timelets

Since 2005, five metro areas — Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Jose, Seattle, and San Diego — accounted for 90 percent of all US growth in “innovation sector” jobs, which Brookings defines as employment in the top science, technology, engineering, and math industries that include extensive research and development spending. Meanwhile, 343 metro areas lost a share of these jobs in that same period.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/9/21000162/high-tech-job-growth-concentration-brookings
https://www.brookings.edu/research/growth-centers-how-to-spread-tech-innovation-across-america/

In the medical desert that has become rural America, nothing is more basic or more essential than access to doctors, but they are increasingly difficult to find. The federal government now designates nearly 80 percent of rural America as “medically underserved.”
...

What Van Horn offered was a three-year contract with $300,000 guaranteed for the first year, which was about 50 percent more than Cummings could have earned in a big city. He wanted to practice in a small town where he could get to know his patients. His wife liked the nearby mountains. They would be close enough to drive back to Central Texas to visit family. The federal government would forgive much of his student debt as a reward for his working in a medically underserved area. Van Horn had sealed the deal with a $5,000 signing bonus and a $3,000 monthly stipend during the final year of his residency.
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Even during his residency in tiny Winnemucca, population 7,400, he had worked with a medical team of emergency physicians, hospitalists and general surgeons. Once he started in Van Horn, he would eventually become the only doctor on call.

https://www.news-journal.com/news/in-the-medical-desert-of-rural-america-one-doctor-for/article_cff7ecda-e2f2-11e9-a269-330f202342cd.html

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