My argument is very simple but you apparently misunderstand.
morgante guessed that I reject fact checking simply if it doesn't confirm my worldview.
I rebutted that the fact checkers in question aren't simply disproving my worldview. Rather they are advancing an opinion-based counter-narrative under the guise of objectivity.
You replied and suggested that I should be held to the same standard as a purported arbiter of truth.
I rebutted that I do not claim to be a sterile, objective source of bald fact-checking. And a major news consumption platform is not appending my opinions to people's feeds and elevating my opinions to objective status. My opinions-masquerading-as-fact won't be advanced by Facebook as evidence of the disreputability of those I disagree with.
First I will explain the joke in my previous comment, since it seems to have gone over your head. Read what you wrote literally, as if someone else wrote it:
> I do not put myself out there as a disinterested arbiter of fact.
> Facebook isn't going to be appending my critical analysis to alleged fake news stores.
The joke I made works--or doesn't--based on whether or not you can see those statements as a self-evident good thing: wouldn't it be good and proper that Facebook isn't going to be appending your critical analysis to alleged fake news `stores` (sic), given that--by your own admission--you aren't putting yourself out there as a disinterested arbiter of fact?
Now to be a bit more serious.
You claim to have an argument...but, where? What is your argument? Where can I find it stated, explicitly, in words?
I can't imagine myself walking away from this conversation saying "you know, despite my initial reaction `halpiamaquark` was actually totally right about...". I mean really, how should I finish that sentence? What's the point you came in here trying to make?
You come across as wanting the world to know you don't like Snopes and Politifact and...that's it?
The play-by-play as I see it starts with this:
> The kosher fact checkers list includes the biased and opinion-based Politifact and Snopes.
That's not an argument; it's a statement of your opinion, but presented as fact.
Now purely talking rhetorical strategies I can't blame you here; after all if you'd lead with this:
> The kosher fact checkers list includes Politifact and Snopes. In my opinion, Politifact and Snopes are biased and opinion-based.
...I think the natural response would be "...and I care because? Is there going to be a point here, eventually?". On the other hand, if you just state your opinion like a fact it's pretty good bait--you'll get people jumping in to play the "I'm going to respond to what I guess you're probably thinking" game.
That's what happened: `morgante` played that game and made a guess, and then, in your own words:
> I rebutted that the fact checkers in question aren't simply disproving my worldview. Rather they are advancing an opinion-based counter-narrative under the guise of objectivity.
I'd characterize this as (a) rejecting his guess at what you think and, then, once again, (b) stating your opinion about Politifact and Snopes as if it were fact.
We're now 3 comments in and there's still no argument: what, again, is the point you're actually trying to make? I mean it's quite clear that you think Snopes and Politifact are biased because you repeat that claim every chance you get, but what's the implication? Can you be direct and make the point you're trying to make, or is there really no point to be had here?
At this point I jump in. It was amusing to me that there was something about presenting opinions as fact that had you so mad--so mad!--while on the other hand you seemed to have no way of expressing yourself other than, well, presenting your opinions as facts.
So I did make a snarky reply but I have to disagree with your characterization of it:
> You replied and suggested that I should be held to the same standard as a purported arbiter of truth.
...no, that's not it at all. Where are you getting this "should be held to the same standard as a purported arbiter of truth"? That's all you and your quarky ways, and presumably all your unstated ideas and assumptions that could perhaps comprise an argument if you were to surface them explicitly.
All I actually did was (a) take your quote:
> Politifact and Snopes push their opinionated worldview as though it is objectively true and morally righteous.
...and prepend an "I think" to it, and then (b) point out that failing to do so would've left you seeming guilty of the same thing you are so mad--so mad!--about Politifact and Snopes (allegedly) doing.
Your follow-up response was where you finally introduce some actual statements of fact:
> I do not put myself out there as a disinterested arbiter of fact.
> Facebook isn't going to be appending my critical analysis to alleged fake news stores.
