You’re ignoring another possibility which is that things would be worse in Japan without the agglomeration effects provided by Tokyo. I get wanting there to be more options but in the US half the GDP comes from the big metro areas. We have the same effect just more distributed. The problem is the logic of small distributed towns just goes away without agriculture. Look at the rural West versus the East. With less agriculture you have more agglomeration in a few large metro areas.
Why should the logic of distributed towns go away without agriculture? We were far more distributed when you were industrial than we are now. Oren’s whole article is about why there’s reason to value pluralism and more distributed activity!
For one thing it means an enemy can’t nuke away your whole economy with one hit (sub for natural disaster or whatever, this is the resiliency argument). And as someone who lived under NYC government and its unified school admin, I think there’s a lot of say about the inefficiencies of too much scale. Big bureaucracies are hard to manage! Oren made more points about the value of regional competition, etc
The logic of agglomeration largely goes away with remote work, and concentrated urban living is suboptimal for an awful lot of people. Given a choice, people often prefer to live in distributed smaller communities, closer to nature, and able to live near family and community. That’s certainly been the post-pandemic migration pattern. I would rather live in a more rural area, have room for a garden, and be able to keep horses, than live in the nicest home in NYC.
Agglomeration obsession has resulted in a deeply divided and dysfunctional political climate in this country, where many of our problems, including housing shortages and lack of community, are literally caused by the supposed panacea of moving everyone away from family and nature.
Lots of companies and the federal government are now moving back away from remote work though. I’m for the potential of this and think remote work could be a way to break away from agglomeration effects. But agglomeration effects are not just about work. You’re not going to find nice museums or music venues or NBA teams or hosts of other fun services and activities in rural areas. Also think about raising a family and the ease of getting help with kids in an urban area versus rural. Lots of rural areas in the US look just like Japan, populated largely by older people. Again, maybe this can be reversed, but my main point is Japan had managed to stay relatively functional, wealthy and stable throughout a really steep demographic decline. One of the things agglomeration helps with is efficiency. Would it have the same efficiency without this effect?
Lots of companies are simultaneously using remote work as a competitive edge, and lots of new small businesses are online only. And their employees are serving as a customer base for local businesses who are not online. The number of hours worked online is pretty steady.
Many people do not really care about living close to museums or sports teams or concerts versus making it a weekend day trip, and rural areas often have a lot of small local music venues.
It’s easier to get help with kids in many rural areas, not harder.
I think agglomeration’s contribution to efficiency is overstated by a very large amount, particularly when you consider externalities.
I think you’ve stopped responding to my core critique. Everything you’re saying is fine it’s just not evidence that agglomeration on net isn’t more of a help to Japan than a hurt. Maybe what you’re saying will pan out and there will be shifts in Japan and the US in the future. But it’s not happening now for a reason. Tokyo had been growing like this for a very long time. If it had no positive benefits it’s hard for me to see how it would have continued for so long and also developed a city with so many positive aspects. Have you been to Tokyo? It’s incredibly safe, incredibly quiet, has incredible service, an amazing array of services and foods available incredibly easily, much more reasonable housing costs than any other big global city, incredible public transportation, and the list goes on. If agglomeration were on net a negative it’s hard to see how all of those benefits would come along for the ride. Meanwhile I go to most rural areas in the US or Japan or anywhere really and there’s most commonly a slow decaying that doesn’t seem to abate. Why? I have no issue with trying to arrest the decay. But you have to think about why the trend is so common if you want to solve the problem.
“But the 2023 Virginia county and city population estimates released today by the Weldon Cooper Center show that a more lasting impact of the pandemic has been high levels of migration continuing to flow out of Virginia’s large metro areas into smaller metro areas and rural counties. The persistence of this trend, which mirrors the transformative effect of suburbanization in the last century, will likely attract the public’s attention during this decade, as it is slowly, but significantly, altering Virginia's demographic landscape.”
