Economy
America's Polarization Threatens to Undo Us
More and more, the geography of the U.S. is one of winners versus losers—but the populist backlash puts our future at risk.
On top of America’s long-running political divide between red and blue states, and its widening economic divide between the rich and the poor, there is a troubling gap between its geographic winners and losers. The United States is growing spatially more unequal, in ways that are ripping the country apart and threaten to undermine prosperity for all of us.
New data released earlier this week by Mark Muro and Jacob Whiton of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program get to the heart of the matter. Bigger cities are prospering more than smaller cities, and much, much more than rural areas. And the trends are accelerating.