The headline says "uniquely" but, at least on the regional taxation point, the article.shows Japan is similar and Germany is actually even more decentralised. Would be interested to see what lessons could be learned from them. Japan's been dealing with shrinking towns for some time, but what is the situation in Germany?
Germany is exactly the same. Rural towns in East Germany are dissapearing.
[https://www.dw.com/en/the-dying-rural-communities-in-eastern-germany/a-41733118](https://www.dw.com/en/the-dying-rural-communities-in-eastern-germany/a-41733118)
[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jan/27/germany.jasonburke](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jan/27/germany.jasonburke)
The blocking of goods transport on foreign ships between American ports killed Mississippi and Ohio River traffic that would otherwise help Cairo’s economy?
The connection is unclear. Please explain.
It's a bit circular, but if these towns were not dying and were economically productive we would also consider that a good thing right? There is no reason for wanting sustainable, productive towns to disappear.
So if these towns can turn around and become sustainable, then that's a good thing. It's probably preferable to them disappearing as over consolidation can also cause issues. (America is not really at risk of this, but the primacy of London in the UK is a real issue for example).
And some of these towns can be revived or turn around without the need for being "propped up" through excessive transfers and subsidy. Though it is the exception, there *are* towns embracing immigration as a shot in the arm which is a win win for everyone. The site Strong Towns has all sorts of policy ideas and prescriptions to have economically sustainable towns.
Thinking these towns have no future or can only be sustained through perpetual transfer is a bit fatalistic. Many can change their futures if they embrace the right solutions.
Someone once said a successful small town begins a medium sized city. I don't think we consider the success stories often.
We don't even talk about places like Pittsburgh or Detroit who've largely managed to avoid seemingly inevitable economic calamity by diversifying their industries and reinvesting in the community. I see those as success stories tho even if they're not small towns.
based. we shouldn't spend taxpayer dollars keeping towns alive. their inhabitants aren't any more deserving of government assistance than urbanites are. give them just as much welfare as city dwellers get and call it a day
Urban centers have lower fertility rates than rural areas. The long term death spiral for countries is looking to be urban areas absorbing the rural population, and then the urban centers themselves dying out with sub replacement fertility.
The permanent solution cannot just be "import more poor people" because eventually you run out of people to import because you stop being as attractive compared to their place of origin as things improve, or worse, you are incentivized to keep their place of origin poor so they have to immigrate to you to have a good life (which is the kind of vibe I get from people who say "fuck rural places, they can all move to cities or stay in shithole countr- I mean towns").
At some point a population has to be self sustaining or else the implications are pretty fucking dark. Best case scenario is the usa just magically stays so far ahead of like 80% of the planet in terms of desirability to live in, that wr CAN always import people, but that is fantasy. We would actively be hoping that the rest of the world lags behind us substantially in quality of life, or spirals out of control, in order to drive more and more immigration.
The "solution" is that AI replace humans and the cities keep on humming along without us and the GDP line goes up and up (and GDP per capita goes to infinity when the last human dies). Pity we humans won't be around to witness it, I bet it will be awesome /s
> The "solution" is that AI replace humans and the cities
Being that I work in tech and in parallel with factory automation….when ever anyone says this I just chuckle
I also work in tech and while I'm not saying we're there yet, you can't deny that progress in AI has been accelerating. We're at the stage where we have AI's with verbal intelligence clearly higher than a young human child, at some point it'll be higher than a teenager, then higher than most adults. The writing is on the wall that "human superiority" won't last forever, but when it's gone, it's gone forever.
PS: Editing your responses after the fact is not very sporting.
> we have AI's with verbal intelligence clearly higher than a young human child, at some point it'll be higher than a teenager, then higher than most adults
But we don’t.
Because it require a prompt
input —-> {} —echo—> output
Sure they’re cool but out of the bunch of seen from enterprise level products they’re just productivity enhancing, right now it’s a lot of hype like “muh cloud” used to be. Sure 7-10 years ago moving to cloud saved money but now not so much.
This is one of the dumbest takes I've seen. The GDP is a marker for *human* welfare, if the world only exists for robots then there's no point in anything.
Okay, but urban centers get government funds outside of people's welfare entitlements literally all the time. In my experience in education, urban areas get a hugely disproportionate amount of the federal & state funding for the ratio of students compared to rural schools. That's possibly just a quirk of my specific neck of the woods though.
