As part of a project for Capital Matters, called Capital Writing, I’ll be interviewing authors of economics books for the National Review Institute’s YouTube channel. This time, I talked to USC professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett about her book, The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means for our Country. Below you will find an edited transcript of a few key parts of our conversation as well as the full video of our interview.

Dominic Pino: So you called the book Overlooked Americans. Exactly which Americans is it that you think are overlooked?

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett: Well, the subtitle is about rural America, but I think you can really pan out to a lot of Americans. And what I mean by this is, I think in our media conversation, we talk about this divisive country and these really active angry voters, predominantly on the right, but also on the left. And my argument is if you actually talk to everyday Americans, particularly in places we don’t spend a lot of time like rural America, you find people who have very, very different views and they really challenge the stereotype.

DP: In this book, one of the things that you do that’s sort of unique and different from other kinds of books about this topic is you actually go and talk to people, and you do interview research with people in rural America. What was it that made you go above and beyond the survey and data kind of research that you also do in the book, but to complement that with interviews?

ECH: I’ve always been a mixed-method researcher for all of my books. And the reason is because data gives you facts, but people give you the truth. And so I think it’s really important. Even survey data can be so misleading because people are asked to say yes or no or agree or disagree. And then they’re forced to make a less nuanced contribution to the work and to our understanding. And so for me, when I sat down and spent many hours talking to people, one of the things that was clear was that the people I spoke to just had a — it was just really different from what we were reading and hypothesizing and this survey says this and that survey says this. Talking to lots of people, you get this very nuanced view of America.

DP: To give listeners some perspective of what we’re talking about, there’s kind of a bipartisan narrative now that says that the middle of the country is hollowed out. People pick different enemies that they say did it. People on the left will often point to free markets or they will point to things about income inequality and things like this. People on the right will point to foreign trade or the out-of-touch elites, whoever they may be at any moment. You hear this with Donald Trump talking about American carnage. You hear it with Joe Biden talking about the need to rebuild the middle of the country with industrial policy or redistribution programs or whatever. And anytime there’s a really strong bipartisan agreement about a narrative like this, it’s usually a good sign that it needs a little bit more digging into. And I think that’s kind of what you’re doing with this book. And I really wish that everybody in Washington, D.C., would read it, on both sides.

Let’s start with the data questions. We’ll come back to the interview stuff later, but what are some of those data points that you think are really good at illustrating what’s wrong with that narrative and things that might surprise people if they’re used to hearing that sort of thing?

ECH: I used a bunch of different data sets. On the economic front, one of the stories in this country is that rural America voted for Donald Trump because they were just so angry at the liberal elites. And they were angry because they didn’t have jobs and they didn’t have money and they felt left behind. So I tried to understand kind of proxies for that. Were they all poor? Were they all unemployed? Did they lack owning a home? And the answer is not at all.

Now, I don’t wanna say that there’s not truth that parts of rural America are suffering. There are parts of rural America are suffering. I’m a regional and urban planner by trade, and I study and teach economic development. So for me, the problem is these are just too general. Even the kind of divide of urban and rural doesn’t make any sense. I mean, Akron, Ohio, and Manhattan: They’re like totally different universes in the same way that coastal New England and the heart of Appalachia are totally different. And so this idea of an impoverished rural country — it was actually unfair to the places that are impoverished because that’s where we will not then target policy and economic development that we should. But it also then stokes this fire, this kind of idea of urban and rural being at odds with one another.

So what I found when I looked generally and then I cut it up by region was that on the whole, rural America has low unemployment, lower in many places than in urban America. They across the board tend to have greater home ownership. Median income is a little less, but we’re dealing with like $9,000–$10,000, which, say if you live in like, Cambridge, Massachusetts versus living in like, coastal New England, or you’re living in Philadelphia versus rural Pennsylvania, that $10,000 doesn’t really get you very far in a major city. And so by that measure, income was also fairly on par.

