10 ms·

Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

92 points by iamthirsty 9y ago

TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
Almost the only people doing well in rural America are those with generational wealth. I know plenty of people from my small hometown that have been doing okay with their farms. One of them has a gravel business. Those without such luck are either moving to a bigger city or experiencing a declining quality of life, and they're coping with drugs, meth mostly. I can't imagine what that would be like in areas that haven't been able to build that generational wealth. The question is, how do we get rural economic development going again?
- latencyloser 9y ago
  Would remote work help? I would think encouraging or allowing more 'white-collar' workers to be more spread out throughout the country would help increase demand in places other than large cities and tech hubs. I, for one, miss rural life (wide open space, less traffic, mom and pop stores, etc.) but unfortunately my career as a programmer doesn't cater to that lifestyle all that well.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Well, yes and no. It would help unless those jobs were shipped overseas. Many jobs that can be done remotely end up outsourced eventually. My father, who is a software developer, works remotely and makes an obscene amount of money for his area, but his position is not normal.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    A few generations of really focused, quality education would help a lot more. Until then, I'm afraid it's a bit of a mess.
    - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      How would education bring back jobs to rural America?
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        Education would make some of these people employable in the first place, and in jobs which a handful of robot arms can’t do better.
      - kuro-kuris 9y ago
        Making an educated guess: better education with regards to job opportunities requirements allows you to compete in a smaller market so your work won't be offshored.
      - Clubber 9y ago
        It won't. You will just have educated people that now have to move away to get jobs. It's a simple easy answer until you think about step #2, getting a job in rural America.
    - megaman22 9y ago
      It'll be a bit of a mess in any case. In a lot of rural school districts, you've got better than half of the students on free-and-reduced lunches, and often upwards of a quarter or a third of the students on IEPs. I grew up in such a place, my mother still teaches in that district. You really need to fix the basic underlying economic issues, so that you don't have kids coming to school hungry, and you don't have the best and brightest of the community fleeing so they can find work.
      - QAPereo 9y ago
        Absolutely! Frankly I'd argue that feeding your students should be a universal no-brainer anyway, especially when they can't afford it themselves. We know too damned much about the link between ability to learn and retain information, and a good nutritional intake to pretend that schools can ignore it to shave $$'s. The problem is that public education is public and so it runs into various forms of ideological resistance on that basis. Worse, the power of local districts to shape educational policy leads to predictable deficits, often also driven by ideology/politics. We have the money, we just choose to spend it on healthcare inflation, and weapons to sell. We don't see an immediate profit in education, so it's sidelined or privatized. We are shortsighted idiots, as a species.
  - rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
    Let's say you have a reasonably well-paying remote job and you could live anywhere. Let's also say you're married and have children. Do you want them to go to good schools? Do you want them to receive quality healthcare that does not break the bank? Do you want to use convenient services like Uber/Lyft when the need arises? Do you want access to a network of professionals that can help you grow your career? If you answered yes to these questions, you're not going to find many places rural America that satisfy your needs. At best you'll end up in an outer-exurbia like greater Atlanta. I don't think remote work of a few well-paid professionals is a viable and sustainable solution for rural America.
    - ashark 9y ago
      I'd probably pick a smallish (sub-250k population) city, I think. The kind that rural folks mean when they say they're going to The City to shop. Maybe a "university town". Beats exurbs or ultra-pricey real cities. The trick is finding one small enough that you aren't stuck with shitty schools if you want to live in the city core.
      - rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
        Well that often tends to be the case. Most college towns, even little ones, are so much more expensive than the countryside. Here in Ithaca NY, the property market (relative to income) is ungodly expensive, because most people either bought their houses decades ago when they were affordable, or they're college students who will pay any price in rent to get their quality education. Some people commute in from as far away as Syracuse or even Pennsylvania. Property prices are much more affordable 15 minutes drive in any direction, but no college professor or staff would want their kids going to any of the crackerjack rural schools. Can't say I speak for the Midwest, so it could be different there.
