Coal and the Left Behind Regions

The NYT had an article that focused on Buchanan County, Virginia as an example of a left behind area in the United States. The county's economy had centered on coal.

While the discussion implies that its downturn is a recent story, the data presented in the piece shows that most of the decline occurred more than two decades ago. The county had more than 5,000 coal mining jobs in the early 1980s. This had fallen to just over 1,000 by the late 1990s. While there was some uptick in coal jobs...