Let’s relocate a bunch of government agencies to the Midwest(vox.com)
vox.com
Let’s relocate a bunch of government agencies to the Midwest
http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/12/9/13881712/move-government-to-midwest
119 comments
This was done in Norway some years ago. With mixed success.
The government departments lost a most of their key people whom had no interest to uproot their kids and their own future career from the Oslo area. Especially as some department moved to some very small provincial fringe towns where future opportunities are limited. Departments moving to larger towns (Stavanger/Bergen/Trondheim) was probably less affected. And it did result in very large increases in travel budgets as meetings still mostly had to be held in Oslo (airport) with other departments and companies.
Though in theory it was a move I supported. To help decentralise and support local economy but also so e.g. fisheries department actually being in an area where fishing is important probably affect their policies etc. But it does come with a cost, they miss the quick collaboration across department and other industries, and most importantly reduced staff contribution in the (potentially very long) transitional period until new local competent people are up to speed. I think a lot of staff did not move and ended up working from home for parts of every week for a few transitional years before moving full time or most likely eventually a suitable person could replace them.
The government departments lost a most of their key people whom had no interest to uproot their kids and their own future career from the Oslo area. Especially as some department moved to some very small provincial fringe towns where future opportunities are limited. Departments moving to larger towns (Stavanger/Bergen/Trondheim) was probably less affected. And it did result in very large increases in travel budgets as meetings still mostly had to be held in Oslo (airport) with other departments and companies.
Though in theory it was a move I supported. To help decentralise and support local economy but also so e.g. fisheries department actually being in an area where fishing is important probably affect their policies etc. But it does come with a cost, they miss the quick collaboration across department and other industries, and most importantly reduced staff contribution in the (potentially very long) transitional period until new local competent people are up to speed. I think a lot of staff did not move and ended up working from home for parts of every week for a few transitional years before moving full time or most likely eventually a suitable person could replace them.
It's been done before, check out Brasilia, Yamoussoukro, Naypyidaw more recently.
I think it's fair to say that it's not been a massive success, and that federal employees generally did/do everything they could to stay in the old capital.
Aside from the fact that the entertainment and cultural options available tend to be limited, distance from the rest of the family and friends, as well as the perspective of being tied very strongly to a single employer are usually unappealing.
You run a real risk of losing anyone senior/competent, and keeping only the most junior of your staff, who have no other option but to relocate.
To stand any chance of success, I would think that the process needs to be fairly gradual, with good transport connections with the historical centres of activity.
I think it's fair to say that it's not been a massive success, and that federal employees generally did/do everything they could to stay in the old capital.
Aside from the fact that the entertainment and cultural options available tend to be limited, distance from the rest of the family and friends, as well as the perspective of being tied very strongly to a single employer are usually unappealing.
You run a real risk of losing anyone senior/competent, and keeping only the most junior of your staff, who have no other option but to relocate.
To stand any chance of success, I would think that the process needs to be fairly gradual, with good transport connections with the historical centres of activity.
DC itself is an example of a new planned city for a government capital. It just happens to be pretty old (for a US city).
Yes, but it was created from scratch rather than relocated from a pre-existing well-established capital. It was also set up relatively close to the large cities at that time, unlike the examples I've given, or a location deep in the Midwest.
The majority of the Midwest is within 200 miles of a major population center. And then any effort to establish more government offices would tend to choose areas at least nearby existing centers.
(You can check this with chains like Cleveland-Detroit-Chicago-St Louis-Kansas City; each interval is less than 300 miles)
I don't disagree that it would need to be an incremental process.
(You can check this with chains like Cleveland-Detroit-Chicago-St Louis-Kansas City; each interval is less than 300 miles)
I don't disagree that it would need to be an incremental process.
It sounds like we agree completely then, 200/300 miles is just the kind of distance that a high-speed train is perfect for.
The process also needs integrity.
I've seen a few of these proposals now. The good ones have a clear rationale for relocation: the Australian Federal Treasury, for instance, is moving a sizeable chunk of their workforce from the capital (Canberra, population ~400,000) to Sydney (population ~5m). Why? Because the financial industry in Australia, and many regulators in the Treasury portfolio, are based in Sydney. Seems logical to do this if you agree that lower-level, person-person connections are valuable (I think they are).
The bad ones have no clear rationale, and co-incidentally the relocation target happens to be a marginal electorate in some regional area...
I've seen a few of these proposals now. The good ones have a clear rationale for relocation: the Australian Federal Treasury, for instance, is moving a sizeable chunk of their workforce from the capital (Canberra, population ~400,000) to Sydney (population ~5m). Why? Because the financial industry in Australia, and many regulators in the Treasury portfolio, are based in Sydney. Seems logical to do this if you agree that lower-level, person-person connections are valuable (I think they are).
The bad ones have no clear rationale, and co-incidentally the relocation target happens to be a marginal electorate in some regional area...
Although I don't think this is feasible or even necessarily the right thing to do, I personally am dying to go back to the Midwest.
Coming from beautiful, friendly, cold Northern Michigan, I'd be ecstatic to get out of the DC area, but good luck moving the other 10,000 NASA employees.
It's a different culture in the Midwest. Some good, some bad, but overall I personally prefer the ability to have friendly conversations with strangers back home than the (generalizing here) awkward, egotistical, self-interested metropolitan area here. The first questions you are asked in DC are inevitably "Where do you work?" and "What's your title?". That being said, DC is a beautiful city and there's a lot of great things here.
But still, I'd much prefer to be camping on a beach on Lake Michigan...
Coming from beautiful, friendly, cold Northern Michigan, I'd be ecstatic to get out of the DC area, but good luck moving the other 10,000 NASA employees.
It's a different culture in the Midwest. Some good, some bad, but overall I personally prefer the ability to have friendly conversations with strangers back home than the (generalizing here) awkward, egotistical, self-interested metropolitan area here. The first questions you are asked in DC are inevitably "Where do you work?" and "What's your title?". That being said, DC is a beautiful city and there's a lot of great things here.
But still, I'd much prefer to be camping on a beach on Lake Michigan...
I think you are really stereotyping here. I suspect your impressions are based more on your social circles than the actual culture. If your circles are in work related settings or with other transplants from outside D.C., the experienice is a lot different than if interacting with D.C. natives. Likewise for non midwesterners who move to the Midwest.
You certainly have a point, and I definitely was generalizing.
My social circles consist mostly of international folks who work in various agencies and laboratories, and a few who work in private industry.
My biggest fault with DC (and most of the east coast to be honest) is just the difficulty of starting a conversation with someone. It seems like a lot of people walk around with their heads down here (either glued to a phone or the pavement) so as to avoid making eye contact. Folks here also give me strange looks when I say "sorry" all the time.
But hey, different cultures and different strokes. Not saying one is objectively better, but I definitely know which one I prefer personally.
My social circles consist mostly of international folks who work in various agencies and laboratories, and a few who work in private industry.
My biggest fault with DC (and most of the east coast to be honest) is just the difficulty of starting a conversation with someone. It seems like a lot of people walk around with their heads down here (either glued to a phone or the pavement) so as to avoid making eye contact. Folks here also give me strange looks when I say "sorry" all the time.
But hey, different cultures and different strokes. Not saying one is objectively better, but I definitely know which one I prefer personally.
Very much this. If you're a transplant that's come for work and spend you're time with other transplants that have come for work, it's not surprising that you'll end up talking about what you do for work. This is particularly true if you go to generic young professional events (whereas if you go to, say, a language meetup people will ask you more about your experience with the language). There's nothing particularly wrong about this, but it will give you a skewed view of things if you think it is representative of the entire area (for instance, transplants who think that native Washingtonians are virtually nonexistent).