“In 2023, many people continued to move out of Northern Virginia, a trend seen in other big metro areas across the country. Many of these people stayed in Virginia, moving to smaller cities and counties nearby. Migration from Northern Virginia helped the Winchester Metro Area become Virginia’s fastest growing metro area, with its population increasing at nearly five times the rate of Virginia as a whole. It also contributed to Richmond Metro Area’s greatest influx of new residents in its history. The four fastest growing counties in Virginia so far this decade—New Kent, Goochland, Louisa, and Caroline—were all in or adjacent to the Richmond Metro Area.”
Northern Virginia is the District of Columbia suburban part of Virginia.
Yeah Winchester just became a bedroom community for the DC area. Extending the size of urban metro areas isn’t the same as say VA coal country getting repopulated. Oren cites 40 million as the population of greater Tokyo. That includes suburbs that are in a not dissimilar commuting distance as Winchester is to Northern VA. I think it’s again fine that people in the US want space. But what you’re saying is just a related version of what Japan does at a closer scale for the US context. It’s not rural Iowa getting repopulated.
My daughter went to Tokyo as her first foreign trip as an adult last summer. She said whenever they wanted to go somewhere she'd look for the closest train station on her phone and get on. There was always a train close by going where she wanted.
The “clean and safe” part is because our mentally ill aren’t locked away to the extent they are in Japan. The "easy to get around" part is because infrastructure costs are much higher here than in other countries because of the extent of veto points and legal red tape to be overcome.
Excellent post: past regional planners like Lewis Mumford explicitly called for deconcentrating economic activities away from metro regions as a way of solving both rural and urban problems. I'm hoping to write on this topic soon: great to know that I'll be joining a vibrant conversation!
I’ll also be writing about this topic in my forthcoming book “The Menace of Prosperity
New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981” -I look forward to your thoughts!
In fact he's one of the inspirations of my book, A Part-time Job in the Country, in which I propose a plan to resettle Americans in new country towns out beyond the exurban fringe: not as a rejection of big cities so much as the third and final stage in the suburbanization of the metropolitan complex.
Remote work has already made a large impact on this. When people can live where they want and still get good jobs, a whole lot of them move out of large metros.
Probably one of the most interesting critiques of the abundance book I’ve seen. A few thoughts:
I think the housing issue often times get focused on super star cities and glosses over the fact housing has become a problem almost *everywhere*. Reality is, across-the-board, with the exception of a few metros, housing has become ever pressing concern for Americans, no matter where they live.
The large idea behind abundance is that we should be able to provide meaningful options to Americans across the board. Reality is, that’s not happening in rural and smaller places. They often lack critical infrastructure, access to healthcare and good education that would be a huge proponent for people to stay in these areas. If you want these areas to succeed, you have to have a government that is effective in working to deliver these basic goods so that people can choose to stay.
I agree that abundance needs to be widespread and diffused. It’s one of the strengths of the American economy that different regions have fierce competition with each other. A recognition of this benefit started with inflation reduction act and the CHIPs and Science Act, where the Biden administration worked with Republicans to invest in many the left behind places. However, a core issue with the government has been that it’s too bogged down by bureaucracy to actually deliver on some of these material gains. If you want more places to be developed and have opportunities you need to have an effective government that can really deliver those things.
Finally, I think culture pays an important part here. Most Americans *dont* want to live in mega cities. They often pressured too because of jobs. The government can play a crucial hand and making sure that people who want to stay in smaller places can, but it needs to be effective at doing so. We should all care about a government that is quick, lean, and responsive to the needs other people
Rural areas, in general, don’t really need a lot of infrastructure, since most is private. You have well and septic instead of public water and sewer. Starlink has made the issue of broadband access largely moot.
We have had universal availability of electric for a long time. Healthcare can be an issue depending on location - ditto schools - but many rural areas are within a reasonable distance of good doctors, and schools are often quite decent, and can be supplemented.
Most of the federal efforts for rural areas seem pretty ineffective. While they planned for years on broadband without deploying, actual rural people signed up for Starlink.
I’m glad that doesn’t match your own observation, but data after data consistently shows that people who live in small towns, rural areas and exurbs, have consistently lower access to healthcare, education and infrastructure. It’s why people have been leaving for the last 50 years!
“Most of the federal effort for rural areas seem pretty ineffective” but that is the central argument of abundance: federal efforts should be effective so people can live wherever they want! We should demand that our government work! Indeed the electrification of rural areas and post office deliveries only happened because the government *was* effective. To this day private companies opt of rural/exurb places because they deem them too expensive; the government often has to step in
That really isn’t quite what the data shows. Exurbs in general do not have many issues re healthcare, education, and infrastructure. In fact, several of the exurbs showing greatest growth in Virginia have among the highest average incomes in Virginia, including Goochland County, Albemarle County, Fauquier County, and James City County. All are rural looking counties that are outside of city centers but within driving distance of them.
Remote small towns and remote rural areas have different issues than small cities, exurban areas, college towns and recreational areas.
Government in the U.K. has wrestled with this for 50 years and made very little progress. The U.K. is a very centralised state, but allocating resource to the problem from the centre does not work. I suspect multiple well functioning cities are the only way economic activity will be spread around. Some small towns may thrive with specialist shops but only in wealthy regions.
With remote work and online businesses, people can literally live anywhere. In the US, there has been a notable shift to exurban counties, college towns, smaller cities, and pretty rural areas. It’s not evenly distributed, but it’s a trend big enough to impact the Electoral College.
And there's the comments like "this is a small town" (city of 80,000). If that's treated like a hamlet of 20 people, how much community is there in a city 40x as large?
Isn't one of the unstated problems here that, in the main, families aren't going to raise kids in 2 or even 3BR high rise apartments (except maybe to a very limited extent in NYC) and so just building more of them--even if we could--would not in the long run bring more abundance.
At best, we'd be creating a greater abundance of childless professionals and I'm not convinced we need more of them.
Will there ever be a day when public officials in red America are held accountable? How many decades of one party rule must their voters endure? Sadly, gaslighting from officeholders on the right continues unabated, a time tested strategy through much of history. It’s hard to build, to make progress, to promote consensus, to adapt to a rapidly changing world. It’s so much easier to blame the trans kid in a faraway city who wants to play volleyball than it is to hold up constructive ideas and bring people together. I’m tired of the mean spiritedness toward fellow Americans and the trash talking of America. Elites like Oren have never-ending critiques of fellow elites, but never seem to hold up an economy in the world they’d prefer to live in. That said, I guffaw watching as Don forces smart people on the right to find ways to justify his authoritarian movement and cartoonish incompetence. They know better, and they know that honest, thinking people are on to their corruption. Imagine Don’s aging, addled brain at 81… Good luck America.
So I have not read the book but have read a lot about it and listened to several podcasts with Ezra Klein and I like both him and Derek Thompson as writers. All that is to say, though I am sympathetic to their arguments as I understand them, I do think they suffer from a blind spot in exactly the spot you point out. They seem to underestimate the issues of power concentration as long as everyone is happy, when in reality part of our current societal angst is because the general public perceives the power concentration in both the public and private sectors and they do not like it, even if they are doing well in life otherwise. Like you, I agree the solution is diffusion of power everywhere it is practical and possible.
Middle class people in many stagnant urban areas (Detroit, St. Louis and even recently attractive Chicago) are leaving for places like Silicon Valley and cities in the Sun Belt for a reason no one wants to talk about and it’s not economics. It’s black crime. Here I go anyway.
Young black men (15-34) are just 2% of the population and commit about half of the nation’s homicides. That’s a rate an astounding 50 times higher than the average American. Who wants to live in fear or require their wives or daughters to be exposed to such out of control individuals? Everyone knows this is true. We all watch the nightly news where the truth is revealed every single day and yet no one and especially no black politicians are even willing to discuss it. We need a serious national conversation about black crime and what is necessary to control it or attempts to maintain population in our dying metropolitan areas will continue to be fruitless.
I always liked the old European small villages concept. Back in the 1970's I traveled to Europe quite a bit from Germany down to Italy and Spain. The small villages I went through as I traveled were awesome. I went through again just in 2023 and these small villages didn't seem to be anywhere near as dynamic as they were 50-60 years ago.
Of course, there were mostly now just older people and less people and less vibrant. I guess from what I read this is all due to globalization, monopolization, and depopulation. It was kinda sad really.
I remember this growing up too. I think I was right at the end of this period where small cities in the US here were set up the same way. (I'm 71 years old) Of course, between taking out religion and blaming small city people that they had small minds???
