
How the widening urban-rural divide threatens America - nether
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1101-hanson-rural-urban-divide-20151101-story.html
======
crapshoot101
Victor David Hanson is a pretty conservative guy and his point certainly has
some merit, but there's definitely some "rose-tinted" glasses here. For
example, while I tend to agree with him on the water and environmental
assessment studies, the biggest issue in CA is that those farmers' don't pay
anywhere near market-pricing for the water, which in turns provides a
significant incentive to grow water-hungry crops. That's not the necessarily
the best example to illustrate the divide he highlights.

[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the-
california-water-shortage-again.html)

~~~
x0x0
The author is a liar.

To pretend the water crisis is about food is a giant lie, if the given subtext
is we need to eat. The author is smart enough not to outright lie, but he
definitely leaves a wildly incorrect impression.

We piss away acre-feet of water per orchard to irrigate almonds, using
approximately one gallon of water _per almond_. I love almonds, but we will
live just fine without them. No-one will starve if they don't have almonds.

We export a _hundred billion gallons of water_ per year via alfalfa. ie a
year's water supply for a million families. I'm sure Japan will whine if they
have to figure out some other way to feed their cattle, but that's their
problem. Nobody in California or the US will go without food if Japan and
China have more expensive beef, or are forced to internalize the the
environmental impact of their food choices.

We grow fucking cotton in the desert. You don't eat cotton.

etc...

I've posted about this before, but pretending that the water crisis in CA is a
choice between food, where the subtext is people will go hungry, and
environmental concerns is a flat out lie. It's a choice between 2% of the
economy that is wildly, ludicrously wasteful with an increasing precious
resource and is pitching a tantrum that they may not be able to treat water as
effectively free.

~~~
SilasX
And yet I'm still forced to use a heavily throttled shower head on pain of
major fines, as if it makes any difference.

------
MBlume
At risk of reductio ad hitlerum -- at the time Jefferson wrote the quote given
in the article, the wisdom of the rural folk was that slavery was awesome and
should continue forever. It was the out-of-touch urban interlopers who thought
it should stop

~~~
trynumber9
Are you sure? They rural farmers, in the south, would have competition from
the slave plantations. And the farmers in the north were generally of the
northern protestant branches which saw modern slavery in a very poor light.

~~~
guelo
"The standard image of Southern slavery is that of a large plantation with
hundreds of slaves. In fact, such situations were rare. Fully 3/4 of Southern
whites did not even own slaves; of those who did, 88% owned twenty or fewer.
Whites who did not own slaves were primarily yeoman farmers. Practically
speaking, the institution of slavery did not help these people. And yet most
non-slaveholding white Southerners identified with and defended the
institution of slavery. Though many resented the wealth and power of the large
slaveholders, they aspired to own slaves themselves and to join the
priviledged ranks. In addition, slavery gave the farmers a group of people to
feel superior to. They may have been poor, but they were not slaves, and they
were not black. They gained a sense of power simply by being white."
[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html)

------
hspak
This read like a really angry rant against modern culture in general. Yes,
politicians don't always make very good choices and yes people spend a lot of
time on the web now. This is no reason to call the urban population
"clueless."

Rural life is also unscalable. Rural citizens won't always be more knowledge
in agriculture. They do not have more or less "common sense" than the urban
population.

/rant

------
jph
I spend significant time in very urban areas and very rural areas, and I'm
seeing more convergence because of the net.

There is covergence thanks to major sites such as Netflix, Amazon, Facebook,
etc. And near-ubiquitous smartphones help.

