I live in western Pima County, southern AZ. Pima County has abandoned our area by shuffling all our resources to the tourism city of Tucson. But here, squatters live in abandoned trailers, tarp houses of canvas beer signs, among farm animals that are obviously starving. ATVs burglarize homes then escape via broken gates and destroyed fences across State Trust Land. It is common to hear over 1000 rounds of ammo, everything from .22 up to Tannerite explosions, with automatic weapons, every weekend dawn to dusk, illegally trespassing with motorized vehicles and illegally shooting on State Trust Land within sight of our neighborhood. When we call the sheriff, they say they have no one to send out here, 1/2 hour from the city of Tucson. Pima County will not collect property taxes or force owners to clean up their area, when community wells break down, there are up to hundreds without any water at all, in 110 degree heat. No highspeed. No trash pickup. No cell service. Illegal chopshops operate all night, ripping up old trailers for scrap metal. Known methlabs deliver drugs by minors as young as 12, on loud dirtbikes, all night. Nazi symbols in dirt roads, made with motoroil. Acres of vehicles, trailers, motors, trash, abandoned buildings, are left to drain poison in the little bit of aquifer we have left. Property values: ruined, homeowners cannot sell. Yet everyone of these idiots is a white, tweaker, toothless, drunk Trump supporter. The author has not seen MY Rural America.
92
Why are liberals so willing to embrace certain traditional cultures, such as Muslims, but so unwilling to embrace other traditional cultures, such as rural America? Seems a bit inconsistent.
21
How dare you speak truth to us?
12
At the end of the road in the accompanying photo is Donald Trump.
3
It is seriously disingenuous and lazy to say that nothing can be done to help rural America. This shows a complete lack of understanding of rural problems and no effort to try and understand them. This is what got Obama in trouble in rural America as well as both Clinton's.
It's not hard to figure out the problem. Go into Walmart and see a gallon of milk for $.78 when it costs the farmer a minimum of $1.20 to produce that gallon. Or go buy a Big Mac for $.99 when it requires a million head of cattle on 10 acres of land eating a steady diet of cheap grain that their bodies where never meant for to produce a hamburger for that price.
If you want to help rural America, you are going to have to go after the ten mega corporations that control our food supply. Stop letting Walmart set prices. Stop letting ADM and Cargill control the price of grain and then control the price of seed that you are required to buy if you want to sell any grain. Stop letting big ag rape and pillage our land. It is our most valuable resource and the most fertile land in the world, we need to treat it as such
93
they so love to whine and complain that they are now guaranteeing future poverty by refusing to educate their children. it’s all holy and stuff to homeschool their way into abject poverty.
10
Sociologist---then Senator, R. Patrick Moynihan---once proposed a policy of "benign neglect" for the urban ghettos. It might be time to consider such a policy for the rural areas.
4
I say we stop trying. Many of these areas were only populated in the first place because of an immigrant’s dream of land ownership via the Honestead Act. Let’s buy out whomever wants to leave, rip out the fences and let this land return to nature. If tribes want the land back, I say give it back after compensating the current residents. We could all benefit from having more open wild areas for wildlife habitat and from having these hardworking, tough souls being able to do other work than trying to keep an ancestor’s dream alive.
30
Imagine a Democrat or so-called ‘Progressive’ that didn’t have a sneering contempt for those who live in rural areas.
If you Dems ever find such a person, you’d be looking at a 45 state electoral college wipeout in 2020.
But I don’t think you and your media adjunct can control yourselves when it comes to demeaning those you feel are not with the program.
13
Is Vermont an example of what to do or what could help, or is it too dependent on tourism to be copied?
3
Cities trade away livability for the sake of packing more people in, as in a recent NYT piece about Brooklyn, NY and proposed tall apartment buildings shading public gardens. If cities would say 'no' to such plans the remaining alternative would be to locate jobs in more rural areas. They routinely say 'yes' because it benefits a select group monetarily while thousands will live with the often deleterious results.
Alexandria, VA or Queens, NY need another 25,000 Amazon jobs like I need another hole in my head.
Hollowing out of farm families and their towns is the result of factory-style farming which is neither good for the environment or small rural towns. Not to mention the glyphosate in breast milk and many foods, or the death of bees and other insects that form the base of the food chain wildlife depends upon, or the manure pollution unleashed by multi-thousand animal CAFO operations.
City packing and small town withering are both the direct result of rent seeking to the detriment of what people really need to have a quality of life. Putting people first, as the Green New Deal does in many regards, and obviously judging by their outsized attacks, scares the pants off politicians serving the rent seekers.
24
I am bemused by columns that describe the changes in rural areas & what might be done to change them back, but rarely give insight into what the residents actually want. There is typically not even a definition of “rural” which is left to our imaginations & often limited experience with “rural” folk to color the nature of the discussion. Comments from current & former rural residents are valuable, yet still mostly skim the surface. Is it accurate to conclude that no one is really talking to these people?
This group is not organized so their voice, & what they want, is muted at best. We still make prescriptions or conclude that their future is hopeless. Wouldn’t it be much better if they told us they want? Not only because there’s no sense in imposing undesired “solutions” that would then likely fail, but because, IMHO, this process would also help them come to terms with the nature of their situation. A wise commenter suggested that change is possible through education; such conversations would help begin that education. Rural America, and we, may learn & have to accept that there is no going back & that some solutions are not possible. Even so, the conversation itself is important.
Regardless, some westernized societies have programs to help preserve the viability & dignity of ALL citizens: a guaranteed income, affordable healthcare & education, subsidized daycare, etc. These help show that all citizens are valued; we should at least work for the same.
19
I can confirm krugman's analyses. in Indiana we have many farm communities that have been dying now for decades.
10
It may sound cruel but I have never understood the business model for modern family farming. I understand the tradition and sentiment but in today's world it never seemed like a viable way to make a living. That said, I also worry about the fate of these farms. It's kind of sad to watch an industry and lifestyle go extinct.
8
I grew up in rural canada. It was and still is a center of immigration. After every global war usually. I'm curious if nothing like this happens in the US? In our case I guess the federal government directs them in that direction. All of them changed our world for the better.
Recently my mother's rural baptist church was saved from utter emptiness by an influx of Christian Koreans. She and her husband were overjoyed. This story is repeated multiple times across the prairie. I cant speak for the USA but a bit further north this idea that rural people aren't living in the globalized world sounds odd to me.
Is there more to the USA story as well?
18
The song: How are you gonna keep them down on the Farm after they've seen "Paree",
is a very old song.
4
We should let the rural states have their way and shrink government, so that their excess population will leave or die and only the well-to-do are left. They are welfare queen states filled with ungrateful welfare queens who hate the systems that keep them going, and we should use their hatred to destroy the parameters of their current existence.
If we are going to use our resources to keep others alive and well, these resources should ultimately wind up spent in our communities, and the way to make this happen is for the recipients of these resources to move.
8
Brilliant.
6
Rural folks keep voting for the people who will do nothing to help them, because conservatism's answer to what can "we" do to help you is nothing and that you should help yourself, well, that or some tripe of a concept of how public funds can be funneled into the same corporate hands for a "market solution". The only "we" that is coming to help is a vigorous federal policy bundle, just like it did when the new deal brought power to the south and crafted a middle class from literally nothing and helped pave, power, sewer, and water our nation's way to great wealth creation. When rural folks start voting for rural interests, instead of trumped up notions of "the role of government" or crafty smoke bombs like "family values", rural areas will see more investment and development and support where it counts, right square on top of the problems. Haven't we pushed it all aside for another day for long enough?
16
One of things that can be done for rural America is make it easier to exploit the economic opportunities availible to rural America.
Too often there is some expert from the big citiy shows up to tell us how we should be living.
For the most part we don't need the city experts to run our lives. We have our own local experts.
Urban folks have completely destroyed their environment, and are completely reliant upon rural America for their food and raw materials to manufacture virtually anything.
Increasing the prices of goods produced in rural America would do wonders, but protesters have blocked pipelines to get our oil out for example.
Urban and suburban voters better pray the folks in rural America continue to do their jobs, otherwise those in the big city will certainly starve to death, for lack of food, plastics, oil, metals, paper, water, etc. The list is long.
Rural folks can organize and run their communities just fine, but the city folks could learn a lot about rural needs by listening, and importantly not making fun of rural Americans by suggesting they are rubes, or deplorable people.
In the end, urban voters should consider how critical rural America is to their lives, and then simply listen to what rural America needs, instead of telling them how they should organize their communities and lives.
If country folks want to go to church and thank God for their bounty, don't judge them. Respect them.
5
@Doug Karlberg
"Rural folks can organize and run their communities just fine, ..."
If that's true, then why is an article like this even necessary? If "rural folks" can organize and run their communities, why are the rural areas in decline?
24
Thanks for a very insightful and timely explanation of an issue that doesn't get a lot of attention in the press. Certainly the political differences between rural and urban areas gets attention. So do the demographics. But the root issue of a rural lifestyle in an increasingly urban, post-industrial, information-driven, technological society -- where lack of education can be a disability as severe as any physical disability -- does not get much attention. And, as the comments show, it is an issue that not many of us want to view dispassionately.
11
Here’s a thought. What about making rural America a powerhouse? There’s space there for wind and solar farms and it would provide well paying steady jobs for the people who work them.
8
@Maggie, once the wind and solar are installed, there is not a lot of labor needed. The only thing I can see that would improve rural America is better commodity prices.
13
We could buy a generation of time, and possibly more from improvements in fundamentals, with a massive national infrastructure program -- including prominently, the restoration of a comprehensive rail transportation system.
The decline of rural America has coincided with deepening of its disconnection because rail transportation has become even more primitive in recent decades. Towns that should be 45 minutes from a city are two hours away by rail -- and an unpredictable two hours or much more by car except at 2:00 AM.
It should not be just the sexy high-speed rail between big cities. Small cities and towns need to be served, too, and they aren't right now because government refuses to fund it out of some kind of spite. It only has deteriorated to third world status.
14
I’m not angry about your writing here about the rural crisis in America, Paul. I’m used to your intensive geographic economics—and Jersey brashness.
As a rural person I’ve pondered, studied and mourned the ever worsening health of my beloved parts of the country. The problems sort generally into the economic and sociocultural and they are truly dire and resisting of solution.
If one believed in conspiracy, we could just curse Eisenhower and his Interstate Highways for destroying our local places or TV for draining the creative life of our communities.
Jane Jacobs had some good observations (Cities and the wealth of Nations) on the dynamics between metro and rural areas. I’m afraid we haven’t heard much positive stuff in the decades since her writing.
E.F. Shumacher (Small is Beautiful) wrote how our quest for bigness and maybe the inherently destructive nature of unbridled capitalism was destroying rural industry. But all that was decades ago, and we still haven’t learned how to value the unique gifts offered by city and rural areas of our nation.
I think it’s about finding a better balance in our national life. We need major adjustments to our economic and social incentives. How about a ——- new deal?
14
"Many of the problems facing America have easy technical solutions; all we lack is the political will."
Exactly! Not only rural America but also much of southern suburban America, such as where I live outside fast-growing Myrtle Beach, SC, fail to understand how poor schools, poor healthcare and poor job prospects due to both contribute to negative outcomes for the livelihoods of every single person in the area.
I listen to my neighbors: they came here for the weather and the low taxes. They are not willing to pay another $10 a year, let alone $100 a year to help improve schools and healthcare. They see those as someone else's problems, especially if their children are grown and not in school here.
A man from Massachusetts drives a truck and does landscaping on the side. A man from the NC mountains was a mechanic. Now retired, he busies himself with home improvement projects. A retired police officer from NJ complains about the "lazy" people on welfare, not understanding the dynamics that lead to the breakdown of families in rural SC.
They work hard, but not necessarily smart. I hired a man to blow up leaves and pine straw. He raked, then blew them, then raked again. It took him hours and in the end, he inadvertently skipped part of my small yard and removed mulch that I didn't want removed. I did that small part of the yard, about 1/5 of the total in 20 minutes just by raking.
We are in a vicious cycle.
9
With Trump and friends recent desire to stop mail service daily who would want to live in those cold snowy places any way. We lived in Wyoming County, Pa and it was a GOP county . No meal on wheels no elderly transportation . The two local grocery stores in Nicholson Pa closed when Walmart moved in. Now it is a place to just live and die. We moved to south Delaware where you have grocery stores mail delivery and easy access to health care. I am glad I moved it is only going to get worse for the rural people as they get older.
9
In order to improve the lot of those who live in rural America; many, but not all of whom, are the farmers we all depend upon for our food, we need to massively improve it's infrastructure and by infrastructure, I don't just mean roads and bridges.
Rural America needs access to quality education, health care and improved communications. Rural America also needs jobs; but in order to attract companies to create jobs in rural America you have to provide these infrastructure improvements.
It's a long term investment, but if the U.S. doesn't make that investment rural America won't survive.
15
I grew up in Western New York state, which is economically getting destroyed right now. One of the reasons is the policies imposed on the rest of the state by you and your pals in New York City. Specifically, the fracking ban. Well-to-do visitors from New York City who like picturesque rural landscapes, and power-mad environmentalists who think me and my neighbors are inbred idiots, pass laws and put in place regulations that economically strangle rural areas. We don't need your "help". We need you to just get out of our way.
62
@John Pettimore I grew up in Northern NY. If NYC really wants to help out the rest of the state, they can either
1) become part of NJ
2) slide into the sea
3) become their own state, and stop stealing from the rest of the state.
Hey, does NYC need a pipeline put in? Why, they just put in a pipeline, claim eminent domain, and give you some chickenfeed for it. Do they need a new garbage tip? Why then, they just bribe a major or two, and then destroy and entire town with OMNI.
NYC somehow thinks that although they produce NOTHING at all, they are the bedrock of the state's economy. The only thing they produce, is banking fraud.
11
Yes, let’s get out of the way so all of our natural beauty can be fracked, mined, dug up and exploited. That is the mentality that is fouling our communal nest.
117
Automation is a job-killer too.
4
It is time for tough love. Cut off the money to the red states. You get back only what tax money you raise. Why should land get a vote anyway?
8
Consider UBI.
locate all newfed govt facilities in rural america. provide masive subsidies like new yorks for amazon provide infrastructure to service them locate alternative energy plants
1
@stan forbes
All the tax breaks in the world couldn't convince Amazon to locate an HQ in a rural area because it would be unable to attract the types of employees that it needs in sufficient numbers. Young STEM graduates want to be in NY, San Francisco, DC, etc..., not the middle of Nebraska. Relocation of older employees is also difficult with families concerned about employment opportunities for spouses and good schools for children.
5
In these discussions, it's probably worth distinguishing so-called "farms" (or gentleman farms), usually near cities, that have no farm products (except maybe emu eggs or llamas). Anyone who says they have a "farm", just ask them WHAT they farm. Next are all the "farms" (agribusinesses and estates), that have farm products, but the wealth on the farm is from OUTSIDE sources, either government subsidies, corporate financing and tax write-offs or simply wealth from other sources that subsidize farm activities. Finally, there are the productive and self-sustaining, often smaller and family-run farms that people commonly think of when they think of "farms". Unlike a century ago, these are now quite rare (but the Amish, Mennonite and organic farming movements are revitalizing many of these.) Many people that see modern, metal "barns" in pastoral settings might be disappointed to learn that most of these are storage facilities for very expensive, public-financed farm machinery.
9
Let's get realer: No one committed to neoliberal capitalism knows how to reverse the decline of rural America. Living in a world subject to social forces that we are counseled to regard as objectively beyond our influence or control - otherwise known by mainstream economists as "the world economy" - is a choice, and though it is an unconscious one for most people it is quite conscious for opinion-formers like Mr. Krugman. Of course, that choice entails abandoning billions of people to the tender mercies of a system that is indifferent not only to their survival but the survival of the majority of the world's species as well. That Mr. Krugman imagines it as the only acceptable choice is a problem inscribed in his ideology, not in reality.
5
I have lived in rural America for all my 73 years. I wish our small towns were thriving rather than dying, but I know your analysis is correct.
Economic decline, social decay and drug abuse, especially among poorly educated youth, are prevalent in rural Colorado, my home for the past 42 years, and are even worse in my birth state of Mississippi, where most of my family still reside.
I am fortunate to be able to receive adequate health care, but those services, at least the corporate ones, are failing too. Will the federal government step in to help us stragglers survive "out here"? Not under the current administration but perhaps, if we elect a decent, empathetic president and Congress - soon.
Regardless, for the good of the nation, I support the idea that the Electoral College must go and each citizen's vote must count equally.
In a way, I am glad to be old and unlikely to see how this plays out. I am not optimistic.
21
"We can’t help rural America without understanding that the role it used to play in our nation is being undermined by powerful economic forces that nobody knows how to stop."
I have the answers!
They should migrate (like illegal immigrants do) for greater opportunities in the big cities.
They should migrate (like illegal immigrants do) where there are better schools and better places to prepare their children for challenging futures.
They should migrate (like illegal immigrants do) and work hard at menial jobs -with their families all chipping in and huddling together in small rooms SO that they can save up and improve their lives.
AND THERE -in the cities- they will begin to see how the people they hated and the politicians they loved were NOT what they were told to believe.
ps -and they don't even have to sneak in or get green cards
10
There are plenty of struggling communities in blue states. NYC residents should hop in their cars some weekend and take a drive through Sullivan, Delaware, Ulster, and Greene counties. Check out some of the empty storefronts and ghostly streets. Not the heartland, but affected much the same.
8
What in the WORLD would generate 16-1700 comments on what Mr. Krugman said here today ?
And then there is this:
"I'm not sure of the point of this obvious hit-piece about rural America".
Hit Piece ? Huh ? Did you even read his piece ? This was surely one of the most mellow and non blaming pieces I have read. You are telling me NOTHING can be said about ANYTHING nowadays ? My God.
Mr Krugman was describing the decline of the Heartland. And what could possibly be done to help. Are you saying no one can talk about this ? Are you saying there is no decline ?
9
Rural towns and cities are seriously deprived of the infrastructure that knits nations together. So, lacking airlines at reasonable cost, good roads, and high speed telecom they are as isolated as rural communities were before the railroads came along. Since rural life can be very enjoyable for many people, infrastructure investment, properly done, should do a lot to revive rural life.
10
Every once in a while I go to the grocery store, look at all the food and think about all the ( who knows how many) grocery stores that exist all over the place. If you have the money you can buy so
much food. Every town in the country...even in ,say, Alaska there are grocery stores full of food. Think about it.
3
"Despite vast sums spent on reconstruction, the former East Germany is still depressed three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall." Driving east of Berlin I was staggered by how neat and pleasant the east German villages were. In Feldheim (look it up) the village produced its own electricity and gas. The town's were bouyant and also (to overuse a word) tidy. Yes, the must be some problem areas, in in driving a couple of hundred miles, we saw none.
7
It is impossible and misleading to write of a single rural America. Some areas are moribund; others are thriving. We should invest in broadband and good K-12 everywhere. But our other investments should be imaginative and follow the natural but neglected gifts many rural places have to offer. Why not make wilderness and recreation prime industries in Appalachia and parts of the Far West? Why not build out hospitals near research universities and settle millions of retirees in refurbished or new housing in less populated but beautiful parts of the Midwest and New England? Why not build high speed train networks that whisk urban working people from rural small towns that many find delightful to live in but can’t find work in to bursting metropolitan regions? Why not reinvigorate the agricultural fields and landscapes by paying people to build hedgerows, reforest, and tend to the environment? And why not concentrate more agriculture in vertical, indoor greenhouses near metropolitan regions, so that food rather sprawling, car-dependent suburbs encircle our cities. What we have is a rapidly evolving economy with a concomitant lack of imaginative geographic solutions.
18
As the old Grangers used to say:
The soldier says, "I fight for all."
The politician says, "I rule for all."
The rentier says, "I fleece you all."
The minister says, "I pray for all."
But the farmer says,
"I FEED YOU ALL."
53
Yes, we all need food and farmers. But we don’t need as many farmers as before and the rest have to go do something else. Just like the coal miners.
Just because your parents did a job doesn’t mean you have to and get to do that same job. Not many in a bigger city can do that either.
As nice as rural life can be, we can’t subsidize them to stay and wait more farmers or miners being needed.
17
@Tom
Having grown up in Appalachia, and gotten out as far and as fast as antipathy could carry me, I'm not the ideal spokesman for the "simple life." But there's something to be said for multigenerational experience in things like farming and ranching. Unless we want to get all our food from BigAg Corp.
We're going to subsidize things, it's just what we do. If I had my way, we'd take 1% of the money we spend subsidizing big fossil and the Wall Street reptiles (via the capital gains swindle) and pay small farmers just so we could have some food that doesn't taste like a chemistry set.
37
Having lived over 30 years in rural, Southeastern Indiana, I have seen the decline Dr. Krugman describes. Not too long ago, the town where I lived landed a huge new automotive plant. All of the executives from the plant live in a city an hour away, the non manufacturing jobs are minimum-wage temp positions and most of the factory employees commute from elsewhere. Long story short, the community gained nothing except the costly responsibility for maintaining a stressed infrastructure, fire protection and police protection.
Southern and Midwestern States offer tax incentives, land deals and low non-union wages. Even when they get the plant, the community gains nothing, not even the tax revenue, which was given up to lure the industry. To top it all off, Indiana has instituted a 1% property tax cap. Communities with low property values are unable to raise enough revenue to maintain basic services.
16
Dr. Krugman, I usually agree wholeheartedly with your columns but with this one I think you are off track. I kindly submit that there are people who know how to fix rural America's problems but that the entrenched interests in our country -- Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Chemicals, Big Real Estate and Big Finance -- do not want us to fix them. I think that we need to look beyond economists for answers and perhaps to environmentally and economically aware people who still live in these communities and are committed to their survival. For instance, Art Culien, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of the Storm Lake Times in Iowa and author of: "Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper, " Check it out.
9
If you were to watch television ads, you would find major U.S. companies marketing a myth of Farmland USA. It's the place where every man has a honking' big four by four that can carry dumploads of rich rural loam, while good wife is home making apple pies (with grandma pitching in) and the kids are just home from another wonderful day of school at the little red schoolhouse just down the road. The corn is tall, the wheat is overflowing, the farmers are white and they are always smiling even as they toss massive bales of just harvested hay.
And the animals -- the advertisers never forget the farm animals -- are majestic beasts running free across the sun-speckled open prairie. Not a fence or a pen in sight.
This myth persists even as the number of independent family farms has dwindled, corporate ag has taken over crop and livestock production, and you really won't ever film an ad anywhere near a hog or chicken processing plant. The kids may or may not be in school, and fond of chemical self-delusion, while the wives are working the extra shift at Wal-mart or McDonalds.
The folks who still pretend to believe all this are the people in state legislatures and Congressional delegations. They clearly prefer the homogenized version of Grant Wood's stalwart farm couple. Why waste time trying to fix something that ain't broke.
There is no rural recovery in store or sight as long as the legislators and the voters keep holding out for the return of the mythical never was.
13
Ignoring climate change and carbon emissions will bring on Armageddon (see the current story about massive Nebraska flooding), and then the Religious Right will say that the Book of Revelations has come to pass....and Jesus will say "what happened? I thought I warned you several times. You ignored all the warnings I sent...."
7
“...I’m sure that some rural readers will be angered by everything I’ve just said, seeing it as typical big-city condescension...
Yup...
Somewhere, Verlyn is scowling deeply...
Says Krugman always thought “Rural Free Delivery” was a stealth red-state welfare program...
3
People could move...right?
3
the world offers multiple examples of far right candidates with surging popularity: Brazil, Netherlands, France. The rural America/ Trump relationship may not be unique as we may like to think, but it does serve to pit the coasts and "heartland" against each other with both groups clinging to stereotypes about the other. The point of the article is correct though, there isn't much promising opportunity if you're trying to get a leg up in some rural places. Little social safety net if you're trying to catch a break. Too little investment in infrastructure to seed small business.
3
Rural areas do well if they are college or university towns, or resort areas, or just beyond reasonable commuting distance from large metropolitan areas. Otherwise, their fates are determined by individual decisions to leave.
Rural areas can also do well, and preserve much more of their culture, if they can attract prisons or military bases.
Rural areas tend to view colleges or resort facilities as islands of foreign influence and occupation, as they in fact are.
5
We live in the heart of rural America but in our small community of 3500 we have a thriving arts community, an excellent school system, a cable TV (PEG Station) operated primarily by the High School and more available jobs than we have qualified applicants. The bad is much like the big cities: drugs, inadequate housing in many areas and a low wage rate in some of our industry. Since we have an excellent emergency services department we have a low crime rate and reasonably quick access (15 minutes) to hospitals and careflight. A traffic jam is 3 cars lined up behind a grain truck or a big harvester and most of us know our neighbors. Is this Shangri-la, no? But also what it is not is a lost cause. Our government and non profit leaders work together, along with the schools to solve the very real problems such as the opioid epidemic, lack of technical training, inadequate broadband access in much of the county, etc. I have lived in major metro areas on both coasts and the South and I will take our problems, bad as they are, over most (not all) of the much larger cities. I say not all since Greenville, SC, is much larger but seems to be successful, friendly and open to change. It would be nice if some of our Federal govt leaders recognized the importance of rural America on a daily basis rather than just when they are looking for electoral votes. No farms, no small towns, no food and pretty soon, no democracy. Think about it!
6
@BobG
Am I misreading you, or are you claiming that without rural areas we wouldn't have a democracy? Our rural areas, with their over-representation in the Senate and Electoral College, actually seem destructive of democracy.
5
Elected officials in the rural red states unable to save family farms from corporate greed? No affordable health care? Education underfunded and dismal? Astounding! The flyover states have my thoughts and prayers.
5
Yet another well thought out and thought provoking column from Dr. Krugman. Thinking outside the box and not going back to discredited and failed approaches has to be the guiding principles here
4
What nonsense! This is discredited Neo-liberal thinking at its worst. With his obsessive devotion to blaming, Krugman has truly become part of the problem, not the solution. He rarely has anything positive to offer (if he ever did).
Breezy dismissal of the less fortunate in our society was not the Democrat creed when I was growing up. In the Great Depression, FDR tried everything, threw idea after idea at the wall, often in the face of searing criticism, until he found what stuck
Our cool, calculating Neo-liberals, today, no longer have an interest, or simply can’t be bothered, or are determinedly hostile, when it comes to the white farming- or working-class.
One only needs to read Tom Vilsack’s remarkable testament to what can be accomplished in the rural economy, and the political benefits for the Democrats, to understand how far off base, how hollowed out and devoid of imagination are the Neoliberal nostrums offered by Krugman.
Vilsack is a former Democratic governor of Iowa, and secretary of agriculture for Obama. His powerful article in the journal, Democracy, can be found here: https://democracyjournal.org/?p=12664
8
My last visit to my hometown in relatively rural Wisconsin may very well be my last. My college educated hometown "friends" use the N-word in conversation, unapologetically. When I questioned their choice of words, I was told I was "living in a liberal bubble" -- and I replied that I was looking forward to going "home" where friends and neighbors actually care about diversity and each other. I'm very sad about "rural decline" but I can't support a resurrection of old, tired, racist, rural areas.
21
Yes and no. No, not because I think Krugman is unfair to rural people (although the assertion that many rural people "rarely encounter an immigrant" shows that the good Professor hasn't been to rural areas of the country even on vacation), but because in typical economist fashion it presents economic forces as akin to laws of nature. it's not that easy. The economy is a social product, structured by laws and regulations that aren't natural but man-made. While it is true that geographical concentration conveys advantages no matter how you organise our economy, the scale of the economic advantage derived from it is a social and political decision. Silicon Valley isn't merely a consequence of a concentration of skill - it wouldn't be Silicon Valley if it wasn't for laws (patents, copyrights, and abandoning anti-trust enforcement in this case) that allow the transformation of that skill into vast profits. Wall Street would be a tenth of its size and wealth if it weren't for legal structures that promote financialisation. Conversely, the vanishing of many long-standing industries - capital destruction on a massive scale - in rural areas wasn't caused by textile factories moving to big cities, but by rules making outsourcing attractive.
7
Yes, laws do make a difference. Just as federal food subsidies help consumers be protected from big swings in crop production they also keep a lot of inefficient farmers in business and keep a lot of rural America afloat.
2
Just as we saw over 150 years ago, there are plenty of immigrants - many fleeing from poverty, persecution, death, and destruction n their homelands - who would gladly and gratefully welcome the chance to move to and set up communities in the "heartland," wherever that might be. Some have farming experience. Others can make a variety of goods. Many can cook. Some have professional degrees and commendurate talents that would be welcomed. (Or should be.)
And just as immigrants largely from Europe displaced native Americans to create settlements and till the land, it's possible immigrants from Latin America, the Near East, and Asia might displace descendants of those 1800s immigrants to build their own communities.
For every person looking to move out (or who dies off), there is likely another looking to move in. Perhaps the solution lies in immigration...
5
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
53
Ironically, taking away that disproportionate voting weight rural voters currently enjoy might actually allow those of us with more socially liberal ideas to successfully put them into place, ultimately benefitting the former who seem insistent on voting against their own best interests.
12
I would submit two additional thoughts.
First, our goal should be equality of opportunity for all--not necessarily equality of outcome. So we should make available excellent schools, access to high-speed internet, and quality health care all across the country, both in the cities and in rural areas.
Second, we should find incentives for young professionals to live and work in rural areas. Here in Oregon, for example, we have had some success in getting young doctors to practice in rural areas by providing forgiveness of educational loans. Perhaps that could be applied to all college graduates who are willing to spend, say, three years working in a rural community.
In general, there is no single solution to softening the effects of the economic forces that are hitting the rural areas so hard. I suspect we will have to try many things--over many years--to discover what works.
5
One of the major beneficiaries of a UBI may be rural areas. ex 1000/Mo goes lot further in upstate NY than NYC.
This is oddly fitting given that I'd argue automation is one of the key parts of rural decline. Forestry, Agriculture and Mining; the mainstays of rural employment historically all require far less labor than they used to.
2
@Paronis
You're absolutely right that rural areas would be more impacted by UBI than urban areas, to the point of potentially reviving entire regions. And UBI is almost certainly more politically possible than R(ural)BI, despite being significantly more expensive.
The problem is that UBI, in every current, "fiscally viable" iteration, involves the elimination or massive reduction of many other programs and services. So not only does the money go further in rural areas, but it also literally takes away from urban areas, where the majority of program beneficiaries live.
(That majority, by the way, is primarily by virtue of the difference in overall population, not proportion).
1
I live in a somewhat rural area in western Maryland, but I’m only about an hour and change from DC. People here are doing well, but their political views are no different from the struggling communities deeper in Appalachia. My state senator and delegates are right wing whacks.
It’s more than about economy and race. Secularism is pushing out religion. They hate that.
And then, some of the division all seems arbitrary. Some is manufactured by provocateurs who have discovered that provocation sells. And they buy it. They buy it all.
8
I'm not sure of the point of this obvious hit-piece about rural America. What Is Mr. Krugman saying? Decline is inevitable? Get real that rural America doesn't matter?
Real or not, the tacit purpose of this article is to continue constructing the rhetorical framework at NYT which advocates the abolition of the electoral college.
Then we can avoid and ignore those those pesky non-city-dwellers once and for all!
2
Rural Privileged White Male areas in this country can start healing themselves by becoming aware of and informed about the larger World around them and begin to understand that like Middle Ages, the World does not revolve around them. The High Priests of the Middle Ages tried to silence those who discovered the truth that the Earth did in fact revolve around the Sun, not the reverse. Voting for tRump was a last gasp effort to attempt to turn back the Tide of History. The High Priests failed and the Privileged Whites of rural Amerikkka will also, ultimately fail. As Privileged Whites have always scolded Black Folk to "get over it and pull yourselves up by your bootstraps", now these same Whites must look in the mirror and do the same.
2
Rural voters who voted for Trump and his alt-Right minions are total dupes. Republican State legislators everywhere are bent on frustrating the very development that would help their constituents prosper. Transportation, high-speed internet, state subsidized education and child care are all opposed by rural Republican legislators who regularly claim that such projects only help "those people" They have only one sad mantra, and that is: lower taxes! As if their problems of infrastructure and social service needs will be solved by starving publicly supported development in favor of putting a paltry few bucks in the pockets of rural residents. Oh, and cutting all support for the aforementioned "those people."
Trump doesn't give a rat's patootie about rural America. He only wants to bamboozle them into voting for him. So far it has worked. How to educate these sad, cheated voters into waking up to the GOP-Trump Big Con is the challenge of 2020.
8
"I’m sure that some rural readers will be angered by everything I’ve just said, seeing it as typical big-city condescension."
Don't worry Paul. They don't read The Times. Everything they need to know comes from "Fox and Freaks."
5
@george Elliot Fortunately, rural America is more complicated that that (as someone who lives in the most rural of states, I read the NYTimes and despise Fox News). But there needs to be conversation, not finger pointing.
5
Dr. Krugman demonstrates in this article that he is truly UNinformed about so-called "rural america".
If there is any place more directly affected by refugees, its got to be Rural America.....where most of the Cental American refugees are flooding, lured there by Mega_corps with great standing on Wall Street(Dr. Krugman himself is most likely invested in a number of them). The corporations fire all the locals and then hire the refugees at half cost, then make most of those wages back by housing the refugees in company owned trailer parks.
Dang, Krugman.....do a little research......maybe next time drive more the 50 miles outside of NYC.
2
1. I'm in a rural, declining farm area of Virginia....not exactly the heartland but similar problems and sentiments (but with NoVa to prop up the tax base);
2. As a blue in a sea of red, I don't make a fuss over it but I do try to contribute to the locality through service and social activities, seeking out what they can teach me and demonstrating understanding while slowly broaching concepts and practices that may not reflect the party in favor but do support the community
3. You can bet there will be a "reckoning"...with climate change re-arranging the map of agricultural productivity, and growing food scarcity elevating the value of the farmer. Then, there's the looming crises over water availability and prioritizing how it's used.
4. Farming/land use will require increasing innovation, which will lead to interesting and valuable jobs in more rural areas. Sustainable practices, resistant crops, diverse food types (think bugs), large renewable energy installations...
4
do those in rural areas not meet immigrants? who works in the chicken processing plants, who does these farm jobs? often times local populations of immigrants looking for opportunity and willing to work low wage jobs.
4
Is the author suggesting that rural means all those land locked states? And is rural supposed to mean just farmland? Because there’s a whole lot of cities that have been eclipsed by the unlivable metropolises of NYC, LA, and SF and the wealthy eastern coastal cities.
