There was a big push to wire up rural areas in the early 2000s. It didn’t happen everywhere, but it happened in quite a few places that can serve as data points. Here in Maryland there is quite a bit of municipal fiber covering the areas Verizon FiOS doesn’t. Some of it has been in place since the early 2000s. Are those communities with fiber doing better than those without it, economically? They’re not doing any better than their neighbors without fiber. The limiting factor isn’t the availability of bandwidth, it’s the lack of desire to hire anyone from these places for remote work. This is not a “build it and they will come” situation. Many places built it. Nobody came.
People have these unfounded romantic notions about fiber and economic development. Here in Maryland, more than 60% of households have access to fiber. Has it revolutionized the economy? Not at all. Annapolis is a small city (pop. 40,000) that has had fiber more than a decade and almost all the tech jobs here are connected to the Navy (and we’re already here). What do people do with fiber here? Netflix. Fiber is not a catalyst for job creation and economic growth. It’s a means for content consumption. That makes it an awful investment of public dollars.
There's plenty of small business incentives out there. The problem is that the whole "fiber-fueled small rural business" concept is pure romantic fantasy. That's not viable in a modern economy. The future is about massive scale: Amazon replacing regional retailers, etc.
The crux of the problem is that people only talk about jobs, and other people/corporations creating those jobs. Everyone can agree we need more jobs and better jobs. The real issue is that people aren't finding ways to start their own business, make themselves a job. Politicians use the word "jobs" like saying it makes them appear. And too many people think that is how is should work. Those people miss out. Make a good business for yourself and people will throw money at you.
i think it’s perfectly fine to invest public money on things that improve everyone’s lives. for me and and many others fiber provides a much higher quality of living even if it doesn’t bring extra growth economically.
Maryland is a pretty rich state, spoiled by military and government connections. It is a poor choice to use as a baseline for the entire nation when plenty of rural areas are still barely scaping by economically and in terms of access to the Internet. Raising the baseline ability of our communications networks is anything but a terrible economic investment, the fact that you cite Netflix shows your focus is only on the short term. I challenge you to look beyond your short sightedness, once people have had their fill with the benefits to media consumption afforded by higher bandwidth connections, and into the future where such connections will be necessary as our infrastructure and information expand in the decades to come
... They are proud of their small-town values ....
And this part of the issue. I come from a small town. The “values” of small towns are racist, homophopic, and nationalistic. I’ve known many people who moved away, started dating someone of another race and then come back home with their significant other and feel completely out of place - not because of family, but because of the city. I’ve also had gay relatives who refuse to visit family back home but welcome them to come to where they live in a larger city.
I’m Black and in conversations, when I tell people where I live - an infamous “sundown town” as recently as the 80s - the first thing I hear is “why do you want to live around all of those White folks”. People don’t understand how much of an anachronism small town America is. The brain drain is real, young people who are capable can’t wait to move as soon as possible to experience more of the world.
I can’t imagine anyone who is not a native born American ever wanting to live there.
>People don’t understand how much of an anachronism small town America is. The brain drain is real, young people who are capable can’t wait to move as soon as possible to experience more of the world.
Yeah, I'm one of those people, and after I moved I found out that I don't enjoy city life at all. The entire reason I want to go into tech is so I can get a remote job and go back.
Higher population density doesn't mean much for the city I live in now - there's hardly anything to do that I'm interested in, and urbanites are as closed-minded as their caricatures of everyone else. (Not having Netflix isn't as much of a problem as not being a socialist, or not being down with a nationwide gun ban or whatever, but it's in the same ballpark.) I had to abandon all my hobbies when I moved, for lack of space and proximity to the communities. And the threat of physical violence is much higher here - I've learned from experience that I can't go outside after dark.
Living in the burbs has a lot of the advantages of both the opportunities of a major city and the space and convenience of a small town. I live in the burbs and it’s very conservative - pro gun, religious, pro-life, pro-business, but not “build a wall”, “anti-immigration”, etc - ie they are more Bush conservatives than southern Confederate Flag waving conservatives.
It’s slso very safe and I wouldn’t be worried about getting robbed at night. I would be more worried about the police being called on me if I’m jogging at night for “looking suspicious” as a minority.
> And this part of the issue. I come from a small town. The “values” of small towns are racist, homophopic, and nationalistic.
As someone that comes from small towns and lives in the city, I find city dwellers to be much more racist and judging than rural folk. The fact that you put nationalistic next to racism probably tells me trying to get into a intellectual conversation about this though isn't going to get anywhere.
I was one part of a group of people who worked hard for several years to try to nurture a growing a tech scene in a rural area not far from Sacramento. I stepped away from that almost two years ago and my current thinking is it can't be done, not just because we largely failed at it but because there are a number of other towns trying to do the same and they aren't getting traction either.
I wonder if a healthy tech economy isn't more of an emergent behavior, and it tends to emerge in cities because there are more people, more resources, and more opportunities all mixing together.
You need good communications infrastructure, not just fiber but cellular too. If all you have available is satellite or (gulp) DSL, it's really painful to get work done. But that requires an enormous financial investment, especially in rural areas where RoI-per-mile is mostly negative.
Often the rural areas already have a culture there, and that culture doesn't necessarily want to get along with tech. Here, cellular providers can't deploy new towers because too many people are convinced that they'll get cancer, including some members of city council. Rural areas will tend to be mostly populated by people who either moved to get away from the city, or have never experienced life in a city. For those people, there's very little about a strong tech scene that sounds marketably attractive.
That also means that the talent just isn't there. And talent isn't there in part because opportunity isn't there. And opportunity isn't there because talent and infrastructure aren't there.
Nobody wants to just pump half a billion dollars or more into a small town just to see what shakes out, and if you did, you'd probably only end up ruining everything that made it an attractive enough small town to experiment with in the first place.
This is all really a shame, because it's contributing to a lot of the political and economic divide in this country, as rural areas are neglected, and shrink, and die slow deaths, while people all jostle for tiny amounts of space at high cost in dense population centers.
I grew up in a rural area near Sacramento. Culture is your big problem; when I was there, reading in public was "gay" and grounds for a (light) beating/physical humiliation.
Of course, I was in high school at the time, and high school is terrible everywhere; I'm sure it's different for adults. But, point being, at least in the '90s, it was not a place that encourages you to study or engage in intellectual pursuits.
well, germany is quite spread out and has lots of tech in smaller towns. It's not always perfect and we are also struggeling with some things, but I think a few approaches can be emulated. First, I think it's important that the small town is not on it's own, but in a close neighborhood of other smaller towns with which it's cooperating a lot. For a serious tech economy, even small towns need a working ecosystem (and I think can't be too small). They have to specialize, cooperate and develop the needed ecosystem, so that they can reach "critical mass" in some area. Ideally, this includes a small university nearby, so that there's a cooperation between the task of education and employement and the specialized, needed workforce can be trained. Also, research-institutes, which help small businesses which can't fund a research division on their own, are important. In germany, they are often coupled with thematic industrial clusters, a smaller patch of land where the city tries to get all the industry together. The research-institutes in germany are the Frauenhofer-institutes, public-private partnerships of applied reasearch with a focus and goal of supporting the local economy.
For example, the small town of Hof in bavaria with a population of 45.000. It has a university of applied science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hof_University_of_Applied_Scie...), which is focused on educating the workforce suitable to the local economy (often in close cooperation). There's some research going on in the university, but it's not a research intensive one. Since the textile-industry in Hof is quite strong, there's a Frauenhofer cooperating with the university of applied science nearby (https://www.htl.fraunhofer.de/en/manufacturing-processes/tex...).
TLDR: I think tech in smaller towns is possible, but it needs a specialized economy, not too-small towns and a close cooperation between the public and private. Tech won't come by itself, it needs to be lured.
Germany has a good railway system that connects many (most? all?) small villages with nearby towns with nearby cities. More importantly, its rural population density is an order of magnitude greater than the US, at 237/km^2 vs 35/km^2 (source: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/rural-population-percen..., https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/rural-population-...). The biggest misconception that I’ve found my friends from other developed countries have about the US is that we are comparable to other developed countries; we aren’t; we’re more comparable to a continent, and more of a second-world country than a first-world one.
Moreover, the US system of government was designed to tilt the scales a bit in favor of rural areas than cities (that was maybe a fair trade-off a couple centuries ago). Combine that structural power dynamic with decades of rural depopulation as smart kids from small towns pursue opportunity in cities (I’m one) and it goes a long way towards explaining why we seem so crazy with our elected officials.
IMHO average population density is an almost meaningless number, because population density is not even close to a distribution where the mean is informative. I'm not sure whether it's the case in the US, but it's perfectly possible to have a tiny average population density and yet areas where small and medium towns are not too far apart from each other. You don't have to have rail service connection a tiny town in Arkansas to New York, it's sufficient if there is a train to the next city with its own cinema.
I agree that the population density is a big factor, i wanted to express that with "not-too-small-towns". I don't see how tech-jobs can move into the completely rural areas. But there are still areas left above the critical population mass.
If you speak French or German, there is this recent documentary about China linking up its villages to e-commerce [1].
The presented village specialized in silver manufacturing. The example supports your thesis that some form of specialization is needed to be competitive enough in a market.
That said, I think research facilities are only needed if the economy is focused on state of the art technology. Otherwise, the joined experience of the businesses seem to be enough to keep them competitive.
What's interesting to me is that the Chinese villagers seem to have jumped on the opportunity on their own, without any government incentives. I would like to know what's holding back other villages in China or around the world to look for their own opportunities?
