7 ms·

The solution to rural depopulation: the kids stay.

21 points by hexis 17y ago

JCThoughtscream 17y ago
So personal ambition is an evil to the community and must be suppressed, then? Sure, that's a strawman summary, but speaking /as/ the son of a countryside peasant that not only left for the big city but the country entirely for greener fields in America, I cannot at all support the view that youthful ambition is harmful, regardless of its effects on small communities. Seeking a better life than your parents had - and seeking to make your children's life better than what you've had - is far from repugnant or malicious. The romanticized notion of a warm, inclusive small-town culture ignores the many cultural and economic ills isolated communities produce alongside Mom's "famous" apple pie. Even if we change the cultural incentive, it won't change the fact that these communities tend to /stay/ poor, and simply lack the resources internally to change that. Perhaps the answer isn't to shake an angry cane at the relentless changes wreaked upon small communities, but figure out a way to increase the incentive to invest back into the Heartland. Say, encourage geographically localized startups...
- mechanical_fish 17y ago
  From Stewart Brand's "Cities & Time" lecture: http://longnow.org/seminars/02005/apr/08/cities-and-time/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02005/apr/08/cities-and-time/ Vast new urban communities is the main event in the world for the present and coming decades. The villages and countrysides of the entire world are emptying out. Why? I was told by Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women, “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and family elder, pound grain, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children. Her independence goes up, and her religious fundamentalism goes down.” So much for the romanticism of villages. In reality, life in the country is dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous. Life in the city is exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, and safe. Brand's lecture, in some versions, includes a photomontage of deserted country towns from all over the world. In every country, in every culture, rural residents are leaving for the city. Unless people need a lot of land to grow the food they need to survive, they have no incentive to stay on the land.
  - eru 17y ago
    > In every country, in every culture, rural residents are leaving for the city. I don't know if it's as universal as you say. Some highly developed countries, like Switzerland, seem quite stable in this regard.
    - pchristensen 17y ago
      Stable at extremely high levels of urbanization. They've already made their move to cities.
      - eru 17y ago
        Yes.
        eru 17y ago
        I dug around. I found http://ww2.unhabitat.org/habrdd/conditions/westeurope/switze.htm http://ww2.unhabitat.org/habrdd/conditions/westeurope/switze... Seems like Switzerland has an urbanization level of 65% of the population. Does this count as extremely high? And it's not stable. Its projected to reach 72% by 2025.
        pchristensen 17y ago
        60-80% is typical for industrialized countries. I'd be interested to know if the increase is projected because of shrinkages of rural/small towns or growth in urban population from births, immigration, etc.
        eru 17y ago
        See the link. The statistics are there.
- petercooper 17y ago
  I'm on your side, but to answer your first question.. yes, that's how it runs in many communities. In some English countries it's called the tall-poppy syndrome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome - in Scandanavian it's the Jante Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_Law The US has a much stronger recent history of personal ambition and "go-getting" - which is why European incomes tend to have a smaller gamut and the US has a big gulf between rich and poor. Good thing or not? I think the US has it right, to be honest, but there can certainly be cultural expectations not to get "too big for your boots."
  - JCThoughtscream 17y ago
    I believe Pratchett calls it "the Crab Bucket" in his latest book. Even amongst European cultures, or any small-community culture anywhere, the ones that actually sit down and think about what it all actually amounts to quickly start feeling a bit of wanderlust, I suspect...
rg 17y ago
Twenty years ago, I seriously planned to set up an endowed trust to educate mid-western young people about the advantages of moving to the coastal cities of the US, along with some modest financial aid to move. Since then I have dropped that plan, because the Internet now provides all the information needed to convince mid-western young people to move as soon as they can.
- pmorici 17y ago
