Tom Saler: The gap between rural and urban America is growing wider

Two Americas, separate and unequal.

Over the years, those troubling words have spoken to any number of chasms dividing major segments of the U.S. population.

Many such fissures continue to exist. Yet even in a nation seemingly as conflicted as ever, there may be no larger gap than that separating rural America from its urban counterparts.

Not surprisingly, economic factors underpin a fair amount of the breach.

Since 2007, the median income of rural America has averaged 25 percent below that of U.S. metropolitan areas. In the South, about a quarter of rural populations live below the poverty line.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioid addiction is highest in counties hardest hit by the global financial crisis, the economic calamity now a decade in the rear-view mirror.

“The Great Recession hit harder and lasted longer in rural communities, and many predominately rural states still have yet to recover from the depths of the recession,” wrote Martin Heinrich in a May 2017 minority staff report to the congressional Joint Economic Committee. Total employment in rural communities still has not returned to its pre-recession level, while the education gap with urban areas has widened.

In 2000, 27 percent of metro-area residents held a bachelor degree or higher, compared with 16 percent for those living in rural communities; by 2016, that 11-percentage point gap had grown to 15 percentage points. Almost 80 percent of those living outside of metropolitan areas hold only a high school diploma, or less.

In a knowledge-driven economy, that’s a major hurdle to overcome.

The 2010 Census marked the first time that rural communities — home to about 15 percent of the U.S. population — suffered a net outflow of people. In the 1970s, rural populations were growing by about 1.5 percent per year, or nearly twice the rate of metropolitan areas. Recently, however, non-metro counties have seen their populations shrink; from 2010 to 2016, 1,300 rural counties suffered a net loss of 790,000 people.

Robert Wuthnow interviewed hundreds of rural Americans for his book “The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America.” One person told Wuthnow that “kids who have anything going for them with a four-year degree, they’re gone.”

City limits

Rural communities face obstacles not generally encountered in cities, such as dependence on a single employer and a lack of physical and digital infrastructure. More than one-third of rural counties still lack access to broadband compared with 4 percent for urban areas.

Still, some of the economic problems may be of rural America’s own making. According to New York Times columnist David Brooks, U.S. counties that embraced ethnic diversity over the two years through 2016 generated about three-quarters of the nation’s economic output, despite being outnumbered five-fold by counties considered less open to immigration.

Though the unemployment rate in rural areas has returned to pre-recession levels, that’s only because the labor participation rate has shrunk, which is how economic drag and the opioid crisis feed off each other.

“Nearly half of prime age (non-labor force) men take pain medication on a daily basis, and in nearly two-thirds of these cases they take prescription pain medication,” according to a 2017 research paper by Alan Grueger of Princeton University. “Labor force participation has fallen more in areas where relatively more opioid pain medication is prescribed, causing the problem of depressed labor force participation and the opioid crisis to become intertwined.”

The rural-urban economic gap figures to expand further if China follows through on threats to impose retaliatory tariffs on 128 American products, many of them from the agricultural sector. “It is only polite to reciprocate,” taunted the Chinese.

According to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, of the roughly 2,700 counties that could suffer job losses, 82 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2016. An earlier unrelated study by professors Pablo Fajgelbaum and Amit Khandelwal concluded that trade-related price increases hit the poorest 10 percent of consumers twice as hard as the wealthiest 10 percent.

As the world’s second-largest economy, China is not some powerless sub-contractor just hoping to get paid on a real estate job. The Chinese government has leverage and is prepared to use it. Residents of America’s small towns and rural communities should have seen this coming.

Tom Saler is an author and freelance journalist in Madison. He can be reached at tomsaler.com.