
The solution to rural depopulation: the kids stay. - hexis
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704322004574480250107329602.html
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jballanc
What this reviewer, and most commenters on rural depopulation, seem to miss is
that there is no inherent virtue in "small town" America. Small towns have
existed, historically, either as jumping-off points for pioneer exploration or
as local hubs for farmers and their goods. I think it's safe to say that the
pioneer exploration of America is a done deal, and factory farms (and even
family farms) have shown that advances in technology can make even farming
efficient to the point that local hubs are no longer needed.

The average New Yorker has such a significantly smaller impact on the
environment than the average small town resident, that I really can't think of
a good reason for small towns to exist any longer. The sooner we all move
toward urban settlement and leave the rural areas to efficient farming,
weekend trips, and mother nature, the better!

~~~
garply
'I really can't think of a good reason for small towns to exist any longer'

I found this post really insensitive. But it's good, because it made me
realize that I've been insensitive in a similar way without knowing it.

My brother and I grew up in a rural town of 6,000 in the Midwest. He went off
to Harvard and is now a doctor on the West Coast and I went off to Stanford
and now run a business in China. We visit home on the holidays. So you can say
the article struck a personal note - I'd never read about the pattern before
(though I was intuitively aware of it) and knowing that I'm contributing to it
leaves me with a sense of melancholy.

The point that you miss, jballanc, is that these are communities of living
people - each with its own tiny culture. There are problems with these places
that I don't know how to solve, but their gradual decay is sad in the same way
that the destruction of cultures all over the world is sad.

I have to thank you, though. As a foreigner in China whose invested a lot of
time in mastering Mandarin, I've come to strongly believe that the elimination
of the other Chinese dialects and the traditional character set is a very
favorable thing. I've probably said, at some point or another, that I 'really
couldn't think of a good reason for the traditional character set to exist
anymore'. Until now, I've never been able to fully understand why, for
example, some Taiwanese Americans get so upset about the gradual decline of
their character set. When speaking to them about the issue, I must have come
off as insensitive as you do to me. In the future, I will change my behavior.

~~~
jballanc
I, too, grew up in a small Midwest town and have since lived in Miami, New
York, and Silicon Valley. I guess you could say that I'm being insensitive,
but I tend to see things a bit differently. Change is inevitable, and thinking
that you can hold on to things forever is foolhardy at best. Yes, small town
America has an ever so slightly different culture, and loosing it might be
painful (much like loosing traditional print media, I should think). But I
always think back to when I was 8. I had a stuffed toy animal that I loved and
vowed never to give up. Then I realized that, while that stuffed animal
represented a certain part of my life that I valued, it was time to move on.
There will always be new things to value in the future.

Now, as for the issue you raise of language, at the risk of sounding
hypocritical I must say I've always been a strong proponent of preserving
dialects and less common languages. I think it ultimately comes down to a
cost-benefit analysis. I don't think that small town America represents a
culture unique enough, or hard enough to recreate, that it's worth
extraordinary attempts to preserve it. Languages, on the other hand, often
represent hundreds or thousands of years of collective cultural knowledge, and
once that's gone, it's gone.

A last point I feel I should make: if there _is_ some "intrinsic value" to
small town America, I think attempting to preserve small towns by creating
artificial incentives to keep headstrong youth from leaving would probably do
as much or more to destroy that intrinsic value than just letting nature take
its course, so to speak, and gradually reduce the number of small towns.

~~~
ilyak
Small languages may be interesting but we just don't have enough humans to
speak them all, as humans don't want to study small languages unless they
happen to be hobbysts or acquire that language as children.

------
JCThoughtscream
So personal ambition is an evil to the community and must be suppressed, then?

Sure, that's a strawman summary, but speaking /as/ the son of a countryside
peasant that not only left for the big city but the country entirely for
greener fields in America, I cannot at all support the view that youthful
ambition is harmful, regardless of its effects on small communities. Seeking a
better life than your parents had - and seeking to make your children's life
better than what you've had - is far from repugnant or malicious.

The romanticized notion of a warm, inclusive small-town culture ignores the
many cultural and economic ills isolated communities produce alongside Mom's
"famous" apple pie. Even if we change the cultural incentive, it won't change
the fact that these communities tend to /stay/ poor, and simply lack the
resources internally to change that. Perhaps the answer isn't to shake an
angry cane at the relentless changes wreaked upon small communities, but
figure out a way to increase the incentive to invest back into the Heartland.

Say, encourage geographically localized startups...

