Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

This is much less interesting than the rust belt decline or any other number of dying communities. Kansas used to need a lot more people to support farming and thus had enough people around for small towns to have a little life to them. Now they don't. It's a good thing that we can make so much food with fewer people, but it does mean even fewer people will live in rural agricultural communities.

We love to romanticize the small farmer, but I don't know why we'd expect vast areas of farm land to support vibrant small towns.

View on HN

I disagree. The decline of mechanized agricultural America makes for an enlightening comparison to the fate of the mechanized manufacturing Rust Belt and its eventual decline. After all, the common thread does seem to be that mechanization and automation results in productivity gains with fewer workers, but nearly everything else differs, and yet the results are quite similar.

As the article lays out, in some ways the farmers were victims of their own success, while in others they were fighting a losing demographic battle against out-migration and lack of opportunity to retain talent. Studying why things ended up this way is valuable.

With the internet, small towns should be more viable in places like Kansas.

Technology tends toward centralisation.

Given the same Internet, a larger, denser, more central location has a greater comparative advantage.

You need more than internet access (which is probably not all that great in much of rural Kansas!) for people to want to live somewhere. I mean you can get that anywhere, why pick perfectly flat wheat fields? The small towns were a byproduct of needing a lot of people to grow wheat, they weren't destinations that people chose.

If I were going to pick a boring, flat land wheat farm type of place with ultra low cost of living to telecommute from, I would not pick Kansas. You can buy a pretty decent house in Ritzville, WA for $100k, it is on I-90, and it's not a ridiculous driving distance to Spokane or Seattle. And numerous mountainous hiking/camping/skiing/4x4ing locations within a 2 hour radius.

Also in the wheat farming sort of region, some random small town 45 minutes from the moscow-pullman metro area in SE WA. Pullman is a nice welcoming college town. Can buy houses for $100-120k.

And there's a tesla supercharger there, so you are covered for everything.

I wouldn't expect people to make that choice when there are better options. If I wanted to get away from urban life, I'd go move next to a forest with hiking, or near a ski resort, not near miles and miles of endless farms.

Maybe we need Lyft to run a rural helicopter transportation service. So that people can live in a town or small city and have a fast, easy commute to distant farm operations where they work.

That sounds highly infeasible.

Maybe it'll be a thing when passenger-carrying drone-style aircraft (hex- octo- deca- copters, whatever) become a thing.

> This is much less interesting than the rust belt decline

Can you expand on this? Is it because you don't care about farmers in comparison to industrial workers, or is there a deeper meaning?

Kansas was never bustling, the rust belt was.

Did you live there? There was a definite vibrancy to the network of small towns in the Midwest that is being lost, similar to the rust belt. The cultures were very different, though, so perhaps one person's "bustling" is another's unmentionable adjective.

What is "bustling"? People lived there and enjoyed their lives, raised children, and participated in a culture. Who are you to look down your nose with "bustling"?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com