Left behind?, part 3

The final issue I want to consider is whether people living in rural areas feel left behind in a material sense.  The GSS has a question on satisfaction with your financial situation which has been running since 1972.  There is no essentially no difference between the averages for people in MSAs, "other urban" counties (ie, with towns of over 10,000), and rural counties.*  The trend is -.01 in MSAs, -.02 in other urban counties, and -.04 in rural counties; the difference is probably statistically significant, but is too small to show up clearly in a figure.  Since 1994, there has been a question on how your standard of living compares to your parents' standard of living at the same age.  There's no clear difference on the average (if anything, people in rural areas are a bit more positive):  the correlations with time are -.07 in MSAs, -.10 in other urban, and -.06 in rural counties.  Finally, there's a question on how you see your family income relative to other American families--people in MSAs see it as higher, but there is little or no difference in the trends.  The GSS also asks about actual family income, which is indeed higher in MSAs.  The trend on family income is .15 in MSAs, .10 in other urban, and .16 in rural counties.  

So the growing relative dissatisfaction in rural areas doesn't seem to be a result of growing relative dissatisfaction with economic conditions.  That is, to the extent that people in rural areas feel "left behind," it's not by economic developments, but by something else.  

A couple of other notes:

1.  In the 21st century, over half of the white respondents live in MSAs, about a third in "other urban," and about 12% in rural counties.  

2.  In his speech at the Republican convention, J D Vance said he grew up in "Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community and their country with their whole hearts."  Middletown has a population of about 50,000 and is classified as part of the Cincinnati metropolitan area.  There's necessarily some fuzziness in the boundaries of metropolitan areas, and it's about 40 miles from Cincinnati, so you could argue about whether it should really be included.  But 50,000 isn't a small town--in Maine, where I live now, that would make it the second largest city.  So why did he say that it was?  I think it's an example of a tendency in political rhetoric and journalism to treat small town/"heartland"/working class/economically declining as more or less the same thing.  

*As before, I limit the analyses to whites.