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Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

nytimes.com

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Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#131

Post by wenc »

dredmorbius wrote: post #95
chocolatebunny wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird that it kind of makes it a small town vs big city discussion. I think most of the big tech sectors seem to spawn near good universities. The universities supply the highly educated workforce for the businesses and the size of the city seems to play less of a role.

Look at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Supercomputing centre and home of Mozilla, but the talent and firms leave. And they don't head to Chicago either.

I was talking to UChicago prof who did his undergrad at UIUC, and he said a lot of money was spent to bootstrap the tech economy in Champaign-Urbana but even back then at the height of the dotcom boom, it didn't make sense to him because most people just did not want to live in the middle of cornfields.

Rural colleges (even good ones) that are too far away from a city or a metropolitan area rarely have strong diversified economies because talent just doesn't want to live there. If they did, these places wouldn't remain small.

Ann Arbor does reasonably well, but it is close to Detroit (which despite most people's mental images of blight, has a very large suburban population that isn't too different from that of other cities in America). Pittsburgh does reasonably well because it is itself a city.

Off the top of my head I can think of many small college towns with good tech programs that have not managed to develop a strong diversified/tech economy:

* Ithaca, NY

* Providence, RI

* West Lafayette, IN

* Charlottesville, VA

Madison WI does ok for some reason (it's a really idyllic place to live as a student), but even then outside of Epic and a few large employers, it's not really a talent magnet.

Historically, the very concept of a university in medieval times arose due to urbanization. Outside of a few exceptions like Oxford/Cambridge, situating universities in rural settings is actually not the default idea. Thomas Jefferson famously despised city life and placed UVa in rural Charlottesville, and other colleges in America followed suit. But most European universities are usually located in cities or towns, and instead of sprawling bucolic campuses, they are spread out all over a city.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#132

Post by ashleyn »

weberc2 wrote: post #118
nimbius wrote: post #99

speaking as someone who works in a small town in the midwest as an auto mechanic, the people that shot themselves in the foot with this idea were the very ones who proposed it. I got 5 months of free online Python classes from the local government. This was part of some larger state plan to 'revitalize' us as a 'web 2.0' something or other for the 'silicon valley' of the midwest. The whole thing read like snake oil b…

What state is this? How do they require minorities to have ID but not whites? Apologies if these questions are naive, I'm not particularly familiar with midwest politics.

I'm also pretty sure no state managed to successfully pass and keep a "bathroom law", especially after the enormous outrage against North Carolina.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#133

Post by ip26 »

nimbius wrote: post #99

speaking as someone who works in a small town in the midwest as an auto mechanic, the people that shot themselves in the foot with this idea were the very ones who proposed it. I got 5 months of free online Python classes from the local government. This was part of some larger state plan to 'revitalize' us as a 'web 2.0' something or other for the 'silicon valley' of the midwest. The whole thing read like snake oil b…

The skills are probably still worth teaching. Many professions could really benefit from some Swiss army computer skills (and it's not always obvious which pairings are good). Biology, for example, really could use some solid database skills. I have seen million-line barely manageable Excel documents that were born to be an SQL database. Makes me cry.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#134

Post by HarryHirsch »

dredmorbius wrote: post #95
chocolatebunny wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird that it kind of makes it a small town vs big city discussion. I think most of the big tech sectors seem to spawn near good universities. The universities supply the highly educated workforce for the businesses and the size of the city seems to play less of a role.

Look at University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Supercomputing centre and home of Mozilla, but the talent and firms leave. And they don't head to Chicago either.

Why would that be? Midwestern smalltown politics and close-minded attitude? An Indian colleague who is teaching in the nowhere Midwest tells genuinely awful stories about racism and is getting ready to leave.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#135

Post by kenmicklas »

dvtrn wrote: post #35
kenmicklas wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They offer a certain quality of life many desire. But at an enormous cost to the environment, tax base, and economic resilience of society. It's legitimate for people in the cities to ask whether they want to keep subsidizing this lifestyle, and whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved.

whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved. What would some examples of this be, in your opinion?

I think these enormous tracts of suburban and rural land that were populated with government subsidies and no real economic reason to exist should be slowly and gracefully depopulated, with people settling denser areas (which we have a scarcity of, due to racially motivated zoning laws and other policies). We also need to do a better job of limiting sprawl so that people living in cities are closer to nature and don't have to travel through hundreds of miles of suburbs to "escape".