A lot of this too is the concept you bring out a lot here. Not everyone wants to be famous, super stupid God like rich, and idolized because they are rich. Most of us just want some job we feel is worthwhile, some security to a reasonable point and even some kind of family life to work for. Simple man kind of stuff. A lot of these so-called creative types want the opposite. Fame fortune, and what they feel is big ideas. Which to the simple man sounds really just like a big oversized ego.
Along these same lines, readers might enjoy this work of imaginative nonfiction in which I draw a picture not only of what the highest and final stage of capitalist development is going to look like here in the US—which turns out to be a new form of socialism in all but name only (see chapter two, note v)—but of what can with some justice be described as the apotheosis of the entire Judeo-Christian project out of which capitalism emerged. Or at least that's what it looks like to me.
I used to have a foot high pile of reports and “agendas” that have been circulated since the mid-60s on how to move economic activity out into small towns. Recycled almost all of them (i kept Mumford and MacKaye, the real thinkers from an earlier era) because people are still repeating themselves and the results are still about the same. Not outstanding. Capitalism is also, it seems, Capitol-ism. As long as the accumulation of wealth is the underlying narrative, activity will concentrate. And despite a great deal of nostalgia for that “same small town in all is us,” no one has come up with a more powerful narrative.
Thanks for sharing this report. I had a front row seat for the Rural Renaissance of the ‘70s and then watched how that receded in many places. I spent the pandemic in a very rural place and watched that play out; lots of smoke and very little flame. I think we have to wait a few years before concluding that this time is different at a national scale. It will irrevocably change certain smaller places, though, just as the 70s did.
It seems to be sticking, at least for now. In Virginia, smaller cities, like Richmond, Charlottesville, and Blacksburg, saw an influx of new residents, and the exurban counties around those city centers saw quite a lot of growth. That growth, five years out, is not showing signs of reversing.
The New River Valley counties outside of Blacksburg, which are both beautiful and very rural, showed surprisingly strong growth.
My personal take on the pattern is that many people both want something less urban and want to still be within reasonable driving distance of amenities and small luxuries. The college towns tend to have good grocers and restaurants plus lots of cultural activities, all within easy driving distance of very pretty countryside.
I am in Bozeman at the moment, the poster child for college towns attracting growth. But even here the ‘70s growth burst almost reversed in the 80’s. Remote work has altered the dynamic and I’d expect a place like Blacksburg to be at least stable. Which shifts the question from “rural economic development” to how to deal with the impacts of sprawl.
Honestly, when you get more developments more places in a huge country with a declining birthrate and six decades of very unbalanced growth, sprawl isn’t something I worry about much when I look at rural repopulation.
If Blacksburg’s neighboring Giles County, population about 16.8k, gets another 500 people living on little hobby farms to put its population back to where it was in 1960, I am going to say yay sprawl and root for them.
I have zero interest in trying to densify growth in the counties around Blacksburg, and a decent number of bigger farms are no longer economically viable as businesses. I don’t mind seeing them split into smaller farms, although I am not a fan of suburbs in rural counties. Small farms are fun to live on if you farm as a hobby - pretty much my ideal living situation, keeping in mind I have a professional job, remote, for the bills.
Making up for previous declines in growth is not a sprawl problem. It’s a good thing.
You’re ignoring another possibility which is that things would be worse in Japan without the agglomeration effects provided by Tokyo. I get wanting there to be more options but in the US half the GDP comes from the big metro areas. We have the same effect just more distributed. The problem is the logic of small distributed towns just goes away without agriculture. Look at the rural West versus the East. With less agriculture you have more agglomeration in a few large metro areas.
Why should the logic of distributed towns go away without agriculture? We were far more distributed when you were industrial than we are now. Oren’s whole article is about why there’s reason to value pluralism and more distributed activity!
