“In the knowledge economy, talent flows from places with limited opportunities to coastal magnets with leading research universities. Traveling in the opposite direction, the authors found ‘nearly everywhere we went we were surprised by evidence of a different flow: of people with first-rate talents and ambitions who decided that someplace other than the biggest cities offered the best overall opportunities.’ ”

The reviewer, Carter Wilkie, once inventively spell’s Deborah Fallows’s name as Barbara, but it is an interesting and valuable review.