People act as if all these small towns are growing our food and are vital for the national economy when in reality the vast majority of them consist simply of the industry required for their local suburban/rural existence (schools, supermarkets, hospitals, road maintenance, etc.).

The places that are actually productive (e.g. large agricultural regions) of course have to stay but these are relatively not so populated to begin with (and use less and less labor every year). People have no idea of the magnitude of distortion that props up the myth of the small town in America.

Policywise, I think a gradually introduced land value tax and carbon tax (replacing to some degree property and income taxes) could do a lot to enact this restructuring in a "natural" way.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#136

Post by eigenstuff »

kenmicklas wrote: post #33
ryanmarsh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are "we" trying to keep small towns alive? Also, I don't see why remote workers can't live in small towns. They offer a certain quality of life many desire.

> They offer a certain quality of life many desire. But at an enormous cost to the environment, tax base, and economic resilience of society. It's legitimate for people in the cities to ask whether they want to keep subsidizing this lifestyle, and whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved.

I live in the kind of rural place you're talking about. Rural town of 2500, majority farmland/undeveloped, historically impoverished part of the country.

Many people in my town are exactly what you'd expect. But a good fraction of them are millionaires with huge McMansions and lakeside property. The cars that go down my road are a mix of beat up pick up trucks and Cadillacs.

I guarantee you, no outside entity subsidizes us. Not with those kind of property taxes coming in. And I guarantee you, my town is not unique in this regard.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#137

Post by ThrustVectoring »

jandrese wrote: post #83
badloginagain wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory all you need to make it work is good internet connection. Especially if its remote. If there was a serious offer from some company where for the same amount of rent in SF, I could have a mortgage on literal acres of land, thats attractive. Less attractive is the crumbling infrastructure, opioid wildfires, actual wildfires, and aggressively conservative culture. Gotta try something though, right?

Plenty of other factors too. No nightlife. Limited restaurant options. Schools that offer only the basics and may be failing. No public transit. Shitty and expensive Internet. No local job hopping opportunities. Limited extracurricular activities for the kids. Lots of anti-intellectual peer groups in the schools. You pay a lot for that cheap house in the end.

The job hopping opportunities can't be overstated. It's the BATNA for salary negotiations with employers, so it basically determines what your salary is going to be.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#138

Post by LrnByTeach »

bskap wrote: post #125
LrnByTeach wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are seven states with only ONE House of representative: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. The reason for the above is that there are so little population ( less than 650,000 )in the whole state. These 7 states each have TWO senators. The reason for this is this is how the country was formed giving 2 senators to each state in the constitution. These 14 senators are alwa…

Not all 14 of them are Republican. Delaware has two Democrats, and Vermont has one Democrat and one Bernie Sanders.

agree, that makes it 11 GOP senators to 3 DEM senators.

California with 40 Milion population 2 senators, to 2 senators for these 600,000 population for each of these 7 states.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#139

Post by apcragg »

weberc2 wrote: post #126
aurailious wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure the comment didn't say that.

To be clear, I was responding to this: > Are you a blue-collar minority? Unless you know exactly when and where to go to get a license, then voting is practically impossible. How else can you interpret this? Blue-collar minorities are less capable of knowing where/when to get a license than blue-collar whites? Or perhaps the "minority" bit is a red-herring altogether and the salient criterion is "blue-collar"?

Or groups of people live in certain geographic areas and are not served by public transit or near government offices like a DMV. That can have the effect of making it generally harder one one group despite equal competence.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#140

Post by michaelbuckbee »

In the mix with this are the tax incentives that are being offered up for tech companies to move into rural areas. While there has been a lot of attention on HN focused recently on Amazon's and Apple's move, the really interesting one to me is Foxconn.

Foxconn really seems to have suckered a small Wisconsin community (and the state) into giving them an incredibly lopsided tax incentive deal - as detailed in this amazing episode of ReplyAll [1]

I think a far smarter idea is to pay tech workers an incentive to relocate to the state, as Vermont is doing [2]. The payback is quicker and the results far easier to scale.

1 - https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/132-negative-mount-ple...

2 - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/us/vermont-moving-money.h...

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