For one thing it means an enemy can’t nuke away your whole economy with one hit (sub for natural disaster or whatever, this is the resiliency argument). And as someone who lived under NYC government and its unified school admin, I think there’s a lot of say about the inefficiencies of too much scale. Big bureaucracies are hard to manage! Oren made more points about the value of regional competition, etc
The logic of agglomeration largely goes away with remote work, and concentrated urban living is suboptimal for an awful lot of people. Given a choice, people often prefer to live in distributed smaller communities, closer to nature, and able to live near family and community. That’s certainly been the post-pandemic migration pattern. I would rather live in a more rural area, have room for a garden, and be able to keep horses, than live in the nicest home in NYC.
Agglomeration obsession has resulted in a deeply divided and dysfunctional political climate in this country, where many of our problems, including housing shortages and lack of community, are literally caused by the supposed panacea of moving everyone away from family and nature.
Lots of companies and the federal government are now moving back away from remote work though. I’m for the potential of this and think remote work could be a way to break away from agglomeration effects. But agglomeration effects are not just about work. You’re not going to find nice museums or music venues or NBA teams or hosts of other fun services and activities in rural areas. Also think about raising a family and the ease of getting help with kids in an urban area versus rural. Lots of rural areas in the US look just like Japan, populated largely by older people. Again, maybe this can be reversed, but my main point is Japan had managed to stay relatively functional, wealthy and stable throughout a really steep demographic decline. One of the things agglomeration helps with is efficiency. Would it have the same efficiency without this effect?
Lots of companies are simultaneously using remote work as a competitive edge, and lots of new small businesses are online only. And their employees are serving as a customer base for local businesses who are not online. The number of hours worked online is pretty steady.
Many people do not really care about living close to museums or sports teams or concerts versus making it a weekend day trip, and rural areas often have a lot of small local music venues.
It’s easier to get help with kids in many rural areas, not harder.
I think agglomeration’s contribution to efficiency is overstated by a very large amount, particularly when you consider externalities.
I think you’ve stopped responding to my core critique. Everything you’re saying is fine it’s just not evidence that agglomeration on net isn’t more of a help to Japan than a hurt. Maybe what you’re saying will pan out and there will be shifts in Japan and the US in the future. But it’s not happening now for a reason. Tokyo had been growing like this for a very long time. If it had no positive benefits it’s hard for me to see how it would have continued for so long and also developed a city with so many positive aspects. Have you been to Tokyo? It’s incredibly safe, incredibly quiet, has incredible service, an amazing array of services and foods available incredibly easily, much more reasonable housing costs than any other big global city, incredible public transportation, and the list goes on. If agglomeration were on net a negative it’s hard to see how all of those benefits would come along for the ride. Meanwhile I go to most rural areas in the US or Japan or anywhere really and there’s most commonly a slow decaying that doesn’t seem to abate. Why? I have no issue with trying to arrest the decay. But you have to think about why the trend is so common if you want to solve the problem.
The US has already started de-agglomerating, and rural decay, overall, has started to reverse, per census data.
UVa’s Cooper Center has done a good bit of analysis of these trends, which are very noticeable in Virginia.
See for example https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america
Or
https://www.coopercenter.org/research/amid-slow-population-growth-virginias-demographic-landscape-being-transformed
“But the 2023 Virginia county and city population estimates released today by the Weldon Cooper Center show that a more lasting impact of the pandemic has been high levels of migration continuing to flow out of Virginia’s large metro areas into smaller metro areas and rural counties. The persistence of this trend, which mirrors the transformative effect of suburbanization in the last century, will likely attract the public’s attention during this decade, as it is slowly, but significantly, altering Virginia's demographic landscape.”
“In 2023, many people continued to move out of Northern Virginia, a trend seen in other big metro areas across the country. Many of these people stayed in Virginia, moving to smaller cities and counties nearby. Migration from Northern Virginia helped the Winchester Metro Area become Virginia’s fastest growing metro area, with its population increasing at nearly five times the rate of Virginia as a whole. It also contributed to Richmond Metro Area’s greatest influx of new residents in its history. The four fastest growing counties in Virginia so far this decade—New Kent, Goochland, Louisa, and Caroline—were all in or adjacent to the Richmond Metro Area.”
Northern Virginia is the District of Columbia suburban part of Virginia.
