10 ms·

A lot of upperwardly mobile, ambitious people don't realize this, or they generally understand it only in terms of chastising their high school peers who stayed

A lot of upperwardly mobile, ambitious people don't realize this, or they generally understand it only in terms of chastising their high school peers who stayed home. If you build a society based on the assumption everyone will simply move and re-skill to the regions with economic opportunity, you get a lot of regions of bitter people who stayed behind somewhere and watched their local economy get destroyed by trade deals and technological advances, and that's how you get an anti-globalization populist political movement.

Fauntleroy 4y ago
I'm one of the "upwardly mobile" folks who moved out, and I'm a bit shocked at all the comments here treating the headline like it's a bad thing. Having a local and consistent community is an essential part of a "good" city. I know that many of the places we moved away from were... lacking, but simply abandoning everything isn't going to help at all either.
- eddsh1994 4y ago
  I have moved quite a bit myself and honestly still miss 'home'. Hopefully soon I'll stay somewhere for the rest of my life, or a good chunk of it, so I can be 'home' again. My wifes a researcher and we follow the academic positions so I probably have another 3 or 4 locations to live in first (: There are a lot of perks of having that stable community feeling around you.
parker_mountain 4y ago
Part of it, as well, is that a lot of these regions that people moved out of are the suburbs. Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading.
- Yhippa 4y ago
  > Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading. Genuinely curious: what is the basis for that claim? Even if you don't cite a source. Edit: these responses are very insightful. Thank you all for the responses.
  - ethanbond 4y ago
    At least American suburbs are ultra car-dependent meaning you're not walking anywhere (literally physically degrading to both you and the environment) and you do not have chance social encounters at nearly the frequency of any walking city (socially degrading). This is not to say there aren't real benefits to life in the burbs and serious disadvantages to city life, but it's fairly evident by now that American suburbia is not the utopian dream it was sold as.
    - Alupis 4y ago
      Perhaps for you city dweller's, but for the rest of us, we really like our suburbs. Not being able to walk everywhere is literally not even a factor I look for when moving to a new area. I want quiet, safety, cleanliness, privacy and affordability. I have yet to see the metropolis that checks all of those boxes, or any of them for the matter.
      - ethanbond 4y ago
        Pick any moderate sized city in Europe! There's no reason Americans have to choose between glass and concrete imposing megastructures a la (parts of) NYC or sprawling car-dependent and socially atomized burbs a la Houston/Phoenix etc. We can have moderately dense, highly walkable, transit-connected, safe, clean, private, quiet, socially vibrant, affordable towns and suburbs all over the country. We just choose not to in large part because many Americans, brainwashed by The Automobile, can't even imagine such a state of affairs.
        oceanplexian 4y ago
        If ZEV’s and alternative energy take off, and self driving eventually lives up to the hype, public transportation will be obsolete with the exception of dense cities. Assuming such a future comes to pass (And that’s obviously a big question mark), desirability and property values in suburban-like neighborhoods would go up, since suburbs are no longer at a disadvantage for all those things you are arguing, like walkability, socially vibrancy, etc. A quick tap on your phone and 15 minutes later you can be at the bar or the shops or whatever else. Combine that with the remote work revolution and the future is looking great for suburbs and terrible for cities. If anything, I’d argue Americans are ahead of the curve. In a society where self driving cars are cheap, environmentally sustainable, and always available people would naturally fan out into suburban living, with mixed-use development falling out of favor.