More-powerful convergence is happening thanks to the rural areas adopting tech
for farming, weather, robotics, construction, how-to learning, and broad
support for personal freedom.

~~~
001sky
If your thesis was correct, it would be evident to the author who is actually
time-sharing (taking advantage of all the things you say). But what he
describes in his essay is how even he is of a different mindset...this essay
is more about context switching. Its impossible to context switch when you
never leave the house/office/facy neighborhood. Or to use some data, look at
the dismal % of african americans that go to yosemite or even know how to
swim. There's lots of racial and historical bias at play in that data, but the
empirical point remains--context switching for urbanites is _hard_. And the
poorer you are the harder it is. The reverse is also true--the poorer and more
white you are in appalachia, the less likely you are to context switch with
the weathy coastal cities. So we have money and culture paying a part as
barriers to context switching, notwithstanding the revolutions in
transportation (train, plan, auto, jet) and communications (telegraphy,
telephone, tv, internet...etc).

------
sxcurry
Except that where I live (rural Southern Oregon) there is some of the highest
rates of welfare and foodstamp dependence in the West. Sort of tears apart the
premise of this story. Note that the author is with the Hoover Institute.

------
hoilogoi
I think one of best examples of this was the push to make mandatory the
National Animal Identification System. The idea was put every farm animal into
a database and RFID the larger ones. I'd heard that farmers would need to log
the timestamp of every feeding or watering (though I can't find any source for
that in 2 minutes of Googling.)

I did find this. "... the animal owner would be required to report: the
birthdate of an animal, the application of every animal’s ID tag, every time
an animal leaves or enters the property, every time an animal loses a tag,
every time a tag is replaced, the slaughter or death of an animal, or if any
animal is missing. Such events must be reported within 24 hours." From
[http://www.countrysidemag.com/90-1-mary-
zanoni](http://www.countrysidemag.com/90-1-mary-zanoni)

I would argue that this is burdensome and easier to rationalize for an
urbanite. Also note that they likely didn't consider how small farmers will
often arrange to have their animals graze on a neighbor's field, which would
mean logging entry and exit twice a day.

------
ilaksh
Don't underestimate though, the power of social pressure to influence the
belief system and overall culture of immediate neighbors. Usually first your
are born into an area, then you adopt the culture in order to get along. It
can be very difficult to hold counter-beliefs in many groups.

------
lisa_henderson
In this bit, Hanson indulges in pure fantasy:

"Rural living historically has encouraged independence, and it still does,
even in the globalized and wired 21st century. Autonomy and autarky, not
narrow specialization, are necessary and are fueled by an understanding that
tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place."

In reality, the rural areas of the USA are wards of the state. Without
government subsidies for water and electricity and telephone services, and
without government subsidies for the food that farmers grow, many of the rural
areas in the USA would have stopped agricultural production back during the
1930s.

This is strange:

"urbanites have argued that farmers can make do with less but wildlife needs
ever more"

I would have thought that a conservative like Victor David Hanson would have
been angry about the massive subsidies that the government offers to farmers,
but apparently he doesn't care about that. Thanks to those subsidies, the USA
typically produces too much food, not too little of it. Scaling back on those
subsidies a bit, for a good environmental cause, seems like classical
stewardship in action: the state is suppressing the demands of a greedy
special interest, in favor of a project which benefits all of society.

I am disappointed that Hanson seems to support government subsidies when it
comes to farmers (in the form of water subsidies), but then turns critical of
government subsidies when it comes to helping an individual woman. Hanson
writes this criticism of the fictional "Julia":

"Looking to cement his lead among urban unmarried women during his 2012
reelection campaign, Barack Obama ran an interactive Web ad, "The Life of
Julia." Its dependency narrative defined the life of an everywoman character
as one of cradle-to-grave government reliance — a desirable thing. Julia is
proudly and perennially a ward of the state. She can get through school only
thanks to Head Start and federally backed student loans. Only the Small
Business Administration and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act enable her to
find work. In her retirement years, only Social Security and Medicare allow
her comfort and the time to volunteer for a communal urban garden, apparently
a hobby rather than a critical food source."

So helping big agri-business with government subsidies of water is perfectly
acceptable, but helping a woman go to college is a terrible thing?

~~~
refurb
Victor is against farm subsidies as well. Just read some of his other writing.

