If there are more people in a city than it provides opportunity for it seems to me to be a similar cruelty to incentivize them to stay in one place because they have "roots" there or something equally vague.
States like disability because it is 100% federally funded and determinations are made by administrative law judges based on local standards. Temporary assistance (aka welfare), Medicaid, and other programs have a administrative and program cost sharing with the state and/or county.
Urban poverty has a lot of disability cases too. Welfare phases out in a few years and chronically poor folks end up labeled disabled.
I call it insidious because once you're on disability, there is an incentive to not try to re-enter the workforce. Most welfare recipients are off the rolls pretty quickly.
I would even agree with urban relocation if one city had a disproportionate number of people trapped in inter-generational poverty and another had extra jobs. I don't think "deep cuts" to urban welfare are ever the solution. I do think that the welfare system should prioritize setting its recipients up for success.
There just aren't any houses, so their quality of life takes a greater hit than staying put in the form of huge commutes and dramatically increased cost of living. See service workers or teachers in San Francisco.
1. https://www.curbed.com/2017/6/20/15834514/rent-transportatio...
2. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/607957/the-unaffordable-u...
3. http://www.sfexaminer.com/mayor-lee-spend-44-million-sf-teac...
Additionally, there are other cities that have more opportunity than closed mining towns do. At the bare minimum the people need to relocate to someplace marginally better with ANY economic opportunity, because where they're at now has NO opportunity, not necessarily some place that is the top of economic opportunity.
For people on the low end of the earning spectrum, the lack of tangible benefits for moving outside of a vague promise of better job prospects makes staying put a viable option. If you worked at McDonalds, would you move across the country and away from your entire social support system for a chance to commute two hours on public transit to work at Arbys? I wouldn't.
> "entire social support" systems, which I might add seem to be coming up short in the first place.
I doubt very much you'd make the same statement about the urban poor.
Good on you, mate. I've had similar experiences myself.
> Why are they only worth helping if they live in cities?
Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's reading a bit much into what I'd said. I don't think I said anything that could even remotely merit such an interpretation.
There is, of course, a spatial proximity of learning centers to population centers but that is just a byproduct of practicality.
> I doubt very much you'd make the same statement [about social support systems coming up short] about the urban poor.
Is there some reason you think I wouldn't make similar assertions about the urban poor? If people live in systemic poverty, then their social support networks have largely failed them. I would argue such a point remains true regardless of a person's origin.
I think perhaps you've misread tone. I was born and raised in a rural resource community, one of the most remote in the U.S. I'm not anti-rural, by any measure.
That said, some skills are best taught in a hands-on fashion. Add to that such learning approaches are more easily adapted to by some than others.
Rural telephone service and electricity both required subsidization by those who've opted to lead more practical lives i.e. lives where phone and electricity and other various utilities don't have to be directly subsidized by others.
Is it fair to force people who make reasoned and informed decisions about their own lives and where they live to pay for the decisions of those who prefer the country life?
I'm not advocating forcing people to move, under any circumstances.
A basic house is $65k in Morgantown: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Morgantown-WV/22898744...
And a nice house with a 10 minute funicular commute to Downtown Pittsburgh (the Paris of Appalachia) isn't too much more: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/11363350_zpid/globalre...
And one can pay much less if one wishes: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2040-Lowrie-St-Pittsburgh...
Scarcity-driven housing costs are one of the biggest problems in a few coastal cities— but in much of the country, the problem is poverty.
Both Pittsburgh and Morgantown are pretty prosperous, yet remain affordable enough for blue-collar workers to own homes close enough to the center of the city to commute by foot, bus, streetcar, funicular, PRT pod, or bike. The neighborhoods I posted are a bit rundown, but perfectly livable— I'd live in any of them.
The schools aren't necessarily great in the Pittsburgh neighborhoods but they usually aren't in rural Appalachia either.
I don't disagree that moving is hard when one is poor and one relies on one's social connections for a lot of support. It's just not because of a lack of houses in the prosperous parts of Appalachia.
Housing shortages on the coasts are a huge issue, and a huge issue for national inequality— but overbuilding and inner-city abandonment remain a bigger issue in a lot of cities in the middle of the country.
This equation isn't typically true for urban areas, so there's no reason for people to move. (See Detroit for details on exceptions.)
I know folks on the right screamed about the 'welfare queens' living on the tax payers' dime in the inner cities for generation after generation. In reality, this was a coded attack against blacks, and the majority of the claims were hyperbole.
But now the left has begun making the same mean-spirited attacks on uneducated whites from Appalachia, the Midwest, and the south.
Both types of stereotypes are annoying to hear repeated again and again.
This economic transition will eventually effect everyone. Everyone. These people are just at the front end of it.
Also, if you compare the rate of job displacement right now with technology compared to say the early 20th century where a majority of the jobs that existed 50 years prior were "destroyed", then it doesn't seem like we're at much of an inflection point.
More likely, because we have development policies that make it hard/expensive to move, we're not putting people in the new jobs like we used to--this has down the line effects of slowing growth because the workers who are also consumers aren't spending what they could have.
Say that in another thirty years, though. You're referring to billions of people in countries that haven't yet entered a post-industrial economic situation. Are those billions any safer than the millions in the U.S. who've fallen out of it?
If the residents refuse that sort of help and instead demand that the government somehow make the old mines profitable again, then one may indulge in some exasperated eyeball-rolling and mockery, but I'm trying not to do that preemptively.
https://thinkprogress.org/appalachia-used-to-be-a-democratic...
"Shame" is defined as "a painful feeling of humiliation or distress caused by the consciousness of wrong or foolish behavior." Teaching people to feel shame for conduct like lying, cheating, and stealing is an important tool societies use to enforce social norms in situations (such as with young people), where resort to legal action would be excessive and harmful.
It works at a macro level too. Consider this article: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-25947984 ("Child Labor: India's Hidden Shame"). The word succinctly captures the international community's disapproval of certain practices that are common in certain places, with the implication that continuation of those practices will meet with continued disapproval from international peers. Again, that's an important social tool at the international level.
It'd be similarly ignorant to praise murdering your enemies. Sure no doubt about it, it's really effective. Doesn't mean it's legal or ethical.
These things are brute force hammers. If you really think shaming has value, read the Scarlet Letter.
And we all live in a "reptilian brain context". I'm not sure what other context there is. It makes no sense to reason about society as if we weren't all half a chromosome away from a chimpanzee.
Find an on par opponent and you'll get escalation of shaming, get your ass handed back to you with wit, or the person will just ignore you.
So I refuse that it's effective. It's perhaps been effective for you, self selective bias. You probably don't shame people you've sized up who won't respond to shaming the way you want.
But yeah, I totally only believe this because I'm a successful bully (◔_◔)
If you're living off of government assistance and vote Republican while Republicans are constantly talking about stripping away said assistance programs, you absolutely deserve whatever happens to you. I have zero sympathy for you. You made your bed, now you get to sleep in it.
The only people I will have sympathy for are the children who have parents that are too dumb to see through the bullshit spewed by Fox, InfoWars, Breitbart, etc, and people that vote Democrat because they know better, but end up getting screwed by the Republicans that don't.
This isn't a case of both sides do it at all.