Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"It's a term I use to describe really the last 30 years of our economy, and it describes the interconnectedness of our modern economy brought about by advanced changes in communications and transportation. And it has had profound effects on the North Carolina economy. For example, throughout most of the 20th Century, North Carolina really was able to attract businesses by saying, 'Hey, we've got a lot of low-wage labor here. Come here because labor is cheap.' Well, we can't do that anymore. If a business is looking for cheap labor, they will go to a foreign country. So this has led, for example, to very dramatic downsizing in many of our traditional industries that really carried the state in the 20th Century, industries like tobacco, textiles and furniture. In the case of textiles and furniture, many of those jobs literally have gone overseas. And what North Carolina has had to do is to grow and attract new industries in areas like technology, health care, financial services and food processing, to name a few. And really, we successfully made this transition. We have been one of the fastest growing states in the country over the last 30 years. But this transition has not helped everyone in every region. So in this book, I describe all these changes. I describe the impacts on people, places and policies. I also speculate on what's ahead for the North Carolina economy."