I'd also say that a lot of people just ask where you work as a matter of conversation, not because they're interested in what you can do for them in business. Opening a conversation that way unfortunately has a lot of side effects.
It's always fun when someone from HQ is transferred out to the rural Siberian hinterland of MSFC. A combination of "Wait, they have Starbucks here in the middle of nowhere?" and "Why are there cows next door?"
Having just gotten back from Asia, I'm convinced at this point there are Starbucks everywhere.
And they plan to open another 12,000 stores globally by 2021: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-starbucks-investors-idUSKB...
They have around 25k stores now, roughly half in the U.S.
They have around 25k stores now, roughly half in the U.S.
Haha I'm at GSFC so I'm somewhere in between, but we still have to deal with 95/495 traffic, which is a real drag.
There's something like 19,000 people working on Redstone Arsenal. Do not try to enter around 7:00 am (0700 for those of you with a 24-hour bent) or leave around 3:00 pm (1500...). Huntsville traffic is usually moderately heavy, except for a 45-minute window around those times.
Management 101: Go back to reading peopleware before taking (or suggesting) stupid decisions.
All case studies ever done about relocating an entire company to far away have _always_ gone bad.
People didn't follow. Of the few who did, some will realize next year that it was a bad idea and leave. All your present and past employees will distrust you because you forced them to abandon their life.
All case studies ever done about relocating an entire company to far away have _always_ gone bad.
People didn't follow. Of the few who did, some will realize next year that it was a bad idea and leave. All your present and past employees will distrust you because you forced them to abandon their life.
It's on a different scale, but in the UK the BBC decided to move a lot of their operations out of London. This was party done as a political move to spread the jobs out from the south east of the UK to the north of England, which is in a similar postindustrial situation to the Midwest (I presume).
They needed up moving most of the tech and R&D departments, children's programming, and see news, sport, and radio shows.
They needed up moving most of the tech and R&D departments, children's programming, and see news, sport, and radio shows.
Judging by comments it fees like the HN crowd has an incredibly warped view of the Midwest. It is amusing because it is a rather great place to live.
Being from the midwest, and working from within and without, there's been definitely been a growing anti-midwest sentiment coming from the coasts. As if it's dead and now should be written off. Abandon the place, like Detroit. Go to S.F. instead, where C.O.L. is extreme, and because jobs should concentrate. (Well, yes, to a degree.)
Since its industrial-labor power fell we've been seen as more of a joke than of anything serious. (Which drives the politics a bit wacky, too.)
Since its industrial-labor power fell we've been seen as more of a joke than of anything serious. (Which drives the politics a bit wacky, too.)
A lot of snobbish comments here IMO, coming from Europe I'm getting an image of the Midwest as a place where 99% people work in agriculture and don't know how to read or write.
It's a very misleading stereotype because where I grew up in the Midwest, seemingly 80% of my classmates had a parent who was an engineer.
A few of the Midwest states in the corn belt consistently out performed the rest of the nation in the pre college tests that used to be given to most of the nations students, though part of this was due to the lack of minority students.
Indeed. I live in the country outside of a good sized (university-centered) city (Bloomington, IN). There are farms nearby, I have a huge empty field behind me, surrounded by a large amount of "woods", and my neighbor across the street has horses (yes, we do lots of cows and corns nearby too). However, I work pretty comfortably from home and the City just announced plans to build out a city-wide GigE fiber network (although I'm probably not included in the that, being outside the City limits, I already have GigE FTTH).
I've lived and travelled all over the country and the only thing the Midwest has going for it is it's not the South.
The author suggests moving all 20k NIH employees to Cleveland, and seems to think that all 20k will go along with this instead of finding different employment that doesn't involve uprooting their families and moving to Ohio.
The basic premise may be disruptive in a "Big Bang" move but could be accomplished gradually by building new facilities and shifting project flow over time.
Also, the DoD makes fast changes like this all the time as the result of BRAC. Government employees don't tend to just up and change jobs - they are career workers who like the stability and promise of a pension.
Also, the DoD makes fast changes like this all the time as the result of BRAC. Government employees don't tend to just up and change jobs - they are career workers who like the stability and promise of a pension.
Would the German experience of transitioning from Bonn to Berlin be of much relevance here?
It's STILL not completed, over two and a half decades after the wall fell. The amount of money wasted is incredible (7.5M € in 2016 in direct costs, http://www.merkur.de/politik/hendricks-stellt-bericht-zum-bo...), not to mention wasted time and the loss of efficiency because teams and management are split across Germany.
Really! I had no idea. I barely ever see a reference to Bonn in anything I read about Germany these days; I'd formed the impression that everyone had moved in the 90s.
(a) The difference between moving civilians and moving military personnel is that if a civilian doesn't want to go they can just resign, but if the military person doesn't want to go they have to suck it up and go anyway. (b) The "good" government pension hasn't been available since the 80s, (b') uprooting your family and moving hundreds of miles away is a pretty big blow to stability.
> ...the DoD makes fast changes like this all the time as the result of BRAC.
Nothing fast results from a BRAC decision.
Nothing fast results from a BRAC decision.
The author also doesn't realize how intertwined many agencies are, including the NIH.
It's not uncommon to have meetings that have NSF, DoE, DoD, NIH and HHS employees all in the same room. This was especially valuable during public health emergencies.
It's not uncommon to have meetings that have NSF, DoE, DoD, NIH and HHS employees all in the same room. This was especially valuable during public health emergencies.
He also assumes that should those people not move, that Cleveland has enough people with the right skillsets to fill the gap.
The more relevant question is this: are there enough people with right skillsets willing to relocate to Cleveland?
Money talks, and the same salary goes a lot farther in Cleveland than DC. It's really dumb that we compress all of our workforce into a few cities, especially in an age when 90% of office jobs can be done just as efficiently anywhere with a high-speed internet connection, rather than face-to-face in a cube farm.
> the same salary goes a lot farther in Cleveland than DC
It's not the same salary, DC's locality pay is higher than Cleveland's : https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... vs https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
It's not the same salary, DC's locality pay is higher than Cleveland's : https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... vs https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...
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Pretty weird to see a discussion of the economy in the midwest without a single mention of Chicago - you know, the third largest city in the US... ;)
Just moved out of Chicago. Would not recommend. Besides the north corner and downtown the city and state are broke poor and crime ridden.
Enjoy your insane taxes without much to show for it. Chicago is notorious for corruption and the massive state budget routinely evaporates and screws everyone
Enjoy your insane taxes without much to show for it. Chicago is notorious for corruption and the massive state budget routinely evaporates and screws everyone
FWIW, I moved back to Chicago from SF. Would totally recommend. World class cultural institutions (SFBA can feel a little provencial at times), great quality of life, super affordable for a city of its stature so starting a business is much much cheaper here.
To each their own, but if you think taxes or politics are broken here, you've clearly not experienced SF. :)
To each their own, but if you think taxes or politics are broken here, you've clearly not experienced SF. :)
Didn't move there either for many of the same reasons :) . Nicer weather but otherwise most of the same issues
I'm from Indiana.
Chicago is its own beast, and most midwesterners don't really identify with it and it has its own sort of issues and problems and isn't so representative of the other cities.
And so it goes that you are gonna wind up with different moving benefits if you go to Chicago rather than Detroit, Cincinatti, Louisville, Indianapolis, and so on. (and Different disadvantages as well).
Chicago is its own beast, and most midwesterners don't really identify with it and it has its own sort of issues and problems and isn't so representative of the other cities.
And so it goes that you are gonna wind up with different moving benefits if you go to Chicago rather than Detroit, Cincinatti, Louisville, Indianapolis, and so on. (and Different disadvantages as well).
