A growing earnings gap between those with a college education and those without is creating economic and cultural rifts throughout the country.
Educated workers in cities produce work that requires innovation and new ideas, work that isn't easily replicated and can't be outsourced. Less educated workers in struggling regions are competing with people and machines around the globe, and their wages are the worse for it.
But the divergence is more than just between workers who benefit from globalization and those that don't. It's also between the places those two groups tend to live. That's because of something that economists refer to as the agglomeration economy. Basically, it means that companies want to locate near other innovative companies so that they can find skilled and specialized workers, which in turn makes those companies even more productive. They want to be places where the job market is full of educated workers who they can hire. They want to be near the specialized services, like venture capitalists or bankers, who can help make their companies even better or provide funding. And they want to benefit from what Enrico Moretti, an economist at Berkeley calls a "knowledge spillover," in which people at certain types of companies learn from innovations created at other companies near them, through professional and social networks.
This concentration of good jobs in a few hubs creates more opportunity for everyone, not just people with college degrees. Innovation workers can command higher salaries than people in other industries such as manufacturing do. With their money they eat out more, go shopping, spend on entertainment, and pay for services like dry cleaning, house cleaning, and childcare. All of this spending creates more jobs. Moretti has analyzed 11 million workers in 320 metropolitan areas, and found that every new high-tech job in a metropolitan area creates five additional local jobs. Every new manufacturing job creates just 1.6 additional local jobs. "A city that has a lot of college grads also tends to have a different economic ecosystem," Moretti told me. Yet such cities are cost prohibitive for many of the lower-skilled people who might want to locate there. Moving to booming cities is both a solution for low-skilled people, and an impossibility.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/americas-great-divergence/514784/
I believe that the "impossibility" of relocating to urban areas is exaggerated. There are many midmarket cities that people living in rural areas could affordably relocate to. Jacksonville comes to mind...
I think that much of what has caused people living in rural areas to stay put is a lack of knowledge. Many people living in rural areas either don't know, or refuse to believe that the grass really is greener closer to cities.