As for Julia, i think his argument is that waste is waste. Sure you might have
good intentions by helping Julia and it's a noble cause, but current gov't
programs do a terrible job at it.

------
hackuser
I drove through central Utah; it was on a road with no shoulder and grass
growing through some cracks (but well-paved enough to drive at highway
speeds). And that was it - the only visible presence of government. There were
miles between houses.

Many people reading this are in cities. Step outside and look around for the
presence of government: Roads, sidewalks, streetlights, stoplights, road
signs, police, buses, power lines, sewer, manholes, turn the tap for city
water, fire hydrants, regulated things everywhere - buildings, parking,
restaurants, etc etc. And people everywhere, of all kinds, almost all of whom
you don't know.

Perhaps that explains the differing perspectives of people who live in urban
and rural areas. And consider that that who lives in rural and who lives in
urban areas is to a great extent self-selected.

~~~
_delirium
I get what you're getting at, but the difference isn't quite _that_ stark
among most of the actual population of rural areas, at least today (pre-1930s
is another story). There are some really off-the-grid rural areas, and those
people have quite different views, but that's less than 1% of the U.S.
population. The vast majority of the population of rural areas has grid
electricity, running tap water, mail delivery, a phone line, a sheriff's
department, etc. The federal government's rural-electrification push still has
visible results all over the place, the National Rural Utilities Cooperative
is present in thousands of communities, subsidized rural mail delivery is
almost ubiquitous, most people's kids go to public schools, kids get
vaccinated, many farmers receive government subsidies and loan guarantees,
many people have FDIC-insured bank deposits, many people live on Social
Security, etc.

------
DCPOS_Anthony
Jeez... it's like the guy is looking for an excuse to find a new thing groups
can hate one another about.

------
hackuser
Climate change causes significant losses for farmers, and very likely will
cause many more. Yet it's the city folk who vote to do something about it and
the rural population that makes it a point of ideology to reject even looking
into the possibility of it.

------
nemo
The urban-rural divide does create issues, though the author is very selective
and invents a fractious view of reality concocted from stereotypes that does
more to perpetuate the problem than help, and blurs cultural and political
lines. Politically, rural States are inherently over-represented Federally by
virtue of each State having two Senators regardless of population, and that
has and will continue work to the detriment of urbanized States. Politically
the complaints about government dependence by urbanites selectively ignore
that more tax dollars are sent proportionally to rural States than urban
states, which are in no small part a product of rural States having immense
power over the Feds. relative to urbanized States. Slagging the "The Life of
Julia" as a "dependency narrative" ignores that a big point of the narrative
was keeping the government out of Julia's reproductive choices and other life
choices, freedoms rural religious-minded folks are not keen on protecting. On
top of that (and perversely amusingly), rural areas have steadily outgrown
proportional rates for use of food stamps and food assistance programs than
urban areas. Culturally, rural states idealize a kind of independence that's a
product of a political structure that hands out capital and favors to quietly
prop those rural areas up while turning a blind eye to their benefit from the
government to assist themselves.

------
dsfyu404ed
"These differences wouldn't matter so much if it weren't for the fact that the
nation's urbanites increasingly govern those living in the hinterlands, even
as vanishing rural Americans still feed and fuel the nation."

Ask someone in Central VT what they think of the way the state caters to the
population mass in Burlington. Ask someone in upstate NY what they think of
NYC running the show for all of NY. Illinois and Chicago. Ask someone in North
Adams MA about what they think of the people in the Boston area. You'll often
get something like "they're nothing like me but they basically run the state
and tell me how to live my life only because there's so many of them"

Here's an example. Some hillbilly who wants to shoot a deer in upstate NY has
to pay his way through all sorts of red tape in order to put an animal that's
generally a pest (since there's so many of them) in his freezer. I talked to a
game warden from NY who mentioned that even though it's illegal to take deer
with .22, more deer are taken with .22 than any other caliber and his personal
opinion was that because the policy and procedure around firearms and hunting
permits/tags was expensive and bothersome people who intend to keep what they
shoot just shoot what they please when they're given the opportunity (i.e. see
deer on drive home from work, stop, shoot deer, put deer in truck, continue
driving home) and .22 is the most convenient caliber for doing this because
.22 revolvers are (relatively) cheap and plentiful. He went on to say that the
rules and regulations are in tune with what a suburb of NY might want and not
really appropriate in the rural areas and that it causes a lot of grief
because once people start ignoring parts of the law it's a gateway to ignoring
other parts. All of this was in the context of fish and game.

From a utilitarian standpoint it makes sense to favor the many in the city
over the few in the countryside but there's usually a limit to how far you can
apply general rules to social issues...

"At my house, I worry about whether the well will go dry. I lock the driveway
gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 p.m., I go to the door armed.
Each night, I check the security lights in the barnyard and watch to ensure
that coyotes aren't creeping too close from the vineyard. I wage a constant
battle against the squirrels, woodpeckers and gophers that undermine the
foundation, poke holes in the sheds and destroy irrigation ditches."

...this seems pretty atypical for someone living in the middle of nowhere.
Most people grab their gun if someone they're not expecting comes to the door
at 10pm regardless of where you live. Pretty much nobody has security lights,
some people have lights on their driveway so they can work at night but not
specifically security lights. Nobody without small livestock (sheep) cares
about coyotes. Once the dumb ones do something dumb they get turned into
evolutionary dead ends via some hot lead.