> Chicago is its own beast, and most midwesterners don't really identify with it
This is certainly not true with people in the Detroit area, in my experience. Maybe it's true in the rural Midwest but in urban and suburban Midwest, Chicago is definitely viewed as an integral part as was Detroit some time ago (and possibly still today).
This seems like a case of "if it doesn't fit the argument, let's not count it."
This is certainly not true with people in the Detroit area, in my experience. Maybe it's true in the rural Midwest but in urban and suburban Midwest, Chicago is definitely viewed as an integral part as was Detroit some time ago (and possibly still today).
This seems like a case of "if it doesn't fit the argument, let's not count it."
It isn't that it isn't integral - in fact, I see it as integral enough that I truly think Chicago keeps the midwest alive, at least portions of it. It is just different. A lot of the problems that other midwestern cities have - decline of factories, for example - chicago is able to make up for to an extent. And to me, that is the main thing: The chicago experience doesn't match the average Midwestern city experience - and discussing chicago directly takes a bit of time. Hence the exclusion in the article.
This seems like you're justifying the "if it doesn't fit the narrative, it doesn't count" case that I mentioned. Chicago is still a Midwestern city whether it's doing well or it's doing poorly, just as Detroit is a Midwestern city when it was booming decades ago and when it's not currently. "Midwest" is a geographic and perhaps cultural term, not a term that refers to failing cities.
the third largest city in the US
What does the city's size have to do with this discussion? I think you are actually giving points to the other side of your argument.
A large amount of comments are mistakenly conflating the Midwest as rural and this move as de-urbanization though the author mentioned moving to Midwestern cities.
Already exists. It's called the Denver Federal Center.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Federal_Center
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver_Federal_Center
Back in the early 90's the CIA had planned to move to WV; never happened obviously.
Sen. Byrd moved a bunch of federal facilities to the part of WV closest to DC. No entire departments, but significant back-office operations are there. Here's an FBI example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI_Criminal_Justice_Informati...
Looks like Byrd was behind the attempted CIA move, here's how that ended: http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal92-...
Looks like Byrd was behind the attempted CIA move, here's how that ended: http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/document.php?id=cqal92-...
For context: the `Sen. Byrd` referred to above was the senator from West Virginia from 1959 to 2010. Clearly, he was trying to get federal dollars for his state.
Obviously they wouldn't move to WV and say they didn't.
I really do enjoy the DC area, however I would love to be back in the Chicago area. Sure it would be a locality pay cut, but housing is so much more affordable.
The supposed precedent for this is that DC survived sequestration?
The worst thing to happen during sequestration was a week or two of furloughs -- the author is proposing the permanent removal of tens of thousands of jobs.
More than half of federal employees are over 45. So you're either forcing them to uproot their families, or (more likely) forcing them to switch careers at an age where that's not so easy.
The worst thing to happen during sequestration was a week or two of furloughs -- the author is proposing the permanent removal of tens of thousands of jobs.
More than half of federal employees are over 45. So you're either forcing them to uproot their families, or (more likely) forcing them to switch careers at an age where that's not so easy.
There are government agencies and regional offices in the midwest already. DFAS in Indianapolis, for example, is housed in one of the largest government buildings outside of the Pentagon. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Finance_and_Accounting...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Finance_and_Accounting...
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66% of Americans live within 100 miles of the border. It would make more sense to move all the Americans living in the middle (sometimes middle of nowhere) and focus on making the cost of living in major cities more affordable; 9 of the top 10 cities are all within 100 miles of the border.
That 66% includes most of the population of the Midwest as well (all of MI, northern OH, Chicago area, etc.). We're not moving them away from population centers by your evidence.
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights-governments-100-mile-b...
https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights-governments-100-mile-b...
It also excludes some major cities on the Mississippi, which are not isolated despite being neither coastal nor near a border.
Have you considered that some of the 34% of people living in 'the middle' prefer to live there? I find it hard to believe you are seriously advocating the forced relocation of citizens in the name of making 'more sense'...
I'm suggestioning that American stop subsidizing vast unpopulated areas of its country for the benefit of a subset of the country. Once the subsidies are deverted, the areas will naturally depopulate.
Because unskilled workers (and their children) fare better when uprooted and transplanted into cities???
Farm Bill subsidies have incentivized modes of agriculture that minimize labor inputs, so subsidies have already largely depopulated fly-over country. Are you thinking that these rural folk are getting more than their share of federal services? I don't see how... Interstates have to be maintained anyway, and schools are mostly funded locally. Are you worried about the cost of keeping all those small post offices open?
Farm Bill subsidies have incentivized modes of agriculture that minimize labor inputs, so subsidies have already largely depopulated fly-over country. Are you thinking that these rural folk are getting more than their share of federal services? I don't see how... Interstates have to be maintained anyway, and schools are mostly funded locally. Are you worried about the cost of keeping all those small post offices open?
Basically, yes they do. if you build the housing that the market demands, as happens in most cities on Earth, people tend to move there voluntarily.
But we haven't. We've pretended that these urban engines of economic growth and fiscal productivity are simply an area of private real estate investments or money trees for state and federal governments to pluck to feed the less privileged. We've surrendered this massive amenity (the ability to move the jobless to places that can give them jobs) due to quirks of our electoral politics, quirks of our property law, quirks of our economy, and quirks of our welfare system. Instead we've propped up jobs and rural communities with massive subsidization, and watched as the very best that our economy can offer prices itself out of existence.
The Bay Area is only the most extreme example of this; It can cost 20x as much to house someone there, as to house them in Topeka. This is a massive productivity & economic growth success story that we are holding back because we're choking off housing and driving up prices, preventing the population of Topeka from moving there. The concept of natural limitations ("The peninsula is only so big!") is absolute bullshit, because the population density is drastically lower than many far more economically marginal places have achieved. For $2M in _construction costs_ to house each family you could house the population of the entire world, 7 billion people, comfortably in a place the size of the SF city limits.
But we haven't. We've pretended that these urban engines of economic growth and fiscal productivity are simply an area of private real estate investments or money trees for state and federal governments to pluck to feed the less privileged. We've surrendered this massive amenity (the ability to move the jobless to places that can give them jobs) due to quirks of our electoral politics, quirks of our property law, quirks of our economy, and quirks of our welfare system. Instead we've propped up jobs and rural communities with massive subsidization, and watched as the very best that our economy can offer prices itself out of existence.
The Bay Area is only the most extreme example of this; It can cost 20x as much to house someone there, as to house them in Topeka. This is a massive productivity & economic growth success story that we are holding back because we're choking off housing and driving up prices, preventing the population of Topeka from moving there. The concept of natural limitations ("The peninsula is only so big!") is absolute bullshit, because the population density is drastically lower than many far more economically marginal places have achieved. For $2M in _construction costs_ to house each family you could house the population of the entire world, 7 billion people, comfortably in a place the size of the SF city limits.
>> "For $2M in _construction costs_ to house each family you could house the population of the entire world, 7 billion people, comfortably in a place the size of the SF city limits."
Interesting, please explain or provide a link to an explanation.
Interesting, please explain or provide a link to an explanation.
SF has 121km^2 of land area within the city proper. This may be a little low - I was hoping to use the area-including-water of 601km^2 within the city limits.
Kowloon Walled City was put together with little central planning, ruled by gangs, located directly under the approach path of an airport landing strip, and relied on a near-zero-public-infrastructure model. It was limited to ~15 stories. It housed ~50k people on 6.5 acres. Most importantly, it was built for people in the developing world, for a lot less than $2M per dwelling - residents accepted about $10k per person in remuneration during the eviction/demolition process; If we take this as a fair value of the housing construction, we have perhaps 50x the resources as Kowloon had. That density at 121km^2 is 230 million people in the city landmass of SF; At 601km^3 it rises to 1.14 billion.
