Rural/Non-rural Differences: Due to Migration?

Several publications noted a Post study on rural/nonrural differences:
Successful Farming.
Rural Blog
Kevin Drum 

The emphasis seems to be on cultural differences.  ERS has an analysis of "nonmetro" counties and population loss. Four of its takeaways: "

• Rural out-migration peaked in the 1950s and 1960s (not shown on graph), but was offset by high "baby boom" birth-rates.

• Net out-migration from nonmetro areas was more severe during the 1980s compared with 2010-16, but overall population change remained positive during the 1980s because natural increase contributed roughly 0.5 percent growth annually (compared with 0.1 percent recently).

• Nonmetro net migration rates peaked during the 'rural rebound' in the mid-1990s and again in 2004-06, just prior to the housing mortgage crisis and economic recession. Net migration remained positive for much of the past two decades, increasing nonmetro population every year but one from 1990 to 2009, but net-outmigration has since contributed to population loss.

• The Great Recession contributed to a downturn in natural increase, as fewer births occur during times of economic uncertainty. But falling birth rates and an aging population have steadily reduced population growth from natural increase in rural counties over time, in line with global trends."

Not sure about the overall history, but since the beginning of the country rural areas have exported some of their population to the cities.  Indeed, in England London was a death trap so it sucked in country boys and girls, often to meet an unpleasant fate.

I wonder how much of the cultural differences are due to this sorting?  Presumably the people who stay in rural areas are more integrated into the locality, more active in churches and civic organizations, more committed to having a career, or rather, to making a living through local job.  While the people who move, who go to college and never come back, those people are more into careers in academia, or finance, less interested in religion, etc.

[Update: the effect of the rural out migration means that existing institutions, the schools, churches, stores, etc. lose vitality and makes it hard to create new organizations to meet new needs.] 

A final speculation: note the ERS says that nonmetro areas suffered a net loss of population since 2010--that may be both a symbol and a cause of discontent in such areas, discontent leading to the 2016 election result.
 

Rural Life: Improvements

The Rural Blog has a post on seven ways rural life has improved. The items:

• water service
• trash service
• private phone lines
• paved roads
• satellite TV
• Internet
• Apple, Amazon, Netflix

I agree with the items, though they may not be present in all rural areas.  For example, some roads in the Mid West are reverting to gravel because there's not enough traffic and taxes to support asphalt. And I'm sure pumped wells are still common in many places.

The Virtues of Rural Life

 I suspect my blogging has reflected my aversion to rural life, having left the rural area where I grew up as soon as I got a permanent job.  Yet I'm ambivalent, as I often am, so I'll link to this piece in the Post, written by the guy who moved his family to Red Lake County, MN after describing it as the worst place in America to live, based on ratings of various criteria.  A paragraph:

Nor, as far as I can tell, have we come up with a good way to quantify nostalgia. Red Lake Falls feels like the kind of town your grandparents would live in, and I mean that in the best possible way. The town's 1,400 residents keep tidy homes on tidy lawns with sprawling vegetable gardens out back. To an adult living here for the first time, it feels like the kind of place you remember visiting during summers in childhood, where memories are built on indolent afternoons spent in broad sunny lawns while the adults relaxed on a screened-in porch with cocktails in their hands.

The author has children, BTW, and I don't, which might explain much.

Farewell to the Barbershop?

An article here at Jstor on the changing culture for men's hair:

The last two paragraphs:

They’re not signs of a disintegrating bygone culture of manhood. Rather, they signify a transformation of white, well-to-do masculinity. In the past, the barbershop was a place for these men. Today, while the old model may thrive in black or up-and-coming neighborhoods, white professional men are seeking a pampered experience elsewhere.
And they’re creating intimate relationships in these new men’s salons. But instead of immersing themselves in single-sex communities of men, they’re often building one-on-one confidential relationships with women hair stylists. Stylists often explained this intimacy as part of their jobs. For white men with financial means, though, the men’s salon becomes an important place where they can purchase the sense of connection they may otherwise be missing in their lives.

For a while in my younger years I cut my own hair, but then I migrated back to a barbershop, finding a shop which was reminiscent of my boyhood shop in Greene, NY: patrons and barbers who knew each other and would talk about things like hunting and cars.  My Herndon shop was bigger, not a two-man operation, and it had trophy heads and military memorabilia on the walls. Still it seemed the patrons and barbers mostly knew each other, or at least made small talk (not my forte). Over the years it's downsized and become less of a conversation center.

I don't know what's happened to barbershops in small towns in rural areas--probably closed if the area has lost population. 

Vilsack Undermining Rural Values

This has gotten a lot of attention from the right, including giving Rush Limbaugh a lot of laughs (and showing he doesn't understand rural life very well).

Our neighborhood store was run by two middle-aged women, who lived behind the store (until it burned).  What was the nature of their relationship?  Who knew, certainly not I. Nor did we care.  I remember being astonished when a co-worker at my summer job (who'd had surgery for ulcers which didn't improve his disposition any) commented on them with a sneer.

