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Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

nytimes.com

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Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#91

Post by caseyohara »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #42
caseyohara wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the city environment undeniably makes many people less happy. Studies have shown a link between urban living and mental illness. Do you have a link for these claims? Genuinely curious, I've always wondered about this.

This is from the National Institute of Health. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5374256/ I'm not an expert at knowing what studies are good... so someone will probably comment about why this study is problematic, and that's ok. "Studies have shown that the risk for serious mental illness is generally higher in cities compared to rural areas. Epidemiological studies have associated growing up and living in…

Thank you, that is interesting.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#92

Post by danans »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #45
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.

Pray tell, where do you expect all those agricultural products, lumber, livestock, and so forth that we all depend on to come from without small towns and rural communities? They have to grow somewhere after all.

> Pray tell, where do you expect all those agricultural products, lumber, livestock, and so forth that we all depend on to come from without small towns and rural communities? They have to grow somewhere after all.

The article provides several examples showing that those industries continue to operate in small towns, but that they require very little labor anymore, due to mechanization and automation.

The majority of the financial gains for these industries go to the capital owners (including all of us who can afford to save for retirement), not to the local labor pool. The labor pool doesn't have leverage to change that, because they often have few other options for work in their area.

The remote workers transplanted from cities aren't going to meaningfully increase employment in the old sectors. They will just enjoy the cheap housing and lower cost for low-skilled services.

Local low-skilled labor won't be able to suddenly shift to high-skilled remote IT work, and the sectors are too different to have an effect on the others' labor rates.

At best, the remote IT workers' discretionary local spending might prop up a few small service businesses, like restaurants, but the remote workers are likely to keep most of their capital in the same non-local financial instruments that their equivalents in cities do. And who could blame them for doing so?

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#93

Post by lotsofpulp »

hopefulengineer wrote: post #44
thinkingkong wrote: post #7

Small towns cannot be tech hubs, because that's not even what a 'hub' is. It would be the end node, or an outlier constantly. I'm from a small town but we have one huge industry which employs around 80% of the local community. The rest of the folks are in construction, service industries, schools, etc. No amount of effort would turn that region into a tech or innovation hub without it also turning it into a city. Ins…

The biggest problem for small and medium communities is brain drain. It's a vicious death spiral because the smart and ambitious kids basically have to move away to large cities to get quality jobs. The only solution I can think of is incentivizing remote work so people don't have to be concentrated in cities. You might not even have to incentivize it because it's a tremendous advantage as a tech company to be able t…

The only incentivizing needed is to provide fiber to the home so everyone has ample connectivity to compete on a level playing field, and then businesses will figure out which mix of remote and in office employees works for them and allows them to best position themselves in the market.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#94

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

johan_larson wrote: post #13

Maybe we shouldn't be trying to keep these small town alive. Maybe we should focus on shutting them down in an orderly fashion and help the residents move to more dynamic areas, probably in large part by helping them acquire skills that are actually in demand there.

Maybe we should accept that different people want different things and not try to shoehorn everyone into the same situation.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#95

Post by dredmorbius »

chocolatebunny wrote: post #56
edaemon wrote: post #5

For what it's worth the submission title here ("Turning small towns into tech hubs isn't working") doesn't appear in the article. The basic reasoning of the article: ...the high-tech industries powering the economy today don’t have much need for the cheap labor that rural communities contributed to America’s industrial past. They mostly need highly educated workers. They find those most easily in big cities, not in s…

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.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#97

Post by lotsofpulp »

mohankumar246 wrote: post #79

Whenever people question the concentration of tech jobs in cities like SF it always makes me think: 1) Why do most jobs related to show business(movies) are concentrated in LA? 2) Why are most jobs in banking concentrated in NYC?

Face to face, non audit-able interactions are important in finance. Maybe the same for show business, plus LA has really nice weather and scenery.

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#98

Post by Rapzid »

eropple wrote: post #29
madengr wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe rural america (energy, food) do Master Blaster style embargo on big cities.

"Rural Americans" own neither the energy nor the food production located near them. By and large, rural America is subsidized by the rest of America, be they urbanites or large companies. And to be frank, that's fine; I support generally allowing people to find the best way for them to live, within reason. (Where people like me start getting snippy--and we do, we aren't saints--is when that's not acknowledged. "Real…

The Rest of America

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#99

Post by nimbius »

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 but I learned some pretty good skills in python and a lot more about Linux than I knew before.

Our state has these lofty goals but couldnt attract more than a mega-truck-stop diner in the past 8 years. The reason for this is that unless you have a winning complexion (are white and male) you arent going to have a lot of fun here.

Want birth control? well thats a 2 week waiting period and a mandatory consultation. Did you run out? well you have to renew that script every month. Want it covered by your insurance? tough, legally, our state outlawed that. Need an abortion? book a flight, we require a trans-vaginal ultrasound and a waiting period.

Are you LGBTQ? enjoy our bathroom law. adoption providers can also legally discriminate against you for even asking to adopt. theres also no protections in the workplace, so enjoy being fired for "gay."

Are you a blue-collar minority? Unless you know exactly when and where to go to get a license, then voting is practically impossible. our bowling alleys and food courts/theaters also enforce a dress code thats loosely translated to "no blacks."

Re: Trying to ‘Save’ the Rural Economy

#100

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

caseyohara wrote: post #19
ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good question... I have often wondered if many of our environmental/political problems would be solved if we helped everyone move to major cities. But the city environment undeniably makes many people less happy. Studies have shown a link between urban living and mental illness. So it might be nice to maintain options for humans who thrive in a more rural environment.

> the city environment undeniably makes many people less happy. Studies have shown a link between urban living and mental illness. Do you have a link for these claims? Genuinely curious, I've always wondered about this.

Sure, living in a city drives me crazy.
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