I am genuinely confused here: Do we have an "eastern hear...

I am genuinely confused here: Do we have an "eastern heartland" problem? Or do we have a "prime age male joblessness" problem? Those two problems would seem to me to call for different kinds of responses. yet Summers, Glaeser, and Austin are smooshing them into one: Edward L. Glaeser, Lawrence H. Summers and Ben Austin: A Rescue Plan for a Jobs Crisis in the Heartland: "In Flint, Mich., over 35 percent of prime-aged men���between 25 and 54���are not employed...

...In Charleston, W.Va., the joblessness rate for this group is 25 percent. These places represent some of the more extreme examples of what may be America���s largest and least understood social problem: the rise of prime-aged male joblessness, which has reached over 15 percent for most of the past decade from under 6 percent for all of the late 1960s....

The Eastern Heartland['s]... relative G.D.P. would have been more than 50 percent higher had it grown at the rate of America���s Coastal states....

The earned-income tax credit has been effectively promoting employment for over 40 years, but its design makes it poorly suited to fighting the ocean of male joblessness..."

And I am confused about the geography. Pennsylvania is not a coastal state. And I would assign Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa to the "eastern heartland"���i.e., the midwest plus the non-seaboard south���rather than to the "western heartland". And the "western heartland" seems to me to be Texas-Arizona-Colorado (40 million total, and Colorado is very different from the other two) plus a whole bunch of other places that are very different and add up to only half as many people.