...but despite finally providing something other than simple re-statements of your opinions, as a response this was incoherent.
I mean, yeah, I can guess what you might be thinking, but I'm not going to do your job for you.
If you want to claim to have an argument you have to, you know, actually make it: state your premises, show your steps, show your work, and how they all fit together to make the point you want to make. Otherwise you're just venting!
I also don't like your odds here: the current site mechanics and moderation pace don't seem adequate to preserve the good parts of the site in the long run, but any significant overhaul would also risk the same.
> "Because Politifact and Snopes are biased and opinion based, they are not credible to determine whether stories are 'fake'."
Even here you could go more honest and humble--"I think that Politifact and Snopes are biased and opinion-based to the point I can't see them as credible to determine whether stories are fake"--but such a modest approach would indeed be very counterproductive if your real purpose here is to, as you say, invite reactions and watch your karma to take the pulse of the community.
> Yes, I provided no evidence. I don't care to. What minuscule effect can I hope to have on a tiny handful of strangers on the internet?
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.
Respectfully, "those guys know how to do one thing well" is (IMHO) much more accurate phrasing than "those guys know what they're doing". Note that these are compatible statements.
You misunderstand the point about limited "places" (or at least the point I believe is intended).
For sake of argument, assume 90% of jobs out there are "bad jobs"--no prospect of real wage growth, declining stability, decreasing benefits--and the remaining 10% of jobs are "good jobs" (with some wage growth, stability, and benefits).
Assume also that it is widely believed that in general, to have a chance at landing a "good job" you need at least an undergraduate degree (necessary, not sufficient!).
In such a situation, will you not see everyone throw as many resources as they can into getting their kids a better chance of making it into one of those good jobs?
There's a lot you can quibble with but that's the "limited places" of significance, with demand for university education a byproduct of that more fundamental demand (for better positioning vis-a-vis the "good jobs").
This is thus more of a race to establish relative position vis-a-vis other entrants, so IMHO looking at tournament theory (etc.) is helpful for understanding the overall dynamics.
> In such a situation, will you not see everyone throw as many resources as they can into getting their kids a better chance of making it into one of those good jobs?
Absolutely, but the resources you can throw at it is strongly dependent on the availability of loans. Hence why we have $1.3 trillion in aggregate debt.
Hard problems are rarely just one hard problem, but until you solve the first hard sub-problem you won't even know what the other hard sub-problems are, let alone what proportion of difficulty each contributes.
It's like climbing a mountain in the fog: you've found the way forward and if it holds out you can extrapolate when you will reach the top, only to find you dead end at the face of a sheer cliff...it will be awhile before you find the next way forward.
It's progress but the destination remains further than it seems.
In addition to (eventual) climate change China has been making itself increasingly unlivable due to conventional pollution (in all forms)...but the leadership there has always seen this as a temporary cost that must be borne to catch up with the west.
Internal pressure will already force China to do something sooner rather than later; handling the problem is a good way to consolidate power internally and thus tackled enthusiastically.
Throw in the USA voluntarily ceding its position of world leadership and it's an opportunity to go from barely-tolerated semi-pariah to increasingly-respectable world leader.
In particular expect China to "save" Africa once the worst begins. But, not immediately; groundwork is already being laid, but right now they can afford to be patient.
Back in the cold war days it was something of a banal truism that only an objective, external threat--e.g. alien invaders--could ever get us squabbling apes to set our differences aside and work together towards some common goal.
It is very likely that within a decade the effects of climate change will go from "scientists arguing" to "transparent to everyone".
Although this will not exactly be "alien invaders"--"real life godzilla" seems closer to the mark--civilization as we know it will be faced with an external threat that cares not for what we think--indeed, that cannot be bargained with--but only for how we act (and indeed, if we act).
If nothing else that thought experiment will become a real experiment soon; I hope we make it through.