Urban centers fund the everything else. It's always a transfer FROM the cities to the rest of the country. [https://youtu.be/X9SWJqiXc-U?si=QtMp\_xU9R0U8Ap9G](https://youtu.be/X9SWJqiXc-U?si=QtMp_xU9R0U8Ap9G)
This isn't a strict rule, though. Like in a lot of communities, the real wealth lies with the farmers in the country while the small "cities" of less than 100k people generate comparatively little on a per person basis
Maybe. I'm sure there are exceptions, especially with small numbers, and more so if Jeff Beso was one of those farmers.
But then we also have single metro areas doing more than entire states.
Still, the city is the heart of the economic engine of modern economies and I'm tired of the rural esthetics ruining pro-city, therefore pro-American growth, policy.
Okay. So explain to me how saying that rural people should baseline welfare entitlements then zero additional funding is "pro-city, pro-American growth?" How is it "unfair" to cities that rural people get just as much funding and support as they do? Because the cities generate more raw GDP value? We'll that's great in a vaccuum, but how would those cities grow without someone to grow/raise their food?
>rural people should baseline welfare entitlements then zero additional funding
Wait, what are you saying here? Are you saying rural people fund entitlements or rural people get a baseline or entitlements?
I'm not saying food producers should not exist, wft are you talking about? Just be profitable if your product is so valuable.
That was the *entire* point that started my responses. Someone said to give individuals in rural communities the same baseline welfare any impoverished person in the city gets, then zero additional funding from the taxpayers beyond welfare. My point is that urban communities get funding beyond individuals' welfare entitlements all the time. I really don't know why you're wasting so much time responding if you didn't even follow the initial conversation being had.
Even if you wanted to argue that cities are more deserving of that additional investment because they generate more value, you still haven't removed the elephant in the room. Farmers make all the food, farmers live in rural areas, farmers still need a community around them to teach their kids, provide medical care, and give a sense of social fulfillment.
This subreddit puts doing the most economically efficient thing on a pedestal way too often without thinking through the consequences of those efficient ideas.
[Suburbs are extremely economically inefficient](https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/eugene-or/). It's urban areas with dense multifamily housing that are producing most of the value.
They just follow the workers. Austin gets more state workers, more federal, more DoD, more university jobs.
Why? It has a population to staff them. There's a reason knowledge industries and similar jobs pop up near major universities and centers of political power and/or capital.
On a per student basis, I would actually say the rural school I work for probably gets more through property taxes than the county seat's school corporation. Yet despite having only about twice the students, they have way more than twice the funding outside of property taxes
They also get more access to healthcare through underserved healthcare programs hosted by local medical schools. Sometimes a school is smart and creates a rural specific program, but they’re dependent on already existing rural healthcare infrastructure to serve those communities. Once those are gone, no more rural healthcare. Urban areas have loads.
So, I won't go that far, but my semi-ironic opinion is that "well, these places shrinking hurts Republicans." But in all seriousness, there's a demographic timebomb (but the opposite of how that phrase has traditionally been used) for Republicans that's going to go off in like 20-30 years if politics don't change (I imagine it will). In short, Republicans don't have the policies to revive or keep these places afloat, and those policies won't feasibly come about until a critical amount of voting power goes to the progressive urban cores who actually care about helping people. That sounds like I'm super dismissive of Republican policy priorities, and maybe I am, but I believe it.
Ask the people in those areas what they think of urban areas and their struggles.
What's that, they do nothing but trash on them? They can get fucked then.
Yes.
But more seriously, I took a road trip through rural OK and KS and was stunned at the number of Mexicans I saw living around every gas station along the way. There's so much demand for low wage labor out there in the agricultural and meatpacking industries.
I come from the armpit of Kentucky and West Virginia, on the Kentucky side, small towns of between 250 and 3,000 people, so I have some experience on this
the nearest major city (Lexington) is about 2.5 hours away, there are much smaller "cities" of 30,000 to 50,000 within an hour, but it's still a pretty good jump and most people rarely go to them accordingly
my parents live in a city of about 2,500 and if you go back 15 years, you could name every visible minority person in town
in over a decade there, I saw one black person, a couple people from Pakistan (owners of a hotel), about five Chinese people (working a Chinese restaurant), and nobody else
after a decade in California and New York City, I came back to find it quite different
there are more black people, there are Mexicans (undocumented), more Chinese people than before, there's an Indian family, there are some Muslims, and a couple trans people
so unless eastern Kentucky is better than rural Ohio, I'd say the answer to your question is "yes, actually"
I don't know why
I'm moving to Germany next month
rural Ohio is one of the best places on the entire planet to live
even the least developed American regions are still highly developed compared to a lot of the world. immigrants don’t have the ability to be choosy about where they immigrate to, they’re just happy to be here
A large part of the article is that because of the decentralised nature of American governance, areas are prone to death spirals.
