How the widening urban-rural divide threatens America

Victor David Hanson is a pretty conservative guy and his point certainly has some merit, but there's definitely some "rose-tinted" glasses here. For example, while I tend to agree with him on the water and environmental assessment studies, the biggest issue in CA is that those farmers' don't pay anywhere near market-pricing for the water, which in turns provides a significant incentive to grow water-hungry crops. That's not the necessarily the best example to illustrate the divide he highlights.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the...

At risk of reductio ad hitlerum -- at the time Jefferson wrote the quote given in the article, the wisdom of the rural folk was that slavery was awesome and should continue forever. It was the out-of-touch urban interlopers who thought it should stop

This read like a really angry rant against modern culture in general. Yes, politicians don't always make very good choices and yes people spend a lot of time on the web now. This is no reason to call the urban population "clueless."

Rural life is also unscalable. Rural citizens won't always be more knowledge in agriculture. They do not have more or less "common sense" than the urban population.

/rant

I spend significant time in very urban areas and very rural areas, and I'm seeing more convergence because of the net.

There is covergence thanks to major sites such as Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, etc. And near-ubiquitous smartphones help.

More-powerful convergence is happening thanks to the rural areas adopting tech for farming, weather, robotics, construction, how-to learning, and broad support for personal freedom.

Except that where I live (rural Southern Oregon) there is some of the highest rates of welfare and foodstamp dependence in the West. Sort of tears apart the premise of this story. Note that the author is with the Hoover Institute.

I think one of best examples of this was the push to make mandatory the National Animal Identification System. The idea was put every farm animal into a database and RFID the larger ones. I'd heard that farmers would need to log the timestamp of every feeding or watering (though I can't find any source for that in 2 minutes of Googling.)

I did find this. "... the animal owner would be required to report: the birthdate of an animal, the application of every animal’s ID tag, every time an animal leaves or enters the property, every time an animal loses a tag, every time a tag is replaced, the slaughter or death of an animal, or if any animal is missing. Such events must be reported within 24 hours." From http://www.countrysidemag.com/90-1-mary-zanoni

I would argue that this is burdensome and easier to rationalize for an urbanite. Also note that they likely didn't consider how small farmers will often arrange to have their animals graze on a neighbor's field, which would mean logging entry and exit twice a day.

Don't underestimate though, the power of social pressure to influence the belief system and overall culture of immediate neighbors. Usually first your are born into an area, then you adopt the culture in order to get along. It can be very difficult to hold counter-beliefs in many groups.

In this bit, Hanson indulges in pure fantasy:

"Rural living historically has encouraged independence, and it still does, even in the globalized and wired 21st century. Autonomy and autarky, not narrow specialization, are necessary and are fueled by an understanding that tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place."

In reality, the rural areas of the USA are wards of the state. Without government subsidies for water and electricity and telephone services, and without government subsidies for the food that farmers grow, many of the rural areas in the USA would have stopped agricultural production back during the 1930s.

This is strange:

"urbanites have argued that farmers can make do with less but wildlife needs ever more"

I would have thought that a conservative like Victor David Hanson would have been angry about the massive subsidies that the government offers to farmers, but apparently he doesn't care about that. Thanks to those subsidies, the USA typically produces too much food, not too little of it. Scaling back on those subsidies a bit, for a good environmental cause, seems like classical stewardship in action: the state is suppressing the demands of a greedy special interest, in favor of a project which benefits all of society.

I am disappointed that Hanson seems to support government subsidies when it comes to farmers (in the form of water subsidies), but then turns critical of government subsidies when it comes to helping an individual woman. Hanson writes this criticism of the fictional "Julia":

"Looking to cement his lead among urban unmarried women during his 2012 reelection campaign, Barack Obama ran an interactive Web ad, "The Life of Julia." Its dependency narrative defined the life of an everywoman character as one of cradle-to-grave government reliance — a desirable thing. Julia is proudly and perennially a ward of the state. She can get through school only thanks to Head Start and federally backed student loans. Only the Small Business Administration and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act enable her to find work. In her retirement years, only Social Security and Medicare allow her comfort and the time to volunteer for a communal urban garden, apparently a hobby rather than a critical food source."

So helping big agri-business with government subsidies of water is perfectly acceptable, but helping a woman go to college is a terrible thing?

I drove through central Utah; it was on a road with no shoulder and grass growing through some cracks (but well-paved enough to drive at highway speeds). And that was it - the only visible presence of government. There were miles between houses.

