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Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

Small town America is a market inefficiency, it's time to move on.

I don't imagine this sentiment would go down well with most Americans (who I assume live in small towns?) but this is so damn true. There was a small period in history where small-town economies were sustainable (post WW2) but these towns seem to have completely failed to reinvent themselves in light of changing economic conditions. OTOH you have American cities and urban areas innovating like crazy and leading the push towards sustainable living, clean energy etc and creating new markets with lots of jobs.

One of the things I found incredibly surprising in America is just how much people do not like to move; especially those living in small towns to bigger cities. So we have a situation where the cities are attracting people from other countries often many oceans away, and the people living in the same state are unwilling to move out of their home towns.

> I don't imagine this sentiment would go down well with most Americans (who I assume live in small towns?)

http://www.citylab.com/housing/2012/03/us-urban-population-w...

It's complex. But populationwise, we're mostly in larger towns.

> One of the things I found incredibly surprising in America is just how much people do not like to move; especially those living in small towns to bigger cities. So we have a situation where the cities are attracting people from other countries often many oceans away, and the people living in the same state are unwilling to move out of their home towns.

this is novel for America. Traditionally Americans moved all the time.

> this is novel for America. Traditionally Americans moved all the time.

I always thought that moving to the "big city" when you are young was a part of the American tradition while I was growing up (my parents and the parents of most of my friends did so), but perhaps I was mistaken.

Growing up in the northern suburbs of Dallas, it was simply treated as a given that my classmates and I were all the children of transplants. Often, our parents came here from much bigger cities because they got tired of urban life and the associated high cost of living and wanted an inexpensive house in the safety of the suburbs. Funnily enough, the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington MSA is now the fourth-largest metro area in the entire country precisely because of people like my parents and my classmates' parents.

My parents are both from NYC, and I never thought it odd even in the slightest that they moved halfway across the country about five years before I was born.

http://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-47.h...

Take a look. :-(

> One of the things I found incredibly surprising in America is just how much people do not like to move;

Moving is a huge hassle, and expensive. If you confine your employment opportunities to small towns, it's likely your next job is over 200 miles away. An out of state move costs easily over $1000 and doing that every year is not financially viable for most people. If you want to stay put, your job search gets very tough.

I did the whole "work in small town" thing for a while, and managed to do it with only moving a few times. Not knowing for sure where you'll be living in a few years takes its toll. Finally threw in the towel and moved to a metro area.

And if you're starting in one of those small towns, not making much money, how long does it take to save up enough to make the move? Not just the cost of the move but the downpayment for that new apartment, getting the basics set up, and parking.

It's even worse if you decide to move to the "big city" after your local options have run dry. Odds are you burned through your savings, added some debt, and are in over your head..

I live in a small city surrounded by small towns. I get it. The world moves too fast and most of our life is spent sleeping or looking at screens. The only time you put the screen down you experience reality.

I could handle all of that, but to add geographic separation from your family and friends of many years? For many people, being poor with family outweighs being lower-middle-class far away.

I live in one of California's larger cities. Some of my relatives live in a resort town that is flooded with city people during the season. When driving I sometimes find myself waiting my turn at a tricky intersection, behind a family member who I know is not impaired or anything. Yet they take FOREVER to negotiate the intersection. EVERY thing is slower in that town. And I have relatives in Oregon who live in a university town but hate going to Portland, which is equally slowly paced to me as the university town. Same deal. And come to think of it, they would have family in Portland so there wouldn't necessarily be isolation, just change. I think this confirms the general impression that the young might make the move to the city for a job, but the less young have a bigger adaptation to make.

It would be interesting to see some good polls on this.

> One of the things I found incredibly surprising in America is just how much people do not like to move; especially those living in small towns to bigger cities

Most of them can't move. They couldn't afford any city housing. They are often economically trapped in their situations.

> One of the things I found incredibly surprising in America is just how much people do not like to move; especially those living in small towns to bigger cities

Most of them can't move. They couldn't afford any city housing.

You white people hurry up and die was seen as surprisingly unpopular as a campaign slogan in the last election.

I mean you can want them to die off all you want, and encourage political and economic moves to eliminate them and their economic base and their culture and their religion, but until you genocide the last of them, you might not like the voting results.

That's basically the 2016 election in a nutshell.

Of course once they're killed off, who do you intend to replace them and is it going to be any better and who's next on "the list"?

There are white people in cities and suburbs too, you know. And actually, many people would be satisfied to subsidize rural areas or enforce anti-concentration laws that help them thrive. We just want them to return the favor.

Rural voters who vote for "free markets", though, are voting for Silicon Valley and for Wall Street. Those are the industries that the free market has favored! If you voted for a free-market candidate and you work in one of those two, congratulations. The definition of insanity, though, is doing the same thing over and over, while hoping for a different result.

Rural USA - and I grew up there - is optimized for mining, farming, ranching, and logging. The bulk of the money has shifted elsewhere, and the economy has moved on.

I don't myself see a future for the rural US outside of the 4 interests above - it's collapsing inward as automation and time rolls on. I would like to see a future. But the network effect of urbanized areas is tremendous and forms a vortex of attraction for all sorts of things.

But this isn't new - WW1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Ya_Gonna_Keep_'em_Down_on_...

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyhttp://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/and...

and Hofstadter in his book Age of Reform (regarding populism/progressivism in the 1870-1925 era) remarks that the migration to the cities was taking place in the 1800s.

Did you want to drive to work in a bulletproof motorcade? Because this is how you get heavily armed mobs.

I think the theory is you geographically segregate, with the people of the mob pointing their guns at each other and their children (and the furriners), while the elites isolate themselves in dense, expensive metropolitan areas and neighborhoods that have more in common with Shanghai, London, and Dubai than with Iowa.

Voila! No motorcade necessary.

Great plan. I suppose a quick review of where food comes from is in order?

By 2050, the majority of the food supply for the ~20 American arcologies will be sourced from a network of regional factory farms patrolled by lethal autonomous drones.

The most prosperous arcologies, of course, will be fed by overseas trade received into nearby autonomous port systems.

(Seriously, why aren't port operations already entirely automated?)

(Seriously, why aren't port operations already entirely automated?)

At the better ports, they are.[1] That's the Port of Rotterdam.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo

Oh, cool. Carry on then.

Most of them will die from meth and/or heroin long before they turn into heavily armed mobs

If work from home becomes more prevalent, it might not be so.

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