Discussion for article #230029
This seems like something that might ultimately exacerbate inequality. If everyone who can does move away from the places that are on the way down, they probably (slightly) depress wages in the growth centers they move to. And they accelerate the economic decline of the areas they leave, so that the folks who won’t or can’t leave (older, poorer, less well eduated, less access to credit or transportation) are left worse off, with much less intellectual, economic or political infrastructure in the area to help them cope. A slightly gentler version of throwing the less-useful types out of the lifeboat.
(And as a practical point, we know that there’s a reason militias and tend to locate in depressed rural areas…)
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A rather strange article in my opinion, but maybe I’m missing something. This sounds like the story of the United States since at least the early twentieth century to me.
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Exactly. I left Buffalo NY for just these sorts of reasons in 1965!!! Something the article neglects to inquire into is the effect of leaving the governance of these places in the hands of the people who didn’t have the gumption/drive to move. Not pretty.
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Moving is one of the best forms of economic mobility. Article makes great sense.
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Of course this phenomenon doesn’t just widen the gap between successful and less successful. It also creates vast tracts of resentful working poor whose racial animosity is easy to exploit to elect people who gladly make their problems worse.
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I left my awful hometown 22 years ago to get away from white trash racism, sexism, heterocentrism and a general cultural, scientific and historical ignorance which persists to this day. America is full of people who think the Earth is flat and 6,000 years old, which is fine for a manufacturing economy but unsustainable for an information economy.
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It’s looking a lot like Communist China out there…where they too are being forced economically to move from their rural areas to the new factory towns. The rich will have the rural areas all to themselves at this rate…in Communist China and Communist (Republican central party) America.
My family just moved from the sparsely populated NW Illinois to a thriving small city 2 states away.
My wife and I were both working and using a babysitter or daycare for the hour or two each evening our 8 year old had till one of us got home. After bullying at daycare and two insane babysitters we had to do something different. The Mrs told me that she’d shop around for a job that would let me stay home and here I am (imagine sounds of a washer running in background)
By moving to a new area we more than made up for the loss of my wages.
The story of America is moving. First people moved from the old country to America. Then they moved from farms to the cities. Then from cities to the suburbs. People are always moving looking for opportunities. People chase jobs. The reason is obvious. Nobody wants to starve in place.
I left my rustbelt town to go to college and never seriously thought about moving back, although it has recovered to a certain extent. I don’t know what the answer is, but chaining people to the place they grew up in isn’t it. It is just inconceivable to me that many of these places will be able to claim renewed economic purpose to replace mining or agriculture or whatever else they used to have. West Virginia, Southwestern Virginia and Eastern Kentucky come to mind, but whistlestop towns in Colorado and other parts of the southwest are in the same boat. It’s depressing that the locals in this article are talking about a casino.
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People sometimes ask me what happened to my home state of Wisconsin. It used to elect the likes of LaFollette and Feingold (well, and McCarthy and Sensenbrenner, etc.). And my first answer is that America elected a black president (whom a plurality of Wisconsinites voted for twice), and that whipped its wingnuts into a frenzy. And that’s surely a big part of it, but the other thing that happened is that in the '90s and '00s, people like me left for bigger cities in other states because there weren’t any manufacturing jobs anymore. I’d bet that this is a large part of the reason you see these formerly blue bastions in the Upper Midwest and elsewhere going blood red – a large part of the liberal Democratic electorate has left for greener brownfields.
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I know Danville well- my mother grew up in a coal ming town about 5 miles south of there and 5 of my first cousins grew up up there.
Only one of my cousins lives in Danville now- the others are literally spread all over the country.
Modern capitalism requires labor mobility, whether we like it or not. It has always been thus. Some can move; some can’t. (One more reason that home ownership can be a trap for some.) What, really, are the alternatives here? Places shrink; places grow. Capitalism requires governmental bandages, yet effective ones tend to lag the wounds and damage. We’re doing a poor job in that department. Nation-building begins at home, methinks.
I left the Detroit area in 1975 for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was obvious to anybody with a brain that it was on a downward, on-way slide into econo-troubles. I was lucky enough to have the right age, freedom, resources, and education to do so. The ability to see the future was a small part of it.
"The flow of educated workers from struggling communities to areas with brighter job opportunities might, to some extent, help shore up the U.S. middle class, "
No it won’t. It will hand the GOP/Teatrolls more RED real estate and thereby give them more districts with which to control the House and run the country by minority rule. It’s precisely what they want. More young professionals flocking to concentrate their educated liberalism into tiny geographic areas so the rural red areas on the map can function like landed gentry with votes that essentially count more than everyone else’s. They want nothing more than to see that (just throwing numbers around) if a state’s population is 5M and 3M of them are liberals, then the liberals are all packed into the cities and 4/5 of the representatives are GOPers. This will destroy the middle-class further over the long run, not help it.
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Moving from a depressed economic condition with larger-than-average vote leverage, to a local environment that’s relatively buzzing with work but much much much smaller-than-average vote leverage.
Hmmm … sounds like pretty good system for Democrats to self-deactivate while the Old Man Potters and Koch brothers install toadies in perpetuity. Who needs to care about Mexico having turned into a gigantic crack house run mostly by exurban drug lords, when we can start up with that very same pattern at home?
Towns, like people, have to reinvent themselves. If young people and new businesses are not staying or moving in, they have to find out why and adapt or die. I moved 30 miles from a ton with a 6% wage tax to one with none, and got phenomenally better public schools to boot because the taxpayers are willing to pay for them and see the benefit to having them. If towns and their citizens do not pay attention to the fundamentals, the towns die a lingering death.