      - eropple 9y ago
        That's part of it. The other part is transit. Cars are bad; I don't really want to ever own one again and I definitely don't want to have to drive one every day if I do. So anywhere I'd want to move would need to either be super walkable or have transit. And small cities usually, IME, aren't the first and don't have the second. I live in a 50K-population city adjoining Boston, so they exist, I just don't know how well they exist independent of bigger cities.
  - kylehotchkiss 9y ago
    I spent 4 years at my tech job in rural Virginia. Internet there was faster, cheaper, and more reliable than it has been in San Diego, where I am now. I had lots of friends there, it was always fun to enjoy the outdoors with them. So it can help, but you eventually feel like a fish out of water when nearly nobody you know understands what it is you do. I feel like we'll get there one day in the USA, paying under $1000 for rent for a comfortable home is a lifestyle I wish i could see more technical people adopt.
- rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
  This is true and is hardly limited to the Old South. Rural Upstate New York is effectively in the same boat. Frankly I think trying to develop rural America to be economically competitive to urban America is a bad idea wrapped in the cloak of a well-meaning idea. Infrastructure and services and much (like 2-5x) more expensive over a wide area. And you need a LOT of infrastrucute to reasonably support a professional class economy (just think how many specialist lawyers and doctors you would need before you could justify leaving a metro area). Instead, we should focus our attention on lowering the cost of living in cities and enact policies that make it easy for people in rural, poorer areas to move to cities, such as a government-paid waiver on the first few months of rent, or a state-subsidized relocation package. There are a lot of people who would like to move but cannot save up enough to pay for relocation, security deposit, and things like that while they look for metro work. Last time we seriously developed rural America it was in the 1930s, when the needs of an industrial economy were different and primarily the benefit was cheap rural manufacturing labor over costly metro manufacturing labor. But now far cheaper labor and supply chains are in China, so the New Deal framework is moot in this circumstance. Make it easier for rural folks to come to cities, instead of trying to smear cities across the countryside. I can't see any other sustainable solution. That being said, it doesn't mean everybody has to pack up for the coasts. A lot could be done to make inland cities like Indianapolis or Chattanooga or St. Louis more attractive to rural residents of their respective states.
  - ashark 9y ago
    Can confirm that from the perspective of a Midwesterner who grew up largely in smaller towns, one grows up feeling that moving to a major coastal city is nearly impossible. Even as a software developer I have to remind myself that no, really, I could move to one of those places. It's a hard mindset to get out of, and for most, it's also kind of true. Smaller non-coastal cities retain, in the mind of the typical rural midwesterner, a reputation for high crime and violent racial unrest (among those old enough to remember the 60s and 70s, anyway). The former especially isn't entirely undeserved. And anyway, even those are shockingly expensive by rural standards, unless you want to live in the very worst parts of the city where the concerns of high crime and terrible, dangerous schools are especially valid. To say that moving to the city, for most values of "the city", isn't broadly appealing to the rural set, is accurate.
- ajross 9y ago
  > The question is, how do we get rural economic development going again? That's like asking how to revive the blacksmith industry in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. These regions aren't declining because of inattention, they're declining because their native industries are shrinking. Surely there are regulatory treatments that can be applied here to relieve some of the suffering, but "return to the good old days" isn't an option.
  - tomjen3 9y ago
    I might agree with you if gp had said how to get the coal industries going again - but is there really _nothing_ which can usefully be made in community with lots of space and (compared to the bay area) insanely cheap housing?
    - quuquuquu 9y ago
      Plenty of things could be manufactured or coded in these areas. Cheap housing and materials in general mean you could make a really awesome hacker house or even factory for physical goods. Of course the real problems are: 1) VCs don't invest here 2) A startup's success is usually based on its ability to sell itself (using networking contacts) to a larger corporation 3) who then REALLY don't want to have an office in Nowhere, Alabama If they did want to do it, they would have done it already. Lord knows they have the money.
