Still bearded

“It is now well-documented that some of Brooklyn’s much-written-about creative class is being driven out of the borough by high prices and low housing stock,” wrote the New York Times in July. Earlier in the year mysterious adverts sprang up in the city urging Brooklyn’s nouveaux-pauvres to move to Detroit. The next iteration of this—reports that the Motor City is being ruined by a phenomenon called Brooklynisation—is already under way. The numbers say it isn’t so. Musicians, filmmakers and other wistful folk who subsist on craft ale and eschew gears on their bicycles are in fact multiplying in Brooklyn. What about the labour market? Here too the picture is not what might be expected. The number of jobs in banking is where it was a decade ago. The number working as securities traders has fallen while the number in the performing arts has increased (a direct switch, perhaps?). The Brooklyn exodus is a myth.