There appears to be some forgetting that UK money half penny resolution until not all that long ago.
American programmers working for an American bank back in the 1950s probably wouldn't have really had to deal with British half-pennys.
]]>See, she did give us something useful... a new unit of time.
]]>That said, decreases in economic disparities seem worth doing. Given that humans all have roughly the same ability to burn down systems, some sort of 'national dividend' / 'protection money' (to be paid out of a wealth tax) seems reasonable.
And, a real problem is that people, mostly, cannot change quickly, so technological change creates quite a bit of isolated misery. Some sort of 'disruption' tax might also help. The next obvious candidates are truckers. Long term, not sticking people in boxes to haul cargo will be a good thing, but rough for 50 year olds with no other skills.
*Would you welcome conservative missionaries seeking to uplift you? If you want to mandate sustainable farming, sure, food is important, but I suspect that soulless corporations can farm sustainably for less. In terms of bad ideas, welfare / disability should be restructured, likely including relocation and retraining a conditions of benefit eligibility. But, incentivizing growth of small towns seems likely to work out poorly. There just don't seem to quite be conditions allowing their growth.
@paws4thot I am perhaps sometimes a bit moody/venty and often enchildrened / enwifed / enworked but do not deliberately troll.
Though, in some cases, infrastructure investment may make sense. I'd guess that the US could use more midsized towns and fewer small ones.
That said, while I'd argue that helping poor people leave these communities and find a place somewhere better is probably a good thing, I'm not particularly sympathetic towards certain aspects of rural culture. Yes, people are people and trying to get by, but, no, the sort of people who shout racial slurs at my nephews have a net negative valuation in trolley problems.
Still, I wonder if there is a way to make smaller towns workable. Distributed manufacturing and work-from-home could help. (That said, big chunks of the middle of this country just seem miserable to live in.)
]]>Speaking as someone who grew up just outside of a middling sized town. Town of 32K. County of 52K. This was as of the 1950, 1960, and 1970 census records. And now it's smaller. And a bigger town is 3+ hour drive at 70mph away. There are 4 larger cities but when I was growing up they were 4 or 5 hours away.
Lots of towns like this and smaller had small factories that gave decent jobs to folks with only a high school diploma (or less). But these days most even tiny outfits want someone who can UNDERSTAND and operate a computer controlled machine. And they need solid broadband to deal with communications. And transportation what cost less than what it cost to ship from their remote site to a decent transportation hub. And ....
I spend most of one summer polishing machine blanks for the Ideal Reel Company. There were 6 of us doing this and winding massive reels of wire into smaller reels for the hip holsters. Plus a clerk or two and some guys in shipping. The owner to patented the concept drove up every morning about 10am checked on things then left around 3pm. These companies don't exist anymore.
https://www.gerarddaniel.com/product/ideal-reel-products/
To many folks, especially with an education, moved on or never came home from upper education. Note how the population of where I grew up was stagnant while the US as a whole grew from 150mil to 200mil. And I and both my brothers left and only go back for the occasional funeral. And my parents even moved to be closer to their grand kids.Populations just now are 26K in the town and 62K in the county. (The city has annexed a lot of the county and people just moved further out.) So a bit of growth but nothing like what it should be if it had kept up with the growth of the country as a whole.
The reason for the existence of most small towns across the rural US had to do with technology more than anything else. Transportation technology or the lack of it.
As to how to deal with the people still living in these towns, that's harder. Most of my relatives live back there or moved to similar places. And they are utterly convinced their way of life is the true and proper one. Which is why they are solid behind Trump. He tells them what they want to hear over and over. (Of course DT also thinks they are stupid fools to be grifted but ....) Anyway, the people still in these town don't want to leave. AT ALL. Those that don't fit in have left and keep leaving.
]]>]]>And while a big, diversified city can afford a lot of dead ends, a smaller city can’t. Some small cities got lucky repeatedly, and grew big. Others didn’t; and when a city starts out fairly small and specialized, over a long period there will be a substantial chance that it will lose enough coin flips that it effectively loses any reason to exist.
Paul Krugman wrote a thoughtful piece on why small cities fall prey to gambler's ruin.
And while a big, diversified city can afford a lot of dead ends, a smaller city can’t. Some small cities got lucky repeatedly, and grew big. Others didn’t; and when a city starts out fairly small and specialized, over a long period there will be a substantial chance that it will lose enough coin flips that it effectively loses any reason to exist.
Raises some interesting questions. The Emily Badger piece he's thinking about prompts me to wonder. If the larger cities were once dependent on the smaller cities for resources, what can smaller cities today to be needed by the larger cities ... and what can rural areas do to be needed by cities?
I also note the Bloomberg piece by Noah Smith suggests those small towns & rural areas NEED educational resources (i.e. being a college town boosts the local economy) and they need immigration to bring in new and diverse populations.
And that appears to be three strikes against MAGA America:
• They hate the large cities that they NEED to need them IF they are to survive
• They're against higher education
• They are anti-immigration
Instead of worrying about being replaced, they should be trying to find ways to integrate immigrants into the fabric of society. People get old and eventually die, but if they build a welcoming society that INCLUDES others, their ideals and values can live on after they're gone.
]]>Relating that back to Krugman's thinking, if you live in a small town you can gamble on making it an enlightened place that's friendly to immigrants and minorities. In that case, it will probably grow, because people will want to go there/stay there and establish businesses, or go to college and actually come back. As Krugman would say, this attitude allows the town to take more gambles.
Or you can make your small town unfriendly to everyone except White people of the right religious persuasion, in which case something between 10-25 percent of your younger generation will very gladly leave every year and never come back, but the town will stay the same and your kids (at least the ones who choose to stay) will be safe from brown people and new ideas... but your town won't be taking any gambles, which means that anyone who is taking gambles will eventually eat your lunch.
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