  You're joking right? There are plenty of quite nice larger cities in the midwest that aren't at all costal and have a much lower cost of living than the coasts.
jballanc 17y ago
What this reviewer, and most commenters on rural depopulation, seem to miss is that there is no inherent virtue in "small town" America. Small towns have existed, historically, either as jumping-off points for pioneer exploration or as local hubs for farmers and their goods. I think it's safe to say that the pioneer exploration of America is a done deal, and factory farms (and even family farms) have shown that advances in technology can make even farming efficient to the point that local hubs are no longer needed. The average New Yorker has such a significantly smaller impact on the environment than the average small town resident, that I really can't think of a good reason for small towns to exist any longer. The sooner we all move toward urban settlement and leave the rural areas to efficient farming, weekend trips, and mother nature, the better!
- krying_krab 17y ago
  Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too. The Midwest and its way of life depended on a technology and an industry that is not anymore experiencing growth. This could happen in coastal cities tomorrow too. Trying to adapt your town to meet the needs of a modern economy is, I think, a much nobler cause than letting it wither and die because it lacks some sort of abstract "inherent virtue" thing. I'm pretty sure there's no "inherent virtue" in having kids anymore either. I mean think about it, kids increase net environmental impact by humans. :|
  - lionhearted 17y ago
    > Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too. D'oh, I upvoted your comment before I read the whole thing. After spending time in provincial China, yes, I agree that the people living with miserable quality of life on subsistence farming should move to Chengdu, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, or one of the developed places in the rest of Asia or the West. Haven't been to Africa but I imagine it's similar. Most of the valuable and useful things happening in the world right now depend more on working with other people than natural resources or lots of space. If you like it as a preference, go right ahead for it. But speaking in terms of individual success and progress, or as advancement as humanity/society-at-large, yes, generally speaking we ought to migrate to where there's other smart people we can work with. So I agree with the first part of your semi-sarcastic comment because I missed the sarcasm, though I disagree a bit with the rest of it.
jwhitlark 17y ago
Well, I've been to Japan, Kuwait, France, Turkey, Mexico, Canada, and all over the US, and don't consider myself especially well traveled. (I recently bumped into someone I knew in high school; turned out that he had hitchhiked the length of Africa.) Someone who had never left their hometown of 2,000 would have a hard time convincing me they have a better insight into the human condition than I did. Wouldn't be impossible, but... Now if they want to move back, after kicking around the world for a few years, more power to them.
lionhearted 17y ago
I voted up the article because I think it'd be fun to discuss, but I think its premises and conclusions are off. Let's start with this one: > Achievers score well on SATs and imbibe the poisonous assumption that success can be measured by the distance one travels from home. People who've traveled far from where they originated have been highly respected through almost all of history. Even in extremely anti-immigration/xenophobic places like Tokugawa Japan 1600-1850, travelers were always highly respected and sought after. There's a number of reasons for this. People who successfully migrate are looked upon as strong and healthy, because it's hard to move away from your support network. They have valuable different perspectives and understanding of culture, organizations, and technology. In sex and marriage, someone from further away reduces the chance of inbreeding and lets the dominant (usually more robust) characteristics from both parents take over, leading to more likely healthy and strong children. People from New York are more respected in Los Angeles than in NYC. People from California are more respected in New York than in Los Angeles. Migrating does take guts and it is hard, but by living in different places you get multiple perspectives on how the world runs. And yes, quite literally the further you go, the more diverse, varied, and valuable your alternative perspectives are likely to be. > Thus to achieve is to leave—shaking off the dust of a hick town and migrating to exotic locales with "diverse cuisine and more varied shopping." He missed the biggest part of leaving to an urban place - a variety of ideas. Someone who is highly intelligent starts to question society - but if