The local newspaper brings news of my adopted state’s changing fortunes. The so-called “big sort” continues apace. In the middle of the last century, North Carolina was powered by jobs in tobacco, textiles and furniture. In the last thirty years, huge numbers of those jobs have vanished, often overseas.

Greensboro-Winston-Salem-High Point in the center of the state was once booming on the strength of these industries. As they have waned the region has suffered. Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill and the Research Triangle Park created to capitalize on the region’s educational institutions has prospered, attracting jobs in tech and government. Charlotte became a banking powerhouse and transportation hub.

Since 2007, Raleigh has created 180,000 jobs, Charlotte 176,000, Greensboro-High Point 3,300 and the rest of the state has lost 78,000. Not surprisingly, the poorer, less educated, blue collar, rural regions in this reshuffle of the economic deck have done poorly compared to the white collar boom towns. And the two areas also tend to vote in diametrically opposed ways.

A similar scenario has been enacted throughout the country. Whole regions have been hollowed out, the young disappearing to seek their fortune elsewhere. I grew up in a rust belt city that was the sixth largest in the nation when I was born, and a manufacturing behemoth. It’s now the 31st largest MSA and a huge number of those steel, auto, and ancillary jobs are gone.

Not only have the jobs that employ us changed, the places where they can be found has too. In 1940, only one city of the top twenty in size was below the Mason-Dixon Line, New Orleans, and only two were west of Missouri, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The other 17 were in the Northeast and the industrial Midwest. Today, fourteen of the top 20 are in either the South or West.

In 1920 for the first time in American history, more than half of Americans, 51.2%, lived in urban areas. We were 63% urban by 1960, 75% by 1990 and are close to 85% today. People with a high school education and those who worked with their hands could once earn a living wage that supported a family. That part of the American Dream is fading away. Higher skills are needed for different jobs in different places.

Many Americans find themselves left behind by these changes, and living in places that have little to offer families that have called them home for generations. It is obvious that to keep their heads above water many will have to acquire more education and to relocate to where the opportunities exist. And the pace of change may require more than such retooling in a lifetime. Not everyone will be able to adapt.

History is filled with cases of this kind of evolutionary change in economies, and they are often very painful. Those caught in the change can find it hard to take the long view. The changes may eventually create a better society, but individuals may find their situation far worse – their job prospects poor, their housing values dropping, their home town lagging, their retirement plan underfunded or gone, their children forced to seek a future elsewhere.

The Luddites pitched a fit when industrialization came in. Family farmers found themselves unable to compete with agribusiness. Labor had to organize to have a chance against the power of industrial giants. Now computers, robots, and foreign competition have been changing the landscape again.

The young may be more able to adapt. The old are likely to feel abandoned, displaced, and bereft. Those who need jobs today are likely to find the jobs require skills they don’t have and are located in places they have never been. No wonder some voters are confused, angry and want their country back, but it is gone and isn’t coming back. This appears to be the nature of modern times, as Jacques Brel sang:

Join us now, we’re on a marathon
We’re always dancing when the music plays
Join us now, we’re on a marathon
Dancing, dancing through the nights and days
We must dance because the Fifties zing
The Fifties zing because the Sixties swing
And the Seventies flash and the Eighties bang
And the Nineties whimper and the century hangs…
So we keep on dancing, dancing, we can’t rest
Marathon, marathon
Mara, mara, marathon.