One really dispiriting prospect in Florida’s article is his statistic that college-educated people are more concentrated geographically than ever.
As a Midwesterner by temperament (I’m currently halfway thru a graduate program in Iowa, despite my 20 years in the NE), I think about my hometown/college town changing from a welcoming and livable community with a pleasant pace of life into a way station where no one with a degree would stay on if they could. I could easily see it happening.
I have visions of a future where anyplace green and peaceful is either gated, HOA’d and moneyed or seedy, abandoned and dirt-poor, and where the only culture, opportunity and life is found in grimy, impersonal rat race places amidst the kind of tension that makes people drive 80mph on a Sunday morning with no traffic and spend half of every day barking into cel phones.