For 50x the resources, in a streamlined design-build process rather than an ad-hoc "does the roof break? No? Build higher" manner, with an indefinite height limit and modern technology and a large degree of central planning (absolutely necessary for a 3D construction+utilities grid), I assert we could comfortably house the vast majority of the world in 601km^2 if we absolutely had to at 6x the density of Kowloon. 50x the resources pays for a lot of complexity. Right now, that money (an enormous quantity of the urban economy) is draining into land values & the financial system, but the city is enduring that money sink because the city (and large cities, in general) has found things it is fantastically more productive at, than 100 large towns each 1% of the size.
Kowloon Walled City was put together with little central planning, ruled by gangs, located directly under the approach path of an airport landing strip, and relied on a near-zero-public-infrastructure model. It was limited to ~15 stories. It housed ~50k people on 6.5 acres. Most importantly, it was built for people in the developing world, for a lot less than $2M per dwelling - residents accepted about $10k per person in remuneration during the eviction/demolition process; If we take this as a fair value of the housing construction, we have perhaps 50x the resources as Kowloon had. That density at 121km^2 is 230 million people in the city landmass of SF; At 601km^3 it rises to 1.14 billion.
For 50x the resources, in a streamlined design-build process rather than an ad-hoc "does the roof break? No? Build higher" manner, with an indefinite height limit and modern technology and a large degree of central planning (absolutely necessary for a 3D construction+utilities grid), I assert we could comfortably house the vast majority of the world in 601km^2 if we absolutely had to at 6x the density of Kowloon. 50x the resources pays for a lot of complexity. Right now, that money (an enormous quantity of the urban economy) is draining into land values & the financial system, but the city is enduring that money sink because the city (and large cities, in general) has found things it is fantastically more productive at, than 100 large towns each 1% of the size.
As a general principle, when a city finds something it's really good at, something it's the best in the world at, and there's room to grow this thing? It is entirely natural for the city to balloon in size. It is ridiculous to expect the rest of the world to direct money into the city, without the city employing more people in this industry (and thus more people in general), and thus needing to house more people overall. That is what economic growth is, and an area of labor migration (where someone in an economic backwater can move to a thriving new boomtown) is a large part of what a functioning economy is. SF desperately needs coders; But as it adds coders, it also needs to add yoga instructors, bank tellers, retail sales clerks, and dentists to serve the coders, or to serve each other while sponging off the excess money flowing into the pocket of the coders.
> Farm Bill subsidies have incentivized modes of agriculture that minimize labor inputs [...]
I once had a passenger who'd been tapped to work in her bank's "wealth management" department (>$10 million portfolio, iirc). One of her clients was the "sweetest" old lady. Farms were part of the portfolio - they'd analyze the productivity of the various properties, and decide to keep or to sell.
I said to myself, "that is NOT farming."
I once had a passenger who'd been tapped to work in her bank's "wealth management" department (>$10 million portfolio, iirc). One of her clients was the "sweetest" old lady. Farms were part of the portfolio - they'd analyze the productivity of the various properties, and decide to keep or to sell.
I said to myself, "that is NOT farming."
Subsidize? Maybe those vastly unpopulated areas of the country ought to stop feeding those 100 miles from the coast.
I agree with you. I constantly hear (especially during election season) about how the blue coastal states are basically 'subsidizing' the idiots from fly over country - some statistics about tax payments and farm subsidies tossed out to make the case.
In reality, the situation is reversed. The US largest export, by FAR, is agriculture and meat, almost none of which comes from the coasts.
If you want to count GDP, do you really think that the trillions of dollars of bank profits from lower Manhattan are really as important to the economy of the US as the trillions of dollars of corn, soy beans, wheat, beef, pork, etc that's produced in the Midwest? The former is just redistribution of wealth, the latter is actually traded to other countries.
How bout all that energy produced in Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Texas? Do you think the US would miss it more than they'd miss the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in DC on mostly dubious military spending or on the thousands of silicon valley companies finding creative ways to serve tracking ads?
In reality, if the red states and blue states separated from each other, you'd have one nation with massive real exportable wealth divided by a small population, and another nation with mostly printed and worthless dollars backed by non exportable services, divided by a huge amount of people and their unfunded entitlements.
In reality, the situation is reversed. The US largest export, by FAR, is agriculture and meat, almost none of which comes from the coasts.
If you want to count GDP, do you really think that the trillions of dollars of bank profits from lower Manhattan are really as important to the economy of the US as the trillions of dollars of corn, soy beans, wheat, beef, pork, etc that's produced in the Midwest? The former is just redistribution of wealth, the latter is actually traded to other countries.
How bout all that energy produced in Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Texas? Do you think the US would miss it more than they'd miss the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in DC on mostly dubious military spending or on the thousands of silicon valley companies finding creative ways to serve tracking ads?
In reality, if the red states and blue states separated from each other, you'd have one nation with massive real exportable wealth divided by a small population, and another nation with mostly printed and worthless dollars backed by non exportable services, divided by a huge amount of people and their unfunded entitlements.
Less than 1% of the GDP if you're being generous:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
What am I missing?
What am I missing?
It is subsidization, on too many fronts to name. If anything it has been too effective because it is quite invisible and taken for granted by the recipients, which then allows them to see their own life narratives as stories of succeeding in the market economy due to hard, honest work.
The work may indeed be hard and honest, but it only succeeds at the costs and prices it succeeds at due to vast subsidies, which again are taken for granted (if even seen as such--or seen at all).
The worst part is that even with this heavy subsidization the cost difficulties of modern infrastructure under sparse settlement leave non-urban residents feeling shortchanged despite the disproportionate spending they receive.
Here's how that usually goes: basic infrastructure (roads, power, water, communications) has costs that scale roughly linearly in terms of how much you build: your build and maintenance cost are roughly proportionate to how many miles of road or miles of pipe or miles of wire, and so on.
Thus as you have a population that is more widely spaced-out your effective per capita infrastructure costs go up: you have more road per person and more wires per person just to deliver the same level of capability.
You often wind up, then, needing as much as 5x or more the per capita budget in a sparsely populated area to build and maintain infrastructure at a comparable level to a denser area (whether this is done or not is about administrative competence but that is a separate issue from the cost themselves).
At a state level, however, it is hard to have wildly disproportionate per capita spending: you can maybe get away with spending 2-3x per capita on infrastructure in non-urban areas versus urban areas, but not 5-10x.
But this spending-effectiveness discrepancy means that even with heavy subsidization--eg non-urban areas effectively getting 2-3x the infrastructure spend of the urban ones on a per capita basis--the spending outcomes will likely be better in the urban area because the cost efficiency is that much higher.
This thus leaves the non-urban areas feeling neglected--the infrastructure isn't as well maintained etc--even though they are in fact already given disproportionate resources...they just aren't given resources that are disproportionate-enough!
Ironically the "decaying small town" is the best proof of this effect: you go from comparatively well-maintained state highway to a city of 10-20k with crumbling streets and broken street lamps, etc., back to well-maintained state highway...because the state highway is subsidized by the entire state (and often federal funds), but that small town is on its own fundingwise, and reveals what the surrounding area can actually afford, sans subsidization from outside money.
The work may indeed be hard and honest, but it only succeeds at the costs and prices it succeeds at due to vast subsidies, which again are taken for granted (if even seen as such--or seen at all).
The worst part is that even with this heavy subsidization the cost difficulties of modern infrastructure under sparse settlement leave non-urban residents feeling shortchanged despite the disproportionate spending they receive.
Here's how that usually goes: basic infrastructure (roads, power, water, communications) has costs that scale roughly linearly in terms of how much you build: your build and maintenance cost are roughly proportionate to how many miles of road or miles of pipe or miles of wire, and so on.
Thus as you have a population that is more widely spaced-out your effective per capita infrastructure costs go up: you have more road per person and more wires per person just to deliver the same level of capability.
