Hello and welcome to the intelligence from The Economist. I'm your host, Jason Palmer.

Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

The north of the country is sensible, hardworking, thrifty. The South is careless, lazy, corrupt.

Now, which country is it? It could be anywhere. Wherever you look, there's a North-South divide,

mutual mistrust that's somehow just human nature.

And he came, he saw, he conquered, pretty much the story of Julius Caesar, wherever he went.

He also wrote of his conquests with a little exaggeration.

Our correspondent retraces Caesar's steps and sorts the facts from the fanciful.

First up, though.

In the years after the Second World War, a lot of Americans, those with the means to do so,

left the noisy, cramped confines of the big city for a gentler pace of life.

An exodus of residents from the central city to surrounding towns was beginning.

Today, Long Island is America's new major market with the highest spendable income for household in the nation.

The idea of moving out to the suburbs really took hold.

Now, a new wave of migration is happening out of large urban centers,

and it's not just because of the pandemic. Some analysts and observers say they haven't seen

anything like this in decades. They're comparing the shift of populations to the suburbanization

of the 1950s. Alexander Sewage Bass is our senior correspondent for politics, technology,

and society.

Cost and COVID-19 aren't the only considerations.

Remote work is also playing a role.

One analyst who I spoke to predicted that somewhere between 14 million and 23 million Americans,

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