What this means is that people like Dan Dark and Ashley Gabbert are having increasingly different experiences of America. “What has been striking over the past two decades is how different the winners are becoming from the losers,” said Moretti, who has studied this phenomenon, which he calls the Great Divergence. “The wage gap, the human capital gap, the gap in type of employers, have been growing at a fast pace.”

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A few decades ago, Ashley Gabbert’s hometown of Connersville was a manufacturing powerhouse. Known as “Little Detroit” for the volume of cars and automotive parts it produced, it was a key link in the Midwest’s automotive supply chain, and was at one time the world’s top producer of dishwashers. At its peak in 1980, Fayette County, of which Connersville is the county seat, had around 28,000 people and 12,000 manufacturing jobs.

Connersville today is a small hamlet of single-family homes interspersed with boarded-up buildings, fast-food restaurants, and low-cost chains like Family Dollar. Fayette County’s population is now 18 percent smaller than it was in 1980. Its unemployment rate is 6.1 percent, one of the highest rates in the state of Indiana. Its residents report higher numbers of poor mental health days than residents in other parts of the state, and they have among the shortest life expectancies. Like many of Indiana’s more rural regions, Fayette County is facing a growing opioid epidemic. “What’s happened to Connersville is that the jobs came out and heroin came in,” Ron Corbin, a longtime resident, told me.

This decline began in the 1980s, Dan Parker, the executive director of the Economic Development Group of Connersville and Fayette County, told me, as big manufacturers started to downsize or move overseas. The last big employer, the auto parts supplier Visteon, laid off its remaining 890 employees in 2007. That closure and the ones before it had a ripple effect on other businesses like gas stations and dry cleaners, as people in the community were thrust out of work. “A lot of the mom-and-pop shops just evaporated when those corporations folded,” Parker told me.

As big employers left, it became increasingly difficult for people to do better than their parents did—economists’ go-to measure of economic mobility. Ashley Gabbert’s mother worked at the Visteon plant, making radiators, until she got laid off when the plant closed. But Gabbert has fewer options than her mother did: There are only two manufacturing companies left in Connersville, and because there are so many more workers available relative to the number of jobs, they can pay less than the big companies once did. Gabbert was lucky to find a job in manufacturing at all; Justin Williams, 24, is working at a bar where he depends on tips. He’s also had stints at a call center in town, which paid $9 an hour, and at a restaurant that closed down because of lack of business. His mother worked for the Visteon plant, where she made $25 an hour. “The money is different nowadays,” he said.

There are, of course, many people in Connersville who are doing just fine, and who wouldn’t leave for a more dynamic area even if given the chance. I talked to a man named Clay Smith, 30, who has been a lineman for an electric company for nine years. He loves his job, gets paid well, owns his own home, and spends his weekends outdoors. He didn’t go to college, and is doing just fine.