everyone, literally everyone in a town of 3,000 belongs to the First Baptist Congregation, and you're starting to have thoughts like - how come the Bible contradicts itself? How come it advocates enslaving your enemies? Genocide? Religious wars? Well, these are interesting conversations to have, even if you remain Christian. But you can't even have that conversation in many places where everyone is conformist. Sure, New York probably has a better mix of restaurants than Iowa, but that's not why smart people leave. It's because there's a better mix of ideas, simply by there being more ideas that you can find someone to talk about with. If you're intelligent, you begin to question things other people take for granted. If you live somewhere where people don't appreciate having their core values questioned, then you have to leave to keep growing intellectually. So the intelligent people leave. It's not some rabid consumerism.
- bhousel 17y ago
  > People who've traveled far from where they originated have been highly respected through almost all of history. > People from New York are more respected in Los Angeles than in NYC. People from California are more respected in New York than in Los Angeles. Is there any actual evidence of this? It's the first time that I've ever heard of this theory. FWIW, I migrated from Philadelphia to New York City five years ago, but I'm not getting any respect this week :-/
ilyak 17y ago
Why would anyone want to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere? Even worse, in rural area. Makes no sense to me.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
  Having earlier lived in the largest city in the US and now in rural Minnesota, I think I may have some insight, but bear in mind that this is only the way I see life, not how I think others should. This is where I should be at this point in my life. When I lived in cities, that's where I wanted to be. When I stopped wanting to be there I moved, it's that simple. Don't stay where you don't enjoy it. I enjoy the peace, the solitude, looking up at the Milky Way at night, waking up to my rooster crowing and pheasants squawking. I like sitting out on the grass in the dark of a warm summer night with my wife listening to the horses ripping up mouthfuls of grass. I find a wholesomeness in trudging through knee-deep snow when it's -10F with a 15 knot wind, carrying two 50-lb bales of hay on my shoulders to the horses. Doing that, then jumping in my truck to drive off to a climate-controlled office building and writing software the rest of the day causes a certain dissonance that's strangely pleasing. I can do things here that would be impossible in the city. I make wine from the wild grapes on my own property, I have enough land that I could grow anything I want to (and do!). I like being able to be considerably more self-sufficient than I could be anywhere else. I could raise/grow all my own food if I were so inclined. Honestly, about the only thing I miss about the city or suburbs is the easy access to decent restaurants.
JulianMorrison 17y ago
OK, so, what are the advantages of small rural towns?
wglb 17y ago
I grew up in a small town out on the prairie. My parents and I worked quite deliberately to get me to school out of state, and that area is where I stuck. Yet I wouldn't trade the childhood experience for anything. One author told of her move to a city that it was hardest on one of her sons because "on the farm, they were men in training, but in the city they were just boys" (Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean). On the other side of the coin, the attempts to maintain the small family farm through subsidies is excruciatingly expensive, for America and Japan as well. Oddly, the farm subsidies have a bigger positive impact on the large agribusiness entities than the family farm. Personally, I have the reverse view of cities, even though I have lived in cities for now most of my life. If you grew up in a city, you might think much of what we see in life is normal. I think it is not. The only time that most New Yorkers got to see the milky way was when the Ohio powerline intersected a tree and the power went out. But did they know to look up and see that terrifying grandeur? So I have an insider's view of this article, like many others, that come in from the outside to "fix" something that they only partially understand. Imagine a task force of rural leaders from, say Idaho or Oklahoma, come to New York, set up an interview shop, publish a paper on the decay of society and what we as a nation need to do to fix it. The migration is a larger phenomenon that seems inevitable, but some of us have mixed feelings about.
- eru 17y ago
  > Oddly, the farm subsidies have a bigger positive impact on the large agribusiness entities than the family farm. Same in Europe. Large agribusinesses can afford lawyers.

21 points by hexis 17y ago

So personal ambition is an evil to the community and must be suppressed, then? Sure, that's a strawman summary, but speaking /as/ the son of a countryside peasant that not only left for the big city but the country entirely for greener fields in America, I cannot at all support the view that youthful ambition is harmful, regardless of its effects on small communities. Seeking a better life than your parents had - and seeking to make your children's life better than what you've had - is far from repugnant or malicious. The romanticized notion of a warm, inclusive small-town culture ignores the many cultural and economic ills isolated communities produce alongside Mom's "famous" apple pie. Even if we change the cultural incentive, it won't change the fact that these communities tend to /stay/ poor, and simply lack the resources internally to change that. Perhaps the answer isn't to shake an angry cane at the relentless changes wreaked upon small communities, but figure out a way to increase the incentive to invest back into the Heartland. Say, encourage geographically localized startups...

mechanical_fish 17y ago
From Stewart Brand's "Cities & Time" lecture: http://longnow.org/seminars/02005/apr/08/cities-and-time/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02005/apr/08/cities-and-time/ Vast new urban communities is the main event in the world for the present and coming decades. The villages and countrysides of the entire world are emptying out. Why? I was told by Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women, “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and family elder, pound grain, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children. Her independence goes up, and her religious fundamentalism goes down.” So much for the romanticism of villages. In reality, life in the country is dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous. Life in the city is exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, and safe. Brand's lecture, in some versions, includes a photomontage of deserted country towns from all over the world. In every country, in every culture, rural residents are leaving for the city. Unless people need a lot of land to grow the food they need to survive, they have no incentive to stay on the land.
- eru 17y ago
  > In every country, in every culture, rural residents are leaving for the city. I don't know if it's as universal as you say. Some highly developed countries, like Switzerland, seem quite stable in this regard.
  - pchristensen 17y ago
    Stable at extremely high levels of urbanization. They've already made their move to cities.
    - eru 17y ago
      Yes.
      - eru 17y ago
        I dug around. I found http://ww2.unhabitat.org/habrdd/conditions/westeurope/switze.htm http://ww2.unhabitat.org/habrdd/conditions/westeurope/switze... Seems like Switzerland has an urbanization level of 65% of the population. Does this count as extremely high? And it's not stable. Its projected to reach 72% by 2025.
        pchristensen 17y ago
        60-80% is typical for industrialized countries. I'd be interested to know if the increase is projected because of shrinkages of rural/small towns or growth in urban population from births, immigration, etc.
        eru 17y ago
        See the link. The statistics are there.
petercooper 17y ago
I'm on your side, but to answer your first question.. yes, that's how it runs in many communities. In some English countries it's called the tall-poppy syndrome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome - in Scandanavian it's the Jante Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jante_Law The US has a much stronger recent history of personal ambition and "go-getting" - which is why European incomes tend to have a smaller gamut and the US has a big gulf between rich and poor. Good thing or not? I think the US has it right, to be honest, but there can certainly be cultural expectations not to get "too big for your boots."
- JCThoughtscream 17y ago
  I believe Pratchett calls it "the Crab Bucket" in his latest book. Even amongst European cultures, or any small-community culture anywhere, the ones that actually sit down and think about what it all actually amounts to quickly start feeling a bit of wanderlust, I suspect...

rg 17y ago

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

pmorici 17y ago
You're joking right? There are plenty of quite nice larger cities in the midwest that aren't at all costal and have a much lower cost of living than the coasts.

jballanc 17y ago

What this reviewer, and most commenters on rural depopulation, seem to miss is that there is no inherent virtue in "small town" America. Small towns have existed, historically, either as jumping-off points for pioneer exploration or as local hubs for farmers and their goods. I think it's safe to say that the pioneer exploration of America is a done deal, and factory farms (and even family farms) have shown that advances in technology can make even farming efficient to the point that local hubs are no longer needed. The average New Yorker has such a significantly smaller impact on the environment than the average small town resident, that I really can't think of a good reason for small towns to exist any longer. The sooner we all move toward urban settlement and leave the rural areas to efficient farming, weekend trips, and mother nature, the better!

krying_krab 17y ago
Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too. The Midwest and its way of life depended on a technology and an industry that is not anymore experiencing growth. This could happen in coastal cities tomorrow too. Trying to adapt your town to meet the needs of a modern economy is, I think, a much nobler cause than letting it wither and die because it lacks some sort of abstract "inherent virtue" thing. I'm pretty sure there's no "inherent virtue" in having kids anymore either. I mean think about it, kids increase net environmental impact by humans. :|
- lionhearted 17y ago
  > Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too. D'oh, I upvoted your comment before I read the whole thing. After spending time in provincial China, yes, I agree that the people living with miserable quality of life on subsistence farming should move to Chengdu, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, or one of the developed places in the rest of Asia or the West. Haven't been to Africa but I imagine it's similar. Most of the valuable and useful things happening in the world right now depend more on working with other people than natural resources or lots of space. If you like it as a preference, go right ahead for it. But speaking in terms of individual success and progress, or as advancement as humanity/society-at-large, yes, generally speaking we ought to migrate to where there's other smart people we can work with. So I agree with the first part of your semi-sarcastic comment because I missed the sarcasm, though I disagree a bit with the rest of it.

