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Comment by jballanc | Hacker News Reader

What this reviewer, and most commenters on rural depopulation, seem to miss is that there is no inherent virtue in "small town" America. Small towns have existed, historically, either as jumping-off points for pioneer exploration or as local hubs for farmers and their goods. I think it's safe to say that the pioneer exploration of America is a done deal, and factory farms (and even family farms) have shown that advances in technology can make even farming efficient to the point that local hubs are no longer needed.

The average New Yorker has such a significantly smaller impact on the environment than the average small town resident, that I really can't think of a good reason for small towns to exist any longer. The sooner we all move toward urban settlement and leave the rural areas to efficient farming, weekend trips, and mother nature, the better!

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Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too.

The Midwest and its way of life depended on a technology and an industry that is not anymore experiencing growth. This could happen in coastal cities tomorrow too. Trying to adapt your town to meet the needs of a modern economy is, I think, a much nobler cause than letting it wither and die because it lacks some sort of abstract "inherent virtue" thing.

I'm pretty sure there's no "inherent virtue" in having kids anymore either. I mean think about it, kids increase net environmental impact by humans. :|

> Why stop at the American Midwest? I'm fairly certain that there's no "inherent virtue" in Africa. Oh, and let's add China too. India maybe. Everyone should just come to America. Yes, you Canadians playing peekaboo in the corner too.

D'oh, I upvoted your comment before I read the whole thing. After spending time in provincial China, yes, I agree that the people living with miserable quality of life on subsistence farming should move to Chengdu, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, or one of the developed places in the rest of Asia or the West. Haven't been to Africa but I imagine it's similar.

Most of the valuable and useful things happening in the world right now depend more on working with other people than natural resources or lots of space. If you like it as a preference, go right ahead for it. But speaking in terms of individual success and progress, or as advancement as humanity/society-at-large, yes, generally speaking we ought to migrate to where there's other smart people we can work with. So I agree with the first part of your semi-sarcastic comment because I missed the sarcasm, though I disagree a bit with the rest of it.

'I really can't think of a good reason for small towns to exist any longer'

I found this post really insensitive. But it's good, because it made me realize that I've been insensitive in a similar way without knowing it.

My brother and I grew up in a rural town of 6,000 in the Midwest. He went off to Harvard and is now a doctor on the West Coast and I went off to Stanford and now run a business in China. We visit home on the holidays. So you can say the article struck a personal note - I'd never read about the pattern before (though I was intuitively aware of it) and knowing that I'm contributing to it leaves me with a sense of melancholy.

The point that you miss, jballanc, is that these are communities of living people - each with its own tiny culture. There are problems with these places that I don't know how to solve, but their gradual decay is sad in the same way that the destruction of cultures all over the world is sad.

I have to thank you, though. As a foreigner in China whose invested a lot of time in mastering Mandarin, I've come to strongly believe that the elimination of the other Chinese dialects and the traditional character set is a very favorable thing. I've probably said, at some point or another, that I 'really couldn't think of a good reason for the traditional character set to exist anymore'. Until now, I've never been able to fully understand why, for example, some Taiwanese Americans get so upset about the gradual decline of their character set. When speaking to them about the issue, I must have come off as insensitive as you do to me. In the future, I will change my behavior.

I, too, grew up in a small Midwest town and have since lived in Miami, New York, and Silicon Valley. I guess you could say that I'm being insensitive, but I tend to see things a bit differently. Change is inevitable, and thinking that you can hold on to things forever is foolhardy at best. Yes, small town America has an ever so slightly different culture, and loosing it might be painful (much like loosing traditional print media, I should think). But I always think back to when I was 8. I had a stuffed toy animal that I loved and vowed never to give up. Then I realized that, while that stuffed animal represented a certain part of my life that I valued, it was time to move on. There will always be new things to value in the future.

Now, as for the issue you raise of language, at the risk of sounding hypocritical I must say I've always been a strong proponent of preserving dialects and less common languages. I think it ultimately comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. I don't think that small town America represents a culture unique enough, or hard enough to recreate, that it's worth extraordinary attempts to preserve it. Languages, on the other hand, often represent hundreds or thousands of years of collective cultural knowledge, and once that's gone, it's gone.

A last point I feel I should make: if there is some "intrinsic value" to small town America, I think attempting to preserve small towns by creating artificial incentives to keep headstrong youth from leaving would probably do as much or more to destroy that intrinsic value than just letting nature take its course, so to speak, and gradually reduce the number of small towns.

