LONGVIEW, Tex. — On the eastern plains of Texas, local leaders are trying to stop the bleeding of talent to the bright lights of Dallas and Austin. They are sprucing up downtown, completing 10 miles of walking trails, investing in parks and schools and making other improvements that they hope will entice young workers to stay and help this part of the state finally claim a share of the Texas Miracle.

Few parts of America have nurtured faster job growth than Texas in the years since the 2008 financial crisis, in what is now the longest sustained economic expansion in American history. But that growth has largely left cities like Longview in the dust. No state — not even California, long held up as the embodiment of America’s widening geographic inequality — has seen a larger post-recession divergence between its elite cities and everywhere else.

Nearly all of the net growth in jobs and new businesses in Texas over the last decade, Labor Department data show, has been concentrated in four large metropolitan areas — Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. Those areas accounted for more than four out of every five jobs created in the state since the recession ended, their populations swelling with surges of young and talented workers. Collectively, the four saw double the rate of job growth as the rest of Texas.