Planning the Next Great Migration

Mississippi is a very rural state. The largest city, in a state of about 3 million, is Jackson, the capital, which has 426,000 people in the entire metropolitan area. Kurtz et al. (2020) concluded that Mississippi is well placed for sustainability in terms of food supplies even given present diets, unlike some other Southern states whose large cities would not be easily provisioned locally. Mississippi has well-known problems—poverty, unemployment, inequality, infant mortality, poor education and health care—that are worse than in most Southern states. If those things don’t trouble you or you don’t think they’ll affect you, Mississippi might be pre-adapted for decline.