Rural Americans: The Media Narrative vs. the Facts

I interviewed USC professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett about her book The Overlooked Americans. Click here to read parts of our conversation in article form, or here to watch the whole thing on YouTube. She provides an antidote to the mainstream media’s narrative about rural Americans — that they are poor, angry, and resentful — by using data and interviews to put together a more accurate summary of the evidence.

Here are some of the facts that she reported in the book that might be surprising if all you’ve heard is the media narrative about rural Americans.

• In an analysis of data from 45 states:
  • 28 have lower shares of households with family income under $10,000 per year in small towns than in urban centers.
  • 15 have higher median household incomes in small towns than in cities.
  • 40 have lower unemployment rates in small towns than in cities.
• In 2019, the overall share of households making under $10,000 per year was about the same in urban areas as in rural areas.
• The proportion of rural Pennsylvania residents making under $10,000 per year is 6 percent. The proportion for Philadelphia is 13 percent and for Pittsburgh is 7 percent.
• A higher proportion of small-town Pennsylvanians have incomes between $100,000 and $150,000 than do Philadelphia residents. In Pittsburgh, 17.7 percent of residents make over $100,000. Across the border in West Virginia, 18.5 percent of small-town residents make over $100,000.
• In 2019 at the national level, urban median income was $10,642 per year higher than rural median income. The lower cost of living in rural areas mostly erases that difference, and many rural Americans’ incomes go further than urban Americans’.
• Income inequality is generally lower in rural areas than in urban areas.
• The South explains much of the overall variability between the urban and rural populations nationally. The difference between urban and rural poverty for the rest of the country is less than half a percent. The South also has the highest levels of rural inequality.
• The median homeownership rate for communities in the Mid-Atlantic with fewer than 5,000 residents is 73 percent. That compares to 32 percent in New York City and 52 percent in Philadelphia. The small communities had an average unemployment rate of 6 percent between 2012 and 2016, compared with New York City’s 9 percent and Philadelphia’s 13 percent.
• Midwestern communities with fewer than 5,000 residents had a median unemployment rate of 5 percent, and 42 percent of these communities had higher median household incomes than St. Louis, Chicago, or Milwaukee.
• The Interior Northwest (Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming) was the region of the U.S. most supportive of Trump. It had the lowest unemployment rate (4 percent in urban areas and 3.7 percent in rural areas) of any region. The homeownership rate is in excess of 75 percent in most counties. Only New England has a more educated rural population. The Interior Northwest’s rural median income is only $8,700 less than the national urban median income, and the lower cost of living in the rural Interior Northwest means the quality of life is likely slightly better.
• Between 2010 and 2020, the manufacturing sector grew by 20.2 percent in the Southwest and 8.6 percent in the South. The South added 300,000 manufacturing jobs in that period. The only region that saw manufacturing decline over that period was the Northeast.
• Employment in the professional, scientific, and technical services sector between 1990 and 2020 grew by 87.1 percent in urban areas and by 82.5 percent in rural areas.
• Employment in the finance sector between 1990 and 2020 grew by 25.7 percent in rural areas and by 15.9 percent in urban areas.
• The South has more finance-sector jobs than any other region. In 2020, it had 750,000 more finance and insurance jobs than the Northeast. Since 1990, finance employment in the South has grown by 34 percent and technical and professional services employment has grown by 92 percent.
• The Midwest’s agricultural sector grew by 135.1 percent between 1990 and 2020.
• On the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey in 2018:
  • 55.9 percent of urban Americans and 53.7 percent of rural Americans describe themselves as “pretty happy.”
  • The percentage of urban and rural Americans who describe themselves as “more or less satisfied” with their personal finances is exactly the same, at 45.2 percent for each.
  • 50.0 percent of rural Americans say they are “very satisfied” with their job or housework, compared to 44.5 percent of urban Americans.
  • 64.9 percent of rural Americans say they are “very happy” with their marriage, compared to 61.2 percent of urban Americans.

None of this is to say everything is great in rural America, or that there are no problems. It is to say that portraying rural America as being in overall decline is incomplete at best and false at worst. As I have written previously, the “national conversation” about rural America is just as bad as the “national conversations” on many other topics. Blaming a caricature of poor and resentful rural people for lashing out and causing political problems isn’t very productive.