POSTPONED-Regional Inequality in America: Winners and Losers, or Just Losers?

Alec McGillis

The country is growing increasingly divided between a handful of hyper-prosperous cities, mostly on the coasts, and countless left-behind cities and towns. Regional inequality helped give rise to Donald Trump and is making different parts of the country incomprehensible to each other. It's not only causing resentment and despair in the left-behind places, but also driving the affordability crisis in the winner cities. How did we get here, and what can be done about it?

Alec MacGillis is a senior reporter for ProPublica, where he has been on staff since 2015. Previously, he worked for the New Republic, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun and four smaller newspapers. His pieces have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Atlantic and New York, among others. He is the author of “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell” (Simon & Schuster, 2014). In 2018, he served as lead correspondent for “Left Behind America,” a PBS Frontline documentary set in Dayton, Ohio. He has received the Polk Award for National Reporting, Toner Prize for Political Reporting (2016), and Elijah Lovejoy Parish Award, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting. He was a member of the 2010-2011 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan and delivered its Hovey Lecture in 2017. A native of Pittsfield, Mass., and graduate of Yale, he lives with his family in Baltimore.