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Comment by jbhatab | Hacker News Reader

Giving money is not the issue in rural America. It's not social welfare such as health insurance or anything of the sort. If anything I'd say there's a lot of disgust with how many rural Americans live off the system.

It's lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that? Tesla isn't opening up a factory in New Hampshire anytime soon. There certainly isn't as many amazing colleges such as UC berkley there. Throwing money into unemployment and welfare won't solve the problem at all.

Trump literally said I will fight to get you jobs back. Ignore if that is true. Ignore if he is an idiot. Ignore if that works in the long term. He was the only candidate that actually said a single idea that was directly aimed at helping them.

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> It's lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that? Tesla isn't opening up a factory in New Hampshire anytime soon.

In generations past, Americans picked up and moved to where the opportunity was, rather than staying put. Why is it unreasonable to expect the same now?

The economy has permanently changed - those jobs are never coming back. On the other hand, moving is far, far easier in 2017 than it was for those on the Oregon Trail or the Mayflower.

Presumably the cost of living in cities with growing economies disincentivizes poor people from moving.

To cities, perhaps, but not to areas of opportunities (even fleeting). Consider South Dakota.

What exactly is drawing people to South Dakota?

Oy. It was too late at night for me when I wrote this. I meant North Dakota, referencing fracking jobs.

But by happy circumstance, it seems Sioux Falls is booming. So I wasn't completely wrong.

I figured that was the case, but Sioux Falls also does a lot of advertising in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis / St. Paul MN) to convince businesses to move.

Sioux Falls is actually a pretty nice town. SD is a bit strange because the capital of the state is such a small town. SD also has no state income taxes for individuals or businesses.

Sioux Falls is booming after a decade of investment by the financial and medical industries.

Sanford Health is particularly noticeable - there are multiple hospitals and research centers there or under construction.

I believe the banking is mostly credit card companies and cheque printing.

It's got a surprising number of amenities for a small city and if you can stand the location and politics it's got relatively high wages and low cost of living.

Yes so you want to have every move to the city where the opportunities are. Which may be fine, but imagine for a second someone telling you that 'you should just move from where you are because where you were born isn't good enough'. Not very considerate. Also, they would be thrown into an environment that is wildly different than there own with far less money than everyone else and lack of skillets and knowledge to thrive.

They would be an extreme disadvatantage. Now I don't disagree that that may be a solution, but seriously take a step back. Ask yourself if you think you just said is empathatic towards people in rural America?

Ask yourself if you had said that about other issues in America. 'Why can't black people just start learning how to code to catch up?' 'Why can't gays just get over not being able to be officially married?'

Basically what you're saying is 'why cant people that aren't me adapt to how I operate?'

> imagine for a second someone telling you that 'you should just move from where you are because where you were born isn't good enough'

Now imagine telling a corporation that 'you must build your factory only in City X' -- why should they? They will build where they find space at good rents and an industrial ecosystem and workers.

What if the factory owner lives in California. So he has to move his life across the country and build in New Hampshire because a rural worker in New Hampshire didn't want to move themselves? How does this make sense?

Capitalism is blind to political movements, wealth inequality, and full employment. All that matters is the bottom line. This is leading to globalism, automation, and use of illegal immigration which is gutting the lower and middle classes. Would it be best for the corporation? No, of course not. But there needs to be a balance between the lower and upper classes, and right now that balance is not there. A rising economy should benefit everyone. This lack of balance is why populist politicians were so popular this election.

Wouldn't a progressive, Bernie-style [limited] redistribution be better to achieve such a goal? Appropriate corporate tax funded social spending sound like a more efficient way to help everyone than forcing a factory owner in California to move his factory to some random rural area.

I don't run a factory, but I am a full-time co-founder of a startup. There is no way I'd move our NYC-based operation to some rural area, there is little to no specialized technical community outside the major cities. For example, would I be able to attend weekly Machine Learning meetups in West Virginia? Would I be able to have lunch regularly with VCs in Ohio? I've been overseas doing a parallel medical trial, in a big city, and still it is very difficult to operate here. The depth of community just doesn't exist.

I realize a tech startup isn't a perfect example, but I imagine some of the same concerns would be applicable to factory owners. It is simply not realistic to assume that employers (who already don't have trouble finding talent) should move to where workers are, rather than the opposite.

Factories and employers used to put factories in rural areas because of the cheap labor. Globalism has exploited the fact that many other countries don't have the labor laws or quality of life America does, and made it so rural America isn't an economically viable location to put jobs. I'd agree that a Bernie-style form of redistribution would be ideal, but in my opinion, it's important to be politically expedient. America's political system is rigged to the point where even if a redistribution program was passed, it would be removed within a decade. Given the fact that wealth and GDP has never been higher and that corporations are having no problem finding profits, we need to find a way to make rural America an economically feasible location to put jobs again, which means ending or slowing globalization.

Would it solve problems if we had an equivalent to meetup for online meetups such as the above? If we suggest all can be done online, why aren't our meetups online? Certainly, time zones are an issue, and some meetup functions can be duplicated by a mailing list or forum, but why haven't we figured this one out? (The time zone could be solved by having multiple meetups and people go to the ones which are better for their time, for example.) And a speaker is something is probably easier than the average user group - someone just joins from their house...