    - ajross 9y ago
      It's cheap housing in the sense of price seen by the consumer due to scarcity. Housing in rural areas actually costs significantly more to produce and maintain in real economic terms. The solution to high San Francisco housing costs is high density development in exurbs and other cities, and very much not "let's all move to Nebraska".
- cletus 9y ago
  Personally I think the current socioeconomic trends are firmly against small towns and they're all dying and this will continue until something drastic changes. For one, family farms have largely been replaced by agribusiness, which tends to be far more economical. For another, employment and home ownership trends are bad for small towns. Employment is now more short-term. There are hardly any "jobs for life" now. This makes those with limited employment prospects (in that there are few employers in their area) particularly vulnerable to change. Home ownership makes the labour market as a whole less flexible/mobile. The solution to these problems is urbanization. What's more, the suburbs formed in WW2 with the explosion in private vehicle ownership and, for some reason, governments actively subsidized it. People will often declare (here and elsewhere) that they like to live in the suburbs. It's cheaper, the lots and houses are larger and so on. Thing is, no one is paying the true cost of this in terms of all the infrastructure to support it, be it roads, railways, utilities, schools, hospitals and so on. If you look at the major urban centers, they tend to generate a surplus and that surplus is used to subsidize those that live outside that city. It's true in NYC. It's true in London. At some point I expect this to end, which will strengthen the trend towards urbanization. One problem is that construction pretty much everywhere is becoming unaffordable. This applies to housing and infrastructure. Homeowners get excited about their rising property values but that's pretty short term thinking. There was an article posted here last week about how all the cheap eats are disappearing from SF. Well, real estate costs (land + construction) are an input into literally everything. You simply can't have cheap services in an area with expensive real estate in the long term. Construction costs are a real problem eg [1]. Australia, which once had a great standard of living, is now ridiculously expensive in local times. Honestly, it's like the whole country is Vancouver. IIRC the median house price in Sydney is now A$1.1m (up from ~$650k ~7 years ago). [1]: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/why-is-affordable-housing-so-expensive/523707/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/why-is-affordable-hou...
  - Recurecur 9y ago
    It rather amazes me how intelligent people who've lived through some of the most rapidly changing times ever seem sure they know the future. Imagine a glut of cheap energy, rapidly improving materials science, pervasive robotics, and large-scale 3D printing. I think it's almost inevitable that construction costs would come way down. Between telepresence and cheap transportation, the need to aggregate people into urban environments would cease. I think it's highly likely things will go in this direction at some point.
- mod 9y ago
  I wonder, how "well" did previous generations do? The bar has been moved so far, so quickly, that it's hard (for me) to say. I would venture that folks in rural America are living better than they ever have. I see truly destitute people, too...I live in one of the poorer counties of one of the poorer states in the USA. But people aren't starving, and depending how far back you go, that was a reality people would have to face. Point is, we're now comparing rural incomes to city incomes, and thinking "well the farmer is busting his ass with a lot of risk to make 45k, and the baby-faced web dev in the city can make 90k twiddling his fingers." Sure, but they're both...okay. I'm not sure we have to make them equal. I'm not sure we can.
PatientTrades 9y ago
I grew up in Newport News, Virginia. Its one of the towns on the map that is nearly black. I can tell you first hand that many in that city still feel the aftermath of slavery. The poor illiteracy, cognition skills, financial mobility, health, etc, within the black community is truly staggering. I now live in California, but for anybody that claims slavery had no long term effect, go to some of those towns you will be shocked.
- beingmyself2 9y ago
  How do these disadvantaged individuals compare with those who never left Africa? Are we brave enough to control for pre-Antebellum ancestry?
  - dang 9y ago
    We've banned this account for serial ideological trolling. Would you please not create accounts to do this with? It's not what this site is for.
  - PatientTrades 9y ago
