Train's engine can only travel as fast as its caboose

The left-behind counties in America: a way ahead?

Old concept of mine: a nation cannot leap ahead and globalize any faster than the interior (more traditional, religious, conservative, in America most White) portions. Do so and you’ll get a reaction. Original lesson for me was the Iranian Revolution of 1979. More recently it was the Tea Party movement (2010) and MAGA (2016).

Saw this fascinating study from Economic Innovation Group entitled “Economic Renaissance or Fleeting Recovery? Left-Behind Counties See Boom in Jobs and Businesses Amid Widening Divides.”

A deep dive became warranted, in my personal sense, when I came across the map of left-behind counties and was reminded that I grew up in one: City of Boscobel, Grant County, WI, then with a population of about 2,200 (3,200 today). Located on no major highway, Boscobel and its surroundings villages (we were the bigger town around) were typically bypassed by economic developments.

Classic story: Land’s End, started in Chicago the year after I was born (1963), came close to locating its manufacturing center in my hometown. We were passed over for Dodgeville WI because … no surprise … there was anticipation of a major highway being laid down between Dubuque IA and Madison WI and it was set to pass through Dodgeville.

So, Dodgeville got all those jobs, all that development, and all that connectivity, and Boscobel remained a backwater most suited for visiting hunters from Chicago.

Boscobel eventually sought and achieved its survival in accepting a maximum security prison (Wisconsin Secure Program Facility). Not exactly the way you want to go, but it kept the local hospital open.

I know that ER entrance so well.

This is why I still love going back to Boscobel:

Anyway, on to the report:

The intro:

Left-behind counties in the United States have just experienced their strongest three-year period of job creation and business growth since the turn of the 21st century. Despite their vigorous recovery in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic gap between these counties and the rest of the country nonetheless continues to widen. 

Representing just under 1,000 counties and inhabited by 18 percent of the country’s population, these left-behind communities are defined by lagging population and income growth from 2000 to 2016.  

This analysis examines the economic experiences of left-behind communities in the run-up to the 2020 and 2024 presidential election cycles and illuminates the ways each has been markedly different.

Between 2016 and 2019, annual job growth in these counties averaged only 0.4 percent, less than one-third the national rate. By the start of 2020, fewer than one-third had recovered all the jobs they lost during the Great Recession, which ended more than a decade earlier.

However, between 2020 and 2023, jobs in left-behind counties grew more than four times faster than in the four previous years—and nearly half of these counties have already regained all the jobs they shed during the COVID downturn. 

Despite their recent economic resilience, left-behind communities are still making up lost ground from decades of stagnation. Fewer workers are now employed in these counties than almost a quarter-century ago. Meanwhile, the rest of the country continues racing ahead of them.

With many left-behind counties situated in swing states that could determine the next election’s outcome, the reverberating impacts of their economic struggles could have an outsized effect on the nation’s political trajectory as a whole.    

Bingo! Am I right?