Have you visited Ohio? There are cities there. My company is working with a startup in Akron that's doing some neat stuff. You can bet it's not strip-mining the social graph.

Funny story -- Yes! I did visit Ohio, to see a VC actually. I was able to get a single VC meeting for the whole trip. Perhaps there are other VCs, but I found just one willing to take a meeting. The odds in NYC were higher. The odds in SF are even higher. I find it difficult to believe there VCs are as accessible in Ohio as they are in NYC/SF.

> Would I be able to have lunch regularly with VCs in Ohio?

Yes. There is a fantastic, burgeoning startup community in Ohio. One that seems to be getting traction is Root, an really innovative insurance company (I'm not affiliated with Root).

Exactly!

Viewed by the capitalist system, these communities are useless. People hate feeling useless, even if you give them everything they need to live (the Democrat's solution)

So, how do you make economically irrelevant communities viable?

I have no idea.

The left solution is not simply throw money at the problem and ignore if it solves it.

The basic income movement beneath a lot of this is meant to, over generations, migrate the culture from one where your work defines your value as a human being to one where you are valued for your non-monetary contributions to society as well.

A good, first approach is to structure incentives to encourage people to move from irrelevant communities. Such as not punishing manufacturing for moving overseas, ending non-strategic subsidies, and similar as the stick, and funding non-profits dedicated to helping people relocate to areas with brighter opportunities.

We will have to do these things due to climate change anyway (create policies to handle migration) if the Agricultural Revolution is to ultimately win over Nomadism, we may as well figure out things that work here and now.

Make remote work the standard option whenever possible. For example, all the paper pushing work can be easily made remote and distributed to rural areas.

If you make remote work the standard, why wouldn't a company offshore it to remote workers who are often wildly cheaper due to market forces and market distortions (like minimum wage laws)?

There are plenty of English reading/writing/speaking people in India capable of remote work.

These communities aren't useless. They just support fewer jobs and probably a lower standard of living than they once did. This happened to coal mining towns in Wales a hundred years ago. A lot of those people came to the US. But Wales didn't become useless, it just lost a major source of employment. People will migrate, retrain, change their expectations.

>but imagine for a second someone telling you that 'you should just move from where you are because where you were born isn't good enough'

I don't have to imagine it. There are 8 cities between my great-grandfather and me.

- Russia (we don't know what city), where my great-grandfather was born.

- St. Louis, where my great-grandfather settled as a refugee from the pogroms (he was Jewish).

- Chicago, where my great-grandfather relocated for work and my grandfather did undergrad->PhD.

- Seattle, where my grandfather moved after graduation and met my grandmother from Ottawa.

- Lawrence, KS., where my grandfather got his faculty job and where my parents met.

- Rochester, NY. where my parents moved after college.

- Milwaukee, WI. because the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle was written during the evenings and delivered in the afternoon, while the Milwaukee Journal was written during the business day and delivered the following morning. My dad was a journalist and my mom was a teacher (they have both changed careers now) and they wanted to have dinner together.

- Chicago again, where I went to college.

- Berkeley, CA. where I now live for my software engineering job in San Francisco.

My family is privileged in many ways (white skin, tradition of going to college, supportive households, etc). But no one in my family's history has had the incredible privilege of being born in a place that remains suitable for an entire lifetime, much less multiple generations of lifetimes. I cannot even comprehend what it would be like to be born in a place I could stay in forever while having a decent career. That must be nice if you can get it.

In terms of public policy, I'd consider that kind of luxury to be on par with owning a vacation home. Yeah, it'd be nice if everyone could have that, but there are much more pressing problems to solve.

I know people whom moved from my rust belt home town and after the crash in 08' lost job(s). The one person was living in Florida for years before the crash. They were basically strong armed by social services into returning to their home states if they wanted to keep receiving assistance. I imagine they felt family ties would help ease the burden, if said person were back home near family however, in this case his only sister wasn't able to provide much beyond emotional support. I remember reading of similar cases in Hawaii after the crash, in those cases people were given flight vouchers for a resettlement to their home states.

> imagine for a second someone telling you that 'you should just move from where you are because where you were born isn't good enough'. Not very considerate.

Reality doesn't really care about consideration.

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world's altar-stairs

That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

-Tennyson

I moved to the west coast from the south because educational and job opportunities were way better. I had finished my bs, but it was a very low avg state school. what i did anyone could. i want to help others but i dont know how.

> Ask yourself if you think you just said is empathatic towards people in rural America?

It's not a matter of empathy. There are laws of economics at play. The free market chooses the most competitive products and the most competitive products are made in economic centers. Capitalism favors cities. These economic forces are forces of nature, and opposing them is like opposing the laws of physics.

Now, the government can step in to pump money into rural areas in various ways (direct investment, tax credits, etc.), to make their products more competitive. But that's unsustainable, and once you turn on the spigot you can't turn it off without hurting people even more. You want to know what it looks like when the government makes a determination on which areas are going to make which things, market competition be damned, for social reasons? It looks like the Soviet Union.

We live in some very weird times if Republicans are getting elected to promote Soviet economic policy in America.

In a vibrant economy, jobs move to where there are workers. That is the reason so many factories were built out of the major cities in the first place.

Trump is right to identify insufficient aggregate demand as the cause of unemployment in the midwest and underemployment pretty much everywhere. The culprit is much more China than Mexico. If the administration can significantly reduce the trade deficit it will have very positive effects on US employment and income.

Workers move where there are jobs. I haven't seen anything else, anywhere.

Factories were built where it was cheap or where the founders decided, but to be fair, as close to people as possible.

The culprit is neither China or Mexico, it's automation [1]. To say anything else is to deny reality.

You can accomplish far more today with the advances in robotics and logistics than you could 30 or even 20 years ago.

This is an example of a brewery working at full capacity with a total of 6 people per shift. If this brewery was operated 35 years ago it would be 600 people per shift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tLim5pkfOw

So how exactly are you going to stop these owners of capital that are so rightfully praised in the United States? You have entire cities that will offer free electricity, massive tax incentives, and looser regulations for what? A couple hundred jobs? What about the tens of thousands of people that are out of work? Are we really going to subsidize hundreds of thousands of tax dollars for jobs that barely pay $15/hour?

I don't know what the solution is but I do know it will require massive amounts of tax dollars and it won't be the poor paying it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...

The problem now is automation, but that's because all of the jobs that couldn't be automated have already been shipped overseas. I argue that automation, globalization, and arguably illegal immigration are the three largest factors gutting the lower and middle classes in America. Also, you don't have to give better jobs to everyone, just a big chunk. There are ~10 million illegal immigrants in the US, which has a population of ~300 million. Right or wrong, shipping them out or giving some sort of work visa(to require at least minimum wage pay) would raise demand for lower class jobs to the point where lower and middle class wages may finally start rising again.

Edited to recognize the open debate on illegal immigration. I don't understand how illegal immigration could lead to a better job outlook for the lower class. If anyone has some info on that, I'd appreciate it.

Nope: you forget that immigrants (legal or otherwise) increase demand for goods in their local economy which creates demand for jobs to fulfill these goods. Research shows that this demand creates more jobs than the immigrants "consume".

> Research shows that this demand creates more jobs than the immigrants "consume".

This seems a bit counter-intuitive to me, could you point me to any research?

Jobs are made possible by consumption. Illegal immigrants are consumers too.

Without them, we'd have fewer workers competing for jobs, which seems like a good thing, but we'd also have fewer jobs to go around because of decreased consumption.

That's a fine theory but do you have any proof?

This episode of the "Science Vs" podcast goes over a lot of research on immigration including what I mentioned about job creation: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/immigration/

The first two are on point. The third is politically motivated. The question of whether illegal immigrants contribute more to everyone is still relatively open: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_imm...

Read the NYT piece again: it cites evidence the trade deficit is a major problem. Of course, since accepting this means admitting that Trump is correct on trade, the authors immediately write-off the evidence by insisting that these jobs would eventually disappear anyway. So can we really blame China?

Unfortunately, the problem is not about keeping any particular job so much as keeping the American economy vibrant enough to create new jobs as the old ones disappear. This requires the economy to operate at full employment, which requires adequate aggregate demand, which requires... well... there's your problem with the massive trade deficit and Chinese protectionism. Put more simply, if the Chinese were purchasing as much from the United States as they were selling into it, there would be a lot more job opportunities in the industries selling to China. Those would drive up wages and create competition to hire those newly unemployed.

Incidentally, it is worth remarking on the fact that China is going through the same pattern of automation and labor dislocation as the United States. The country also has an endemic problem with rent-capture and corruption that works against an efficient private sector. Despite this, the economy is doing much better at job creation largely because of the country's mercantilism: its politically engineered trade surplus ensures adequate demand in the southern export-oriented parts of the economy, while state control of the financial sector serves to redistributes gains from trade to the SOE sector etc.

Ask any dairy farmer in the US: it's mostly Latinos whom do the dirty work that in-country people scoff at. If you want something done in the US, it's usually immigrants whom do the hard work.

If people are willing to schlep they have the opportunity to feel purpose and a sense of accomplishment, but if they're going to sit idle and/or get wasted, that's the surest path to rusty irrelevancy. Folks need to bootstrap themselves and find/invent useful contribution to society that can turn a profit, rather than expecting someone to show up and hand it to them.

At what wage? Pretty sure if shoveling cow shit paid an executives salary you would have no problem finding people willing to do it w/o turning to under the table labor.

Mike Rowe is often an interesting one to follow for this kind of information, regardless of one's political leanings.

http://mikerowe.com/2016/02/stopignoringskillsgap/

Yeah, I like Rowe's stuff on the skills gap but I don't think what he is talking about in that article, skilled trades, and what the op is discussing, unskilled farm hand and factory labor, is the same labor market.

The last people to the pyramid game are the suckers, so there's little motivation to commit financial suicide so a boomer can cash in and retire in wealth by selling to you.

Also the overall standard of living is lower in cities than in rural areas for non-1% job categories. You'll make maybe 10% more money while paying 20% more and living in higher crime and worse conditions as a welder, for example.

Its not even clear for "computer people" that the overall standard of living is better in a city. We all know there's only one politically correct thing to say about urbanism, but there's a difference between being required to say under social duress vs actually is.

>¤We all know there's only one politically correct thing to say about urbanism, but there's a difference between being required to say under social duress vs actually is.

I'm not sure what this means, can you expand on this?

The difference is decades of economic policy that encouraged people to dump their life savings into owning their own home. When you've invested heavily in something, you tend to suffer from sunk costs fallacy. Add to that the fact, that those that own the homes and the land are typically the leaders in their community and you have those invested in a place encouraging others to stay there as it dies. Those that own the home can move out, but if enough do so, then the only prospect for the laggards is abandoning the home and losing it all.

I agree that people should move, but circumstances are different today.

I'd love to see more sociology and economic research in how towns die and recover. Tons of money studies urban poverty and decay, and I suspect rural poverty and decay doesn't get nearly the same attention because it's out of sight and out of mind for those funding the research.

Why is it unreasonable to expect the same now? The economy has permanently changed - those jobs are never coming back. On the other hand, moving is far, far easier in 2017 than it was for those on the Oregon Trail or the Mayflower.

Transportation is easier - but lets face it, it takes money to move now just like it took money to move back then. This is the entire reason we can't expect folks to just be able to move. There aren't jobs coming back, so they have no income. If they are lucky, they make minimum wage. And to make more money, they have to save up first month's rent, deposit, utility deposits, plus the actual moving expenses. All this for a city likely to be more expensive than their rural location. It isn't much wonder why folks aren't moving more often.

Sure, one could find work in the nearest town, but that takes commute money. If one has a friend they can live with, that helps, but many don't.

Rural is, by definition, constrained to a few economic activities such as farming and logistics. You mentioned a Tesla factory, but if you look at the "Gigafactory" you will see it is in a rather rural place. But it is reasonably close to materials and logistics.

As far back as the 1800's towns have "died" when the rail road went a different way. That isn't a new phenomena.

But looking at what works historically and what doesn't, the 'new' thing now is the Internet which makes a lot of things possible that weren't before. If you can get 40 gbits of capacity pulled into a 'rural town' then you can build an office building where everyone can connect pretty seemlessly to an office anywhere else. You can build customer support there, you can build logistics tracking systems, you can build R&D facilities. If you do this a there will be a complaint that you are 'ruining' the town.

A complaint I hear often is people want to work in tech but they want a place where they can buy a house and raise a family. That could be the lure of rural America if the state would fund fiber infrastructure to the town.

Yep, it could also be a great way to lower the cost of living in already over populated cities. People living in smaller localities and close to work would also diminish commute times - lowering carbon emissions.

I wonder how costly a fiber "plant" is? What's stopping the US from a "roll out the fiber" New Deal-style project?

For one thing, cable TV companies (who are the only practical ISP in many areas) don't want competition and have no reason to do it themselves.

They're not going to exist in every locality. My relatives are still on satellite and dial up.

It is worse than that. Of course they don't want competition but the the monopoly services areas are an artifact of legislative deal making. So the current situation is codified in law and would need to be changed.

Monopoly service areas for universal service offering was the deal.

This is a huge barrier, there is a lot of 'rent' money being doled out to 'sole providers'

From an infrastructure improvement point of few, state funded fiber beats all other uses of infrastructure tax dollars (I've been doing research as part of my 'Sunnyvale Fiber' project). At the state level, legislative support for a 'digital' easement allows for emminent domain type land offset cases (where the state comes in and says "for this parcel we're going to require an underground easement for fiber transit". The good news is that you can (if you choose to) bury these things 50+ feet down which protects them from most threats. Horizontal drilling capacity (some sitting idle in fracking fields) can be employed to create the necessary conduit for generally long lengths (up to nearly 5 miles or 25,000' by some estimates)

Adding water, power, freeways, and airports all cost more, and generate fewer net commercial opportunities.

> It's lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that?

There is none. The entire history of civilization is a shift of economic activity from outside of cities to cities, and, in terms of long term trends, is unlikely that ever changes in the foreseeable future.

"Rural America" can't, really, have it's fortunes reversed any more than obsolete industries in urban America can; all that can be done in either case is to help people transition out of them. That's perhaps not the answer people want to hear, but anyone saying anything else is lying to exploit their pain and probably facilitating their destruction.

I respect the honesty here. Basically we are moving towards cities and we need to move faster. Maybe that is the answer and we start a migration plan? Not sure.

But I'd at least like to see some people in the cities say 'we honestly don't care about rural people and they need to adapt'. That would sit better with me.

I dont know many people in cities who would say they dont care about rural populations. Most city-folks (i hate the false dichotomy here, but lets continue with it) I know care very much, but realize there are no quick fixes. The longer-term fixes are to improve education and increase mobility by de-linking health-care from employers.

I hung out with plenty of 1%er conservatives (rural Connecticut hedge fund) and plenty of progressives (in my neighborhood in Brooklyn.) I rarely saw any empathy amongst wealthy, elite sub-urbanite hedge fund crowds.

As for quick-fixes, the only quick fix I've seen so far is one that will come at a huge cost -- deregulating environmental controls. I agree this will seriously increase rural job opportunities, but it will come at a long-term cost as those factories dump chemicals into local areas. Now that the EPA is being gutted, I can see that happening.

>The longer-term fixes are to improve education...

Being highly educated does not matter if you can't get a job. Also, a balanced economy shouldn't require everyone to be highly educated.

You are absolutely correct. I should clarify that education also includes vocational education. However, I was actually speaking about K-12 -- the foundation for whatever one might wish to do later in life (university, vocational school.) I'm incredibly lucky that our big city (NYC) offers excellent public magnet schools, albeit obtained by exam+ambition+drive+luck. My friends in rural areas (mostly doctors) tell me that is rarely the case for their children in rural areas.

> deregulating environmental controls. ... as those factories dump chemicals into local areas ...

Nope, Nope, Nope.

See: 1970's, burning rivers, toxic smog, many "Superfund sites" that STILL haven't been cleaned up.

http://americandecadesboyle.wikispaces.com/Environmentalism+...

Not sure if fracking is an environmental issue, but a study says it is.

http://www.newsweek.com/fracking-wells-tainting-drinking-wat...

> Basically we are moving towards cities and we need to move faster

Not necessarily. It might be possible and even desirable to slow some aspects of it down, but not wind the clock in reverse.

> But I'd at least like to see some people in the cities say 'we honestly don't care about rural people and they need to adapt'.

It's not a matter of not caring about rural people (or urban people who have been surviving off industries that are on the way out, or that once survived off industries that are gone that they wish would come back); caring about the people demands dealing with them honestly and doing the things that can mitigate harms to them from the transition, not trying to pretend that the world is going to rewind to some past state for them.

> But I'd at least like to see some people in the cities say 'we honestly don't care about rural people and they need to adapt'. That would sit better with me.

What a willful misunderstanding of the other position.

If someone said to you, while commiserating over some kind of economic hardship you were experiencing, that you ought to move into their town or even live on their street, would that seem to you equivalent to their saying that they "honestly don't care about" you?

There were mass depopulations of cities at the end of the Western Roman (due to Germanic invaders), Eastern Roman (due to Muslim invaders), Abbasid (due to Mongols) and certain of the Chinese (due to Mongols, Xiongnu, etc etc) empires. This was not exactly good for economic activity.

I seem to remember reading descriptions of the collapse of the Roman Empire in Britain and they seemed to be suggesting that it was economic collapse that led to depopulation of cities and towns - you can't survive in a city if there is no functioning economy to provide you with food and other necessities in exchange for money.

I don't really think this is necessarily true. If the number of people who have jobs that can be worked remotely continues to increase, and if the possibilities of virtual office space can be realized than cities might become less appealing.

The main draw of cities is higher wages and greater social activity, but these are things that are decreasingly necessary to do in person, especially as VR adoption increases. As it becomes more possible to work and socialize online/in VR the incentives could shift so that it makes more sense for people to work online in high paying information worker jobs but paired with the low cost of living out in the countryside.

If this is the case it would be an interesting reversal of the current historical trend towards greater centralization, but this kind of decentralization wouldn't be unprecedented. I think you greatly overstate the extent to which rural America is doomed. If anything, it would seem that as economic opportunities become more evenly distributed over the globe due to the proliferation of information technology that people would come to prefer living rurally, especially since evidence suggests that people living in rural areas are happier on average[1].

[1] http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/06/the-price-of-happines...

Careful what you wish for. If your job can be done from Nowheresville, Kansas, it can be done from India. My guess is that remote work will bypass rural USA.

Timezones still matter. It is a big pain to work with teams in a timezone 12 hours away.

People in low COL countries can be paid enough to work 3rd shift for much less than the cost differential between a 3rd world slum and a Nowheresville KS house.

Depends on the job. We don't expect our software engineers in India to work nightshift or live in slums.

> Giving money is not the issue in rural America.

Ok, but, if you take away the wealth redistribution, rural Americans' taxes go up and they have even less income. It's even harder to pay for school or move to the city for work. Or just to put food on the table.

> It's lack of opportunity. What is your answer to that?

Move where the jobs are? It sucks to move away from home, but it's not like every city-dweller is born in the city where they work. Plenty of people move to other cities for work.

NH is within spitting distance of plenty of great schools.

> Trump literally said I will fight to get you jobs back. ... He was the only candidate that actually said a single idea that was directly aimed at helping them

If you think Trump was the only candidate promising to create jobs, you're simply weren't listening to the debates or other campaign messaging: http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Hillary_Clinton_Jobs.htm

I listened to the debates many times. Trump brought up jobs for rural America over and over because he knew how badly it effected many Americans. Hillary brought up jobs much less. I should just do a tally on how many times Trump mentioned jobs vs Hilary in the election race. I'm confident it would lean towards Trump.

PS. I am 100% not a Trump supporter. See how this devolves into assuming I'm a Trump supporter? I'm just stating things based on what they said. I never even attacked Hilary and her claims.

i'm guessing you mean hillary didn't bring up jobs in rural america vs jobs in general? because hillary literally had outlined how we as a country would move ahead and sustain our jobs/economy (basically: more education, investment in technology, encouraging startups).

all trump has talked about is how jobs are fleeing america. he even criticized ford for moving jobs from michigan when in fact they weren't.

so please, if you're going to say trump brought up jobs, at least address the fact that he didn't offer any solutions then, nor has he offered any now. that Carrier "job save" of 1000 was due to the state of indiana offering them incentives to keep the jobs here. that's not a very sustainable idea (also, although i'm not necessarily opposed to states giving companies incentives like this at tax-payer expense, that move seems very anti-free market all things considered).