    > How do these disadvantaged individuals compare with those who never left Africa? Not sure if you are aware but the large majority of brown and dark brown skinned (black) Americans are actually indigenous Aboriginal (Native Americans). Most "Blacks" in America can be directly traced back to natives who were already in America when Europeans arrived in the 1400s. Google dark skinned Indians you will see pictures of what im talking about. Its really naïve to think that all the millions of Blacks here today all came from Africa or even have links to Africa. Just some facts that are left out of the history books and never taught.
    - beingmyself2 9y ago
      So the slave ships were not a thing, they just enslaved the people already here? Do you have some sort of real source on these facts?
occultist_throw 9y ago
Ive always taken an unpopular view about slavery. "We never quit doing slavery." It is true the Constitution was amended after the Civil war to include banning of slavery in most circumstances. However, slavery is explicitly still allowed as a "punishment for a crime". Instead of "Black = Slave", it's "Black = criminal , criminal = slave". After all, it only takes only 6-12 angry white men to find you guilty. I would think one of the major points BLM should be making, is removal of slavery as a punishment. It has too many very degenerate ways it can fail - and in some ways I think were very intended. But I doubt in this political climate of this happening. EDIT: Boy, I said it was an unpopular view. Wasn't expecting this much hatred and contention, along with this much -1's. I mean, it's not like the 13th amendment explicitly says.
- cletus 9y ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted (+1 from me) but this is essentially the basis of the Netflix documentary 13th [1]. The thesis is that slavery was replaced by excessive incarceration of African Americans, which were then used as cheap or free labour... much like slaves were. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
  - macrael 9y ago
    And before that it was the thesis of the book The New Jim Crow. Arguing that the modern incarceration system came into being as a system of control to replace the Jim Crow laws that arose as a system of control to replace slavery. The most 'aha' connection there was that a shocking percentage of black men have felony convictions of some sort or another, and we deny felons the right to vote in most states. Jim Crow indeed.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      > we deny felons the right to vote in most states. Only while incarcerated. http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-voting-rights.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-v...
thriftwy 9y ago
It's interesting to consider how having fertile soil reliably gets you. You would imagine it is a good thing until you realize it's a guaranteed case of Dutch disease, one that is reliant on having a lot of indentured labour around. And then it will stop being profitable and demand subsidies.
deleted 9y ago
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fmitchell0 9y ago
As an engineer, I always get frustrated when it seems like a lot of our customers are more concerned with the perception of the existence of something, rather than its actual existence. I'm continuing to learn (UX not withstanding) that just because you solve a problem, it doesn't mean the user believes the problem is solved. As a black engineer, I've often thought that if there were data, science, math, and straight forward research on the more than $300B+ the slavery system provided for the U.S. in free labor (think of the biggest costs to business) and it's effects, that maybe we could have a conversation about data-driven solutions. Think of how we've added data to sports and created a new economy on improving outcomes because the definitions of success are clear with many pathways. Looking at this thread, which I assume to be mostly engineers, slightly disabuses me of this notion. The longest threads are about the use of the word slavery (perception) and rural, (mostly white) america (not even sure why this is relevant).
- swasheck 9y ago
  > Think of how we've added data to sports and created a new economy on improving outcomes because the definitions of success are clear with many pathways. I've thought about this, too - using data to work toward solutions to problems that plague our society. I'm constantly haunted by the belief that there is a set of solutions "out there" but am bedeviled by my own inability to accumulate, homogenize, and aggregate that data that I _can_ find. Even still, sites like 1degree.org do give me hope that the data is available and that there are folks who are willing to do the work of using it (though that's an admittedly different application). At any rate, thank you for your post. It's stirred that thought within me again.
  - lostlogin 9y ago
    An observation on how data gets used: someone decides what they want to do then dig out or fund getting the data that supports the plan. How do you avoid that?
jkolyer 9y ago
More virtue signaling from Nate "the landslide" Silver
- dang 9y ago
  If you can't stop posting unsubstantive, inflammatory remarks, we're going to have to ban you. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531321 and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

