The Rural Brain Drain
Last Thursday’s event at the New America Foundation on the “rural brain drain” billed itself as examining a “major policy problem that has largely escaped media and political attention.” Indeed, you may get glimpses of this issue from time to time–as we did when media attention was focused on the rural “meth problem” earlier this decade–but it is, for the most part, invisible. The flight of population and talent from small, primarily Midwestern towns has been steady for decades now. The best and brightest often depart for better economic climes, joining the “creative class” as popularized by Richard Florida. Those who are left behind are left with few opportunities, with both agriculture and industry shrinking their workforces and depressing wages. (Two facts were mentioned that I cannot corroborate but are striking: (1) The average size of farms in Iowa has doubled since 1990 and (2) wages in the meatpacking industry, a significant employer in the Midwest, are now 1/3 of what they were fifteen years ago.)
The social implications of this process for the small towns themselves are disturbing. The economic dislocations coincide with all sorts of other problems: crime, family breakdown, drug abuse, etc. Of course, in the long run, even the very existence of these towns is at stake. Much of the Great Plains — little more than a century after being settled extensively — has simply emptied.
A common enough interpretation of this phenomenon is that it reflects the march of progress. The rural exodus is merely part of America’s steady urbanization and transition into a “new economy.” Why should we get all worked up about the sad but inevitable? I would submit that conservatives should be concerned. Even if you are not a follower of Wendell Berry, one can see the virtues of an agrarian way of life: its closeness to nature, distance from the distractions and temptations of urban life, and largely traditional culture. Even the Republican Party should worry. After all, small town America, the “Heartland,” is a central part of its mythology.
How can we repopulate the interior again? The policy suggestions proffered at the event were a mixed bag, many calling for sustained government intervention, i.e. building a broadband infrastructure or a high-speed rail system. Others were slightly less statist: offering land or tax incentives to newcomers or “returners.” These are all well and good, but I think they miss the gorilla in the room: mass culture. Other than perhaps country music, our culture is overwhelmingly urban. I would think that the comforts and entertainment of modern life exert a huge allure for the rural young. I doubt much in the way of incentives or infrastructure investment could overcome that powerful force.
Do any TAC readers have firsthand experience with this “brain drain”? Listening to sociologists talk about this is one thing, but it would be nice to hear about it straight from the horse’s mouth.
I’ve tried not to succumb to the brain drain; it ain’t easy.
From this horse’s mouth (http://nathancontramundi.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/confessions-of-front-porch-realist/):
Country music is very urban now.* Heck, rural life is very urban. When my mother was a child, half the kids might be gone from high school in the fall to help with the harvest. In my graduating class of 160, there were maybe two or three dozen kids that lived on farms. Since my graduation, you might find 1/3 of my graduating class residing with a 30 mile radius.
* Some of CMA winner Taylor Swifts hits: Romeo and Juliet; You belong to me; Love Story. Carrie Underwood hits: Jesus Take the Wheel; Before He Cheats; All American Girl
Know about it? I’m living it.
I go to a university 400 miles from my small town. I felt I had to flee the Michigan Economic Disaster™ (all the jobs in my area dissapeared), and a State School down here was in the rare habit of accepting my Bible College credits at face value (they deserve it, too, if the relative ease of my pre-reqs here is any indication). I absolutely miss home, although I face the reality that most of my old friends have left as well, so any return there would be bittersweet.
I would never move back there as a single man (because to do so would be a life sentence in that regard) and I highly doubt that any of the girls I meet down here would have much taste for the place, either.
I miss my Church, I miss watching high school football there on autumn evenings, I miss the bar, the grocery store and the ice cream shop. At this point I even miss jury duty…
I would suggest that NE Kansas become an intentional community for agrarians, right-wingers, conservative Protestants and Traditional Catholics. All are well represented even now, and our Jefferson County Attorney writes regularly for The Frontporch Republic. You can go to meeting of your flavor just about every week, and if you yearn for an urban adventure, Kansas City isn’t very far away. It really isn’t a lonely place for a good conservative of almost any stripe. Opportunities abound for conversation and socialization. And I still use the internet.
I wonder if similar phenomena are taking place in lots of other countries. Do Britain and France and Germany have “rural brain drains”, and are they as obsessed with pampering their “creative classes” by indiscriminate development for a handful of cities as America increasingly is? It would be good to know.
Certainly in Australia there is a rural brain drain, and has been for decades. Me, I don’t think I could live outside a big (or at least middle-sized) city anymore. This probably makes me suspect in the eyes of a fair few American Jeffersonians (not to mention traditional Catholics), but so be it.