Yeah Winchester just became a bedroom community for the DC area. Extending the size of urban metro areas isn’t the same as say VA coal country getting repopulated. Oren cites 40 million as the population of greater Tokyo. That includes suburbs that are in a not dissimilar commuting distance as Winchester is to Northern VA. I think it’s again fine that people in the US want space. But what you’re saying is just a related version of what Japan does at a closer scale for the US context. It’s not rural Iowa getting repopulated.
My daughter went to Tokyo as her first foreign trip as an adult last summer. She said whenever they wanted to go somewhere she'd look for the closest train station on her phone and get on. There was always a train close by going where she wanted.
Clean, safe, easy to get around.
Why can't we do that?
The “clean and safe” part is because our mentally ill aren’t locked away to the extent they are in Japan. The "easy to get around" part is because infrastructure costs are much higher here than in other countries because of the extent of veto points and legal red tape to be overcome.
You know why
Excellent post: past regional planners like Lewis Mumford explicitly called for deconcentrating economic activities away from metro regions as a way of solving both rural and urban problems. I'm hoping to write on this topic soon: great to know that I'll be joining a vibrant conversation!
I’ll also be writing about this topic in my forthcoming book “The Menace of Prosperity
New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865–1981” -I look forward to your thoughts!
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo247855479.html
I'm an old Lewis Mumford fan myself, Dan.
In fact he's one of the inspirations of my book, A Part-time Job in the Country, in which I propose a plan to resettle Americans in new country towns out beyond the exurban fringe: not as a rejection of big cities so much as the third and final stage in the suburbanization of the metropolitan complex.
Would love your opinion.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Remote work could make an impact in this arena, even if only a limited one.
Remote work has already made a large impact on this. When people can live where they want and still get good jobs, a whole lot of them move out of large metros.
Probably one of the most interesting critiques of the abundance book I’ve seen. A few thoughts:
I think the housing issue often times get focused on super star cities and glosses over the fact housing has become a problem almost *everywhere*. Reality is, across-the-board, with the exception of a few metros, housing has become ever pressing concern for Americans, no matter where they live.
The large idea behind abundance is that we should be able to provide meaningful options to Americans across the board. Reality is, that’s not happening in rural and smaller places. They often lack critical infrastructure, access to healthcare and good education that would be a huge proponent for people to stay in these areas. If you want these areas to succeed, you have to have a government that is effective in working to deliver these basic goods so that people can choose to stay.
I agree that abundance needs to be widespread and diffused. It’s one of the strengths of the American economy that different regions have fierce competition with each other. A recognition of this benefit started with inflation reduction act and the CHIPs and Science Act, where the Biden administration worked with Republicans to invest in many the left behind places. However, a core issue with the government has been that it’s too bogged down by bureaucracy to actually deliver on some of these material gains. If you want more places to be developed and have opportunities you need to have an effective government that can really deliver those things.
Finally, I think culture pays an important part here. Most Americans *dont* want to live in mega cities. They often pressured too because of jobs. The government can play a crucial hand and making sure that people who want to stay in smaller places can, but it needs to be effective at doing so. We should all care about a government that is quick, lean, and responsive to the needs other people
That really does not match my own observation, and I live in one of the formerly rural, very rapidly growing exurbs that has been affected by post-pandemic population shifts. Housing shortages appear to be primarily a relatively few areas and a big question of affordability on the low end. See https://news.ku.edu/news/article/study-finds-us-does-not-have-housing-shortage-but-shortage-of-affordable-housing
Rural areas, in general, don’t really need a lot of infrastructure, since most is private. You have well and septic instead of public water and sewer. Starlink has made the issue of broadband access largely moot.
We have had universal availability of electric for a long time. Healthcare can be an issue depending on location - ditto schools - but many rural areas are within a reasonable distance of good doctors, and schools are often quite decent, and can be supplemented.
Most of the federal efforts for rural areas seem pretty ineffective. While they planned for years on broadband without deploying, actual rural people signed up for Starlink.
I’m glad that doesn’t match your own observation, but data after data consistently shows that people who live in small towns, rural areas and exurbs, have consistently lower access to healthcare, education and infrastructure. It’s why people have been leaving for the last 50 years!