3
Having family in the coal region/rust belt part of PA that all voted GOP all the way, because they were told their jobs were coming back, I've spent time talking to them, not judging but listening. They don't want change, they don't want some mega-corp fulfillment center opened, even it if means jobs for them. They want to go back to working in the steel mills or the coal mines, get their pensions back, some who have none now because the funds dried up, they want their wives home, cooking, taking care of the kids who are running around the yard and not sitting inside playing video games and getting fat. They want the laundry hung outside on the line. They want a return to a simpler time. No amount of telling them that's not happening is helping. They don't want to be retrained to work for a solar energy company, they don't want to learn to use the computer, they don't want someone telling them they can't have their soda-pop, their camel cigarettes, their boxed macaroni and cheese product, and their hungry-man dinners when Mom has to go to the PTA meeting.
Their desire for simpler times has quite simply pushed them farther into an abyss of mourning, and no amount of opportunity will change that. My family members are not alone. They collect their conspiracy theories and share them with the like-minded, out-of-work neighbors and the family members still left in town, hoping for a new return to the old. No one can fix that, unless those suffering want it to be fixed.
476
@Amy
This is one of the best comments I've ever read.
Thank you.
59
@Amy, you get it. I get it. Many people get it. And it's possible many of your relatives' kids get it too, moving out of the area to seek better opportunities. Bruce Springsteen sang of jobs that were gone "...and they ain't coming back" in My Home Town.
Change waits for no one and can be a very scary thing. Still, your relatives have job skills and a good work ethic that could be put to use on infrastructure projects. Construction equipment, welding, iron work, pipe fitting, electrical, you name it.
Our current president (who they voted for) promised to create jobs and spend lots of money on infrastructure projects that everyone would support, regardless of political leanings. Your relatives would do well to lobby their representatives and senators to hold Trump and Congress to that promise.
48
@Amy, yes, that is the height of rural white angst - nostalgia for a simpler time when white people held all of the positions of authority (in their world) and they could denigrate minorities, LGBT and women with impunity. For all of today's talk about equality and diversity, all they care about is retaining their position at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid. I just don't see how anything can be done to help rural white communities until they decide for themselves that clinging to old thoughts and biases is no longer working.
52
"But rural Americans — many of whom rarely encounter immigrants in their daily lives — have a vastly more negative view."
That's funny. Rural Americans never met their grandparents?
3
By the same logic expressed in this article, we should stop transfer payments to Detroit, Baltimore and Cleveland etc. since the uneducated, poor and unemployed people living there don't matter and haven't for quite some time? I won't hold my breath waiting.
2
I actually don't think that the conservative Republicans values of rural Americans serves them well. The exception to the decline in rural environment is college towns. Most are thriving. They attract people who don't necessarily have connections to the institution but are attracted to the environment. This brings investment and development.
2
@Karen Thornton Those college towns, in addition to be more intellectually stimulating, also aren't as thoroughly "red" as the surrounding areas. This makes them a more viable alternative for minorities and gays.
1
I grieve for the family farms, watermen, family-owned businesses and other forms of 'traditional' life ways that are evaporating in the modern economy. Why is it that 50 years ago a familly could support itself on a small farm, but today the only farmers around are "gentlemen farmers" people with other sources of income who keep land, livestock, as a 'hobby.' This feels dangerous and wrong to me, but I don't understand why it has to be inevitable.
3
Given the political situation in this country in recent years, I find myself leery of any group that strongly supported Trump, like farmers. I think of such groups as being rather unsophisticated and intellectually out of the main stream. I am probably not alone in such thinking. Yeah, I know they say not to criticize farmers with my mouth full of food. On the other hand, they were paid for producing the food.
2
RE: Non rural self sufficiency:
1. I doubt that people in east and west coast cities haven't been to the mid west. They are missing out on quaint small towns, good people and lovely scenery. Being Pittsburghers, we take trips "west" (to the mid-west).
2 I used to garden on 1/4 acre in a southern PIttsburgh suburb and be fairly self sufficient for vegetables and rare fruits for 7 months a year.
3. We can't do it anymore due to an over population of urbanized deer ( 33 deer in approximately over 70 square acres in our subdivision ). Deer literally eat 594 different species of plants- and reach up to eight feet high in your yard.
4. In Pittsburgh and suburbia, there are zoning regulations which do not permit a 9 foot deer fence in your yard (Note: deer jump that high). Also, no electric fences. ( A child and "logically challenged" people hazard). And too many illogical, deranged "Bambi" worshipers who have never eaten venison and will not permit culling by pro hunters.
5. So where do we get our food?
6. Do Urbanites believe that get their food -from magic supermarkets or big box stores? No, from the people in the mid-west and California who farm.
7. We still are lucky enough in Pennsylvania to have farmers in the center of the state which somewhat helps our state's food independence.
Conclusion:
I don't mind helping out the farmers and the small towns who service their needs. Remember- they feed and care for all of us.
3
@Pat Nixon, I don't think it is a question of whether or not to help out farmers in the Midwest financially (there are plenty of agricultural subsidies today). It is a question of how to stop the decay and abandonment of settlements in rural America in favor of the opportunities and inclusiveness of large population centers. As Krugman points out, history has shown that money alone is not a salve for the bleeding wound. In my opinion, rural America is a victim of its own political success by siding with politicians and social issues that are antithetical to American values and the values of the vast majority of Americans who happen to reside in the major coastal cities. They have also successfully leveraged an election system that overrepresents their presence at the ballot box. In a sense they lobbed the first strikes in a culture war that they have started out winning, but, as it appears now, seems increasingly like they will end up losing as demographics change. Rural America will continue to decline until mindsets change or die off.
3
How do you solve a problem like 'Merika? I think the issue is our size. We're the third biggest country by both size and population but while most of us are clumped in big metros mostly around the coasts we also have a vast interior with tiny townships dotting the landscape. In days past they would have died with dignity after the interstate came in or the nearby mines were exhausted or the local plant was shut down but now with middle-class America's wealth tied up in home ownership that model hasn't been feasible for the last 30 some years. Now, folks are locked into dying towns breeding misery and dissatisfaction and mental illness with no fix politically viable to both the ruralites and the powers that be. These towns are simply too poor and too neglected to be saved at a cost the rest of America is willing to pay. The era of rural America is over. The markets have spoken. Rural life is incompatible with the capitalism these same rural peasants choose by voting for the party of the bankers and merchant princes. They can either change with the times or be swept away with it. Nothing is forever, and no group has the right to demand that the world stagnate for their benefit alone. Moreover, these same folks gleefully told black America, when their community was hit by the same forces, that these issues were caused by character flaws and immorality. They fought hard against any govt going to them. Why do they deserve any better?
Are Detroit, Omaha, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis, Cleveland...rural? I think these terms are sloppy here. There are cities that haven’t thrives like the coastal cities. That’s a different problem than rural.
3
Having grown up and lived in the heartland for over 50 years, I'd like to point out something I feel Paul is missing here.
We do know how to stop the powerful economic forces that undermine the role rural America used to play, we just don't consider it reasonable to do. If we're going to get real, lets get real.
Continuing to grow GDP every year, lead the world in technology, military might, and wealth has come with a price tag. Good...bad...indifferent...you decide, but since we're being real...
There's a reason Eugene Debs wrote about "...when a man has to beg for work..." and it resonated, there's a reason MAGA resonated. When all the work is controlled by large corporations we are less free.
Do we need large corporations? With 8 billion souls on the planet at this point the answer is probably yes, so the puzzle becomes how do we control and balance their interests with our freedom.
Speak effectively to that puzzle and it will resonate too.
7
Seemingly left out from your analysis is the role that corporations have played in rural decline. 1 Walmart franchise replaces at least 2 dozen small businesses with minimum wage jobs. How can an economy by built when corporations drains the life blood out of it?
10
Hi Paul,
What about reforming agriculture?
There may not be good examples to draw from, but all signs point to the need for a fundamental re-work of the agricultural and food systems. There is research that organic polyculture farming can produce much more food per hectare than industrial approaches, while fixing its own nitrogen, preventing pests naturally, sequestering carbon and securing soils, recharging groundwater, and eliminating runoff that kills huge swaths of the ocean and reducing aquaculture.
The trick is it is more labour intensive, and more technical. But paired with the right labour standards, economic incentives, and an emerging back-to-the-land culture among millennials, could there be a green new deal to feed the world in the 21st century?
3
@Patrick.... A one man operation in the Midwest can farm 500 acres. At 200 bu/acre they can produce more than 5 million lbs of shelled corn per year. At 60 bu/acre they can produce 1.65 million lbs of soybeans. That is one person working by themselves. If you want to fundamentally re-work agricultural the first thing you have to do is to understand what is going on today, and then get real about the kind of changes that could realistically be made.
2
@Patrick it isn’t possible to feed the country with the kind of production that results in farmers markets.
But you’re right in that the system is INCREDIBLY gamed against farmers and ranchers who practice sustainable agriculture.
A complete re-work of the USDA would do more to help rural communities than just about everything that’s been suggested.
4
I'm perplexed about why rural America is suffering. Don't they vote and send representation to Congress? Don't they have their own president?
The coal miners and farmers and working class have been anointed The Real Americans for the past 40 years. They've had one president in their corner after another, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. We're always supposed to listen to them and cater to them. They have the guns and the freedoms, yet they're still faltering.
I'll tell them like they're always telling the rest of us: Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps. Work harder.
4
The sad thing is that most rural voters would benefit from Democratic policies (e.g. Medicaid.). Sadly, their racism and bigotry blind them to it. Even more sad is the Republican elites could actually care less about rural voters. All they care about is making sure rich people get tax cuts.
4
Something I always thought would help: disperse the federal government headquarters, as much as possible, into “heartland“ states. Say, agriculture in St. Louis, Interior in Cheyenne, HEW in Indianapolis, HUD in Chicago, etc., etc.…
With today’s communication technology, distance should be next to no factor at all… After all how many current DC employees ever leave their buildings to go to another federal headquarters building…?
Thank about it. Every locale would have a stake. Less Us versus Them. Regional economic growth …
7
@Mike The best suggestion that came out of the 2016 election cycle was the suggestion to move the Department of Interior headquarters to Nevada. Put it in Elko and let them see how their policies affect real communities.
1
@Mike
On the other hand, a lot of qualified employees may not want to live in Cheyenne. There's a lot of talk about investment, but it always assumes a "if you build it, they will come" attitude. No amount of investment will succeed if people don't want to live in small towns.
As a progressive mid-westerner, one who grew up on a north-central Kansas farm for that matter, a lot of what Krugman is saying here makes sense. However, I'll admit that overtly stating that our votes matter more than our lives definitely comes across as condescension (despite his ending disclaimer). Hopefully this was just incredibly poor word choice in a pair of sentences from a columnist I typically look forward to reading.
1
Birth rates should be mentioned, too. Throughout history, urban populations died off, and their numbers will filled by migrants from the country--rural areas typically are a source of human resources as well as natural ones. But with birth rates dropping in rural areas, combined with regular migration to cities, towns have been left empty.
2
The NYT has published many articles in the past few months about how immigrants are necessary for many rural areas to survive. These immigrants are farm workers who pick fruit and vegetables; others who work in slaughterhouses; more who work as dairy farmers, etc. Krugman’s article says those in rural areas ”rarely encounter immigrants in their daily lives” and “have a vastly more negative view”. How do these two stories fit together?
5
@Greg Wetzel, I live in rural western Montana, and aside from a couple of ranches that employee Peruvians, there are very few immigrants anywhere around. And yes, immigrants are viewed rather negatively here.
I've watched the lovely small towns of the Hi Line and eastern Montana empty out or boom and bust because of Williston Basin oil. Grain and pulse crop commodities and beef are priced awfully low, it's tough to make a living in rural areas until commodity prices improve. That might not happen anytime soon. Unfortunately I think Paul Krugman has a point. No one really has a good idea how to revive rural America. Even those of us who live here don't have a clue.
5
@Greg Wetzel The hardest working people I know are the immigrants - legal and illegal - who work for the ranches out here.
1
Perhaps we should import a very large number of anglophone journalists and economists as immigrants, and see whether it changes the tone of these routine think pieces from the comfortable zip codes?
1
It’s a good thing that size zero is the new two, because you New Yorkers must like living without food.
I’ve built my life around sustainable, regenerative agriculture, and yet government policy has all but put me and others like me out of business. We can’t make a living competing against artificially deflated food prices. Why pay me enough per pound for me to live a reasonable life, when you can buy mass-produced misery from Tyson Foods all day long at Wal-Mart?
I’m hanging on - barely - but my father was spot on when he told me to get out of ranching. The margins are too thin, and there is too much out of our control that crushes us financially, to justify the work, the financial risk, and the physical wear and tear.
7
Hang on. There are many of us who won’t buy Tyson. Blah
3
@Sue Kennedy, why are you taking New Yorkers to task about your problems? Shouldn't you be focusing on the competition instead? You know... the ones who are somehow able to produce "product" faster and cheaper? And out in the American west, aren't conservatives all about free markets and competition and zero sum game economics? Oh, and allowing a little sumpin-sumpin to trickle down to the plebeians? So don't you find it fair that there are winners and then there are losers... and right now you aren't winning?
Rural America is in need of some tough love. There is no appetite whatsoever to prop up these areas with redevelopment funds unless it makes economic sense. And, the people who live there must be committed to joining the 21st century, which means they must leave fox 'news' and the republican party behind - neither of which is likely to happen. It's probably time to let evolution run its natural course.
4
Obama was my hero (and still is, to a degree). But he TOTALLY caved to agribusiness on ethanol and biofuel. The problem is MUCH bigger than one political party or the other. The longer we blame Republicans the longer things will stay the same. But the election of Donald Trump (and Bernie's success) actually makes me OPTIMISTIC.
3
If the election of Donald Trump makes you optimistic I'd HATE to see what pessimism is for you! There's no reason to be optimistic, in any way, about the election of Donald Trump!
3
@carl bumba.... "But he TOTALLY caved to agribusiness on ethanol and biofuel".... Maybe you don't understand ethanol and biofuel." First, the reason ethanol is important is because it serves as a buffer. The amount of corn produced in any given year can fluctuate significantly. You don't ever want a shortage, but what do you do in years when there is a surplus? You convert it to alcohol. This is something that has been done for very long time. Did you ever hear of the Whiskey Rebellion? Second, corn is converted to ethanol by first breaking down the carbohydrates to sugar, and then fermenting the sugar. Did you know that cellulose is the same thing as carbohydrate but with a different bond connection between the sugar units? When it comes to biofuel (ethanol) we are one step away from converting wood scraps, leaf litter, and newspapers, it to ethanol which is a superior, renewable, CO2 neutral fuel, that can supply are transportation needs. It will happen.
3
Band aids for rural America:
A robust internet system for business.
Local energy sources from alternative systems
Look to the arts for development like Austin, Nashville, Branson.
Convince Google to build their HQ there
Infrastructure-we still send our goods on roads from coast to coast passing through rural America
Break up big agriculture
Price protections for agricultural products.
Stop the trade wars
Stop the pitting of people in one part of the country against the other-I'm looking at you, Fox, Donald, Rush, Hannity
There are ways, all we need is to wrest the means from the miserly and get started.
6
Re-introduction of homesteading seems to be an ageless theme for settling and resettling areas not for the faint of heart. After that terrible hurricane, Puerto Rico is attracting wealthy settlers with tax breaks, while native dwellers, wiped out by the storm leave for the mainland. Blighted communities are tough to analyze and find cures for. Incentives to invite techno savvy computer people into Vermont, seems to be working. Traveling Rt. 66 into tumble weed ghost towns, could lead to interesting ideas of about farming Marijuana if there is water. Socioeconomic viability studies are time consuming, but someone will do it.
1
The economy of rural areas has been fundamentally urban for decades. The headquarters of the large firms that farm, mine, and manufacturer power in rural areas are located in cities. As are the big box and online retailers that have shoved aside home grown businesses. As are the tourists and cottage country folk who have pushed the price of real estate sky high in rural areas rich in amenities while contributing little to the demand side of the local economy. Attempts to reverse the heartland's declines must acknowledge this rural/urban relationship, and the fact that its monetary flows are far from equal. In other words, we must no only ask "what is wrong with rural areas" but also "why can't urban areas return more of the value they take from rural areas". Most surveys indicate that more people would like to live in rural areas and small towns than do. And maybe more would if the monetary balance between resource periphery and market core was in balance.
3
Fortunately, we coastal elites don't have to have a solution for declining small cities and towns in the heartland. They have already decided that only Trump can fix it.
If rural Americans in conservative red states change their views about what they need to progress, they have plenty of political power to make themselves heard. In the meantime, the blue coastal states should concentrate on solving their urban, suburban and, yes, rural problems their own way.
4
The topic should be considered in light of our need to address climate change and lightening human impact on the planet. If we were to adopt sustainable agricultural practices (smaller scale organic farming for example) and sustainable forestry practices (i.e. selective logging which leaves carbon-absorbing, oxygen-giving forests in tact), a much larger rural workforce will be required. Not all people want to live in cities, and there is a small, but important counter trend at work: young people leaving the city to live closer to the land and nature. The Chimacum Valley located a 2 hour drive from Seattle is becoming a center for organic farming and production of a variety of food products (think goat cheese and cider). Believe it or not, our local paper reported that 90% of the young people who are doing the organic farming are college educated. Rural areas are far from dead. I predict a renaissance when we wake up to the fact that our current systems require massive fossil fuel inputs and aren't healthy for either us or the planet.
3
@M Secord...."a much larger rural workforce will be required.".....Are you volunteering to move to the country and do manual labor for a sub minimum wage? Organic farming today is a niche business whose size and volume could not begin to fill the void unless 20% or more of our present work force would volunteer to do just that.
I grew up in a rural area and left. When rural areas want to help themselves first, I will leap in to support additional federal efforts; but not until I see demonstrative proof they want something more for themselves. These areas have voted for lower taxes, poor schools, a less diverse workforce and what they so lovingly call 'traditional values'. Traditional values mind you is code for 'we don't want to change, really.
The Trump supporters in rural America are the very people that blame the federal government for their woes; while not holding themselves accountable for who they vote on to their school boards, town councils, county boards and state legislatures. These are the same people who complain about businesses not wanting to relocate to their area, when in fact, they have allowed their educational systems dwindle, their libraries and arts programs to disappear. They wonder why they can't attract businesses because they only offer a 'low tax base'.
It is called accountability, and I see none when it comes to the Trump supporters and other rural Americans when it comes to how they have self-governed over the past 50 years.
8
@Bryan
"These are the same people who complain about businesses not wanting to relocate to their area, when in fact, they have allowed their educational systems dwindle, their libraries and arts programs to disappear. They wonder why they can't attract businesses because they only offer a 'low tax base'. "
I think that since Republicans, fundamentally, only care about taxes, it never occurs to them that taxes are just one factor influencing a corporation's decision about where to site a new factory, warehouse or regional HQ. If a company decides that it won't be able to attract a sufficient number of qualified employees and will have trouble transferring employees to the new location, it will find another place. Yet, people are attracted to the very things that are lost when taxes are cut to the bone -- a good education system, vibrant arts scene, parks and recreational opportunities, public transit, etc...
1
The best thing we can do is to stop compromising with politicians from these places, because they are obviously backing bad policies.
It is time for Democrats to lead the country toward good policy, instead of compromising with bad policy. If the entire country stopped pushing Supply Side Economics, which has never worked, even once, the entire country would be doing better, which would have to rub off on rural areas. It would also give them an alternative to bad economics that they could see in action, so they didn't automatically reject good policy for bad.
All of you Democrats that think compromising before negotiations even start is somehow wise or reasonable, need to Google the Overton Window, and how he Republicans have been purposefully going to the extreme right to move the apparent "center."
Following Republicans to the right makes bad policy easy and good policy nearly impossible.
Democrats need to lead toward the Greater Good, not wallow in lesser evil.
The right is wrong and the left is essentially correct. Don't follow to the right. Lead to the left.
5
Although it's contradictory, I truly believe that by giving the rural voters out sized influence in our politics is only bringing about policies that hurt them. If we eliminated the electoral college and lived in a true democracy, then we'd actually be able to vote into power politicians that would enact policies that would benefit the cities and suburbs where people actually live. Fortunately, for the residents of rural areas, the majority of our country supports universal healthcare and other government programs that would keep them afloat unlike the GOP politicians they continue to vote into power. I'm tired of reading NYT opinions about how we, the majority, need to give up everything we believe is right so that a few thousand old white men in Iowa and Ohio switch parties. This is not a democracy.
1
Nice article in the business section on the training Co. Pursuit. I think the same principles being used by this inner city appraoch, could work in rural communities. Like Jimmy V famously said "never give up"
1
I grew up on a farm in North Dakota and now live in the only real urban center in the state, Fargo. There is no solution to rural decline. Any economy based on resource extraction is doomed to fail. The solution for people living in rural areas is to get out as fast as possible, which is exactly what people with brains and/or ambition have been doing for the last 100 years in states like North Dakota. The real tragedy is that we have created numerous "rotten boroughs", like the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming, where a small number of people left after the great brain drain have outsized influence on our national politics(i.e., the U.S. Senate). This is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.
3
When I grew up in a small (10,000 population) town in North Idaho, our tiny main street thrived with many private businesses. There was sporting goods, hardware, and stationery shops. There were actually men's and women's and co-ed (J.C. Penny) clothing stores downtown. There was even a Safeway grocery store downtown.
In the late 20th century, Wal-Mart came to town, shuttering a lot of businesses. A mall was built in the 80's, but now half those stores (including Macy's) are closed. The downtown thankfully reinvented itself, but mostly with coffee shops and brew pubs. One can hardly find clothes to buy in town. The hardware and other stuff goes to big box stores, whose headquarters are far away.
America consumers don't care about local businesses or where their money goes. They care about cheap prices, period. The people here strongly defending rural America? Many will quickly turn their back on the local businessman and buy Wal-Mart, or log on to Amazon, which made an $11 million profit last year and paid ZERO in taxes. I find it difficult to believe that rural America (where I lived for years) is anymore righteous and loyal than other parts of America, when they'll buy big box stores over their neighbor's business in two seconds.
6
The Iowa GDP has grown by 10% from 2012 to 2018. Is this an economy in decline? Or just not keeping up with inflation?
2
I understand Mr. Krugmans point but i think the problem is even bigger than just a plain city dwelling/rural dichotomy. What we do know from some economic research is that there are powerful psychological factors that become entrenched once a region is hit by poverty. And this cannot be amended by targeted subsidies, job guarantees and similar measures. It is basically similar to having communities like Burundi or Niger in the middle of an advanced country. And even though the left tries to assert itself as patriotic, that will never be enough for the residents of those communities because of these psychological factors, so the left should give up and focus more on changing the electoral importance of city/rural voters. America is still a free country, so they theoretically could move in serch of better prospects?
I was recently shocked when visiting the area in Georgia in which I grew up. It is hollowed out in a way that is very different from ten years ago. I do not share the sense that rural America is this country's "heart land" nor would I be happy returning to a small town -- anywhere in the country. I also am frustrated by the voting patterns and the racism too often present, but that does not represent everyone in those areas, anymore than the South Bronx is the entire borough, or Howard Beach all of Queens.
We should also keep in mind that our security as a country must include the ability to feed ourselves. Corporate farming does not have to be the solution to that security issue. If we understood small scale farming, ranching, etc as part of a security need, perhaps we could find our way to some solutions for parts of our rural areas.
Unless we are simply going to write off large portions of our citizens, the name calling and labeling of others has to end. That is Trump's way. If we continue to make it more and more acceptable, there will be no United States in a few decades.
3
Paul Krugman,
I live in rural America, and the lack of jobs drives the young away, and there is no investment in infrastructure. Today to be in business you must have access to the internet. What we have here is a joke, no cable access even though the superhighway of the internet runs right through this county. The internet has to be expanded to rural communities, without it costing the locals a fortune. Also, when the Military budget is $700,000,000 per year there isn't much left over for infrastructure investment at home. Trump seems to want to put a Military base in every country, so that what? he can protect American Business Interest? If one wants to make America great again we should start by investing in America again. Cut the bloated Military Budget, and in vest in Rural America!
7
Paul et al,
I’m considering a run for US Senate or US House in 2020 as a Democrat from arguably the most rural of our Lower-48, Montana.
I disagree with your stark assessment, but know you are just trying to level with us.
One thing: in a rural state like Montana with an abundance of public lands, rivers, and lakes, one needn’t be rich to live a rich life. So it’s unimportant, perhaps even counterproductive, to be especially wealthy. And even elite sports like skiing are low cost - on most mountains - and thus accessible to most. Hiking and fishing opportunities amidst some of the earth’s greatest beauty are free. And many other rural states can claim a similar dynamic, though I remain biased Big Sky.
But Angus Deaton, yourself, et al have gotten it right: rural America is suffering. But it is suffering for explicable, not mysterious, reasons, much of which you’ve discussed in prior work: Corporate Monopolies and weak Anti-Trust, undermining local entrepreneurs and small business; Corporate Incentives/Tax Structure that lead to poor protections for workers; Lack of creative solutions to drawing capital to flycountry country; Inadequate investment and accountability in Education, Health Care, & Infrastructure; Lack of High-speed Internet... etc.
When I consider all the above, I grow optimistic for Montana, for rural America. Let’s get the shackles off the talented folks in America’s Heartland before we assess there’s no hope.
John Mues
johnformontana.org
6
Growing up in a rural area in Oklahoma I understand the plight of the farmers. Our family farm was sold after my grandfather passed on. Why? There is no money to be made, living hours from doctors, shopping, entertainment of any kind, and internet that takes longer to load than a two hour drive. Younger generations see no value in breaking your back to maybe break even. I can’t recall a single year of my life that farm subsidies didn’t keep us afloat.
My generation is free thinkers, we don’t live by the dogma of any church, we have access to facts and do research on things. I know of five people my age that haven’t left for a bigger city and a job that pays well and doesn’t destroy their body.
The hard right turn politics has taken in rural areas has chased even more people away. Why risk not having access to healthcare because the state refuses to expand it with money from the federal government? This lack of security is driving people from rural areas.
Maybe, just maybe the death of rural America is due to decisions made out of moral and religious superiority? Could the fact that many people from rural areas believe they are better Americans, better Christians, forcing their interpretation of a religion down everyone’s throats be part of the problem? I know my generation has fled the church. We see no value in a group of people who push hate when the book and savior they claim to follow taught love. The hypocrisy is astounding.
This is not bashing, this is the truth.
6
With cheap, reliable, high-speed internet infrastructure, people will live almost anywhere.
4
10,000 years ago people began to move from hunter gatherers into towns and farms around them and my guess is those left out hunting and gathering felt left behind as more and more moved to towns and farms. 200 or so years ago as the industrial age took command people began moving into bigger towns where energy, manufacturing, and trade were drawing workers and merchants. I would guess many farmers felt left behind. Today the migration to cities continues around the world. The old saw " the only thing permanent is change" is in full swing, we can mitigate the problems but we must embrace change as part of our human condition.
2
Globalization resulted in the sacrifice of tens of millions of people. We saw it coming. Dueling experts and "experts" testified, wrote books, and gave interviews and speeches everywhere, complete with predictions and charts and statistics.
We knew what would happen and permitted it.
Getting real about rural America begins with facing what was done, why, by whom, and to whom, and how failure to respond to this had to lead to the levels of deprivation and desperation that in turn has led to Trump and other domestic madness and tragedy.
If we don't tell the truth and help the millions of people who were and are - right now - being sacrificed, globalization will continue eating its way up the economic "food" chain, and it’s already well into the middle class, and has begun to nibble away at the upper middle class.
The victims won't all turn to opioids and suicide. They won't all be convenient victims. We could soon face what Europe is facing now and that's just one short step from armed insurrection in a country with well over 300 million civilian guns. With that, we'd soon face "The French Question," as in 1789. Who would our military support? The government that’s betrayed them? Or the people, among whom are their families, friends, and fellow soldiers?
We'd better get this right while there's still time.
2
The proliferation of larger and larger corporate ownership of agricultural land means fewer and fewer family farms. The corporate ‘out of locality’ purchasing power for machinery for instance has dried up commerce in most towns in “fly-over” areas. These towns have lost population so that towns are consolidating their schools, necessitating students to bus 20 or more miles to another town, sometimes even three towns now work together to enable educational and sports activities to continue. What is now called a “family farm” in Montana at any rate, is a misnomer. My husband had a relative with around 1,500 acres (which at one time was 3 farms) which he sold for around 2 million. So that acreage was added to another. What average person could ever break into farming?
2
Rural America needs to stop complaining about the changing trends (automation, immigration) and do something about it. No longer can they work a factory job for decades and then collect their pension.
The jobs still exist and always will exist, they're just changing. 100 years ago no one predicted there would be electric charging station maintenance workers or data center technicians.
They need to educate themselves and get new training. Easier said than done, I know, but going back to the days of White America is not a solution.
1
@Wilson
‘White America?’
I know that stereotypes save time but ‘white’ only equates to ‘rural’ in the minds of those who do not know.
Millions of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans live in the rural areas Democrats have so much contempt for.
2
I do not hear anyone mourning the loss of cottage industries, where families crafted products at home, to the factories. I do not hear anyone bemoaning the factories that process our foods between the farm and our local grocery mega store, all conveniently packaged and shrink wrapped. The people displaced by these developments and their pain are forgotten. We cannot stop the small factory fields from becoming large factory fields, but we can assist those who are displaced so that the pain that is forgotten is minimized.
6
It's worse than that. If I want to build a low skill manufacturing plant, I will build it in a small town where I can be the dominant employer in town. This lets me get incentives from the city government, pay monopsony wages, and have effective veto power over the city government about letting another large employer set up shop in town, further impoverishing the town. If I, as a young adult in this environment, have a choice, I, too, would go elsewhere where my talents were more favorably compensated and where, if I got tired of that employer, I would have a choice of where else I could work.
4
I like the bumper sticker that says “No Farmers No Food”. I live in a rural area of upstate NY and have watched it decline for 50 years. The signs and symptoms are everywhere; no need to enumerate them. There is a cure, however, there is the possibility of reversal of this trend but, like climate change, it requires massive cooperative efforts at all levels of government and the private sector and a willingness to actively participate in the process from those living in and those who would like to,live in rural America. It requires a plan, a statewide plan, with a 20 to 30 year horizon to accomplish. The elements will vary state by state, region by region and the plan will involve many unpopular choices. For example, if we are going to fix agriculture and outfit it for the carbon reduced future, cows and their feed crops need to be reduced drastically. Hemp and cannabis have more value added than corn and soybeans so perhaps we need to switch from one to the other. The specifics will fall out of the plan and the vision behind the plan. If we make a national commitment to revive rural America, say in 30 years, it could be done. If we just sit by and watch and wring our hands, rural America will continue to head down the tubes.
4
Simon and Garfunkel said, people "hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest".
After watching Leaving Neverland over the weekend, I gained a new understanding of the humongous depth and power of denial in individuals and mobs of people.
Reviving areas like rural America are going to be generational in scope. Like East Germany, the people hate everyone so much and feel so entitled that they are truly lost souls and dangerously beyond hope.
There is a huge supply of a better life out there in rural areas, we need to make it viable for new, young people to go and get it. Alas, our capacity for such planning is currently incarcerated by denial.
3
@Jay Sonoma I really have no idea what you are trying to say?
Coates wrote about 'reparations' via policies of opportunity for those behind socioeconomically among Blacks. I agree with Krugman's article that policies and programs - like those in affordable & accessible Health Care, good public education would help lagging rural communities Black or White. Broad band, Cell Phone access, postal service, roads, utilities are among the basics that would move the needle. We protect 202 acres, 180 in carbon fixing forest...but we were just stuck home due to road floods lasting over two weeks. Our cell only works when we go to town, which we do for mail since no service to our home. No 'smart phone', no home delivery of newspapers, no bookstore, faulty & limited reception for TV or broadband...none if it rains. Problems that AT&T could aid with DSL but....the profit margin.
2
@Mary M Headrick: It's even worse than you portray. If your town or county tries to set up a municipal entity to provide internet service, Tennessee law prohibits you from doing it.
2
I am unutterably weary of being stereotyped because I live in a relatively small town in the Midwest. In the fifty-three years I've been eligible to vote it's been hard to find a candidate sufficiently progressive for my tastes, and I'm delighted to see the House of Representatives become more female, more diverse, and more progressive. Nor am I alone by a long shot.
Nor is the Midwest home of the only bastions of provincialism and prejudice. There's plenty to be found in all areas of the country, including all those booming metropolitan areas.
7
As a percentage of the national population the rural population has been in decline since the advent of industrialization (since roughly 1850). This country became majority urban somewhere around 1890/1900 and there was a massive shift to cities in the first decades of the 20th century and then again in the 60's and 70's. This is not a new phenomenon. The critical point is that now the population level in some rural areas is so low that it is no longer sustainable at a level that supports a reasonable standard of living.
So, should we try to prop up areas that are likely going to remain on the edge of extinction, or are we going to come up with a plan to help people adjust to a new reality? We're a new country, still, but we're aging and we're being caught at a point where we don't have a means to mark the passing of places. This may be the time to start to think about how we transition places from places that are to places that were and recognize the value they once had without having to preserve them forever.
1
thank you Paul Krugman for writing this article. This article is long overdue in the NYT which for the truth (yes many issues) and commercial reasons give us much, much more on women's issues than men's issues. If candidates want to win they must go to the areas of "jobless men" and "deaths of despair" and acknowledge the long standing issues and neglect in America's rural areas with real honesty and sensible plans to help the area you have described This area has been ignored by the press , politicians and talking heads during which men have also had struggles without programs and sensitivity to fit their needs. As Oprah said on the Letterman show a few years ago (see it on you tube)" I have programs for girls and women in Africa who need help but no programs for men- the guys just stand on the corners drinking and smoking". Ya I was surprised but "O" like others don't understand that men are encouraged into treatment and programs differently than women. Thanks PK for writing this article and Thanks NYT . "Writing off" men and their needs with negativity toward them is very real across America. Men have real needs and issues... also.
1
Something that was not mentioned by Professor Krugman which is vitally important to understanding what has happened to rural America is the fact that agriculture has become agribusiness. Large corporations now export the wealth that used to recirculate within the local regions now goes into bank accounts in New York City. Anyone familiar with the history of coal mining regions know that for over a century the wealth derived from coal was extracted just like the coal and that wealth was never seen in the local economy except that required to keep the people working. It's called exploitation of resources and victimization of the locals who produce the wealth. Resentemnt is not a new thing in these areas. But they found someone who pretended that some magic might change the reality of capitalism in their lives.
As it is everywhere, the wealth is funneled up to the already rich in our system.
Nothing makes me more hopeful for the future of our nation than the bright younger members of Congress recently elected. They understand this perversion endemic in our system and rather than lip service they actually are determined to do something about it. I absolutely adore them for their courage and determination and brilliance. Future generations will thank them.
2
Rural America can be revitalized, but it will require drastic measures. These measures would require returning to the way things were in previous generations. No more corporate farms. Farms should be family farms and small relative to today's vast size. This would have the advantage of employing many more people in a farm economy and would contribute to a resurgence of population growth in rural areas. Farming equipment such as tractors and harvesters should be available for renting at a low cost for everybody in a farming area.
Large farms should be bought out at a low price by the government and broken up and sold at reasonable prices to small scale farmers. Whether this is considered to be efficient or not does not matter. It is vastly more important to revitalize the rural and farming economy and bring back to many people this ideal and cherished form of living.
A society should not be tied mercilessly to a certain type of economy simply based on who has the most power and who has the most money.
3
Interesting that this comes at a time when, because of media, rural America is far more able than ever before to have their heads in the heart of the city.
I'm from the city, lived in Cambridge (Mass.), and now for years have lived in the middle of nowhere and feel fairly connected.
Does all it take turning off Fox and switching to the Real News?
2
Grew up East Coast elite. Moved to rural Michigan 5 years ago because there are still good jobs for my profession in rural towns. What I've noticed is that many working age people with some decent level of income don't really live and do commerce in their home towns. They like having a home base and land in a less populated area, and family roots, but on a daily basis so many of us travel far and wide to go to work, to shop in the nearest city, to enjoy entertainments. Income is not being invested in small towns. We export it. I've got neighbor who talks fondly of the days when it was a once a year thing to go shopping in the nearest city - usually for Christmas. Everything was bought in town, and people were satisfied with a selection of goods and services that covered your basic needs, but didn't offer tons of variety. I drive an hour to the city twice a week for variety in the supermarket and for entertainment, because staying put is quite boring. It's common for people to be gone every weekend in nice weather, and for retirees to spend entire winter or summer seasons living in a second home in a prettier and more fun location. They have a sentimental attachment to home, but do a lot of their living & spending elsewhere. The folks left behind to actually do their living in towns are those in poverty and struggling to make ends meet, and they don't have anything to contribute to the economy beyond supporting the dollar stores and the walmart where they also work.
2
Isn't it about time that we all agree that there are no capitalistic based solutions to the myriad and multitude of basic societal challenges?
My point now and always has been that a vastly disproportionate amount of wealth and income goes to a tiny percentage of the population. Leonhardt offered a salient article on the "state of the union" last month - https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/opinion/trump-state-of-the-union.html
which illustrated how over time the vast majority of income and wealth that has resulted from a growing GDP has gone almost exclusively to the top 1%.
In rural mining and farming areas, the workers have received little for their hard work and since the majority of farms and all the mines are owned by huge corporations they've reaped the profits and passed them onto CEOs and shareholders.
Rural communities have been left to fend for themselves or depend upon the state or federal government to subsidize basic necessities like healthcare, education, utilities, maintenance of infrastructure. Capitalism has literally squeezed the life out of rural America while they pillaged the land to grow their riches.
It is not just rural areas that have been crushed by capitalism. The rust belt of America which adjoins rural areas has seen jobs disappear overseas or as a result of automation. Not satisfied with destroying livelihoods whole, the behemoth corporations paid off politicians to do away with unions - the last bulwark to a livable wage.
6
Universal Basic Income. Give $1000/month to every American adult.
It would add so much to rural economies and provide incentive for younger people to not leave in search of jobs that pay slightly higher. A much better solution than "job retraining" or farm subsidies
3
The distances are vast and the transportation poor. If you could work from home and live anywhere you wanted, a lot of people might choose to live in those beautiful rural areas. But how long does it take to drive to the doctor's office? To take your kids to school? Heck, even to fill your truck up with gas? What business will build far from at least an Interstate Highway? And who wants to move their family INTO such an area, unless they're willing and able to home-school their kids.
It doesn't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, and it's blowing people together, into larger towns, not apart into the vast plains.
2
No one who reads the NYT would know. Last year the federal government committed almost $5 billion to rural
broadband. My studies have shown that a quarter to half of all rural job and population loss can be attributed to lack of rural broadband. BTW this all happened in spite of White House disinterest. You could build a wall with that kind of money!
3
Krugman says rural areas are the face of poverty. NY is 32nd in unemployment. First? Iowa. Then NH, North Dakota, Vt, Idaho, Ne, Va., South Dakota, Mn, Wi.. Rural states. Even the eastern ones. Ma, follows Wi., but then we get Ut, Mo., Ok., South Car., Tn, and Fla. Source-Bureau of Labor Statistics, January 2019.
4
I have no comment, but a question: Rural Pennsylvania is where the Amish are concentrated. They live a rural life. And they are fantastically prosperous.
Why?
1
In addition to growing and raising a lot of their own food, they don't spend money on cars, cell phones, big screen TVs, video games, alcohol, etc. And lots of free labor from their kids, instead of spending money shuttling them to soccer games and taking them on ski trips. Live like an Amish person, and you'll be prosperous, too.
5
@blaine
Socialism, that's why they're so successful.
Shared risk, capital, labour and profits.
They also don't spend a lot on personal material possessions, however the main secret to their prosperity is socialism.
2
It was 1991 when I last visited rural Arkansas, but I imagine the right wing media are still in total control. The people I talked to could only offer "Bill Clinton running for president, yuck yuck yuck". They had no clue what his policy positions were nor any knowledge of what he did as governor. They simply didn't care.
Like the toxic messages Sinclair and Fox are broadcasting now, fear and victimhood were hammered into these people. They truly believed that Mexicans were taking their jobs and nothing could be done about it.
The healing can only begin when the right wing media machine is no longer pushing its toxic message to the financially vulnerable masses.
8
@Pete Steitz
I agree, but are those who believe right wing media really helpless victims? Why do these people believe these obviously malignant personalities and networks? Apparently they have curricula in their schools that are different from more progressive areas of the country - curricula that do not promote critical thinking skills, computer literacy, curiosity, creativity, respect for science and factual knowledge and diversity, etc. etc. Or perhaps they are stupid
and mean-spirited themselves and like attracts like?
2
My question is: why do these rural Americans consistently vote against their own self interests? Clearly trump is not from them or for them. Neither was the Bushs, and in fact so many of their policies hurt these people. Not to mention their local leaders some of whom turned down stimulus money and health care support. Just wondering if any of this readship has thoughts about it.
2
Krugman's fact-free column illustrates everything that is wrong with the Progressive approach to public policy.
The Krugman-styled "important" problems -- all the primary concerns of Progressives -- are all "solvable." And all the concerns and issues of rural America are, in his take, insolvable. And that's what he calls "getting real about rural America."
How Krugman continues to have an audience is astounding. Cliches surrounded by smugness encased in distain for anyone who dares to disagree.
2
Krugman's column brings to this writer's mind that perverse paean to capitalism Marx & Engels penned in "The Communist Manifesto," which proclaims in part:
"The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life..."
2
Well, those farmers are underwater now, living in the 'fake news' of climate change. Midwestern republican congressfolk start yelling for FEMA money, having just come from a meeting where they sneered at Puerto Rico.
This struck me: "There’s nothing wrong with discussing these issues. Rural lives matter — we’re all Americans, and deserve to share in the nation’s wealth." Maybe even talking about Black lives matter? Women's lives? The 99% who aren't Jared and Ivanka?
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a president (again) who actually talked like that? How low trump has brought us. Iowa's disgusting Steve King has a really creepy but increasingly common graphic showing red states and blue states battling like some 'rockem-sockem robot' game. It's so...middle school boys throwing punches wildly on the playground.
Now, instead of addressing climate change and its increasingly dangerous storm systems, we'll hear 'democrats hate farmers', or 'Alexandria Cortez killed your cows with climate'. Anything except working together. trumpies are getting weirdly aggressive!
5
To say "and so on.." seems condescending. As to the substance of your piece, I have two suggestions. 1. Talk to Warren Buffet. 2. Require owners of big farms to live there.
1
I seem to remember hearing once something like "God helps those who help themselves." or "If you find yourself in a hole stop digging." or "If you continue doing the same thing and expecting a different result you might be insane."
I saw a story a few years ago about the subsidies for solar energy that Germany was promoting. The story centered around a farmer who was leasing his grazing land for panels; getting paid for doing so all the while his sheep were grazing under the panels.
Our farmers support a so called man who calls the need for alternative energy sources a hoax. They vote for people who promise them an end to abortions; who promise them they will stop these gay people from having rights; they will protect them from the rise of black people getting the full benefits of society. Of course these republican politicians do no such things but these rural folks keep voting for them. They keep buying the con.
A government for the people can help plan for the ravages of progress that come to those less prepared for them. But the government for corporations that these people keep voting for is not going to help them. It is going to kill them.
4
Rural Americans vote for right-wing religion and they get right-wing economic policies. They are their own worst enemies.
5
"Rural America" is not just a series of soybean fields. The backbone of "rural America" is its small towns. And people who seemingly live in the middle of nowhere, work and shop in those small towns.
Before neoliberals threw American workers under the bus in pursuit of "free" trade and the concomitant vast bonuses for Wall Street executives (aka Democratic donors), those small towns had lots of manufacturing jobs. They made dishwashers, refrigerators, tractors, and just about everything from crayons to car parts.
Those manufacturing jobs pumped huge amounts of money into the rural economy.
Krugman is either an idiot, or extremely intellectually dishonest in pretending as if the decline in rural incomes was inevitable. It was not. It is very much the product of policies pursued by corporate shills like the Clintons and Obama.
Even after decades of free trade has laid waste to the rural economy, resulting in a heroin epidemic and the election of Donald Trump, Obama administration hacks were on NPR bemoaning the fate of the TPP. That callous indifference to the fate of rural workers is why the Democrats lost a presidential election to a twice-divorced, reality TV star, whose business model depends on frequently filing for bankruptcy.
3
@Jim Vote for Sanders or Warren the next time. They will rein in on free trade, kill wall street bonuses, tax hedge fund billionaires to bring free healthcare and investment to a rural America near you.
1
If these people would get real, bone up on some education, and stop listening to the right wing, they are would at least know which side their bread is buttered on.
4
Here are some ideas: 1) Abolish compulsory public education. Schools stink. Rich liberals like Paul Krugman, who no doubt has a private school orientation, have no clue how public education laws have hurt middle class America. Stinky schools is one of the #1 reasons nobody wants to move to these areas. Nobody should be forced to send their kids to school. 2) Stop licensing lawyers. Seriously. The legal industry is so expensive and cumbersome and benefits people with fancy educations at the expense of working people. It's not some joke or a Shakespeare quotation. Lawyers have truly hurt America in very serious ways, even while their personal prosperity has increased inversely to American decline. Letting people live and trade without zoning ordinances, business licenses and regulations would bring these areas back to life in a matter of months. What Krugman is saying is that the status quo has not hope for rural America. What he doesn't say is that he supports the status quo and would oppose making the necessary changes to save America, because it would be the end of rich talkmeisters like himself.
1
Some suggest subsidizing corporations to set up in rural areas to provide work. My take is the contrary: the draining of rural vitality is due primarily to corporations sucking the life out of rural America with massive agribusiness, mining, fracking, and sucking aquifers dry. This activity is an age old American trait — money-before-all-else.
4
But the data! Poverty is lower in rural America than urban.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/12/a_comparison_of_rura.html
2
Move the national capital, now on the coast, to the Heartland.
30
@Modaca
No, just move most agencies.
For example, Agriculture to KC, DoD to Atlanta, Energy to Houston, etc. (other cities would be just as appropriate).
Eliminate and consolidate the essential functions of others like HUD, Labor, Education, etc.
State and Justice should stay near DC .
3
@Modaca And DC becomes the 51st state with appropriate congressional representation.
13
@Modaca
Wherever the national capital is relocated will not be rural, and the surrounding area will turn urban, suburban, and exurban.
12
American greed up and down the food-chain caused this decline. The, "I want more, more, more stuff - but cheaper" - sold us out to Asian manufacturers. Now, most Americans couldn't afford to buy American even if it was offered, which in most cases, it's not.
I farmed for years in the Midwest during drought, stray-voltage misery, no health insurance, of course, and 'the other' low milk price era; where for a year we sold milk cheaper than it cost to produce! So when small farmers can no longer make it on a hundred head of cows, corporations take over (just as they intended to) and then make millions on government set-aside subsidies while everything around farming dies - including the towns.
Which is better do you think: paying a little more for your milk to keep rural America healthy, maintained and viable, or paying corporations millions of your tax dollars to send it into decline?
Too late for that question. It's already happened.
9
As someone who grew up in rural Nebraska yet spent 25 years in the Twin Cities I can appreciate both sides of this coin. Back in Nebraska now, I'm surrounded by "$8.00 an Hour" Republicans who get all worked up about abortions, guns, immigration and issues that have nothing to do with their pocketbook. Try to talk 'em off the ledge about the economy and all they do is bring up Benghazi. Sad to say, the vital happy countryside of my youth is gone forever...
7
Come on, Krugman , with your education in Economics and your ability to gather resources (other Economists) you can do better than this.
Economists let BIG AG buy out and shut down every small farm which in turn devastated entire rural areas in America because their thinking was 'bigger is better' and now you're shocked? Providing financial safety nets in difficult times for farmers was too much for conservative economists who pretended that the national debt was the big concern and now you're shocked at the subsequent consequences? We had an agency that once policed aggressive businesses that sought to become vultures......why aren't you economists , en masse, demanding its return?
We have allowed BIG AUTO, BIG PHARMA, BIG DEFENSE and BIG WALL to dominate and soon (if not already) devastated rural America will be right plumb smack in the middle of urban America !
Think Camden, NJ.
Bigger is NOT always Better.
2
The decline of small local town square businesses was a problem even before Walmart dealt a death blow to almost every village.
1
Hallelujah and Praise the Lord. I’m so sick of the experts and opinion writers trying to understand/explain the politics of “real Americans.” I hope the message of democratic politicians and presidential aspirants rises above parochial economic and social interests. What policies benefit all Americans? Mr. Krugman offers many areas for exploration and debate.
3
We are never going to get real about rural American until we get rid of Senators like Joni Ernst, Chuck Grassley, Ben Sasse and Rep Steve King who only care about warming their chairs in Congress.
3
California has 40 million people and is the 5th largest economy in the world for one reason - immigration. We have traffic jams in our farm country - its awful. If the 'heartland' wants growth, it should stop being xenophobic and start supporting immigration instead of the Far Right. Immigration equals economic growth, while xenophobia equals obsolescence. These heartland folks have chosen their poison with their politics.
4
I'm living on the farm I grew up on for the last 68 years. I've tried to understand why the neighbors that I previously thought were honorable are so enthralled by Trump. It's the racism and misogyny that holds them. Those two traits "trump" their own economic well being. I'm ashamed.
9
The perceived big-city condescension of your points stands up pretty well against the ignorant arrogance on the part of rural residents who somehow think they represent "the real America." If deaths from opiate overdoses represent "the real America," then I'd say they're correct.
3
I think that there is little hope for them because for generations, the best and the brightest from those areas have left, leaving them populated with mostly poorly educated, anti-immigrant, anti progress Trump supporters.
1
I grew up in rural decline and despair in the 1960s and 1970s
The irony is that the consumerism that props up urban economic growth and big cities is what is destroying our planet.
So which place does it make more sense to live?
What will be better for the long run, 20 to 50 years, not just this election cycle?
There is certainly much that can be done for the "Heartland" as to infrastructure, education, healthcare, transition support to ensure a quality of life. However, Republicans have convinced these Americans to vote against their own self-interests, of their families and communities for decades. Uniquely, South Dakota has two U.S. Senators as California and then there is the archaic Electoral College, advantageous to the white nationalist rightwing Republican element supporting Trump.
3
I don't entirely agree with Dr. Krugman's despair about how to fix rural America. It's not just unstoppable economic forces leading to rural decline -- we've made POLICY CHOICES that have led us down this path. We can choose in turn to address those choices. I'd invite Dr. Krugman up to tour some of "Bernie Sanders country" and then cross the border between Vermont and Quebec to see how different the dairy farming industry, just to name one thing that has sustained rural America in the past, looks on both sides. That has happened because of policy choices.
5
Bakersfield CA and other San Juaquin Valley cities grew from the mass immigration of Depression era “dust bowl” migrants into California. These able bodieded workers and their families migrated to where jobs took them.
Unlike our southern border, no visa, passport or even a work permit are required to cross a state line. Instead of offering corporations incentives to move to where workers are unemployed, subsidize families to emigrate to other states where jobs are plentiful.
Federal assistance to relocate and to learn marketable skills can be supplemented by transitional income support. What the private sector did to successfully support international immigrants through ethnically and religiously based support services, can be replicated to support those desperate to work who are currently trapped in regions without jobs.
It should not require a Great Depression and a World War to persuade ambitious Americans to emigrate to regions in their own nation where prospects are better. Since the colonists arrived in the 17th century, geographic mobility enabled the both native and international migrants to move . Their ambition to succeed created a transcontinental nation.
2
Perhaps rural areas' lagging productivity can also be partly traced to the rapid development of the IT sector. With urban IT centers, economic virtuous cycles are created where the synergy between university research and dense concentrations of IT firms and workers combine with large target audiences to create growing production possibilities curves or frontiers. Rural areas often lack these essential population elements which are needed to form the IT infrastructure for internal control of many other principal industrial sectors. And, this IT deficit seems to be continuously compounded by new combinations of workers and "smart" or artificially intelligent machines with ever more efficient output potentials. This urban/rural digital divide is probably a leading underlying cause of the current economic malaise afflicting many rural areas.
[JJL 03/19/2019 Tu 1:22pm Greenville NC]
1
One thing that might help is building a nation-wide broadband infrastructure, prioritizing the rural areas first. Many jobs can be done remotely now, and don't require being at a central location all the time.
Rural areas offer inexpensive housing, and many people might choose to live away from the cities for that and other related reasons, if it was possible to have a good-paying job. A massive infrastructure project focusing on broadband would help make that possible.
7
It's time to rethink the "buffalo commons" idea that had a brief spate of publicity a few years ago. Rural areas should be converted into environmentally diverse large parks, possibly even with animals brought back from extinction.
People formerly employed in farming and mining should be given real work. There's plenty that we need to do, but we don't do it because there is no way to make it privately profitable. Real work like infrastructure repair, environmental restoration, and public transit need to be supported by society in general.
Levying a tax on automating jobs out of existence is one way to finance this.
2
And who greased the skids for the corporate takeover of farming. It wasn't the Democrats who promoted this; it was the "free market" lovers. We still need just as much food as we used to, but we don't need as many farmers to grow it. For what coal we do want, we don't need as many miners. My idea for helping the towns is an infrastructure project (a huge one) to get high speed internet out to the country side, and thus to attract telecommuters. There has to be a segment of the city population who would relocate to the picturesque country side, to the iconic Hallmark small town, if they had the option. If they had the infrastructure, towns could invest in attracting these kinds of workers. And, of course, there is the green new deal, as well.
5
My father grew up in rural WI, migrated to the city and became a flaming socialist, union organizer and fighter for civil rights. And yet, despite all ... he could only get my grandfather to vote once for Sen./Gov. Gaylord Nelson despite this mans concern for rural America and the environment.
My recommendation is to continue support for small farmers and bringing what is needed to rural America and JUST FORGET trying to convince them to vote in their best interest. Instead, concentrate on fighting back against voter suppression and register as many Democratically like minded people as possible and get them to the polls for EVERY election.
7
On one hand, I do feel bad that globalization has continued to pull jobs out of middle America which is probably the primary factor negatively impacting their livelihoods. On the other hand, it's hard to feel all *that* bad when the people in middle America are the ones voting for the politicians pushing exactly the policies that are doing them in. They need to be responsible for voting for policies that actually help them rather than token immigrant/abortion bans.
8
Pie in the sky but what if I could live in Peoria IL. and commute via bullet train to downtown Chicago 166 miles away everyday in just under an hour? Now my salary from my job in the large metro area is spent in Peoria where I would live (for example) because housing is cheaper. My job would then have a multiplier effect on my surrounding "rural" community.
Right now that Peoria to Chicago commute of 166 miles would be well over two hours by car. Not reasonable.
So rural America can keep its ultra low taxes and cars while all the talented people, corporate HQs and factories keep moving to the cities and foreign countries and rural areas will die OR maybe we should start thinking outside the box.
I know, that train route would never be profitable. It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to enhance peoples lives and uplift them financially by giving them the means to work. Government does a lot of things that aren't profitable and they were never designed to be. Like the interstate road system.
5
Why the "Looking down the Nose"
at those who live the Rural life ?
Yes, farmers don't need to have large families
to help plant and harvest and they have stopped having them.
Unfortunately, not that many farm hands need to be hired
to run the farm and so the population has declined and the
local towns/stores suffer from that loss of population.
However, we can eat what we grow and raise.
Those in the Cities will be wondering what they
can do when their jobs disappear and their incomes
vanish in the next economic downturn.
Then, the Rural Life won't look so bad.
5
Tie reforming the electoral college to the renewal of the farm bill. We need a lever to force them to accept the one person, one vote rule. Talking won't work. Money does.
2
If East Germany were a separate country with its own currency, they could have depreciated it to bring in more investment and jobs. As a single unified country, it's people moving to the West, leaving the East wither on subsidies from the West, rather than investment and jobs moving to the East. So let me propose a solution for the rural America: make it a separate country with its own currency so that it can have its own economic policy, wean off the subsidies and determine its own fate.
1
We need a new economic/social/political model. Capitalism has served its purpose. But as we all know, all things must pass. We have brilliant economists like Krugman who could guide the transition. We can address climate change, health care, education, healthy agriculture, and all our other problems with a fair economic model. But be ready. The ruling class will fight it tooth and nail. How dare we think we have a right to fulfill our lives?
3
They are all interesting problems. Germany's situation looks like the most instructive. $1.7 trillion is an awfully big fail. Hard to think the U.S. could do any better. Yet ultimately, a coalition of federal and state effort has to be the direction. Make sure health care and education are in place. This is where universal Medicare for all and free college tuition make a lot of sense. Start here with the mind and body.
I think good progressive options everywhere would be two: 1.) Establish a true national job market bringing job seekers and employers together nationally. Of course, that mostly addresses options for the young, providing them with mobility. Include how to be effective with the phone and e-mail. Simply sending resumes is a huge waste. There is also 2.) Teach entrepreneurship in public schools starting very young, age 10, with electives through high school. That is not really as unpredictable as it may appear at first. It's the natural advantage that children of the rich enjoy, leading to starting billion dollar enterprises in dorm rooms. Spread that advantage around, then wait and see. A few ideas can go a long way: the essentials of partnership; start-up finance, to name two. How to sell an idea, three.
This country, more than anything, needs creativity. That is always the case, anywhere.
There's rural and then there's rural. I think we need to be careful about generalizing both rural and urban populations. America is a big place.
Part of my family is from southwest Virginia. If you want to talk about rural, try driving an hour each way to the nearest grocery store. The place literally isn't on the map. If you're a young kid growing up there today, you better have a big satellite dish because there aren't any regular jobs. You're learning how to telecommute if you want stay near home. Your only other options are becoming a preacher or an auto mechanic. As you can imagine, the market for preachers and auto mechanics is already pretty well saturated.
You compare that to some of the towns I've seen across the Midwest and West. They'll call themselves rural. From my standpoint though, they are just just low density suburban. You'll need a car but otherwise you wouldn't notice the difference much.
On the other extreme, you have the urban misunderstanding. Take a place like New York. There's almost too much humanity to wrap your head around. My home town had a population of around 50,000 in area I could walk end-to-end before I reached high school. We were considered "suburban." I could fit fully one-quarter of Salt Lake "City," Utah's most populous city, into the town boundaries. I consider this place medium density suburbia.
There's urban and then there's urban.
4
Unfortunately its not as simple as economics. My experience is that it is a deep cultural resentment. Regardless of what the economy does the fear and anger at immigrants, gays, elites, liberals , environmentalists is so strong that it over rides any economics. I have had discussions about many policies and given solid evidence against the reasons the rural folks have to explain their choices, and i find it is not working, they go back to the need for a wall, the need to stop regulations, the need to stop the environmentalists, and the dangerous and misguided liberals wanting to give our country away. Any failure of the economics is due to the liberal Dems wanting to stop Trump, he's trying hard they say.
10
It is ironic that rural America, supposed home of rugged individualism, is seeking favors from the rest of us to shore up their crumbling economy. And, as many have noted, rural America stands behind a reality TV star and is unconcerned by his lies and hatefulness. If I were a believer in signs from "god" the signs are telling rural America that they have got it wrong and clinging to their guns and bibles isn't going to change their miscalculation.
9
@Glenn W.
Just like the Bible, "signs from god" can be twisted to support any viewpoint so you'll never convince them that their positions are unsustainable.
3
I grew up in suburban Chicago but our family has always had a deep connection to small town America. Dad was from South Bend, grandson of Brethren church members and ex Southern planters who moved North. Mom,from Cuyahoga Falls, OH descended from Baltimore Jews from the fields of Lithuania and Scottish farmers that fought the Revolution in NY and never found the better times they sought when later settling Ohio. We went to farmers markets, family reunions in small towns and had the biggest vegetable garden on our block.
Appropriately,I went to college in a small rural town and after 30 years in the Valley we moved over the hill to rural Santa Cruz County, far enough to find peace every night but within striking distance of the churning and relentless innovation of Silicon Valley.
I share all this because Mr Krugman has struck a nerve. I and many Americans feel an umbilical like connection to the heartland, even as we live and work in massive metropolitan centers of innovation and commerce. The forces that make our cities, products, services, and their people great are the same that turn rural America into mostly a concept. We can describe and feel it in our own ways, but most cannot make a decent living.
There is no simple fix, but it's becoming harder and more expensive to live in our most successful cities. Many are moving back into the middle as a result...to cities mostly but they support rural areas as well. With time economics inevitably yields an answer.
5
Krugman's main argument seems to be that we "can't revive a region." And there's some truth to the fact that we probably can't revive every single town and village across the entire Midwest, Plains, and South. Yet we've seen urban America be revitalized across the board over the last few years. Look at NYC going from a no-man's land of crime in the early 90's to the leading city of America in about 25 years. Look at how Detroit has turned around.
Many of rural America's small towns CAN be revitalized with the right strategy. People are heading to the city for economic opportunity and adventure. But it's a tradeoff that costs you green space, peace and quiet, and a decent sized living space. Now imagine that good, hi-speed WiFi was available throughout the country. As tech workers are increasingly empowered to work partially or even fully remotely, who wouldn't want to at least have a pied au terre cabin (if not a primary residence) near some quaint New England village or Wisconsin lake or forest in the Smoky Mountains? As city folks come out to hunt, fish, and engage in nature, suddenly little coffee shops, art galleries, and farm to table restaurants pop up to cater to them. Suddenly folks without cabins are coming out to visit for a weekend, too. Now imagine that electric trains pass through some of these towns as we connect the cities of the Eastern seaboard.
All we lack is the political will and the imagination to revive the heartland.
8
As a remote tech worker based in NYC married to another tech worker who manages teams of coders let me explain why while that sounds feasible on the surface it just isn’t practical. Most remote tech jobs in the USA aren’t fully remote. My job requires meeting with customers on occasion so I need to be near a major city with customers or in a small city with some customers that also has a major airport, something I won’t find in the rural communities that are suffering. My husband manages developers in NYC as well as remote offshore teams. Developers typically work together on projects so even when offshoring you try and offshore to a team of people located in an office together. It just doesn’t make financial sense to pay remote developers US salaries, those jobs are typically in India, Eastern Europe and other places where salary expectations are much lower. While living by a lake sounds nice, the majority of tech workers either have kids or are young and single. So they like to be located near good schools or in cities with lots of other young singles. If you look at the small number of tech companies that tried opening in small town middle America, they struggled with recruitment. While my husband and I sometimes talk about spending a couple weeks or a month working remotely in a beach town, the reality of school and childcare just doesn’t make it feasible.
@Natalie P Hi Natalie, I realize you may think you're the "expert" on tech. Thing is I work in tech myself and I can tell you that fully remote tech workers aren't unicorns in the industry and I've worked at some of the more prominent startups in NYC. The reality is good developers are hard to find and while companies don't prefer remote, they certainly accept it if you're good enough at what you do. Speaking of which, the reason all of our jobs haven't been offshored is that those developers/designers/analysts just aren't very good or very fast.
Second, where did I propose that all tech workers should just move to small towns (much less that tech companies themselves should HQ there)? Re-read my post and then look up the definition of pied au terre.
Third read the NYT real estate section about the number of New Yorkers (typically in their 30s) moving to Hastings on Hudson or Hudson or elsewhere in the Catskills. There's a clear appetite to escape the city, and by the way NYC's school system is far from a slam dunk with a lot of the "school" integration making districts a total tossup, and private schools in the city can easily run 30k/year.
The strength of this country is its diversity. Diversity of color. Diversity of religion. Diversity of beliefs. Diversity of opportunities. Diversity of geography. All kinds of diversity. Krugman had overtones of divisiveness and many of the comments are "us v. them" sorts of comments. This theme plays itself out in politics, economics, race...etc. We are interdependent. Yes, the diversity can cause tension, but the tension can build our collective strength. How do we get to a place that seems so simple yet is ever elusive - mutual acceptance and respect? Somehow my 3 year old gets it but too many of us older, wiser and smarter adults don't.
"Not surprisingly, rural America is also pretty much the only place where Donald Trump remains popular; despite the damage his trade wars have done to the farm economy, his net approval is vastly higher in rural areas than it is in the rest of the country."
three reasons why:
he's white.
he's not female.
he's not a democrat.
6
Does anyone believe that more than a quarter of East German men would have cast their ballots for the extreme-right, white nationalist Alternative for Germany if Trump hadn't been elected? America leads even when we do a bad job of it.
As for rural America, it represents 15% of the population and yet has grossly undue influence in the Senate. They should use their considerable heft for policies greater than gun rights and ending abortion.
We can't return to the 1950s.
6
No one is talking about the corporate take over of agriculture in the mid-west. For lots of reasons, the family farms have been gobbled up. Corporate agriculture has brought us poisoned food, depleted soil, GMOs and CAFO meat production. Small producers are abused by corporate buyers. Many small operators are trying to use organic and regenerative farming to stop soil loss and produce healthy food. How about thinking about breaking up the giants and redeveloping and helping small, environmentally sound farming done on a smaller scale? The corporate welfare currently given to politically powerful farming conglomerates could instead be directed to environmentally sound smaller farmers could perhaps change this tide and give farming families a shot at survival and prosperity. Corporate farming is one of the main drivers of loss of people and jobs in the mid-west, but our bought and paid for politicians won't change it. This is more complicated than I can explain but it might be worth a look see.
3
@Saturn The trend towards corporate farming is irreversible. The economics of automation and technology don't work well for small farms. Breaking up big farms into smaller ones would just raise prices for everyone.
Of course, that doesn't mean that we have to support "corporate welfare." Tax breaks should be eliminated and the revenue returned to the communities.
@Barry Short This may be true. Sad. Corporate farms are only interested in profits, not in the quality of the food they produce or the damage they do to the top soil with their chemicals. There is a price for us to consider also - cheap food produced by current agricultural model is filled with poisons and has lower nutritional yield. I guess we get what we pay for.
We should care about rural America because we are all in this together. On a more selfish note, we all like to eat. Without rural America, we'd be hungry.
79
@kathleen cairns
there should be a limit to our gratitude...
so much of what were private farms are now corporate
owned and operated, and these big private ags are thousands of acres, worth millions, often inherited, and without Trump's tariff tampering, usually sure money...
25
@kathleen cairns Many countries import the food that they eat. Going without rural America doesn't mean that we'd starve.
15
@Barry Short
America farmers are the most efficient in the world. What other collection of countries could supply us with as much food as we would require if our own farmers were not producing our food?
18
A few thoughts - the rural areas up to 2 or 3 hours away of big urban areas are doing very well now; especially in VA and NC. because urban people delight in visiting and because of a connection between small farmers usually organic and restaurants and neighborhood farmers markets in the suburbs and cities. Very small towns in SC also appear to be doing much better than 20 years ago. My point is that it isn't all doom and gloom. People do want what rural areas can give. It is unfortunate that businesses in the midwest and rural areas are going under and that young people are moving away. - I still think more people are moving to some of these areas than you assume. I wish there could be a starter business paying a high wage that could be used to spur small businesses in the surrounding areas. But if the experts can't figure it out, how could I?! I just wanted to say that I see some amazing things happening in rural and farm country in my state. Not enough, but a good sign nonetheless.
2
@Thoughtful1 Exactly! Areas that are distant from any cities are suffering, but lots of folks are moving out further, especially if they don't need to go to cities every day. And there are returnees who are willing to accept less affluence in return for a less pressured lifestyle. Moreover, many retirees are moving further from cities, and often the services (and jobs) follow them. Banning California is a good example.
As someone who grew up in a rural area, I don't need to hear any more about how sorry we should feel for white rural American people. They have more government "handouts" (as they call them when they go to other people), and more voting power than any other group, and they are constantly told that they deserve more. "The Heartland" and "Real America" mean nothing, but they wear these terms like badges that justify their racism, sexism, homophobia, and violence that they claim their religions mandate.
Yes, there are plenty of progressive rural people, my parents are two of them, but they are outnumbered and literally out-gunned. Try being any kind of minority in a town of 500 and tell me these places are worth saving. Rural America has some amazing scenic beauty to offer, but is a social and economic wasteland. But we'll keep pouring tax money into this pit while our cities' infrastructure crumbles as long as we have the electoral college.
9
Support for small family farms would be a good start to addressing the problems of rural Americans. Making sure they have working hospitals, good schools, well-paid teachers is also a must.
There is one major problem with all this that the Federal government cannot spend it’s way out of and it is that these people continue to vote in politicians that do not have their best interests at heart. If you vote for someone who turns away subsidizing your healthcare then yes, your hospitals are going to close. If you vote in someone who wants an end to mandatory education, then yes, your schools will crumble. If you vote in someone that tells you taxes are the evil of all evil then yes, your roads, sewage and electric are going to fall into ugly disrepair. Until the voters in these states come to grips with the fact that rage based on helplessness and the idea that you are cut out of the pie, may gain votes by reflecting their own emotions, that will not sustain and better their situation.
3
Corporate mindset of our governments (local, state, and federal) have decimated small farms and farmers while turning agriculture factory farming. This destructive transformation was engineered by governmental actions like giving multi-million dollar subsidies to these massive factory farms and allowing them to turn rural communities into cesspools and forcing farmers into desperate and hopeless environments. Republicans play the role of devilish Lucifer denying these Americans of any human dignity. If there is one thing that is responsible for the abysmal rural decline then it is Unemployment. And Unemployment not only causes poverty but also steals health, education, and dignity and self-respect. We can turn this situation around by providing universal health care, free or affordable education, and by holding these behemoth farming factories accountable for the environmental degradation and destruction of public health.
1
Paul Krugman keeps referring to East Germany. East Germany is not one homogenous, economically broadly suffering region. There are parts of East Germany which are doing extremely well. And, as a there are parts which are doing less well but where people enjoy rural life, the enabled by a very modern infrastructure.
Another success model from Germany is Bavaria. Until the 60ies, Bavaria overall and especially the more rural parts of it like Lower Bavaria where poor people's land. Today, every region in Bavaria is prosperous. Apart from a political framework that encouraged business investments, the State's government invested heavily into infrastructure like railways, motorways, and eventually the internet that connected these regions to urban centers. Equally importantly, the Government forward-deployed educational facilities such as universities, government administration offices, etc. into these rural areas. As a result, lots of well-paying white collar jobs were created which in turn supported rural jobs in farming, and foresting, and construction, and etc. Why couldn't that be replicated in rural America?
1
@W
There is a big problem: The size.
Germany after 1945 became perfectly shaped to run a modern industrial country. This was by no means planned - in fact rather the opposite- but happened by coincidence, this means fundamental chamges in economy, technology and agriculture all took place after WW2. Then specific distances and density allowed the economic operation of modern infrastructure you have cited. It´s not so dense as it is in the Netherlands or the Northern part of Switzerland but it´s still sufficient in many but not in all regions.
Nationwide full supply is impossible. Even in Bavaria the thinly settled eastern part - Oberpfalz, Lower Bavaria is sufficiently dense nowadays - or some parts of Sauerland here have structural deficits that can not be fixed.
The solution is forming clusters as regional centers and connect them by consistent regional and nationwide planning like the French do also. But even then gaps between centers and clusters will remain that can not be filled.
In more thinly populated and much larger France large rural areas are still required for - mechanized - food production in Europe so they are in similar situations like rural America.
There are closed small factories peppered throughout rural Michigan. That's where the job loss occurred, much more so than farming.
Automation took a toll as did transfer of production to cheaper labor countries.
Even lumbering has been automated to the point where a single worker on a tree harvesting machine can do the work that once required a hundred workers, same story with building material manufacturers.
A white collar worker can be as productive in the sticks as in an urban office. What's missing in the sticks is high speed Internet. If we attempt to supplement the rural economy, ubiquitous broadband is the place to start.
3
High-speed internet is all well and good, but it doesn't provide that "invisible exchange of information that comes from face-to-face contact." This is the underdiscussed factor that powers areas of skills concentration such as Silicon Valley, Austin, and Boston. Technology offers no compelling replacement for face time. Add to this the enormous cost of installing high speed broadband in sparsely populated areas when compared to cities, and one can see how deeply structural the problem is.
3
We need a yet to be named economic/social system that is equitable, principled, impartial, ethical, consiconable. Competition globally and nationally is not competitive it is inflictive; it is warfare. Education, healthcare, employment, housing must be available to all; the unhealthy attitude of the selfish oligarchs must be contained. A living wage must be mandatory. ALL regulatory agencies must be honestly staffed and functioning for the safety, health and future of everyone.
We are a culture of many parts and peoples; all must be respected.
OPINIONS ARE ALWAYS IN MOTION.
1
Regardless of the importance of America's urban areas, we must remember that none of America's wealth would have been possible without its vast farming areas. These have made it possible for large majorities of Americans to live away from the land while still being dependent on it.
Yes, I agree with Mr. Krugman about the difficulties of rural America. While I live there now I was from a somewhat larger urban area. I enjoy its slow pace and lack of crowding. I also know we need a way to prop up this region, as farming and its related industries are as vital now, maybe more so, than they have been in the past. What, exactly, to do? I must join professosr Krugman in saying that I just don't know. I DO know, however, that it is incumbent on rural residents to save themselves - clearly urbanites don't care very much, in spite of their dependence those vast grain fields.
1
In American economics only the next quarter matters.
The last century is not relevant.
2
@wrf1984
" I also know we need a way to prop up this region, as farming and its related industries are as vital now, maybe more so, than they have been in the past. "
I think that the point is that farming doesn't require as many people as it did even a few decades ago. We can continue to maintain a vigorous farming system even if the rural population declines.
1
What if "rural America" can't be "saved"? We take it for granted that all small towns are salvageable, but in cases where they aren't - I think the most humane thing to do is to dissolve those towns and help their citizens get out. As an extreme example, consider the small town of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which was completely evacuated due to an underground fire. Flint, Michigan may be another case where there's really nothing that can be done. These kinds of disasters are inevitable as towns fall into disrepair and lack the resources to prevent such things from happening. It also makes the recent change in the tax code to get rid of the above-the-line deduction for moving expenses that much more deplorable. What's needed is a national program to help towns dissolve as humanely and rationally as possible.
3
I grew up on a 100 acre dairy farm. There were at least 20 small dairies in the valley. Now there is one - What happened? As Dr. Krugman could explain, it's called "economies of scale". A large wheat farm in my youth was 2200 acres. They hired a large number of people at harvest - great summer employment for college kids. Now a couple of adults with an extra worker or two at harvest can farm 4-6,000 acres. My parents preached education - my brother obtained a PhD and taught at a major university. I obtained 2 Masters and worked for USDA for 30 years. Often people would ask my parents when we were "coming home" - they would say "to do what exactly....". Couple this with national ag policy that favored farm consolidation, and the impact on rural communities was devastating. As population declines, schools close, banks and stores close - and most devastating is when the rural hospital closes. If you encourage children to become educated, and there are no decent paying jobs in rural areas, the die is cast - slow but inexorable decline. They also the myth they are self sufficient, not recognizing the billions spent on ag subsidies, irrigation subsidies, dams and other publicly funded infrastructure that supports them. I moved back to the farm to care for my aging mother. It's very Red. It's also interesting to hear the local retirees snarkily talk about socialism as they enjoy their SS and Medicare.
10
The hope I see for rural is green agriculture. as more people come to the city they still need to eat. Our hope my be our desire for better food. Not 10 apples that all taste about the same, not pork and tastes like chicken or chicken that almost taste like nothing. Really tasty food take people to grow it. It is the same as Child care, or education or cooking baking story telling writing or art, It takes people to make it good. Give the farmer something that they will be proud to grow and farmers will come to grow it and rebuild towns and all the rest. Follow the madel we have pour cemicals in and take people out and get more pork that tastes like chicken that chicken that tastes like nothing. Come on how many of the people that work at the Time or in DC shop at Whole Foods? We would all be better off if we all ate that well.
1
What may have an impact in changing this dynamic are climate change, and the desire of many people, young as well as older, to avoid the fast paced, debt-ridden life in increasingly overpopulated cities. First, many folks have moved to coastal cities in warmer climes that within a generation - or less - will be barely habitable - underwater and/or so hot that it could be lethal to spend much time outside much of the year. Some regions of the Midwest that lack water will also bleed even more population for this reason, especially in the southern portions. But it seems likely that areas that have lost population in recent decades - the rural Northeast and the upper Midwest, could very well see climate refugees moving in the opposite direction. It's a fantasy to think, for example, that the cities of Texas are going to be able indefinitely to air condition their way out of the consequences of climate change. Already there is movement of some younger people moving back to small farming, especially organic farming, supplemented with crafts of various kinds, because they want a different lifestyle. I suspect they will be joined by retirees who leave the expensive cities. I don't think this sort of revival will be loud, splashy, or immediately, and these returnees will be selective. Regions and sub-regions where there is a lot of crime and out-of-control opioid use will be avoided. But gradually there will be a shift that will buoy or at least sustain rural areas.
@gkb
I wouldn't count too much on retirees. The lack of specialized healthcare and high closure rate of hospitals makes rural areas an undesirable place for older people.
2
This says it all: "Not surprisingly, rural America is also pretty much the only place where Donald Trump remains popular; despite the damage his trade wars have done to the farm economy, his net approval is vastly higher in rural areas than it is in the rest of the country." Until rural populations start to realize that Republicans, especially Trump, only want their voles, as they continue to pursue policies that favor the rich, the rural areas will continue to decline. It's hard to feel pity or any sense of obligation to do something for people who refuse to help themselves.
2
How about a green new deal for rural America? We should start by helping small and medium sized farms, especially sustainable practices. Let’s invest in small and medium instead of mega corporations and their shareholders.
1
I think is also more under siege of unscrupulous politicians that benefit from small economies and a not too well educated population.
1
Here’s a thought: let’s make revitalization of rural communities a part of the “Green New Deal.” As we invest in sustainable energy, let’s do so in a way that’s designed to develop hubs of economic activity in rural areas.
It only makes sense to develop solar and wind power generation facilities in rural areas. Given the existential threat of climate change, nuclear energy should be back on the table, and those plants should also be located in sparsely populated areas. All of this could bring jobs, workers, and money to the heartland, and generate demand for housing and service industry jobs. Energy production facilities could form the backbone of planned communities designed to maintain quality of life and lure young residents who otherwise would flock to urban centers. The promised investment in red states and rural communities could help build the political consensus needed to pass the “new deal.” Coastal liberals get sustainable energy and action on climate change, red state conservatives get economic growth.
Ah, who am I kidding? The federal government is a dysfunctional cesspool led by a corrupt megalomaniac who “doesn’t believe in” climate change and who finds it more convenient to blame all ills on Democrats and immigrants. An infrastructure deal has been there for the taking for the past three years at least, and all we’re doing is building a pointless, multibillion dollar wall.
2
Any green new deal will create 10's to hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Solar installers are one of the fastest growing jobs. Wind also creates a lot of jobs and some of those permanent.
But instead we seem bent on ensuring we create the largest ever dust bowl...
1
Last week the South Dakota legislature voted down a scholarship program to help students with economic need. It might have helped 6,000 kids afford college. Rep. Tom Pischke from Dell Rapids said it was tantamount to socialism and an idea promoted by Democrats.
When lawmakers in South Dakota think college for kids is a Democratic socialist plot it is clear that helping rural America is a lost cause.
https://www.yankton.net/opinion/editorials/article_1bfa8e30-4479-11e9-882f-232baaa8a21b.html
9
Dreaming in the direction of historical forces is a different thing than dreaming against the flow of historical forces. The hard truths - based on a more or less objective assessment of historical conditions - are just that, hard; hard to accept. Except in some progressive's fantasy in which large numbers of young adults move 'back to the land' to engage in small lot organic farming, modern food production techniques mean fewer and fewer farmers will be needed to grow our food. Ditto re workforce requirements of modern resource extraction. A movement of capital to smaller rural cities to promote development of small technology employment zones - well, that is theoretically possible, but made difficult by twin headwinds: young highly educated people are attracted to cities, and employers of highly skilled people tend to 'cluster' - and clustering is easier in larger population areas. The recent "opportunity zone' tax incentives are one way to encourage capital investment in rural areas, as would broadband extension into rural areas; whether that and similarly constructed programs can overcome historical forces remains to be seen. The 'hard truth' school seems to me pragmatic in its assessment; the dreamers are, however, of course, been critical to the enduring greatness of the US.
If you're an IT professional you intentionally avoid cities with only a few employers.
1
Krugman has highlighted a phenomenon that is occurring throughout the world, the intra nation immigration from rural to urban. We often think of international immigration, but this intra national immigration is much greater and much more significant. What’s happening here in America is just one example of something much greater.
2
Good one, Dr. Krugman. Although it's a mixed bag, Norway's "distriktspolitikk" is a decades-long attempt to address the eternal urban/rural dynamic. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/tema/kommuner-og-regioner/regional--og-distriktspolitikk/om-regionalpolitikken/about-regional-policy/a-brief-history-of-rural-and-regional-policy/id2425727/?selectLanguage=/se/Fattat/gielddat-ja-guovllut/guovllu--ja-regionalapolitihkka/om-regionalpolitikken/about-regional-policy/a-brief-history-of-rural-and-regional-policy/id2425727/
Tim Carney's appearance on C-Span a week ago VERY CLEARLY articulated the issues.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?458552-5/washington-journal-tim-carney-discusses-book-alienated-america
FINALLY - FINALLY - I understand the meaning of MAGA to the Trump voter - the anger, frustration and despair which drove these people into the arms of the charlatan Trump. They lost their jobs, their churches, their schools, their towns, their identities, their whole way of being.
Globalization was embraced and took place with ZERO thought to its negative impact - which we now know is incalculable - and life-destroying.
4
@Diana
Unfortunately, along with all of this despair, it has resulted in the horrible statistic of "white, middle aged males" becoming the single largest group of those in America "taking their own lives".
Trump just told them what they wanted to hear, it was all a fraud and now despite his bizarre continued support among many in this group, before too long, it will be confirmed it was all a "scam".
@Diana Too bad the Trump voter just made it worse.
1
There is an extremely high correlation between counties that went for trump the chump and deaths of dispair.
Jamie Dimon seems to be backing Senator Warren, in that, Europe regulates big tech better than we do in the United States. An economy estimated at 269 trillion is probably something our sectarians rule with a heavy hand.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/technology/elizabeth-warren-tech-companies.html
1
Out west, minorities (including foreign born) are driving population increase in rural counties - https://headwaterseconomics.org/economic-development/trends-performance/minority-populations-driving-county-growth/
Actually, I wonder how infrequently rural Americans encounter immigrants.
When I read accounts of who is working in meat packing plants, cleaning barns, milking cows, and doing other less desirable work on the farm, it is immigrants - often undocumented.
So, why does rural America have such fear and loathing of immigrants?
I think this is another hard-to-explain trend in US politics: the ready assignation of blame to another group for one's own misfortune.
And the cognitive dissonance at work when employers of undocumented immigrants on the farm vote for Trump, believing a wall will protect them from... something, well, that just another seriously unexplainable phenomenon.
6
One of the biggest killers of small and large farms, and the local jobs that go with them, is the small oligopoly of very large agricultural products distribution that has squeezed family farming operations, big and small, to death. It is time to bust the trusts, so to speak, and bring back some semblance of real competition back to all marketplaces.
3
Unfortunately, in his story, Paul Krugman has missed what is probably one of the most important elements contributing to this decline and that is Republican's outwardly desire to purposely underfund and destroy public education within the states they control, hence, as a result, because of a lack of properly educated and trained people, businesses of any consequence will not relocate to these areas hastening their decline.
Demographics don't lie, the "Heartland" is growing older and its population is shrinking.
5
Back in the 2000s, I used to read Krugman and nearly always agreed with him. I don't know whether I've changed or he has, but I don't anymore.
The United States is a country of more than 300 million people. If it can only sustain economic prosperity for a few dozen high-cost-of-living cities on the coasts, that seems to speak to a fundamental failure of the U.S.'s economic system--not to some mysterious problem with "rural America." And if the answer to the obvious decline of much of the country is simply to throw up your arms and attribute it to "powerful economic forces that nobody knows how to stop," then you shouldn't be surprised that people in rural America stop voting for you. Most people would rather vote for someone who at least claims to be trying to make their lives better, versus someone who simply concludes that there is nothing that can be done.
1
@RC Krugman isn't giving up, he is admitting that he doesn't know. If people want to vote for a con man that claims to understand (Trump, and Republicans in general), that's their right. However, don't expect others to consider that a smart move.
1
@RC
"Most people would rather vote for someone who at least claims to be trying to make their lives better, versus someone who simply concludes that there is nothing that can be done."
The problem is that the person/party who claims to be trying to make their lives better is actually making things worse. That should be quite clear at this point.
1
Providing inexpensive high speed internet and cell phone service to rural America could be a game changer.
2
Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges and artist Joe Sacco document this phenomena (which they call sacrifice zones) in their heartbreaking book "Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt."
"Sacrifice zones, those areas in America that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement. They wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like in places where the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit."
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1568588240
4
Start with:
Taxes are not bad, they're an essential instrument of democracy to provide a balanced environment for everyone to have level playing field and provide basic necessities such as: Education, roads, electricity, internet, clean environment and HEALTH CARE.
Religion is great and everyone should believe in their religion, but you can't force your belief onto others.
Can we start with just these 2, please
10
Small family farms, unless it is truck farming in the vicinity of large urban areas, are disappearing from the American landscape. They are demanding and increasingly uneconomic. Jobs are few. Young people are fleeing rural areas. Very large, productive, corporate farms are taking over and the chief beneficiaries of all manner of supports: subsidies, taxes, crop insurance, et. al. Their agricultural exports are a pillar of America's external accounts. America is one of the critical food surplus countries in the world. What to do?
First, segregate the problem and identify who we're talking about. There is no one "rural". It ranges from wealthy to impoverished. The rural private sector similarly caters to different segments while the public sector serves all.
Second, we can support small family farms to ensure their survival as is done elsewhere in the world through direct crop and minimum rural income subisidies and crop insurance. It is expensive but it can be done. And we might pay for it by increasing taxes on and reducing subsidies and tariffs for food stuffs like red meat and costly domestic sugar that are detrimental to our health and the environment.
Third, farms can be paid to be climate friendly --Brazil requires significant swathes of farms be maintained as forest. Small farms in national park buffer areas or linking natural habitats could also be paid to maintain permanently fallow, rehabilitated areas.
It can be done. It should be done.
4
@Chris P
What is so magical about "small family farms"? There seems to be some national mythos that they are the moral backbone of the country. Instead of subsidizing people to remain on small, inefficient farms through higher taxes and food prices, wouldn't it be better to invest that money in educating today's rural children to be the engineers that we will need tomorrow?
1
just give rural areas health care, let it then adjust. btw I'm rural upstate NY.
1
10% of the world's population lived in cities at the start of the 20th century; 50% do so now and worldwide, 1 million people a week move from the countryside to cities. 70% of the world's population will be living in cities by 2050. Cities will then be producing all their own food in high rise or so-called Vertical Farms. https://curiositystream.com/video/360/vertical-farms?playlist=
...as cities are predominantly liberal, voters just need another 30 years before the countryside can again return to its natural state and Republicans rejoice in their newly found humanitarian values
2
I would like to know from the rural people what they feel the solutions to the problems should be. A solution is not electing a politician or three who have solutions. That is a step down the road. The first steps should be what the people involved in the problem can create as solutions. Not the people in the urban/suburban areas propose. Not what the academics propose. Not what the tech folks propose. Let's get the solutions from the rural people who are directly affected by all this - ideas no matter how feasible or seemingly unfeasible they may be. Then they should come together in increasingly larger groups - start very locally, and then county and statewide - to discuss, hash out, propose. Then the academics, techies, urbanites can add their voice and expertise (but expertise will come from the rural people too). After all that, elect politicians who deeply understand the solutions and can vote/appropriate government money, public-private money - whatever - to help those solutions come into being. But the funding has to follow a strategic plan - grand on scale, effective on the local scale. A Marshall Plan for rural America.
But it starts with the rural folks voicing their problems and coming up with solutions.
Rural folks - you are not apart from us in the urban areas - we are part of each other. Listen, Mr. Krugman, and start planting seeds in your journeys around the country for rural solutions to rural problems.
"But rural Americans — many of whom rarely encounter immigrants in their daily lives — have a vastly more negative view."
Immigrants are a way of life in many rural communities. Eighteen languages are spoken in Storm Lake, Iowa and 80% of schools are made up of immigrant students. Big Ag hires only immigrants.
Many rural Americans encounter immigrants in their daily lives and for a better understanding of rural American read Pulitzer Prize author Art Cullen's book Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper.
Tech is moving to rural areas in 2019:
https://clayandmilk.com/2018/12/10/pillar-technology-connects-with-silicon-valley-leaders-to-bring-tech-jobs-to-jefferson/
1
It is with great sadness that I read Krugman's op-ed. Sadness not just for the suffering in the heartland but also because there is an answer. Currently agriculture is akin to a mining operation, taking more out of the soil than it puts back. But it doesn't have to be. There are new methods, called "regenerative agriculture and grazing" that puts back resources, especially carbon. Regenerative methods sequester carbon and in a "carbon cap and trade" system farmers would be able to leverage those best practices. This is not wo-wo, pie-in-the-sky stuff. this is real science. It would demand a reeducation of the rural workforce and demand that science have the status it needs to make political decisions based on its findings - both not easy. The answer is highly technical. But one thing I've learned being around farmers is that they're good at that kind of stuff. More economists need to be looking at this option. "Regenerative agriculture"
3
Come on Dr. Krugman. Use some of that ability to do really wonky column explaining how public policy has accelerated consolidation in agriculture and doomed large swaths of rural America. We subsidize and deregulate agri-business while doing little or nothing to promote farming. They are not the same thing. All of that cheap food at the grocery store comes with tremendous costs in so many other ways. I think of the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where much of my family is from. When I spent summers with my grandparents, my grandfather managed a small hog farm and a variety of crops were raised in the area. My grandmother worked at a chicken processing plant. Now, the Delmarva peninsula is basically all in support of the poultry industry. Much less diversity and much less opportunity, but plenty of cheap chicken. We can't turn back time, but we can certainly rearrange incentives.
What if we identified rural zones that were economically distressed and losing population--as we already do in urban areas--and we then encouraged Central and South American and Syrian and African and any other immigrants to apply for long-term living and working permits (including a path to citizenship) to move there to build homes and do small-scale family farming and also work in local industries that have trouble finding workers?
They would have to commit to staying in their initial area for a fixed term (the way the military academy graduates get free education in exchange for a fixed term of service after graduation.) Rural in-migration has happened informally (and in many cases, illegally) in midwestern towns with large meat-packing and dairy-farming operations, and those towns have been revived--and prejudice incidentally reduced--by the virtues of immigrant labor.
We should build on that serendipitous positive development with the encouragement of official U.S. policies. P.S. Undocumented people already here should also be encouraged to apply for these new permits.
2
East Germany can't be fixed, even after spending "$1.7 trillion, more than $100,000 per person"? This doesn't show the impossibility of turning things around, rather it shows a bureaucracy that is probably corrupt and is certainly unable or unwilling to spend any of that money in positive ways. Maybe that's the same thing.
We don't lack the means, we lack the will, as you say so well.
What if Cities themselves are the issue? The conversation always starts from the assumed point of view that the "success" of Cities must mean that there is a problem with rural communities. However, I'm not sure there is any value in looking at the issue that way. For me the bigger problem is the myriad of ways in which Cities are able to take advantage of rural communities through the collection of wealth. To say that there are no ways to save Rural America while Rural America is still forced to send the majority of its wealth to Cities just seems to me to miss the point.
2
@John It is the cities that are making their own wealth by providing the infrastructure and, just as importantly, the social environments that are attractive to educated individuals and growing corporations. They're not plundering the surrounding countryside like some sort of modern-day Vikings. One only needs to look at the "giver" and "taker" states to see that the wealthy, urbanized states are generally subsidizing the rural states.
1
I wonder about the impact of factory/industrial farming on rural areas. When large corporations take over, the emphasis shifts to one of maximizing profits by ruthlessly slashing wages and shrinking the workforce. Workers are imported from poorer nations. These are good people who are willing to accept wages that Americans find insufficient or insulting. The work itself becomes pressurized and mind-numbingly repetitive. The days of the family farm are just about over, and this has been to the detriment of rural America.
3
In recent times, the mechanization and corporatization of farming, and mechanization in mining and lumbering have gone further to de-population of the hinterland.
That is changing. Small university towns are seeing rapid growth. Improved transportation and e-commerce are reducing the advantages of large cities. People are making lifestyle choices to live away from the traffic jams and pollution of the big cities. Places like Reno, NV, Bozeman, MT (called by many locals "BozAngeles", and Midway, UT, are growing rapidly. Jackson, WY, and Park City, UT are becoming unaffordable to the middle class.
This will reverse the Heartland's decline, and it will accelerate as new development in these areas improved infrastructure. The challenge is for current residents of these areas to ensure that their children are properly educated to be able to compete in this new rural economy, otherwise they won't be able to afford to continue to live there.
2
@TMah I can see what you're driving at, and it seems reasonable. However, the rural folks there now that vote for politicians that don't value education and rational thought will be manning the 7-11. At least they'll have a job, but they still will be left behind in many ways.
1
Well, let's look at the bright side. After all, given rural America's demographic trends, the problem should take care of itself in one or two generations.
7
The Land Institute established in 1976 is trying to reestablish communities and create business environments in declining small rural towns. It can be researched online. Wes Jackson is behind restoring land to produce better after it has been depleted and abused. We can make rural life more challenging, profitable and desirable.
1
Rural America can be one of two things, the declining economic home of the underpaid, under educated, and addicted described by Dr. Krugman or...the New American Frontier. What does rural America have that so many could take advantage of? Cheap real estate, open spaces, a slower pace of life, connection with neighbors and community, the opportunity to shape communities to more human/humane values. Many commenters below have proposed policies that can make this possibility a reality, Medicare for all and the reintroduction of hospitals, clinics, and professional jobs into rural areas, guaranteed income floors, environmental cleanup and reclaiming of quality wild areas, populations. Expansion of internet connectivity making startup business easier. Massive potential if we can muster the will and creativity.
8
Well the number one readers pick comment says it all. Forget the rural areas, take away their political voice. You can close all of the exits off Interstate 80 but we will still be here. We need to recognize that some of the problems here are on the way everywhere. Monopolies Of big Ag are no different from monopolies in Big Tech, monopolies are cannibalistic. When the monopolies of rent decide they want your first born the rural areas will start to look good, oh wait a minute Big Ag will own all the farmland. Monopolies are like monolithic machines grazing on us. Right now this conversation is on the rural areas but Monopolies are grazing everywhere, it's just easier to see the destruction in the open areas instead of the congested areas.
7
How about this solution: A seamless VR technology and ubiquitous supporting infrastructure that can enable that "invisible exchange of information that comes from face-to-face contact"? I know. Really Hard. But whoever solves that problem not only gets to be the next Infosys (and more), but also gets to reverse one of the dominant problems of out times. The killer app for VR is not play, but work.
1
We are lifelong farmers, and have searched for the answers to the problems you listed. We believe the answers lie in a complete refocus of agriculture policy starting at the ag college level and in government policy, away from industrial ag's recommendation of chemical farming and refocus on the soil. working with nature's solution to abuse of our land. I recommend Gabe Brown's book "Dirt To Soil" or any of the other approaches under what is called "regenerative agriculture". It is time to repopulate the rural areas with people who love farming and rural life, but can't survive economically because of the cheap food policys that are in place in this country.
6
You decry environmental regulation but the pollution of natural water sources and ground water from strip mining, large livestock farms and fossil fuel production is just one factor that is making life in many rural areas less desirable for residents. Tourism, (i.e. hunting, fishing an wildlife observation) might help bring back some of these rural regions, however in many rural communities,( e.g. but not limited to coal country), people can no longer eat the fish and wildlife they catch and the rate of pollution related lung diseases has also increased. Yet some residents resent environmental safeguards meant to benefit us all but especially themselves as intrusive government overreach. They continue to vote against their own interests.
4
@Conrad The Arlie Hochschild book Strangers in Their Own Land is a fascinating effort to understand exactly this conundrum: people voting for those who accelerate the destruction of the very features that allegedly draw them to live in specific places. An unfortunate aspect of this book is that solutions seem remote. The single most damaging feature of this problem, in my opinion, is that the current "leadership" under Trump can only exacerbate these trends. A clear-eyed understanding of the magnitude of the problem is a necessary first step and I do not see that the Republican Party even wants this. Krugman's analysis seems accurate to me, despite his lacking a solution. Is there one?
4
There is a climate angle to consider as well. American farms have become so efficient at producing food (and ethanol fuel) we have an over-abundance of it. Let’s return that land back to the wild and let native grasslands do what it’s really good at doing: locking carbon back into the soil.
How? Why not offer a 20-year government buy-out for farmland (based on soil quality and conservation value, which the USDA already does) and return it back to the bison and actively manage the prairie grasslands that nature and American Indians had done for millennia.
2
On the irony front, farming and rural America would benefit from increased immigration. Not from migrant labor but from building community. Many of the small farmers in California’s Central Valley immigrated from outside the U.S. and developed farms in the area.
Making the matter more difficult is the high cost of farm land. That prevents entry into the farm business by new people. Mostly, those farms that are not passed through inheritance or gift are sold to Big Ag. Whose operations are highly mechanized. This means we have depressed rural areas with high unemployment and no industry.
2
Powerful economic forces are attacking rural America in addition to powerful environmental forces as we see in Nebraska with the floods. I have listened to heartbreaking stories of farmers and ranchers completely destroyed. What can states and the federal government do to stop the tide of climate change? The first thing would be for rural Americans, like those I live with, to stop denying it.
2
Have you considered that many rural dwellers are satisfied with their lot in life and aren't worried about your concerns?
2
@Jack Have you considered that rural areas where a large percentage of younger people leave and thus deprive the communities of the type of continuity that comes with extended families, will wither away because of this process? It's great that residents like their lives, but unless one wishes to live in a region with a declining economy, they should be concerned about the trends described in this article. I would also suggest that since the vote for Trump was much greater in rural than urban areas, dissatisfaction with their lives may be a factor. I suggest this since it is evident that many votes were effectively protests against the established order.
2
@Jack
His "concerns" are concerns about them. If they're so happy, why are they all on opioids? Why are they complaining about not having any jobs? Why do they accept government benefits and then complain about people who don't share the same skin color getting those same benefits? Why do employers have a hard time finding non-drug-addled workers?
I guess I should just conclude that they are satisfied with misery. Never thought of that.
3
@Jack
Then they should stop coming into our cities to score narcotics and stop using food stamps.
I do not have all of the answers either. A few I do have. One is food and fiber pricing is too low and does not reflect costs in money, society and environment. All areas of the globe that rely on production of food and fiber today are struggling because of monopoly pressures pushing low prices and higher costs benefitting big Chemical Companies and others. For more sustainability and broader benefit, we must move to true Organic farming for most of the food production.
Also each depressed place is different from others because of what exists, who lives there and where it is. Some places can only recover/progress if massive changes such as water importation from great distances and expense occur - those places may or may not be able to do so. Many desert areas in Nevada for instance will not recover their mining based populations and activities. But in California's Central Valley there are very viable water solutions that in the short term are expensive but long term definitely not.
Apropos the above, ask the people in each part of the country what vision they have for locally making their place more viable and long term sustainable in a both intentional and aided way is needed for positive energies moving forward. My county pursued big employers (to replace agriculture) unsuccessfully while building suburban housing and ranchettes for decades. Yet few wanted either activity except a few powerful people. On the other hand helping local entrepreneurs has helped and works.
1
Bravo Professor. No one may have the answers but the heartland needs to know they are recognized and people are concerned about them. Without concern there can be no answers.
2
Nice to see you are starting a conversation on "rural decline" Dr. Krugman. Perhaps it will spark a recognition of the root of the various problems facing our rural brethren -and the actual ground they care for: R-e-s-p-e-c-t...or the lack of it in this case.
Beside's the obvious first round assists you mention: infrastructure, universal healthcare and childcare which would go a long way to helping rural communities.
But I'm surprised you didn't mention something an economist would naturally look at...Food. We all need it. As a species we used to spend 1/2 our waking hours (regionally variable) acquiring our daily nuitrtion. Here in the 21st century U.S. the cost of sustanence is 5% to 20% of the average budget.
Much like the price we pay at the pump for gasoline, the price we pay at the grocery store does not reflect the real cost -not to mention the long term consequences- of our modern food production. We are grinding down our support system - the people and the land they work - in the relentless pursuit of the most "efficient" and immediately profitable solutions to feeding ourselves.
18th and 19th century economic theory, and Capitalism especially, have led us to achieve unimaginable successes, but could not foresee the complexity of unintended consequences brought on by global trade linked to untethered greed.
Maybe you are right that "..nobody knows how to stop" the undermining of our rural resources - human and terralogical -
but I hope not.
1
With almost 1300 comments, any comment is lost in this large a crowd...
But to practice my thinking-writing...
I have supported a variation of the steady state economic model since school. I think it is both a crime and not moral to go to Wal-Mart and buy things made some place where they can pollute the environment more than we would allow here. They can use child labor which we would not allow here. Where if you organized for a union you would be shot or end up in jail for years.
As long as we tolerate the consumption of goods in the USA made in systems that would not tolerated here we are hypocrites that deserve whatever evil falls onto our society.
So dear Professor, I ask the question. What would the USA look like if we tomorrow closed all out boarders to good s and services from abroad? If we said we will make and consume everything in the USA from the raw materials we have in the USA and no place else?
What affect would this have on the future prospects of the majority of Americans?
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@JD
You make some great points JD.
Would that we could go back and undo or redo our rush to globalization.
Unfortunately the world has gotten too small. We can't fix the problems we've created by solely retreating from global free trade - though some aspects of that idea would help.
Much like climate change, we can clean up our own carbon footprint or 'back yard' but China and India could easily overwhelm the planet in 50 years if left unchecked.
We're all in this together now...
We used to "throw away" trash...there is no more "away" now.
Humans have already likely have exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. We still have some options, but the choices are narrowing fast. A major part of any solution must involve limiting and adjusting our trade appetite as you suggest but there will be more to it than that.
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@JD
I know the planet would be delighted! I'm glad you're doing the dirty work of questioning our morality. It's just too obvious to avoid.
Paul misses three critical factors influencing rural economies:
1-Rural economies are largely resource based and are thus more vulnerable to ecological disruption, from flood to wildfire;
2 -Rural economies lack diversity and are thus more susceptible to the impacts of increased corporatization (consider the reach and control of Monsanto, Purdue Farms, Walmart, Weyerhaeuser, Trident Seafoods, ConocoPhillips etc); and
3 -Rural economies are infantilized and mythologized by nearly everyone of influence and power outside their bounds.
The NYT would serve the country well by randomly selecting a handful of rural places across the country and dissecting their underlying economies. These are the people who feed us, produce our energy, extract nearly all domestic raw materials, and are responsible for protecting our natural heritage. We should all understand them a whole lot better.
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@Anger2Action
Who are you? Don't stop.
Want to know what rural America needs?
Ask rural Americans.
I'm an L.A. expat living in Chico, working in Glenn County, in California's agricultural heartland. Folks grow almonds, walnuts, rice, cattle, dairy and rowcrops. Most farmers here are fourth, fifth, sixth, gen with small kids aiming for seven. Farmers are well educated and incredibly precise about agriculture, for example, I've heard an assessment of grazing lands that use satellite imagery over multiple years via cellphone.
Things Glenn County is doing that could be a national model:
- Every single eighth grader goes to the Glenn County Fairground for an annual career day, during which c. 80 different people represent what they do and talk about how they got there.
- The Glenn County Cities & County Economic Development Committee is working with Sacramento + multiple counties to improve rural internet acccess and collaborate on bringing/developing new business locally, as an offfshoot, they helped develop a hiring fair.
- Educators from local colleges, high schools + CSU Chico have met with local companies and asked what they need, education-wise, in new hires; building new relevant coursework
- Glenn County Office of Education built the Glenn Success Conference Center, being used to focus business development
Ag margins are tight, so this forces tough decisions all the time, in CA, it costs more to make a gallon of milk than dairies are paid.
Much to be done, no doubt...but don't tell, ask.
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@Melina Watts
If they're so smart, how about figuring out a way to do all that without illegal farm workers?
Oh, it's those small profit margins. My bad.
Look, I spend a lot of time in Kern County, and I'm always amazed at our scientific methods of agriculture, our animal husbandry, and everything else associated with the great State of California's advanced agricultural industry. Lots of Universities in your state, lots of good thinking going on. But, your farm help is illegal, plain and simple. So don't pat yourself on the back so much.
Also, you actually tax your citizens (or try to, your billionaires seem strangely unwilling to pay any taxes.) Compare that to Kansas, and maybe you'll understand why your programs won't work in other states--it would require funding. Funding comes from taxes, augmented by the occasional billionaire who likes to play government with the money they didn't have to pay in taxes. You have a fair amount of those in California also.
California is just not a good example of the malaise that has hit our heartland.
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@Melina Watts
Yes, why do we listen to Dr. Krugman say nothing about such matters?
Glenn Co. is most impressive.... we really are backwoods out here. Our state extension office is a shoe box and if you don't have more than 100 acres it's not worth putting your foot in the door. With productive/valuable land like yours, it makes sense to have it supported so well. (FFA and 4-H is about all we got... they teach Ag in the high school.)
@CF Well, CF, no one is stopping you and your family to begin the "Americans Taking Back the Fields" movement. Have at it!
It’s a huge irony that the US has millions of acres of land where few people live (i.e. rural America), yet could be invigorated by immigrants who should be allowed to enter the country with the stipulation they locate in rural areas. And we know Farmers desperately need these workers! So win win. Yet the citizens who live there fear immigration and vote for Trump! But Trump needs these misinformed souls so best to keep them in the dark.
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The low skilled jobs, many in the Heartland, were mainly sent overseas by a Republican, right leaning Congress and Presidents, the people that those in the Heartland have voted for since Reagan. While Krugman is right that it is a difficult nut to crack, but the red state Heartland voters have to take some responsibility for it given their voting behavior.
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Just like rural electrification changed America, we must bring high speed free or low cost internet to ALL of America. No one can participate (and no one will relocate) to an area in which they can’t be connected. Along with all the other solutions already pointed out (universal healthcare, living wage, child care etc), we have solutions but we seem to have no will. We used to be a can do people, but we’ve given up and I blame politicians but republicans much more than democrats. R’s have actively stopped our progress; D’s have not fought hard enough to thwart them. And we need to stop the stupidity of anti-immigration. We need immigrants!!! They can revitalize us, but we must stop demonizing them. Set up visa work programs, let them help our rural areas, let them freely do the work Americans can’t/won’t do any longer.
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@lynnt
If they were really being demonized then you would expect there would be some pretty clear signs of prejudism toward local Mexicans/Central Americans. While they should be asked this question, I just don't see it in this slice of Trumpland. Everyone knows they work hard - and that's what people are judged on out here. Some may have communication issues with them, but they do respect them (and love the food). IMO, it's actually Trump supporters who are demonized.
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@carl bumba
Let's see..."Mexicans are rapists and murders"....does that sound familiar? It's Trump himself who demonizes immigrants, and Trump supporters cheer. Oh, maybe they don't cheer Trump over there in the Ozarks. Maybe your Trump supporters are just nice folks who like Mexicans and Mexican food. Hey, anything is possible.
The problem is not new, and is not just happening here in the USA.
I have a 1973 book by Heather Robertson, "Grass Roots," (James Lorimer & Co., ISBN 0-88862-099-3) about the depopulation of rural towns across Western Canada.
It is apparently the natural inclination of humans to huddle together in cities—here, in Canada, and Australia, Japan, all across the world. We continue to disconnect from the natural world, while espousing its merits.
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I’m a refugee from Oklahoma, and must say this is close to the mark. You can’t find a success story because it’s difficult to bring a spurned cousin back into the fold.
The American steppe has been milked of resources and educationally and socially ignored. The result is belligerent ignorance and poverty, and metropolitan America sheds alligator tears. In their heart of hearts, city people simply look down their collective noses at their rural relatives, roll their eyes, and go on about their lives. It’s easier that way. The rest is familiar social history. Trump is an inchoate cry for help.
Whatever, they certainly got the establishment’s attention.
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“West Germany invested $1.7 trillion in an attempt to revive the former East Germany — more than $100,000 per capita — yet the region is still lagging, with many young people leaving.”
Great! We’ll take them! Historically, Germans have integrated well into this country, speaking our language, not sequestering themselves in closed communities, and enthusiastically adding to the community cohesion so necessary to keep our society open. Of course, they would need to enter legally...
Borrowing another asset from Germany, the US should subsidize passenger and light freight rail to our isolated, rural communities, thus increasing opportunities for them as well as for those in the city who want a frictionless, restful way to get to those rural communities. Win-win-win.
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@NorthernVirginia
They can be wound a little tight though...
Corporatized farming. Once the Corporation moves in civilization leaves. Rural and Urban.
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It may be unfair to rural communities hit hard by the "powerful economic forces that nobody knows how to stop," but the question is whether anybody should try to stop these forces. America is a capitalist democracy. The role of rural America isn't being "undermined," it's simply changing through the forces of creative destruction. The irony is that Republicans traditionally supported this type of free market economic dynamism while Democrats favored a more interventional approach to managing the hard edges of a free market economy. There may be things that state and federal governments can do to ease the changes or to encourage economic development in rural areas, but as long as we remain a free market economy driven by private enterprise and innovation, trying to "stop the powerful economic forces" at work is a fools errand.
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Declaring each and every rural person an "Opportunity Zone" would be helpful.
Deutsch Bank could loan them untold amounts of money and they could build beautiful buildings which are destined for bankruptcy court.
Yep.
Opportunity Zones.
Get one for your cows.
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Krugman is right about the need for education and universal health care. Unfortunately, Republicans will fight this tooth and nail; the concept that government can do good for people is very dangerous to their increasingly radical-right and xenophobic power base.
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Maybe if we stopped taxing 30% of their income....
Rural Americans don't want good health care or to rebuild the infrastructure. They prove this by voting Republican.
So you can't really help someone who does not understand the cause of most of your problems:You.
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It's ironic that the trends described by Dr. Krugman are the direct result of unfettered capitalism. If there were some central planning by the federal government, new loci of commerce could be planned for some of the bleak, dying areas. A basic income could be supplied to everyone in these areas and support for entrepreneurial start-ups could be offered. Infrastructure projects like improved rail and repair of bridges could give employment to those unnecessary coal miners. And all this could be accomplished by raising the tax rates to the level they were under President Eisenhower.
But, then, the plutocrats - who benefit wildly from the status quo - would call all that "socialism" and the whole middle of the country would vote NO. Stupid is as stupid does.
I live in the middle of nowhere and this article feels like someone who has limited contact with the middle of the country. Yes there are a lot of right wing people but you would be surprised how many democrats there are. Dems just aren’t the majority. Many conservationists and outdoor enthusiasts with a gig economy sort of mentality. They live remotely via computer jobs, travel, and many small entrepreneurs. The tech world is making it possible for people to move back to this sort of lifestyle
Paul Krugman is the best reason to read the NYT. Which is why his attitude is so depressing. It's not that he's condescending to rural people, but that he's so grudging. He admits, as if he didn't really want to, that rural people are as deserving as any other Americans and that "there's nothing wrong" with discussing their problems. How about "there is everything right" with discussing their problems?! Just as there is everything right about discussing blighted inner cities, as similarly intractable as the problems are there. Can you imagine Krugman saying about inner cities what he, in effect, says here about rural areas: "Chat away, if you want. There's nothing wrong with it. But let's get real. Nobody knows what to do. If people are suffering, they should just get out."
Does the metropolitan attitude create Trump supporters or do Trump supporters create the metropolitan attitude? Alas, whatever the case, Krugman could do better to break the cycle of derision than he does here.
The majority of all field grains and cattle produced in this country come from fewer than 10% of all the producers (farmers/ranchers) The other 90% are so fragmented and produce so little that they lack any real force in the marketplace. Tax payer subsidies provide enough money to keep even marginally qualified producers in the game. The majority of the corn raised (field corn) is consumed by livestock not humans. The same for soybeans. So why subsidize crops that are fed to animals rather than humans directly. If our Congress would enact legislation that provided workable subsidizes for producers who raised crops that are directly edible for humans, it could provide in fact edibles that could in fact impact the worlds need for edible food. And, perhaps bring more producers back into rural areas. Ironically rural American is so dependent on government aid to exist, yet belittles government often in conversations. Nebraska is a debtor state sucking more federal funds in than it pays out. Proverbial "Biting the hand that feeds it".
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@John P. McGlynn So taxpayer subsidies that keep farmers in the game are socialism that no one wants to talk about in the Republican party.
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@John P. McGlynn
It's good that you point out how few big producers there are. But your "marginally qualified producers" is using the standard of corporate agriculture. City people are mislead to think that most "real", i.e. small, and TRULY family-owned, farms benefit significantly (or at all) from tax subsides/the farm bill.
The obvious first step is to stop rewarding agribusinesses and row crops over small farms and vegetables. But look how even Obama caved to midwestern agribusiness on ethanol and biofuel. He was in their pocket from the beginning. I used to think it's what it takes to get elected in America (and definitely in Iowa). But since Trump (and Bernie), I am far more OPTIMISTIC.
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You may have taken step 1, acknowledging you don't know.
Next step, go ask, "What assets to you have?" and then "What would you believe life should be here?", then, "What are the obstacles? " then "How can you apply your assetts?" and last "How can we help?" Finally, work the plan.
You say, "But rural Americans — many of whom rarely encounter immigrants in their daily lives — have a vastly more negative view." Obviously you have never visited. Paying good wages and offering decent working conditions to people who do farm work would go a long way towards solving the problems of unemployment in rural areas among those who do not own thousands of acres and associated infrastructure but are too "poor" to pay decent wages or offer decent working conditions, but are dependent on illegal migrant labor. The other side of the cheap food coin is poverty. I don't remember whether it was the NYT or the WP that lately published an opinion piece posing as news that dairy farmers in NY could only operate if they had cheap Mexican labor. Where did the idea come from that hard labor under nasty conditions had be done cheap?
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Rural areas come in different sizes. There may indeed be little hope for western Nebraska, but places like Middletown, Ohio, the setting for J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, are close enough to Dayton and Cincinnati that people in Middletown could find economic vitality in those two cities. Whether by commuting, or by moving a short distance that would not completely cut them off from existing family and social networks.
But will America's tech and corporate elite find it in themselves to do some business in Dayton or Cincinnati, or will they limit themselves to their usual crowded, expensive, coastal enclaves?
My should anyone in America be "entitled" to live where they presently are? Most Americans move to where the jobs are. Why can't rural Americans do the same?
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@Yo
If your work is tied to the land you're sort of "grounded". Then there is the (extended) family support, including child-rearing. Moving itself is very expensive. You may need a high-paying city job to move to where high-paying city jobs are.
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@Yo Yes Sir. Freedom is so complicated.
Decent paying jobs for rural America & everybody for that matter. If people were working we could have better lives all the way around. The rich are not going to support us, they don’t pay taxes
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I'm from rural America and I don't find the article condescending at all. It's honest and timely.
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The more things change...
They'll never want to see a rake or a plow,
And who the deuce can parley-vous a cow?
And how ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm
After they've seen Paree?
@rich
I'm happy where I'm at... our cheese is not like what we had in Paris, but we're working on it. And farming is pretty regulated over there.
The good doctor here is far too nice. Telling people the truth, when backed up by evidence, is not condescension, Big-City or otherwise. Condescension would be going to "work with rural communities" to attempt to educate their young and coax them to seek jobs elsewhere. Condescension like that is based on a belief that those selfsame people are too stupid to see that the jobs are not where they live and that the answer is U-Haul.
Move and get an education and a job? Ok, that works for a lot of kids from rural areas (which can be highly unpopular with their parents). Stay and whine because America no longer values the mythical wonderfulness of maintaining a now-unsustainable population in a particular location? Okee doke, but your "lifestyle" (hey! it's a choice!) is done because it is no longer economically necessary, and your morally-superior-victim shtick is losing its persuasive power.
I'm not condescending, I just don't care.
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Can anyone imagine Dr Krugman writing a similar opinion piece on inner city neighbourhoods where the only solution is to displace the ethnic long term residents by gentrification, or urban homelessness in California where you just ignore ignore refugee camps that should be run by the Red Cross or Medecin San Frontiers. Strangely enough, both of these are in Democrat run states.
3rd term abortion and free health care will not add anything (many of the people qualify for free healthcare) Guaranteed income, honestly, will be a pittance that may be the same as current welfare. Electoral reform and breaking up MySpace is meaningless.
So the Democrats don't have solutions for rural poverty, urban poverty or homelessness. But upper class liberal concerns (aka NYT, WP readership) - they have a bucket full.
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Can't get the jobs back, but WE CAN make sure that every citizen is treated with respect, dignity, and is not left behind....
.... it starts with Honesty, and ends with Heart....
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"But rural Americans — many of whom rarely encounter immigrants in their daily lives" - And with this single comment, Paul, it makes me think that you have spent little to no time in rural America. In Nebraska alone I would venture to say that the population in almost every small to medium sized town is at least 1/3 immigrant. From Somalians to Latinos to Laotians to Vietnamese.
And you imply that rural people are ignorant. Pot meet kettle
In the immortal words of Pres. Coolidge, "Well, farmers never have made much money."
Since nobody knows how to stop it don't worry about it.Since it is Trump country it would be the patriotic thing to do.
rural areas could be revised by building a fast super fast train that can take a person and transport them to a day job in coastal areas and transport them back to homey rural homes at night. These same rural people will infuse there hard earn dollars and support new restaurants, grocery stores, boutiques, and community projects in their areas. Faster internet could be another answer it’s unbelievable how slow it is in middle Indiana. The glory of rural America, it’s feeding the world and real Americans vs non, a nobler way of life,and all the other brain washing that Christian religion have hobbled them with are just tag lines. It’s called getting on board
Follow the $$ - that's what nearly all of us do in order to survive in an economically driven society.
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The infrastructure program for America does look it would pay for itself. In the more immediate return on investment (ROI), wages paid to those on the job, either as federal workers. state workers or working for private contractors, will be paying income taxes, buying goods and services in those regions where they are working and, in return, those businesses will pay business taxes while hiring more employees who will, in turn, pay income taxes while spending THEIR income on local goods and services. This is what "trickle-down" should really mean.
In the long run, those roadways and bridges will support the movement of goods creating more businesses and jobs.
And it seems to me that infrastructure spending not only pays for itself, it may be like "painting the Golden State Bridge" where there is not finish line. Our nation's infrastructure will always need regular maintenance so these don't look like temp' jobs.
But "infrastructure" is not just about roads and bridges. It is also about rebuilding the facilities for public education, maintaining our national and state parks, developing alternative energy resources
It is all about doing the right thing; not kowtowing to the whining of the rich and powerful to reduce their taxes.
This is the richest country in the world. But it is becoming the most militarily powerful third world country. Fixing the roof while the sun is shining is all about political will. Will Republicans answer the call? Probably not.
Yes, it's time to get real. Thanks for another timely column, Paul.
The most insightful suggestion on what is to be done that I saw (without reading them all but) was this one, in the post from Edward Blau of Wisconsin:
"What can be done is to decrease the fear of the future by providing health insurance not tied to work, subsidized child care, meaningful and free technical education and ongoing support for education at the state and local level."
This is just the kind of apparent "little" that can change a lot.
As Blau concludes, "the only real solution is to show these people that government does care about them to decrease their anger and sense of being ignored and left behind."
If we can collectively get our government to act like this, they may even feel that their fellow citizens care about them. This approach understands the value of DIGNITY, which has, sadly, been far too undervalued in in too many parts of American life.
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Let's take the long view for a minute. At the same time everyone says that rural communities are lost and gone forever everyone also says that global warming will make the coasts, where everyone lives, uninhabitable. Where does everyone think everyone is going to go when they get forced inland from the coasts? Perhaps Amazon and their ilk should rethink their desire to build in coastal cities and take a stab at rebuilding the heartland. Sure they might have to import some talent, but they may save a lot on future moving costs.
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Paul Krugman misses the main point. Rural America is in decline because farming became a corporate enterprise, eliminating the small farmers who were the backbone of rural America. And they farmed because they loved it, for "the joy of going out to feed the animals in the pre-dawn glow." And their son's were the backbone of the generation the defeated the Axis in WWII, we couldn't win such a war today. And what killed small farms? Members of the US Congress who were bought out by large corporations, and steered massive subsidies to massive farms. This looks irreversible at this point, but Congress could at least try. Start ratcheting back the corporate farm subsidies, figure out how to steer them to those "family farms" that still exist. Thomas Jefferson would be proud, if they even had the guts to try. But they are all on the take.
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I am surprised and discouraged that Krugman shows so little imagination here, and seems to just give up. Is that what we want? Are we facing societal forces that are inexorable and spanning generations? Like the forces that changed history over time in various lost worlds?
I am late in commenting, 1238 comments so far, so what I suggest may already be in the comments. If so, sorry.
How will we get more people to remain in rural areas? The depopulation started with the farms getting mechanized first and then bought up by large companies to create our industrial agriculture.
Industrial agriculture is not good for the earth or for humans. We are seeing this particularly in livestock husbandry. Cows are left penned up. Pigs are in such small spaces that they cannot move. Chickens are treated cruelly. And all this increases the likelihood of harm to humans.
Pig manure is a huge problem for the communities where these large pig farmers operate. A virus wipes out large numbers of animals because they are packed so close together. Growth hormone in milk is a well known scandal, etc.,etc.
All these practices came about because govt enacted policies that made this possible and profitable.
These practices can be changed again so agriculture is more small scale, requiring more manpower locally, more rural jobs, thriving communities again.
Yes, this will cost more. US govt could ask all of us if we are willing to pay X cents more for our food, in order to save the rural communities. The corporations will be livid but perhaps the people will say yes.
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I live in Idaho and while there's a ton of rural people here, I'd say close to 100% of the growth in this state (at last look, the fastest-growing state in America) is in the Boise area (metro population around 700,000); and Coeur d'Alene in North Idaho, just across the border from Spokane, Washington. Including Spokane, that metro area is also around 700,000, if not more.
As I drive north through the state to visit relatives, I see run down shacks and shuttered businesses in many small Idaho towns. I don't know what the answer is.
I do know that in my youth, you knew what was around you. I thought my little, rural small town Idaho burg was the best. Then I moved to other states and the world opened up for me. Today, the internet and some quick videos open up the world to high school students, even rural kids, who see something different than the farmer down the road. Not only do these kids want jobs, they want something more exciting than Clem and Martha eating eggs at the diner and sidewalks rolling up at 6 p.m. They're outta there, sorry.
Small, rural towns without nearby universities or metro areas are sadly sunk.
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I think a significant opportunity leveler would be to provide affordable, quality internet access to rural areas. Because when you have that, lots of location-independent things become possible. But without it? Not so much, anymore.
Much of the problem comes from the fact that farming is incredibly efficient these days mainly due to chemicals used in the farming business. This has led to an overabundance of farmland and the goods they sell almost everywhere. Take away most of the chemicals and you would see a need for more "productive" farmland with more labor necessary to run the operations. Prices would be no doubt higher however almost all that extra money would go to rural areas. Instead of farms getting bigger and bigger they would get smaller and smaller with each making money. In other words, farms would look like they did in the 60s.
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It seems like in this age of remote access for a majority of office work we should be able to rebuild rural areas for a young, vibrant work force. We need to provide incentives for google, amazon, and the like to create a sector of remote-access jobs for young professionals. We also need invest in research for energy storage so we can turn the rural areas into solar and wind farms that can generate electricity for nearby metro areas. These farms can provide blue collar jobs for rural families. Then you could have young professionals and young blue collar workers living in rural towns, creating more jobs to support these workers. Throw in some infrastructure (high speed rail in and out of the neighboring metro?) and we can have a sustainable future with less overcrowding in the cities and suburbs.
As a young professional married to an electrician with a young family living in the metro city of a rural state, I can tell you I would readily consider relocating to a rural idyll if jobs were available for me and my law degree via my computer, and for my husband's blue collar skills. SLC is overcrowded, with traffic problems, a serious air quality problem, and a future of water shortages due to the ballooning population. I know a lot of people would avoid cities if they could. We just need to relocate tech jobs, which largely can be accomplished from home, away from these crowded hubs.
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I agree with most of Krugmans points. However, he says "...overall U.S. public opinion is increasingly positive toward immigrants. But rural Americans... have a vastly more negative view." As has been so often the case lately, many people- especially politicians- seem to fail to differentiate between legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants. I suggest if the question were 'Do you favor illegal immigration' the large majority of Americans, both urban and rural, would say no. Conversely, I submit a large majority of both support legal immigration. There really is a huge and important difference.
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For ten years I have lived in rural upstate New York with my husband (and six-year-old twins). We are smart, liberal, thoughtful people living a frugal life in in our neighborhood on $55,000 a year. Of our twenty neighbors, half live in the houses they grew up in; the other half are raising families right down the road. I wish more liberal people like us moved to rural America and put down roots in these impoverished communities! Our consumer choices are limited. We can't afford to travel. Our kindred spirit friend circle is small. Our schools are not progressive. That all bothers me (especially the schools). What do I love about living here? My middle/upper class consumer upbringing with "the best" of everything taught me I needed to live to work--make money to buy things: make more, to buy more! Living in rural America with a family of four: the pace of life is slow and our options often feel rustic, but many middle/upper class people go on vacation to achieve exactly that. If more people made do with less and cherished the slow life out in rural America, that group of kindred spirits would grow, schools could change, you could stop the rat race of living to work, to consume, to keep up with the best. I coexist on a friendly, superficial level with my conservative neighbors, but I'd LOVE to coexist with some more liberal people out here!
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“So what can be done to help rural America?” Probably not much until it is weaned away from fake messaging of Fox News and White House Twitter.
Those folks, traditionally characterized for their common sense and integrity, need to look at the government they support and decide if the Mitch McConnells and Trumps truly represent their ideals and best interests.
Then they need to vote accordingly, not based on divisiveness and bigotry but on common sense and integrity.
Seems kind of a cop out for Krugman. Usually he has a plan, but in this case, he seems to throw in the towel. I can think of a few ideas. Wind farms, solar farms, technical colleges that would produce people skilled in network infrastructure followed by net based job and entrepreneurial opportunities. There are many unfilled jobs in the information age that are not as fettered by distance or location as traditional jobs except for the lack of infrastructure and connect ability to the internet. There are large regions of the US that don't have a reliable source of internet or cell service because they are too broadly dispersed and unprofitable. This would be an area that we can use government assistance and local labor to start the ball rolling but give a say to the locals on how to do it so it isn't seen as an invasion but an opportunity. I'm not saying that this by itself would change things, but it's one place to start and relatively low risk.
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If you really want to see how much small towns and villages across the country have been decimated by the move away from decentralized local economies since the 1950s, pick up one of those popular "look back in time" picture books that are available for a large number of towns and cities.
Take a look at image showing busy downtown areas in the 1940s and 1950s. You'll see plenty of cars, a drug store, grocery store, clothing stores, the shoemaker, several gas stations, perhaps a movie theater, and some small restaurants.
Look at those same downtown areas today on Google Street View and it's like a ghost town with empty store fronts, one or two cars, a lone pedestrian (often a senior), a bunch of antique shops, the inevitable hair and nail salon and pizza parlor, and that's it.
You don't need to go very far. Check out any of the towns and villages along New York State Route 17 (the Quickway, soon to be Interstate 86) in Sullivan and Delaware counties, along the fringe of the Catskills. The decline in these areas in just 50 years is mind-boggling.
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Invest in FREE high speed internet for rural areas across the country. Support online education programs focusing on coding and other high tech skills that can be done via internet connections to high tech employers. Also support online education programs for service industries that can have employees work away from offices, e.g., legal, customer support, service support. Subsidize purchases for computers for access to such programs.
As the nation invested in the free national highway system, today we must invest in a free fast internet connection ... to provide equal opportunity for today's jobs.
Yet, as always, powerful interests, i.e., telecommunication companies, will aggressively lobby against free connections and access.
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I grew up in a rural town in Texas, lived in the big cities of New York and Los Angeles, and then found myself teaching English at a small community college in rural Arizona. I had lived all kinds of lives--urban, rural, middle- and working-class, professionally employed and barely scraping by--so I tried to share all those experiences and perspectives with students. I tried specifically to present both sides of the political spectrum.
My students, many of whom received federal grants and all of whom benefited from the local taxes that funded the school, nevertheless ranted against all things "government" and resisted any idea that socioeconomic (and racial/ethnic) status might impact one's ability to succeed in America.
They said this sitting in a class designed for adults with basic literacy--that is, adults trying to attend college but with the writing and reading skills of junior high students. Most had ended up there due to their own poor schooling in underfunded institutions and a lack of personal resources for their academic/family/physical health/mental health/housing/transportation/nutritional problems. It was as if they were proving the very ideas they were rejecting.
The county voted for Donald Trump 2-to-1 in 2016.
3
@Lori Isbell
Do you really expect people to admit that they need government handouts to keep them from being dumb and low-class? I've noticed that they don't seem to teach much about human dignity in college.
1
Reading the column and the many comments is depressing. The United States is mostly farmland, some way to make living there and working there useful and satisfying must be found, because our population isn't shrinking and our cities are very crowded. "Country living" means cleaner air and human-needed satisfying vistas of land, sky, sun, and stars. As the old song said, accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.... find a way. It's not impossible.
Government, both state and local, can help de-centralize to some extent. There is no need for some functions of government to be located in the capital cities, for example. With modern communications, information processing (which is a large part of our economy) can be done just as well in the rural Upper Peninsula of Michigan as it can in Lansing or Detroit. As Treasurer of a non-profit, each year I file tax forms with the IRS office on Ogden, Utah. How many government workers live there, rather than in Washington, D.C.? Lucky them!
The Province of Ontario intentionally located its lottery offices in northern Ontario, providing many direct jobs, plus support jobs. We could have mopre of that in the U.S.
3
@YooperDooper
Absolutely! And rather the contracting federal projects to the corporate, private sector, we should shift these top-heavy projects to state and municipal governments... get them right where they belong.
1
Right NOW campaign promises and deals are being cut to Iowa agribusinesses and the local politicians that represent them - and the expense of the rest of the country. Iowa is not like most states and should lead the entire process. Look at the way corn syrup and ethanol/biofuel has been dumped on the American consumer. Look how it has changed our physical dimensions, health and life expectancy.
Life on our small farm in the state just below Iowa will only get harder when these corporate arrangements are made. I lived in VT for many years and saw how Bernie represented small dairy farms and other working class people. He (and maybe Tulsi Gabbard) will not sell out to corporate interests, IMO. The others, like Beto or Biden, have probably already done it!
1
woops... Iowa should NOT lead the primary/caucus sequence.
The first ones should be economically diversified and NOT dominated by a particular agricultural, industrial or natural resource interest or any other corporate-level commercial interest. Indiana would be good, as would my state of Missouri. Why don't we ORDER this media-focused sequence of states by carbon footprint or sequestration numbers - or voter registration percentages? And, while we're at it, impose media silence periods like almost all other democracies.
Maybe the reason it's hard to revive declining regions is because they aren't in decline, it's just that denser suburbs and cities are advancing. Maybe also because the forces of inertia in "backward" rural regions are natural, literally, are a force of nature -- that's what the barren snow picture shows in this article.
I live in a generationally impoverished and rurally isolated region, and what we suffer from is neoliberalism. Now let's get something straight here: I am a progressive liberal, so the neoliberal is my natural enemy. The neoliberal forces are those that want to save us from ourselves whether or not it hurts us in the long term, and it's not unlike the activity where powerful western nations dumped sacks of food on Asian islanders and African nations, how economic hitmen worked to encumber small nations under debt, and how wester nations sought to put their petty dictators into power over their own people for political control over those nations.
These forces are patronizing, they are hegemonic forces from afar, they seek to profit of those of us despite our small numbers. The arrogance of coastal elites coming out to our rural areas, dressing down into jeans, hats, boots and flannels, talking down to us with colloquial language, eating junk food and walking around asking us for their votes is hardly different from Milton Friedman's ideas about how to wrangle the people of Chile.
These non-rurals want to fix us, and they complain they can't, what gall.
2
Part of the demise of rural America also goes back to consolidation of foreign-owned factory farms owned by giants like Smithfield Foods (China). They are polluting our waters, our ground and our air. Agriculture enjoys many exemptions from environmental laws. For example, the disposal of millions of gallons of hog waste is unregulated. In Iowa they actually inject it in the ground near the very same aquifers used for drinking water. Here in Missouri, putrid hog waste stagnates in pits for months, then gets liquified and sprayed onto the ground, polluting surface water with no state or federal oversight. Americans continue to buy cheap pork from their labels such as Eckrich and Farmland Foods. Every time you buy beef, bison, pork or chicken from a local farmer - your dollars directly support rural America. These family farmers can usually be found at farmer's markets.
I'm taking a chance in doing this...divulging where I live, in the far rural beautiful UP of Michigan where half the U.S. maps don't even acknowledge us. It's a year round tourist mecca, but also a very stable secure area consisting of several major universities and colleges as well as a very diverse population of various political leanings and cultures. We're doing just fine, thank you.
2
Rural America's economy has always been primarily based on commodity production not valued added enterprises that utilize commodities.
For example, coal miners dig coal (a commodity) while cities use the electricity from coal to make all sorts of goods and services. Rural areas produce bright hard word working young people (a commodity) that go off to cities for higher education and then higher employment, and never return. In rural areas you have less physical freedom as you are tied directly to the land that produces that commodity. In cities you have high speed internet, and freedom to work wherever, and whenever.
It is far more profitable, and secure to be a cheesemaker than to be a dairy farmer, and you have better hours, and far more freedom.
1
Strong agricultural trade policies that benefit the producer of farm products would be a nice start.
Current US policies keep farm prices hovering around the cost of production which benefits only the leveraged predator agribusiness farms. Everyone else suffers a slow death.
Real trade policies result in higher prices received and relative prosperity for average farmers.
Shameful farm subsidies come in two flavors: the ones the enrich an individual such as the owner of a sugar conglomerate and the ones that give pennies to average farmers because free markets are failing.
Tax policy that keeps abreast of the times could be a benefit to real farmers if the fake farmers are cut out.
Fake farmers such as horse breeders who enjoy incredible tax rightoffs because of the obsolete notion that horses are agriculture is an obvious loophole to close.
Horses are toys of the rich yet their owners get the same tax treatment as a dairy farmer. They basically get to write-off the expense of horse ownership regardless of how far removed it is from agriculture.
Trump is an excellent example but there are many other millionaires in this country who file fake farmer tax returns and get repulsively large writeoffs that belong to real farmers.
1
The jobs that were once performed by rural Americans have been mechanized at a far faster rate, and far more comprehensively, than the jobs generally held by urban- and suburbanites. Coal, once mined by armies of men who risked their lives and their heath mining coal underground, now can only sit and watch as enormous excavating machines operated by only a couple of individuals mine the same amount of coal it once took hundreds of men to bring up to the surface. While cutting back on coal use is an ecological imperative, it is not the reduced coal usage that ended the coal mining "way of life."
Similarly, farms are now more mechanized than ever, with the few farmworking jobs remaining paying low wages despite long, arduous hours of work.
Both public and private education lag behind in rural areas, largely a result of the localized funding of schools. The young must seek their opportunities elsewhere, causing the kind of decay that reductions in population always bring about wherever they occur.
As Dr. Krugman says, this is an intractable problem, but it does not explain why it has turned the rural populations politically conservative. All conservatives ever do once in office is make the plight of these people worse, and obstruct any program designed to alleviate the conditions that are causing the decline of their living standards. This situation implies a certain gullibility that results in an eagerness to accept deliberately misleading promises and seductive lies.
Perhaps it would be good to ask what rural Americans want. There are a good many of them who don't feel the gravitational pull of the job opportunities and lifestyles of metro areas. They simply want to be left alone.
However, there is a price to be paid for that. Far fewer health care choices, Far lower incomes and opportunities for financial growth. Access to high speed internet services (something most of us now feel is an essential need in life). But, all of that may be a desirable trade-off for quieter lives, cleaner air and a far easier ability to enjoy the great outdoors.
So, rather than fret about what we metro people see as a group left behind, we should first discover if rural Americans are leading the lives they want. If so, let them be left alone.
1
I would assert that many rural people have no interest - and in some cases lack the financial means - to spend time in a big city. And many city dwellers have little interest in spending their vacations in a rural or small town location.
I wonder if there might be some value in setting up a sort of "reciprocal visit program" by which an urban family would pair up with a rural family, and they would host each other for visits. During these visits, the hosts would (proudly) show off their community - be it the big city, or the windswept town out on the prairie - to their guests. Introduce them to friends and neighbors, go out to eat, go for a walk or hike, take in the local flavor. Talk about their problems and concerns (but in a way that leaves politics out of it).
It is easy to hate or resent that which is unfamiliar. So by making the unfamiliar familiar, maybe we can reduce hate and resentment. Neither rural nor urban dwellers have any claim to being "more American" than the other.
1
City Mouse and Country Mouse? I would venture that a Bro from Brooklyn would be like a Martian visiting planet Earth if he spent a week in Sparta, Tennessee. The reverse, in visiting Manhattan, would yield a Spartan, while initially reticent with all the ethnicity as languages, would quickly yield to the shops and sights. The city offers stimulation. The country, stagnation.
1
@Last Moderate Standing, I'm living in the country and don't feel stagnant. My husband and I choose to live here because we love the environment and want to live close to the land. There are things I dislike about being here, for sure. But stagnation? That's painting country living with a pretty broad brush. For what its worth, I love the city ethnicity and languages, but the shops and sights are the downfall for me: life isn't about consuming.