My parents lost their farm when I was in high school. In our case, the region didn’t see lots of local kids leaving, it saw the urban areas expand out to reach us. What was once a purely agrarian community in western Washington is now full of commuters from the big city and refugees from California. I want to return to the countryside, but am not quite sure how best to do it. I’m presently pursuing my PhD for the specific purpose of getting a job at a rural college. I figure that’s probably my best bet for returning to my small-town roots.
Manufacturing. Before, there would be farms, but also factories and other businesses, and there would be somewhere for the best and brightest to settle back near home – maybe do some farming, but doing IT or engineering or something for the local factory or warehouse and getting paid well for it. Now the USA brains go to the big cities, and the few places left hire H1Bs from India. (Yes, Indians of another kind on the great plains).
Yet in the big cities we still have lots of theory X management (Dilbert’s boss). So you can’t live in an inexpensive small town and use the internet. They want your physical presence.
I have to take great exception to your phrasing of the issue, if indeed it *is* an issue. It is not a “brain drain” at all. That would imply that there are unfilled jobs requiring advanced skills and/or training in this “Heartland” that you mention in the most abstract of terms.
What you are noting is in fact a “people drain” and it comes not from an antipathy towards rural life but rather from a desire to embrace a better *lifestyle* that comes from an acquisition of the skills and training that is more suited to an urban setting.
I am trying hard to imagine how my life would be richer should I be “living off the land” as it were, and I am coming up short. As perhaps you are as well — what would the introduction of, for example, broadband internet service (or some similar government-subsidized perq) truly offer to people who work hard with their hands on a daily basis? Aren’t you agitating for the modern equivalent of bread and circuses when you advance an argument like this?
How would working at a factory, or working as an IT resource in a remote location make one part of the rural population except by very loose association?!?
I thought it was pretty clear in my piece that government subsidies, including broadband deployment, were not the answer. The “brain drain” implies that talent and jobs requiring that talent are leaving rural areas. For every number of farming and manufacturing jobs that are lost, you lose jobs for the more educated: lawyers, accountants, teachers, etc.
If the rural life has absolutely no value other than as a food resource, then we would be wasting our time bemoaning its decline. But plenty of folks leave rural areas not because they hate farming or are bored but because there are few opportunities for them. I have absolutely no idea what we can do about it, but that does not make it any less a worthy issue to discuss.
Oskar Chomicki, You raise a really boundless and I think fruitful area of inquiry. My feeling is that we are becoming more like a European country, with a capital city and perhaps a great city of commerce to which everyone gravitates. New York Washington and Hollywood are the triumvirate aspirational cities. And in a sense NY and DC are two poles of the same megalopolis.
It seems to me that American regional cities have lost so much luster in the public imagination that hard chargers tend not to see settlement in them as equating real success. I remember when Hollywood made movies with names like “Tulsa” and “Pittsburgh.” The only regional cities with glamor now are Seattle, Las Vegas and perhaps Savannah. Texas has a kind of presence that attracts a lot of people while repelling many as well.
It’s always struck me how the really interesting people I met in New York were almost invariably from the heartland or overseas.
Finally there is the question of all those corporate gypsies who leave their home towns but cannot be said to live anywhere in particular until they retire.
Re: Dominance of urban culture
The Wikipedia article “Rural Purge” has something to say:
The “rural purge” of American television networks was a series of cancellations in 1971, of still popular rural-themed shows and shows with demographically-skewed audiences. It is commonly referred to as “the year CBS killed everything with a tree in it”…
I think that MattSchwartz hit the nail on the head. With so few men and women getting married at an early age (or even right out of college), there isn’t much desire for young people to embrace the virtues of small town/rural life. A young couple with a child would find many benefits to rural life – low cost of living, a civil society that embraces traditional morals, few avenues of temptation. A young single man may find all that boring.
Thomas,
You are absolutely right. New York, LA, and Washington could rightly be said to be co-capitals of the U.S. I’m sure this process of people gravitating to these cities has been going on for decades — in NYC’s case, for centuries — but it has taken on a new character in recent years. Look at the media for instance. The American Spectator moved from Indiana to DC in the ’80s and the Atlantic moved from Boston to DC in 2005. There are many other examples, I’m sure. I don’t think it’s a healthy development for our republic. It is pretty clearly a sign of imperial culture to have cultural, economic, and political power concentrated in these places. Sure, you have Dallas, Houston, or Phoenix becoming global cities in their own right, but we all know those locales are not where real decisions — and their accompanying media narrative — are made.
Oskar Chomicki writes: “You are absolutely right. New York, LA, and Washington could rightly be said to be co-capitals of the U.S. I’m sure this process of people gravitating to these cities has been going on for decades — in NYC’s case, for centuries — but it has taken on a new character in recent years. Look at the media for instance. The American Spectator moved from Indiana to DC in the ’80s and the Atlantic moved from Boston to DC in 2005.”
