Those Darn Small Towns

Evidently, those of us in rural America would be far better off if we got a big fat check to move to an urban area.  At least that's the conclusion of a book recently published by the Minnesota Historical Society.  An article published by Minnesota 2020, a new think tank, expresses the predictable and justifiable outrage:

But it is with this passage on Page 296 that I threw down the book on my desk — partly in disbelief, partly, to be honest, in anger: "Southwestern Minnesota has too many tiny towns. Places that originated as agricultural service centers have lost their reason for being, and they are too small to grow. Wise public policy might buy out their residents and allow them to live elsewhere."

Too many small towns, and they have lost their reason for being? Are the authors really serious?

If they are, they're basically saying the region has become too inefficient to continue to operate as a place to call home. Pretty damned cold. And they're also being condescending — allow us to live elsewhere? Gee, that's kind of them to offer. But maybe we don't want to, and that's why so many of us are fighting to maintain sustainability and vitality.

Read the whole thing here.

Here in the home office John Crabtree and I got to talking about this.  And we came to the conclusion that the two geography professors must be offended by the continued existence of these town.  Buyouts?  If you're so convinced these towns "have lost their reason for being" why would you need buyouts?  Just let them die.  At least that's what any respectable free market economist would say.  They're going to die anyway, so let's be efficient about it.

The authors would probably respond that buyouts are more humane, or help people transition to a more economically sustainable geographic location.  Perhaps that's true.  But we suspect these professors are ticked off by the fact these darn small towns keep hanging around.   It is an affront to their theory and scholarship that they continue to exist.  According to their models, it shouldn't happen.  According to their models, these towns should probably be gone already.

I would be the last to say every small town in Minnesota, or anywhere, will survive.  They won't.  There is a free market aspect to the depopulation of some rural areas.  But some small towns, and the people who live in them, are willing to put up with a little inefficiency because they value the non-economic attributes rural communities provide.  Those small towns are usually the ones embracing innovation and entrepreneurship, continuing to thrive in the face of so-called "inefficiencies".

 In fact, I would be one who says that rural communities are worth an economic subsidy, given their social benefits.  But that's not even the topic here.  These professors simply think we should accelerate the decline of rural America.  In fact, they think there is an inherent public good in accelerating that decline, so that decline should be subsidized by the federal government.

And by the way, how are we going to decide who gets the buyouts?  No doubt we'd have to create some master matrix (many of you will know what that means) or giant model that says we're going to offer buyouts here, but not there.  And it will be on the basis of something like one community is half a mile closer to a national park than another.  How efficient is that?  Come on.  There are rural communities that are thriving in places no one would expect them to. 

So forget this crap peddled by some theory-obsessed snake oil salesmen.  This sort of thinking has been around a long time. Many mainstream agriculture economists still cannot understand why the number of very small farms keeps increasing.  It literally makes them angry- all of those little farmers should be out of business.  But they're not, because they're figuring out new and innovative ways to get started or stay in business. 

In the same way, the death of rural communities is not inevitable.  Somebody needs to tell these clowns that they should start working on promoting public policy and conducting research that meets the needs and aspirations of rural America, and stop working to force rural America to conform to their tired academic theories.