"Places with less economic complexity tend to grow more slowly and
have much bigger gaps between rich and poor."

in creation of all the planet's most vigorous and intellectually advanced societies. For all their faults.

As for Appalachia in particular, geography, anyone? For all that millions of people travel every day, satellite communications, and so on, geography still rules. Big time.

It was hardly simplistic. BTW it covered the geography and sociology of the region too.

That doesn't in any way excuse an inexcusable title and overall theme, however. The author knows full well most only see the title and won't even read for the while I did.

Just imagine if coal jobs had been unionized, with workable amounts of coal profits allocated to good wages and benefits. They'd be gone now, of course, as the market for most U.S. coal largely evaporated, but it'd be leaving behind reasonably prosperous and far healthier middle class workers wondering what they were going to do next and regions that could support new industry because they'd have have developed with the money that poured in and stayed there. Large numbers of their kids would have gone to college and could become managers and techies in the new industries.

Lack of unionization of capitalist jobs is only one of a number of significant factors in Appalachia's desperation, but all by its lone little self it cuts the feet off the title's premise. It could have been so different.

Btw, when people talk about wanting good jobs again, what they really mean is those with the incomes and benefits that collective bargaining once achieved for both union jobs and competing non-union ones. For that, high productivity is needed.

As far as I can see, the biggest problem with allowing capitalism to continue as an economic method is environmental and population sustainability. Today's model of capitalism depends on growth, and that has to change.

It's really well written and very thorough.

I feel so bad for the people whose lives have been trashed by big coal companies and then abandoned. And yes, these same people voted against their own best interests, but as the article points out, a lifetime of stress will do things to your thought processes.

When Mullins asked his guidance counselor how to apply to college as a junior, she told him that, without having taken advanced classes, it was pointless.

What kind of guidance counselor just stomps on a kid's dreams like that?

I'd like to think that he/she was just misguided, not deliberately mean, but it's terrifying to think about how that person affected so many kids' lives for the worse.

Teen birth rates have dropped tremendously in the last couple of decades.

A sad solution but one which may be the only option.


Or perhaps there will just be a new boss in town:

http://www.wsaz.com/content/news/Gov-Bevin-to-announce-economic-development-for-eastern-Kentucky-420391033.html

A new location for billion dollar business, Braidy Industries has been determined after the land on the original site for the aluminum factory was deemed not strong enough to support the facility.