Then I'm not sure that you can definitively claim that income "volatility" is necessarily higher outside of {list of expensive coastal metros}. It could be high

Then I'm not sure that you can definitively claim that income "volatility" is necessarily higher outside of {list of expensive coastal metros}. It could be higher, but there's no information to suggest that to be case. > given the economic stagnation of many rural areas that depended on one or a handful of manufacturing or natural resource extraction facilities, I imagine many people can see and feel it. Rural areas have almost never been economically dynamic, in any society (outside of agriculture, at least). Nobody is arguing that one ought to live in a rural town — but there are a ton of tier-2 and tier-3 cities, and suburbs of tier-1 cities where gainful employment is within reach, especially for wage earners in the bottom 3 quintiles. This includes Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Omaha, Little Rock, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Madison, Nashville, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, etc etc etc. Even Chicago, a tier-1 city went from having an income-to-home-price multiple of 2.45x in 1984, to 3.55x in 2017.