![]() ![]() Their regional flight to safety mirrors the much longer trips taken by immigrants who found in America a refuge from the potato famine and the Cossacks’ charge.įor 350 years, American migration and immigration were abetted by ample living space. John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath tells how the Joad family flees Oklahoma and the Dust Bowl and eventually finds hope on the West Coast. Nineteenth-century farmers became far more productive by abandoning New England’s poor soil and moving to Iowa and Illinois. Migration has been an economic engine for America, as well as a safety net. The gap between white and African-American earnings narrowed substantially, partially because of the Great Migration northward. The long-impoverished South got richer, as industry moved in and many of the poorest moved out. The free movement of workers and capital narrowed America’s economic differences. Between 19, more than 6 percent of Americans moved across counties every year. Industrial capital and Rust Belt capital moved to the warmer, more pro-business Sun Belt. Urbanites left behind their crowded apartments and embraced car-based living in the suburbs and exurbs. African-Americans fled the Jim Crow South to northern cities of opportunity. Today, Mississippi remains America’s poorest state, but no other state doubles its per-capita income.Īmerica was then a country of migrants. ![]() In 1950, Mississippi was America’s poorest state, and 18 other states enjoyed incomes more than twice as high. In the decades after World War II, the income differences across American regions shrank. Finally, the eastern heartland should become more business- and entrepreneur-friendly by reducing regulation. Education reform is at least as important, and community colleges must do more to train employable students. The need to make work pay more is particularly acute in the eastern heartland, so we could subsidize work more in that region. The best way to reduce joblessness is to make work pay more, for employees and employers, by reducing the implicit tax on employment generated by social-welfare policies like disability insurance and SNAP payments (food stamps), which discourage work because benefits get cut when an individual exceeds a certain threshold of earned income and by expanding policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which subsidizes working. The dire social problems of the eastern heartland, particularly long-term joblessness, call for a serious policy response. Out-migration takes the form of an exodus of the skilled, which leaves struggling regions further lacking the human capital that could spark economic regeneration. In a postindustrial America, capital has little incentive to relocate to low-wage areas. Industry has fled the eastern heartland for decades manufacturing has happily relocated to the better-educated, more pro-business western heartland. The eastern heartland is ground zero for rising male mortality, the opioid crisis, and social-welfare dependence. This framework produces a more accurate view: that there is a band of economic dysfunction in America’s eastern heartland, starting in the Mississippi Delta, running through Appalachia, and ending in the Rust Belt. The split between east and west is based on whether the state joined the union before 1840. In my analysis, I divide America’s 48 contiguous states into the coasts, the eastern heartland, and the western heartland. Our pacesetting coastal cities are extremely successful, but much of what I will call America’s western heartland enjoys growing employment, with low joblessness, including Minnesota, Texas, and the Dakotas. Migration rates have fallen dramatically, and joblessness has become a fixture of many local economies.įrom the perspective of New York or Silicon Valley, it’s tempting to divide the country between the prosperous coasts and the faltering flyover states, but that simple dichotomy is misleading. ![]() Poorer areas are no longer catching up with richer ones. America has always contained striking economic disparities, particularly along geographic lines, but those that exist today are different, and more disturbing, because they seem more permanent. ![]()
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