Many people reading this are in cities. Step outside and look around for the presence of government: Roads, sidewalks, streetlights, stoplights, road signs, police, buses, power lines, sewer, manholes, turn the tap for city water, fire hydrants, regulated things everywhere - buildings, parking, restaurants, etc etc. And people everywhere, of all kinds, almost all of whom you don't know.

Perhaps that explains the differing perspectives of people who live in urban and rural areas. And consider that that who lives in rural and who lives in urban areas is to a great extent self-selected.

Jeez... it's like the guy is looking for an excuse to find a new thing groups can hate one another about.

Climate change causes significant losses for farmers, and very likely will cause many more. Yet it's the city folk who vote to do something about it and the rural population that makes it a point of ideology to reject even looking into the possibility of it.

The urban-rural divide does create issues, though the author is very selective and invents a fractious view of reality concocted from stereotypes that does more to perpetuate the problem than help, and blurs cultural and political lines. Politically, rural States are inherently over-represented Federally by virtue of each State having two Senators regardless of population, and that has and will continue work to the detriment of urbanized States. Politically the complaints about government dependence by urbanites selectively ignore that more tax dollars are sent proportionally to rural States than urban states, which are in no small part a product of rural States having immense power over the Feds. relative to urbanized States. Slagging the "The Life of Julia" as a "dependency narrative" ignores that a big point of the narrative was keeping the government out of Julia's reproductive choices and other life choices, freedoms rural religious-minded folks are not keen on protecting. On top of that (and perversely amusingly), rural areas have steadily outgrown proportional rates for use of food stamps and food assistance programs than urban areas. Culturally, rural states idealize a kind of independence that's a product of a political structure that hands out capital and favors to quietly prop those rural areas up while turning a blind eye to their benefit from the government to assist themselves.

"These differences wouldn't matter so much if it weren't for the fact that the nation's urbanites increasingly govern those living in the hinterlands, even as vanishing rural Americans still feed and fuel the nation."

Ask someone in Central VT what they think of the way the state caters to the population mass in Burlington. Ask someone in upstate NY what they think of NYC running the show for all of NY. Illinois and Chicago. Ask someone in North Adams MA about what they think of the people in the Boston area. You'll often get something like "they're nothing like me but they basically run the state and tell me how to live my life only because there's so many of them"

Here's an example. Some hillbilly who wants to shoot a deer in upstate NY has to pay his way through all sorts of red tape in order to put an animal that's generally a pest (since there's so many of them) in his freezer. I talked to a game warden from NY who mentioned that even though it's illegal to take deer with .22, more deer are taken with .22 than any other caliber and his personal opinion was that because the policy and procedure around firearms and hunting permits/tags was expensive and bothersome people who intend to keep what they shoot just shoot what they please when they're given the opportunity (i.e. see deer on drive home from work, stop, shoot deer, put deer in truck, continue driving home) and .22 is the most convenient caliber for doing this because .22 revolvers are (relatively) cheap and plentiful. He went on to say that the rules and regulations are in tune with what a suburb of NY might want and not really appropriate in the rural areas and that it causes a lot of grief because once people start ignoring parts of the law it's a gateway to ignoring other parts. All of this was in the context of fish and game.

From a utilitarian standpoint it makes sense to favor the many in the city over the few in the countryside but there's usually a limit to how far you can apply general rules to social issues...

"At my house, I worry about whether the well will go dry. I lock the driveway gate at night, and if someone knocks after 10 p.m., I go to the door armed. Each night, I check the security lights in the barnyard and watch to ensure that coyotes aren't creeping too close from the vineyard. I wage a constant battle against the squirrels, woodpeckers and gophers that undermine the foundation, poke holes in the sheds and destroy irrigation ditches."

...this seems pretty atypical for someone living in the middle of nowhere. Most people grab their gun if someone they're not expecting comes to the door at 10pm regardless of where you live. Pretty much nobody has security lights, some people have lights on their driveway so they can work at night but not specifically security lights. Nobody without small livestock (sheep) cares about coyotes. Once the dumb ones do something dumb they get turned into evolutionary dead ends via some hot lead.

Perhaps America, the concept, deserves to be threatened at this point. There is increasingly little binding "us" together as a nation at this point: some historical borders, increasingly irrelevant legal and social structures, a few holidays. There is no common foundational creed or concept.

Perhaps its time to politely say our goodbyes.

Idea for solving two problems at once: require every prospective college student to spend a certain term (six months, whatever) performing agricultural labour in order to qualify.