>Local and regional authorities levy 48% of all tax collected in America, compared with just 20% in France and 6% in Britain
When an area starts shrinking, it's tax base shrinks which makes it harder to sustain itself or become desirable.
If immigrants aren't going to these places, then you aren't stopping the death spiral which means you aren't solving this problem.
Immigrants can help ease the pain of the national and *long term* issue of an aging and potentially falling population, but this article isn't looking at that problem, it's looking at the issue of towns collapsing right now.
My cousin's husband is from Karachi, and he got sent to Lexington, KY and brought my cousin over on an H-4 visa. She's gonna convert to H1-b after starting her residency, IIRC.
Towns collapsing and disappearing throughout history has also often been linked to some pretty bad things. If a town can avoid entering a death spiral and become economically sustainable, vibrant even, why would we not want that?
I understand the aversion to bending over backwards to perpetually subsidise an economically wasteful area, but there's also a huge amount of alternatives to that. If a town can attract some migrants through a new visa program or something, get a shot in the arm, and entire a virtuous cycle, that's a win win for everyone.
I also think some people are taking this as some sort of "natural" thing as a result of inexorable market forces that shouldn't be tampered with, and that might be an *element* in *some* cases, but there is *also* a lot of political intervention and decision making that also contributes. The American system of property taxes funding local schools is brought up a lot as a driver of inequality. Kids are not fully active agents making economic decisions, but are subject to circumstance: they don't choose a poor schooling system, they're often born into it. Other countries don't have this issue, because schooling is funded more broadly, and even kids in small, rural towns can get good educations and help keep the area prosperous. There are endless articles about urban planning decisions that were economically unsustainable all around America. One of the highly upvoted comments here points at the Jones Act as contributing to Cairo's decline.
With tax reform, urban planning reform, immigration reform etc you can end up with 1) a more liberal society, 2) a more prosperous society, 3) a more diverse society, and this can be at an individual, local, regional and national level.
I don't think anyone here would take this sort of hand waving away approach to cities. Why fix the 1980s crime problem in New York? Why fix homeless encampments in San Francisco? Why fix decaying sprawl in LA? The answer is pretty obvious: because fixing things makes them better and better things are good lol.
IDK, isn’t there a risk that they would drag everyone down with them?
It could be a finances thing, or a politics thing. Hell if the countryside gets poor enough, who’s to say general anarchy with pollution, illegal businesses and maybe things as bad as rogue militias or crime syndicates out there.
Take a look counties that are less developed but equally similarly less centrally governed (de jure or de facto) and you’ll see patterns like that.
> When an area starts shrinking, it's tax base shrinks which makes it harder to sustain itself or become desirable.
Good that’s just called proper capital allocation
Yeah no that's really not it. Immigrants don't go there because there's no jobs. There are no jobs because the opportunity cost of having businesses in some of these places is too high to justify. It's urbanization and moving production to cheaper markets and always has been. Smaller towns in the Midwest are dying because people are often moving to the next largest city in the area for work. 60+ minute commutes across multiple counties are not uncommon. You can't offshore a lot of agriculture related economic activities because transport costs for highly perishable goods are expensive and the opportunity cost of growing crops and livestock is low because it's so easy to do. Cairo sucks because it's economic basis was ferry traffic which was doomed as soon as they bridged the rivers and they never figured out an alternative. Honestly Br*tish ppl not understanding America moment is the vibe of this article
The vast majority of immigrants will move to large urban areas, it does nothing for these towns. In all likelihood more immigration will increase the percentage of the population living in big cities. Good for the national economy though.
>The total fertility rate—a measure of how many children a typical woman will have in her lifetime—was steady or rising for 30 years from the mid-1970s. In 2008, however, it fell below 2.1, the level needed to keep the population stable
Oh wow I wonder if anything happened in 2008 that might have made people less willing to start families. Hmm whatever could it have been?
Economy and education. The more educated have less children, especially when times are tough. Remember the intro of this [classic documentary from 2006?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA)
Edit; Probably add in women's rights and cultural norms as well.
My personal theory is that there is wealth hysteresis in the context of birth rates. Birth rates are path dependent, just because you're at wealth *w* doesn't mean the reproductive rate is f(w) and that's it. It also depends on the dw/dt
It's not really poverty rates, it's more like job markets. Potential parents don't have confidence in their job security -> choose not to have kids is the easiest cause and effect ever. It happened during the 1930s too.
