Urban vs Rural - 7

The policies that drove the region’s catch-up—relatively low taxes and low wages that attracted factories and blue-collar jobs—have proven inadequate in an expanding economy where the forces of globalization favor cities with concentrations of capital and educated workers.

...the South, which is more rural than the rest of the country and has fewer big cities. In part because of its legacy of racial segregation the region has, relative to others, underinvested in human capital. Thus the South, the only region to have enjoyed such a dramatic rise in the postwar period, is the only one to experience such a retreat in the past decade.



In the 1940s, per capita income in the states historians and economists generally refer to as the South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky—equaled 66.3% of the national average, according to historical data reconstructed by University of Kent economist Alex Klein and The Wall Street Journal. By 2009, that had climbed to 88.9%. That was the high-water mark. By 2017 it fell back to 85.9%.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-souths-economy-is-falling-behind-all-of-a-sudden-the-money-stops-flowing-11560101610

Kantian meditation

... it must be perfectly 
         indifferent to you 
                   whether you say, 
when you 
       have discovered 
                   this unity: 
God has wisely 
            willed 
                   it so; 
         or:
Nature has wisely 
                arranged. 

For it was nothing but
                the systematic unity, 
which reason 
           requires 
                 as a basis for the investigation
of nature, 
that justified you
                in accepting 
                           the idea of
a supreme intelligence
                       as a schema for
                              a regulative principle;
and, the farther you 
            advance in the discovery 
of design 
        and finality, the more certain 
                                  the validity 
of your
           idea.
...
These principles, 
             by placing the goal of all
our struggles 
             at so great 
                        a distance, 
realize for us 
              the most thorough 
                         connection between 
the different parts of 
                     our cognition, 
                               and the highest 
degree of systematic unity. 
                            But, 
on the other hand,
              if misunderstood 
                        and employed as 
constitutive principles
                of transcendent cognition, 
                                  they become 
the parents of illusions 
                    and contradictions, 
                            while pretending to 
introduce us to 
             new regions of 
                          knowledge.

--- Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason.