The solution to rural depopulation: the kids stay.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704322004574480250107329602.html

by hexis • 17 years ago

21 38 17 years ago

online.wsj.com

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• 17 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

eru7• 17 years 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.

petercooper• 17 years 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 - in Scandanavian it's the 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."

JCThoughtscream3• 17 years 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• 17 years 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• 17 years 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.

jballanc2• 17 years 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• 17 years 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. :|

lionhearted2• 17 years 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.

garply2• 17 years ago

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

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

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

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

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

jballanc2• 17 years ago

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

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

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

JCThoughtscream3• 17 years ago

Oh, that's simple: the simplified set is ugly. Traditional writing is so close to being an art form onto itself, the difference is negligible. Furthermore, the change's fairly recent too, so you have three or four generations being told they have to relearn their own native language, and... yeah, organic evolution's preferable.

rdtsc• 17 years ago

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

But if they are not self-sustainable then who will subsidize them. Should everyone's taxes go towards supporting unsustainable communities out in the middle of nowhere?

There are lot of communities with their own culture. It gives us a fuzzy and warm feeling to think about the quiet little town and the local gathering at a local diner in the morning to chat and sociailize. But at the end of the day, if they are all living on welfare, we can only have so many such small towns.

Often economic reality is at odds with our warm fuzzy feelings. This is one of those instances.

xiaoma• 17 years ago

What is this "decline" in traditional Chinese characters you're talking about? Unlike the PRC, Taiwan and HK both have universal literacy. Residents of Taiwan in particular are amongst the most voracious readers on the planet. According to one study I read, only the Japanese are reading more. Not only that, but mainlanders are now increasingly familiar with traditional characters, due to the influx of HK/TW music videos and movies. The opposite is not true... not even in HK.

Whatever the reasons you have for disliking traditional characters, it's important to recognize that the simplification process involved a trade-off. Characters became faster to write by hand, somewhat more phonetic (for Mandarin speakers), but recognizability was sacrificed to a degree as was semantic information (e.g. swapping the 燕 out of 嚥 and slapping in an 因).

In reading, the important thing is how distinct a character is from another, not how simple it is.

Look at these character pairs (traditional/simplified)

    義 vs. 叉    /    义 vs. 叉

    無 vs. 天    /    无 vs. 天

    廣 vs. 廠    /    广 vs. 厂

    術 vs. 木    /    术 vs. 木

When it comes to hand-writing, which isn't nearly as important as it was in the past, most people do use some simplifications for speed. Most aren't as extreme as the PRC simplifications were, though. In truth, simplification still hasn't met its original proponents' goals of promoting widespread literacy, while the areas using traditional characters achieved those goals without changing their writing system.

The Taiwanese Americans you were speaking to were almost certainly aware of all of the above, but they might have been too polite or just too off-guard to point it out.

wglb5• 17 years ago

Please explain how the average New Yorker has a significantly smaller impact on the environment than the average small town resident. Are you referring to CAFO?

eru7• 17 years ago

Just a guess. The average New Yorker may not have a car.

pchristensen3• 17 years ago

NYC has a higher share of transit riders and walkers than any city, also a decent number of bikes, so much fewer VMT per capita. Also, larger multi-unit buildings are more efficient to heat than single family houses. So although NYC's environmental impact is huge, its residents have about half as much impact per capita as average Americans.

Incidentally, CA has lower than average environmental impact because the temperate weather means less energy used for heating and cooling. (Plus the higher efficiency standards and higher population density)

HeyLaughingBoy2• 17 years ago

There is no inherent virtue in just about any living arrangement: it all depends on your perspective. Yours appears to be focused on environmental impact, I prefer to live in the near silence out in the country. When I visit family in NYC, I can't believe that I used to live there: the noise and crowds drive me nuts!

I don't live in an incorporated town: I live in a rural "township" with a population of roughly 2,000 over 36 square miles. IIRC, that's about the size of Manhattan. Yet I know my neighbors better than I did when I lived in Brooklyn, NY some 20 years ago. The mother Nature you relegate to weekend trips is the same mother Nature I enjoy dealing with every day.

Like I said: it's all about perspective.

wglb5• 17 years ago

The no inherent virtue in "small town" America is really off the mark and inappropriate.

And as noted elsewhere, it isn't the per-capita environmental load that is important, it is the total load. Aside from CAFO and other agricultural environmental costs, the total rural load might be small. And you can't attribute the agricultural load to the people living there, because the food goes to the cities to be consumed.

jwhitlark• 17 years 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.

lionhearted2• 17 years 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• 17 years 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 :-/

ilyak2• 17 years 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.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

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

wglb5• 17 years 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.

eru7• 17 years 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.

The solution to rural depopulation: the kids stay.

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