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Hello and welcome to Behind the News.

My name is Doug Hinwood.

Two guests today.

Narina Hertz will talk to us about the epidemic of loneliness.

And Rosanna Rodriguez will say a few words in defensive mutual aid.

Before that, comments in a couple of recent papers.

Electural maps and analysis have helped create a story that the US is becoming increasingly unequal geographically,

with affluent coastal regions getting richer in the heartland left behind.

This looks to be a bit of an oversimplification.

A new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research by Cecil Gaber,

Patrick Klein, Damian Fergara, and Danny Yegan finds that most of the action in the growth of spatial inequality

has been happening at the county level, not the state level.

And surprisingly, poverty rates have been converging across counties

and what the authors called democratization of poverty,

as the urban wage premium has declined for less skilled workers.

Meanwhile, the real divergence is happening at the upper end, as the rich get richer in some places, but not all.

The authors first look at income dispersion across states.

They find a broad W pattern, with interstate income inequality falling from the early 1960s into the late 70s,

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