Woe Is Rural America (and it’s well-deserved)

“Greater Minnesota” is just a politically correct phrase for “rural Minnesota,” which is everywhere in the state except Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester, and . . . that’s about it. Duluth is a wannabe city, but that northern industrial area is just a black hole for development tax dollars with little-to-no possible return. St. Cloud is even less likely to stage any sort of economic comeback. Rural everywhere has suffered a brain and skills drain since the turn of the last century. “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm” was a popular song in 1919 and popular music has never been great at spotting trends early. Back in the 60s, Larry McMurtry explained what had happened to rural Texas with “The kids who stayed in the country tended to be dull, lazy, cautious, or all three; those with brains, zip, and daring were soon off to Dallas or Houston.”

Red Wing and Goodhue County, for example, has suffered a steadily declining population since 2000 and regular property tax increases that make the area less and less attractive to anyone with the math skills to know what will happen to residential property taxes when Xcel closes the nuclear plans in the next decade. $15/hour or about $30,000/year is not a living wage in a town where even a serious fixer-upper costs more than $150,000. Area property values have increased by 37% in the last decade and wages by less than 3%. The city’s “average commute time” is 19.8 minutes, which means a substantial number of the area’s workforce is working a good distance from the city (mostly in the Twin Cities). Almost 14% of the city’s residents live in poverty, with women between 55 and 64 the largest demographic in that group. One quarter of the people employed in the area are over-65. The average resident’s age is 42.7 years, 6 years older than Minnesota’s average, and 41% of the City’s residents are past retirement age.

So, filling those local jobs means competing with employers from outside of the area with wages, benefits, decent management, and advancement opportunities. And that is for a rural city only 50 miles from the serious competition. Cities and businesses further from the state’s economic hub have to be shedding young talent like my sheepdog when spring hits. Red Wing is attempting to shift to a more tourist-friendly destination, but noise and air pollution and a lack of recreational resources (other than the river) and a serious lack of city development talent has turned that effort into pointless and ineffective construction and economic flailing and growing property taxes. A short look at the rural area’s economic and demographic situation would make any reasonable person suspect it is not sustainable. The city has at least a half-dozen massive development failures in its recent history, a downtown that is being rapidly abandoned by businesses and customers, an excess of empty business buildings and, even, a few empty housing units, a decent infrastructure but large and expensive municipal and county services, and an aging population that is less able to finance the “if you build it they will come” city government’s attitude.

Attitude is a rural problem, too. Much of rural American believes it is full of strong, independent individuals who are more able to take care of themselves than “city folks.” That couldn’t be much further from the truth. Rural areas and states receive an outsized investment relative to their contributions to the GNP and tax base. Rural areas need cities, but cities are steadily less dependent on the goods and services produced by rural areas; to the point that this has become a loud “taxation without representation” issue for cities that have had their education systems, infrastructure, and services scavenged for the benefit of declining rural areas. Rural areas, mostly, imagine themselves to be indispensable and their anger and outrage in the face of facts drives them to the Fox and Republican propaganda machines, which isolates them even more.

There is a lot of data supporting the argument that the keys to economic success are tightly linked to diversity, inclusion, and openness. It is incredibly rare to find any small town that exemplifies any of those attributes. 50 years ago, Mr. McMurtry also had a pretty strong and accurate opinion of the kind of people who live in outstate “cities” and rural areas, “Lubbock, Amarillo, and Wichita Falls are the three principal cities of the Texas plain—cities that I find uniformly graceless and unattractive. In summer they are dry and hot, in winter cold, dusty, and windswept; the population is rigidly conformist on the surface and seethes underneath with imperfectly suppressed malice." The vaccine paranoia, anger and resentment, and self-destructive “rebellion” against science is a great example of that “imperfectly suppressed malice.” And an obvious result is the mass exodus from those areas by healthcare professionals. “Toxic individualism” is the media’s phrase for people who grossly over-estimate their own intelligence, knowledge and capabilities, and distrust anyone smarter than themselves; which is often practically everyone outside of their narrow and sheltered society. Attracting talented young people, or retaining them, into that environment is an impossible task.

Would You Rather I Think You Are Wrong, a Fool, or a Liar?

