Technology and diverging values widen the gap between small-town USA and cities.
Americans in rural areas and small towns see the world a lot differently from those living in and around cities, according to a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll that the newspaper has been reporting on this week.
A lot of the biggest differences in the poll have to do with values, or at least perceptions thereof: About 4 in 10 rural residents say their values are “very different” from those of people in cities and suburbs, while only 2 in 10 urban residents return the favor. But there are also some pretty clear economic contrasts: Only 30 percent of rural Americans rate job opportunities in their communities as excellent or good, compared with 50 percent in urban areas and 45 percent in suburbs.
I also can’t help but wonder if much of the rural sense of estrangement from the metropolitan areas where the great majority of Americans live has to do with a simple and striking demographic reality: Since 2010, for what appears to be the first time ever, rural America has been losing population.
This is from a fascinating new summing-up of rural population dynamics from U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service geographer John Cromartie. The metro/nonmetro divide makes for a more restrictive definition of rural America than the one used in the Post-Kaiser poll, which also classified residents of metropolitan areas with less than 250,000 people as…