Why Rural America Is Thriving, with Author Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

The story often told is that rural America is in decline, and that rural Americans are resentful of their suburban and urban counterparts.

But Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues in her new book The Overlooked Americans: The Resilience of Our Rural Towns and What It Means For Our Country that rural Americans and rural America are in many ways actually thriving. Currid-Halkett joins Institute director of public policy Liam Julian for an enlightening discussion.

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett holds the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and is professor of public policy at the Price School at the University of Southern California. In 2022, she was appointed the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. In 2023, Currid-Halkett received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

In addition to The Overlooked Americans, Currid-Halkett is the author of The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City (Princeton University Press 2007); Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity (Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); and The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class (Princeton University Press, 2017), which was named one of the best books of the year by the Economist. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Salon, the Economist, the New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others.