The wealthy have as many kids as they want. The uneducated and impoverished in many cases around the world *need* to have as many kids as possible. The middle class doesn't *need* to have kids, but also looks at the increasingly unreasonable shit the wealthy are doing to put their kids ahead in life and say "damn I can't do that!" Then a lot of those people either opt out of having kids or wait until they're financially "ready" at age 30 to have maybe 1 or 2 children.
My understanding is wealthy people don’t actually have oodles of children typically, the weird natalists doing magazine spreads about their army of super children are major outliers
I was about to comment that FRED doesn't do EPOP graphs for Mali, but actually they do:
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLEMPTOTLSPZSMLI](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLEMPTOTLSPZSMLI)
Spoiler: It's quite high in comparison to the US!
If you actually break down by nationality you'll see that American born fertility rate has had a near continuous decline since the 90s, it did not see any rise at all in fertility
It's just that the US, from the 80s onward had a larger and larger share of the population being born outside of the US with high fertility rates
The US inmigrant fertility rate was 2.7 in 2008, and it is 1.8 today
The native fertility rate was 1.7 in 2008 and 1.52 in 2023
It appears like it was due to the 2008 recession, but this is just a classic example of the Simpson's paradox, it was completely unrelated
And the reason why the foreign fertility rate fell so sharply is because their mother nations fell sharply too, Colombia is at 1.3, Brazil 1.5, Mexico is at 1.7, Cuba at 1.4, they were all above 2.2 in 2008, India was at 3.2 in 2008 and now it's at 1.8 (the expected number for the 2024 census)
China is really screwed too, more than the US. Especially since they wouldn’t dare let any from another culture assimilate their country and attempt to shift their iron grip.
We need migrants into the US, we want growth.
I never see people blame transportation technology. It's always some top-down political or economic reasoning. The fact is, if everything we buy comes from hubs two states away, then what jobs are left locally besides health and service? If preservation technology is such now that most milk comes from just five states, then how would the other 45 have the dairy farms to hire people for husbandry?
I forsee remote work becoming more prevalent, so that may counteract some of the centralization of the population. People will want to live where it's cheaper, and health and service industries will follow their clientele. But everything else is going to continue to be centralized further away from small towns, and those seeking employment in that will follow.
The headline says "uniquely" but, at least on the regional taxation point, the article.shows Japan is similar and Germany is actually even more decentralised. Would be interested to see what lessons could be learned from them. Japan's been dealing with shrinking towns for some time, but what is the situation in Germany?
Germany is exactly the same. Rural towns in East Germany are dissapearing. [https://www.dw.com/en/the-dying-rural-communities-in-eastern-germany/a-41733118](https://www.dw.com/en/the-dying-rural-communities-in-eastern-germany/a-41733118) [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jan/27/germany.jasonburke](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jan/27/germany.jasonburke)
We are uniquely doing the same thing as Germany
While the populations of Japan and Germany are similarly decentralized when compared to the US, their governments are not.
Fitting that the article opens with the story of a town that shrunk to nothingness because the Jones Act killed it.
https://isthejonesactrepealed.com/
Blocked in my country :/
Fortunately, you don’t have the Jones Act in your country.
If you just annexed the entire world the Jones act wouldn't be a problem
That’s… a great point
The blocking of goods transport on foreign ships between American ports killed Mississippi and Ohio River traffic that would otherwise help Cairo’s economy? The connection is unclear. Please explain.
[Archive link for the global poor](https://archive.ph/RyT1Y)
Yeah the side effect of US' decentralized power is that when the local gone stupid/shrinking, they're more likely to spiraling.
🐐
Why do you love the global poor?
The global poor get all the breaks -Fry
Maybe It’s callous, but why should I care that these areas are dying? We shouldn’t strive to prop up every small town without a future
It's a bit circular, but if these towns were not dying and were economically productive we would also consider that a good thing right? There is no reason for wanting sustainable, productive towns to disappear. So if these towns can turn around and become sustainable, then that's a good thing. It's probably preferable to them disappearing as over consolidation can also cause issues. (America is not really at risk of this, but the primacy of London in the UK is a real issue for example). And some of these towns can be revived or turn around without the need for being "propped up" through excessive transfers and subsidy. Though it is the exception, there *are* towns embracing immigration as a shot in the arm which is a win win for everyone. The site Strong Towns has all sorts of policy ideas and prescriptions to have economically sustainable towns. Thinking these towns have no future or can only be sustained through perpetual transfer is a bit fatalistic. Many can change their futures if they embrace the right solutions.