>more education, investment in technology, encouraging startups

This is very, very obviously not what rural Americans want to hear.

But all politicians promise jobs - this is nothing new. Even Hillary promised jobs, she even had plans for it.

Promising jobs is not new.

She supported TPP which people viewed as anti job. Trump was strongly against TPP. Stuff like that speaks louder than simple I'm gonna create jobs promises which as you say all politicians say.

edit: correct acronym.

You've got your acronym wrong, it's TPP not TTP.

Actually, she had a plan, and had the technical/ bureaucratic/ legal backing to make It.

Trump, had and has not come up with a concrete plan as I recall. His current plan seems to be to... I don't know actually.

Just opposing the TPP doesn't make a case for trump winning votes and the presidency.

Trump had other actual statements, like "i will not let ford shut this plant down, and send jobs to Mexico!"

Let's not forget: "we'll start hitting those people where it hurts the most!" Those people being immigrants and China, who were "taking all the jobs."

hillary believed that most people would be rational and not vote for someone that obviously against what America stood for. He has had more scandal in his run for office than I've seen in many imaginative tv shows.

It seems, when it came down to it, people chose to vote for their party. Even if whatever trump said or did, was against what they held as the standard for a president.

No one is talking about taxing the poor. For the vast majority of Americans, there tax would remain the same. Its the 1%, and especially the top .1% that are going to need to pay, as they are the ones hoarding the wealth.

Er, Hillary had a $30 billion plan directly aimed at helping coal communities [0]. I happen to not support much of that plan but the claim "He was the only candidate that actually said a single idea that was directly aimed at helping them" is demonstrably false.

[0]http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-clinton-idUSK...

edit - Include link

Rural America exists today due to the explosion of Rail in the late 1800s to 1930s. the Interstate Highway System, and DOD strategically building highways between bases that avoided large population centers. That infrastructure allowed many small towns to spring up manufacturing, factories, processing, etc. as practically speculation on what areas would become denser over time. As the infrastructure has crumbled, as cheaper substitutes came along from overseas or in other areas, and as temporarily wealthier areas sent their best and brightest to denser areas for better educational opportunities, the resources available to these areas have dwindled.

Unless we find some way for rural areas to be reinvigorated though government-funded infrastructure building and private arbitrage as we have in times past, we're going to have to let nature run its course. This kind of outcome has happened time and again in the past, to cultures now long since dead. Rural America doesn't like that, and of course neither does MSA America, since it means the underdog doesn't win. So give a figure. How much does cost of living as a percentage of income need to be before we as a society can stage an intervention to say "No, we can no longer support your way of life. It's become too expensive. You need to figure out how to be productive or your seat at the table is no longer open."?

Would you say the same to a homeless person? Why should we just let the interior of our country become economically baren just so the top 20 percent of people in cities can reap the rewards of globalism? That's millions of people that you're saying should either suck it up or die.

I'm not saying die, I'm saying move forward.

Rural America is a happy unintended outcome of previous laws, policies, and such that has become prohibitively expensive with a low ROI. Questioning whether help should be given in the form of subsistence handouts or expensive infrastructure shifts isn't taboo--it's at the heart of demand from Rural America. "Bring Jobs Back!" How? Government has two methods: coerce jobs to be opened there (fascism or socialism, which most Rural Americans claim to be against) or to design policy to encourage growth (no guarantee jobs will come back, especially the old jobs people are trained for). We must ask ourselves the question whether we want collectivism or similar types of job-making programs, shown to be fairly fragile depending on who is in charge, or whether we want to move forward with the techno-liberal/libertarian march that has been ongoing since the Industrial Revolution.

If saving Rural America is a zero-sum outcome with the long-run survival of the species through colonizing the solar system and beyond, which do we invest in as a society?

As a last point, isn't leaving Rural America to it's own devices to figure things out what Rural America has been voting for since Nixon, anyhow?

No, America was rural before rail and the highway systems, as was the rest of the world. America has gotten progressively less rural since its founding as fewer people have had to be directly engaged in farming.

Rail and the rest allowed it to persist.

>> Tesla isn't opening up a factory in New Hampshire anytime soon. There certainly isn't as many amazing colleges such as UC berkley there.

That is because of economies of scale. It is not possible to get a U.C. Berkeley in every one of the 17,000 towns the US has. Not even big cities will be getting U.C. Berkeley. Aside from NYC and Boston and Pittsburgh, there isn't any other city that has a comparable Top-5 engineering school.

Same for Tesla factories, you cant have a factory in every one of the 17,000 towns.

I'm not sure how Trump is helping these towns, but the Dems did offer solutions, more fundamental solutions. Like better access to education so new graduates could qualify for better jobs. These problems have been created over a generation and wont be solved with a simple travel ban or what not, they will be solved with education and empowerment.

Secondly, Dems have tried hard to get a better health-care system. Being an entrepreneur I understand how critical this is -- without healthcare I would not take risks, not with a family. I'd stick to my job to just get health benefits. Having a portable health plan is also critical to allowing people mobility, hopefully upward mobility.