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading. If the suburbs aren't sustainable, then what about rural? What about seaside? Where everything is super spread. It sounds to me that the "because roads" is an argument constantly made by those who levy taxes and by those who wants ever more taxes to be levied on others. I live in a super-spread out rural/seaside area where I drive across vineyards to drive my kid to school. Businesses here aren't making a lot of money and yet there are roads. I somehow don't buy that very hard that sell that the suburbs aren't sustainable "because roads". Do I really need to pay huge income taxes (France BTW) then 21% value added tax on everything I buy then 30% on any profit I'd make in the stock market, placing there money that's already been taxed? And paying four different (yup, four) taxes on real estate (land tax, "living tax", yearly tax on real estate wealth and now, the new, to me, one: "real estate tax for micro entrepreneurs")? The tax never stops. And then, in addition to that, I've got to listen telling me that my area is too spread out "because roads and sewers" and I should pack my stuff and go live in a city? Just FUCK THAT.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    It's not the same. Rural areas in Europe (and mostly anywhere else, for that matter; this is not about Euro-exceptionalism) are not 100% residential urban sprawl like the typical U.S. suburb. They have locally densified villages and towns, each with a self-sustaining mix of housing and local business. That's what a sensible model looks like.
    - beenBoutIT 4y ago
      The US doesn't keep local businesses the way Europe does. Corporations with local branches is about as close as we get. A small rural CVS next to a small rural Texaco next to a small rural Dennys is a rural town economy.
      - theGnuMe 4y ago
        Dollar Store not CVS. Dennys will be locally owned and not a Dennys diner. Might be the town bar though. May not be a Texaco, that will depend on where you live. There are some rural chain gas stations like Caseys though (great pizza). Your gas station might sell bait too. Maybe.
- egberts1 4y ago
  Secret is to foster flip economy in updating houses. Can't be crushing that too after what we did to our beleaguered housing industry.
082349872349872 4y ago
It's funny how globalised the anti-globalisation populist political movements may be. Yesterday's news included "Reichsbürger" getting busted in Deutschland for conspiring to coup, and it was mentioned the suspects were also pretty QAnon-aligned. However, Reichsbürger are not indigenous, but are derived from US "Sovereign Citizens", who result from an amalgam of nuttery derived from XIX and XX conspiracies wishing to stand athwart history yelling "stop!": from those who thought the 14A is bogus to those who thought the 16A is bogus to those who didn't care for the Civil Rights Act, etc. Anyway, all these conspiracies apparently became more mainstream in the 1970s US because of the many newly embittered people due to the farming policies of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz . (incidentally, our farming policy here is diametrically opposed to both "get big or get out" and "plant fencerow to fencerow", and we still have major political centre parties, as well as left and right wing parties. But that correlation may have no relation to causation...)
- pessimizer 4y ago
  This heavily underestimates the influence of Ezra Pound through his disciple and biographer Eustace Mullins. Butz certainly upped the economic pressure on rural people, but the theory is regular old European conspiratorial antisemitism as revived through Dreyfus, then post-WWI central European "stabbed in the back" fantasies, and interpreted by the fascist Europhile Pound. If the US government hadn't just completed a program of left-wing eradication in the early part of the 20c, the pressure probably would have turned rural people towards the populism that they had turned to throughout the 19c and very early 20c; the kind of populism that culminated in the 4-term FDR presidency and the New Deal. "Populism" as you use it here (to refer to right-wing antisemitic groups), was intentionally turned into a slur that was used to attack the working-class left-wing: > Most of the Progressives, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson, were bitter enemies of the Populists. In American political rhetoric, "populist" was originally associated with the Populist Party and related left-wing movements, but beginning in the 1950s it began to take on a more generic meaning, describing any anti-establishment movement regardless of its position on the left–right political spectrum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_Mullins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_Mullins ----- edit: as far as I can tell, the only two things that are characteristic across all European cultures are drinking cow's milk and conspiracist antisemitism. Although America further developed it and fed it back to Europe (note Ford's influence on Hitler), the framework is definitely European. And of course, a lot of fascism in Europe was financed by the US post-WWII.
tsol 4y ago