~~~
mechanical_fish
From Stewart Brand's "Cities & Time" lecture:

<http://longnow.org/seminars/02005/apr/08/cities-and-time/>

 _Vast new urban communities is the main event in the world for the present
and coming decades. The villages and countrysides of the entire world are
emptying out. Why? I was told by Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for
Women, “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and
family elder, pound grain, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job,
start a business, and get education for her children. Her independence goes
up, and her religious fundamentalism goes down.”_

 _So much for the romanticism of villages. In reality, life in the country is
dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous. Life in
the city is exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, and safe._

Brand's lecture, in some versions, includes a photomontage of deserted country
towns from all over the world. In every country, in every culture, rural
residents are leaving for the city. Unless people need a lot of land to grow
the food they need to survive, they have no incentive to stay on the land.

~~~
eru
> In every country, in every culture, rural residents are leaving for the
> city.

I don't know if it's as universal as you say. Some highly developed countries,
like Switzerland, seem quite stable in this regard.

~~~
pchristensen
Stable at extremely high levels of urbanization. They've already made their
move to cities.

~~~
eru
Yes.

~~~
eru
I dug around. I found
[http://ww2.unhabitat.org/habrdd/conditions/westeurope/switze...](http://ww2.unhabitat.org/habrdd/conditions/westeurope/switze.htm)

Seems like Switzerland has an urbanization level of 65% of the population.
Does this count as extremely high? And it's not stable. Its projected to reach
72% by 2025.

~~~
pchristensen
60-80% is typical for industrialized countries. I'd be interested to know if
the increase is projected because of shrinkages of rural/small towns or growth
in urban population from births, immigration, etc.

~~~
eru
See the link. The statistics are there.

------
jwhitlark
Well, I've been to Japan, Kuwait, France, Turkey, Mexico, Canada, and all over
the US, and don't consider myself especially well traveled. (I recently bumped
into someone I knew in high school; turned out that he had hitchhiked the
length of Africa.) Someone who had never left their hometown of 2,000 would
have a hard time convincing me they have a better insight into the human
condition than I did. Wouldn't be impossible, but...

Now if they want to move back, after kicking around the world for a few years,
more power to them.

------
lionhearted
I voted up the article because I think it'd be fun to discuss, but I think its
premises and conclusions are off. Let's start with this one:

> Achievers score well on SATs and imbibe the poisonous assumption that
> success can be measured by the distance one travels from home.

People who've traveled far from where they originated have been highly
respected through almost all of history. Even in extremely anti-
immigration/xenophobic places like Tokugawa Japan 1600-1850, travelers were
always highly respected and sought after.

There's a number of reasons for this. People who successfully migrate are
looked upon as strong and healthy, because it's hard to move away from your
support network. They have valuable different perspectives and understanding
of culture, organizations, and technology. In sex and marriage, someone from
further away reduces the chance of inbreeding and lets the dominant (usually
more robust) characteristics from both parents take over, leading to more
likely healthy and strong children.

People from New York are more respected in Los Angeles than in NYC. People
from California are more respected in New York than in Los Angeles. Migrating
does take guts and it is hard, but by living in different places you get
multiple perspectives on how the world runs. And yes, quite literally the
further you go, the more diverse, varied, and valuable your alternative
perspectives are likely to be.

> Thus to achieve is to leave—shaking off the dust of a hick town and
> migrating to exotic locales with "diverse cuisine and more varied shopping."

