general, if natural increase tends to produce a population with a random distribution of talent and ambition, and if industrial filtering tends to sector high and low skill 27 May 1971

DOI link for Thompson discrete hierarchy of skill (education), wage level (income) and employment growth (vocational opportunity)? Can this dynamic variation on the more static theme of central place theory be accepted with mild interest as a theoretical or empirical curi-osity, as seems to be true of so much of regional economics, or are there important normative and policy ramifications here? If industries do in fact filter down through the national system of cities, then human resources would tend to filter up in a complementary way. The textile and apparel towns of the Piedmont area have been able to maintain full employment of a rapidly expanding labor force -- have been able to absorb the exodus from agriculture in that region --by capturing an ever larger share of these slow-growing industries. But tight local labor markets have not produced an average per capita income, as the more ambitious and talented young adults of that region have migrated out (filtered-up) to various larger places. Worse still, this trading of high talent for low skill work has compromised the long run development potential of that region. This is, moreover, a double-edged sword in that the larger, more industrially sophisticated urban areas of the North struggle with heavy unemployment that leads to near unemployability and, in large measure, for lack of low-wage unskilled work. New York City needs low skill work as desperately as a textile town needs skilled work. In general, if natural increase tends to produce a population with a random distribution of talent and ambition, and if industrial filtering tends to sector high and low skill 27 May 1971

Thompson discrete hierarchy of skill (education), wage level (income) and employment growth (vocational opportunity)? Can this dynamic variation on the more static theme of central place theory be accepted with mild interest as a theoretical or empirical curi-osity, as seems to be true of so much of regional economics, or are there important normative and policy ramifications here? If industries do in fact filter down through the national system of cities, then human resources would tend to filter up in a complementary way. The textile and apparel towns of the Piedmont area have been able to maintain full employment of a rapidly expanding labor force -- have been able to absorb the exodus from agriculture in that region --by capturing an ever larger share of these slow-growing industries. But tight local labor markets have not produced an average per capita income, as the more ambitious and talented young adults of that region have migrated out (filtered-up) to various larger places. Worse still, this trading of high talent for low skill work has compromised the long run development potential of that region. This is, moreover, a double-edged sword in that the larger, more industrially sophisticated urban areas of the North struggle with heavy unemployment that leads to near unemployability and, in large measure, for lack of low-wage unskilled work. New York City needs low skill work as desperately as a textile town needs skilled work. In general, if natural increase tends to produce a population with a random distribution of talent and ambition, and if industrial filtering tends to sector high and low skill 27 May 1971