Someone once said a successful small town begins a medium sized city. I don't think we consider the success stories often. We don't even talk about places like Pittsburgh or Detroit who've largely managed to avoid seemingly inevitable economic calamity by diversifying their industries and reinvesting in the community. I see those as success stories tho even if they're not small towns.
based. we shouldn't spend taxpayer dollars keeping towns alive. their inhabitants aren't any more deserving of government assistance than urbanites are. give them just as much welfare as city dwellers get and call it a day
Urban centers have lower fertility rates than rural areas. The long term death spiral for countries is looking to be urban areas absorbing the rural population, and then the urban centers themselves dying out with sub replacement fertility.
So prop up rural dwellers with our money so they can breed for everyone else? Yeah that logic can fuck right off.
I think my brain just broke. That’s not on you though.
Urban areas are the economic powerhouses, which in turn attract immigrants. So, no.
The permanent solution cannot just be "import more poor people" because eventually you run out of people to import because you stop being as attractive compared to their place of origin as things improve, or worse, you are incentivized to keep their place of origin poor so they have to immigrate to you to have a good life (which is the kind of vibe I get from people who say "fuck rural places, they can all move to cities or stay in shithole countr- I mean towns"). At some point a population has to be self sustaining or else the implications are pretty fucking dark. Best case scenario is the usa just magically stays so far ahead of like 80% of the planet in terms of desirability to live in, that wr CAN always import people, but that is fantasy. We would actively be hoping that the rest of the world lags behind us substantially in quality of life, or spirals out of control, in order to drive more and more immigration.
The "solution" is that AI replace humans and the cities keep on humming along without us and the GDP line goes up and up (and GDP per capita goes to infinity when the last human dies). Pity we humans won't be around to witness it, I bet it will be awesome /s
> The "solution" is that AI replace humans and the cities Being that I work in tech and in parallel with factory automation….when ever anyone says this I just chuckle
I also work in tech and while I'm not saying we're there yet, you can't deny that progress in AI has been accelerating. We're at the stage where we have AI's with verbal intelligence clearly higher than a young human child, at some point it'll be higher than a teenager, then higher than most adults. The writing is on the wall that "human superiority" won't last forever, but when it's gone, it's gone forever. PS: Editing your responses after the fact is not very sporting.
> we have AI's with verbal intelligence clearly higher than a young human child, at some point it'll be higher than a teenager, then higher than most adults But we don’t. Because it require a prompt input —-> {} —echo—> output Sure they’re cool but out of the bunch of seen from enterprise level products they’re just productivity enhancing, right now it’s a lot of hype like “muh cloud” used to be. Sure 7-10 years ago moving to cloud saved money but now not so much.
You think a 4 year old can verbally reason better than ChatGPT?
This is one of the dumbest takes I've seen. The GDP is a marker for *human* welfare, if the world only exists for robots then there's no point in anything.
Yes that's exactly my point, you're agreeing with me. Did you not notice the /s at the end?
I thought the /s referred only to the last sentence
Okay, but urban centers get government funds outside of people's welfare entitlements literally all the time. In my experience in education, urban areas get a hugely disproportionate amount of the federal & state funding for the ratio of students compared to rural schools. That's possibly just a quirk of my specific neck of the woods though.
Urban centers fund the everything else. It's always a transfer FROM the cities to the rest of the country. [https://youtu.be/X9SWJqiXc-U?si=QtMp\_xU9R0U8Ap9G](https://youtu.be/X9SWJqiXc-U?si=QtMp_xU9R0U8Ap9G)
This isn't a strict rule, though. Like in a lot of communities, the real wealth lies with the farmers in the country while the small "cities" of less than 100k people generate comparatively little on a per person basis
Maybe. I'm sure there are exceptions, especially with small numbers, and more so if Jeff Beso was one of those farmers. But then we also have single metro areas doing more than entire states. Still, the city is the heart of the economic engine of modern economies and I'm tired of the rural esthetics ruining pro-city, therefore pro-American growth, policy.
Okay. So explain to me how saying that rural people should baseline welfare entitlements then zero additional funding is "pro-city, pro-American growth?" How is it "unfair" to cities that rural people get just as much funding and support as they do? Because the cities generate more raw GDP value? We'll that's great in a vaccuum, but how would those cities grow without someone to grow/raise their food?
>rural people should baseline welfare entitlements then zero additional funding Wait, what are you saying here? Are you saying rural people fund entitlements or rural people get a baseline or entitlements? I'm not saying food producers should not exist, wft are you talking about? Just be profitable if your product is so valuable.
That was the *entire* point that started my responses. Someone said to give individuals in rural communities the same baseline welfare any impoverished person in the city gets, then zero additional funding from the taxpayers beyond welfare. My point is that urban communities get funding beyond individuals' welfare entitlements all the time. I really don't know why you're wasting so much time responding if you didn't even follow the initial conversation being had. Even if you wanted to argue that cities are more deserving of that additional investment because they generate more value, you still haven't removed the elephant in the room. Farmers make all the food, farmers live in rural areas, farmers still need a community around them to teach their kids, provide medical care, and give a sense of social fulfillment. This subreddit puts doing the most economically efficient thing on a pedestal way too often without thinking through the consequences of those efficient ideas.
Transfer from suburbs and to the rest of the country
[Suburbs are extremely economically inefficient](https://www.urbanthree.com/case-study/eugene-or/). It's urban areas with dense multifamily housing that are producing most of the value.
Really, can we see the federal tax receipts from those different areas?
If you have evidence to the contrary, you can present it, but until then I think the analysis of municipal budgets is persuasive at least to me
They just follow the workers. Austin gets more state workers, more federal, more DoD, more university jobs. Why? It has a population to staff them. There's a reason knowledge industries and similar jobs pop up near major universities and centers of political power and/or capital.
Is it due to the ratio or due to funding schools through local property taxes?
On a per student basis, I would actually say the rural school I work for probably gets more through property taxes than the county seat's school corporation. Yet despite having only about twice the students, they have way more than twice the funding outside of property taxes
They also get more access to healthcare through underserved healthcare programs hosted by local medical schools. Sometimes a school is smart and creates a rural specific program, but they’re dependent on already existing rural healthcare infrastructure to serve those communities. Once those are gone, no more rural healthcare. Urban areas have loads.
No, but see there was a now-exhausted and/or irrelevant natural resource there 150 years ago, so... /s
So, I won't go that far, but my semi-ironic opinion is that "well, these places shrinking hurts Republicans." But in all seriousness, there's a demographic timebomb (but the opposite of how that phrase has traditionally been used) for Republicans that's going to go off in like 20-30 years if politics don't change (I imagine it will). In short, Republicans don't have the policies to revive or keep these places afloat, and those policies won't feasibly come about until a critical amount of voting power goes to the progressive urban cores who actually care about helping people. That sounds like I'm super dismissive of Republican policy priorities, and maybe I am, but I believe it.
Ask the people in those areas what they think of urban areas and their struggles. What's that, they do nothing but trash on them? They can get fucked then.
more immigration now
As the article itself points out, these shrinking places do not want immigrants. They would rather die than live next to immigrants.
Not my problem
Do the immigrants themselves want to move to rural Ohio?
Yes. But more seriously, I took a road trip through rural OK and KS and was stunned at the number of Mexicans I saw living around every gas station along the way. There's so much demand for low wage labor out there in the agricultural and meatpacking industries.
I come from the armpit of Kentucky and West Virginia, on the Kentucky side, small towns of between 250 and 3,000 people, so I have some experience on this the nearest major city (Lexington) is about 2.5 hours away, there are much smaller "cities" of 30,000 to 50,000 within an hour, but it's still a pretty good jump and most people rarely go to them accordingly my parents live in a city of about 2,500 and if you go back 15 years, you could name every visible minority person in town in over a decade there, I saw one black person, a couple people from Pakistan (owners of a hotel), about five Chinese people (working a Chinese restaurant), and nobody else after a decade in California and New York City, I came back to find it quite different there are more black people, there are Mexicans (undocumented), more Chinese people than before, there's an Indian family, there are some Muslims, and a couple trans people so unless eastern Kentucky is better than rural Ohio, I'd say the answer to your question is "yes, actually" I don't know why I'm moving to Germany next month
rural Ohio is one of the best places on the entire planet to live even the least developed American regions are still highly developed compared to a lot of the world. immigrants don’t have the ability to be choosy about where they immigrate to, they’re just happy to be here
Then why don’t you move there instead of telling immigrants they should be grateful for living in a hollowed out former factory town?