You often wind up, then, needing as much as 5x or more the per capita budget in a sparsely populated area to build and maintain infrastructure at a comparable level to a denser area (whether this is done or not is about administrative competence but that is a separate issue from the cost themselves).
At a state level, however, it is hard to have wildly disproportionate per capita spending: you can maybe get away with spending 2-3x per capita on infrastructure in non-urban areas versus urban areas, but not 5-10x.
But this spending-effectiveness discrepancy means that even with heavy subsidization--eg non-urban areas effectively getting 2-3x the infrastructure spend of the urban ones on a per capita basis--the spending outcomes will likely be better in the urban area because the cost efficiency is that much higher.
This thus leaves the non-urban areas feeling neglected--the infrastructure isn't as well maintained etc--even though they are in fact already given disproportionate resources...they just aren't given resources that are disproportionate-enough!
Ironically the "decaying small town" is the best proof of this effect: you go from comparatively well-maintained state highway to a city of 10-20k with crumbling streets and broken street lamps, etc., back to well-maintained state highway...because the state highway is subsidized by the entire state (and often federal funds), but that small town is on its own fundingwise, and reveals what the surrounding area can actually afford, sans subsidization from outside money.
The modern infrastructure that you're talking about, is that phone and electricity and water and sewer? Because most of the small town inhabitants pay for that themselves, or get small subsidies through federal programs.
For example, the "much" higher cost of bringing phones to rural areas is a surcharge on your phone bill. In 2014 it was about $7 billion. That's a lot, but a complete joke compared to the federal budget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund
Rural electricity is often run by co-op because the big power company doesn't think it's worth spending the money to string the power lines to everyone. So those folks are literally doing it themselves. And they pay for it in their power prices. http://www.electric.coop/our-mission/powering-america/
Rural water and sewer often doesn't exist again because the houses are too far apart for it to make financial sense to run the pipes. So people have wells and septic systems. That they pay to have installed and maintained out of their own pockets.
You can argue all you want about the road subsidy for state run roads and I'm sympathetic to it, to a point. But eventually all/most/some of those roads do in fact have to exist to get the food from the countryside into the cities. You might be able to make do with less rural roads, but certainly not none. I suppose you could argue that trains are all that's really needed (private investment) and that farmers can make and maintain their own gravel roads. But now we're just talking about funding the road maintenance in a different way, through higher food prices instead of taxes.
But for that to really work, everyone in every city would have to be willing to forego fresh vegetables and all collectively be OK with the corresponding health outcomes that would result.
For example, the "much" higher cost of bringing phones to rural areas is a surcharge on your phone bill. In 2014 it was about $7 billion. That's a lot, but a complete joke compared to the federal budget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund
Rural electricity is often run by co-op because the big power company doesn't think it's worth spending the money to string the power lines to everyone. So those folks are literally doing it themselves. And they pay for it in their power prices. http://www.electric.coop/our-mission/powering-america/
Rural water and sewer often doesn't exist again because the houses are too far apart for it to make financial sense to run the pipes. So people have wells and septic systems. That they pay to have installed and maintained out of their own pockets.
You can argue all you want about the road subsidy for state run roads and I'm sympathetic to it, to a point. But eventually all/most/some of those roads do in fact have to exist to get the food from the countryside into the cities. You might be able to make do with less rural roads, but certainly not none. I suppose you could argue that trains are all that's really needed (private investment) and that farmers can make and maintain their own gravel roads. But now we're just talking about funding the road maintenance in a different way, through higher food prices instead of taxes.
But for that to really work, everyone in every city would have to be willing to forego fresh vegetables and all collectively be OK with the corresponding health outcomes that would result.
Spot on. And really the subsidized roads and trains are less about getting fresh produce to the cities and more about getting the trillions of dollars of agricultural products to the sea for export, our single largest source of income by far.
Without the Midwest, our currency would effectively be worthless.
Without the Midwest, our currency would effectively be worthless.
133 billion is a recent usda figure. Do you have any source for "trillions"?
For bystanders the figures I am referencing are here: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
There's a big gap between the two.
For bystanders the figures I am referencing are here: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
There's a big gap between the two.
The point I tried--and failed!--to make is that in general the recipients of these subsidies have very simplistic and one-sided views of them (if they even see them as subsidies).
I'll pick on this statement of yours:
> But eventually all/most/some of those roads do in fact have to exist to get the food from the countryside into the cities.
...it's not wrong, but it's incomplete: you forget as well that for modern farming, you also need all/most/some of those roads to get tractors/fertilizer/pesticide to those farms so they can actually have surplus food to bring to the city to sell (and presumably the farmers would like clothes, housewares, televisions, and so on...).
Sure, at an aggregate level the numbers wind up the same--you save some on roads but fresh produce has a higher sticker price--but it's grating that the recipients of said subsidy consistently take such a one-sided view of the implicit transaction.
Sticking to just the roads, it's also very partial-equilibrium: stop funding those roads (e.g. so they devolve to dirt or gravel) and what happens to the cost-effectiveness of those electrical coops? Maintenance and repair gets pricier b/c it becomes harder to get where you need to get...and depending on how crappy we're letting our roads get in this thought experiment we're maybe having a much harder time getting the generating and related equipment to where it needs to be in the first place.
Moving on a bit, when you dig into things like that universal service fund it's IMHO a mistake to take it at face value.
The first issue is assuming the surcharge is the only form of subsidization; this isn't generally true. It's quite common for e.g. telecom utilities to charge roughly uniform rates over surprisingly wide geographic areas, with surprisingly wide operating costs "under the hood". There are a lot of reasons behind this pricing uniformity, but regardless of why it exists it's effectively a second layer of (hidden) subsidization (b/c the residents of lower-cost-of-service areas are effectively contributing funding to the residents in higher-cost-of-service). There are enough reasons for this uniformity it's hard to imagine it disappearing...but it's still important to be aware of b/c otherwise you assume that that subsidy is sufficient to cover the true cost-of-service differential.
A second issue is mis-understanding the incidence. Let's use pretend #s to make it easy: everyone's bill looks like $localBase + $nationalSubsidySurcharge (so the subsidy is collected from everyone and then redistributed as-needed). We'll use that $7 billion / year figure as the total subsidy collected, and as a nice round # assume 350 million people paying, so basically everyone in the country's throwing a $20 into a big pot to keep everyone else's phones working.
So far so good. But now let's kill the subsidy, what happens? First, everyone's bill goes from "$localBase + $nationalSubsidySurcharge" to just "$localBase", since now we're no longer kicking in that $20.
Keeping all assumptions simplistic, we will go with 60% of the country (just under that 2/3 living near the borders) were already paying full-freight on their base rate, and thus they're now $20 richer with no direct ill-effects.
The remaining 40%, however, were paying a base rate that fell $7 billion short of what it needed to be--whence the subsidy we just threw out--and thus now it's up to ~140 million people to scrounge up that $7 billion shortfall. This isn't the end of the world--they're just going from "$localBase + $20" to "$localBase + $50 (== $realLocalBase)"--but it'd a big increase (their original contribution, that much again, and then a bit more).
In this case I had to slant the #s pretty aggressively and for this specific subsidy the reality of the situation is more modest...but I worked through it b/c it illustrates the fundamental logic of such subsidies: you have a lot of people paying a little bit to save a smaller group of people from a large expense.
Such arrangements are not, IMHO, intrinsically questionable...but it's definitely a bit questionable to conflate aggregate costs ($7 billion, cheap!) with the implicit per-capita benefit received (with my BS #s it's a net $30/head for the recipients).
Having said all this I feel the need to point out that farmers proper are usually much more realistic; it's more the farming-adjacent (e.g. those who live in "rural" areas) who tend to think of roads as (literally) one way "food to town" transports and so on.