92 points by iamthirsty 9y ago

Almost the only people doing well in rural America are those with generational wealth. I know plenty of people from my small hometown that have been doing okay with their farms. One of them has a gravel business. Those without such luck are either moving to a bigger city or experiencing a declining quality of life, and they're coping with drugs, meth mostly. I can't imagine what that would be like in areas that haven't been able to build that generational wealth. The question is, how do we get rural economic development going again?

latencyloser 9y ago
Would remote work help? I would think encouraging or allowing more 'white-collar' workers to be more spread out throughout the country would help increase demand in places other than large cities and tech hubs. I, for one, miss rural life (wide open space, less traffic, mom and pop stores, etc.) but unfortunately my career as a programmer doesn't cater to that lifestyle all that well.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Well, yes and no. It would help unless those jobs were shipped overseas. Many jobs that can be done remotely end up outsourced eventually. My father, who is a software developer, works remotely and makes an obscene amount of money for his area, but his position is not normal.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  A few generations of really focused, quality education would help a lot more. Until then, I'm afraid it's a bit of a mess.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    How would education bring back jobs to rural America?
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Education would make some of these people employable in the first place, and in jobs which a handful of robot arms can’t do better.
    - kuro-kuris 9y ago
      Making an educated guess: better education with regards to job opportunities requirements allows you to compete in a smaller market so your work won't be offshored.
    - Clubber 9y ago
      It won't. You will just have educated people that now have to move away to get jobs. It's a simple easy answer until you think about step #2, getting a job in rural America.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    It'll be a bit of a mess in any case. In a lot of rural school districts, you've got better than half of the students on free-and-reduced lunches, and often upwards of a quarter or a third of the students on IEPs. I grew up in such a place, my mother still teaches in that district. You really need to fix the basic underlying economic issues, so that you don't have kids coming to school hungry, and you don't have the best and brightest of the community fleeing so they can find work.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      Absolutely! Frankly I'd argue that feeding your students should be a universal no-brainer anyway, especially when they can't afford it themselves. We know too damned much about the link between ability to learn and retain information, and a good nutritional intake to pretend that schools can ignore it to shave $$'s. The problem is that public education is public and so it runs into various forms of ideological resistance on that basis. Worse, the power of local districts to shape educational policy leads to predictable deficits, often also driven by ideology/politics. We have the money, we just choose to spend it on healthcare inflation, and weapons to sell. We don't see an immediate profit in education, so it's sidelined or privatized. We are shortsighted idiots, as a species.
- rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
  Let's say you have a reasonably well-paying remote job and you could live anywhere. Let's also say you're married and have children. Do you want them to go to good schools? Do you want them to receive quality healthcare that does not break the bank? Do you want to use convenient services like Uber/Lyft when the need arises? Do you want access to a network of professionals that can help you grow your career? If you answered yes to these questions, you're not going to find many places rural America that satisfy your needs. At best you'll end up in an outer-exurbia like greater Atlanta. I don't think remote work of a few well-paid professionals is a viable and sustainable solution for rural America.
  - ashark 9y ago
    I'd probably pick a smallish (sub-250k population) city, I think. The kind that rural folks mean when they say they're going to The City to shop. Maybe a "university town". Beats exurbs or ultra-pricey real cities. The trick is finding one small enough that you aren't stuck with shitty schools if you want to live in the city core.
    - rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