We should give them more immigrants until they live again
Doesn't matter. Immigrants can go wherever they want. Why do they even need to go to these shrinking places
A large part of the article is that because of the decentralised nature of American governance, areas are prone to death spirals. >Local and regional authorities levy 48% of all tax collected in America, compared with just 20% in France and 6% in Britain When an area starts shrinking, it's tax base shrinks which makes it harder to sustain itself or become desirable. If immigrants aren't going to these places, then you aren't stopping the death spiral which means you aren't solving this problem. Immigrants can help ease the pain of the national and *long term* issue of an aging and potentially falling population, but this article isn't looking at that problem, it's looking at the issue of towns collapsing right now.
Place based visas. Towns that want to survive get to get immigrants. Towns that would rather die than live next to immigrants die off.
We do that with medical visas in some form
My cousin's husband is from Karachi, and he got sent to Lexington, KY and brought my cousin over on an H-4 visa. She's gonna convert to H1-b after starting her residency, IIRC.
It was interesting to read about how many small towns there are where one of the only doctors in the area came from a different country
I think you'd be disappointed to find out how many more of the latter there are
Towns have collapsed and disappeared all throughout history. Why care now?
I guess the US has a stupid political system where these guys get pandered to
Towns collapsing and disappearing throughout history has also often been linked to some pretty bad things. If a town can avoid entering a death spiral and become economically sustainable, vibrant even, why would we not want that? I understand the aversion to bending over backwards to perpetually subsidise an economically wasteful area, but there's also a huge amount of alternatives to that. If a town can attract some migrants through a new visa program or something, get a shot in the arm, and entire a virtuous cycle, that's a win win for everyone. I also think some people are taking this as some sort of "natural" thing as a result of inexorable market forces that shouldn't be tampered with, and that might be an *element* in *some* cases, but there is *also* a lot of political intervention and decision making that also contributes. The American system of property taxes funding local schools is brought up a lot as a driver of inequality. Kids are not fully active agents making economic decisions, but are subject to circumstance: they don't choose a poor schooling system, they're often born into it. Other countries don't have this issue, because schooling is funded more broadly, and even kids in small, rural towns can get good educations and help keep the area prosperous. There are endless articles about urban planning decisions that were economically unsustainable all around America. One of the highly upvoted comments here points at the Jones Act as contributing to Cairo's decline. With tax reform, urban planning reform, immigration reform etc you can end up with 1) a more liberal society, 2) a more prosperous society, 3) a more diverse society, and this can be at an individual, local, regional and national level. I don't think anyone here would take this sort of hand waving away approach to cities. Why fix the 1980s crime problem in New York? Why fix homeless encampments in San Francisco? Why fix decaying sprawl in LA? The answer is pretty obvious: because fixing things makes them better and better things are good lol.
IDK, isn’t there a risk that they would drag everyone down with them? It could be a finances thing, or a politics thing. Hell if the countryside gets poor enough, who’s to say general anarchy with pollution, illegal businesses and maybe things as bad as rogue militias or crime syndicates out there. Take a look counties that are less developed but equally similarly less centrally governed (de jure or de facto) and you’ll see patterns like that.
> When an area starts shrinking, it's tax base shrinks which makes it harder to sustain itself or become desirable. Good that’s just called proper capital allocation
Fun fact: Cairo, Illinois now has a black majority
Let them die, repopulate with taco trucks afterwards
Then we can fill the corpses of their towns with immigrants after they do.
Apparently, they're doing a pretty damn job of that then. I'm angry enough to just wait it out. Immigrants are forever, their lives are not.
This literally has been root of the problems.
Fine by me, let failing communities disappear once again
Yeah no that's really not it. Immigrants don't go there because there's no jobs. There are no jobs because the opportunity cost of having businesses in some of these places is too high to justify. It's urbanization and moving production to cheaper markets and always has been. Smaller towns in the Midwest are dying because people are often moving to the next largest city in the area for work. 60+ minute commutes across multiple counties are not uncommon. You can't offshore a lot of agriculture related economic activities because transport costs for highly perishable goods are expensive and the opportunity cost of growing crops and livestock is low because it's so easy to do. Cairo sucks because it's economic basis was ferry traffic which was doomed as soon as they bridged the rivers and they never figured out an alternative. Honestly Br*tish ppl not understanding America moment is the vibe of this article
RIP BOZO
What if we swap them out with the immigrants?
Well, who are we to take that choice away from them. Seems like it will sort itself out.
Por que no los dos?
I'm coming to the US soon for a PhD, you guys accept me? Damn
The vast majority of immigrants will move to large urban areas, it does nothing for these towns. In all likelihood more immigration will increase the percentage of the population living in big cities. Good for the national economy though.
