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Originally Posted by well named
I have also previously ruminated upon residential segregation as one of the most important social issues in the US, so I agree with that.
Relevant here, since it was just posted:
The real driver of regional inequality in America
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America in the Gilded Age was a starkly unequal place, not just in terms of inequality between people but inequality between regions. Long-settled, fast-industrializing states in the Northeast were far richer than those of the West or the South, which had many fewer factories, railroads, and other kinds of capital goods that allowed for productive work and high wages. But around 1880 that began to change, and for 100 years, income gaps between states slowly converged at a rate of about 1.8 percent per year.
Three cheers for looking back at the Gilded Age for comparison to our current time.
Anyway:
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But since 1980, that process has began to slow, and over the past decade it’s essentially stopped entirely. Today, Massachusetts’s GDP per capita is about double what you find in Mississippi — roughly equivalent to the gap between Switzerland and Slovakia — and it’s not getting any narrower.
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Ganong and Shoag argue that the slowing population growth in rich cities and the slowing of regional income convergence are intimately linked trends.
Less skilled workers used to move to rich states to increase their wages. That lowered average income in the rich states while raising it in the poor ones, as people’s natural tendency to move toward economic opportunity helped drive nationwide convergence of wages and incomes. But in the contemporary United States, zoning restrictions that prevent adequate levels of house building mean that much of the higher incomes earned in rich states simply pass through in the form of higher housing costs.
For skilled workers, this trade-off is worth it, but for the working class, it generally isn’t. Consequently, working-class people have begun to move out of the rich states and toward the cheap ones — throwing the pattern of convergence into reverse.
A huge, huge problem. Our cultural insanity is partly due to exactly this. I've seen a few very sharp scholars/commentators/etc. make the connection. But the ultimate and best hope for our future, the "man our cultural differences seem to get worse and worse, will it ever end?" is to solve these sorts of zoning problems and migration patterns that simply deepen segregation and ultimately service white oppositional culture.
In the end, cosign on ideas like this:
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The housing fix for regional inequality entails more rather than less concentration of economic activity in rich coastal metro areas. The mechanism is that with a greater supply of housing, the working-class share of the population of these metro areas would grow disproportionately — dragging per capita incomes down while pulling them up in poorer places. Sunbelt and Rust Belt cities would be richer but smaller, while coastal ones would be bigger.
This would leave almost everyone better off, but it’s not exactly the political solution to the problem of regional inequality that elected officials are looking for. To get that job done, politicians may need to look at more direct solutions like moving white-collar government work to cities that have suffered population decline or creating new universities in declining areas.
The "dragging per capita incomes down while pulling them up in poorer places" isn't exactly well articulated but the rest is good.
Last edited by DVaut1; 08-18-2017 at 09:41 AM.