It's strange the level of distrust in the west over institutions that the majority of the world find completely uncontroversial. It takes a village to raise a child, and in a world without villages families are the biggest support system most people have. I have a feeling this is another instance of the minority being louder than the majority.
- terminal_d 4y ago
  > institutions that the majority of the world find completely uncontroversial Not even remotely true. And yes, as de-facto "management", most of the blame is on these "institutions".
  - tsol 4y ago
    Where in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, etc do they not value family highly? It's the traditional culture in most countries
- beenBoutIT 4y ago
  America lost most of those villages that raise children and families with two parents decades ago.
the_optimist 4y ago
There’s a deeper level here. Conforming economic, security, n judicial blocks to geography more strongly maps onto the governance structure for the US. In other words, this is a system that inherently creates and maintains divisions.
nonameiguess 4y ago
That honestly sounds like a lot of spurious causal assumptions. The Rust Belt and coal mining regions didn't get economically depressed because people left. People left because of the economic collapse. You seem to be saying if all those college kids just moved back to Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the people there wouldn't be mad about their economies being destroyed? Because they still would have been destroyed.
- fullshark 4y ago
  More people (economists/policy makers) just ignore the rust belt's (or local regional) problems, because aggregate GDP is going up and to the right and people just go where the labor is needed so everything is going great. We don't need factory workers anymore, just learn to code and travel across the country for a job what's the problem?
  - solveit 4y ago
    No, it's we don't need factory workers and factory towns any more, so travel across the country for a job because there's no alternative, the town is gone and nobody can save it. Learn to code isn't going to work for most people, sure, but travel across the country isn't something that can be avoided.
    - fullshark 4y ago
      Not everyone is agreeable to this prescription because they live in X and can't or don't want to move, and they then equate economic growth / globalization with economic death, cause that's what it means for their town and that's my original point.
kaitai 4y ago
Two sets of assumptions, though: * The "stay behind" terminology is both evocative and biased. I didn't "stay behind". I moved away several times, thousands of miles, and lived in other places that ambitious people live, and then moved back to within 10 miles of where I grew up because the quality of life is better here. I can afford more, I have cultural amenities like world-class music and art, I'm near family and old friends as well as new friends, and people aren't all totally consumed by their work. The "upwardly mobile ambitious" set can frankly get stultifyingly boring and disconnected. I like having friends in construction, non-profits, pet services, etc. * Like many Americans who really do "stay behind", I contribute to elder care in my family. A lot of people stay put because they need to care for someone, and America does not make it easy to get vulnerable or ill people services. This is part of what contributes to what you call the "bitterness" -- lack of support for child care, elder care, care for the mentally ill or those struggling with addiction, and in many cases it's a vicious circle: gotta stay in Podunkville to take care of grandma and your cousin 'cause you can't afford to get grandma other help and your cousin doesn't qualify for anything but SSI so he can't afford to move either, but staying in Podunkville you tank your own educational and job prospects, therefore keeping you in Podunkville forever. Sometimes it seems you can only truly be upwardly mobile if you can avoid caregiving responsibilities.
- justahuman74 4y ago
  > Sometimes it seems you can only truly be upwardly mobile if you can avoid caregiving responsibilities. This resonates strongly with me, I can't imagine being able to move around like I do when my parents become too old
cossatot 4y ago
While I partially agree with your assessment, it's worth noting that much of the dynamic settlement of the US has been based on commodity booms, which really can't be considered perpetual parts of the economy. People had to leave their homes to go clear the prairie, log virtually all of the US forest, mine the West Virginia coal and then the Wyoming coal after that, etc. Once those resources are used up, there is little left for people to do, regardless of technological advances that require fewer workers for the same output, much less trade deals (how much wood and grain do we import?). The economies oriented around renewable resources (Oregon timber for example) simply can't sustain as many people because the environment can't continually produce the output that it did during the initial exploitation. This of course affects the downstream, more industrial elements concentrated in cities as well, which process the ore and lumber and make engines and furniture.
