The Cost of Coastal Elitism: What Happens When the Smartest Leave Main Street Behind

In this compelling episode, Chuck Warren and Sam Stone are joined by Oren Cass, Chief Economist at American Compass and editor of the new book The New Conservatives. The discussion explores the cultural and economic consequences of America’s growing divide between elite urban centers and the rest of the country.

Cass reflects on his decision to live outside of major coastal cities, arguing that while it's tempting to romanticize the choice as giving him better insight into real American life, the reality is that most Americans simply don’t live in the political and economic bubbles of New York or Washington, D.C. Their concerns are often far removed from the narratives dominating national discourse.

The conversation takes a deeper turn into the economic restructuring of the U.S., where elite migration to coasts has drained small towns of leadership and investment. Cass emphasizes that while this consolidation brought short-term efficiency, it came at a massive social and political cost—undermining community institutions and widening inequality.

He critiques the modern elite mindset that attempts to "solve" systemic issues through philanthropy or virtue-signaling instead of true accountability or shared sacrifice. As Cass points out, simply “writing a check” isn’t fixing the deeper problems—it’s part of the problem.

Transcript

Chuck Warren: But do you feel you not living in a major city and living in a smaller community outside New York, D.C., has helped you have a better outlook – and more curious about how do we make everybody's lives better?

Oren Cass: Good question. There are days when I like to think that that's true because it's a good story to tell the people like, well, why aren't you living in Washington, D.C. where you could show up for meetings more regularly? And, well, it's really important that I live outside D.C. It helps me do my work. I don't know how true that is. I think at the margin, certainly I am able to observe things that are different.

I think one way in which it's very helpful is what you really realize is just that most people's world just doesn't revolve around any of this stuff. The things that people care about, the things that people pay attention to, the things that they're upset about, the things that break through into their lives are not the things that everybody's obsessing about inside the Beltway in New York City. But I think to a significant extent, the causality probably runs the other way. That as somebody who, you know, my own, and I always emphasize, I'm not saying that my own choices should be everybody's choices.

I want people to have lots of different choices about how they live their lives. But as someone who did take this outlook, on what I thought was important, you know, just what was important in my own life. I think that both led toward a lot of the thinking I brought to my politics and

also the thinking I brought to how I wanted to live my own life.

Sam Stone: You know, it's an interesting juxtaposition between the investment banker you had. We had a guest on, and I'm forgetting the gentleman's name. I should apologize to whoever he was for that.

But he was talking about how in the past, before the flight of wealth to the coasts, Every small town in America had its two or three patron families that were the wealth generators who were connected to those communities.

Chuck Warren: They sponsored the high school football team, Begans Rotary, Lions Club.

Sam Stone: And even within the cities, individual communities had those individuals. And the flight of those people to these ivory tower, New York, D.C., L.A., and within their bubbles – Do you think that is leading to this perception that you talk about in your book about the consumption-poverty line being the key to success, that they're just kind of throwing chattel at the masses while they continue to accrue greater and greater wealth? To what end? It's hard to say sometimes.

Oren Cass: Yeah, I think that's a very good way of putting it. And I think it touches on two really important points.

One is in sort of how our economic system has failed and the way in which just thinking about the economic pie did not serve people well. Because economists will tell you, and they're right, in a lot of cases, the best way to get the fastest growth, at least according to the models, would be we'll get all the smartest people into the same buildings together. Let's go find all the people with the highest test scores in every town, take them all out of those places, put them all in the same universities, send them to the same companies, the same cities, the same industries, and wow, look at all the efficiency.

And in the short run, and I think we saw this, you can get a lot of efficiency that way. But the cost of that in terms of what you leave behind in political and social terms and then ultimately in economic terms is just too high. Because at some point, what all the smart people in the big buildings,

the big cities find is that there aren't even any businesses to run anymore. Right. there's you know once you've kind of bought and sold and chopped up all the businesses in the rest of the country what are you going to do next and so you know that has been a huge failure and then exactly your point it's very well put. They then turn around and try to say well okay how do we claim we're trying to fix this without actually making any trade-offs or sacrifices ourselves. Basically just like

just tell us where to write a check right like that's and like and let me like embrace a story that says As long as I do write the check, I've kind of done my duty and done everything I can. And that is how we built our politics until in the last few years it fell apart.

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