~~~
RyJones
22LR is marginal for taking deer at close range with a rifle. Taking one with
a revolver would require almost contact distance to be tenable - and if you
shoot it in the lung or heart, it's going to run a long way until it dies.

I doubt the person telling you the story has much experience with taking deer,
let alone with a 22.

~~~
griffordson
And the idea that someone is going to poach a deer and throw it in the back of
the truck on the way home from work is also laughable. The penalties for
poaching are far too harsh for anyone who cares about ever hunting, fishing,
or owning a gun for the rest of their lives. It's not something that happens
in broad daylight for sure.

~~~
rcurry
Oh man, you'd be surprised - I'm an avid predator hunter and spend ridiculous
amounts of time out in hay fields at 2:00 AM with a night vision system, and
you would not believe the stories I've got about poachers. One night, I had a
couple of good old boys roll up and shoot a deer that couldn't have been more
than about 75 yards away from me.

EDIT: There's a whole cottage industry around robot wildlife that are used to
catch poachers, both day and night:
[http://www.roboticwildlife.com/enforcement_decoys/index.php](http://www.roboticwildlife.com/enforcement_decoys/index.php)

------
carsongross
Perhaps America, the concept, deserves to be threatened at this point. There
is increasingly little binding "us" together as a nation at this point: some
historical borders, increasingly irrelevant legal and social structures, a few
holidays. There is no common foundational creed or concept.

Perhaps its time to politely say our goodbyes.

~~~
jedmeyers
I disagree with the premise that there is little binding that holds us
together. I hope we all still consider the Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness to be of the same high importance as Founding Fathers did.

~~~
carsongross
That isn't the case anymore, and it is becoming less the case as time goes on.
Life? Sure, but every country at least pays lip service to that now. Pursuit
of happiness? A pretty, but vacuous concept. Liberty? The only concept of the
bunch with any teeth, and, since the Irish, German and Jewish immigrations of
the 1800's, a concept in decline.

America is no longer a nation, rather it is a multi-ethinic empire, held
together by force and historical momentum.

------
hugh4
Idea for solving two problems at once: require every prospective college
student to spend a certain term (six months, whatever) performing agricultural
labour in order to qualify.

~~~
_delirium
Reminds me of the Maoist solution to the urban/rural divide: send the urban
elites to work on the farms for a period, so they could unlearn their
bourgeois attitudes, and learn how the rural masses live [1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_the_Countryside_Moveme...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_to_the_Countryside_Movement)