ubermonkey 4y ago
I mean, there is definitely a connection between "area is insanely inhospitable to educated youth, who then leave, and as a result those who remain have diminished opportunities," but this formulation feels like blaming those who leave instead of those who created the environment that ran the escapees off. I grew up in a shitty place. I knew from early childhood I would leave, and I knew this even though I was living a very privileged existence in that place. My parents were upper-middle class; we had new cars and a country club membership and all that shit. And I knew this despite being low-key discouraged from wanting to leave because Family. It was (and remains) a racist, sexist, homophobic state, and nothing is likely to change that.
theGnuMe 4y ago
You also have the issue of people who move to high cost locales, raise kids and then their kids who especially can't afford it move away (or wait to inherit the house from you).
throwaway5959 4y ago
_8j50 4y ago
Well, wtf is wrong with them that they stay when the economy gets destroyed? Move and make money elsewhere? Do they know there is skills and worker shortage all over the country? Why do they think their little corner in the world is special? I think it is mix of fear and complacency because when it gets bad, it doesn't get bad enough. As an adult you are responsible for taking care of yourself and those you love above any other obligation. Not just moving towand and states but people move to different countries and continents primarily out of their obligation and desire to fulfi that duty and lead a better life.
- terminal_d 4y ago
  Why the vitriol? >fear and complacency Not everyone wants to live in a big city, or away from people they know.
  - _8j50 4y ago
    Then povery is the price. It's not enough that you can do pretty much what you want for a living and make good money but it also has to be available at random towns in the middle of nowhere? My experience is, people are stuck on the past when their area was prosperous. If they're not leaving because they like it there, then what's the problem? Just don't complain about it. Either work to change things there or move to a better place. America as a nation was built by people that kept moving for better opportunities elsewhere.
anovikov 4y ago
Only fix could be Soviet style registration system right? Where you are tied to the place where you were born unless Party sends you somewhere else? I mean, we are over that phase even on international level. People move countries all the time. Complaining about this being the case within one country is just out of place. And to mitigate enti-globalization populists, just better propaganda is needed. Let's face it: democracy only works when people are brainwashed (or there is a poll tax or other system that lets only well-to-do vote).
unity1001 4y ago
Worse: Because humans have evolved to live in close-knit communities that cooperate and human species have a 'bonding period' in which young adults bond with others in their group in order to create a social group that will collaborate to survive in the future, people leaving not only their early neighborhoods, but also their families creates subconscious anxiety in those who left. They go and live in locations where they don't know other people, changing places multiple times, often way past the early adulthood bonding period. This further isolates them and amps up the subconscious anxiety. The result are societies with psychological problems, or in worse cases like the US, entire societies running on prozac and other medication. Even further exacerbated with the system trying to isolate people more to make them into individual consumers to get maximum profit and work output out of them, pushing them also to compete with each other, further alienating people from each other. The system uses concepts like "Social mobility" etc, but these are just terms pushed forward to avoid calling it what it is - the system forcing people to do this in order to maximize its profit by not investing where there is no immediate and maximal return, and instead milking economic centers and urban centers that are already highly profitable. For the same reason the US rural areas lack broadband - there isnt immediate, maximal profit for private companies in bringing broadband to those regions, and they also prevent municipalities from starting their own broadband service for their people with the excuse of 'free market'.

