I interviewed USC professor Elizabeth Currid-Halkett about her book The Overlooked Americans. Click here to read parts of our conversation in article form, or here to watch the whole thing on YouTube. She provides an antidote to the mainstream media’s narrative about rural Americans — that they are poor, angry, and resentful — by using data and interviews to put together a more accurate summary of the evidence.

Here are some of the facts that she reported in the book that might be surprising if all you’ve heard is the media narrative about rural Americans.

None of this is to say everything is great in rural America, or that there are no problems. It is to say that portraying rural America as being in overall decline is incomplete at best and false at worst. As I have written previously, the “national conversation” about rural America is just as bad as the “national conversations” on many other topics. Blaming a caricature of poor and resentful rural people for lashing out and causing political problems isn’t very productive.