I didn't really expect people to read this...

Some excerpts:

The proportion of counties seeing negative business establishment growth during

periods of national expansion has increased steadily over the past three recoveries.

Over the first five years of the 1990s recovery, 17 percent of counties continued to see

net declines in business establishments. From 2002 to 2006, that figure rose to 37

percent — and had more than tripled to 59 percent by the 2010s.

The U.S. economy is becoming far more reliant on a small number of super-performing

counties to generate new businesses. A mere 20 counties accounting for only 17 percent

of the U.S. population were responsible for half of the net national increase in business

establishments from 2010 to 2014.

As with business establishments, the geography of job growth has narrowed from

one recovery to the next. Following the 1991 recession, only 14 percent of counties

continued to post job losses over the course of the next five years. That proportion

rose to 28 percent in the 2000s and to 31 percent in the 2010s (three-quarters of

which lost population at the same time). In other words, the share of U.S. counties

participating in national jobs recoveries has fallen from 86 percent in the 1990s to

72 percent in the 2000s and only 69 percent in the 2010s. The share of the country’s

population living in bypassed counties varied but was relatively low in each period:

During both the 1990s and 2010s recoveries, 11 percent of the population lived in

counties that continued to lose jobs. Over the 2000s, when manufacturing

employment losses pummeled more populous corners of the Great Lakes, more

than one in five Americans lived in counties that were bypassed by the national jobs

recovery.

Over prior recoveries, large counties did not play a central role in delivering the

country’s employment growth. This is no longer the case. The most populous U.S.

counties — those with over one million people — created 3.3 million jobs over the

2010s recovery, more than any other size class of counties and more than twice as

many jobs as they created over each of the two prior recoveries. By contrast, counties

with under 100,000 people collectively created fewer than one million new jobs in the

2010s — substantially fewer than 2.5 million they created from 1992 to 1996 and the

1.2 million new jobs they created from 2002 to 2006. As a result, the 2010s recovery

has served to accelerate a shift in the country’s economic gravity towards populous

counties after decades of decentralizing growth that spread economic activity to more

locales.