Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse

by Timothy P. Carney

Montgomery County, Maryland, which is the third-most-educated county in the nation, measured by advanced degrees—31.6 percent of adults over twenty-five have a graduate or professional degree.5 (Nationally the rate is less than 12 percent.)

The rest of the top four—Arlington and Alexandria in Virginia, and the District of Columbia (functionally a county for our purposes)—are among Trump’s thirty-five worst counties in America.

While Trump won every county in Pennsylvania’s primary, Kasich’s strongest showing wasn’t his birthplace in Western Pennsylvania but the wealthy and highly educated “collar counties” around Philadelphia: Montgomery, Delaware, and Chester.

Robots are a harder “problem” to address than foreign competition. If you brought the factories home, they wouldn’t be filled with Tracy Pritchards and Andrew Dudas and Jeff Masons.

They would be filled with robots.

They find that working-class wages fell dramatically after 1972, to about two-thirds of their former high in the 1990s.

More women working during the war, the economists found, translated into more women working after the war, as well.

Fayette County was a tie in the 2008 election, with both Obama and John McCain getting 49 percent.32 In contrast, Trump would win it by 30 points

you were studying Pennsylvania and Ohio in the 2016 election, you could have predicted a county’s swing to Trump by looking at its rate of overdose deaths.

Factories that compete with China aren’t scattered equally about the United States like molecules of gas that expand to equally fill a chamber. They are concentrated in various regions. The

“For typical American male workers,” economists Jeff Madrick and Nikolaos Papanikolaou wrote in 2008, “there has been no general rise in wages since the late 1960s, with only short periods of modest improvement.

“This increase for whites was largely accounted for by increasing death rates from drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis.”