Sitaraman et al.: The Geography of Inequality

Ganesh Sitaraman, Morgan Ricks, and Christopher Serkin (all of Vanderbilt Law) examine the causes of widening ecnomic and other inequalities across geography in Regulation and the Geography of Inequality (Duke Law Journal). The authors start with an observation about increasing gaps between the economic and social realities of thriving places like so-called “superstar cities” and the realities of other cities and rural places that are left behind.

The authors also enumerate the ways geographic inequality “between dynamic and stagnant places” negatively impacts a variety of other serious problems simultanous facing the United States, including political alienation, community health, and national security.

Rather than accepting this widening gulf as a result of inexorable economic trends, however, the authors instead assert that specific regulatory choices—particularly in the areas of transportation, communications, trade, and antitrust—precipitated geographic convergence in the mid-twentieth century and, as deregulation has prevailed in those same areas, rising geographic inequality more recently.

Regulation and the Geography of Inequality discusses the shortcomings of zoning and tax policies as solutions and offers up several other ideas to revitalize lagging geographic areas, including re-regulation and the incorporation of geographic considerations into regulatory policy. Throughout the article, the authors emphasize the central role of law and policy choices in shaping geographic inequality.

The authors also share an interesting conversation about this project on the podcast Densely Speaking, available here.

This work also certainly builds on fabulous work by Annie Eisenberg and others on how law and policy choices have shaped rural realities. We have digested just a sliver of that work here for reference as well.

This digest was produced with significant contribution by Aurora Kenworthy, UNL Law Student.