“Most of the federal effort for rural areas seem pretty ineffective” but that is the central argument of abundance: federal efforts should be effective so people can live wherever they want! We should demand that our government work! Indeed the electrification of rural areas and post office deliveries only happened because the government *was* effective. To this day private companies opt of rural/exurb places because they deem them too expensive; the government often has to step in
That really isn’t quite what the data shows. Exurbs in general do not have many issues re healthcare, education, and infrastructure. In fact, several of the exurbs showing greatest growth in Virginia have among the highest average incomes in Virginia, including Goochland County, Albemarle County, Fauquier County, and James City County. All are rural looking counties that are outside of city centers but within driving distance of them.
Remote small towns and remote rural areas have different issues than small cities, exurban areas, college towns and recreational areas.
Census data does not show a continuing exodus of rural residents, but rather the opposite in recent years. See https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america from UVa’s Cooper Center.
This reversal has come largely from remote work, e-commerce, and near-ubiquitous availability of satellite Internet.
Government in the U.K. has wrestled with this for 50 years and made very little progress. The U.K. is a very centralised state, but allocating resource to the problem from the centre does not work. I suspect multiple well functioning cities are the only way economic activity will be spread around. Some small towns may thrive with specialist shops but only in wealthy regions.
With remote work and online businesses, people can literally live anywhere. In the US, there has been a notable shift to exurban counties, college towns, smaller cities, and pretty rural areas. It’s not evenly distributed, but it’s a trend big enough to impact the Electoral College.
And there's the comments like "this is a small town" (city of 80,000). If that's treated like a hamlet of 20 people, how much community is there in a city 40x as large?
Not much More anti-social behavior ensues. Or maybe that’s the result of more autism. Or reduced homeownership rates or …
Isn't one of the unstated problems here that, in the main, families aren't going to raise kids in 2 or even 3BR high rise apartments (except maybe to a very limited extent in NYC) and so just building more of them--even if we could--would not in the long run bring more abundance.
At best, we'd be creating a greater abundance of childless professionals and I'm not convinced we need more of them.
Will there ever be a day when public officials in red America are held accountable? How many decades of one party rule must their voters endure? Sadly, gaslighting from officeholders on the right continues unabated, a time tested strategy through much of history. It’s hard to build, to make progress, to promote consensus, to adapt to a rapidly changing world. It’s so much easier to blame the trans kid in a faraway city who wants to play volleyball than it is to hold up constructive ideas and bring people together. I’m tired of the mean spiritedness toward fellow Americans and the trash talking of America. Elites like Oren have never-ending critiques of fellow elites, but never seem to hold up an economy in the world they’d prefer to live in. That said, I guffaw watching as Don forces smart people on the right to find ways to justify his authoritarian movement and cartoonish incompetence. They know better, and they know that honest, thinking people are on to their corruption. Imagine Don’s aging, addled brain at 81… Good luck America.
So I have not read the book but have read a lot about it and listened to several podcasts with Ezra Klein and I like both him and Derek Thompson as writers. All that is to say, though I am sympathetic to their arguments as I understand them, I do think they suffer from a blind spot in exactly the spot you point out. They seem to underestimate the issues of power concentration as long as everyone is happy, when in reality part of our current societal angst is because the general public perceives the power concentration in both the public and private sectors and they do not like it, even if they are doing well in life otherwise. Like you, I agree the solution is diffusion of power everywhere it is practical and possible.
Middle class people in many stagnant urban areas (Detroit, St. Louis and even recently attractive Chicago) are leaving for places like Silicon Valley and cities in the Sun Belt for a reason no one wants to talk about and it’s not economics. It’s black crime. Here I go anyway.
Young black men (15-34) are just 2% of the population and commit about half of the nation’s homicides. That’s a rate an astounding 50 times higher than the average American. Who wants to live in fear or require their wives or daughters to be exposed to such out of control individuals? Everyone knows this is true. We all watch the nightly news where the truth is revealed every single day and yet no one and especially no black politicians are even willing to discuss it. We need a serious national conversation about black crime and what is necessary to control it or attempts to maintain population in our dying metropolitan areas will continue to be fruitless.
I always liked the old European small villages concept. Back in the 1970's I traveled to Europe quite a bit from Germany down to Italy and Spain. The small villages I went through as I traveled were awesome. I went through again just in 2023 and these small villages didn't seem to be anywhere near as dynamic as they were 50-60 years ago.
