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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   2624 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 18, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Why should smart people move away from small towns, especially now that the Internet has come?

They don't 'have' to move, but if they stay, complaining about a lack of jobs is questionable. The Amish stay in their small towns, but they 'make their own luck' and configure their economies to work for them. There is no reason why Appalachians could not theoretically pursue localized, autarkic economies that maintain their communities, but they don't, instead complaining when the large company in their town shuts down the factory or the mine and then refusing to leave.

And it has to be said that their ancestors, whom they venerate (eg. in the very song OP links) often moved for economic reasons. The Kevin Williamson argument is essentially that these small, economically unproductive communities can only survive because of welfare. Often in deprived communities, the main employers are the state (healthcare, government, schools) - all subsidized by state and federal government - and welfare, and that these are the only things keeping the economy going. Dollars only flow in through government. They are not self-sufficient in any way, but they preach a gospel of self-reliance, and that's hollow and hypocritical.

They are not self-sufficient in any way, but they preach a gospel of self-reliance, and that's hollow and hypocritical.

I think it's that they see the giants astride the land (the corporations, the governments) and despair of how to make a living once they've trampled the earth and moved on.

Then too, the analogy of red and blue buttons which was the hot topic last week; these are the blue buttoners who depended on those who declared it would be forever safe to keep pushing the blue button, never realizing their fellows skipped town to China leaving them ever closer to the 50% mark of death.

To elaborate on this, a town has to have an economic raison d'etre: Something they produce to export in order to get money to buy imports. A mining town might export minerals, a factory town might export manufactured goods, a farming town food, a tourist destination might "export" hotel and restaurant services. Everyone else earns money by by providing services to people who produce the exports, or by providing services to those people, and so forth. In principle you could have a small town supported by exporting things like software, but I don't know whether any such towns actually exist.

When a town no longer produces things to export, it no longer has a reason to exist. The sole service it provides to the outside world in exchange for money to buy imports with is qualifying for welfare.

People blame the government for not giving it a reason to exist, but if the government subsidizes unprofitable industries for the sake of propping up a town with no economic reason to exist, the residents are just LARPing at being productive. Maybe it's cheaper than just giving them straight-up welfare and getting nothing at all in exchange, but in the long run, this isn't good for anyone involved.

This has been eating at me since reading the ACX guest review of Jane Jacobs.

To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located.

Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants.

By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities.

That review was incredible, and I've wanted to write a post on it since I read it. It suggests a lot of pointed questions about the nature of economics as a discipline.

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