Knowledge industries are not good for local economies. Places like California and New York are not good places to live if you're not an intellectual elite. You're much better off in a place where the economy is not so reliant on sorting people based on intellectual capability. Iowa might be boring, but the economy is flat. The rich aren't that rich, and the poor aren't that poor. And the rich people aren't out there bidding up prices for everything, so normal people can afford to buy houses and start families.

You can talk about income redistribution, but the problem is that the folks who are driving the inequality don't want to be the targets of redistribution. I grew up in a cookie-cutter 1950s house with 1,100 square feet in a boring Virginia suburb. I guarantee you that the white collar worker that has bid the price of that house up to almost $900,000 now doesn't think we should take money from him and give it to people lower on the totem pole.