One thing to consider is how much uglier our national discourse will likely become. For example, the narrative around our recent election seems to be settling around a rejection of urban and coastal elites and experts: middle america is tired of being ignored, insulted, condescended-to, looked down upon as ignorant yokels, and so on and so forth..."show us and our opinions some respect", they say, electing the man who's now appointing the man who's going to (literally) slam the pedal to the metal while (figuratively) rolling coal all the way.
I wonder how these people will wind up being thought-of once climate change goes from deniable--as it is now, at least domestically--to undeniable (as it certainly will, and likely soon).
I mean, seriously: if for forty years you've been warned by experts that continuing to do X will eventually lead to Y, you continue to do X, and it eventually leads to Y...how can you reasonably expect anyone to respect you? To consider your opinions worth the time and energy even to listen to, let alone take into consideration? Why should you not expect to be seen as anything other than an idiot in the classical sense ("incapable of useful reasoning; danger to self and others")?
I do not expect this to end well--culturally and socially--and expect it will play out far uglier than the dust bowl...
I also think readers on this site vastly underestimate how radically the world will shift once change becomes undeniable; the default assumption seems to be that things will generally continue as they always have right up until it gets so bad it's game over for everyone.
In reality, as soon as it climate change begins having undeniable impacts expect a radical changes in financial behavior...which will likely have direct, pervasive impact upon daily life well in advance of the direct impacts of climate change proper.
Will the 30-year mortgage remain typical for home purchases? Will 5-year commercial leases remain typical? Will it remain possible to price weather derivatives accurately enough to be viable? Will SV angels continue hobby-investing in high-risk, high-reward gambles, or turn their attention to second homes in northern latitudes?
I can only see a move to shorter time horizons and more risk aversion from the private sector.
Have these unfortunate souls considered moving to closer to where productive economic activity is happening, and performing labor in exchange for money, which may be exchanged for goods and services?
Speaking from my own experiences, it can be very difficult to move from a rural area to an urban job center if you are poor. For one, everything tends to be much more expensive. If you aren't particularly educated and don't really have any valuable skills, it's made even more difficult. If you add a substance abuse problem into the mix it becomes almost impossible.
This is true, but being honest if not polite: in many ways, considering poor rural whites stupid is an act of charitable kindness, even if it doesn't seem as such (the connection to your point will become apparent by the end).
To a complete outsider, the situation of poor rural whites summarizes as "sucks, and has sucked for 20-30 years".
One interpretation is that (on average) things are as they are due to lack of capability: in short, "those people" are sufficiently stupid--and consequently also ignorant--that it would be inappropriate to hold them fully-responsible for their decisions and circumstances (in the same way we don't for children or the mentally-handicapped).
An alternative interpretation is that (on average) things are as they are due to lack of character: in short, "those people" are sufficiently sound of mind and body that it would be inappropriate not to hold them fully-responsible for their decisions and circumstances (just as we do for everyone else).
As insulting and demeaning as it is to be thought stupid and ignorant, in this specific case being considered stupid and ignorant is, in fact, coming from a place of (unconscious) charity.
I'm deadly serious here.
Someone cruel and nasty will default to the second interpretation--your life sucks because you suck at life, and moreover it's your own fault for choosing to suck at life, despite having been perfectly capable of not sucking at it.
Someone kind-hearted and generous will default to looking for some other--any other--interpretation (many would say: "excuse"): perhaps your life sucks because of systemic discrimination and structural racism? perhaps your life sucks because of structural economic changes brought about due to unfair trade policies? perhaps your life sucks because your formative years were in a difficult and unstable environment, given inadequate education and surrounded by crumbling infrastructure? or, perhaps, your life sucks because you are simply stupid--and therefore also ignorant--and you thus are simply incapable of effectively navigating the modern world?...
So as patronizing and demeaning as it was to be thought of as stupid and backwards--and to know that's what you were seen as--at least it came from a place of kindness (if you had the eyes to see).
With love and sadness, I don't see that unconscious kindness surviving for much longer: rural america has now commanded the nation's attention and asked to be treated seriously, but will likely find that the consequence of asking the rest of the nation to treat rural america seriously will, eventually, shift the default coastal outlook away from the insulting "those poor morons, too stupid and ignorant to know how to help themselves" and towards "those useless trash, too lazy and prideful to help themselves"...and that this shift will be irreversible once it does get underway.
After all of which, it's time to return to your point: the challenges and difficulties you point out are real...and on top of that, success is not guaranteed, you can move to a larger city, wind up failing, and return home worse off for having even bothered to try.
But, to raise those challenges as anything other than common and mundane--difficult, yes, but similar in nature and magnitude to the problems we all face and deal with, in our own ways, such as our abilities are--is at once to illustrate "I am still living in a bubble" and to engage in what, outside that bubble, will likely come across as "special pleading": it's too hard, my circumstances are special...which I both understand and empathize with, but also makes it that much harder to grant as much respect as one might hope for from within said bubble.
Which is why I am pessimistic: asking for respect and to be taken seriously means people who used to look down upon rural people from a position of ignorance, but also (unconscious) charity and good will...those people will now take a closer look, and I think that will result not in increased respect, but only in harsh judgment and the loss of that former kindness and charity (as unrecognized and unconscious as it was).
My parents came to this country without speaking any English, my mother and I learned English together watching Mr. Rodgers, so I'm fully aware of the difficulties such circumstances present. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Mexican American immigrants and the amount of hardship they go through. I live in an area of LA county that's around 92% Hispanic, speaking from my experience here, I would argue that they aren't doing "just fine". The community in which I now live suffers from many of the same problems I witnessed among poor rural whites, namely domestic violence, drug/alcohol abuse, crime and gang violence, and a lack of educational achievement.
Your last comment seems needlessly cruel to me. I had a friend in Texas who's parents were drug addicts. His dad was killed in a car accident and sometime later his mom got a boyfriend who proceeded to rape him on a weekly basis from the time he was seven to around the time he was twelve and put into foster care. He ended up bouncing around foster homes, getting deeply involved in drugs until he finally enlisted in the Army, and after a few deployments and a stint at community college he eventually graduated college and is now a geologist.
I'm extremely proud and humbled by his accomplishments, but to be honest, if he had simply turned into a meth head and died under an overpass, I can't say I would be begrudge him considering the circumstances of his youth.
The farmers I know are doing well for themselves. My sample may be biased because I only encounter ones with an interest in technology, but to a one they don't seem to be hurting objectively (feel like they are hurting? Probably a few).
But these are people making something people want, in an efficient way, and capturing a perfectly-reasonable proportion of the value they create.
That's farmers though.
Rural "workers" I feel sorry for but only so much. I don't know these people like I know the farmers I know--farmers I meet through work, these I know only as extended family, friends thereof, and people I meet in passing while traveling for work--but I have met enough and known enough to know what the deal often is.
The standard story for these dudes tends to be they grew up in town, didn't do that well in high school--and these guys are usually older so they missed the big student loan expansions that changed college from rich kids and smart kids only to something most people had a crack at--but at least back then you really could walk onto the proverbial factory floor (or learn a skilled trade, but those guys' lives have tended to follow a different arc and I skip them here) and wind up with a stable, good paying job.
So the standard story continues with them doing hard honest work and being paid well for awhile--long enough to have settled down and started a family--but of course we all know the story ends once the factory shut down fifteen or twenty years ago.
Since then it has been a long, punishing grind, the city they live in has started falling apart, the good kids leave the area and try to make it elsewhere, the young people who are left are a mix of bad kids (drugs, petty crime), the unambitious, and a handful of saints i both admire and pity (hanging around out of a sense of obligation for a sick relative or similar).
It's a sad story, but to treat them as having had no agency in all this time is profoundly insulting--insulting in a way far graver than any any snark I can make in passing--and I refuse to do so.
