Comment by jjcon

I’ll second this. I lived in the US in a rural area for a while. The standard of living there was pretty simpsons-esque despite most of the area being only high school educated. When I moved to an urban center a few years later that is when I saw a lot more people in this authors demographic, struggling to make ends meet. People in the rural areas were fairly aware of the urban, but the reverse was not true at all, people in very urban areas assumed their experience was universal.