Michael R. Strain, Columnist

Pay Workers to Leave Depressed Towns

Public policies are more effective when they invest in people, not places.

December 23, 2019 at 2:00 PM UTC

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

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Here’s an unsettling fact: Economic inequality between U.S. states can be greater than inequality between the U.S. and other countries. For example, GDP per person in the state of New York is about twice as high as in Mississippi. The gap between the U.S. as a whole and the nation of Slovakia is smaller.

These figures come from the International Monetary Fund’s October 2019 World Economic Outlook. They matter in part because wide disparities between a country’s different regions could reflect barriers to worker mobility.