The local factory closing and thus derailing your world and the life plans you made in it: that's a tragedy for you and yours, and I am truly sympathetic for the difficulties so imposed.
Failing to better yourself beyond "some high school, worked hard and honest for awhile"? That's on you. Spending multiple decades in the same place, waiting for outside forces to benevolently restore the favorable circumstances of yesteryear? That's on you. Failing to go to where there are actual jobs suitable for the skills they have (often, again being honest, out of a fear of urban life that would be comical if the consequences weren't so unfortunate)? That's on you.
We aren't taking about children here; these are grown men, possessed of automobiles, clean criminal records, and an admirable willingness to do hard, unrewarding work...but they are often also grown men feeling entitled to have that work offered to them in the place and manner of their own choosing, on terms of their own choosing, in accordance with the world they grew up in...and affording them a social stature and respect concordant with their own pride and self image.
With deep sympathy: the ask is too high, the world has been telling them that for decades, and after awhile any sympathy I have for their plight becomes entangled with scorn for failing to take real responsibility for their own lives.
It's hard for me, personally: as a rather more devout person than many on this site I really and sincerely believe that every human being possesses an intrinsic dignity and that we are all truly and equally alike in god's eyes and to love everyone as my neighbor...but it's hard not to slip into scorn and derision for people whose pride had lead them to fail to act like responsible adults and transformed what should have been a mere difficult period into a lifetime of struggle, disappointment, and resentment...and I have to struggle at it to keep my own disappointment in them from becoming something worse.
I was under the impression they were stuck there due to kids and the fact that moving to the city with minimal education =/= does not lead to much more positive career tracks. A dead end job in the city is a dead end job with highEr in rent, color, taxes, etc.
Fine for the single person who is young but not the older guy with kids. Same with college....hence the rise in online schools or scummy for profits.
Agriculture jobs aren't coming back, and they weren't sent to China. Automation and productivity gains in agriculture have exploded, and as a result there isn't a lot of call for farmhands these days. Unless we move back to an agrarian existence, the rural poor are going to have to figure out something that doesn't involve a shovel.
There are still millions of jobs in agriculture and construction, but they are now poorly paid because they are performed by people who aren't protected by employment laws and have no negotiating power.
The only change that needs to be made is forcing agriculture and construction companies to obey the law.
Perhaps the removal of an undocumented workforce that requires being paid under the table will force agricultural and construction companies to obey the laws.
Oh, well, if you're talking about the jobs lost in the 1800's, I agree, those jobs aren't coming back.
But that graph is relatively flat since 1970, and I seriously doubt they were able to count all the jobs now being performed without documentation and not reported to the government.
I could imagine that illegal immigrants are also a much easier workforce to manage. They won't be forming unions and going to strikes; if you want to terminate the employment, they won't go to a lawyer and sue you. They're humble, they're flexible.
(I don't know that job market so well and I don't even live in the US, but this is the perception I get from the system.)
Perhaps there is a middle ground? People need food, and being able to grow your own saves money. Small scale production builds community and resilience. Perhaps people need to feel a connection to the land in rural areas. It is not just about food.
Our family owns a farm in Indiana (principle crop is corn) that is small by modern family farm standards (200 acres). We only need one person to manage the entire farm. I imagine only one person would be needed even if the acreage was much, much bigger. There is tremendous amounts of automation in planting and picking corn.
Small scale production might be better for connecting and jobs and whatnot, but that can't compete price wise. Our small farm isn't exactly a huge money maker as it is.
Modern farming is hardly just grunt work, a farmer has to be familiar with the land and the processes involved. It's actually a bit more technical than many may realize. And the salaries for farming reflect that; it is a pretty decently paid profession. People with this skillset won't go away. You just don't need many of these people per acre.
There is such a thing as labor-intensive crops, of course. But I speculate that any replacement for low-paid "illegal immigrant" grunt work would end up being automation in the end.