jwhitlark 17y ago

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

lionhearted 17y ago

I voted up the article because I think it'd be fun to discuss, but I think its premises and conclusions are off. Let's start with this one: > Achievers score well on SATs and imbibe the poisonous assumption that success can be measured by the distance one travels from home. People who've traveled far from where they originated have been highly respected through almost all of history. Even in extremely anti-immigration/xenophobic places like Tokugawa Japan 1600-1850, travelers were always highly respected and sought after. There's a number of reasons for this. People who successfully migrate are looked upon as strong and healthy, because it's hard to move away from your support network. They have valuable different perspectives and understanding of culture, organizations, and technology. In sex and marriage, someone from further away reduces the chance of inbreeding and lets the dominant (usually more robust) characteristics from both parents take over, leading to more likely healthy and strong children. People from New York are more respected in Los Angeles than in NYC. People from California are more respected in New York than in Los Angeles. Migrating does take guts and it is hard, but by living in different places you get multiple perspectives on how the world runs. And yes, quite literally the further you go, the more diverse, varied, and valuable your alternative perspectives are likely to be. > Thus to achieve is to leave—shaking off the dust of a hick town and migrating to exotic locales with "diverse cuisine and more varied shopping." He missed the biggest part of leaving to an urban place - a variety of ideas. Someone who is highly intelligent starts to question society - but if everyone, literally everyone in a town of 3,000 belongs to the First Baptist Congregation, and you're starting to have thoughts like - how come the Bible contradicts itself? How come it advocates enslaving your enemies? Genocide? Religious wars? Well, these are interesting conversations to have, even if you remain Christian. But you can't even have that conversation in many places where everyone is conformist. Sure, New York probably has a better mix of restaurants than Iowa, but that's not why smart people leave. It's because there's a better mix of ideas, simply by there being more ideas that you can find someone to talk about with. If you're intelligent, you begin to question things other people take for granted. If you live somewhere where people don't appreciate having their core values questioned, then you have to leave to keep growing intellectually. So the intelligent people leave. It's not some rabid consumerism.

bhousel 17y ago
> People who've traveled far from where they originated have been highly respected through almost all of history. > People from New York are more respected in Los Angeles than in NYC. People from California are more respected in New York than in Los Angeles. Is there any actual evidence of this? It's the first time that I've ever heard of this theory. FWIW, I migrated from Philadelphia to New York City five years ago, but I'm not getting any respect this week :-/

ilyak 17y ago

Why would anyone want to live in a small town in the middle of nowhere? Even worse, in rural area. Makes no sense to me.

HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
Having earlier lived in the largest city in the US and now in rural Minnesota, I think I may have some insight, but bear in mind that this is only the way I see life, not how I think others should. This is where I should be at this point in my life. When I lived in cities, that's where I wanted to be. When I stopped wanting to be there I moved, it's that simple. Don't stay where you don't enjoy it. I enjoy the peace, the solitude, looking up at the Milky Way at night, waking up to my rooster crowing and pheasants squawking. I like sitting out on the grass in the dark of a warm summer night with my wife listening to the horses ripping up mouthfuls of grass. I find a wholesomeness in trudging through knee-deep snow when it's -10F with a 15 knot wind, carrying two 50-lb bales of hay on my shoulders to the horses. Doing that, then jumping in my truck to drive off to a climate-controlled office building and writing software the rest of the day causes a certain dissonance that's strangely pleasing. I can do things here that would be impossible in the city. I make wine from the wild grapes on my own property, I have enough land that I could grow anything I want to (and do!). I like being able to be considerably more self-sufficient than I could be anywhere else. I could raise/grow all my own food if I were so inclined. Honestly, about the only thing I miss about the city or suburbs is the easy access to decent restaurants.

JulianMorrison 17y ago

OK, so, what are the advantages of small rural towns?

wglb 17y ago

I grew up in a small town out on the prairie. My parents and I worked quite deliberately to get me to school out of state, and that area is where I stuck. Yet I wouldn't trade the childhood experience for anything. One author told of her move to a city that it was hardest on one of her sons because "on the farm, they were men in training, but in the city they were just boys" (Judy Blunt, Breaking Clean). On the other side of the coin, the attempts to maintain the small family farm through subsidies is excruciatingly expensive, for America and Japan as well. Oddly, the farm subsidies have a bigger positive impact on the large agribusiness entities than the family farm. Personally, I have the reverse view of cities, even though I have lived in cities for now most of my life. If you grew up in a city, you might think much of what we see in life is normal. I think it is not. The only time that most New Yorkers got to see the milky way was when the Ohio powerline intersected a tree and the power went out. But did they know to look up and see that terrifying grandeur? So I have an insider's view of this article, like many others, that come in from the outside to "fix" something that they only partially understand. Imagine a task force of rural leaders from, say Idaho or Oklahoma, come to New York, set up an interview shop, publish a paper on the decay of society and what we as a nation need to do to fix it. The migration is a larger phenomenon that seems inevitable, but some of us have mixed feelings about.

eru 17y ago
> Oddly, the farm subsidies have a bigger positive impact on the large agribusiness entities than the family farm. Same in Europe. Large agribusinesses can afford lawyers.