What is a more realistic solution for rural folk: Bringing them jobs or moving them elsewhere?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Two articles have inspired the OP:

Rural Americans turn to disability as jobs dry up.

Rural Americans dying at higher rates than urban Americans

What’s the solution?

Trump supporters seem hopeful that jobs can be brought back to the “real” America. Manufacturing jobs, coal mining jobs, good blue-collar jobs that anyone with a high school diploma can do. Like the olden days. Give em jobs and they’ll get er done.

This seems very idealistic to me. I can’t see a whole bunch of big corporations flocking to Bumfuck. I especially can’t see a whole bunch of big corporations flocking to Bumfuck to hire low-skill locals and simultaneously paying wages that would harken back to the “good ole days”.

I have a coworker who commutes into the city from Bumfuck. At home he has satellite internet, which he says delivers just a little better than dial-up. There is no broadband where he lives. My mind was blown when he told me this. I live in the bubble of a city slicker. There are things about rural life that I just can’t relate to. I can’t imagine a large employer moving out to a place where you can’t even stream a youtube video.

So I guess that’s why I’m feeling like the rural poor need to get the hell out of Dodge. Poverty sucks no matter where you live, but it seems like it would be a million times worse out in the sticks. Seems like the lack of public transportation alone would do a poor person in. But then you’ve got the social isolation on top of that.

I’m thinking what we really need is to find a way to encourage people to move out of economically dead/dying places. I wonder how successful a “re-location assistance fund” would work. If you live in a certain zip code and make less than X amount of money, then you could qualify for no-interest loan of Y amount of money, which would help you set up shop in another zip code where you’d have a better chance of finding a job. Maybe the program would require participants to take job training classes, and they would provide case workers to help participants transition to their new town. Maybe the program would provide “rescue” funds just in case the participant can’t hack it and they need to return home.

I don’t know. Maybe this is also idealistic. But it seems more practical than the current plan.

What’s your solution?

2

You’re not wrong. As we transition further from an economy that’s about resource extraction and manufacturing and toward one about digital and intellectual products, living your productive years in rural areas is going to get harder and harder. It ain’t the Mexicans taking their jobs. It’s the robots.

We can help some of those people move to where the US is still economically vibrant: cities. But, honestly, a lot of them aren’t going to like it there. It’s a huge cultural change. That migration is probably more of a generational phenomenon.

What we can do immediately is raise taxes on the robot owners and give the money to the poor. Of course, we can only do that if more of the rural poor–especially the white ones–start voting their own economic interests instead of those of the robot owners.

3

Our whole shopworn concept of universal labor is outdated and needs to be completely scrapped, not just papered over with some ACA-like scheme to mask its defects.

Incresingly, our work force is doing nothing but regulatory compliance, which is why banks have more employees now than they had when accounts were kept with a quill dip-pen. If we need to create the requisite do-nothing jobs to keep everyone enslaved, just put the jobs where people are. Employees of my credit card company live and work in South Dakota.

I once had a job in which I commuted 200 miles each week. I worked two 8-hour shifts at big city wages, and made as much as I had been making in 40 hours in a little rural town in Kansas.

For a job requiring in-situ workers, they could work 40 hours in a span of 72, with 8 hours off between each shift, sleeping in a company bunkhouse. Then drive 100 miles to wherever they wanted to enjoy the quality of rural life, and commute back again after four days off.

There are plenty of alternative ways to ensure workers for jobs that need to be done. But that’s not the purpose of the exerciset. The goal is to make sure that nobody has dignified life unless he sells his soul to the company store.

4

Its a little of both.

I know people who drive 50 miles one way to work. In the US frankly most people are within 50 miles of a decent employer. I have known people who lived further away who just park a camper in their employers parking lot, work and stay there during the week, and drive home on weekends.

So in a way you are moving them out but its in a form of driving to a job.

Now bringing jobs to them. I also have known people in rural areas who have started some cottage industries. Making soap, art, bed and breakfasts, there is alot of that. One way to help is to make the internet more available. Right now if you live in the boondocks you have to use satellite.

5

There is semi-rural and then there is RURAL. The issues are very different between those two. When most people think of cities, they think of places like New York, LA, Chicago or Dallas but the vast majority of people don’t live in the largest cities. The definition of a “city” is orders of magnitude smaller than that.

