Rural areas have fallen farther behind urban areas in one measurement of prosperity

The United States has long had trouble living up to the promise in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal," but today's inequalities have more to do with prosperity than race, gender or religion, a leading rural health advocate writes. "Our health seems to depend not only on how much we have, but also on how much those around us have," Wayne Myers, founder of the University of Kentucky Center for Excellence in Rural Health, writes for the Rural Monitor Newsletter. "No one knows how economic inequality shortens life, but it does. Clearly it is more dangerous to be poor in a rich country than to be poor in a poor country."

Myers points to the "Gini Coefficient," a formula developed in the 1800s to measure "the inequality of distribution of most anything within a population." Myers argues the change in the coefficient between 1979 and 1999 in urban versus rural areas shows "the rich urbanites got really rich while the poor urban and city people stayed poor." He explains, "The reason for this growth in disparity is that almost all of the growth in America’s economy in recent years has been in the high-income sectors, and these are generally in urban populations."

Rural America has long had wide variances in income levels within regions, but to fix rural economies the gap between rich urbanites and their poor rural neighbors must be fixed, Meyers argues. "It has been stated that Americans seek to level opportunity whereas Europeans are more inclined to level income," Myers writes. "To the extent higher education relates to opportunity, though, we are even pricing opportunity out of reach. Poor people of average ability can no longer go to college. I believe it is bad economic policy to let the gap between our rich and our poor become as wide as those of Mexico and China. I know it is bad health policy." (Read more)