What part of this has to do with the problem I brought up? Rural white America which is a large portion of America has a lack of opportunities.

I'm not talking health care. And I 100% know that it is not reasonable to bring those schools to rural America. But where is the dialog around helping them? At least a conversation around fixing the heroin problem and finding them jobs. If you have that conversation that was brought up during the election in big debates during the election, please link it.

there are countless examples of Trump at least putting together a plan, even if its stupid, to help them.

Access to medical care, therapy, especially for the poor have always been a top-3 Democrat platform item. Here is one plan HRC had: http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/clinton-proposes-plan-to-addr...

w/r/t the Heroin problem, for a generation, Republicans have pushed an agenda of criminalizing drug addiction, labeling it a moral issue and throwing victims into prison. That worked to their agenda when it was a big urban problem affecting swaths of minorities. As a bonus, it also ups private for-profit prison populations, another Republican agenda. Now that it is a rural scourge amongst white Americans, Republicans are having a difficult time reconciling their previous lack of empathy, so they are mostly silent.

I'm a "city-dweller" and while I'm registered Republican I generally vote Democratic. My taxes go up as a 1%-er, but i'm 100% to have my taxes go up to support my fellow Americans.

> w/r/t the Heroin problem, for a generation, Republicans have pushed an agenda of criminalizing drug addiction, labeling it a moral issue and throwing victims into prison.

Don't forget that Dems were also strongly for this platform in the 90s under Clinton.

They weren't strongly for this. They edged towards it just enough to win enough of the white people who had fallen for scaremongering (and often racist) propaganda put out by Republicans so they wouldn't lose and then have no ability to change the policy.

"Both sides are the same" is a rallying cry of people who know that one side is actually much worse.

If a political party is not entirely for the end of the drug war... they get tossed in the trash. They're lucky they get to hang out with the garbage IMO.

I think the disconnect is in what "help" looks like. From the "city folk" point of view, help means removing barriers: healthcare, education, affordable housing, child care, etc.

Creating jobs in where they don't geographically make sense isn't helping, it's passing the buck.

>But where is the dialog around helping them?

Is this a joke?

The discussion around how to humanely deal with drug addiction has been completely shut down by the right wing. they have made it a literal WAR against drug users.

Rural america dug its grave by pushing for the drug war for decades, and now that white americans are having a drug problem its finally time to step back and look at this issue more seriously?

And you think its the cities that lack empathy? How disconnected from reality can you be?

Curious what you think of relocation financing. One common theme I hear in interviews with rural Americans is that there are no opportunities where they are, but they can't move to the city because the cost of living is such that they could never afford security deposit + 1st month's rent.

OTOH, I know a few founders who have tried to start relocation financing companies, and it just doesn't seem to work. Too much risk on the loans, and not enough demand from the people who would be helped most by them.

I think that's interesting. I'd be curious what the economics behind it would be to make it work, but I think that could be a step in the right direction. Realistically, it may come up with the issues you just mentioned of it just not being economical.

Are people moving to San Francisco or Manhatten only? Is $2k or $3k crazy? Are there groups of people who could room together? Do they have no friends they could temporarily room with while they get on their feet? I came from this life. This is a copout for people afraid to leave their comfort zone.

When I moved to Austin, I had plenty of people warn me I would get mugged every time I set foot on the street. Similar outrageous claims have been made regarding every place I've ended up. Nuts to that. We can't let fear rule our lives.

>Is $2k or $3k crazy?

For most people here, $500 is crazy. People in rural America tend to be poor.

I know people in rural America can have limited means. That's my stomping grounds--I lived it.

People can stock away $50/month, $30/month, you name it. Low amounts. It adds up quick. And even then, you can get 4 or 5 people in an area who want to move to the city to go, and go. Or a person can join the military to get out, in most cases.

Maybe because its late at night, but I feel like I'm coming across unsympathetic. I'm not--I know it's hard to leave. It's not as easy as up and leaving one day. What concerns me is the idea of an apparent lack of desire to put into action the wistfulness of wanting to leave by grandparent comment and other comments in this thread. Rural America is caught in a spiral of increasing costs that it can't dig itself out of. Most everyone knows that. Is it kinder to continue giving sustenance living to people wanting to stay or to open the valve for transferring to cities through housing projects?

By your own math, $50 a month adds up to $2,000 in relocation expenses in years.

Years where nothing has gone wrong that needs to deplete that relocation fund.

It's a nice dream, but it seems like a dream to me. (Also grew up poor, though not as poor as a lot of people.)

Implicit in what I'm saying is getting together with like-minded local people to pool resources for a move.

Once you've found that initial $50, you'll find more margins. Maybe it comes by switching over to lentils, eggs, salt, and multivitamins. Maybe it comes from canceling cable. Maybe it comes by cutting out the internet for awhile while you put the money to better use. Maybe it comes by picking up an early morning newspaper route in the wealthier part of town. Maybe it comes by working at the local Walmart distributor 25 miles away. Maybe it comes by selling the wood on your property, should you have some. The point is that margins for super-saving and liquidation are possible.

> People can stock away $50/month, $30/month, you name it.

Tell me more about disposable income... whats it like?