Small languages may be interesting but we just don't have enough humans to speak them all, as humans don't want to study small languages unless they happen to be hobbysts or acquire that language as children.

> ... these are communities of living people - each with its own tiny culture. There are problems with these places that I don't know how to solve, but their gradual decay is sad in the same way that the destruction of cultures all over the world is sad.

But if they are not self-sustainable then who will subsidize them. Should everyone's taxes go towards supporting unsustainable communities out in the middle of nowhere?

There are lot of communities with their own culture. It gives us a fuzzy and warm feeling to think about the quiet little town and the local gathering at a local diner in the morning to chat and sociailize. But at the end of the day, if they are all living on welfare, we can only have so many such small towns.

Often economic reality is at odds with our warm fuzzy feelings. This is one of those instances.

I don't believe that I suggested anywhere that we subsidize these communities or somehow act to stop what it is occurring. I said I didn't see any real solutions to the problems presented within them.

I was taking issue with the idea that these towns are valueless - that nothing would be lost with their disappearance.

What is this "decline" in traditional Chinese characters you're talking about? Unlike the PRC, Taiwan and HK both have universal literacy. Residents of Taiwan in particular are amongst the most voracious readers on the planet. According to one study I read, only the Japanese are reading more. Not only that, but mainlanders are now increasingly familiar with traditional characters, due to the influx of HK/TW music videos and movies. The opposite is not true... not even in HK.

Whatever the reasons you have for disliking traditional characters, it's important to recognize that the simplification process involved a trade-off. Characters became faster to write by hand, somewhat more phonetic (for Mandarin speakers), but recognizability was sacrificed to a degree as was semantic information (e.g. swapping the 燕 out of 嚥 and slapping in an 因).

In reading, the important thing is how distinct a character is from another, not how simple it is.

Look at these character pairs (traditional/simplified)

    義 vs. 叉    /    义 vs. 叉

    無 vs. 天    /    无 vs. 天

    廣 vs. 廠    /    广 vs. 厂

    術 vs. 木    /    术 vs. 木

When it comes to hand-writing, which isn't nearly as important as it was in the past, most people do use some simplifications for speed. Most aren't as extreme as the PRC simplifications were, though. In truth, simplification still hasn't met its original proponents' goals of promoting widespread literacy, while the areas using traditional characters achieved those goals without changing their writing system.

The Taiwanese Americans you were speaking to were almost certainly aware of all of the above, but they might have been too polite or just too off-guard to point it out.

Oh, that's simple: the simplified set is ugly. Traditional writing is so close to being an art form onto itself, the difference is negligible. Furthermore, the change's fairly recent too, so you have three or four generations being told they have to relearn their own native language, and... yeah, organic evolution's preferable.

There is no inherent virtue in just about any living arrangement: it all depends on your perspective. Yours appears to be focused on environmental impact, I prefer to live in the near silence out in the country. When I visit family in NYC, I can't believe that I used to live there: the noise and crowds drive me nuts!

I don't live in an incorporated town: I live in a rural "township" with a population of roughly 2,000 over 36 square miles. IIRC, that's about the size of Manhattan. Yet I know my neighbors better than I did when I lived in Brooklyn, NY some 20 years ago. The mother Nature you relegate to weekend trips is the same mother Nature I enjoy dealing with every day.

Like I said: it's all about perspective.

Please explain how the average New Yorker has a significantly smaller impact on the environment than the average small town resident. Are you referring to CAFO?

NYC has a higher share of transit riders and walkers than any city, also a decent number of bikes, so much fewer VMT per capita. Also, larger multi-unit buildings are more efficient to heat than single family houses. So although NYC's environmental impact is huge, its residents have about half as much impact per capita as average Americans.

Incidentally, CA has lower than average environmental impact because the temperate weather means less energy used for heating and cooling. (Plus the higher efficiency standards and higher population density)

I would think that is the case if you exclude the environmental disaster that is LA, and the ecological harm done by flooding the imperial valley with water from Mono Lake.

Just a guess. The average New Yorker may not have a car.

I would say that you are correct. However, the total impact of cities is significantly higher.

Do we have any sources pointing either way?

I expect it should be more efficient to provide stuff (food, energy, whatever) to a dense population due to economics of scale. On the other hand bringing that stuff over might take more energy.

The no inherent virtue in "small town" America is really off the mark and inappropriate.

And as noted elsewhere, it isn't the per-capita environmental load that is important, it is the total load. Aside from CAFO and other agricultural environmental costs, the total rural load might be small. And you can't attribute the agricultural load to the people living there, because the food goes to the cities to be consumed.

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