      Well that often tends to be the case. Most college towns, even little ones, are so much more expensive than the countryside. Here in Ithaca NY, the property market (relative to income) is ungodly expensive, because most people either bought their houses decades ago when they were affordable, or they're college students who will pay any price in rent to get their quality education. Some people commute in from as far away as Syracuse or even Pennsylvania. Property prices are much more affordable 15 minutes drive in any direction, but no college professor or staff would want their kids going to any of the crackerjack rural schools. Can't say I speak for the Midwest, so it could be different there.
    - eropple 9y ago
      That's part of it. The other part is transit. Cars are bad; I don't really want to ever own one again and I definitely don't want to have to drive one every day if I do. So anywhere I'd want to move would need to either be super walkable or have transit. And small cities usually, IME, aren't the first and don't have the second. I live in a 50K-population city adjoining Boston, so they exist, I just don't know how well they exist independent of bigger cities.
- kylehotchkiss 9y ago
  I spent 4 years at my tech job in rural Virginia. Internet there was faster, cheaper, and more reliable than it has been in San Diego, where I am now. I had lots of friends there, it was always fun to enjoy the outdoors with them. So it can help, but you eventually feel like a fish out of water when nearly nobody you know understands what it is you do. I feel like we'll get there one day in the USA, paying under $1000 for rent for a comfortable home is a lifestyle I wish i could see more technical people adopt.
rm_-rf_slash 9y ago
This is true and is hardly limited to the Old South. Rural Upstate New York is effectively in the same boat. Frankly I think trying to develop rural America to be economically competitive to urban America is a bad idea wrapped in the cloak of a well-meaning idea. Infrastructure and services and much (like 2-5x) more expensive over a wide area. And you need a LOT of infrastrucute to reasonably support a professional class economy (just think how many specialist lawyers and doctors you would need before you could justify leaving a metro area). Instead, we should focus our attention on lowering the cost of living in cities and enact policies that make it easy for people in rural, poorer areas to move to cities, such as a government-paid waiver on the first few months of rent, or a state-subsidized relocation package. There are a lot of people who would like to move but cannot save up enough to pay for relocation, security deposit, and things like that while they look for metro work. Last time we seriously developed rural America it was in the 1930s, when the needs of an industrial economy were different and primarily the benefit was cheap rural manufacturing labor over costly metro manufacturing labor. But now far cheaper labor and supply chains are in China, so the New Deal framework is moot in this circumstance. Make it easier for rural folks to come to cities, instead of trying to smear cities across the countryside. I can't see any other sustainable solution. That being said, it doesn't mean everybody has to pack up for the coasts. A lot could be done to make inland cities like Indianapolis or Chattanooga or St. Louis more attractive to rural residents of their respective states.
- ashark 9y ago
  Can confirm that from the perspective of a Midwesterner who grew up largely in smaller towns, one grows up feeling that moving to a major coastal city is nearly impossible. Even as a software developer I have to remind myself that no, really, I could move to one of those places. It's a hard mindset to get out of, and for most, it's also kind of true. Smaller non-coastal cities retain, in the mind of the typical rural midwesterner, a reputation for high crime and violent racial unrest (among those old enough to remember the 60s and 70s, anyway). The former especially isn't entirely undeserved. And anyway, even those are shockingly expensive by rural standards, unless you want to live in the very worst parts of the city where the concerns of high crime and terrible, dangerous schools are especially valid. To say that moving to the city, for most values of "the city", isn't broadly appealing to the rural set, is accurate.
ajross 9y ago
> The question is, how do we get rural economic development going again? That's like asking how to revive the blacksmith industry in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. These regions aren't declining because of inattention, they're declining because their native industries are shrinking. Surely there are regulatory treatments that can be applied here to relieve some of the suffering, but "return to the good old days" isn't an option.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  I might agree with you if gp had said how to get the coal industries going again - but is there really _nothing_ which can usefully be made in community with lots of space and (compared to the bay area) insanely cheap housing?
