[Clubber]

>You might have to pick up a laptop and learn to code.

I'm sure you can't honestly believe this will work for the vast majority of people in the US. Either you don't value your trade, or you are simply unwilling to seriously discuss the issue.

[soundwave106]

Historically, that happened before.

There was large amounts of net migration in the late 19th century - early 20th century from rural areas (where work increasingly wasn't due to agriculture automation) to urban areas. [1]

As farms automated, it was often "flyover territories" that took the lead in creating the then-new high school movement. [2]

Heck, for technologies that were increasingly becoming indispensable to life, there was even strong government efforts to make sure access was available for that. (EG in 1936: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act)

So, "pick up a laptop and learn to code" is an acceptable answer to me. Of course, actually, there are a lot of other careers besides coding. The issue is that increasingly, former career paths like resource extraction and manufacturing are either getting automated away, or are getting shoved out by globalization. This leaves the service industry (including the knowledge economy). Your "standard" service job doesn't pay very good these days, and the current "career path" in America to obtain a good knowledge economy job is through a college degree (I know, not the best "signal" in many ways, but for now it is the signal) and rural participation rate is very low [3].

One frustration with the current political scene, which is so dominated by culture war anger, is that these concepts don't even really get aired. How to improve rural higher education, how to aid career transitions from manufacturing, how to improved wage standards for service workers (which are increasingly replacing manufacturing jobs), or even something like rural Internet initiatives? Seems far more interesting to discuss than what often passes for "political news" these days.

[1] https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-us-history/period-... [2] https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/2624456/Goldin_E... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-ru...

[Clubber]

>Historically, that happened before.

Yes, but the population was a lot smaller. Also they had jobs to go to. Even in coastal states, good entry level jobs are hard to come by, even with a college education.

Here's a population by state.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/

Think about getting everyone outside of a coastal state to move to a coastal state. What would that do to existing jobs in the coastal states? What would that do to land values in the coastal states? What would that do to land values in the non-coastal states? Think those people would be able to sell their old houses?

I mean "train and move," isn't really a solution. It makes a good sound bite, but once you think about the details, it kinda falls down when you are talking what? 50 million people?