1
Remember that most states are a mix of urban and rural. Upstate NY, for example, is largely rural and votes more conservatively than Buffalo and downstate. St. Louis and Kansas City are more Democratic than the rest of Missouri. We must work together to find solutions for these issues--education, drug abuse, poverty, violence, environmental conservation--because they touch us all.
It is the Walmartization of the economy. Food products must be cheap at all costs. Farm policy since the 1950's has promoted agribusiness at the expense of farm families and rural communities. Vertical production has effectively closed the market on independent poultry, egg and pork producers other than the occasional success with niche markets for a few small farms. The dairy program has several times bought off small dairies with tax payer money to benefit large scale dairies.
If we quit subsidizing corporate agriculture, strictly limit farm benefits, incentivize smaller operations and more diversified farms, limit eliminate integration and promote rural manufacturing, perhaps in two or three decades we can have a healthier rural landscape.
And as long as we are at it, just as well eliminate consolidation in the rest of the economy too.
1
The rural areas have piled into Trump's bandwagon. The question is what are they getting for that allegiance? Soon they will recognize there is no answer to their plight and the only thing Trump will provide them is a safety net full of holes. As in earlier generations the young people see leaving as the only answer. I think small efforts like customer service centers and other "work from home" jobs could be provided, but no big time industry will come back or be instituted to save the day. All the Democrats have to offer is social programs which the rural people don't want out of a sense of pride. All Trump offers is grandiosity inside promises fertilized by lies. The rural voters turned on Democrats and they will eventually turn on Trump and the Republicans Just a matter of time. Because eventually, no matter how they try to make it look differently, the only difference between being urban and poor and being rural and poor is location.
3
Finally someone wrote this long needed piece. I’ve yet to hear one politician or local rural folks come up with solutions that are remedial not just palliative. We could build whole new cities. Not likely.
1
I feel like technology can play a major role here and perhaps this is where investment should go.
Let me preface this by saying that rural areas are NICE. People enjoy living away from the city. I love visiting West Virginia for example and would prefer living there than in suburban DC. BUT there's no internet. There's no cellular. There's no train, no flights, you have to spend hours in the car just to get around.
So maybe providing cheap mass transit & air travel options and making inexpensive broadband accessible to rural areas would be a place to start. Then at least professionals like me (who work from home anyway) can go live in a small town in the heartland and still be connected to income.
4
The decline of rural areas is very sad--they are beautiful, and they are big part of our historic identity.
But it is time to stop blaming the "coastal elites."
Cities also decline, as well as suburban areas. ( For different reasons, of course).
If this country could finally agree that supporting our citizens with free healthcare, affordable school, and childcare---that could really help, wherever people live.
But a minority in this country (often the very ones who need help) insist on preventing policies that help people, and instead demand ever more tax breaks for themselves.
It's time to vote them out.
1
Once the midwestern towns and cities empty out due to economic changes, a lot of great studio space and living space will become available. I can see a migration of artists coming from both coasts. Things will change as they have, since forever.
Paul is missing the real cause of this decline, and that is the centralization and concentration of economies. You don't have to look far for examples of the decline of rural America - upstate NY and central PA serve as perfect examples.
Let's wind the clock back 60+ years to 1955. You had numerous villages, towns, and small cities with a mix of farmers, light manufacturing and mills, an extensive network of railroads, good schools, union jobs for many, and most importantly, tightly-knit communities of neighbors who volunteered, helped each other out in times of distress, and took pride in their homes and towns.
Why did I pick 1955? That's when the Interstate highway system began construction, bringing in its wake shopping malls, allowing tourists to bypass these small towns on their way to some showier vacation spot. Long-haul trucking really took off, helping larger businesses get goods to market and making smaller "mom and pop" companies non-competitive.
Trucking forced many railroads to consolidate and many went belly-up, with good jobs lost. Lower-priced imports forced local manufacturers to shut down. Others were basically squeezed out of business, like many of the small dairies in NY and PA.
Another nail in the coffin - young people graduating high school and moving out of the area for higher-paying service and now tech jobs, which would never locate in rural areas.
This trend has been going on for at least six decades.
2
@hdtvpete -- This is the most concise and clear assessment of the historical events that have taken place that have made America what it is today. When Trump base voters say MAGA, this is the world they want to go back to. Can you blame them? I think not. But the rest of us know it is an impossibility, so we scoff at them. Perhaps they also pine for the era of segregation and sexism, which are other reasons to scoff at them as well. But I for one would certainly like to go back to a tax rate of the 1950's, and that we could do tomorrow without ripping up the interstate highway system or enforcing protectionism in our trade with other nations.
I think a lot of this can be explained in the book "Ramp Hollow" by
Steven Stoll. And I also think there is no cure, only the
recommended and humane palliatives made here by Krugman - but then we're not a very humane society.
1
Krugman contradicts his own arguments several times in his examples of East Germany and southern Italy. Economies rise and fall. Why try to "save" the Midwest at all when government interference seems ineffective?
Agro behemoths are a major cause of rural decline, dominating markets and letting huge amounts of arable land fallow. Less competition. Aided and abetted by Democrat and Republican regulators alike. We're becoming a National Economy of Threes: Moving steadily towards three major competitors in every market. Not an issue on which that any politician focuses.
3
One of the major problems with rural America is their news source. When my wife and I would drive from San Antonio with its PBS station to San Angelo, we could only get NPR for part of the trip. Most of the trip the only thing on the airways for talk radio was hate radio on the AM dial. In San Angelo, with a population of nearly 100,000, the only talk radio there was hate radio. There was no NPR for the for the folks to listen to. Only recently has San Angelo put together a limited NPR presence. If all one hears is hate radio, then rural America will always be overly influenced by its propaganda. My wife and I have found this to be true throughout rural America, there is little for one to listen to but opinion radio. How can rural America make informed decisions when overwhelmed by such propaganda?
3
So "getting real" for Dr. Krugman is declaring that nobody knows how to fix it... and that it's hopeless. Thanks for your expertise. Maybe Dr. Krugman and his colleagues are clueless about the situation, but there ARE other professionals concerned with this issue AND non-professional exchanging ideas and information over the internet, for instance. There are many good ideas out there. And if they require political will, there's no shortage of this. The people can make big things happen. After all, the president they just elected wasn't exactly groomed for public office.
2
Social support systems for residents of rural areas is a necessary first step. The non urban areas have many resources for human kind. We understand food and natural resources come from the rural areas. Also, recreation, wildlife & wilderness preservation, and re-balancing the intense levels of pollution emanating from our urban areas are available offerings coming from rural areas. However, our economic system fails to adequately compensate for those contributions to society. Our economic system requires course correction.
1
Has any country ever tried giving a universal basic income and free medical care to the people in their economically-declining areas? Perhaps with their basic needs met, people would be able to start to innovate about how to use such regions in more productive ways. Then, instead of just trying to get by, or trying to increase the number of farmers and coal miners (as valuable as those jobs are, there just doesn't seem to be a comeback on the horizon for the sheer numbers of jobs in those fields), people could diversify the types of jobs in the declining regions. Maybe having the UBI and medical care would even be a draw for those regions, causing more people to start moving to those areas instead of only to major metro areas?
1
@Chris Your ideas sound a little like something that Italy is trying to do.
Rural decline also begets more of the same. As we near retirement, my husband and I would once have considered moving to a rural area. True, we would not have created a business to employ local people, but a critical mass of people like us might have increased the tax base, created demand for services and even some goods, etc. (See the formerly rural sunbelt states.)
Now, we worry that we would never be able to fit in. We are not church goers, we are not interested in hunting, fishing and similar pursuits, and there’s a Hispanic branch of the extended family unlikely to visit if they will be subjected to nastiness or have to explain themselves to law enforcement. (These are US born, native English speakers with college educations and good careers.). If you have ever been hassled by law enforcement, the fact they ultimately have no probable cause for an arrest doesn’t make the experience pleasant.
1
The problem is capitalism. While the population continues to grow, business decisions are made solely on the basis of increasing profits for owner and shareholders.
Efficiency grows and humanity gets left on the sidelines. The small farms that used to keep rural folks employed are replaced by huge agri-business conglomerates that see workers as a liability. Consumers suffer as well as the quality of food declines and Congress is paid to look the other way.
It's either people or profits. We are taught to worship money and support the capitalist system free from regulation, but as soon as the rich find away to cut the population out of the bargain they do it. It's a disease.
2
Dr. Krugman,
Candidate for President Elisabeth Warren has called for the removal of the Electoral College system of presidential elections. I wonder if this isn't exactly what Jefferson and the other Founders envisioned, a majority disenfranchising the rural minority? I have had the same idea as Warren for a long time; but I doubt it. I worry that blocking the effective representation of rural people is the wrong move. Rather what educated people want is for rural opinions to be more mainstream, enlightened, not silenced.
I think another long-standing structural feature of our country needs to be reconsidered; that is our system of local schools, parochial schools, private schools and home schooling. It is considered a "right" for parents to bring up their children and educate them. However, from this differential education probably springs much of the dissension that we see in culture, politics and worldview. These differences lead to differences in numeracy, literacy, employability, health outcomes, religiosity, use of political violence and other things. I wonder if it isn't time for a universal curriculum to be required of schools and for all teachers to be trained and tested as to their competency in the important elements of the core subjects?
I wonder if a more universal educational system, which is today vigorously opposed by old white people of the right and the religious, would bring future generations closer and closer in their values and perspectives?
Growth, growth, growth. It is not a good nor a sustainable goal. And climate change is the biggest consequence of this misbegotten goal.
2
An emotional difficulty for rural whites is how rooted they are in family and community. It's much more wrenching for these people to contemplate leaving their families and communities for better opportunities and new lives than it is for footloose, often divorced, transient professionals in metro areas who think nothing of moving, sometimes often, simply for more money.
If Walmart paid a liveable wage rural America would be better off. There are jobs required in rural areas, teachers, convenience store employees, Assisted Living and nursing home caretakers, hair and nail salons, hometown restaurants, state and county highway employees, veterinary clinics, farm, and ranch laborers, utility employees, and many others. All that is needed is a liveable wage for all.
3
The majority of commenters here, which include many who would end our Constitutional system to cement their hegemony over the rest of the country, seem to lack any historical perspective and the wisdom that comes with it. Rome was The City. As the wealth and power became more and more concentrated in the urban center, more and more corruption came of it, and more and more class distinction became cemented and immovable. The blue urban wealth centers are reliving this cycle. As they concentrate power and privilege, some pretend to care about the places they have sold off for profits only they enjoy, others shamelessly pursue more, but all move in the same direction-elitism as measured by money and control. So intemperate are they in their hunger and self-aggrandizement, they would gladly destroy the institutions that gave their social inferiors a voice-the electoral college, the deliberate house of the legislature, and means for individuals to live self-sufficient lives. What is wrong with rural America? Urban America. The next time a blue state voter tells you that you are not voting your interests when you vote red, know that they really mean you do not vote their interest. Unless we get that right in heir minds soon, they will take that away as soon as they can. It has all happened before.
4
@TD One person one vote.
Urban America is not what is wrong with Rural America. Poverty is what is wrong and the disinclination to get an education and either make it work where you are or move. This is also a problem in Urban America as well.
I was born in a very rural area and now live in one. What I see around me now is an aversion to education and an unwillingness to change their lifestyle in any way. And they keep having children who keep up the tradition of living on the economical edge and passing on their derision for education.
1
@MMNY
Direct democracy has been tried and failed, with blood and misery its result. No thank you.
The poor have been and always will be with us.
I am pretty sure you have no statistics to back that up. There is no aversion to education. What you mean is there is an aversion to thinking a certain way, which is taught at certain elite institutions, that, by the way, some people cheat or bribe their way into and that do very little to educate that vast majority of people in this country.
1
@MMNY
I am pretty sure you have no statistics to back that up. There is no aversion to education. What you mean is there is an aversion to thinking a certain way, which is taught at certain elite institutions, that, by the way, some people cheat or bribe their way into and that do very little to educate that vast majority of people in this country.
I think one of the critical misses in this argument is that "rural" no longer means "farming and ranching." Rural areas have become more diverse than they were. Here in the Hill Country, cotton and corn have given way to vineyards and farms that specialize in vegetables and locally grown meat. We've gone from losing jobs and population to not having enough infrastructure and affordable homes for all of the workers we now need. With high speed Internet, it is now possible to work remotely while living away from big cities.
Cities have reached critical mass. When you are separated by your neighbors by 10 feet or less, when you spent a quarter of your work day commuting, when going out to eat involves long lines and crowded restaurants, and when you spend your weekends getting out of the city just so you can slow down, then you really need to re-think about what you want in life. A lot of my rural neighbors have left the city for similar reasons, and we enjoy the closer ties among each other than we ever enjoyed in town.
Rural areas are just as important as urban ones, and there are a lot of advantages to rural life. On the one hand, I don't want everyone to move out of the cities, because the infrastructure is not here to support large numbers of people (and it takes away from the advantage of a rural area). Take a good look at the rural areas around you; we did, and made the move. It was the best decision we've made in a long time.
3
The future of humanity is in cities. The rural spaces will be owned and operated by large companies to produce products to support the cities, but fewer and fewer people are required to operate them, and most of those will be low-wage immigrants.
As we progress towards a smaller carbon footprint per capita, the rural life will become less tenable. It takes a lot of C02 to keep a rural house warm and cool, and to drive a large vehicle into town every time you need anything. And you need a large vehicle because in the winter, you can't count on snow plows to clear the way.
There will still be some rural communities, comprised of clusters of people living close together in small towns, but not as many as there are today.
Welcome to the future.
The "heartland" is just like the "homeland", a colloquial phrase that stirs nostalgic images now long gone.
One of my favorite movies is Armageddon and yes, the nostalgic images captured in the movie do move me. But is that really the "heartland" or just images we want to believe that come from "movie-land"? The question is about the heartland, it is about rural America.
There are success stories of revitalized rural areas but there are also tragically so many more stories about how hard life can be in towns that are/were devastated by time. Perhaps it is time that made many jobs to be automated. Perhaps it is time that took for industry to overwhelm, be it farming or mining. Perhaps it is time that permitted opium addiction to take hold of the minds of those who got lost along the way. Perhaps it is all of the above.
But what is most certainly lost in time is the fact of blame for these inflictions. The heartland once was the rock-bed of honesty and self-awareness. I wonder if it is now the homeland of blame and finger-pointing.
Farming is farming but not quite the same farming that was the game fifty-years ago. Small family farms are replaced by mega
I have lived in rural America for a fair amount of time and see no need to revive it. It’s painful to residents, to be sure, as a town decays, but in the main a town returning to the prairie is not in and of itself bad and actually may be a good thing. It worked for a time to have people in some of these places, but that time is passed. Absolutely, the goods of this country need to be delivered equitably to all no matter where they live, but it is also perfectly ok for a small town to naturally die.
Rather than keep dying rural towns on life support, perhaps a healthier approach would be like hospice care. Make sure those who are there are well cared for, help them leave if they wish to, and stop desperate programs seeking to “bring young people back” or draw new business to areas that offer few amenities. I’ve pretty much only seen these fail, and the population grow more resentful and generally depressed as none of these work and they feel rejected and invisible. A fascinating book on this is “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America” by Patrick Carr and Maria J. Kefalas. They are spot on. Hardly a popular point of view, but to me it is the most rational and kind.
1
Massive infrastructure spending in rural areas must include high speed connectivity, training for residents to use it, and assisted funding for small start-ups to fuel ground-up growth. Unfortunately, small town politicians like ours in rural NH simply do not see such spending as helpful to the failing community. Small minds at the helm do not help depressed towns. Education is necessary at all levels to re-awaken the backward boondocks.
1
We watch our elders slide into senescence with escalating disability and often dementia to boot. We grieve their suffering and our ultimate loss of them. As we approach the dimming of our own lights, we understand this is the way of the world. Things ebb. Things die.
So do the small towns in a rural America.
But, if we learn from our forebears, we can reverse this slump. Native Americans hundreds of years ago would dig a hole, drop a fish into the hole with a bit of seed corn and scatter a few bean seeds around. The fish nourished the corn and the beans added nitrogen to the soil. Way before the Green Revolution, yields shot up.
Our elders have plowed the fields before us and set the stage for our success. All we need do is maintain their efforts which is far easier than the pioneers who dug out trees and rocks to make the first homesteads.
Try an experiment. Pick a medium sized urban area adjacent to a major rural region. Consider Sioux Falls SD, the Quad Cities in IA/IL, Shreveport LA or any other such area. Draw a line 200 miles into the most rural and disadvantaged adjacent region. Build a divided highway with high speed rail and T1 fiber optic capacity in the median.
Jobs would be created for the initial construction. Services would spring up around exits and at the terminus. Offer homesteads to any wishing to come at reduced cost. Just as railroad towns spurred the west, a hub and spoke system could jumpstart a new beginning.
Wash, rinse and repeat.
1
Those who blame the rise of Trump on rural decline seem not to have noticed that the decline has been going on since the founding of the country, as the industrial revolution made farming more efficient. For a time those leaving the farm could get jobs in manufacturing, but the same increasing automation has also caused a reduction in the number of workers in manufacturing since the middle of the 20th century. This has been augmented recently by outsourcing to take advantage of the huge wage differential between the US and East Asian countries. There was a major drop in domestic manufacturing after 2000, but corporate profits shot up at that time. The promised jobs in "service" areas are poorly paying, partly because those areas were never unionized.
In fact the decline for working people has been everywhere - inequality has increased in cities as well as the country. The reaction to this in terms of voting patterns is probably a matter of racial and religious bias. The "social" concerns have dominated politics since the Civil Rights era. If Democrats want to get majorities large enough for significant reform they will need to make it clear that they are on the side of all those who have been on the short end of the still-increasing inequality. Pitting country against city is not productive - except for Republicans.
1
This is an incredibly important point. As the Professor notes some problems are simple to solve, others not so much.
Here is where our elected officials should be spending time and energy working on this problem and those like it that are down the road.
Many of the problems laid out here are the result of changes that come with progress.
How will we function when all it takes to make all the goods needed on this planet is one person, pushing one button, one time a day?
The future holds great challenges. It would be nice to get past the childishness so maybe some effort can be put to the future.
I read all the way through this without ever finding the obvious reason for the inexorable decline of rural America: the steady, relentless increase in the size of a profitable farm.
In 1900, there were millions of small farms. Every farm county had many. Farm families were large. So, county population was large. Distances were harder to traverse. This supported a lot of small, distributed, towns in any given county.
Now, the typical farm is much larger and the family farmer has a smaller family. The population in any country is, therefore, smaller. Distances are easier to traverse and we have Amazon. Little towns shriveled and died. Only the county seats hang on.
This process isn't reversing because it is irreversible.
3
The fact that Krugman can’t think of a solution does not mean there is none, just that Krugman has no idea. Not surprising, since he seems to ignore the unemployment, poor infrastructure, and lack of affordable housing in his own city. Like most progressives his only solutions revolve around giving more power to the coasts, eliminating the electoral college, redistributing income and so forth. He also ignores the many thriving mid-American cities - Denver, Boise, Salt Lake etc - all of which have likewise thriving suburbs and exurbs. No, this faux plead for help for the benighted rural areas is simply an example of Krugman’s limited vision, not a delineation of an actual problem.
5
@LTJ
So, according to you, the rural areas are just fine, great to hear. So let's take all that improvement money and dedicate it to our big cities.
To start:
Fast trains between Boston, New York City and Washington D.C.
Fast trains between New York City, Chicago and San Francisco.
Fast trains between San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.
1
Forget the political impossibility, the bad old patch of the Electoral College, the complex and dysfunctional culture: just copy China. The takeaway from the verifiable facts is that China has raised close to a billion people from abject poverty in one generation. Maybe the operation of a totally non-democratic regime, often guilty of eradicating cultures under guise of re-education, but it’s working, and on a scale difficult to even picture.
Faced, as we are, with population and business flow to the cities, instead of abandoning the countryside, instead building national infrastructure, including the push toward the West and Europe, dropping pre-funded factories in the outback, controlling medical care where no American for-profit providers would ever go, and yes, prioritizing education. So very un-American!
There is nothing in our Constitution that we have to rot into disunion and failure.
1
Have you asked the people forcibly evacuated from their farms if they are living better in the cities? I believe I have read several articles in the NYT about the dispossessed Chinese.
When I hear about people being raised out of poverty around the world, what exactly does this mean?
Do they actually have better lives or are they being forced to work in a factory for 14 hours a day, 6 days a week for slave wages?
A major problem in rural areas is that hidebound capitalism determines the distribution of resources: if there is no immediate payback, capital does not flow. This has always been true. Rural electrification did not occur until communities formed co-ops in the 1930s and federal money flowed into, for example, the Tennessee Valley Authority. Wiring for broadband internet access did not happen until the USDA began providing grants, and is still hindered by counterproductive state laws that dictate that publicly-financed projects cannot compete with "private industry."
Rural America needs a touch of socialism in order to ensure that less densely-populated areas survive and thrive. The only reason industry must be located near population centers is the poor state of low-cost, efficient public transportation as well as underfinanced rural education systems that keep workers ignorant and compliant. A countrywide network of high-speed railroads and broadband communications would allow workers to live anywhere. Densely-populated cities are an obsolete artifact of the 19th century.
The capitalist model for rural America seems to be a depopulated countryside filled with corporate factory farms. This is a foolish and unnecessary prospect.
@John Rural America gets its “touch of socialism” through agricultural subsidies. I would love to hear where you think high speed rail is appropriate since I have no idea how that relates to the family farm.
@Jackson
To bring rural America into the 21st century will probably require a bit more than a touch of socialism, certainly much more than farm subsidies. Back in the day, farmers brought their produce to nearby railheads to load onto trains to bring it to market. The trains are now mostly gone and the rails were pulled up. Those routes could be renovated to bring the family farmers to new employment, education, and entertainment centers which would not necessarily be located in cities.
The Heartland could be a provider of fruits and vegetables grown in Canadian style greenhouses. It could be the mecca of distributive energy based on its wind and solar resources. But instead those in the Heartland who have championed these causes have been beat back by the coal,
oil and big Agra lobby. What we have now are oil companies spoiling the country side and ruining the social fabric of rural areas with man camps all the while touting their economic development influence and buying off the state legislatures. The utilities finally have their way by owning the huge wind farms, finally satisfied that distributive energy or producer owned wind is no longer a threat. The only agri products that can compete in the global market place are those with a huge lobby: corn and soybeans. Dairy farmers struggle to find workers. Many have found immigrants to be good workers but have had to learn the hard way that determining proper documentation isn't that simple when they wake up to raids by government immigration officials. This is but a small sampling of the effect of corporate greed and failed policy.
1
@SingT. Seems like wind farms are the spoilers of the countryside. Please name one place where the government has raided dairy farms.
@Jackson
Let's not split hairs. Everyone's read the NYT article about picking up immigrants working on dairy farms in upstate New York. They don't have to raid a dairy farm, they can pick people up in town or wherever.
California farmers are having similar problems. What galls me is that the farmers don't want the government to punish the businesses because everyone knows it's those sanctuary cities that protect immigrants that are the problem. Hogwash--we have sanctuary cities because businesses have been hiring illegal labor for decades and will fight any sort of immigration enforcement including refusing to use E-verify. I'd personally put every business owner who has an illegal worker on the payroll in jail starting with Donald Trump--and I don't care whether they personally know about it or not.
Rural Williston ND; What happens in these small places is not publicized in the WaPo or any other large media outlet. That's why 90+% of America is clueless about the 2% that live in rural America. Re: the large wind farms, yes those are spoilers on the country side BUT small distributive wind is small wind generators on farms that could be allowed to tap into the existing infrastructure and even sell back to utility companies BUT the utility companies do not allow on the grounds that THEY paid for the infrastructure. Ah, no....we taxpayers paid for most of it back in the 1940's.
China began a huge uprooting of rural China not that long ago. They basically planned on moving 250 million people from rural China to new cities they built in roughly a 20 year period.
They have done it and continue to do it. They have linked their cities with high speed trains and new airports. They have built world class ports and roads along the coast. They are building new subways in old and new cities. They have put up cities of apartments knowing they will fill them.
People have moved off of farms for centuries. People have crossed the globe for opportunity. Rural Americans who are caught in an economic trap should stop looking at immigrants as their problem and start emulating them.
4
Get real indeed.
That rural America lives in a no-growth economy and that people struggle to get by is not a tragedy. It is the natural condition of mankind.
That cities, packed to the gills and spewing poisons onto the earth, are experiencing runaway expansion in incomes, population, stress is not natural.
Constant economic growth defies the laws of nature.
As an important aside, consider how many deaths result annually directly due to those coal miners.
I have seen estimate of 12,000 and 25,000 deaths per year in the US due to air pollution from burning coal.
Using your estimate of 50,000 coal miners, and the lower estimate of deaths, we see that 4 coal miners working a year kill 1 person.
Ignoring CO2 for a moment, why do we mine coal?
While I get the reality that this is a capitalistic country, the truth is that greed has destroyed the heartland, not immigrants or people of color or gay people. We must all accept the reality that life isn't only about money, power over others or blaming some poor refugee fleeing the horrors in their native countries.
The reality is very simple & basic. Rule number 1, is that we all, regardless of race, creed, color, sexual orientation or national origin desire the same things for ourselves & our progeny. Rule number 2, I believe, involves the behemoth national corporations which are in the process of gaining total control & ownership of our water, food & medicinal supplies, worldwide. Rule number 3, as Professor Krugman points out is that a good education, health care, rebuilt infrastructure, & as I would add, decent housing, steady employment, including a living wage should never be considered entities which we cannot afford as a country & owed solely to the 1%.
Professor Krugman is correct when he says we lack the will to do what is necessary or even try. I believe the time has arrived for capitalism to be tamed. Yes, the truth must be told to diffuse the rhetoric of the various hate groups & politicians who take advantage of racial/ethnic/religious differences that provide energy to the tilt the so-called 'left behind' folks to the right. Sometimes, the taste of the necessary medicine is horrible, but the outcome is health. Prof. Krugman, please keep explaining.
2
I travel with my work between rural and urban America. I’ve been saying for some time that we need a National Cultural Exchange program to assist both rural and urban Americans in understanding their differences and identifying their similarities.
I’m not saying this would revive rural America, but it would be a step in a good direction along with Dr. Krugman’s suggestion that elected policy makers develop health care for all.
An actual means of reviving rural America might be the creation of more renewable energy projects. Solar/wind farms and geothermal plants are often constructed in rural areas. They provide substantial short term employment and some long term operations & maintenance employment.
Renewable energy may very well be one of the greatest wealth generating opportunities of our generation. We just need our elected policy makers to understand the value renewable energy affords.
2
Everywhere in America is struggling. Big cities are plagued by gun violence, segregation, and overly high costs of living. Suburban home values are deflating as a result of declining schools and increased drug use. Rural America is facing heavy job loss and an aging population.
It's the same reason everywhere - income inequality. I grew up in a middle class NJ neighborhood. To the west was a zip code with the highest per capita income in the country, and to the east was a zip code with one of the lowest. My father grew up in Kansas, flanked by super wealthy Koch industry executives to the west and the poorest farmers to the east. I have friends in Cincinnati who live in a new penthouse overlooking the poor and decrepit KY suburbs across the river.
It doesn't matter where in America you live. There are educated wealthy people who rode the corporate/tech/medical boom and others who got left behind. The problem is that the middle class is gone. There used to be a buffer of strong union, government, and farming jobs that kept the two extremes from completely tearing apart. But decades of corruption, graft, misguided economic policy, and gerrymandering have brought the system to a breaking point.
This isn't just the heartland's decline, it's America's decline that has been shielded by a media that serves a wealthy and retired clientele. There is nowhere that is safe, affordable, and prosperous anymore. I fear that this will eventually lead to revolutionary consequences.
3
@Clay. Everywhere in America is NOT struggling. How did you even get that idea?
People no longer live over their store that sells goods or services to neighbors within walking distance. Those neighbors buy locally and from around the world. Most no longer work at a factory requiring a local population concentration.
I don't understand why employees working with computers and phones need to commute daily and report to a central office or headquarters than must provide them with space rented at a premium because it must be convenient for their employees' climate damaging commute.
I suspect the paradigm might change. People will work from home and commute a few times a year to their company's headquarters which might decide to locate in beautiful, low rent rural areas. Those rural areas will have to provide good schools and health care in addition to affordable housing and safety. The gov't could help with the schools and health care. Especially by allowing rural areas like minewhere only one insurance provider exists offering only HMO plans the ability to buy in to Medicare.
Dems wanting the rural vote should provide a buy in to Medicare at rates commensurate with those offered by private insurers in metropolitan areas. That would be the pragmatic and politically beneficial path to Medicare for All.
1
@JT, the trend among many companies is to have more workers at home instead of in an office. Hand-in-hand with this trend is the move away from corporations constructing and maintaining opulent headquarters buildings. Now, they are content to simply lease whatever office space they need and let someone else own the building, giving the corporation some flexibility in relocating when necessary to new (and often smaller) quarters.
These companies are highly unlikely to locate offices in rural areas for a host of reasons, even with staffs made up mostly of telecommuters. They will simply lease space near major metro areas, close to airports and interstate highways.
One advantage that flyover country has over New York City is that, unlike, NYC, flyover country will not be part of the Atlantic Ocean in the foreseeable future.
4
In reading the comments suggesting solutions for the deteriorating physical and social issues in this country, I believe the solution is to get the national government working again. Get money out politics. All of this is the result of the battle that the wealthy -- the Heritage Foundation, the Kochs, Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, etc., the Republicans in general have been waging to take over the country and to retain their wealth and to maintain the status quo which is what they have built their fortunes on. Example the energy companies. This dead weight is keeping us from developing a country that meets the times. They have us fighting among ourselves to distract us from the real issues. If we want to fix rural America and the rest of the country for that matter, we need to fix Washington first. Look at Trump's budget. You can see that he is very concerned about rural America and did he mention anything about the flooding in the mid west this weekend? What about the amount of money he is wanting to spend on the military and the Wall? It's frightening. Do you see any way he is going to help rebuild our country? He certainly made out in his tax program. How did you do?
2
Better pay attention to the Democrats too. How amazingly corrupt they are also.
It would help if the Federal government were disbursed to rural areas. This would lessen the terrorist threat to the Washington, D.C. area (and make housing there less expensive), and help a few rural sites.
1
"Heartland" is a sentimental term. What does it mean? Does it even have a meaning, outside the nostalgic imagination of people for whom "farming" connotes purity, hard work, and simple but profound virtue? Do other countries and cultures use an equivalent term to refer to their farming areas? Canada has an equivalent physical geography, but I have never known a Canadian to refer sentimentally to a "heartland" where lies the source of goodness. Does China? Russia? Brazil?
Let's move these discussions past this outdated concept. The beating heart of our culture is in its great cities. Let's focus our resources on keeping these beautiful, diverse, and liveable.
The basic solution starts with honesty, something in short supply from our politicians. The rural decline cannot be stopped, that economy is gone. We produce more food with fewer people, more manufacturing output with fewer people than ever before, almost entirely as a result of improved technology. But, generations of politicians get up in front of crowds and say they are going to bring the jobs back, protect the family farm, all the while falsely blaming immigrants and trade. As long as we lie to people about a never returning economy, we cannot get on with what we are best at, re-inventing ourselves. Government needs to focus on what it can do, proper funding for collapsed education systems, access to adequate health care, good infrastructure to make sure rural communities stay connected. Finally, relocation has to be on the table; we have to recognize that some marginal farming areas will fall out of production and need to return to the wild.
One bit "fly over" unawareness in a generally insightful piece. Immigrants have propped up American rural production since the first Rancher hired a Vaquero to run his herd. For every Steve King out there, there are a hundred farmers who rely on immigrant labor. Immigrants are a viable source of labor and revival. We need reform to bring these people into the open. Rural communities are fearful about losing their way of life but welcoming when helped, examples of this abound, we just need to build on it.
The problem has been defined well but not completely so here goes. The cost of living out side rural America is ever increasing. Large corporation that should be looking at diversifying their locations are in the main run by people who value metro-area life over small town living.
The editorial does a good job of describing what has failed. We need now need to brainstorm on what might actually help. A good start would be to educate corporate America on what good value exists in middle America from affordable house prices to overall quality of like. Subsidies won't do this.
As long as corporations and the 1% control Washington nothing will change. Runaway capitalism is eating this country.
Term limits and publicly funded elections would be a good start. Too much money in too few hands.
2
A king in an ivory tower hardly knows of the issues of the peasantry.
A nobel prize economist who lauds AOC as a tax genius could not possibly hope to understand the financial woes of the regular folk.
2
A very good article, as always.
What I would add to the mix is the emigration that rural areas inevitably experience. Now in my 60's, I have quite a few good friends who were born and spent their childhood in rural areas.
Finding absolutely no activity there - work, social or creative - they moved to "the city" for their education and never looked back. This phenomena has continued unabated for decades, and it's also one that cannot be altered.
In the long run, those in the rural areas will have to adapt or be left behind. I don't say that to condescend to them or to berate them for the misfortune of being inopportunely located- it's just what has to happen. What's more, the cities should keep pressing on; show those in the rural areas what can be achieved in an urban space. Those that can will relocate, those that can't- well... I suppose we can read about them in a future sad editorial.
1
The Midwest has a vast stretches of the best farm land anywhere in the world. Grain is one of our most important exports. We need a government that understands this valuable resource and uses it to our country's advantage instead of foolishly letting the Chinese use it as a bargaining cudgel. Right now grain prices are at depression era lows. A lot of farmers will go out of business this year.
1
Rural America is dead? Remember when urban America was supposed to see the same fate?
A report from the Carter administration released in 1980: “The nation can no longer assume that cities will perform the full range of their traditional functions for the larger society. They are no longer the most desirable settings for living, working, or producing.” The nation should not try to reverse this, and any signs of an urban renaissance were an “illusion."
President’s Commission for a National Agenda for the Eighties, Urban America in the Eighties: Perspectives and Prospects
The heartland has vast tracts of open space that are very suitable for solar and wind farms. These can't really be built near big cities, and we have the grid to pipe power anywhere it is needed, do we not? This could provide many good jobs and stimulate more infrastructure as it is needed. Could this be one solution?
4
One way to improve life in rural America is to change agricultural policy from encouraging cheap to encouraging good.
Industrial farming produces cheap food at the cost of the land, the animals, and the people. We have algae blooms in Lake Erie, a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and farm soil washed down the Mississippi. We have hogs and chickens raised in barns so crowded that only regular doses of antibiotics keep them alive, with laws prohibiting journalists from writing about them. We have farmers so efficient — if you disregard these “side” effects — that they’re isolated from their neighbors or anything resembling community life.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Agricultural policy could prohibit factory farms. It could subsidize organic farming. It could require animals be pastured. It could prohibit agricultural runoff that pollutes the water. It could tax herbicides and pesticides — which are really biocides, since they recognize neither weeds nor pests — instead of virtually requiring them.