Fauntleroy 4y ago

I'm one of the "upwardly mobile" folks who moved out, and I'm a bit shocked at all the comments here treating the headline like it's a bad thing. Having a local and consistent community is an essential part of a "good" city. I know that many of the places we moved away from were... lacking, but simply abandoning everything isn't going to help at all either.

eddsh1994 4y ago
I have moved quite a bit myself and honestly still miss 'home'. Hopefully soon I'll stay somewhere for the rest of my life, or a good chunk of it, so I can be 'home' again. My wifes a researcher and we follow the academic positions so I probably have another 3 or 4 locations to live in first (: There are a lot of perks of having that stable community feeling around you.

parker_mountain 4y ago

Part of it, as well, is that a lot of these regions that people moved out of are the suburbs. Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading.

Yhippa 4y ago
> Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading. Genuinely curious: what is the basis for that claim? Even if you don't cite a source. Edit: these responses are very insightful. Thank you all for the responses.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  At least American suburbs are ultra car-dependent meaning you're not walking anywhere (literally physically degrading to both you and the environment) and you do not have chance social encounters at nearly the frequency of any walking city (socially degrading). This is not to say there aren't real benefits to life in the burbs and serious disadvantages to city life, but it's fairly evident by now that American suburbia is not the utopian dream it was sold as.
  - Alupis 4y ago
    Perhaps for you city dweller's, but for the rest of us, we really like our suburbs. Not being able to walk everywhere is literally not even a factor I look for when moving to a new area. I want quiet, safety, cleanliness, privacy and affordability. I have yet to see the metropolis that checks all of those boxes, or any of them for the matter.
    - ethanbond 4y ago
      Pick any moderate sized city in Europe! There's no reason Americans have to choose between glass and concrete imposing megastructures a la (parts of) NYC or sprawling car-dependent and socially atomized burbs a la Houston/Phoenix etc. We can have moderately dense, highly walkable, transit-connected, safe, clean, private, quiet, socially vibrant, affordable towns and suburbs all over the country. We just choose not to in large part because many Americans, brainwashed by The Automobile, can't even imagine such a state of affairs.
      - oceanplexian 4y ago
        If ZEV’s and alternative energy take off, and self driving eventually lives up to the hype, public transportation will be obsolete with the exception of dense cities. Assuming such a future comes to pass (And that’s obviously a big question mark), desirability and property values in suburban-like neighborhoods would go up, since suburbs are no longer at a disadvantage for all those things you are arguing, like walkability, socially vibrancy, etc. A quick tap on your phone and 15 minutes later you can be at the bar or the shops or whatever else. Combine that with the remote work revolution and the future is looking great for suburbs and terrible for cities. If anything, I’d argue Americans are ahead of the curve. In a society where self driving cars are cheap, environmentally sustainable, and always available people would naturally fan out into suburban living, with mixed-use development falling out of favor.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> Many suburbs are not sustainable, and are degrading. If the suburbs aren't sustainable, then what about rural? What about seaside? Where everything is super spread. It sounds to me that the "because roads" is an argument constantly made by those who levy taxes and by those who wants ever more taxes to be levied on others. I live in a super-spread out rural/seaside area where I drive across vineyards to drive my kid to school. Businesses here aren't making a lot of money and yet there are roads. I somehow don't buy that very hard that sell that the suburbs aren't sustainable "because roads". Do I really need to pay huge income taxes (France BTW) then 21% value added tax on everything I buy then 30% on any profit I'd make in the stock market, placing there money that's already been taxed? And paying four different (yup, four) taxes on real estate (land tax, "living tax", yearly tax on real estate wealth and now, the new, to me, one: "real estate tax for micro entrepreneurs")? The tax never stops. And then, in addition to that, I've got to listen telling me that my area is too spread out "because roads and sewers" and I should pack my stuff and go live in a city? Just FUCK THAT.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  It's not the same. Rural areas in Europe (and mostly anywhere else, for that matter; this is not about Euro-exceptionalism) are not 100% residential urban sprawl like the typical U.S. suburb. They have locally densified villages and towns, each with a self-sustaining mix of housing and local business. That's what a sensible model looks like.
  - beenBoutIT 4y ago
    The US doesn't keep local businesses the way Europe does. Corporations with local branches is about as close as we get. A small rural CVS next to a small rural Texaco next to a small rural Dennys is a rural town economy.
    - theGnuMe 4y ago
      Dollar Store not CVS. Dennys will be locally owned and not a Dennys diner. Might be the town bar though. May not be a Texaco, that will depend on where you live. There are some rural chain gas stations like Caseys though (great pizza). Your gas station might sell bait too. Maybe.
egberts1 4y ago
Secret is to foster flip economy in updating houses. Can't be crushing that too after what we did to our beleaguered housing industry.

082349872349872 4y ago

It's funny how globalised the anti-globalisation populist political movements may be. Yesterday's news included "Reichsbürger" getting busted in Deutschland for conspiring to coup, and it was mentioned the suspects were also pretty QAnon-aligned. However, Reichsbürger are not indigenous, but are derived from US "Sovereign Citizens", who result from an amalgam of nuttery derived from XIX and XX conspiracies wishing to stand athwart history yelling "stop!": from those who thought the 14A is bogus to those who thought the 16A is bogus to those who didn't care for the Civil Rights Act, etc. Anyway, all these conspiracies apparently became more mainstream in the 1970s US because of the many newly embittered people due to the farming policies of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Butz . (incidentally, our farming policy here is diametrically opposed to both "get big or get out" and "plant fencerow to fencerow", and we still have major political centre parties, as well as left and right wing parties. But that correlation may have no relation to causation...)

