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Notes -
I've read a theory by one of the commenters on Steve Sailer's blog that the unprecedented economic prosperity between 1945-73 in the US had the effect of large masses of impulsive, low-IQ people with high time preference from the rural areas of the South and the Midwest moving to Great Migration cities to work in manufacturing (heavy industry in particular). After the oil shocks, stagflation and deindustrialization, it was mostly these people and their descendants who were hit hard, and had no practical means of moving away and getting re-trained to do other things, so they're just stuck there in their misery.
Right - that's a better way of phrasing it.
To me, this appears to be obviously true, and it certainly adds to my cynicism that addressing this situation does not seem to be part of anyone's political platform; I believe the going theory is that those affected are solid clients of the Democratic party, and actually trying to improve their lots (or the lots of the people stuck with them) does not change the political calculus at all, so there's no need to do it.
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