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Comment by purplelobster | Hacker News Reader

That is becoming increasingly clear. When I drive through small to medium sized towns I can't help myself thinking "what do all of these people DO for a living?". They have to import everything they need and many of these places don't produce anything of value. Add into the mix that if they do have any fast food or services, more likely than not they're global franchises sucking even more money out of the town. How is this sustainable?

It seems to me that the more globalized, specialized and efficient the world becomes, a few hubs will produce pretty much everything. If in the past every town within a 100 mile radius had it's own carpenters making furniture, today there's one big Ikea in the middle of them all taking all that business away.

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You see communities surviving, perhaps thriving in their own way and you don't understand how.

Instead of thinking, "I must not know something", you think "these places don't produce anything of value".

Your comment said very little about economics and a great deal about you.

"Weird, I look at cities and wonder what the heck you all produce since you've closed your factories (they smell) and don't farm, ranch, mine, fish, or log."

Economics is subtle and much more complicated than what you describe. We are not heading to Mega City 1.

You're right, I mean there has to be something there or the people couldn't survive (unless they're all on disability). I would say though that 90% of these places don't have much except maybe farming. Maybe that's enough to sustain these places, but given how automated farming has become I'd doubt it. And farming is also concentrated the same way Ikea is. Modern farming tend to be much bigger scale (thus fewer players).

You probably should do some research on what farming actually means in this day and age. Farms are not self sustaining, they buy seed, equipment, fuel, and supplies. Those people buy other things. A farm is a huge input to an economy and money changes multiple hands.

My mother has lived in a couple of different up-in-the-mountains hamlets and I've met the people in nearby houses. Like you say, there's farming support work. There are also people like scriptwriters, professional wine tasters, hoteliers/B&Bers, architects, software engineers, government consultants ('what kind of consulting?' => 'consulting'...) and officials, retirees, successful artists, landlords living off rent from elsewhere, so on and so forth. There are heaps of people with 'portable' jobs that can bring money into a town, and plenty of those like the small town or hamlet life. You can't tell that a town doesn't have a well-off scriptwriter living in a back street simply by driving through it.

> We are not heading to Mega City 1.

Gutted, I need a Chopper style surf board!

There is a lot more to a local economy than factories and fast food. Small towns likely have an agricultural component, and most all will have trades (plumbers, electricians, HVAC, carpenters), mechanics, general handymen, other services, doctors, optometrists, lawyers, other professionals. It may not be New York or San Francisco but there's enough work to do to get by.

Pay off your $60K house by the time your 30 (perhaps from commuting to some distant town) - and entertain yourself with television and playing cards, and you don't need much annual income.

TV and cards don't need much income, but the health care certainly does.

It's more complicated than that. Just to give you an example, everything you mentioned is a service that would, ideally, be consumed locally.

Consider where the money to pay the plumber comes from. Will hundreds of people from other towns call on that plumber? Or on their own plumbers?

What I'm trying to say is that at some point, someone, not necessarily the plumber, but someone has to bring money into the town.

It's quite common for people to reach child-raising or retirement age and move to such places, or even leave their families there and continue to work in the big city. These cities also tend to have a lot of cottage-industry scale businesses: the average small American town is probably the worldwide capital of some incredibly obscure product or service. A town needs hard-currency inflow to pay for their imports but not a terribly large amount of it.

I've thought the same thing, I live in a small town and when I travel out to the country and see small houses actually shacks (their pickup truck is bigger) my mind spins.

Agriculture sounds innocent enough but living in such an environment I know it's not that simple. It's seasonal which is at the moment a huge problem the Canadian government has with seasonal workers in isolated areas. People get government assistance aka employment insurance or "EI" in Canadian-ese but the government has closed down the offices people go to apply and made it web based, baffling non-techy 60 year-olds. Now "EI cops" are making unannounced visits to these rural areas to make sure they people on EI are looking for work...but where?!

Anyway it's an age-old situation, the people make our food live in the middle of nowhere get pennies per ton and when they need money the government and city dwellers sneer at them.

Admittedly, at the same time Big Farming are just the same kind of bastards as any other large manufacturing or resource-extraction capitalist titans, and are often receiving very nice breaks from the government.

Take a look at the ownership breakdowns here:

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/agriculture/farm...

826, "Farms by Size and Type of Organization" is probably the more interesting report.

There is some room at the top for your cartoon owners there, but the typical farm, by acreage and number, is a medium sized place (still hundreds of acres) that is closely held by a family.

The USA calls subsidies a different name but they're still subsidies especially sugar and corn crops. It's do as I say not as I do even if the rules are broken, but it's no shock coming from the US.

NAFTA supposedly has wording about subsidies but the US often denies it I am just going by what I hear since living in an agricultural region you hear this stuff since birth even if you're not a farmer or fisherman.