He missed the biggest part of leaving to an urban place - a variety of ideas.
Someone who is highly intelligent starts to question society - but if
everyone, literally _everyone_ in a town of 3,000 belongs to the First Baptist
Congregation, and you're starting to have thoughts like - how come the Bible
contradicts itself? How come it advocates enslaving your enemies? Genocide?
Religious wars? Well, these are interesting conversations to have, even if you
remain Christian. But you can't even have that conversation in many places
where everyone is conformist. Sure, New York probably has a better mix of
restaurants than Iowa, but that's not why smart people leave. It's because
there's a better mix of ideas, simply by there being more ideas that you can
find someone to talk about with. If you're intelligent, you begin to question
things other people take for granted. If you live somewhere where people don't
appreciate having their core values questioned, then you have to leave to keep
growing intellectually. So the intelligent people leave. It's not some rabid
consumerism.

~~~
bhousel
> People who've traveled far from where they originated have been highly
> respected through almost all of history.

> People from New York are more respected in Los Angeles than in NYC. People
> from California are more respected in New York than in Los Angeles.

Is there any actual evidence of this? It's the first time that I've ever heard
of this theory.

FWIW, I migrated from Philadelphia to New York City five years ago, but I'm
not getting _any_ respect this week :-/

------
rg
Twenty years ago, I seriously planned to set up an endowed trust to educate
mid-western young people about the advantages of moving to the coastal cities
of the US, along with some modest financial aid to move. Since then I have
dropped that plan, because the Internet now provides all the information
needed to convince mid-western young people to move as soon as they can.

~~~
pmorici
You're joking right? There are plenty of quite nice larger cities in the
midwest that aren't at all costal and have a much lower cost of living than
the coasts.

------
wglb
I grew up in a small town out on the prairie. My parents and I worked quite
deliberately to get me to school out of state, and that area is where I stuck.

Yet I wouldn't trade the childhood experience for anything. One author told of
her move to a city that it was hardest on one of her sons because "on the
farm, they were men in training, but in the city they were just boys" (Judy
Blunt, Breaking Clean).

On the other side of the coin, the attempts to maintain the small family farm
through subsidies is excruciatingly expensive, for America and Japan as well.
Oddly, the farm subsidies have a bigger positive impact on the large
agribusiness entities than the family farm.

Personally, I have the reverse view of cities, even though I have lived in
cities for now most of my life. If you grew up in a city, you might think much
of what we see in life is normal. I think it is not. The only time that most
New Yorkers got to see the milky way was when the Ohio powerline intersected a
tree and the power went out. But did they know to look up and see that
terrifying grandeur?

So I have an insider's view of this article, like many others, that come in
from the outside to "fix" something that they only partially understand.
Imagine a task force of rural leaders from, say Idaho or Oklahoma, come to New
York, set up an interview shop, publish a paper on the decay of society and
what we as a nation need to do to fix it.

The migration is a larger phenomenon that seems inevitable, but some of us
have mixed feelings about.

~~~
eru
> Oddly, the farm subsidies have a bigger positive impact on the large
> agribusiness entities than the family farm.

Same in Europe. Large agribusinesses can afford lawyers.

------
JulianMorrison
OK, so, what are the _advantages_ of small rural towns?

------
ilyak
Why would anyone want to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere?

Even worse, in rural area.

Makes no sense to me.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Having earlier lived in the largest city in the US and now in rural Minnesota,
I think I may have some insight, but bear in mind that this is only the way
_I_ see life, not how I think others should.

This is where I should be at this point in my life. When I lived in cities,
that's where I wanted to be. When I stopped wanting to be there I moved, it's
that simple. Don't stay where you don't enjoy it.

I enjoy the peace, the solitude, looking up at the Milky Way at night, waking
up to my rooster crowing and pheasants squawking. I like sitting out on the
grass in the dark of a warm summer night with my wife listening to the horses
ripping up mouthfuls of grass. I find a wholesomeness in trudging through
knee-deep snow when it's -10F with a 15 knot wind, carrying two 50-lb bales of
hay on my shoulders to the horses. Doing that, then jumping in my truck to
drive off to a climate-controlled office building and writing software the
rest of the day causes a certain dissonance that's strangely pleasing.

I can do things here that would be impossible in the city. I make wine from
the wild grapes on my own property, I have enough land that I could grow
anything I want to (and do!). I like being able to be considerably more self-
sufficient than I could be anywhere else. I could raise/grow all my own food
if I were so inclined.

Honestly, about the only thing I miss about the city or suburbs is the easy
access to decent restaurants.