I'll pick on this statement of yours:
> But eventually all/most/some of those roads do in fact have to exist to get the food from the countryside into the cities.
...it's not wrong, but it's incomplete: you forget as well that for modern farming, you also need all/most/some of those roads to get tractors/fertilizer/pesticide to those farms so they can actually have surplus food to bring to the city to sell (and presumably the farmers would like clothes, housewares, televisions, and so on...).
Sure, at an aggregate level the numbers wind up the same--you save some on roads but fresh produce has a higher sticker price--but it's grating that the recipients of said subsidy consistently take such a one-sided view of the implicit transaction.
Sticking to just the roads, it's also very partial-equilibrium: stop funding those roads (e.g. so they devolve to dirt or gravel) and what happens to the cost-effectiveness of those electrical coops? Maintenance and repair gets pricier b/c it becomes harder to get where you need to get...and depending on how crappy we're letting our roads get in this thought experiment we're maybe having a much harder time getting the generating and related equipment to where it needs to be in the first place.
Moving on a bit, when you dig into things like that universal service fund it's IMHO a mistake to take it at face value.
The first issue is assuming the surcharge is the only form of subsidization; this isn't generally true. It's quite common for e.g. telecom utilities to charge roughly uniform rates over surprisingly wide geographic areas, with surprisingly wide operating costs "under the hood". There are a lot of reasons behind this pricing uniformity, but regardless of why it exists it's effectively a second layer of (hidden) subsidization (b/c the residents of lower-cost-of-service areas are effectively contributing funding to the residents in higher-cost-of-service). There are enough reasons for this uniformity it's hard to imagine it disappearing...but it's still important to be aware of b/c otherwise you assume that that subsidy is sufficient to cover the true cost-of-service differential.
A second issue is mis-understanding the incidence. Let's use pretend #s to make it easy: everyone's bill looks like $localBase + $nationalSubsidySurcharge (so the subsidy is collected from everyone and then redistributed as-needed). We'll use that $7 billion / year figure as the total subsidy collected, and as a nice round # assume 350 million people paying, so basically everyone in the country's throwing a $20 into a big pot to keep everyone else's phones working.
So far so good. But now let's kill the subsidy, what happens? First, everyone's bill goes from "$localBase + $nationalSubsidySurcharge" to just "$localBase", since now we're no longer kicking in that $20.
Keeping all assumptions simplistic, we will go with 60% of the country (just under that 2/3 living near the borders) were already paying full-freight on their base rate, and thus they're now $20 richer with no direct ill-effects.
The remaining 40%, however, were paying a base rate that fell $7 billion short of what it needed to be--whence the subsidy we just threw out--and thus now it's up to ~140 million people to scrounge up that $7 billion shortfall. This isn't the end of the world--they're just going from "$localBase + $20" to "$localBase + $50 (== $realLocalBase)"--but it'd a big increase (their original contribution, that much again, and then a bit more).
In this case I had to slant the #s pretty aggressively and for this specific subsidy the reality of the situation is more modest...but I worked through it b/c it illustrates the fundamental logic of such subsidies: you have a lot of people paying a little bit to save a smaller group of people from a large expense.
Such arrangements are not, IMHO, intrinsically questionable...but it's definitely a bit questionable to conflate aggregate costs ($7 billion, cheap!) with the implicit per-capita benefit received (with my BS #s it's a net $30/head for the recipients).
Having said all this I feel the need to point out that farmers proper are usually much more realistic; it's more the farming-adjacent (e.g. those who live in "rural" areas) who tend to think of roads as (literally) one way "food to town" transports and so on.
Farming could go on without fertilizer though yields would go down initially. Eventually as people figured out how to fix nitrogen with plants again, things would be fine. So the roads are handy that way, but not crucial.
The other direction though, food to cities, that's absolutely vital. Cities don't have a couple of years worth of food stores; NYC would be a total disaster in just a few days without constant resupply. So too would most of the other big cities in the US and around the world.
If you want to be upset at rural folks for not understanding exactly how much you're giving them and how much they're ungratefully taking you can be, but I think it's a little misguided. Rural areas would do fine without cities, but cities would go straight to hell without rural areas.
If government services suddenly disappeared out in the countryside life would go right on with little interruption. But if all the police or fire or garbage or train or electrical or gas services and workers (just one group, not all of them) just vanished into the air cities would have it rough.
Most city folks literally can't image a life without all the services that a government provides because cities would fall apart very quickly. Rural folks absolutely can because quite often the government doesn't do all that much for them.
The other direction though, food to cities, that's absolutely vital. Cities don't have a couple of years worth of food stores; NYC would be a total disaster in just a few days without constant resupply. So too would most of the other big cities in the US and around the world.
If you want to be upset at rural folks for not understanding exactly how much you're giving them and how much they're ungratefully taking you can be, but I think it's a little misguided. Rural areas would do fine without cities, but cities would go straight to hell without rural areas.
If government services suddenly disappeared out in the countryside life would go right on with little interruption. But if all the police or fire or garbage or train or electrical or gas services and workers (just one group, not all of them) just vanished into the air cities would have it rough.
Most city folks literally can't image a life without all the services that a government provides because cities would fall apart very quickly. Rural folks absolutely can because quite often the government doesn't do all that much for them.
Farming could go on without fertilizer, heavy machinery, gasoline for said machinery, for sure...and yields would go down, indeed very much by "a bit". Definitely "a bit" for some definition of a "a bit". I mean if you want to argue a pre-1900 lifestyle is sustainable without all that then I agree...
The point about cities seems quite backwards to me: cities are places where enough enough wealth is produced and enough economies of scale are available that the routine-but-necessary chores can be farmed out to professionals, taking advantage of specialization and the division of labor.
Given the generally increasing returns on density it isn't surprising that most cities have grown to the point that the mundane chores need dedicated professional staff to keep things running, but what of it?
It's also very foreign to see "a government" as some kind of abstract entity at the municipal level, where it's going to be (almost) entirely comprised of other people in your own city of residence.
So trying to put some kind of bright line between something like a volunteer rural fire department on one side and a full-time, professional fire department on the other side seems silly and artificial: they're both local organizational strategies to provide for certain highly useful services, but different resource availability leads to different strategies.
If that isn't clear, saying "the government doesn't do much for them" when we're talking municipal or at most county government is silly to me because--especially at the municipal level--they are their own government in a way you can't fairly say for state and federal level government. So in that light "the government doesn't do all that much for them" is just pointing out that they don't do those things to the same extent--or with the same level of organization--as is done elsewhere (without getting into how much of that is (not) done by choice, and how much is not done due to lack of resources to go beyond ad-hoc, volunteer-driven collectives and coops).
Anyways, you aren't as bad of a "rural pride" fellow as the commenter who has somehow come to believe that the ag sector is somehow exporting trillions each year (it's not) and that it's the biggest export (it's not and it's not even close), and that is more the kind of delusional self-importance I find rather grating.
The point about cities seems quite backwards to me: cities are places where enough enough wealth is produced and enough economies of scale are available that the routine-but-necessary chores can be farmed out to professionals, taking advantage of specialization and the division of labor.
Given the generally increasing returns on density it isn't surprising that most cities have grown to the point that the mundane chores need dedicated professional staff to keep things running, but what of it?
It's also very foreign to see "a government" as some kind of abstract entity at the municipal level, where it's going to be (almost) entirely comprised of other people in your own city of residence.
So trying to put some kind of bright line between something like a volunteer rural fire department on one side and a full-time, professional fire department on the other side seems silly and artificial: they're both local organizational strategies to provide for certain highly useful services, but different resource availability leads to different strategies.