Snark aside, disposable income is possible. Maybe it comes by picking up a side gig, maybe it comes by choosing to avoid drinking/smoking/junk food, maybe it comes by replacing shorter trips (<10 mi) with bike rides. There are dozens to hundreds of margins where individuals can be super-savers. Use a bucket of water and fingers + soap or newspaper instead of toilet paper, use baking soda instead of toothpaste, eat dandelion leaves instead of buying kale, etc.

I lived two years among the poorest of the poor in the Philippines, who live on less then $2/day, and I've seen super saving as a necessity for survival. In the US we have wonderful things like food stamps, guaranteed healthcare at ERs, utilities help if you're poor, etc. that take so much of the risk out of life. If you're living on rice + salt + parasite-laden water, cooking your food in a stolen pot by burning coconut shells from your manual labor during the day as a copras harvester (and getting your protein from unripe jackfruit, salted minnows, purloined coconut, and the wild bird that falls into your traps), living in a house that has a thatched roof and split bamboo walls and floors, and you still send your kids to school and pay the $100/year in tuition to get them there, then seeing how to save literally any disposable income makes a whole lot of sense. We're so wealthy in the US that we have little idea what it means to be truly poor.

It is disingenuous to compare the conditions of poverty in one place and time to another as if poverty is measured absolutely.

Adam Smith, coined the father of economics, had this to say about this sentiment in The Wealth of Nations:

> By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them. In Scotland, custom has rendered them a necessary of life to the lowest order of men; but not to the same order of women, who may, without any discredit, walk about barefooted. In France they are necessaries neither to men nor to women, the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes, and sometimes barefooted. Under necessaries, therefore, I comprehend not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people. All other things I call luxuries, without meaning by this appellation to throw the smallest degree of reproach upon the temperate use of them. Beer and ale, for example, in Great Britain, and wine, even in the wine countries, I call luxuries. A man of any rank may, without any reproach, abstain totally from tasting such liquors. Nature does not render them necessary for the support of life, and custom nowhere renders it indecent to live without them.

Aye, and he wrote before the great stabilization of the Western hemisphere by the Monroe doctrine, and before the American and Canadian Manifest Destiny fervor, before the Irish potato famine, etc. Adventurous times when people of indigent circumstances went somewhere else or faced dire potential outcomes. Smith's argument supports my point that there are margins in all kinds of directions one may potentially save on, in noting that one can forego wine and beer without reproach. The people I lived among also had norms considered reproachful to cross, yet necessity occasionally required.

Sometimes you bite the bullet for awhile, as an investment for the future. You do what it takes.

Is it actually disingenuous?

When I graduated college, I had a decent job in financial software, but figured I would measure my standard of living against my peers who were unemployed or going to grad school and just bank the rest of my salary. That gave me the freedom to take advantage of many opportunities that would've been closed off to me had I measured my standard of living against what other people in my workplace expected.

Similarly, when looking at my life as a whole, I compare it to my dad (who grew up in WW2 Philippines and had his house bombed) and think I'm doing great.

Sure, I understand that it's natural to compare yourself against your immediate surroundings rather than arbitrary points in time and space. But if a mental model comparing yourself against another reference point will make you happier and give you the wherewithal to actually improve your standard of living, why not adopt it?

> For most people here, $500 is crazy. People in rural America tend to be poor.

They had the $500, they just chose to spend it on the latest iPhone.

Maybe, maybe not. This does happen, of course, but I'm not sure it's generalizable.

Grandparent poster is just making a snarky comment based on recent events. (Republican) congressman Jason Chaffetz recently suggested that poor people should be able to afford healthcare if they skipped buying the latest iphone.

My rent in rural Wisconsin was $200 a month plus utilities. One of my roommates struggled to keep up with even that.

> Is $2k or $3k crazy?

Yes. But that's one thing that does keep rural (or even, in my experience, suburban) people from moving to large cities. They really can't imagine paying so much for rent.

Some in my family can't even imagine renting an apartment. It's a house or nothing. A cheap-ish house in a rural area seems to win out over a better job in a city, more often than not.

This makes a lot of sense to me... This is exactly why I haven't moved to CA!

When it is 5 or 6 months of your current housing cost, and you're living paycheck to paycheck (if not piling up debt) due to underemployment, yeah, $2k to $3k is crazy.

Yeh 2k or 3k is crazy for most. Most don't have room mates to help pay for that, and that doesn't even help someone with a family.

>Throwing money into unemployment and welfare won't solve the problem at all. [my emphasis.]

That's not what loeg wrote. There are other ways of spending money, such as infrastructure projects - when I visited Oregon, I noticed how much of the infrastructure was from New Deal projects, which, of course, is the epitome of everything that fiscal conservatives are fighting against. If you are opposed things like that, and you don't have an alternative solution to offer, get off your high horse about other peoples' lack of empathy.

Getting jobs back is a form of redistribution, because it is ultimately funded by subsidies, higher consumer prices, or both. With that said, I favor redistribution, but am flexible about what form it takes.

Dartmouth is in New Hampshire, and neighboring VT has Middlebury, ME has Bowdoin, Bates and Colby and MA has Williams, all in rural environments.

I wonder if people are as disgusted with all the indirect subsidies as they are with the direct ones.

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