  - quuquuquu 9y ago
    Plenty of things could be manufactured or coded in these areas. Cheap housing and materials in general mean you could make a really awesome hacker house or even factory for physical goods. Of course the real problems are: 1) VCs don't invest here 2) A startup's success is usually based on its ability to sell itself (using networking contacts) to a larger corporation 3) who then REALLY don't want to have an office in Nowhere, Alabama If they did want to do it, they would have done it already. Lord knows they have the money.
  - ajross 9y ago
    It's cheap housing in the sense of price seen by the consumer due to scarcity. Housing in rural areas actually costs significantly more to produce and maintain in real economic terms. The solution to high San Francisco housing costs is high density development in exurbs and other cities, and very much not "let's all move to Nebraska".
cletus 9y ago
Personally I think the current socioeconomic trends are firmly against small towns and they're all dying and this will continue until something drastic changes. For one, family farms have largely been replaced by agribusiness, which tends to be far more economical. For another, employment and home ownership trends are bad for small towns. Employment is now more short-term. There are hardly any "jobs for life" now. This makes those with limited employment prospects (in that there are few employers in their area) particularly vulnerable to change. Home ownership makes the labour market as a whole less flexible/mobile. The solution to these problems is urbanization. What's more, the suburbs formed in WW2 with the explosion in private vehicle ownership and, for some reason, governments actively subsidized it. People will often declare (here and elsewhere) that they like to live in the suburbs. It's cheaper, the lots and houses are larger and so on. Thing is, no one is paying the true cost of this in terms of all the infrastructure to support it, be it roads, railways, utilities, schools, hospitals and so on. If you look at the major urban centers, they tend to generate a surplus and that surplus is used to subsidize those that live outside that city. It's true in NYC. It's true in London. At some point I expect this to end, which will strengthen the trend towards urbanization. One problem is that construction pretty much everywhere is becoming unaffordable. This applies to housing and infrastructure. Homeowners get excited about their rising property values but that's pretty short term thinking. There was an article posted here last week about how all the cheap eats are disappearing from SF. Well, real estate costs (land + construction) are an input into literally everything. You simply can't have cheap services in an area with expensive real estate in the long term. Construction costs are a real problem eg [1]. Australia, which once had a great standard of living, is now ridiculously expensive in local times. Honestly, it's like the whole country is Vancouver. IIRC the median house price in Sydney is now A$1.1m (up from ~$650k ~7 years ago). [1]: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/why-is-affordable-housing-so-expensive/523707/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/why-is-affordable-hou...
- Recurecur 9y ago
  It rather amazes me how intelligent people who've lived through some of the most rapidly changing times ever seem sure they know the future. Imagine a glut of cheap energy, rapidly improving materials science, pervasive robotics, and large-scale 3D printing. I think it's almost inevitable that construction costs would come way down. Between telepresence and cheap transportation, the need to aggregate people into urban environments would cease. I think it's highly likely things will go in this direction at some point.
mod 9y ago
I wonder, how "well" did previous generations do? The bar has been moved so far, so quickly, that it's hard (for me) to say. I would venture that folks in rural America are living better than they ever have. I see truly destitute people, too...I live in one of the poorer counties of one of the poorer states in the USA. But people aren't starving, and depending how far back you go, that was a reality people would have to face. Point is, we're now comparing rural incomes to city incomes, and thinking "well the farmer is busting his ass with a lot of risk to make 45k, and the baby-faced web dev in the city can make 90k twiddling his fingers." Sure, but they're both...okay. I'm not sure we have to make them equal. I'm not sure we can.