If that isn't clear, saying "the government doesn't do much for them" when we're talking municipal or at most county government is silly to me because--especially at the municipal level--they are their own government in a way you can't fairly say for state and federal level government. So in that light "the government doesn't do all that much for them" is just pointing out that they don't do those things to the same extent--or with the same level of organization--as is done elsewhere (without getting into how much of that is (not) done by choice, and how much is not done due to lack of resources to go beyond ad-hoc, volunteer-driven collectives and coops).
Anyways, you aren't as bad of a "rural pride" fellow as the commenter who has somehow come to believe that the ag sector is somehow exporting trillions each year (it's not) and that it's the biggest export (it's not and it's not even close), and that is more the kind of delusional self-importance I find rather grating.
> Farming could go on without fertilizer, heavy machinery, gasoline for said machinery, for sure...and yields would go down, indeed very much by "a bit". Definitely "a bit" for some definition of a "a bit". I mean if you want to argue a pre-1900 lifestyle is sustainable without all that then I agree...
Look at Gabe Brown and Joel Salatin for how productive farming can be without (or with huge reductions in) fuel use. I think they managed to use 90% less fuel while still producing a lot of food. Necessity is the mother of invention.
If you can reduce fuel inputs by 90% and fertilizer completely (and most/all pesticides) then you can get by on very turn of the century amounts of oil; the easy oil that's near to the surface perhaps only a few hundred feet down. Most refineries aren't in the middle of big cities since they take up so much space, so those would keep working. You don't need fancy project managers and reservior engineers when the oil is so close to the surface either. So lacking them wouldn't destroy the economy.
> Anyways, you aren't as bad of a "rural pride" fellow
I'm not really "rural pride" either, despite your assertion. I just understand what space in the value chain (or society, call it what you want) I occupy. I've always lived in cities or towns.
Would things be weird for farmers for a while if all the city dwellers suddenly vanished? Sure! Absolutely. They'd have far fewer buyers for sure.
But suggesting that farmers need city dwellers for humans to continue to exist is like thinking that compiler writers need the people that use compilers. Compiler programmers could do their work just fine without everyone writing web apps and the world would keep turning. But if the compiler writers went poof, I assure you that the web app folks would have a much harder time.
Look at Gabe Brown and Joel Salatin for how productive farming can be without (or with huge reductions in) fuel use. I think they managed to use 90% less fuel while still producing a lot of food. Necessity is the mother of invention.
If you can reduce fuel inputs by 90% and fertilizer completely (and most/all pesticides) then you can get by on very turn of the century amounts of oil; the easy oil that's near to the surface perhaps only a few hundred feet down. Most refineries aren't in the middle of big cities since they take up so much space, so those would keep working. You don't need fancy project managers and reservior engineers when the oil is so close to the surface either. So lacking them wouldn't destroy the economy.
> Anyways, you aren't as bad of a "rural pride" fellow
I'm not really "rural pride" either, despite your assertion. I just understand what space in the value chain (or society, call it what you want) I occupy. I've always lived in cities or towns.
Would things be weird for farmers for a while if all the city dwellers suddenly vanished? Sure! Absolutely. They'd have far fewer buyers for sure.
But suggesting that farmers need city dwellers for humans to continue to exist is like thinking that compiler writers need the people that use compilers. Compiler programmers could do their work just fine without everyone writing web apps and the world would keep turning. But if the compiler writers went poof, I assure you that the web app folks would have a much harder time.
> But suggesting that farmers need city dwellers for humans to continue to exist is like thinking that compiler writers need the people that use compilers. Compiler programmers could do their work just fine without everyone writing web apps and the world would keep turning. But if the compiler writers went poof, I assure you that the web app folks would have a much harder time.
I never suggested farmers need city dwellers to continue to exist; there's a crisp distinction between "continuing to exist" and "continuing to exist in a recognizably-modern state".
The binary thought experiments aren't interesting to me; they usually wind up in degenerate cases that add little useful information. It's much more interesting to look at modest tweaks to the status quo and see how things play out differently.
I also suspected from the way you insist on lumping together "farms" and "rural"--really, from failing to make a useful distinction between the two--which makes it hard to have a productive discussion.
"Rural" is a settlement pattern; an exact definition is tricky to pin down but you can do a decent job of capturing the intuition if you define it as the intersection of "areas with population-density under some threshold" and "areas more than X miles away from a city larger than some minimum size", tailoring the numbers to suit your preference.
"Farming" is an economic activity; although a large percentage of farming is done in areas that'd be "rural" under the above definition, not all of it happens in such areas, and depending on how you calibrate the parameters you can get a surprisingly high amount of farming being done in what'd be at-best "semi-urban" areas.
It's just really hard to have a useful conversation if you're going to keep equating "rural" and "farm".
Anyways, I don't really find the "what if X went poof?" conversation interesting.
What is interesting is if, for example, you saw less and less redistribution and transfer payments at the state level and below, basically (as we've been discussing) leading to each locality having to pay more of its own way.
My conjecture is in this scenario you'd see a simple "contraction": farming proper would become increasingly concentrated in higher-density "halos" around the urban areas for obvious reasons (proximity to market, reduced operating costs vis-a-vis being further out, etc.) and the further out areas would increasingly be the territory of the high-scale industrial operations (who have the scope and economies of scale to net out ahead even after paying more of their infrastructure overhead).
What'd slowly evaporate in this scenario is the horribly in-efficient low-density in-between settlements that currently comprise most of the "rural" areas (by population and by area!).
Finally, don't be too enamored of Salatin (and honestly mentioning him together with Brown is a bit odd b/c most of what they have in common is getting noticed by the popular press).
Salatin just isn't that interesting (results-wise; as a person he's quite entertaining and gives a good interview). Brown's soil results are interesting but it's hard to really evaluate--and harder to replicate!--his other results, b/c he's very cagey with numbers and even more cagey with the kind of detail you'd need to duplicate it exactly.
For Brown's system in particular it's quite likely the productivity per acre is about as high as he claims but the effective total productivity may be much lower than he likes to suggest, due to (a) having to feed a lot of it back to the livestock and also (b) having only smallish areas doing actual production-for-market at any one time.
It's again super impressive for the soil-health aspect but the jury is very much out on how productive the style is, and unless he's opened up a lot lately it's hard to independently verify his implied productivity figures.
I never suggested farmers need city dwellers to continue to exist; there's a crisp distinction between "continuing to exist" and "continuing to exist in a recognizably-modern state".
The binary thought experiments aren't interesting to me; they usually wind up in degenerate cases that add little useful information. It's much more interesting to look at modest tweaks to the status quo and see how things play out differently.
I also suspected from the way you insist on lumping together "farms" and "rural"--really, from failing to make a useful distinction between the two--which makes it hard to have a productive discussion.
"Rural" is a settlement pattern; an exact definition is tricky to pin down but you can do a decent job of capturing the intuition if you define it as the intersection of "areas with population-density under some threshold" and "areas more than X miles away from a city larger than some minimum size", tailoring the numbers to suit your preference.
"Farming" is an economic activity; although a large percentage of farming is done in areas that'd be "rural" under the above definition, not all of it happens in such areas, and depending on how you calibrate the parameters you can get a surprisingly high amount of farming being done in what'd be at-best "semi-urban" areas.
It's just really hard to have a useful conversation if you're going to keep equating "rural" and "farm".
Anyways, I don't really find the "what if X went poof?" conversation interesting.
What is interesting is if, for example, you saw less and less redistribution and transfer payments at the state level and below, basically (as we've been discussing) leading to each locality having to pay more of its own way.
My conjecture is in this scenario you'd see a simple "contraction": farming proper would become increasingly concentrated in higher-density "halos" around the urban areas for obvious reasons (proximity to market, reduced operating costs vis-a-vis being further out, etc.) and the further out areas would increasingly be the territory of the high-scale industrial operations (who have the scope and economies of scale to net out ahead even after paying more of their infrastructure overhead).