Of course, there were mostly now just older people and less people and less vibrant. I guess from what I read this is all due to globalization, monopolization, and depopulation. It was kinda sad really.
I remember this growing up too. I think I was right at the end of this period where small cities in the US here were set up the same way. (I'm 71 years old) Of course, between taking out religion and blaming small city people that they had small minds???
A lot of this too is the concept you bring out a lot here. Not everyone wants to be famous, super stupid God like rich, and idolized because they are rich. Most of us just want some job we feel is worthwhile, some security to a reasonable point and even some kind of family life to work for. Simple man kind of stuff. A lot of these so-called creative types want the opposite. Fame fortune, and what they feel is big ideas. Which to the simple man sounds really just like a big oversized ego.
Along these same lines, readers might enjoy this work of imaginative nonfiction in which I draw a picture not only of what the highest and final stage of capitalist development is going to look like here in the US—which turns out to be a new form of socialism in all but name only (see chapter two, note v)—but of what can with some justice be described as the apotheosis of the entire Judeo-Christian project out of which capitalism emerged. Or at least that's what it looks like to me.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
"But it would be very fair to note that a growing and affordable Tokyo has provided no relief. "
Are we really sure that Japan's stagnation wouldn't look worse if not for an affordable Tokyo?
Your best post by a long shot: Thanks Oren!!
I used to have a foot high pile of reports and “agendas” that have been circulated since the mid-60s on how to move economic activity out into small towns. Recycled almost all of them (i kept Mumford and MacKaye, the real thinkers from an earlier era) because people are still repeating themselves and the results are still about the same. Not outstanding. Capitalism is also, it seems, Capitol-ism. As long as the accumulation of wealth is the underlying narrative, activity will concentrate. And despite a great deal of nostalgia for that “same small town in all is us,” no one has come up with a more powerful narrative.
The post pandemic result has been that, with remote work and e-commerce people started de-concentrating pretty darn rapidly.
See for example, from UVa, https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america
I live in one of the areas the Cooper Center has identified as part of that process, so I have seen it first hand.
Thanks for sharing this report. I had a front row seat for the Rural Renaissance of the ‘70s and then watched how that receded in many places. I spent the pandemic in a very rural place and watched that play out; lots of smoke and very little flame. I think we have to wait a few years before concluding that this time is different at a national scale. It will irrevocably change certain smaller places, though, just as the 70s did.
It seems to be sticking, at least for now. In Virginia, smaller cities, like Richmond, Charlottesville, and Blacksburg, saw an influx of new residents, and the exurban counties around those city centers saw quite a lot of growth. That growth, five years out, is not showing signs of reversing.
The New River Valley counties outside of Blacksburg, which are both beautiful and very rural, showed surprisingly strong growth.
My personal take on the pattern is that many people both want something less urban and want to still be within reasonable driving distance of amenities and small luxuries. The college towns tend to have good grocers and restaurants plus lots of cultural activities, all within easy driving distance of very pretty countryside.
I am in Bozeman at the moment, the poster child for college towns attracting growth. But even here the ‘70s growth burst almost reversed in the 80’s. Remote work has altered the dynamic and I’d expect a place like Blacksburg to be at least stable. Which shifts the question from “rural economic development” to how to deal with the impacts of sprawl.
Honestly, when you get more developments more places in a huge country with a declining birthrate and six decades of very unbalanced growth, sprawl isn’t something I worry about much when I look at rural repopulation.
If Blacksburg’s neighboring Giles County, population about 16.8k, gets another 500 people living on little hobby farms to put its population back to where it was in 1960, I am going to say yay sprawl and root for them.
I have zero interest in trying to densify growth in the counties around Blacksburg, and a decent number of bigger farms are no longer economically viable as businesses. I don’t mind seeing them split into smaller farms, although I am not a fan of suburbs in rural counties. Small farms are fun to live on if you farm as a hobby - pretty much my ideal living situation, keeping in mind I have a professional job, remote, for the bills.
Making up for previous declines in growth is not a sprawl problem. It’s a good thing.