The future of work: the American Midwest and the Mexican border are the twin faces of economic globalization--and the upheavals they have endured are the new normal.

• Author: McBride, James

Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities

by Chad Brougton

Oxford University Press, 399 pp.

As a tumultuous 2014 drew to a close, Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen had encouraging news for the American economy: all the signs pointed to a recovery in full swing, six years after the worst of the 2008 crisis. November had just seen the creation of 320,000 new jobs. Job creation in 2014 averaged 220,000 a month. Unemployment had fallen to 5.8 percent even as more people entered the labor force, business confidence was up, and the Fed was backing off its extraordinary monetary easing. Things were finally returning to normal.

The only problem? Underneath these top-line indicators, "normal" looks very different today than it did a generation--or even just a decade--ago. Inequality has gone mainstream, with the top 0.1 percent (about 160,000 families) now owning 22 percent of the nation's wealth (versus 7 percent in the 1970s). More fundamentally, a major pillar of post-World War II American prosperity--well-paid, well-pensioned jobs manufacturing consumer goods for the domestic market--has totally crumbled. While manufacturing employment has been in decline since the late 1970s, the 2000s alone saw a loss of nearly six million jobs, while the aughts became the first decade in sixty years to see zero net job creation.

The remaining factory jobs are largely lower skill, lower paying, and benefits free, while the recovery's new jobs are centered in the often-precarious service sector. The 2008 housing collapse plunged the middle class's wealth to its lowest level since 1940, and the economic upswing has been driven not by rising wages but by the highest levels of consumer debt in history.

All this adds up to deeper economic, and cultural, shifts in the American landscape than can be captured by mere statistics. Rising to the task of chronicling this epochal transformation is the University of Chicago public policy lecturer Chad Broughton, with his new book, Boom, Bust, Exodus: The Rust Belt, the Maquilas, and a Tale of Two Cities.

Through rigorous reporting and extensive interviews with workers, Boom, Bust, Exodus tells the stories of two distant but closely intertwined communities: the Rust Belt town of Galesburg, Illinois, and the fast-growing border city of Reynosa, Mexico. For over a century, Galesburg hosted a steadily expanding complex of factories known as "Appliance City," which employed thousands of workers...