So this economic data was telling the story that rural America wasn’t on the whole a place where people were really actually being left behind. Their quality of life was actually largely pretty good. And again, I do caveat this. I mean, I’m not inured to the fact that parts of the South are in huge trouble. I think that is absolutely the case, but it’s just, it’s too much of a blanket statement.

If we then look at data on how rural Americans think about the world — issues of democracy, issues of equality and social policy, issues of religion and spirituality — you also find that urban and rural America are kind of in lockstep on many of these issues. So it just created this situation for me, which was that we’re just talking about rural America in the wrong way. I don’t want to say it’s misinformation, but we are literally deciding to go with one narrative which isn’t entirely backed up by facts.

DP: Finance is often made a boogeyman specifically. You talk in the book about how if you actually look at — I mean, this is not complicated research. This is just looking at Bureau of Labor Statistics sector-level employment data. You see like, wait a minute, there’s lots of finance jobs in the South. There’s lots of finance jobs in the Midwest and in the Mountain West. And for some reason, this gets portrayed as a thing that only happens in New York.

ECH: This was the thing that I was so surprised by. This wasn’t like I was searching for the Holy Grail. This was literally like I went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and I studied data by zip code, by county. I organized it by region. I had my doctoral students look at it. This was pretty straightforward economic analysis. I was shocked that people hadn’t seen this before.

DP: I grew up in Wisconsin, and then I went to school near Washington, D.C. In doing that, obviously, you meet a lot of different people that you wouldn’t have met otherwise. You’re also meeting people who went to college, so these are already people who are are doing pretty well. But the idea of “doing pretty well” means something different in a place like Wisconsin than it does in a place like Washington, D.C. And it’s not a question of income. A lot of times you can have people with similar levels of income and similar quality of life in both those places, but they still have a very different idea of what it means to do well, and especially what it means for their kids to do well. Can you talk a little bit more about what your research found about that question?

ECH: This was actually really eye-opening for me as well. One of the areas where there really is a difference in rural and urban in general is education levels. So in general, urban America is much more educated than rural America. Now, if you subscribe to the meritocracy — and I have been a card-carrying member for a long time now, I’m raising my kids to be card-carrying members and so forth — you believe that this is the path.

But when you talk to folks in rural America — the way I put it is, they don’t have this expectation that it’s college. It’s like, “You can do what you want with your life,” rather than, “You can go where you want to go.” So when I talked to urban parents, it was like, “They can choose where they want to go,” but implicit in this conversation is, “They’re going to college.” Whereas in rural America, it was, “That is one option of a few.”

This is tough for me because I’ve always been a big subscriber to education and its importance to social mobility. And in my last book, I talk a lot about this, the role of education and cultural capital and the kind of cultural capital that’s wrapped up in being educated and a part of the meritocratic class. However, that’s if that’s what you want with your life. A lot of folks in rural America, they enjoyed that their family was nearby, that their grandkids were close, that life wasn’t so stressful. And actually, I think the constant aspiring — and I use that word because I talked about the “aspirational class” in my last book — that aspiring is exhausting. So even if it feels like the ticket to the better life and the ticket to the better life for your kids, it made me pause and say, “Yeah, for some.” But you can have a very good job — you can be a nurse or a teacher or a plumber or a carpenter or run your own shop, any number of jobs in small-town America — and get off that treadmill and maybe be all the happier for it or certainly be as happy.

DP: I went to high school in a suburb of Milwaukee, well-off suburb, went to a public school, but a good public school. And we had a lot of smart kids. I don’t believe we had anybody in our graduating class go to an Ivy League. And you could probably count on one hand, the number of kids who applied to an Ivy League. It’s not because they weren’t smart or they couldn’t have, but it just wasn’t something that was expected and in many cases, actually, I think it wasn’t even something that was desired. I don’t even think some people wanted to go to an Ivy League because that was seen as kind of pretentious and a little bit off-putting. Whereas in a similar socioeconomic-status school district in Pennsylvania or in New York or in Massachusetts, a lot of those kids would have wanted to be getting into an Ivy League, and they would have applied and they would have put in effort on all those things. And so it was sort of eye-opening to me reading in the book. It’s not a question of income or means for a lot of this. If people wanted to do that, they could afford to take the SAT ten times. They could afford to do all the prep classes and all the extra curriculars and all the stuff you need to do, but they just aren’t that interested, and actually a lot of people are perfectly fine going to the University of Wisconsin. They don’t see anything wrong with that.

