More remote-first companies are the best way to bring jobs everywhere. Remote-first working is a separate and new skill that needs to be developed.
Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas
41–50 of 164 posts
Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas
#42well, germany is quite spread out and has lots of tech in smaller towns. It's not always perfect and we are also struggeling with some things, but I think a few approaches can be emulated. First, I think it's important that the small town is not on it's own, but in a close neighborhood of other smaller towns with which it's cooperating a lot. For a serious tech economy, even small towns need a working ecosystem (and I think can't be too small). They have to specialize, cooperate and develop the needed ecosystem, so that they can reach "critical mass" in some area. Ideally, this includes a small university nearby, so that there's a cooperation between the task of education and employement and the specialized, needed workforce can be trained. Also, research-institutes, which help small businesses which can't fund a research division on their own, are important. In germany, they are often coupled with thematic industrial clusters, a smaller patch of land where the city tries to get all the industry together. The research-institutes in germany are the Frauenhofer-institutes, public-private partnerships of applied reasearch with a focus and goal of supporting the local economy.
For example, the small town of Hof in bavaria with a population of 45.000. It has a university of applied science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hof_University_of_Applied_Scie...), which is focused on educating the workforce suitable to the local economy (often in close cooperation). There's some research going on in the university, but it's not a research intensive one. Since the textile-industry in Hof is quite strong, there's a Frauenhofer cooperating with the university of applied science nearby (https://www.htl.fraunhofer.de/en/manufacturing-processes/tex...).
TLDR: I think tech in smaller towns is possible, but it needs a specialized economy, not too-small towns and a close cooperation between the public and private. Tech won't come by itself, it needs to be lured.
Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The city has a concentration of talent and capital, this doesn’t mean it doesn’t have other things also. In fact, cities are seen as stepping stones for many that lack much talent or capital, which is why they have a lot of poor people: the cities are not creating these people themselves, quite the opposite actually. The kid working st Mcdonads in the big city is probably making $15/hour vs. $8 back in their rural ho…
> cities are seen as stepping stones Absolutely. Humans have a very long history of trying to emulate the rich, and not only with respect to choice of residence, in hopes that doing what they the rich do is the missing link in why they are not rich. We have even seen in the past times where people were leaving the city because that is what the rich had done (favouring large rural estates at the time), leaving the con…
It isn’t that they are copying the rich, they are going from places where there are few opportunities to where their are many opportunities. The Great Migrations, for example, involved African Americans moving from poor southern areas to rich northern cities because they had nothing going on back home, just pointless sharecropping. And you know what: their descendants are probably much richer than of those who stayed back south. The same with the “okies” during the Great Depression going Friday Oklahoma to big cities in California.
They were not emulating the rich, this never had anything to do with “fashion”, they were (and still are) surviving and have hope that they or their children will have a better future. Rural areas can’t provide much of this unless their is a natural resource rush (eg fracking in the dakotas).
Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trouble is that while cities may be rich, the people living there are not. It is true that cities are the likely home to those with incredible fortunes, but they are also home to many in abject poverty. In fact, while average incomes tend to be higher in big cities, median incomes in big cities tend to be lower . This suggests that you have some people doing really well, and a whole lot of people doing not so great.…
>Moving from a poor area, where cost of living is generally lower (although not always), to a rich area, where cost of living is generally higher, does not mean that you, yourself, will become rich. For the average person, that only results in skyrocketing costs, leading to a reduction in quality of life. Maybe? but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many…
> but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many educated people we are near.
There are a lot of dubious claims about education though. I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. Some even claim that gaining an education will result in earning more money, all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has ballooned. How does one earn more money while also earning the same amount of money...?
What they are probably referring to is the fact that the education system filters out people who are less capable. Someone with, say, down syndrome is unfortunately unlikely to withstand the academic rigour required to graduate from college, and is unlikely to possess the traits that employers want to see in order to pay the big bucks, leaving the data to show that this person who did not graduate from college is also paid poorly. But it is faulty logic to think that if you don't graduate from college that you will contract down syndrome.
> That's a big part of why I am so stuck on the bay area; I don't have a degree, and I do really well here. All the offers I get from other parts of the country are terrible.
Your strong ties to the Bay Area suggest that you are probably involved in tech. Which is no doubt centred around the Bay Area, and pays less outside of the Bay Area no matter who you are. But what if all you knew was farming? Do you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or any other major metropolis)?
Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas
#45There was a big push to wire up rural areas in the early 2000s. It didn’t happen everywhere, but it happened in quite a few places that can serve as data points. Here in Maryland there is quite a bit of municipal fiber covering the areas Verizon FiOS doesn’t. Some of it has been in place since the early 2000s. Are those communities with fiber doing better than those without it, economically? They’re not doing any better than their neighbors without fiber. The limiting factor isn’t the availability of bandwidth, it’s the lack of desire to hire anyone from these places for remote work. This is not a “build it and they will come” situation. Many places built it. Nobody came.
People have these unfounded romantic notions about fiber and economic development. Here in Maryland, more than 60% of households have access to fiber. Has it revolutionized the economy? Not at all. Annapolis is a small city (pop. 40,000) that has had fiber more than a decade and almost all the tech jobs here are connected to the Navy (and we’re already here). What do people do with fiber here? Netflix. Fiber is not a catalyst for job creation and economic growth. It’s a means for content consumption. That makes it an awful investment of public dollars.
Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas
#46well, germany is quite spread out and has lots of tech in smaller towns. It's not always perfect and we are also struggeling with some things, but I think a few approaches can be emulated. First, I think it's important that the small town is not on it's own, but in a close neighborhood of other smaller towns with which it's cooperating a lot. For a serious tech economy, even small towns need a working ecosystem (and…
From my experience visiting, Germany does a much better job of getting services into smaller communities. From Mainz, where my family lives, we took streetcar and then bus out into surrounding villages and towns which would be totally un-serviced by transit if they were in North America -- even in areas where the population density is equivalent or higher (such as where I live in southern Ontario).
Tech infrastructure is only one part of it. North America's rural economy is broken due to land use and industry problems. Once you get out of exurbia or areas that are appealing as retirement or vacation homes, the land is mostly just swathes of cash crop mega farms and towns mostly disappearing due to lack of jobs.
Europe's mostly small towns predate the industrial revolution and the green revolution. They have cultural and economic roots that seem to have persisted better through the 20th century's transformations.
Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas
#47Ro Khanna is my hometown progressive. So..obviously..I distrust the politician representing us. Why can’t he do a better job with our multitude of problems? Bay Area is choking. In more ways than one. Talking points is not the same as actually getting them done. It’s just a way to get elected. Again. Also..am I the only one who found the Indian-Pakistani restaurant quip offensive? This is why some of the rest of the…
>Ro Khanna is my hometown progressive. So..obviously..I distrust the politician representing us.
As someone not from the Bay Area, will you please explain why this is obvious?
> Why can’t he do a better job with our multitude of problems?
Perhaps because he has only been in Congress since 2016 and in that time, the Democrats have been in the minority and mostly powerless to do much of anything
Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that has been happening for the last 150 years at least.
Well, until the rent seeking class figured out how to asset inflate the education and property market. If you look at exploding debt levels in property, education, housing, and personal credit something is extremely broken and shoving everyone in the big city is not the long term answer unless we are looking at some massive social upheaval in the near term.
Now that communication is quick, and data more available, more people have an idea of how to give themselves the best opportunity. The best school district you can send your kids to, the best colleges they can go to, the majors they can study, etc.
Problem is it's all concentrated to a handful of options, so everyone is chasing after those, and the sellers know it so they can price it such that almost all the value is extracted from the buyer.
It's funny to think that it could partly be a consequence of all the easily available school rankings, all the way form elementary to university, as people can sort themselves by socioeconomic class much easier. But it could go the other way too, with the concentration being a consequence widening gaps in socioeconomic class. Either way, it feels like a feedback loop to me.
Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Moving from a poor area, where cost of living is generally lower (although not always), to a rich area, where cost of living is generally higher, does not mean that you, yourself, will become rich. For the average person, that only results in skyrocketing costs, leading to a reduction in quality of life. Maybe? but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many…
> but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many educated people we are near. There are a lot of dubious claims about education though. I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. Some even claim that gaining an education will result in earning more money, all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has…
> But what if all you knew was farming? Do you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or any other major metropolis)?
This has been so common throughout history that there is even a name for it (rural flight): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_flight
As agriculture is increasingly mechanized, fewer farmers are needed. So it doesn’t really matter if all you know is farming, moving to the city is your best bet if you aren’t inheriting the family farm. That’s just how economics works.
Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that has been happening for the last 150 years at least.
Well, until the rent seeking class figured out how to asset inflate the education and property market. If you look at exploding debt levels in property, education, housing, and personal credit something is extremely broken and shoving everyone in the big city is not the long term answer unless we are looking at some massive social upheaval in the near term.
True, but that applies to rural areas as well: how many farmers are renting their land these days, or are working for big farm corps that bought all the family farms in the area a long time ago?