On the Front Porch with Tony Pipa and Brent Orrell: A conversation with Kathy Edin and Tim Nelson about ‘The Injustice of Place’

Contemporary differences between rural and urban areas in America have their roots in long-term demographic, economic, technological, and social factors. In this event series, Tony Pipa (Brookings) and Brent Orrell (American Enterprise Institute) host conversations “on the front porch” with authors of recent research on issues facing rural America. These discussions explore the unique challenges and opportunities facing rural America and consider policy options to promote development and opportunity outside the nation’s major metropolitan areas.

For their second conversation, Pipa and Orrell were “on the front porch” with authors Kathy Edin and Tim Nelson, whose recent book “The Injustice of Place: Uncovering the Legacy of Poverty in America” finds that America’s most disadvantaged communities are nearly all located in rural areas, sharing a common history of raw, intensive resource extraction and human exploitation. The authors suggest this history and its reverberations demand a reckoning and a commitment to wage a new war on poverty, with an unrelenting focus on our nation’s places of deepest need.