Rural Development and LGBT

A post at Lawyers, Guns and Money on the USDA's rural programs, the outreach to the LGBT community, and the concerns of the right wing (Limbaugh).

The Saving of America: Immigrants

My mother would have claimed rural America as the heart of true America (even though she was a Bronx girl, her family moved to upstate NY a couple years after she was born).  If she was right, and she wasn't, then immigrants are saving America. From the Blog for Rural America:

"Using recent U.S. Census data, Johnson discovered that, where there is growth in rural areas, minorities account for 83 percent. The Hispanic population in nonmetropolitan areas grew at the fastest rate of any racial or ethnic group during the 1990s and post-2000 time period."

No Toto, No Dorothy, But Fallows Is in Kansas

 James Fallows has a piece on immigration in rural areas, which ties into a two-part blog series by the Center for Rural America.  An excerpt from Fallows:

These cities of western Kansas, Dodge City and Garden City, are both now majority-Latino. People from Mexico are the biggest single immigrant group, and they are here mainly for work in the area’s big meat-packing plants. Others are from Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, and more recently Somalia and Sudan, among other countries. You might think of Kansas as stereotypical whitebread America. It’s pure America, all right — but American in the truest sense, comprising people who have come from various corners of the world to improve their fortunes.

I don't like his title, "real Americans" are everywhere, but it's a worthwhile piece.  I wonder how much immigration has affected rural UK?

Bring Back Manufacturing Farm Jobs?

There's lots of (bipartisan) angst over the loss of manufacturing jobs.  Trump talks about Carrier moving from Indiana to Mexico (it also closed its Syracuse operation years ago),.  The idea is these jobs were good ones, ones which high school grads could do and which would support a family, perhaps even a single-earner family.  Liberals point to the loss of union jobs, the UMW, the UAW, the steelworkers unions are all shadows of their former (circa 1970) selves.

What neither Trump nor liberals mourn is the loss of farm jobs.  (That's not totally true--the food movement often talks about the need for more farmers, but that's somewhat different than farm jobs.)

My own feelings are represented by this piece from Modern Farmer, a person who remembers the farm life fondly, but doesn't want it for herself.

China's Rural Areas and America's

FiveThirtyEight  has a post on Monroeville, AL, which has changed since the 1930's.   That reminded me of this NYTimes piece on China's rural areas.  President Xi visited a rural town:

The bucolic scenes, shown on Chinese state television, cast Mr. Xi as a paternal leader in the footsteps of Mao, at home with the rustic virtues that once made this mountainous region of southeast China a birthplace of the Communist Party’s rural revolution.

But those images conflict with contemporary reality here. Within days, this struggling community of 250 souls will be nearly empty.

Like an increasing number of villages across China, most of its people have left to find work or attend school elsewhere, returning to their ancestral home only for the New Year holidays. The rest of the year, only 50 or so people live here, most of them elderly, usually fending for themselves.

 My point?  China's social evolution is similar to the US one, except much faster.  In our case, the rural areas emptied out over decades; in theirs, just years.  (

Farm Kids and "Our Kids"

Reading Robert Putnam's "Our Kids"

Farm kids seem naturally to have a childhood closer to that enjoyed by those with highly educated parents these days than kids with parents in standard-issue suburbia.  There's differences, of course.  The cultural/intellectual environment isn't as rich and you can't assume a lot of emphasis on words.  I suspect there's less diversity among the kids in a rural school these days than there was in my time, but still more than in most suburban settings.

Economy a Reason for Primary Anger?

I noticed a title on a post somewhere saying that farmers' income would be down by 28 percent this year. Commodity prices are down across the board with no relief in sight.   I wonder if the changes in the outlook for agriculture fuel a little bit of the anger which seems to be showing up in the primaries, particularly on the Republican side?

Farming as a Living and a Way of Life

Via the Rural Blog, this essay in Salon.  The writer grows 10 acres of organic vegetables in California, made $2500. (I'm not clear, that may be $2500 in addition to roughly $100 a week.)

I remember my mother grousing about the land-poor farmers, who'd be better off by selling and investing the money at 6 percent.  (I don't think that's particularly right--land values in upstate NY in the 1950's weren't that high.  And maybe it was my high school ag teacher who made the point in accounting for farming you needed to charge the cost of capital (land) and labor cost, before you got to management income.)

As she says, almost all small farmers these days have "city" jobs as my mother would have called them.  The full-time small farmer is mostly gone, or just surviving because she has the land and the house paid for, so low cash flow isn't that bad.

The rewards of a small farm are a degree of control and independence (though cows and hens are a ball and chain, and being a slave to the market counters the illusion  of control).  It's also great for raising kids--they get loads of time with their parents, and all sorts of learning experience, plus blisters.

Without lots of small farmers you don't have much rural life or community, because there's no one to support the churches, the farmers organizations, the community suppers, etc 

The Enrichment of Rural Life

Was looking at a recent post on Life on a Colorado Farm, the one where she asks for help in identifying a bird at her feeder, then viewed the comments.  The LCF writer lives on a butte in Colorado, so she sees a lot of weather, and nice views.  In this she's a lot like my mother, who lived near the top of a hill in upstate New York, and enjoyed the views looking west over the hills. 