These steps would make the land and food healthier and sustainable. They would let us eat meat without contemplating the miserable system that produced it. And they would put more farmers on smaller plots, recreating farming communities.
6
@James K. Lowden...."Agricultural policy could prohibit factory farms. It could subsidize organic farming".....You have no idea how silly that is. In order to do anything like what you are suggesting it would require that 20% of the population return to the country and work at manual labor for a sub minimum wage. Are you ready to volunteer?
They need to reinvent themselves instead of hanging on to the past. Jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and mining are going to go further down from here. Look around for where the new era's jobs are going to be and start position yourself for getting them.
1
@Ivan....Mining will decline because mineral deposits will be exhausted, but farming will continue to be a major source of revenue and export for the upper Midwest.
2
@W.A. Spitzer
Exports and revenue maybe - but not jobs. Farming has relatively simple tasks that are easily subject to additional mechanization and "robots taking over". The revenue part is easy to overstate. Remember that the farm sector is extremely competitive and as cost is reduced (by mechanization) so will end product prices and therefore revenues. Exports depend on our mechanization being substantially more efficient that that in China/India. They are a lot more likely to catch up more with us, than to stay or fall further behind. The only way we can maintain the current efficiency gap with China/India is to give up the remaining agriculture jobs to cheep robots.
1
Change happens. Evolution happens. The discovery of oil in Pennsylvania killed the whaling industry. Big Agra with its well capitalized operations has killed the family farm. Big box stores have killed the local shops, pharmacies, etc. And big online retailers are now killing big box stores. And computer technology has replaced manual labor in droves.
There are only four things that can be done with change: create it, predict it, ignore it, and respond to it. The first two are the hardest. The last is the most practical. The worst is to ignore it.
We need a mass migration from rural America to urban America. I won't deny the emotional difficulties of leaving a farm that had been in the family for many generations. But the truth is that across a broad swarth of industries, very few family businesses survive to the third generation.
My ancestors left eastern Europe in the late 19th century despite their families having been there for generations because for economic and political reasons they could no longer survive there.
Let's provide some social services that can help rural Americans who are not surviving move to the cities, provide housing help and job retraining.
More important, let's stop giving them more political clout than they deserve. Let's get rid of the Electoral College, which is the single greatest agent for ignoring change that exists in America.
3
In a way, American farmers are the "Luddites" of the past.
Deaths of despair, drugs and alcohol should not get hold of them, they just should emigrate to the cities: that happened in the past. Also, it has happened in Mexico with millions emigrating to the cities and to the States: No "deaths of despair, no drugs", but yes, high consumption of beer, maybe because the higher income allows them, but it normally does not becomes alcoholism.
And yes, people visit the rural towns of their country in the holidays, and they come to life; to die a few days later, when they leave.
C'est la vie.
1
Good points. Sure don’t see any “despair, drugs or alcohol” in our clean, vibrant, economically healthy cities! Just where do you folks live? I’m not making excuses for the problems rural areas have, but it’s clear many of you don’t go outside tiny parts of these cities you think are so wonderful or you are willfully ignorant. This country, except a sliver of a middle class and the top is in a mess. Rather than condescending to rural whites you might want to take a broader look at how the majority Americans are doing. It’s not that great anywhere.
I grew up in a very rural part of South Dakota (the area looks very much like the photo accompanying this op-ed, and, after many years in college, ended up living on a quiet dead-end street in an upscale New Jersey town.
On a trip back to visit family, one of my uncles asked if I wasn't constantly afraid in New Jersey with the rampant crime. I replied that I was annoyed when I forgot to close the garage door on my way to work but that nothing had ever gone missing.
As I talked to my relatives, I realized crime was rampant in rural South Dakota. So they saw TV shows, news and otherwise, sensationalizing "rampant" crime in urban areas and get scared and isolated themselves even more from the rest of the country.
2
The larger trend is humans living in clusters, cities, and urban megalopolises because we've crafted effective (enough) transportation systems to sustain ourselves. We are a lot like ants, only we've figured out how to send fewer workers to the periphery and only a few workers have to reside in the hinterlands. It isn't a moral issue; we need farmers because we need food and the more technology solves those "problems" the more urbanized we'll become. Don't get me wrong, it's not a world I want to live in but there it is.
I live in rural Nebraska, what would be helpful is access to broadband internet. Service here is sketchy at best, without the receiver on a rural water tower 6 miles away we'd still be on dial up. There isn't enough of a return on investing in rural America, our population is to sparse.
The farmer we rent our land to would rather grow a crop he could make money on rather than relying upon the government to underwrite his business. He does call it farmer welfare (it is), but he happily cashes that check and votes for the most conservative politician he can find, as do all my neighbors. Politicians that tell them they will protect their way of life get their vote. They don't give a second thought to how said politicians will hurt them in the long run. Facts and evidence mean nothing to them, willful ignorance rules out here.
This is a good article, followed by a lot of good insightful comments. I myself grew up in an attractive Midwestern town and attended a major public university one hour away from it. Much of my adult life I have lived in major metropolitan areas on one coast or another. Rural stretches of the heartland can be quite bleak and mind-numbing. Urban/suburban sprawling stretches on the coasts can be quite nasty and yes, mind-numbing. There is nothing particularly sophisticated or cultured about sitting in traffic on I-95 sandwiched between two SUVs the size of the Lusitania driven by overweight people who are texting and tailgating while on their way to Walmart then Burger King. When I retire it will be to my very cool university town in the Midwest where I can live much more cheaply and save money to spend time in places like Brooklyn and Paris.
A side note: Americans would do well to look to examples like the town of Matera, Italy (and other communities in that country) which has been rescued by the E.U. and turned into something worth preserving forever. It's not a panacea, but it's a start.
1
@Steve We have gone to St. Louis Cardinals spring training in Jupiter, FL several times and I cannot help but think of the woman that I met from Missouri who lives in your area. I asked her if she enjoyed living there, and her response was she enjoyed it for the six weeks that the Cardinals were in the area; the other 46 weeks she hated it. Traffic, high real estate prices, hurricane danger and rude New Yorkers outweigh the benefits of no state income tax, at least for now.
2
Life in all forms require a critical mass to sustain itself of go extinct, and for human life that mass is primarily used just sustaining itself in the consumption of goods and services. As noted in rural heartland America the production of grains and cereals has grown as the costs in labor has declined with automation. Today and in the future technology will further reduce the need for man to farm those lands, thus reduce the supporting cast of labor and the services associated with that labor. Tens of thousands of acres of land can and will be producing those grains and cereals with remotely operated equipment, with man present only to intervene for maintenance and the transport of product and equipment. As the need for man continues to decline for agi production, the needed required economic mass declines. As to the political implications, the last permeant residents of the heartland may well be those needed to sustain only their three guaranteed Federal Congressional representatives.
I grew up in a rural area that nonetheless had at least 7 manufacturing companies through the 1970s, with one employer providing around 1200 jobs for a multi-county area. Today those manufacturers are all gone, either to metro areas or to other countries. Services jobs now fuel much of America's economic growth, accounting for around 77 percent of employment and 67 percent of GDP. Service jobs help explain the movement of people away from rural areas because fewer services are needed in low-population areas. We need tax laws and incentives to bring at least some manufacturing jobs back to the US. The alternative energy industry might be a good start.
3
Many rural centers were created when farming was labor intensive and most farms existed to feed one family and provide a little cash. That life of the 19th century is gone. Trying to preserve it is ridiculous and expensive for governments to provide the infrastructure to maintain it.
While traveling through the deep South recently, I was struck by the amount of visible rural poverty that existed. It is still an area that has not ever recovered from the economic culture of slavery and the aftermath of the Civil War.
I agree with the author that our current electoral system with the Electoral College gives too much weight to areas that dying and not enough to the centers creating new opportunities.
2
@carl
Great name. a century ago there were many rural farms around the cities that fed these cities, delivering goods to public and farmers' markets. Where half of my family is from, South Side of Chicago, 31st and Canal is where the market was (supplied by "truck farmers") and one or twice a day horse-drawn wagons would bring this fresh produce to the neighborhoods, sold right off the back. (Unsold produce would get dumped under the tracks in the no-man lands between neighborhoods, but that's another story.) St. Louis still has Soulard market. I think we'll return to many of these arrangements and economic organization (though maybe not the horses) as we learn what is good and not good for us.
2
How about removing tax and other government incentives for industrial-scale farming?
How about requiring farming techniques that are more labor-intensive and that would therefore create jobs?
4
Dr. Krugman has almost identified the source of the current divisive atmosphere in our country. The problem is that we are all too willing to let it boil down to us and them, whether it be urban vs rural, coastal vs 'heartland' (used in the sense of the geographic center), north vs south, immigrant vs 'native'. The truth is that we need each other - we need the economic and cultural vitality of the urban areas, we need the beauty and freedom of the wild areas, we need the golden waves of grain to feed us all, and we need people - from wherever - who are willing to work hard at whatever they are capable of doing.
So we need to stop asking the question, "Why should support ...?" We should support EVERYBODY because we need EVERYBODY. We need to fix - and modernize - our crumbling infrastructure so that those who do choose to stay down on the farm can access the web, and get the food and raw materials they produce to market. We need to improve our public schools so that high school graduates have the opportunity and the skills to get higher education or follow a career path that affords them the dignity of a living wage, whether it is in hospitality, mechanics, agriculture, or any of the myriad blue-collar jobs that still exist and are needed to keep our economy humming. We need to ensure that affordable child care, elder care, public transportation, medical care, or nutritional assistance are available to all. We CAN afford it if we adjust our priorities.
3
First, rural areas must identify a resource or market it can supply. Second, they must development the infrastructure, training, regulation, financing, economies of scale to support that supply.
Amazon could be easily--and far more cheaply!--be located in North Dakota, the Texas plains, an Appalachian valley.
Here's two examples, this one working: West Virginia's 5-county Chemical Alliance Zone, a public-private partnership focused on infrastructure, location, and quality of life to recruit leading chemical and polymer manufacturers, leading to ancillary industries in medical devices and aircraft moldings, among hundreds of others. The zone exports more $1 billion a year, reated 15,000+ jobs at $77,000 or more in manufacturing, engineering, training, sales, management. (Lower wage jobs were also created.) Tax breaks have to be matched by training and research.
The second is a revision--an update of the system of American agriculture that has kept food safe and costs low to become the global bread basket for food safety and security as the global middle class doubles in the next decade. Issue 5-to-10 work visas for agriculture on the border--reports say we are a million farm workers short! Add another 500,000 workers for packing, shipping, sorting. After a 90 day review, visas should be issued--to what is the world's most productive agricultural work force. That increased productivity would make the US world leader in food safety and security, benefiting rural America.
3
As a former NoDak, I sympathize, but what they refer to as the Heartland is really just the Bread Basket. The rural states in the middle of the country provide resources that once fully exploited will be forgotten. It's nothing personal, in fact it's exactly the way those folks treat the land.
I understand the temptation to embrace the bleakness and see your survival as proof of your own superiority over nature, but this is all just a myth we tell each other to keep the kids from leaving. I miss the people, but nothing would ever convince me to move back.
This is why safety net programs become so vital in a post-industrial society. There are social and economic problems that a global economy generates that defy governmental or private solutions. Some of the problems, as described in this article, are so entangled in a web of national and international forces that still are not well understood, require some form of financial help to preserve what remains of communities and cultures torn apart by globalization.
What an Gordian knot; how to revive rural towns and make them an integral part of society. If we could come together and allocate rural regions with the exclusive right to produce certain 'goods and services', to be distributed nationwide, then a revival might be possible. It sounds complex but it can be done. Internationally as well; if you give Cuba more power to produce what comes naturally, i.e. sugar, why not sign a contract provided that it allows democratic values to take hold? Or allow Bolivia to produce 'tea' from coca leaves, so to withdraw from it's illegal use (cocaine)? As they say, if there is the will there should be a way. Who said 'economics' is just our unsolvable inequality item not worth discussing, so to not alter the status quo?
According to Redfin, the cities that are starting to lose residents (or who have the most people looking to leave) are: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, and Washington DC.
Why?
These urban “paradises” are anything but—the cost of living is stifling, the taxes are high, and the traffic is oppressive.
Yes more economic opportunities exist in cities. But the rapid urbanization of America can’t continue forever. Look at San Francisco—who but the top 5% of earners can afford to live there?
I suspect rural America will eventually benefit from a backlash against the costs of living in America’s largest cities and more companies and talented workers will want to live in smaller cities more broadly dispersed beyond the coasts and that are closer to many rural communities. This won’t solve all of rural America’s problems, but it may be a start.
2
We have no one to blame but ourselves for the decline of rural America. Our country's leadership during the 80's incentivized corporations with tax laws to relocate. These new tax laws, cheaper labor markets abroad and the advancement of robotics provided for the exodus and accelerated the decline. All remained was a jobless low skilled worker with a limited educational background. Moral hazard and sense of community is no longer in the dialogue of the American corporate structure. Monopolization of markets and crony capitalism rules the day. Corporations run amok with the peoples tax dollars, socializing their corporate debt and privatizing the gains. Poverty is not new to Appalachia or other rural areas. Appalachia was just as poor or poorer at the turn of the century. Our government could revitalize rural America, as well as the entire country, with a new New Deal. A measured public private investment structure in new markets, innovative technologies, broad band access, investment in modern trades skills and a new commitment to our educational system, etc...all or some could potentially straighten the ship. When did America lose its will to go big and bold? How did we get to the point where political ideology, as opposed to compromised foresight rules the day? We don't invest in our people, we don't invest in our country and until we get back to that, our rural areas will continue to decline.
1
There are good ideas in these comments and the Professor Krugman’s opinion piece; basic programs such as investments in education and universal health care also benefit non-rural areas.
But there are two suggestions often mentioned in the comments that might help. High-speed-rail and recreational parks where the rural landscape has the beauty to enjoy it. HSR is analogous to the subway system in NY City which allowed folks outside of southern Manhattan Island to live in the other boroughs. It’s also used in China to decrease the historically high population density in their major cities( Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, etc). Parks and recreational camping are attractions that can support local rural towns as us city dwellers do appreciate relaxing in a natural setting.
These aren’t total solutions for rural areas, but it helps.
1
The Green New Deal may provide part of the solution. Wind turbines and solar farms require land, construction and maintenance providing a new source of jobs. A program to bring high speed internet to rural areas could also help. Of course these are forward-looking solutions, but as long as the population of rural areas wants to go back to the 1950s, it cannot be part of the solution.
3
Agriculture has moved from the legendary family farm to agribusiness -- massive capital investment, enormous acreage. These enterprises are driven by petroleum, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Their long-term sustainability is doubtful, even without climate change.
Perhaps a governmental policy aimed directly at making small, sustainable family operations viable, and penalizing the efforts of multinational, giant chemical and seed monopolies to drive such operations into bankruptcy, would maker the heartland viable. Of course, that would not benefit the 0,1% who control both those multinationals and the US Congress, so it is unlikely to happen.
One need look no further than the Trump administration's war against Canadian dairy policy in the revision of NAFTA to understand why the US heartland is failing. USMCA is all about scaling up production and scaling down the quality of life in the hinterland. You can use your relief check to buy at Walmart.
1
I blame it on cars and the rapid advancement of high speed cars and roads. No longer do folks just drive into the small local town created when horse drawn wagons were the norm. No, now they hop in the car and drive many more miles to the larger towns to shop at the Wal Mart. Yes, ghost towns in the making and there will be no stopping it. Although, it is sad.
Krugman identifies the decline as well as the failed attempts to turn rural economies around.
We live in rural America. Small schools, limited health care and low end jobs that have limited upward mobility. We developed a successful small manufacturing business that sells to farms and ranches across the country. But our work force is high school educated and we have had to furnish on the job training for all. Those that do get higher education have to find jobs in population centers to pay off their student debts and raise their families. They cannot find that kind of work here.
The political attitude is much as described by Krugman. The federal government has not been a good friend of agriculture. Better health care, better schools would be a huge plus, but in the end, if the agricultural industry does not show a profit that promotes better paying jobs, the young people will move elsewhere. Cheap food has always been a political goal but cheap food does not promote a healthy rural economy.
1
The irony of this is here is a pro-government, government can solve everything Liberal saying that government programs to "help" rural areas have done little to nothing, across the globe. So doesn't that challenge the basic idea that government is the solution to everything?
1
A Green New Deal could potentially make rural America one of the most important economic drivers in the US. If small farms are failing, land lying fallow, why not use that land for energy generation? I know it's already happening in Washington and New York states. Solar and wind farms are popping up all over these states, and maybe elsewhere. Farmers can lease their land for this use and even become actively involved in the industry themselves. These industries could create jobs for other people who live in rural areas as well. With the kind of tax breaks given to the fossil fuel industry these endeavors would be very cost-effective and solve so many problems. For me, it's a no-brainer.
1
So the solution is to make the land valuable again, and do so in a labor intensive fashion.
To me the most obvious way to do this is leisure and the arts. Build on the theme that this is the part of the world where you have time, to relax, to breathe, to think.
Oddly I would push for two things - increased time off for everyone and a development and marketing budget for rural areas to entice people to come and visit.
Ultimately economic prosperity comes from having something folks want that you can trade for the things missing from your own life.
There are quite a few factors have have driven many of our rural areas into decline. The most notable set is a lack of jobs combined with a lack of services, which contribute to a decay in community.
We do not have a cure-all for this. However, we do have quite a few jobs that could be done via telecommute. If our government invests properly in community and access infrastructure, and certain basic minimums are maintained for an area--groceries, mail service, utilities, medical care, public safety and education services are among the minimums--it is possible to save some small communities, maybe many of them.
If we put in proper plans to maintain small communities like this, it could also lead to people building more intentional communities some distance off from the cities. While this like any other idea could see abuse, the attempt is still worthwhile.
1
It seems to me that in a world where increasingly many people can work anywhere and much social interaction and entertainment comes over the internet, revival of the heartland can and will happen. Government can help with that (as happened with the New Deal), and high prices in the Silicon Valleys help too. But it may be a rather uncomfortable future for the people who now live there.
One of the main tenets of the Koch’s divide and conquer strategy (everyone should read Dark Money) has always been to kindle hatred and suspicion of the college-educated middle class. This is a deliberate barrier to improved circumstances in the areas we’re talking about. It goes together with aggressive cuts in funding of education.
It doesn’t have to be that way. In the much-mythologized fifties and sixties, one of the grounds for optimism was the new reality (for many people) that one’s kids could aspire to anything. Now there is a sizable population that will do anything to prevent their kids from turning into one of “them”. Part of what we’re fighting is a propaganda war.
1
I have lived in rural America sixty miles from a hospital or any large store. Never mind that that hospital is always on the edge of failure, doctors don't stay long and if you have a heart attack and must be helicoptered out.
It is quiet and beautiful and the people are warm and hospitable as long as you don't talk about politics or about their failing farms. The climate is getting warmer and unpredictable but it is that way every where.
Could I live there now? The town is crumbling at the same rate as old body, but Oh that quiet and the dark skies. There is no place perfect here on this earth even if for a moment you think you have found one and it seems to be getting harder and harder to find a shelter that will serve. Pray for the young.
2
The truth about Rural America is more complicated. "Outstate Minnesota" (that's what we call it here) is dotted with towns and small cities that have diverse economies. People who live in small towns and rural areas around those are part of those micro economies.
The Mayo Clinic in Rochester employs workers who live in rural areas all around it. The Mankato/North Mankato area economy grew 4% last year. The unemployment rate is 2.8%. Le Sueur, MN is shrinking but has a serious shortage of workers for several manufacturers located there. The big problem is a shortage of housing. No one can figure out how to build housing that workers making the prevailing wage can afford.
Minnesota recently elected a progressive governor from outstate. The Republican strongholds are rural areas and wealthy suburban rings around the Twin Cities. But outstate cities like Mankato and Rochester tend to be DFL.
3
Subsidizing rural areas is primarily a matter of national security, that is, food security. We should not invest more than is necessary to maintain food security.
Countries like Switzerland subsidize their farms in order to subsidize their essential tourist industry by keeping the country beautiful. The calculation of how much to invest is based on ROI for the majority, not romance for farmers.
The best thing for all of us is to make truth-based decisions, instead of engaging in fantasies.
3
Perhaps State and Federal Government could locate some of its offices in rural areas to provide jobs.
2
One factor not considered here is the way the cost of living in cities has pushed the poorer people - many of whom are immigrants - out to the satellite towns and beyond, commuting in to the big cities to do their menial jobs, where once they lived in the cities and did menial work for the commuting middle and corporate classes. The clash between these populations and the older residents can't be ignored.
4
Geography matters. One way to make non-productive areas more productive is to make them closer to a productive area, i.e. improving transportation. Here in New England, Boston is thriving, but much of the surrounding area is declining. At a BU-Maine hockey game, half the crowd is rooting for Maine; those fans moved to Boston upon graduating from the University of Maine. New England's smaller cities like Worcester and Manchester, can benefit by having faster, efficient, cheaper rail service to Boston. Not only will more New Englanders have access to Boston. Bostonians can move out there to develop opportunities. Many of the region's cities have the qualities that Boston has like walkable streets and industrial buildings with potential. In return Boston benefits, as it will lower the pressure on housing, causing housing to be more affordable.
This can be done in a number of parts of Middle America, where by connecting smaller towns to regional hubs (like Chicago) can improve the economic opportunities for those towns.
4
The only thing constant is change. Accept it, adapt to it or you're history. In 2019 does anyone really think most people under 30 want to live in a rural area? The internet has exposed rural youth to "what's out there" for them to seek. Historically there's always been something attractive about "rural America." Those days are essentially "over." One can try and hold on to the past but time moves on. Move with it or be left behind and complain about it. Rural America seems to often vote against it's own best interests. It's living in the past hoping to reverse time.....it's not going to happen.
3
It's true that the rural areas are in decline and likely to remain so. Yet, given their disproportionate political clout in national elections, defeating Trump means winning some of the territory that he won in 2016, presumably by appealing to rural voters. Not an easy task, especially as the Democratic Party in recent years has largely turned its back on those voters. Decent, hardworking people who are losing their livelihoods, their communities, their savings and their way of life will grab at whatever promises relief--e.g., Trump. To overcome their hopelessness, plus the various prejudices that accompany it, is the central challenge of 2020 and beyond.
3
With unrelenting demographic growth, climate change and young generations of Americans taking finally control of this Great Country , rural America will come back stronger than ever , as long as there is implementation of widespread quality education ( out of the claws of religious zealots ) and access to healthcare for all .
I don’t know if the examples of southern Italy and former East Germany are relevant in mr. Krugman’s analysis, given the extremely complex geopolitical , historical and ancient substratum of these two countries.
4
I think we should go the opposite route and speed up their decline. If it is inevitable anyway, let's get to the endgame quicker. They want to follow the free-market, right? Well, the free-market is pushing their kids to cities. The free-market is saying there is an over-supply of farms. Speed up the decline, let some of these rural areas go back to nature where they can help our environment. Whatever farms remain will likely enjoy higher commodity prices since the supply will likely shrink. We can possibly get back to a less hostile political environment since the remaining rural people will likely have family in "the big, liberal cities". And, as Paul K. has stated, other countries have tried numerous ways to revive these areas and have failed. It would also help to get farmers out of flood plains and tornado alleys...I'm tired of my tax money bailing these "rugged-individuals" out every few years.
2
As Professor Krugman points out, unlike urban American, where the vast majority of Americans live and work, rural America has outsized political influence and even with that political influence, it has not only declined, but is also the place where anti-immigration and intolerance most vigorously flourish. The Constitution was born out of a fledgling country that was primarily rural. All of that has changed. As a nation, we need to recognize that fact and change our systems of political representation to represent the people of our country and not a small and declining subset, that is an anachronistic relic of a bygone era.
2
I have no idea what the "symbolic" importance of the heartland is, but the simple fact that people in the "heartland" too often vote against their own economic interests to push candidates and policies favoring guns and god and against gays and abortion, is certainly part of the problem. Krugman is right, no one has a solution to the economic decline of the "heartland," but the people in the "heartland" certainly aren't helping themselves.
2
When I visited France last year, I noticed how empty the countryside was. There are huge farms that are worked by agency workers. Rural society consists of old people who live on pensions and those who serve them. The farm workers are city dwellers who are visiting the farm for a job assignment.
Is this a model? Increase pensions in rural areas, and encourage consolidation of the farms into a large organization.
2
"Since then, however, while America’s population has doubled, the number of farmers has fallen by two-thirds."
And yet - there is more food available than ever to feed Americans, of greater variety, and it's all available pretty much year round. Food production productivity has to have increased massively (thanks to corporate farming) , and globalization of food supply, are the reasons, right?
Can state legislators deal with those problems without federal help?
1
Not a criticism but questions raised by the article:
1)Was the $1.7 trillion to revive East Germany directed to-ward rural development or toward industrializing the East?
2) do we know what “rural” means and how does that differ from agricultutal?
3) is there a distinctive rural culture or spirit that differs from an urban one? Does it vary from the South, the Southwest and the Northwest?
4) There is abundant evidence that rural Germany was not influenced by right-wing politics in the ‘30’s, how does that differ from rural America’s embracing Trump?
5) The US has an Urban Development Department, does it have a Rural Development Department other than an Agriculture or Department of Labor?
6) Congress has Agriculture Comms are there Rural Comms?
7) If these questions are raised by world-class economists, do they have answers?
3
The widening gap between reality and belief is where American manipulative politics rules.
As family farms become mere components of agribusiness, as the ore extraction industry despoils broader landscapes while paying Congressmen to stall the inevitable, renewable energy, our media has canonized those so disconnected from society that the term "immigrants" does not include their forebears.
These people will have disproportionate sway over the culture's path so long as they are politically more valuable than, say, those residing in populated areas who understand that any success will come from adjusting to what is rather than pining for what was.
As for education bringing those mired in myths and memories up to speed: Let's face it, the time has passed. We have chosen as a nation to value missiles and ships and nukes over childhood nutrition and civic education (please consult the "Defense" Department's yearly budgets if skeptical), and so we ended up with a relatively safe but ignorant population.
Now, Elmer Gantry and P. T. Barnum might extol those who value belief over facts, and who can blame them? Those who volunteer to be saps should pay a price for their laziness; unfortunately, when those saps control the Electoral College, the rest of us, who did our homework and pay attention to what's truly happening in the world, have to live with their choices.
It's unlikely that these relics will volunteer to cede authority over our elections. Abolish the Electoral College.
2
@Jack Mahoney: you cannot "abolish" the Electoral College as it is part of the original US Constitution.
Yes, part of the problem is the relatively rapid expansion of urban areas for the reasons described. Perhaps that expansion was inevitable, perhaps not. Another part of the problem is the also-rapid technological advances and change of family farms to corporate owned acres.
Long ago, I lived in very rural eastern North Carolina, a land of tobacco and cotton, poor workers and rich landowners. It was also the location of much piecemeal work; people were paid by the piece they produced, including sewing. My then-wife wanted to start a small business making quilts and had line up both a supply of experienced people who sewed commercially and were willing and accustomed to being paid by the piece. We also had an investor from New York who already had similar investments in the area.
Unfortunately, the business never got off the ground because about the same time, manufacturing of all kinds was beginning to move offshore. That process has continued and when I last checked, the supply of individuals who would work for piecemeal prices had completely dried up and disappeared. The business of making quilts has been automated and moved to China.
5
Guarantee them a green job with enough greenbacks to support a family. Or, eliminate the tax deduction a business gets for the cost of offshoring its operations and subsidize the cost of moving someone in a rural area without a job to a place with jobs instead. Affordable healthcare, college, housing, family leave and universal day care would help too - a multifaceted approach to a multifaceted problem.
2
Dr Krugman ends his article on rural American by saying, “We can’t help rural America without understanding that the role it used to play in our nation is being undermined by powerful economic forces that nobody knows how to stop.” Normally, an economist would suggest an area requiring more study; since Dr. Krugman is stumped let me make a suggestion. Please study the effects of the federal crop subsidies/insurance program. I suspect that nothing has had a more disastrous effect on farm county. It is my opinion from years of observation that the farm program incentivizes the consolidation of farms, environmental degradation and depopulation of the plains.
5
The article is intelligent and interesting. The usual NYT commentary of contempt against rural areas leave something to be desired.
You really wonder why they don’t trust us?
5
It hasn't been fashionable to talk about poor white people and many years of disregard have taken their toll.
It behooves the Dems to address this problem, and soon.
4
Yo. You really should’ve thought harder before writing “rural lives matter”.
2
I believe in hub-and-spoke. With adequate infrastructure the attractive area around the big cities can be enormously enlarged.
1
A lot of tech work can be done anywhere. Teams I've worked on meet up on screens, work on connected networks where their finished work product is delivered. Rural America needs to advertise itself as a place where this sort of tech work can be done while giving workers an outdoors lifestyle not available in cities. However, rural Americans must welcome diversity, immigration and other modern values if they want to attract such workers.
1
Your last sentence is the issue.
Why is this "the heartland"? Why the privileged name. Can we please refer to it as the Midwest? That term is propagandist. If that's the heartland what is the Northeast? Liverworld?
2
Much of rural America's decline comes from rural Americans themselves.
Rural America is the nest of backward hell and brimstone Christian faiths which support vulgar, heartless tyranny over compassionate, democratic republicanism.
The backward Christian faiths preach fear of Democrats and love of Donald Trump, a con man who despises them and their flocks, deceives them and their flocks. He is as far from Christian as coal mining is from America's future energy source.
And it is the backward Christian faiths which teach their rural congregations that urban, coastal America is their enemy. A liberal secular enemy that must be subdued by voting for fake, Christian, conservative Republicans. Con men all.
Let rural America choose its future. Coal on their roof tops or solar panels? Hell and brimstone self-reliance or compassionate social-capitalism? Isolationism and building walls or fraternity and building bridges? Republican tyranny or Democratic republicanism?
Rural America's future is not ours to impose; it is their choice.
3
A passage from Great Expectations that I always think of when these issues are debated:
"O, his manners! won't his manners do then?” asked Biddy, plucking a black-currant leaf.
“My dear Biddy, they do very well here—”
“O! they do very well here?” interrupted Biddy, looking closely at the leaf in her hand.
“Hear me out,—but if I were to remove Joe into a higher sphere, as I shall hope to remove him when I fully come into my property, they would hardly do him justice.”
“And don't you think he knows that?” asked Biddy.
It was such a very provoking question (for it had never in the most distant manner occurred to me), that I said, snappishly,—
“Biddy, what do you mean?”
Biddy, having rubbed the leaf to pieces between her hands,—and the smell of a black-currant bush has ever since recalled to me that evening in the little garden by the side of the lane,—said, “Have you never considered that he may be proud?”
“Proud?” I repeated, with disdainful emphasis.
“O! there are many kinds of pride,” said Biddy, looking full at me and shaking her head; “pride is not all of one kind—”
“Well? What are you stopping for?” said I.
“Not all of one kind,” resumed Biddy. “He may be too proud to let any one take him out of a place that he is competent to fill, and fills well and with respect. To tell you the truth, I think he is; though it sounds bold in me to say so, for you must know him far better than I do.”
1
Rural residents should take the time to learn from the immigrants they so casually vilify. Instead of trying to scrape by in poor communities with little to no hope of a future, they should consider emulating those they criticize by picking up and moving out. Its not an easy choice. Leaving your family, friends, culture, and sense of local history, never is. But if millions can come to this country with little more than the clothes on their backs and manage to build a decent life for themselves and their families, I would imagine that rural residents, who speak the language fluently and have a basic level of education, can manage to find their way as well. And I suspect that along the way, they might even develop a newfound admiration for the sacrifices made by immigrants every day.
5
Really? The Elites brought in millions of immigrants to displace their fellow citizens paying low wages for jobs then outsourcing good paying jobs to China. When people rightfully complain about it, they are told they are racist and speak hatred you the left as their immigrant cleaners take care of their children and clean their houses.
What the Left calls hate speech, I call calling out people for their lies and then dressing up in self righteous bigotry towards their fellow Americans.
I don't care. They can all go bankrupt.
Perhaps lumping all of rural America's problems together is neither thoughtful or insightful.
4
Google and Amazon should be building their campuses and “smart cities” in rural areas, not places that have already been cannibalized (for decades if not centuries) by big money.
Who needs a civil war when you can have civil colonialism instead?
We know it won’t happen — prove me wrong, bro! — but it’d be a lot cooler if it did...
1
Who would move there to do the work? Tech workers have choices. They like urban, diverse areas. Tech companies need smart workers. Even manufacturing companies in the tech sector need smart workers to sort, assemble, test, etc. Neither employer will find their smart staffs in MAGA country.
2
@karen: most of that stuff is manufactured in China, as you know and they have no problem THERE with ethnic NON-diversity (the Chinese have no immigration!) or putting factories in rural areas.
Big AG is working to Robotize farming.
Robots need 5G & better.
Need better train system to cities.
I moved Rural for peace and quiet.
I found it.
😎
What a riot! The exact same things could be said of the inner city.
3
Well, being real, like the old white men addicted to Fox the old people of rural America are not going to live forever. So the empty states become emptier, the oligarchs' control of them becomes tighter. Something's going to give. The next few decades promise to be "interesting".
As Dorothy said, "We're not in Kansas, any more."
Kindly note that without Medicaid, Rural Hospitals
will fold. The rural voters bought the con. Boo hoo.
1
@bill b: they were folding long before the ACA and anyways, Medicaid is still around and so is the ACA -- so why ARE the hospitals in rural areas folding?
Howdy from the "heartland" now under water..with all our elected officials voted for a wall 2000 miles south and reduced FEMA funding..REMEMBER...This is the land in the 60-80's that rose above with great prairie populists Senators such as George McGovern, Jim Aboureszk, Tom Daschle, John Culver, Bob Kerrey, and Tom Harkin. Even always red Kansas (ie Kansas-Nebraska act) had Bob Dole and Nancy Kassenbaum. To think how far rural America has fallen in trust and expectations of their government..you likely have no idea who represents us or care..because nobody does. We, They know it. Nothing to care about. Reagan who obliterated the family farms (remember all the movies about this? What about the sequels?) ..and erased the family farms and any progressive dreams. The GOP turned us into the deep south (sorry south). We didn't just bite the hand that fed us...we chopped it off and spit it out in spite of ourselves. The mid terms showed that blue dogs can't win here..but history shows we want McGovern back. Now More Than Ever.
6
Awesome post and warm thoughts to you as you recover from this epic flooding.