There are plenty of things that you could do to help the smaller cities and semi-rural areas. They have natural advantages of their own like low cost of living (and usually lower wages). Many U.S. based call centers are located in the smaller cities of the Midwest for that reason for example because of the savings and the fact that they have a population of people that have neutral accents in U.S. English terms. There are a lot of industries that locate satellite facilities like distribution centers in those types of areas but there could be a lot more with the right incentives especially now that technology makes location irrelevant for many jobs.

Truly rural areas still need people as well. Those millions of acres of corn and wheat fields aren’t going to harvest themselves even though it doesn’t take nearly as many people as it once did. There are lots of essential industries from Maine to Alaska that depend on the fact that they have natural resources because they are in the middle of nowhere. I don’t think intentionally depopulating them any more is going to help matters much.

Some people really do love living in rural areas believe it or not. There are plenty of obsolete towns all over the country but some of them are surviving and even thriving if they learned to adapt over time. You have to sort out which is which to help the ones that are still functional and necessary.

6

I should add that depopulating areas are generally bad news. My own tiny home town only exists because it was once a railroad stop for a train that doesn’t stop at all anymore. Once people start leaving, especially young people, property values plunge and the remaining businesses go into a death spiral. The people that remain tend to be the least mobile and educated so you end up with a mini-Detroit effect. I don’t think it is a good idea to encourage thousands of those sprinkled all over the map any more than already happens.

It may be wishful thinking but it would be better to promote broad and diverse opportunities evenly rather than just try to shove everyone into the larger metro areas. It is much easier said than done but it may be possible with technology.

7

define “rural.” I can drive/ride 30 minutes north of Detroit and be in what might be considered “rural” areas.

8

Well, with the issue of access (both road and internet) then you get a chicken-or-egg Catch-22: big new-economy employers may be loath to move to a place lacking the kind of infrastructure they require, as they’d have to absorb the expense of putting it in either by doing it themselves or through impact fees; and OTOH elected officials in our day and age find that they’ll get slammed if they build “bridges to nowhere” hoping to attract for some development that may never get off the ground.

Another problem not just with with rural areas but with others left behind by the economic trends like urban working class is what **Shagnasty **points out: that by the time you notice something needs to be done about this, often the people with the git-up-n-go to head where the jobs are, or willing to think outside the box, already done got up and headed where the jobs were, or are living happily outside the box. You’re left now with a population more disproportionately represented of the older, the less skilled, the skilled but devalued, and the underachieving(*)… so where are you gonna move them and what is it for them to do there?

(*some of them underachieving not so much by nature as because with the depopulation and loss of economic activity has come a loss of educational resources and of job training and social networking opportunities)

9

Here’s my take on the coal miners.

Mining has always been boom-bust. It is the very nature of extracting a limited resource.

Where are all the silver mining towns that boomed in the old west and had their own theaters and opera houses? They’re ghost towns. The people moved on.

We forget how much boom-bust was the basic pattern of society, because our modern economic policies prevent that sort of thing from happening to the degree it did. Here is a sample of the city of Duluth (Minnesota)'s history;

By 1857, copper resources became scarce and the area’s economic focus shifted to timber harvesting.* A nationwide financial crisis caused nearly three-quarters of the city’s early pioneers to leave.**

The opening of the canal at Sault Ste. Marie in 1855 and the contemporaneous announcement of the railroads’ approach had made Duluth the only port with access to both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Soon the lumber industry, railroads and mining were all growing so quickly that the influx of workers could hardly keep up with demand, and storefronts popped up almost overnight. By 1868, business in Duluth was booming. In a Fourth of July speech Dr. Thomas Preston Foster, the founder of Duluth’s first newspaper, coined the expression “The Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas”.

In 1869–70, Duluth was the fastest-growing city in the country and was expected to surpass Chicago in only a few years.[citation needed] When Jay Cooke, a wealthy Philadelphia land speculator, convinced the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad to create an extension from St. Paul to Duluth, the railroad opened areas due north and west of Lake Superior to iron ore mining. Duluth’s population on New Year’s Day of 1869 consisted of 14 families; by the Fourth of July, 3,500 people were present to celebrate.[citation needed]

In the first Duluth Minnesotian printed on August 24, 1869, Dr. Foster said:

“Newcomers should comprehend that Duluth is at present a small place, and hotel and boarding room accommodation is extremely limited. However, lumber is cheap and shanties can be built. Everyone should bring blankets and come prepared to rough it.”
**
In 1873, Cooke’s empire crumbled and the stock market crashed, and Duluth almost disappeared from the map**. But by the late 1870s, with the continued boom in lumber and mining and with the railroads completed, Duluth bloomed again. By the turn of the century, it had almost 100,000 inhabitants, and was again a thriving community with small-business loans, commerce and trade flowing through the city. Mining continued in the Mesabi Range and iron was shipped east to mills in Ohio, a trade continuing into the 20th century.*

10

As someone with a whole group of relatives who live in rural areas (as in, the largest town in the entire county has <4,000 people) the problem isn’t so much where they live, as what they can do.

