You obviously haven't been to some of these rural areas... which are poorer than urban areas.
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In September 1967, a commission on rural poverty convened by President Lyndon Johnson released its findings in
The People Left Behind report. They documented a rural poverty rate of 25%, almost double the urban poverty rate.
[1] Half a century after
The People Left Behind’s release, IRP and the Rural Policy Research Institute held a conference to reexamine rural poverty. The research presented at the conference indicated that rural poverty declined sharply in the 1960s, but has remained fairly steady since the mid-1970s.
[2] Currently, rural poverty is 3 percentage points higher than urban poverty.
Fifty years after
The People Left Behind report, work, education, and marriage remain the three main pathways out of poverty for most Americans. Unfortunately, rural residents are falling behind urbanites in these three areas.
[4] Since the 1967 report’s release, income inequality has surged as incomes expanded for those at the top quintile and remained relatively flat for the rest of the population. This is especially true for skilled rural men, whose real earnings have not changed in 50 years.
[5] By way of comparison, between 1979 and 2019, the top 1% of the income distribution saw their income increase by 229%.
[6] In addition to stagnant rural male earnings, the rate of male employment also has fallen. Around the time of
The People Left Behind’s release, there was no rural-urban gap for workers with less than a high school degree. However, by 2016, only half of rural men in this low-skill group worked at any point in the calendar year, compared to 65% of their peers in urban areas.
[7] Further, the gap in college attainment between urban and rural men has increased from about 5 percentage points to about 20 percentage points between 1967 and 2016. Rates of college attainment among rural women have been steadily increasing over the decades, but they have not kept pace with increases in rates of college attendance among urban women.
[8] Marriage rates in the United States overall have dropped over the past five decades, but particularly for rural families headed by parents with low levels of education