“Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back.” That’s from Bruce Springsteen’s song My Hometown. The election brought more light to the plight of the middle class. But can public policy do anything to reverse trends such as automation and globalization? FiveThirtyEight on why current proposals won’t help the white working class — or the urban poor.

+ Can politics impact the coal industry. Maybe, but as MIT Tech Review explains, “regulations aren’t the industry’s real problem — market forces are. Coal’s true rival is cheap natural gas.”

+ LA Times: “The U.S. has moved toward advanced manufacturing, which employs highly educated people, and plants that once required manual labor are now manned by robots that work faster than people and cost less.”