Why the prosperity gap in the U.S. is stuck–and how to fix it

The gulf between well-off and struggling counties in the country used to be shrinking, but now it’s growing. To fix it, we need policies that target the needs of specific regions.

Decades ago in the United States, if you lived in a place that was struggling economically, you could reasonably assume that within a few years, it might turn around. This was because of a phenomenon known as convergence, which holds that growth rates in economically distressed areas tend to exceed those in areas that are already prosperous, so that in the future, the gap between them narrows.

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