ECH: And there is nothing wrong with it, by the way. I want to make that really clear.

You really bring up something that’s important, and I’m going to add another layer to it. There is this idea of not just going to university, but going to an elite university, inevitably going to graduate school. And yet what we’ve seen surface in the last, I don’t know, let’s say five years, is that people aren’t always happy doing that. It is a rat race. After all of those credentials, are you even paying your bills? And we also have this mental-health crisis with our teens, of which some of it is certainly attributed to social media, that’s been widely documented, but there is this pressure-cooker thing going on. And I just think, look, rural America has its own problems, but the cultural capital of coastal elites or the meritocrats really is problematic because it does have these other effects. And I think it’s the rigidity of that treadmill that’s the problem.

There are some kids who are perfectly capable and want that level of pressure, and they succeed in that. But I think we have to stop and realize that what we basically created is a situation where if you’re an upper middle-class kid, this is your path. Don’t ask any questions, just get on that treadmill, and apply to Columbia. And I think we have to stop and say, “I don’t know.” I mean, do you want your kid to go to an Ivy League, or do you want your kid to be happy? Sometimes those work in tandem, and sometimes they do not. And I think that was what was interesting about rural America, was there was much more of a flexibility and open-mindedness as to what might happen in the future.

DP: And it’s about valuing flexibility too, right? Because the ability to do what you want as an adult seem to be more important in the Midwest, the ability to have the choice to do what you want, no matter what that is, as long as it’s something that you can support your family on. As opposed to on the East Coast or something, the idea being that success means this very set predefined thing.

ECH: Totally, there was a real sense of independence, self-reliance, and kind of being left alone. That was something that I found really interesting. Being free to make those decisions yourself.

The thing that I think is a problem — because it’s not all rosy, obviously — is that there are going to be kids in rural America who would make enormous sense to be a part of the meritocracy. They are bright in that kind of way. They are, they write in a way that should land them at a place like National Review or the New York Times. They could be gifted surgeons or Supreme Court justices. And what you realize is that the path to get from A to B, it’s not rigid, but it’s pretty predefined. And it’s also something that you need to be aware of. More than anything was, I would say, there might’ve been a lack of awareness of those kinds of options. So that I think is something worth considering, but I don’t think it’s like a dire situation. The people I spoke to were very happy, thank-you-very-much, you know?

DP: How many people expressed kind of a backwards-looking view on economics and employment of, sort of, yearning for a return to a previous version of employment. So we hear of this narrative about deindustrialization and how this has been a big problem for the Midwest or for rural areas. How many of the people that you talked to kind of expressed that view of “We want to go back to nine-to-five punch-card factory jobs as the means for advancement in a good life”?

ECH: No one.

I mean, it was a mixed bag of people who remembered America as being a simpler, less complicated place, but there were plenty of people who felt really good about the future. So I just don’t think I could draw a clear conclusion there.

I think one thing that folks did make clear was their frustration with rural America being demonized, and the role of the media in that. And then, I think the fact that we have this, if you’re on the right, you think the Left is crazy, and if you’re on the left, you think the Right is crazy. And my experience talking to people in both camps is that, no, that’s not true. We’re just people. Maybe we should stop focusing so much on who we vote for. For me the most profound thing is that it didn’t matter what your politics were. You cared about this country. You cared about each other. No one talked about hating fellow Americans at all. People felt a lot of love and understanding and care for fellow countrymen. I think this is such a problem that we’ve created that trope because it just doesn’t align with my experience with talking to Americans.