Wall Street Journal Looks at Rural America, “the New ‘Inner City'” – farmpolicy.com

Summary by Keith Good, www.farmpolicy.com & Social Media Manager, farmdoc project at the University of Illinois.
“Janet Adamy and Paul Overberg reported on the front page of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal that, “At the corner where East North Street meets North Cherry Street in the small Ohio town of Kenton, the Immaculate Conception Church keeps a handwritten record of major ceremonies. Over the last decade, according to these sacramental registries, the church has held twice as many funerals as baptisms. In tiny communities like Kenton, an unprecedented shift is under way. Federal and other data show that in 2013, in the majority of sparsely populated U.S. counties, more people died than were born—the first time that’s happened since the dawn of universal birth registration in the 1930s.
Saturday’s article noted that, “Starting in the 1980s, the nation’s basket cases were its urban areas—where a toxic stew of crime, drugs and suburban flight conspired to make large cities the slowest-growing and most troubled places.
Today, however, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows that by many key measures of socioeconomic well-being, those charts have flipped. In terms of poverty, college attainment, teenage births, divorce, death rates from heart disease and cancer, reliance on federal disability insurance and male labor-force participation, rural counties now rank the worst among the four major U.S. population groupings (the others are big cities, suburbs and medium or small metro areas).”
For complete story summary, visit: https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2017/05/wall-street-journal-looks-rural-america-new-inner-city/?utm_source=farmdoc+daily+and+Farm+Policy+News+Updates&utm_campaign=4a4fc31cd1-FPN_RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_2caf2f9764-4a4fc31cd1-173659477