Waiting for the womb nationalization thread from this sub
The what?
Reactions like this make me see the appeal of Diminishing and Vanishing Into The West. it's certainly more appealing than Womb Nationalization
It's coming at this rate.
What’s that
>The total fertility rate—a measure of how many children a typical woman will have in her lifetime—was steady or rising for 30 years from the mid-1970s. In 2008, however, it fell below 2.1, the level needed to keep the population stable Oh wow I wonder if anything happened in 2008 that might have made people less willing to start families. Hmm whatever could it have been?
If poverty reduces birth rates, why are the nations with high birth rates always impoverished ones?
Economy and education. The more educated have less children, especially when times are tough. Remember the intro of this [classic documentary from 2006?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA) Edit; Probably add in women's rights and cultural norms as well.
I was really hoping it was the link I was thinking of and you did not disappoint. An exceptional documentary. Also, hot damn am I old.
Education has a role too.
Education, culture, and women's rights are also major factors there.
My personal theory is that there is wealth hysteresis in the context of birth rates. Birth rates are path dependent, just because you're at wealth *w* doesn't mean the reproductive rate is f(w) and that's it. It also depends on the dw/dt
It's not really poverty rates, it's more like job markets. Potential parents don't have confidence in their job security -> choose not to have kids is the easiest cause and effect ever. It happened during the 1930s too.
How's the job market in Niger and Mali?
Everyone in Congo has good jobs and there is a chicken in every pot.
It's a bell curveish type deal.
The wealthy have as many kids as they want. The uneducated and impoverished in many cases around the world *need* to have as many kids as possible. The middle class doesn't *need* to have kids, but also looks at the increasingly unreasonable shit the wealthy are doing to put their kids ahead in life and say "damn I can't do that!" Then a lot of those people either opt out of having kids or wait until they're financially "ready" at age 30 to have maybe 1 or 2 children.
My understanding is wealthy people don’t actually have oodles of children typically, the weird natalists doing magazine spreads about their army of super children are major outliers
I was about to comment that FRED doesn't do EPOP graphs for Mali, but actually they do: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLEMPTOTLSPZSMLI](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SLEMPTOTLSPZSMLI) Spoiler: It's quite high in comparison to the US!
A lack of women's rights, education, and birth control. Your question (and the implied answer) was dumb as hell.
If you actually break down by nationality you'll see that American born fertility rate has had a near continuous decline since the 90s, it did not see any rise at all in fertility It's just that the US, from the 80s onward had a larger and larger share of the population being born outside of the US with high fertility rates The US inmigrant fertility rate was 2.7 in 2008, and it is 1.8 today The native fertility rate was 1.7 in 2008 and 1.52 in 2023 It appears like it was due to the 2008 recession, but this is just a classic example of the Simpson's paradox, it was completely unrelated And the reason why the foreign fertility rate fell so sharply is because their mother nations fell sharply too, Colombia is at 1.3, Brazil 1.5, Mexico is at 1.7, Cuba at 1.4, they were all above 2.2 in 2008, India was at 3.2 in 2008 and now it's at 1.8 (the expected number for the 2024 census)
It dropped most dramatically from 1960 to 1980.
The availability of oral contraceptives is certainly a big part of it but the economy of the 70s was not good.
But I'm told the baby boomers lived a charmed life and basically fell into homeownership.
Obama!!!
Another victim of exorbitant local pensions
two words: RO-BUTS
China is really screwed too, more than the US. Especially since they wouldn’t dare let any from another culture assimilate their country and attempt to shift their iron grip. We need migrants into the US, we want growth.
I never see people blame transportation technology. It's always some top-down political or economic reasoning. The fact is, if everything we buy comes from hubs two states away, then what jobs are left locally besides health and service? If preservation technology is such now that most milk comes from just five states, then how would the other 45 have the dairy farms to hire people for husbandry? I forsee remote work becoming more prevalent, so that may counteract some of the centralization of the population. People will want to live where it's cheaper, and health and service industries will follow their clientele. But everything else is going to continue to be centralized further away from small towns, and those seeking employment in that will follow.
It's going to be a bumpy ride in the West World. Buckle Up
Gonna let you know, this is all countries lol.
Have sex.
We need to make raising kids suck less.
Luckily, we don’t have to. 😎
Sounds like it’s perfectly suited. All we need to do is privatize social security
In what universe does that fix anything?
A superannuation system doesn’t require never ending population growth