When mom married she moved to the valley, which she regretted. Her life on the hill was  back in the early 1900's so there's a great difference in life experiences.  A few of them:

• LCF has a camera with which she takes many great pictures.  Mom had a similar enjoyment of natural phenomena, the clouds, the snow, the seasons, etc. but had no way to record it.
• LCF has the Internet and a blog.  Mom had a lonely life on the hill--they had a watering trough by the gravel road which passed between house and barn and she was eager to visit with the few passersby who would stop to water their horses.  During my childhood she was equally eager to visit with the people who came to buy our cracked eggs.  But I'm sure she would have much enjoyed the companionship available through a blog and blogroll and sharing with people with similar circumstances and backgrounds.

The Rural Blog does a good job at reporting on rural life, which often has greater problems than nonrural life (i.e. drugs, access to healthcare, economy, etc. etc.). One thing we need to remember is the isolation of rural life in the not too-remote past, and the changes made by modern technology.

Dwindling Rural Infrastructure

Reducing the number of post offices, reducing the number of FSA offices, reducing the number of rural hospitals, reducing the number of Vermont school districts.

ACA and FSA

From the NASCOE President's message: "

"Here we are in 2014 and we still don’t have a good online tool for producers to communicate and file applications on the simplest of programs (okay there are no simple programs)."

Now I don't know how complex the ACA health insurance program is, as compared to the FSA programs.  Obviously there were problems with the software last October, and I gather it's still incomplete as far as payments goes.  But HHS only had a few years to get the software done and tested, while FSA has had over 20 years since the idea was floated.  I'm really p****d at the botched rollout of healthcare.gov; it's almost enough to make me regret my political allegiance.  But I guess if I'm going to be fair, I should admit that compared to USDA/FSA HHS looks pretty good.  (That's probably the first and last compliment HHS will ever receive on their IT implementation.)

It's easy to argue I'm comparing apples and oranges, because I think administering the insurance program will be handled by the insurance company, not by the healthcare.gov website. And the philosophical question is simple: do you want to maximize efficiency or employment in rural areas.  If the former, then go the way some of the loan programs did--centralize administration in St. Louis.  If the latter, become friends with the senators and representative and fight to keep all offices open. 

I suspect we'll continue to muddle our way down the road, closing some offices, doing some modernization, trying to reach both goals: efficiency and rural life.

The Push and Pull of the Bureaucracy

From NASCOE:

"Items discussed with DAFO include the need for more Key PT’s. One state was able to hire more than the national notice allowed. I encourage each state to get with your SED and figure out a plan to request more."

The budget proposal to cut positions and close county offices is the big issue.  I've already noticed Sen. Gillibrand voicing opposition to closing offices in NY, and I assume that's happening elsewhere.  Since I'm retired, I shouldn't really comment, but the two sentences I quote struck me.  It's an example of how the field can out-maneuver the DC bureaucrats.  For a political scientist, it might be an instance of "rational choice", the idea that people in the bureaucracies look out for the interests of the bureaucracy, not the public.  But applying the idea of the free market to such issues, you could say the "interests of the public" are the result of the interplay of the struggle of various interests.  I think Madison's Federalist #10 might be an example of that.

There's been a long but sporadic effort in USDA to rationalize the county office structure, going back to 1976, an effort having two thrusts: establishing service centers, with multiple agencies in one location, and closing offices which no longer serve a lot of farmers.   There's been a lot of resistance to the effort, so the result has been less consolidation and fewer offices closed than the DC planners hoped to achieve but more than county employees and farmers wanted.

In the broader view, a similar process has been going on for over a century.  The rural population has dwindled in parts of the country ever since 1900 or so.  Reformers, possibly including my grandfather, thought the rural church needed to consolidate--rather than Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, etc. small churches in small towns, why not get together into one which could afford better ministers, support more Sunday schools and other amenities.  Don't think it worked out.

Just recently I saw a blog post on the closing of rural hospitals in Georgia--similar idea I'd think. (Greene, NY, which was our market town, used to have a hospital but it closed in the early 60's, I believe.) 

Most Rural STudents

It turns out that the state where I was born, New York, ranks 8th in the nation for number of rural students.  The link (hat tip I think the Rural Blog) is to an interactive map of the country which shows lots of data on rural education.  (Texas is first in number of rural students.)

The Super Bowl Ad

Has apparently been tweaked to add images of Latino farmers. (I'm not sure whether it would have been USDA-approved, given Vilsack's outreach program.)  But John Phipps thinks it should have shown some CAFO's and snow-birds.

The Changing Country Scene: Aldie Country Store

Aldie is a little country town on Route 50 west of here.  Emily Wax has a nice article in the Post today on the changes the country store has seen over the years: notably the people running it now are a Hindu couple who employ a Hindu vegetarian to cook their barbecue.