More like each country had its own furniture making factories, but your point still stands. The ideal would be a society in which quality locally produced goods would be valued over trashy throwaway goods like those sold at Ikea, but this requires a complete rethinking of what's valuable in life by individuals and the society as a whole. Past experience has shown that attempts to manipulate this bureaucratically through tariffs, fixed pricing, closed guilds or the like just cause market distortions that bring about new problems without solving the old ones. In the meantime, though it's far from ideal, at least there is a way that hardworking people with no market for their labor can avoid starvation, although at a personal loss of dignity and a societal loss of that person's potential contribution.

But you're missing an important point. "Quality locally produced goods" are very expensive. I can get a "trashy" piece of furniture from IKEA for just a few hundred bucks. That same piece of furniture, produced by a local artisan, would cost me thousands. Most people don't buy cheap furniture because they choose to, they do it because I have to.

As the population grows, more people buy more stuff. Local woodworkers and cabinet makers cannot possibly fulfill demand using locally sourced materials and hand tools. If everyone is to get chairs and tables and cabinets, production must be automated. Once automated, production can scale, which usually reduces both quality and cost. Instead of local wood, wood is imported and turned into particle board because its dimensions make automation easier. But now a nightstand can be turned out in less than an hour, where a traditional artisan might spend a week or more, driving up labor costs.

In other words, it isn't that people need to "rethink" what's valuable. They have already done the thinking, and they value more affordable, lower quality goods over limited, expensive ones. And I don't blame them.

But what happens when Ikea sells goods of the same, or superior quality, than those "quality locally produced goods"? In fact, for many of the goods we buy, a lot of the "quality" we perceive from "locally-produced" is a figment of our imagination, or at least biased by taste.

Sure, the coffee table you paid $30 for at Wal-Mart is almost certainly inferior in every way but one (price!) to something you'd find yourself paying $400 (or $4000) for at [locally-produced furniture company]. But you could probably spend $200 and get something made in China or Vietnam that is just as good as anything you could buy locally-produced.

I understand that market forces drive people's buying decisions. I also know there is nothing inherently better about "locally produced," except for lower shipping costs. I understand that hand-made stuff is available overseas from workers paid a fraction of what it would take to survive in Europe or the US, and therefore it's naturally more efficient to buy from them than make it here. There's no way any government or group can change this situation by fiat without causing huge other economic problems.

However, over the long term, the situation of a third-world craftsperson earning in a month the amount of money a minimum wage worker in Europe or the US makes in a day or two is just not going to last in the long run. Either the influx of money from foreign trade and investment will raise wages in places like Vietnam or China to where their physical labor is no cheaper than a first-world nation, or it will pay for automation that will displace laborers just like it has in Europe or the US, and the costs of production in those nations will depend less and less on unskilled labor.

A purely libertarian way of dealing with the problem this article brings up would be to tighten up disability or abolish it and eliminate minimum wage. That way those workers would have to compete against the global labor market to survive. That's not going to work because our society is not going to accept it, and things are so expensive here, they probably couldn't compete even with starvation level wages. I'm not saying the ideal is possible, I'm just trying to figure out if there is any way society can reap whatever contributions can come from people who are currently on disability for marginal reasons without the nuclear option of forcing them to complete against $80 a month wages overseas? It's no good for people to sit around and do nothing all day, either for the individual or society. Idle hands are the Devil's tools.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but maybe a government program? Since the government is paying for them anyway? Something like the old WPA in the US? I don't have much confidence that will work though. Realistically, government programs rarely accomplish their stated goals, and they rarely go away if they do.

Well, there's merit to the idea of a gov't program even if you're kinda sorta against it. As it is now, people are defaulting to a de facto living wage from a program designed for something else because their options are few to none. Something like WPA would allow us to address the problem of our country's infrastructure and put money in people's pockets in exchange for honest work, if nothing else.

It's completely unlikely anyway. We're barely hanging on to some of the existing meager social benefits in this political climate, let alone creating new benefits.

I think that many people in this situation would rather do honest work for their $13000 a year. So the government wouldn't lose anything by setting up a new WPA. And it might gain some new park trails or murals or some children being looked after while their parents worked. It would probably be worth it if the pay was $15000 a year, and there would be some incentive to get off disability. But the pay couldn't be more than minimum wage or else it would funnel people out of regular jobs.

I think with an increase in telecommuting jobs (except Yahoo!) there may be growth in these small towns in the future. Small towns are nice to raise children in, have lower costs of living - which can be offset by high pay, high skill work telecommuted into the office from small town home.

And then the extra cash will turn into custom furniture because all the neighbors have IKEA and they want to be different.

Reminds me of the movie "Cars" by Pixar.

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