I don&#x27;t come quite from your background, but my social circle growing up overlapped with that world a bit.  There&#x27;s a <i>huge</i> gap between the bone-in poverty world and the &quot;rest&quot; of the US; ambition, expectations, mobility, money, interactions with authority, etc.<p>It&#x27;s the case that able and motivated people <i>leave</i>, and they <i>better</i> themselves, and the people left behind are, sadly, less able, less motivated, less <i>something</i>. This accelerates the cycle.  It&#x27;s not just city&#x2F;country (although that seems to be a big part of it): out West there is still a lot of money in industrial farming of wheat, potatoes, etc. Those communities are chugging along. It&#x27;s the communities which have no industry that fail.