pessimizer 4y ago
This heavily underestimates the influence of Ezra Pound through his disciple and biographer Eustace Mullins. Butz certainly upped the economic pressure on rural people, but the theory is regular old European conspiratorial antisemitism as revived through Dreyfus, then post-WWI central European "stabbed in the back" fantasies, and interpreted by the fascist Europhile Pound. If the US government hadn't just completed a program of left-wing eradication in the early part of the 20c, the pressure probably would have turned rural people towards the populism that they had turned to throughout the 19c and very early 20c; the kind of populism that culminated in the 4-term FDR presidency and the New Deal. "Populism" as you use it here (to refer to right-wing antisemitic groups), was intentionally turned into a slur that was used to attack the working-class left-wing: > Most of the Progressives, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson, were bitter enemies of the Populists. In American political rhetoric, "populist" was originally associated with the Populist Party and related left-wing movements, but beginning in the 1950s it began to take on a more generic meaning, describing any anti-establishment movement regardless of its position on the left–right political spectrum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_(United_States) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_Mullins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_Mullins ----- edit: as far as I can tell, the only two things that are characteristic across all European cultures are drinking cow's milk and conspiracist antisemitism. Although America further developed it and fed it back to Europe (note Ford's influence on Hitler), the framework is definitely European. And of course, a lot of fascism in Europe was financed by the US post-WWII.

tsol 4y ago

It's strange the level of distrust in the west over institutions that the majority of the world find completely uncontroversial. It takes a village to raise a child, and in a world without villages families are the biggest support system most people have. I have a feeling this is another instance of the minority being louder than the majority.

terminal_d 4y ago
> institutions that the majority of the world find completely uncontroversial Not even remotely true. And yes, as de-facto "management", most of the blame is on these "institutions".
- tsol 4y ago
  Where in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, etc do they not value family highly? It's the traditional culture in most countries
beenBoutIT 4y ago
America lost most of those villages that raise children and families with two parents decades ago.

the_optimist 4y ago

There’s a deeper level here. Conforming economic, security, n judicial blocks to geography more strongly maps onto the governance structure for the US. In other words, this is a system that inherently creates and maintains divisions.

nonameiguess 4y ago

That honestly sounds like a lot of spurious causal assumptions. The Rust Belt and coal mining regions didn't get economically depressed because people left. People left because of the economic collapse. You seem to be saying if all those college kids just moved back to Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, the people there wouldn't be mad about their economies being destroyed? Because they still would have been destroyed.

fullshark 4y ago
More people (economists/policy makers) just ignore the rust belt's (or local regional) problems, because aggregate GDP is going up and to the right and people just go where the labor is needed so everything is going great. We don't need factory workers anymore, just learn to code and travel across the country for a job what's the problem?
- solveit 4y ago
  No, it's we don't need factory workers and factory towns any more, so travel across the country for a job because there's no alternative, the town is gone and nobody can save it. Learn to code isn't going to work for most people, sure, but travel across the country isn't something that can be avoided.
  - fullshark 4y ago
    Not everyone is agreeable to this prescription because they live in X and can't or don't want to move, and they then equate economic growth / globalization with economic death, cause that's what it means for their town and that's my original point.

kaitai 4y ago

Two sets of assumptions, though: * The "stay behind" terminology is both evocative and biased. I didn't "stay behind". I moved away several times, thousands of miles, and lived in other places that ambitious people live, and then moved back to within 10 miles of where I grew up because the quality of life is better here. I can afford more, I have cultural amenities like world-class music and art, I'm near family and old friends as well as new friends, and people aren't all totally consumed by their work. The "upwardly mobile ambitious" set can frankly get stultifyingly boring and disconnected. I like having friends in construction, non-profits, pet services, etc. * Like many Americans who really do "stay behind", I contribute to elder care in my family. A lot of people stay put because they need to care for someone, and America does not make it easy to get vulnerable or ill people services. This is part of what contributes to what you call the "bitterness" -- lack of support for child care, elder care, care for the mentally ill or those struggling with addiction, and in many cases it's a vicious circle: gotta stay in Podunkville to take care of grandma and your cousin 'cause you can't afford to get grandma other help and your cousin doesn't qualify for anything but SSI so he can't afford to move either, but staying in Podunkville you tank your own educational and job prospects, therefore keeping you in Podunkville forever. Sometimes it seems you can only truly be upwardly mobile if you can avoid caregiving responsibilities.