A couple of years ago, I was traveling in a car with some friends (remember when we did that?) listening to the driver tell us about his alien encounters, paranormal abilities, and his paranoid delusions that Big Pharma possessed cures for practically every major disease from the cold to cancer but were suppressing them for fun and profit. Normally, I zone out when this kind of noise is going on, but that was tough to do on this trip. I tried though, trust me, I tried.

Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me and I asked, “Which is less insulting, being called wrong, a liar, or a fool?” I seriously wanted to know because I do not know the answer, even for myself, at least I don’t know the absolute answer. Liars are often out for some kind of gain, but this wasn’t that kind of situation, and fools can be educated if they want to be. Just being wrong is the human condition. So it seems to me that "wrong" or “fool” would be the better option, but admitting to either is tough on the ego. Especially when you are convinced you are extremely intelligent. I am not cursed with that delusion, at least. So, for me it’s "wrong" or “fool” over “liar.” I might have said “bullshitter” rather than “liar,” but the difference is academic. You could substitute “uninformed,” “misinformed,” “delusional,” or “easily misled” for “fool,” too. Likewise, there are lots of substitutes for "wrong" that apply, but they are no less irritating. Again, the difference is semantic rather than quantitative.

Not surprisingly, my friend did not like the question and I’m still hung out to dry as to which is the worst of the options. No, I’m not kidding. It’s a serious question, or as serious as I’m capable of being. Remember, I mostly think humans are the dumbest least sustainable animal in existence.

One of the funny aspects of this conversation/confrontation is that I’d talked this friend into reading Sagan’s A Demon Haunted World: Science As A Candle in the Dark a while back and he loved it. He read statements like “I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.” And my friend agreed with Sagan and saw no contradiction between Sagan’s ridicule of alien invasions, magical hidden-away “cures” and technologies suppressed by an all-powerful government or corporations and his own claims to unrepeatable and unvalidated paranormal abilities and anything Sagan said to the contrary.

Another friend is absolutely unconvinced that motorcycle helmets contribute anything useful to motorcyclist safety. This is in spite of the most recent “experiment” in Florida in 2000, when the state exempted riders from required helmets. “The interrupted time series analysis (1/1994 to 12/2001) estimates a 48.6% increase in motorcycle occupant deaths the year after the law change.” Other states contributed to increasing motorcycle deaths in the same general period when Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky, and Louisiana weakened their helmet laws. He made some pretty extravagant claims about his lifetime riding mileage, which (probably irrationally) I had to doubt because of his anti-helmet stance. Riding a motorcycle for long hours without a helmet is just not something I’ve ever witnessed in my 50-some years on a motorcycle. The helmet-less biker crowd are usually pushing their extreme limits doing a 100 miles between long bar stops, which usually results in staggering homeward, a crash, an arrest, and/or calling a friend with a pickup or trailer for a ride home. I get that, too, since you really take a sonic and physical beating on a motorcycle without some kind of head protection and a windshield isn’t even close to useful for that purpose.

Like many from my generation, math isn’t this man’s strong point. We hear words like “million” and “billion” and “trillion” tossed around by the media so much that they become familiar-seeming concepts. However, familiarity breeds not just contempt but incomprehension when it comes to numbers; specially at the really large and really small extremes. Likewise, another acquaintance is constantly barraging me with left-wing economic silliness. He admitted that his consumer math skills are so poor that he couldn’t balance a checkbook or a family budget if his life depended on it. (His wife is stuck with that responsibility.) However, with that disability firmly in hand he is convinced he is an expert on the US Fed and the World Bank’s function and the economic solutions to the world’s many complicated dysfunctions. He is really tired of my laughing while he jabbers away about pure nonsense. Again, and likewise, a Libertarian acquaintance has equally nonsensical “solutions” to problems that are so far beyond his economic, mathematical, social-system grasp that they are pure comedy and he also stopped talking to me in person because I can’t stop laughing when he kicks the mini-Koch propaganda in gear and I blurt out, “You know, your heroes were first in line for government handouts when their real estate ‘investments’ and other gambling debts blew up in 2008, right?” People in glass houses, even glass mansions, you know?

So, my question stands and I’d love to hear a response (in the comments, not in a direct email) from anyone who stumbles on this blog. Is it better to be thought simply wrong, a fool, or a liar? What does it mean about someone who picks one over the other? And why do you think one is better than the other?