What'd slowly evaporate in this scenario is the horribly in-efficient low-density in-between settlements that currently comprise most of the "rural" areas (by population and by area!).
Finally, don't be too enamored of Salatin (and honestly mentioning him together with Brown is a bit odd b/c most of what they have in common is getting noticed by the popular press).
Salatin just isn't that interesting (results-wise; as a person he's quite entertaining and gives a good interview). Brown's soil results are interesting but it's hard to really evaluate--and harder to replicate!--his other results, b/c he's very cagey with numbers and even more cagey with the kind of detail you'd need to duplicate it exactly.
For Brown's system in particular it's quite likely the productivity per acre is about as high as he claims but the effective total productivity may be much lower than he likes to suggest, due to (a) having to feed a lot of it back to the livestock and also (b) having only smallish areas doing actual production-for-market at any one time.
It's again super impressive for the soil-health aspect but the jury is very much out on how productive the style is, and unless he's opened up a lot lately it's hard to independently verify his implied productivity figures.
Automation is a thing, fewer and fewer people work in farming, and those who do spend less and less time doing manual labor. I'd rather support this trend and work towards full automation and remote control.
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Surely not forced relocation, but on the other hand I don't quite understand why people think it's a good idea to fight urbanization on a policy level rather than embracing it.
Many people, including myself, don't like cities. Being from Indiana, everyone I know that lives here wants to be here.
Cities are crowded, dirty, and far more dangerous than the country and many small towns.
The coasts are already overcrowded, they don't need more people.
I spent a few years moving around to big cities for tech jobs. Only thing I really discovered is that I strongly dislike living in big cities.
Grew up in a small college town. Great quality of life, affordable (if you have a university job or something supporting them...), very little suburban sprawl, I only have to drive 10-20 minutes to get to the bar district to do something. Sure, I can't go to world renown art centers or find some hyper specific activities/businesses that can usually only succeed in higher population densities, but I'd only be a few hours away from them if needed.
Lots of pluses for me. Hope to take a significant pay cut and shoot for a stable job someday in one of these places. The friends I grew up with make 1/3rd what I do, but they all own homes and seemingly enjoy a higher quality of life. My current solution is save up a nice nest-egg and re-specialize into something else. Haven't decided what yet.
Grew up in a small college town. Great quality of life, affordable (if you have a university job or something supporting them...), very little suburban sprawl, I only have to drive 10-20 minutes to get to the bar district to do something. Sure, I can't go to world renown art centers or find some hyper specific activities/businesses that can usually only succeed in higher population densities, but I'd only be a few hours away from them if needed.
Lots of pluses for me. Hope to take a significant pay cut and shoot for a stable job someday in one of these places. The friends I grew up with make 1/3rd what I do, but they all own homes and seemingly enjoy a higher quality of life. My current solution is save up a nice nest-egg and re-specialize into something else. Haven't decided what yet.
If you're able to cover the cost and except the risks of living in non-urbanized areas, that's fine.
Americans spending billions to create jobs for people to maintain them living in areas that are not economically viable needs to stop.
Americans spending billions to create jobs for people to maintain them living in areas that are not economically viable needs to stop.
There are plenty of large cities in the Midwest as the comment you replied to mentioned. There's a good amount of confusion in this thread as to what Midwest means, especially because the author initially proposed moving agencies to Midwestern "cities". No one is fighting urbanization.
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How can you increase demand for housing and decrease the cost of housing at the same time?
Presumably by subsidizing the housing. Housing is interesting, because what really affects the market is housing stock, not housing investment. But of course housing investment over time builds housing stock.
edit: This wikipedia article proved interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_economics
edit: This wikipedia article proved interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_estate_economics
...by dramatically increasing supply?
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...which would decrease demand (ceteris paribus) :-) I think the question was academic, not practical.
Supply and demand can both increase. It's the difference that matters.
I wrote "ceteris paribus". Please actually read comments before downvoting. My comment still stands. If, everything else remaining equal, supply "dramatically increases" than demand will fall.
While I didn't downvote your comment, using Latin on an English speaking site isn't an effective means of expressing ideas.
I have to agree that to assume everyone would understand some Latin phrase is, well.. presumptuous.
That is a common phrase in ergonomics. I myself don't speak any Latin apart from a handful of phrases, like et al, et ceterea, pecunia non olet... - the usual stuff that I think most people have been exposed to. And "ceteris paribus" is THE phrase in economics. It of course applies to all models, but in that field it's actually being used in everyday speech, and always and immediately (when starting to study anything "economics"). I'm not even an economics person, only learned a little bit of it on the side (didn't find it interesting enough).
So it is NOT a stretch at all to assume that someone who wants to debunk a statement made on the basis of the boring standard subject of economics, the supply and demand relationship, has heard about it! If not, it would be even worse for his statement.
So it is NOT a stretch at all to assume that someone who wants to debunk a statement made on the basis of the boring standard subject of economics, the supply and demand relationship, has heard about it! If not, it would be even worse for his statement.
Rural depopulation needs to happen if for no other reasons than environmental. We should be focusing on returning as much land as possible to natural ecosystems. Urban living is more efficient in terms of resource consumption than rural living (http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html), and the possibilities for further efficiency gains are much greater for urban areas.
If you did that, a handful of people would be responsible for a huge number of votes in the electoral college. That might be interesting.
Apart from issues of gerrymandering, districts are at least supposed to be based on population. So they would just increase district size.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_district#Apportionme...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_district#Apportionme...
"The border" runs along the great lakes and includes a lot of large cities in the midwest.
Like what Stalin did to Tartars?
It's Tatars, not Tartars:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_the_Crimean_T...
...and no, this is the opposite of deportation and there is no ethnic filter being applied.
Please see other comments in this thread for the reasons for deruralizarion.
...and no, this is the opposite of deportation and there is no ethnic filter being applied.
Please see other comments in this thread for the reasons for deruralizarion.
50% of the US population lives east of the Mississippi, on 1/3 of the land. It would make more sense to find why people are so frequently living near the border, and incentivize them to move inland, balancing the population more evenly across the land.
So this guy wants just a little bit of a planned economy. Not too much, mind you. Just the right amount.
Newsflash: If doing business gets easier, then more business will be done. More business leads to more economic activity and more jobs.
It's not that complicated.
Newsflash: If doing business gets easier, then more business will be done. More business leads to more economic activity and more jobs.
It's not that complicated.
But momentum is definitely factor. Once you have a successful city/region, people flock there, often to the point of overcrowding. Businesses want to be where the "talent" is.
So move jobs to a place where people don't want to be?
You can move the jobs without moving all the people. There are a lot of people outside of the DC Metro area who have the necessary qualifications for most federal jobs.
When I was a kid, my father worked for a federal agency in an office that was two hours from Washington and, for some reason, they moved all 400 jobs out of our town to Philadelphia. The jobs all moved even though many of the people didn't.
When I was a kid, my father worked for a federal agency in an office that was two hours from Washington and, for some reason, they moved all 400 jobs out of our town to Philadelphia. The jobs all moved even though many of the people didn't.
And the main reason people don't want to be in such places? No jobs!
How much of the money that would be re-injected into these communities was taken via taxes in the first place?
https://mises.org/blog/which-states-rely-most-federal-spendi...
The current situation is that 39 of the 50 states get back more in Federal spending than they put in in Federal Taxes.
The current situation is that 39 of the 50 states get back more in Federal spending than they put in in Federal Taxes.
The point is that most taxes would be from other states, so it is a net wealth transfer to the new hosting state no matter the tax rate.
Just a fantasy though. About as likely as high-speed rail from SF to NY.