[kenmicklas]

> They offer a certain quality of life many desire.

But at an enormous cost to the environment, tax base, and economic resilience of society.

It's legitimate for people in the cities to ask whether they want to keep subsidizing this lifestyle, and whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved.

[ThrowawayR2]

Pray tell, where do you expect all those agricultural products, lumber, livestock, and so forth that we all depend on to come from without small towns and rural communities? They have to grow somewhere after all.

[danans]

> Pray tell, where do you expect all those agricultural products, lumber, livestock, and so forth that we all depend on to come from without small towns and rural communities? They have to grow somewhere after all.

The article provides several examples showing that those industries continue to operate in small towns, but that they require very little labor anymore, due to mechanization and automation.

The majority of the financial gains for these industries go to the capital owners (including all of us who can afford to save for retirement), not to the local labor pool. The labor pool doesn't have leverage to change that, because they often have few other options for work in their area.

The remote workers transplanted from cities aren't going to meaningfully increase employment in the old sectors. They will just enjoy the cheap housing and lower cost for low-skilled services.

Local low-skilled labor won't be able to suddenly shift to high-skilled remote IT work, and the sectors are too different to have an effect on the others' labor rates.

At best, the remote IT workers' discretionary local spending might prop up a few small service businesses, like restaurants, but the remote workers are likely to keep most of their capital in the same non-local financial instruments that their equivalents in cities do. And who could blame them for doing so?

[Kalium]

You're completely correct. We depend utterly on a lot of basic products of small towns and rural communities.

That said, just because food and lumber has to be grown somewhere doesn't mean it has to be grown in American small towns and rural communities. My wheat and rice can come from Mexico and Thailand and my beef from Argentina.

[freehunter]

What's the delta between the environmental impact of growing wheat and beef etc locally vs shipping it 8000 miles?

[Kalium]

Trans-oceanic shipping and trains are surprisingly low-impact per unit of food. When you add in the environmental impact of things like growing rice in Texas deserts and almonds in California, the results can easily come out in favor of trade.

There are other considerations, too. Favoring local products is a good way to keep poor food-exporting countries poor. I don't want that, though I understand some people have different priorities from me.

[ProfessorLayton]

This is great until a major conflict happens between the US and the country responsible for a major food staple, and domestic production is decimated by imports, and there’s a food shortage.

[Kalium]

That sounds like excellent incentive for everyone to try to avoid and reduce the severity of conflicts.

[eigenstuff]

I live in the kind of rural place you're talking about. Rural town of 2500, majority farmland/undeveloped, historically impoverished part of the country.

Many people in my town are exactly what you'd expect. But a good fraction of them are millionaires with huge McMansions and lakeside property. The cars that go down my road are a mix of beat up pick up trucks and Cadillacs.

I guarantee you, no outside entity subsidizes us. Not with those kind of property taxes coming in. And I guarantee you, my town is not unique in this regard.

[dvtrn]

whether a better kind of arrangement of land use can be achieved.

What would some examples of this be, in your opinion?

[kenmicklas]

I think these enormous tracts of suburban and rural land that were populated with government subsidies and no real economic reason to exist should be slowly and gracefully depopulated, with people settling denser areas (which we have a scarcity of, due to racially motivated zoning laws and other policies). We also need to do a better job of limiting sprawl so that people living in cities are closer to nature and don't have to travel through hundreds of miles of suburbs to "escape".

People act as if all these small towns are growing our food and are vital for the national economy when in reality the vast majority of them consist simply of the industry required for their local suburban/rural existence (schools, supermarkets, hospitals, road maintenance, etc.).

The places that are actually productive (e.g. large agricultural regions) of course have to stay but these are relatively not so populated to begin with (and use less and less labor every year). People have no idea of the magnitude of distortion that props up the myth of the small town in America.

Policywise, I think a gradually introduced land value tax and carbon tax (replacing to some degree property and income taxes) could do a lot to enact this restructuring in a "natural" way.