2
“I’m sure that some rural readers will be angered by everything I’ve just said ...”.
Exactly what rural readers do you imagine you have, Paul?
2
Lesson 101: Move to where the jobs are and don't wait for the jobs to move to you!
1
@Patriot 301: so we have horrible overcrowded cities with $4000 studio apartments and 600,000 homeless living on the streets due to lack of housing. Oh and collapsing failing subways.
Yes, that's brilliant.
No farms=no food.
3
Oh please. Like Elites from the coast care about their fellow Americans. What they care about is their privilege and greedy, grasping ways. Who made it policy to send good jobs overseas under NAFTA? Who still gives China under cost shipping to The USA? Who allows OxyContin and other addictive drugs to be deliberately delivered to Rural America by rapacious drug companies? Who complains in this NYT about all those terrible people in the Midwest and how horrible they are?
I think we all know who the truly immoral people are and it is not people from the Midwest.
3
@PLH Crawford
Your post serves only to help confirm the stereotypes which you claim "Elites from the coast" have about rural Americans. Incidentally, a lot of people find bigotry and hatred toward minorities, non-Christians, immigrants, women and LGBTQ citizens to be immoral, and that supporting a president who coddles and inflames these prejudices to be immoral as well.
What rough beast ... slouches towards Mayberry?
1
Perhaps the author should read William Jennings Bryan's "cross of gold" speech.
Whole new meaning to "Off we go, into the wild blue yonder..."
As if Paul Krugman cares even a smidgen for what happens to rural America.
5
This is not your great, great , great grandfathers America. This is your Granddaughters America. And the Girls will save us ALL.
Seriously.
1
Well, that wasn’t much help.
3
This isn't an American problem. Racism and white nationalism are rife in Australian rural communities.
2
@Barry Henson, Who said it's a problem?
@Barry Henson: surely proven this week by the horrific mass shooting in New Zealand.
The idea that every place else is perfect and "we are awful!" is just plain provably wrong.
They need our help and that's what we should do. Regardless if they would do it for us lefty liberals. It'll take money and the federal government and some out of the box thinking. When they vote for Trump, no ones win. I realize that may mean higher taxes, but we have no alternative.
Try getting real about Baltimore and other Democratic dystopias before Getting Real About Rural America. Krugman's progressive myopia is unfortunate, but not unexpected. Like the Dude said, "Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man." Wisdom of the ages........
1
@Mike
The Democratic dystopias are our economic engine. That's not an opinion.
One more point to consider. Conservatives are fond of talking about perverse incentives. Perhaps we should apply the same logic here. If we throw money at rural Americans because they overdose on drugs, abandon their children and vote for neo-nazis, are we not rewarding their bad behavior? What motivation will these people have to improve themselves? None at all. We have been subsidizing these rural areas for generations. It's about time we stopped throwing good money after bad.
1
The difference with a French newspaper of intellectual quality is that in the NYT comments there is no exchange of ideas . no discussions . Just single individual self centered comments to the article. There are no trains of arguments of 10 or 12 , 25 commentaries. Just may be 3 or 4 , exceptionally , at the best.
1
We are only now becoming aware of a huge new industry for dealing with our own recycled waste products. This is an industry that we used to export to China until they didn't need it anymore . The challenge is now our opportunity- maybe- in sorting reusables and recycling valuable side products while creating jobs for various skill levels and revitalizing financially stressed areas. The technology needs to be invented and shared. It also means creating new awareness of our irresponsible habit of waste and extravagance towards our earth's bounty.
1
Create incentives to leave until there are just enough people to maintain agricultural production. This means removing NIMBY barriers to affordable housing in major cities.
1
The vast, impersonal forces of progress and history cannot be stopped. Fighting them is fruitless. The best we can do is deflect them just a bit, and adapt to the inevitable.
Perhaps Prof. Krugman is familiar with the research of Prof. Hari Selden of the Imperial University on Trantor. He reached the same conclusion.
1
As much as I'd like to get on a particular side of this issue, I think that there is a happy median where we recognize that there are issues on both sides of this spectrum, and I think most democrats realize that. What most democrats don't realize, though, is that they are directly contributing to this issue in at least a couple ways.
Firstly, consider the price of living in a city. I live near Cincinnati and we have relatively cheap housing prices in the periphery surrounding the urban core. Even so, if you are trying to motivate rural country dwellers to migrate to the city, the housing that is available would be mostly unaffordable, and if they have to choose between being on welfare and in the rural south or on welfare and in a city ghetto, I feel like there isn't much impetus to move in. In coastal cities, this is even a harder choice, as the cost of living increase is even wider from rural to urban.
This is an area which democrats, who make up the majority in most cities, need to improve on. Cities need to be a nicer and cheaper place to live to draw people in.
There are other issues that have to do with moral and cultural differences which can impede a rural person from moving into an urban area, but I won't address this due to the comment length.
The economic and social issues in regards to healthcare, retirement, and tax reform, etc, could be changed, but the first part of getting people into an area with better opportunities is to make that move affordable.
2
This is a surprisingly pessimistic article for Professor K. The data he presents certainly stresses the problems. But is closing paragraph and in particular the suggestion that no one knows how to solve this seems a stretch. Really? No one? Sounds like Rev. Malthus. Economics may be the "dismal science", but it is full of practitioners who claim markets or social and financial engineering or regulation can solve just about anything.
The Web and social media have been pushing the idea of connecting everyone despite distances and borders and even language and culture barriers. Yet here we see a picture of people who are profoundly isolated in small groups from their own country and culture. I have not figured out all the answers to this problem said in the 4 minutes I spent reading the article, but that does not mean they cannot be solved. These people are correct in thinking that businesses and governments are not helping them. That does not mean that businesses and governments cannot help them. They will continue to give up on the American dream as long as they feel that other Americans have given up on them.
2
The "Heartlands" mentioned in this article (and in other countries - UK, France), whether rural/agricultural or industrial, became the "hearts" after some considerable time and change there is slower. Are rural folk more dependant on what they know as opposed to what they are sold and less likely to embrace new ideas and social paradigms? They are economically and socially conservative. Urban centres change much more frequently, and maybe this is about the ability to manage change as much as it is about managing opportunity.
An increasing number of farms in Italy and France now augment their income by providing agro-tourism, bringing in more tourists, money and interchange with others more likely from an urban environment leading to a more healthy understanding of each other.
Perhaps the US could do more of this too?
@Mike
I'm hoping there are other ways. These farm vacations and the farms, themselves, are pretty silly, IMO. They are so heavily subsidized and artificial; they are not true, self-sustaining or "working" farms. It's probably a lot of fun though. But it is pretense, going through the motions; the real farming practices will be lost.
1
Rather than trying to fight the basic economics by pouring money into declining rural areas perhaps the best policy would be to help people move to where there is greater opportunity. Our social safety net programs are generally delivered at the State level. This has the effect of anchoring people who rely on these programs in place. What if these programs could be portable across state lines? Thus a family that receives support in say West Virginia relocate with their benefits to say North Carolina where growth needs people and where the family could reestablish its earning power and no longer be in need of government support.
Here's what I propose. Increase taxes and use the proceeds to open (or re-open) small post offices and public libraries across rural America. Subsidize public transportation and open bus and/or train stations in the same small towns. Invest in public education and re-open small public schools in rural areas. Hire postal workers, librarians, station managers and teachers, and pay them well. These working people could then support grocery and hardware stores, restaurants and taverns, etc.
No, it would not be "profitable." But it would be beneficial. We need to stop using the profit motive as our major guiding principle.
1
It's impossible to properly analyze dynamic systems point-by-point. Do you start with low tax income, a result of right-wing no-government attitudes expounded on as an independence, boot-strap philosophy, or look at the resulting drop in education and health standards? Can you complain about foreign manufacturing and immigrant labor while watching Fox on your cheap flat screen TV while eating processed food made possible only by immigrant (legal and illegal) labor? Perhaps look at what these regions offer - cheap land and housing and a population that, when provided with opportunity, has a deep-rooted work ethic. Decentralization, think call centers in North Dakota, might offer direction.
Despite all of the attention currently being paid to the image of rural America, I have not seen anyone mention Moore v. Moore, the 1960 ruling by the Missouri Court of Appeals in a divorce case in which the wife complained that her husband called her relatives a bunch of "hillbillies."
In that ruling the judge wrote, in part, that "An Ozark hillbilly is an individual who has learned the real luxury of doing without the entangling complications of things which the dependent and over-pressured city dweller is required to consider as necessities. The hillbilly foregoes the hard grandeur of high buildings and canyon streets in exchange for wooded hills and verdant valleys."
The judge goes on and on in poetic and eloquent terms extolling the virtues of hillbilly life, and concludes that, "the appellation 'hillbilly' is not generally an insult or an indignity; it is an expression of envy."
My apologies to J.D. Vance if he mentioned this court decision in his book, "Hillbilly Elegy." Whatever the case, it's worth looking up and reading the entire decision.
1
The growth of cities does not occur in a vacuum. Much of the wealth extracted from rural America is contributing to urban growth centers. Much wealth extraction comes by way of declining health of the land and people. And fewer people on the land to give testimony to all the externalities that come from putting the industrial trough before the urban masses. Feed up America, your consumption comes at a high cost to the land. Cheap food and corn ethanol in your tanks kill. Let the sacrifice continue by your ignorance of where your food derives.
2
Animals know to move when their current surroundings become inhospitable. Why can't humans have such common sense?
RE: Every other advanced country provides universal health care.
And many many of these countries those in Europe, and Israel, Japan, South Korea, etc. have their defense paid for by the US taxpayer. Just today Germany said they will not meet their very meager NATO spending target.
2
Sincere condolences...
Mr. Krugman -- Apparently David Brooks just had lunch with 15 people in Nebraska City, Nebraska. Have you visited a small town or a farm and talked to people there recently? I am a liberal Democrat with two Ivy League degrees, living in the rural Midwest. Some of what you believe about the Midwest might be true. Much of it sounds like the prejudices and ignorance that many of my neighbors find amusing and silly in coastal pundits.
2
The larger point I take from this Paul
Is the nosediving lack of support..
and Vanishing way of life
...
If I look at. rural America.. and try to get a feel for just what is in store for it ?.
w a shrinking population ..while still a vast geographical area..(our heartlands)
I do wonder ,,what will become of it/them ?
As a refugee from the Midwest (After university, I took a job in California and later moved to Europe.), I have for many years tried to figure out what it is about the Midwest and Midwesterners that disgusts me so much. Is it that Midwesterners can’t imagine that ordinary real people live ordinary real lives in other parts of the world? Maybe it is the widespread mental disconnect, e.g. “I like my Medicare and I don’t think the Federal Government ought to be messing around with healthcare.” Then there is, for lack of a better term, cultural laziness, which manifests itself in the lack of flowers and vegetable gardens and the widespread acceptance of of convenience foods like potato flakes instead of real potatoes. Oh yes, and there is the hypocrisy - they criticize the way foreigners and immigrants speak English and then vote for presidents who are incapable speaking a complete and comprehensible sentence in that same language. My list goes on and on, I just don't have time to write it all down.
3
Hmm, so rural folks are dumb and backwards, eh? What would urban areas do without the food we grow, the beef we all enjoy, or the milk all our kids drink? What’s the witty comeback for that? We’re one country and should work together. Are all of us not smart enough to do that?
3
Most food in the USA comes from California.
1
Evolutionary forces will ‘solve’ rural America. The old folks will die off. The young will leave for greater opportunity in our metropolitan areas. A disproportionate number of those who stay behind will self-destruct; committing suicide by gun at an alarming rate; dying from drug overdoses at a similarly alarming clip; contributing to their own misery by insisting on voting for politicians who sell fear, superstition and scapegoats to distract them, while cutting taxes on the rich, which in turn provides the pretext for slashing the budget for education, healthcare, jobs programs, environmental regulation and remediation, infrastructure investment and all of the other programs for the common good that rural America desperately needs to pull out of its tailspin.
And all they’ll get to show for it is a bunch of stupid red hats - Made in China, no less. And the fleeting pleasure of barking ‘lock her up’ and ‘build the wall’ when the circus comes to town.
2
Why doesn't Dr Krugman make any comment/remark/statement about industrial agriculture? Those giant corporations that suck up as many small private farms as they can by cutting prices to drive small owners into bankruptcy.
And what about Tyson and Perdue? after buying up smalls farms, they then them into large chicken farms which are then leased back to small farmers with constricting re conditions, feed, etc but for which the lessee gets very low return.
Any chance that these corporate giants may be leading the way to the poverty of local farmers and voters????
2
I searched this article in vain for "food." How can you devote a whole column to rural America without mentioning its product, essential to all of us?
3
Most of that food is produced now by giant corporations. That in fact has led to a huge part of rural America’s suffering. It is not the small farmer owning and directly profiting anymore. It hasn’t been for a very long time. The small farmer is now just the serf to the big corporation and rural America continues to serve suffer. This is one of the big economic factors the author alludes to that is happening and cannot be changed. A huge part of corporate farming is automation now. So during the next 10 years they will need fewer and fewer people to produce our food. Until the land could be farmed with just machines and we will still have our food and the corporations will still have their money and the people of rural America will still be poor and still be in misery and their problems will not be solved it is a big issue and there are no clear solutions. A lot of it is cultural and the people there have to want a solution and the author hinted that but didn’t directly say that they have to make the decision that they have to want change because the “urban elite” can want rural America to be successful until the cows come home and throw money at it all day but the rest of the world has proven that’s not a successful solution. Take it or leave it, but these are the thoughts of the daughter, grand-daughter, great-granddaughter...etc etc you get the point, of a farmer, I.E. the first generation to finally wash my hands of it, use my business degree and leave rural NC.
@Donna S...If you are referring to Florida and California maybe. The Mississippi delta ok. Farming pigs and chickens has become industrial; but cash grain in the Midwest not so much.
Donna, you've got far better family credentials than I do, but I still believe the column was disrespectful and lacking in one crucial element. Liberals should not dismiss these folks again. And, Paul, I almost always agree with you.
Mr Krugman, thank you for writing such an insightful article, when no one wants to face the reality.
As an academic healthcare provider, I’ve worked in university hospitals surrounded by mostly rural communities and then ones in metropolises!
One gets to see folks from the gutter, from the bowels of society, to your average farmer to a home maker, to well educated upper class to CEOs, and all of them talk what they’re facing.
You have surmised it brilliantly.
If something is not done to better educate the rural population, especially health insurance support, it is downright frightening what is happening in rural America. I’ve seen town after town decimated not just by failing crops but by a younger generation lost to drugs, alcohol and promiscuity. The pain for the older generation unbearable.
I’ll give you a small example... our hospital had shortage of fentanyl, but it was being sold two streets away in a alley becuase we kept getting fentanyl ODs in the ER!! And everyone of those ODs was a man between ages of 21-35 years.
Part time jobs, small business, low wage jobs... somethings got to give.
I also learned that rural America feels itself pitted against the ones who live in cities and think that they’re being looked down upon, pitied and considered inferior, ignorant and stupid. Also when HClinton called them deproables she just nailed her own coffin that day. That alone confirmed in their minds what they had suspected all along, they ARE considered “less”.
4
@Ash.
"Also when HClinton called them deproables she just nailed her own coffin that day. That alone confirmed in their minds what they had suspected all along, they ARE considered “less”.
Except that she didn't, and what she actually said was deliberately taken out of context by right-wing propagandist media sources. I wish people would stop repeating this lie.
Good article.. There is vast network of right wing media in rural areas. Start with Limbaugh since the 1990's to today where even crazier people are ruling the airwaves. Then go to Fox News.. The dumbing down of rural voters has been happening for a long time.
2
Hillary and Obama wanted to bring new Green jobs and re-training to coal country. They accused her/him of wanting to kill coal and voted for Trump - and coal plants are still closing.
Can't cure stupid.
3
Rural America is dying .... Literally ... Northern Wisconsin gets older yet less welcoming to immigrants and others who do not fit into their world view. Not that it really matters to them. Literally, many of these folks will not live to see their dream of America realized nor its consequences.
1
Industrial Hemp could be a solution. Glad to see Trump is on board for that one. We now agree on one thing.
3
There is no reversing the irrelevance of rural America to the country except at the ballot box. Already the culturally dead and dying control the government. This will not end well.
2
Mr Krugman: No one knows how to reps to rural dstress?
Are you kidding me?
What about rural electrification,TVA, and New Deal agencies like the CCC, SCS, WPA, hydropower, irrigation, highway and other farmland supports?
GREEN NEW DEAL!
2
Why do rural voters continue to vote against their own best interests and embrace Trumpism, you ask? I grew up in rural Illinois. Although I am mostly proud of my state, home to Senators Durbin and Duckworth, a state where abortions are within reach, a blue state, I live in a hotbed of conservatism. Fundamentalist Christians, prejudice, gun psychosis, these things drive these people to Trump and his ilk. They don't mind being dumb muscle for the top one percent if it means they please their ideological God or are not impeded in their relationship with guns. In a word: Ignorance.
Democrats should point out to the members of Trump's rural base that, all of his promises notwithstanding, their Great White Dope has done little if anything to turn conditions around in their part of the country. Job creation is happening alright- in the same places it which it was happening during the Obama years (i.e., in the cities, the suburbs, in Texas and the Sun Belt). Those half-deserted communities in the Rust Belt that The Donald promised to resuscitate appear to be no better off now than they were when he was elected. The coal mines? They're still dead and they're not coming back. A Democrat in the White House may not have all of the answers, but (s)he won't lie to these people and (s)he will have their backs.
3
Stop trying to 'help'. Allow us the freedom to live as we see fit. Don't give us 'things' - Medicare for all, education quotas and mandates and support, don't give us food and all the things that urban populations want like reparations, affirmative action, requirements on how we can farm, work, share, love, grow old, raise children, or anything else. Leave us the responsibility of freedom and of liberty. Go away, live in NYC and SF and CHI and LA, and don't stop as you fly over. Live your lives without telling us and coercing us and forcing us to live how it should benefit us in your view. Respect us and our lives. Write for your papers and blogs and flip your houses and order organic ferret food from Amazon and respect that we drive to Wal Mart for a Saturday shopping. Bye.
1
Vast areas of uninhabited or very low populated areas can only be a good thing, for non-human animals, plants and the Environment. Save the Planet, let it go wild.
1
"... powerful economic forces that nobody knows how to stop." Please, Professor Krugman, you know better than to say this. You haven't read Professor Domhoff's 'Who Rules America?'?
1
You might want to mention the real villain ... Big Ag. If we truly appreciated the importance of good quality food and the real costs of bad food, we would simply legislate Big Ag out of business. Charge them for their pollution. Prosecute them for their meddling in the democratic process (the inaptly named right to farm legs) , break up the Big Ag giants, and most importantly cut them off from the Farm bill. NOT ROCKET SCIENCE! Wake up America!
3
Rural Americans rarely encounter immigrants? Krugman has got to be kidding. Who does farm work out here? The low level manufacturing and construction? Seriously, how could an educated person say that? Has Krugman ever stepped foot outside a city? Does the ivory tower even have windows?
1
I am always told that liberals need to talk more to those Trump supporters in the fly-over states and understand them.
I never hear people say the Trump supporters in the fly-over states need to talk to liberals and understand them.
I have been talking to those Trump supporters for many years.
I still have neighbors who believe the Clintons had Vince Foster murdered.
And every pro-life evangelical I talked to uses birth control.
2
I fled rural New Jersey four decades ago and never looked back. The problem with small towns isn't jobs. The small township I grew up in was heavily misogynist, deeply racist, and homophobic. When I left I never looked back. Seattle has been my home for over 40 years.
2
Maybe we should encourage global warming so that the coastal cities will be uninhabitable and everyone will have to move inland.
There has always been high migration from countryside to city but formerly this was masked by high rural birth rates
2
Trump has done nothing for rural America
It's called choice.
Democrats are supposed to be for choice.
Many living in rural America don't want to live in dirty, dangerous, crowded, and polluted cities.
Many living in rural America don't like the culture of the big cities.
This is their choice. Why can't Liberals understand that.
Liberals may visit rural America and when they get back into the privacy of their caves have nothing nice to say about those folk.
See now Liberals are looking for votes, its that season.
Now they will look for votes in the black community too.
After the general election, for around two years ,Liberals care not for rural America or the black vote.
Don't forget Abortion.
Many in rural America are pro choice.
They chose life.
No matter what a Liberal politician or columnist has to say if a person is truly pro life , they will not vote for a pro abortion Democrat.
2
Teaching democratic principles and tolerance based on our constitution might really help rural America. People in rural America would then understand that their problems are not caused by black and brown people and will not be solved by a dictatorship that supports white nationalism and the .01 percent.
2
The urban areas are great for most people. But when there is talk about taking the rural people and telling them they must move or starve... i could compare this to telling the native americans their way of life was over and you must now go to reservations and send your kids for cultural re-education at boarding schools.
You don’t have to look to Germany for examples... the white man has been practicing what you preach since the 1600’s.
Noah Smith recently addressed the problem of rural America on the Bloomberg web site. He used evidence with some small towns to support the view that two things help: immigrants and a thriving community college. If Smith is right, then maybe the two things deserve a broader implementation.
1
About 20 years ago I was editor of a newspaper in Wichita Falls, Texas, and a team of my reporters and editors did a series of stories about the decline in the rural population around that North Texas city. A key problem at the time was that farmers' and small-town kids were moving away after high school. There was nothing for them to do. They went to big cities and never returned. Many of those small towns are now dead, and, you're correct, there's really nothing to be done that will revive them.
2
you can't provide a safety net that they won't vote for.... beyond that, there is another factor in the shrinking population. young people, almost always the most creative, want to be somewhere where they are truly free to be who they want to be. this exodus has been slow moving but self perpetuating. I grew up in a relatively progressive town in Central IL but I could not wait to get out and pursue my dreams without small minded people judging me. this type of migration is as common today as it was in my youth .
3
Interesting but we actually live in the midwest. Let us start with agriculture data. In 1980, with the available equipment and seed sources, the average grain farmer fed 18 other people. In 2016, that same grain farmer fed 43 people with less than half the amount of human labor used in 1980. The actual amount of land farmed by a farmer (including family farms) has doubled but almost all of that is rented from neighboring farms. USDA data on farm size is a misleading statistic anymore. Second, farm country is old man country and farmers are one of the oldest occupational groups demographically. Third, look at natural resource conservation in the farm bill. Just about any USDA office can tell you that funding for conservation money is much less than demand. Fourth, regardless of endless revisions of the farm bill, taxpayers still pay over 40% of the subsidy for insurance and other parts of the farm bill. Lastly, farmers out here forgot which party has been the supporter of the Farm bill since its inception in 1938, Democrats which is why it is called the Democrat Farm Labor party in the great plains and midwest. Alas, they have bought into the Republican and Trump meme and will still be wearing their red hats when they go to the auction of their farms. As to their children, they go away to colleges and universities and almost half never return. Their labor is not needed on the farm anymore.
7
"I’m sure that some rural readers will be angered by everything I’ve just said, seeing it as typical big-city condescension. But that’s neither my intention nor the point. I’m simply trying to get real. We can’t help rural America without understanding that the role it used to play in our nation is being undermined by powerful economic forces that nobody knows how to stop."
More to the point, we can't help people who refuse to help themselves. You can do all the "promoting economic development with public investment, employment subsidies, and possibly job guarantees" you want, but they're simply going to call it "socialism," shout it down, and insist that it's all a plot to give their hard-earned money to the blacks.
4
Trump has created a new (or exposed an old?) rural America. More than ever, the republicans have convinced the rural areas that they represent the “real” America, and that their views on everything from the economy to gay marriage represent the true American values. More than ever, when I talk to friends and their children, they won’t move to red/republican areas of the country for fear of being harshly judged or vilified for their beliefs. I’m not sure this is a fair assessment of what life might be like, but it is the reality we are facing. A smart, college-educated nephew just moved to inner city Detroit. A much more desirable move for democrats than a move to any rural “trump” town. It will be a long time before urban American starts heading back to rural, white, Trump, America. Just like it will be a long time before west Germans will move to the old East Germany.
2
@Michael T: The US Constitution's distortions of apportionment definitely internally segregate the US.
2
Yes, good to really look at this issue.
We should all have to take a class in high school on micro-economics and urban economics. We need to understand this better.
All, or at least most, ideas should be looked at; the problem so immense. Country folks aren't dumb or lazy, but they are in a downward spiral with urban centers overflowing. We're very late to addressing this.
If energy can become much cheaper and decentralized (solar, wind, etc.), this could help greatly. Smaller and slower life in our vast rural areas could continue if our will and focus is there. I live in a city of 80,000 in Arkansas; but, we have the largest university in the state (@27,000 students) are the county seat. That helps stabilize us and surrounding small cities.
Our wages are very low for most workers. We too are becoming more economically segregated. This issue is also needing more focus and energy. The idea of community needs some sense of equality of standing, status, respect.
We can do anything. We must have the will to help, and must move away from the dire straits of more greed and selfish gain.
That's actually more fundamental than city-rural issues.
I used to feel sorry for rural poor folks in Appalachia having traveled through many parts of it all my life. Not anymore.
They chain smoke, hold onto an insidious coal mining culture, give into opioids easily, blame blacks and immigrants for all their troubles, and are hoodwinked by the very people who harm them the most: coal barons, the Koch Brothers and Trump. And now they represent a core part of the con man's base, and hence complicit in wrecking our country's social fabric and institutions.
They are bringing the entire nation down with them. Shame on them. They should be deplored.
The great public servant who labeled them "deplorable" was just speaking the truth. And truth is refreshing, lest we forget.
8
The real problem with these rural people cannot be defined or addressed without looking at the billionaire class. The real problem is that America has become a corporate "pathocracy," a corporatocracy, run by a billionaire class of malignant pathological actors from big business to banking to real estate to government. These people are destroying our nation and they are using propaganda to target the heartland so they can grab and maintain power. Why? Because of the electoral system and Senate votes.
What happened to farms in the heartland? Instead of government subsidizing human food grain and produce crops, they focused on corn to feed livestock and make corn syrup byproducts (ie, junk foods). They allowed Monsanto to destroy small farms and plant GMOs. Big ag destroyed local farms, centralized their operations, and hired illegal workers at slave wages and no benefits. Pharmaceutical companies were more than happy to oblige the newly unemployed farmers with addictive pain killers...
The sociopathic corporate leaders and their minion politicians are a cancer. We should be laser focused on getting rid of them. Start by removing gerrymandering and the electoral college. Then get rid of Citizen's United. Corporations are not people -- if they were they'd be locked away in prisons and mental institutions.
3
Urban existence is a place to live. Rural existence is a lifestyle.
And the problem is that urbanites have imposed their supposed values over rural lives.
Prayer is gone from schools. The entire Bible has been erased from the public square. Can't spank our kids; can't even teach them what you feel is important in the schools anymore.
Urban dwellers demand that their Holy concepts of diversity and inclusion be embraced when many of those activities are considered perversions among those with rural lives.
Essentially the process involves taking the lowest common denominator and imposing it via an overwhelming urban electorate and liberal activist judges.
Urbanites demand that the rurals change their ways to conform even when those ways have suited folks for generations. Government regulations have shuttered whole industries and given preferential treatment to huge corporations, many of whom have no need for rural folks.
What the urbanites fail to understand is that when the entire thing erupts -- which it will -- those who are rural will win the "war" without needing to do a thing. All we will do is sit back, fail to provide those "dirty hands" services to the urbans, and within two or three weeks urbanites will start killing themselves for food, medicines, and fuels.
The chickens will come home to roost since the rurals are the only ones who will still know how to raise them
@Steve Crisp
" Prayer is gone from schools."
I was brought up in small towns in the Pacific Northwest & the Southwest & never was exposed to prayer in schools. Don't make blanket statements about rural America as if the Bible Belt extends everywhere.
1
I understand and hear what you are saying regarding how many in the rural U.S. feel that their values are not the values of those in power and on the coasts, and not only that, but that their values are considered to be “wrong” in those quarters. Diversity certainly needs to include people of diverse faiths and beliefs. Finding that middle ground is hard work.
I do want to take gentle issue with something you said, and something I hear regularly from others, about “government regulation.” You also say that corporations have been given big breaks. I must point out that the farm lobby in this country is very powerful, for better or worse, and that farmers big and small are recipients of many regulatory and other benefits conferred by “government regulation.”
The problems are real, but I don’t think too much onerous regulation in the rural areas is the cause. And yes, I live in a rural area. And worked in a government regulatory agency for 30 years.
@Michigan Native
You are so nice and sweet to respond to a person who clearly gets his perspective from Fox Fake News. Thank you so much. I tried to be that way after the election in 2016, but I have given up. There's no point.
What Krugman is describing is the cold invisible hand of capitalism, the same capitalism that rural American praises in contrast to its fear and loathing of anything called socialism. And so it goes.
3
They do not vote on the issues listed in this column. They vote on guns, God and, gays. They take succor in supporting candidates that gives them what they want on social issues. They value the ethnocentrism and religiousity that their preferred candidates espouse. That is how a rural person living in substandard housing driving a rusted out car supports billionaires.
2
What's the elephant in the room you're dancing around?
It's the Electoral College. It's two U.S. senators from every state.
If we only had the proportional legislature of the House of Representatives and simple majority voting for the presidency, with no anti-egalitarian upper house, the problem this column describes would not exist. There would not be the huge disparities in quality of education, medical care, and opportunity that we now see in different pockets of the country. We would not have a Republican elephant so far removed in policies and goals from a Democratic donkey, because extremist slash-and-burn Republicans would have so many fewer places to gain a national foothold.
The problem is fundamentally not a lack of technical solutions. It is the anti-egalitarian political obstacle of the Electoral College and U.S. Senate. We are only looking desperately for impossible technical solutions, because progress for the country as a whole is blocked by this political obstacle, which has been so deftly exploited by agribusiness, the fossil fuel industry, and its corporate ilk.
2
Without two U.S. senators from every state, we would not be trying to prop up the power bases of, or appeasing, senators from low population states, and we could adopt more effective federal policies. It should not be a concern, for example, if such states depopulate and some of their towns die.
No, there are no technical solution's to reversing "heartland" decline. That "heartland" is an obsolete myth in an urbanized America.
I used to feel sorry for rural poor folks in Appalachia having traveled through many parts of it all my life. Not anymore.
They chain smoke, hold onto an insidious coal mining culture, give into opioids easily, blame blacks and immigrants for all their troubles, and are hoodwinked by the very people who harm them the most: coal barons, the Koch Brothers and Trump. And now they represent a core part of the con man's base, and hence complicit in wrecking our country's social fabric and institutions.
They are bringing the entire nation down with them. Shame on them. They should be deplored.
The great public servant who labeled them "deplorable" was just speaking the truth. And truth is refreshing, lest we forget.
1
As one raised in a southeast Arizona farm town, pop. 1,200 in the 1940s and '50s, (now <600), Krugman is spot on. It's a H-U-U-G-E problem.
Theodore Roosevelt knew what to do. Why don’t you start with him. Agricultural centers began to decline at the end of the 19th century. They did not fare well through the industrial revolution, and the technological revolution has done the same thing. Instead of innovating, these areas are complaining. They need investment. Opportunity. Maybe Mr. Trump would like to put his money where his mouth is? Just kidding, we all know he won’t, and he’s not doing a thing to help... in fact more jobs and farms have fallen than have been gained in rural America. Fact.
I can tell what will keep investment away. Racism, among other neanderthal ways of thinking and doing.
I know that many readers are upset by their perception that the Electoral College is unfair to those in urban areas. However, their lack of concern for the *lives* of rural Americans, as evidenced in the most popular comments, is frankly disgusting.
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The individuals that comprise rural America are dying on the vine. They are on the line of fire from very poor Governmental and political decisions, such as; lack of good Education, very poor Healthcare, the undermining of Social Security, Pharmaceutical drug marketing and a host of other problems.
The Republicans have fed them a constant flow of abortion, guns, religion and the best proven elixir, "those others are the cause of your problems". They also identified that the control of State and Local Government would give them the ability to continue the Conservative mantra while keeping all the profits for the 1% and Corporations.
The coup d'etat was trump, the con man who brought the circus to town, much like Ringling Brothers in the beginning of the twentieth century. Who doesn't admire the bully striking out at the perceived "enemy", elitists and liberals?
“HOMER, N.Y. — The fears weigh on Mike McMahon: If one of his undocumented workers gets a traffic ticket, it could prompt an immigration audit of his entire farm. If another gets detained by immigration agents at a roadside checkpoint or in a supermarket parking lot, the rest may flee. And if his undocumented work force disappears overnight, there is no one to replace them.
“It keeps me up at night,” said Mr. McMahon, who owns a dairy farm south of Syracuse. “There are people out there who just say, ‘Send them all back and build a wall.’ But they would be facing empty shelves in the grocery store if that were to happen.”
It has long been an open secret in upstate New York that the dairy industry has been able to survive only by relying on undocumented immigrants for its work force. Now, this region has become a national focal point in the debate over President Trump’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants and their role in agriculture.”
NYTimes 3/18/2019
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I live in a small Midwestern farming town. I've lived in NYC, San Fransisco and Los Angeles to name a few before I moved to my small town.
Let's stop bashing "flyover" country, okay? Lots of people choose to live in the middle. Not everyone wants the hustle and bustle of living on a coast. Some people love the land and the easier lifestyle. It doesn't mean they are stupid. It just means your desires are not necessarily in alignment with theirs.
The problem is religion. It's just that simple. I talk to people who voted for Trump. Many of them hate him. He embarrasses them. It's clear. But he's pushing their agenda. So they vote for him. I'm not talking about the crazies here. The people with arsenals in their basement and some lunatic idea they can defeat the most powerful standing army in history. I'm talking about regular people.
You get "GOD" out of the equation and you'll see a lot of things change.
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@mj: Failure to enforce "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" may ultimately destroy the US.
Urban pundits take it for granted that cities are doing swell, but my experience with them includes ubiquitous homelessness and vagrancy; rampant, public drug use; high crime; prostitution; garbage and litter; extreme poverty; a high rate of dependence on public benefits; unaffordable, crowded living spaces; stifling traffic; areas where English is not spoken; racial strife; and so much more that you don't find on the Love Boat. Then they tell us that we can be like them too, if only we study hard and ditch our bad habits.
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If we can consider breaking up American corporations because of their Intellectual Property why not consider breaking up Agri-business based on its physical property. Give the land back to the people and help them with the business of farming.
I know this isn’t practical. For the same reasons Donald Trump is president, breaking up large agricultural and energy companies won’t happen. And, oh, the cries of “Socialism!”
But people are killing themselves over this while the rest of us watch, scratch our heads, and ask “what can we do?”
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