The American economy is enormous, and enormously complicated. It comprises scores of industries harboring hundreds of occupations, spread across more than 350 metro economies, large and small. A variety of measures can be used to divine the health and prospects of these different places—population growth, job growth, housing prices, and the unemployment rate are among the more common. Each of these measures has its uses, but some of them can conceal as much as they reveal. Population growth, for instance, tells you nothing about the skills and education of the people arriving; job growth says nothing about whether the new jobs are good or bad.

Throughout this article, I will draw on some of these measures. But I’ll lean most heavily on three measures less commonly seen in the popular press, but perhaps more telling: the composition of job growth (high-wage, mid-wage, or low-wage); productivity growth (which is the basis for improvements in the standard of living); and venture-capital funding (a proxy for the sort of entrepreneurial innovation that can power future growth).

Taken together, the patterns revealed by these measures provide a fine-grained picture of America’s post-crisis geography. The economic landscape is being reshaped around two kinds of hubs—centers of knowledge and ideas, and clusters of energy production. Overwhelmingly, these are the places driving the economic recovery. Outside them, the economy remains troubled and weak.

New York City was widely expected to be devastated by the financial crisis. Wall Street’s collapse, the conventional wisdom went, would bring the whole city down with it. In 2009, I predicted that New York would in fact prove to be one of the country’s most resilient places. Even so, the speed and strength of its rebound has surprised me—its explosive growth as a start-up center especially so.

New York’s financial sector did shrink somewhat—before the 2008 crash, finance and insurance accounted for 44 percent of Manhattan’s payroll; in 2009, 37 percent—but the city has retained its perch as a preeminent global finance center, and the reduction of the finance industry’s footprint has provided the spur and the space for other industries to grow.

New York has incredibly high concentrations of management, media, design, and creative occupations. Since the crash, it has gained ground in its competition with Los Angeles as a center for media and entertainment (the imminent return of The Tonight Show, which decamped for Burbank, California, in 1972, is one result). Brooklyn—the setting for the HBO megahit Girls—has emerged as a major trendsetter for everything from film and television to indie rock and artisanal food.

The crash was supposed to send real-estate values plummeting throughout the city, and prices did dip. But today Manhattan and nearby sections of Brooklyn not only are booming, they have surpassed pre-crisis peaks. And as anyone who has noticed how many windows are dark in Manhattan’s luxury high-rises might have guessed, New York is not just a playground for the global elite, but a locus for their investments—including high-end properties where they reside for a small part of the year.