Indeed, Mr. Chomicki, the same thing has happened – although to an incomparably worse, and more demoralizing, extent – in Australia. Years ago Australia had one de jure as well as de facto capital, namely Melbourne. Then, in 1927, the de jure capital became (as it still is) Canberra, while from the 1930s onward the role of de facto capital was shared (as it still is) by Melbourne and Sydney. We have, as a result, managed to acquire all the handicaps of political and cultural centralization, with (unlike, for example, France) none of the benefits. Moreover, in contrast to America, Australia has no regional cities (let alone regional inland cities) worth the name.
What I fear is that Chronicles might be tempted to move away from Rockford, Illinois, and go to DC or Manhattan or LA. Then the game really will be up. I don’t suppose there’d be any chance of The American Conservative moving to, say, Nebraska?
I think the major factor in the “rural brain drain” is a total lack of good jobs “back home.” Regardless of how charming small town life is supposed to be, none of that matters if one cannot find gainful employment equal to one’s potential.
The aspiring young adults who leave small town America for an urban/suburban area in order to pursue a college degree are not even able to then move back and find a decent job; it’s a one-way street. Nearly all of the jobs left in those small towns are blue color at best, totally unskilled and paying minimum wage at worst. Even then, most of the decent manufacturing jobs have already moved overseas, so the small towns are left with no jobs at all for the next generation unless someone is taking over the family farm. And don’t underestimate the negative effects of having half the town living off of government welfare at any given time (and seemingly being totally content with that state of affairs). There were so few young families and, therefore, young kids left in my home town in rural, northeast Louisiana that they recently had to consolidate the two public high schools into one.
Furthermore, there is the greater phenomenon of the “state brain drain,” too. I cannot tell you how many sharp, educated people from Louisiana have left the state altogether for greener pastures, having moved off to Houston, Dallas, or Austin in Texas to work and raise their families. Half of the people in my department at my first telecommunications job in Dallas were former Louisianians.
In fact, funding for the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, a public school intended to nurture the development of the state’s pre-college “best and brightest,” recently came under fire, because so many of its students either leave the state immediately after graduation to attend college elsewhere or leave the state soon after receiving their degree from a Louisiana university (like myself). If few of those students plan to stay in Louisiana in the long run, why should the state’s resident taxpayers subsidize them receiving a superior education? (That’s assuming that any taxpayers should be subsidizing the education of others in the first place.)
I’m sure Louisiana is not the only state experiencing such a “brain drain” (Mississippi, too?), but it is the only one with which I have direct experience. I fully expect the trend to continue over the next few generations until entire states (or regions of states) are “drained” the way these rural towns are. The only thing I can see reversing the trend is a massive breakdown in the division of labor due to a major economic calamity. If (when?) that happens, more people will be forced into self-sufficiency again and, therefore, will be forced to move somewhere where they can actually produce their own food or be relatively near to those who do.
Chad Rushing has written:
“I think the major factor in the ‘rural brain drain’ is a total lack of good jobs “back home.” Regardless of how charming small town life is supposed to be, none of that matters if one cannot find gainful employment equal to one’s potential.”
That’s certainly the case in Australia. The rural Australian unemployment rates have been huge, ever since the 1970s’ drastic reduction of tariffs and the 1990s’ even more drastic reduction of rural infrastructure (banking networks in particular). Outside Australia’s dozen or so biggest cities, it isn’t a matter of finding “gainful employment equal to one’s potential”; it’s a matter of trying to find gainful permanent employment at all, as distinct from three or four weeks’ work here and there as a farm hand.
There exists a vast range of government policies that encourage rural brain drain. One example is the substantial financial benefits, set out in the farm bills, to large-scale “factory” farming. Another example, with which I am more personally familiar, is the waiver/non-enforcement of environmental laws to factory farms. There is no right, at common law, to establish huge pig farms that have tremendous odor and water quality impacts. But establishing violations of common law torts of nuisance and trespass is expensive and risky. The Clean Water Act could be used to stop these practices, but neither Democratic nor Republican administrations have shown any willingness to take on corporate farming practices.
As a result, as a society we privatize the profits associated with corporate farming and socialize the losses, from wells fouled with fecal bacteria to fish kills in the Gulf of Mexico to emptied-out rural towns.
Of course, remedying these wrongs would require bringing the force of the federal government to bear on a powerful industry that purports to represent conservative homeland values. So far, I have yet to hear any Republican support for using environmental laws and ag. policy to rebuild the economic framework to support small-scale farming and, therefore, rural communities.
[...] TAC blogger Oskar Chomicki wrote about the “Rural Brain Drain” that I wished I have chimed in when it was posted earlier (but inlcuding the link so you all can [...]