How rural America is turning into a digital desert

A Q&A with Mark Muro, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and lead author of the 2017 report "Digitalization and the American Workforce." 

The geographic digital divide is as wide, and in fact even wider, than it ever was. The more digital your job is, the likelier you are to be paid well. But then places have very different digital work scales. At the top of the scale, you have these sort of coastal tech superstars that are filled also with highly skilled digital workers, highly educated workers. But then it really falls off and you have many places that have a third the level of digital skills. So we're faced with this spectacle of potentially widening divides between places as the digital "haves" pull away from the digital "have nots."