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?
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.
>> "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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