PatientTrades 9y ago

I grew up in Newport News, Virginia. Its one of the towns on the map that is nearly black. I can tell you first hand that many in that city still feel the aftermath of slavery. The poor illiteracy, cognition skills, financial mobility, health, etc, within the black community is truly staggering. I now live in California, but for anybody that claims slavery had no long term effect, go to some of those towns you will be shocked.

beingmyself2 9y ago
How do these disadvantaged individuals compare with those who never left Africa? Are we brave enough to control for pre-Antebellum ancestry?
- dang 9y ago
  We've banned this account for serial ideological trolling. Would you please not create accounts to do this with? It's not what this site is for.
- PatientTrades 9y ago
  > How do these disadvantaged individuals compare with those who never left Africa? Not sure if you are aware but the large majority of brown and dark brown skinned (black) Americans are actually indigenous Aboriginal (Native Americans). Most "Blacks" in America can be directly traced back to natives who were already in America when Europeans arrived in the 1400s. Google dark skinned Indians you will see pictures of what im talking about. Its really naïve to think that all the millions of Blacks here today all came from Africa or even have links to Africa. Just some facts that are left out of the history books and never taught.
  - beingmyself2 9y ago
    So the slave ships were not a thing, they just enslaved the people already here? Do you have some sort of real source on these facts?

occultist_throw 9y ago

Ive always taken an unpopular view about slavery. "We never quit doing slavery." It is true the Constitution was amended after the Civil war to include banning of slavery in most circumstances. However, slavery is explicitly still allowed as a "punishment for a crime". Instead of "Black = Slave", it's "Black = criminal , criminal = slave". After all, it only takes only 6-12 angry white men to find you guilty. I would think one of the major points BLM should be making, is removal of slavery as a punishment. It has too many very degenerate ways it can fail - and in some ways I think were very intended. But I doubt in this political climate of this happening. EDIT: Boy, I said it was an unpopular view. Wasn't expecting this much hatred and contention, along with this much -1's. I mean, it's not like the 13th amendment explicitly says.

cletus 9y ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted (+1 from me) but this is essentially the basis of the Netflix documentary 13th [1]. The thesis is that slavery was replaced by excessive incarceration of African Americans, which were then used as cheap or free labour... much like slaves were. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)
- macrael 9y ago
  And before that it was the thesis of the book The New Jim Crow. Arguing that the modern incarceration system came into being as a system of control to replace the Jim Crow laws that arose as a system of control to replace slavery. The most 'aha' connection there was that a shocking percentage of black men have felony convictions of some sort or another, and we deny felons the right to vote in most states. Jim Crow indeed.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    > we deny felons the right to vote in most states. Only while incarcerated. http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-voting-rights.aspx http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/felon-v...

thriftwy 9y ago

It's interesting to consider how having fertile soil reliably gets you. You would imagine it is a good thing until you realize it's a guaranteed case of Dutch disease, one that is reliant on having a lot of indentured labour around. And then it will stop being profitable and demand subsidies.

deleted 9y ago

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fmitchell0 9y ago

As an engineer, I always get frustrated when it seems like a lot of our customers are more concerned with the perception of the existence of something, rather than its actual existence. I'm continuing to learn (UX not withstanding) that just because you solve a problem, it doesn't mean the user believes the problem is solved. As a black engineer, I've often thought that if there were data, science, math, and straight forward research on the more than $300B+ the slavery system provided for the U.S. in free labor (think of the biggest costs to business) and it's effects, that maybe we could have a conversation about data-driven solutions. Think of how we've added data to sports and created a new economy on improving outcomes because the definitions of success are clear with many pathways. Looking at this thread, which I assume to be mostly engineers, slightly disabuses me of this notion. The longest threads are about the use of the word slavery (perception) and rural, (mostly white) america (not even sure why this is relevant).

swasheck 9y ago
> Think of how we've added data to sports and created a new economy on improving outcomes because the definitions of success are clear with many pathways. I've thought about this, too - using data to work toward solutions to problems that plague our society. I'm constantly haunted by the belief that there is a set of solutions "out there" but am bedeviled by my own inability to accumulate, homogenize, and aggregate that data that I _can_ find. Even still, sites like 1degree.org do give me hope that the data is available and that there are folks who are willing to do the work of using it (though that's an admittedly different application). At any rate, thank you for your post. It's stirred that thought within me again.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  An observation on how data gets used: someone decides what they want to do then dig out or fund getting the data that supports the plan. How do you avoid that?

jkolyer 9y ago

More virtue signaling from Nate "the landslide" Silver

dang 9y ago
If you can't stop posting unsubstantive, inflammatory remarks, we're going to have to ban you. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15531321 and https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.