Take someone who worked in a coal mine, or a farm, or cutting timber, and move them into a big city. Now you have someone who not only lacks needed skills, but is also cut off from their family and lifelong support system. If they’re lucky, they can get into a training program and in a year or two get a marketable skill. If they aren’t so lucky, you’re just dumping more poor people into the city.

11

There is no solution, because there are no jobs for them to work.

Automation is going to decimate jobs all across the economy. Blue collar workers (especially in manufacturing) were canaries in the coal mine. Manufacturing has lost 1/3 of their employees (from 18 million down to 12 million now) in the last 15 years while manufacturing capacity has gone up.

We will eventually have to turn to universal basic income. There is no real other solution.

12

I’m no expert but I agree that moving people is not the answer. Trying to bring back dead industries is not the answer either.

I believe that clean energy innovators should be enticed to build operations in these blighted areas. Solar panel plants, windmill makers, battery plants, new-wave recycling plants. Whatever is out there. Supportive jobs will pop up along side the factory jobs (restaurants, tax preparation, maid service, daycare, you name it).

American manufacturers are reinventing the Chinese and Indian countrysides. Time for those innovations to come back here.

13

The Free Market will fix it.

or not.

14

Even if Trump was able to force new industries to develop here in Merica, not every little desolate town would reap the benefits of this. Maybe not even most desolate towns. If a place is so dead that all the people with get-up-and-go have abandoned it, then an employer would have a hard time finding good employees.

And presumably there is a reason that American manufacturers have flocked to China and India, and my guess is that it has something to do with the low cost of labor in those places. Should we suspend federal and state minimum wage jobs just so people can have a job? That doesn’t sit right for me, and yet neither does someone using disability as a permanent backup plan. So I don’t know.

15

There’s already a large population of intractably poor people living in most cities, though. If city magic hasn’t rubbed off on them, I’m not sure there’s reason to think it would do so for a newly-migrated population.

16

So, when is automation going to start decimating jobs? In 1950, 37% of the US population actually had jobs, and produced all the goods and services that Americans consumed… Now, the number is 46%, not even counting work done overseas by outsourced jobs. So all of that stuff created by technology and computerization and digiiztation and all the outsourcing have actually resulted in a demand for more manpower, not less. (1950 = 57M/153M; 2016 = 152M/325M)

We will never turn to universals basic income, because it is contrary to the central core philosophy of the Calvinist work ethic, of which we are mercilessly in the stranglehold. Like so many other advances in thinking, every other country in the world may do it, but not this one.

17

The USA for hundreds of years has been characterized by a very mobile workforce. People just up and moved to other states.

It has been observed that the USA is not like that now, and that the need for workers in new locations has been filled by international migration.

18

The current plan is actually pretty practical; let these tiny rural towns dry up of their own accord and die a natural death. It’s not like anyone is moving to these places, so their existence is unsustainable. They’ll get to the point where their population is too old and they’ll wither away to nothing.

Sure, it sucks for them by my standards, but if they really wanted to move they’d have done so already. So the remaining ones must at least kinda like it, either because they don’t like cities, or all their family is out there, or whatever. No point in relocating them.

19

I’m fairly right-wing–whether more libertarian or republican is debatable–but I think universal basic income is something to shoot for. I have moved almost every year for my almost 40 years, mostly among various sub-suburban small towns, and there’s a trend. The only real industry left is healthcare for the populace, and that can veer oddly depending on whether we socialize medicine or not. The other major industry would be foodservice, which doesn’t pay well or require much official education. That’s about it. All of these small towns are basically cannibalizing themselves. Allow a basic human subsistence level, without going through disability or hardship hoops, and see what pans out. It can’t be any worse than the current system.

20

yeah. let’s let those inbred shit-kickers die off while we gleefully watch.

the tone of this thread is really off-putting.