justahuman74 4y ago
> Sometimes it seems you can only truly be upwardly mobile if you can avoid caregiving responsibilities. This resonates strongly with me, I can't imagine being able to move around like I do when my parents become too old

cossatot 4y ago

While I partially agree with your assessment, it's worth noting that much of the dynamic settlement of the US has been based on commodity booms, which really can't be considered perpetual parts of the economy. People had to leave their homes to go clear the prairie, log virtually all of the US forest, mine the West Virginia coal and then the Wyoming coal after that, etc. Once those resources are used up, there is little left for people to do, regardless of technological advances that require fewer workers for the same output, much less trade deals (how much wood and grain do we import?). The economies oriented around renewable resources (Oregon timber for example) simply can't sustain as many people because the environment can't continually produce the output that it did during the initial exploitation. This of course affects the downstream, more industrial elements concentrated in cities as well, which process the ore and lumber and make engines and furniture.

ubermonkey 4y ago

I mean, there is definitely a connection between "area is insanely inhospitable to educated youth, who then leave, and as a result those who remain have diminished opportunities," but this formulation feels like blaming those who leave instead of those who created the environment that ran the escapees off. I grew up in a shitty place. I knew from early childhood I would leave, and I knew this even though I was living a very privileged existence in that place. My parents were upper-middle class; we had new cars and a country club membership and all that shit. And I knew this despite being low-key discouraged from wanting to leave because Family. It was (and remains) a racist, sexist, homophobic state, and nothing is likely to change that.

theGnuMe 4y ago

You also have the issue of people who move to high cost locales, raise kids and then their kids who especially can't afford it move away (or wait to inherit the house from you).

throwaway5959 4y ago

_8j50 4y ago

Well, wtf is wrong with them that they stay when the economy gets destroyed? Move and make money elsewhere? Do they know there is skills and worker shortage all over the country? Why do they think their little corner in the world is special? I think it is mix of fear and complacency because when it gets bad, it doesn't get bad enough. As an adult you are responsible for taking care of yourself and those you love above any other obligation. Not just moving towand and states but people move to different countries and continents primarily out of their obligation and desire to fulfi that duty and lead a better life.

terminal_d 4y ago
Why the vitriol? >fear and complacency Not everyone wants to live in a big city, or away from people they know.
- _8j50 4y ago
  Then povery is the price. It's not enough that you can do pretty much what you want for a living and make good money but it also has to be available at random towns in the middle of nowhere? My experience is, people are stuck on the past when their area was prosperous. If they're not leaving because they like it there, then what's the problem? Just don't complain about it. Either work to change things there or move to a better place. America as a nation was built by people that kept moving for better opportunities elsewhere.

anovikov 4y ago

Only fix could be Soviet style registration system right? Where you are tied to the place where you were born unless Party sends you somewhere else? I mean, we are over that phase even on international level. People move countries all the time. Complaining about this being the case within one country is just out of place. And to mitigate enti-globalization populists, just better propaganda is needed. Let's face it: democracy only works when people are brainwashed (or there is a poll tax or other system that lets only well-to-do vote).

unity1001 4y ago

Worse: Because humans have evolved to live in close-knit communities that cooperate and human species have a 'bonding period' in which young adults bond with others in their group in order to create a social group that will collaborate to survive in the future, people leaving not only their early neighborhoods, but also their families creates subconscious anxiety in those who left. They go and live in locations where they don't know other people, changing places multiple times, often way past the early adulthood bonding period. This further isolates them and amps up the subconscious anxiety. The result are societies with psychological problems, or in worse cases like the US, entire societies running on prozac and other medication. Even further exacerbated with the system trying to isolate people more to make them into individual consumers to get maximum profit and work output out of them, pushing them also to compete with each other, further alienating people from each other. The system uses concepts like "Social mobility" etc, but these are just terms pushed forward to avoid calling it what it is - the system forcing people to do this in order to maximize its profit by not investing where there is no immediate and maximal return, and instead milking economic centers and urban centers that are already highly profitable. For the same reason the US rural areas lack broadband - there isnt immediate, maximal profit for private companies in bringing broadband to those regions, and they also prevent municipalities from starting their own broadband service for their people with the excuse of 'free market'.