Red State, Blue State, Old Jobs, New Jobs

Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City [2011], opens with some statistics that illustrate the remarkable contrast between big city productivity and smaller city or even rural productivity.

About half the US population "crowd together in the 3 percent of the country that is urban." "Workers in metropolitan areas with big cities earn 30 percent more than workers who aren't in metropolitan areas." And the bigger the city, the more this effect is exaggerated. "Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas. These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They're even the same if we take individual workers' IQs into account." {emphasis added]
"On average, as the share of a country's population that is urban rises by 10 percent, the country's per capita output increases by 30 percent. Per capita incomes are almost four times higher in those countries where a majority of people in cities than in those countries where a majority of people live in rural areas."

GDP is measured by exchange. Big networks make it easier for people to easily exchange goods, services, and ideas. If you live in a rural area, two miles from your nearest neighbor, it is much harder to exchange anything than it is if you live in a densely populated area where a million neighbors are within a mile. Bit city networks are rich and complex; rural networks are sparse.

City of the Future, Lev Rudnev, 1927

There is so much to this but one comes from openness to innovation. Cities are like diversified portfolios. If you own 50 different stocks, you just accept that one (or two or four or ten) will shrink in value as markets shift; your entire portfolio may well do better in disruptive, tumultuous markets because the one (or two or four or ten) stocks that thrive through this change could create wealth that is worth multiples of what you lost in the bad stocks. The investor who owns one or two stocks sees big change as a threat because if one or two of her stocks collapse in value, the whole portfolio does. There is so much going on in a city that its people can more easily adapt to innovation and disruption. You get laid off from one failed startup and you go to work at another. In a rural area, if you get laid off from a company you may literally need to move out of state. And as a people become more open to innovation and disruption, they create more value over time than people who try to conserve what they have and protect themselves from change.

As an economic model, cities just work better than rural areas. To the extent that the country moves in the direction of what works best for rural areas, it will generally move in the wrong direction for economic progress.