From my experience visiting, Germany does a much better job of getting services into smaller communities. From Mainz, where my family lives, we took streetcar and then bus out into surrounding villages and towns which would be totally un-serviced by transit if they were in North America -- even in areas where the population density is equivalent or higher (such as where I live in southern Ontario).
Tech infrastructure is only one part of it. North America's rural economy is broken due to land use and industry problems. Once you get out of exurbia or areas that are appealing as retirement or vacation homes, the land is mostly just swathes of cash crop mega farms and towns mostly disappearing due to lack of jobs.
Europe's mostly small towns predate the industrial revolution and the green revolution. They have cultural and economic roots that seem to have persisted better through the 20th century's transformations.
Of the top of my head I can't remember a single big online thing targeting consumers that Germany does. The US has google, facebook, twitter etc, so rather than say Germany has figured out how to do tech in a small town, I would rather think it is accurate for Germany not to have figured out the tech at all.
I know they make cars with electronics in them, but honestly I haven't seen a car with electronics that fundamentally changed how most people approached anything (Cruise Control is nice; self-driving would be a fundamental game changer), Apple and Google have done so in my life time.
well, german tech is not really into the business of targeting consumers. You can critizise it, but you can't deny that germany has a large high-tech industry. I was making the observation that the tech industry in germany is quite spread out and that the solutions here could be applicable to rural america.
If cities are rich because of high concentrations of capital and talent, then it really is a choice between living in a poor area and living in a rich one. You can’t make the poor areas rich without giving them qualities of the rich areas, at which point they simply switch over and become “big cities”.
Trouble is that while cities may be rich, the people living there are not.
It is true that cities are the likely home to those with incredible fortunes, but they are also home to many in abject poverty. In fact, while average incomes tend to be higher in big cities, median incomes in big cities tend to be lower. This suggests that you have some people doing really well, and a whole lot of people doing not so great.
Which is all well and good if you are, say, a software developer and can move to the Bay Area to make $150,000+ per year, but that only describes a very small segment of the population who are able to do that. The typical person is going to find themselves in the "not so great" category. McDonalds pays more or less the same whether you are in the big city or in a small town. The average rural (or urban, for that matter) resident is not going to become a software developer on a whim.
Moving from a poor area, where cost of living is generally lower (although not always), to a rich area, where cost of living is generally higher, does not mean that you, yourself, will become rich. For the average person, that only results in skyrocketing costs, leading to a reduction in quality of life.
>Moving from a poor area, where cost of living is generally lower (although not always), to a rich area, where cost of living is generally higher, does not mean that you, yourself, will become rich. For the average person, that only results in skyrocketing costs, leading to a reduction in quality of life.
Maybe? but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many educated people we are near.
The location-based pay differential is much larger for people who don't have a college degree than for those who do.
That's a big part of why I am so stuck on the bay area; I don't have a degree, and I do really well here. All the offers I get from other parts of the country are terrible.
The city has a concentration of talent and capital, this doesn’t mean it doesn’t have other things also. In fact, cities are seen as stepping stones for many that lack much talent or capital, which is why they have a lot of poor people: the cities are not creating these people themselves, quite the opposite actually.
The kid working st Mcdonads in the big city is probably making $15/hour vs. $8 back in their rural home. Still not enough to live in the big city, but then again that isn’t the only thing they are doing there (they didn’t move to the big city to work in fast food, they have their side gig going on, be it acting or education or whatever). Back home, they would simply be stuck with not much hope for improvement. Ya, their chances of striking it rich aren’t great, but in Seattle it is non zero while in Marysville it is pretty much zero.
> McDonalds pays more or less the same whether you are in the big city or in a small town.
...partially adjusted for local cost of living, of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balassa-Samuelson_effect Which means that, yes, staying in the city is generally a bad deal for a low-productivity worker in the non-tradable sector. But not as much of a bad deal as it would be if those wage variations did not exist. And they might be able to make up for it and even come out ahead by being super frugal and saving most of their income (this is the archetypical "unskilled immigrant to a rich area" story).
That would suggest that it is not worth it for people who are only going to make a small amount of money over minimum income to move to SF, and that they shouldn't.
Alternatively, put a tax on rental income then use that to found more buildings. I am not a fan of taxes, but since rents will always expand they aren't a bad subject to tax.
I'm a bit skeptical of the median income being lower than rural areas. I could see median income relative to cost of living being lower, but median income by itself being lower would be shocking. Do you have a source on that?
A reasonable solution is to start living in villages that are clustered to form bigger villages. The key is self governance and that would ensure self contained units.
The Dunbar number(for households) is a good number for each self sufficient ‘village city’. That would be 150 households with a max of 4 per household. 4-6 ‘village cities’ will make a networked cluster. They can share some common facilities(schools/parks) And so on.
Currently, in the Bay Area, the problem is centralized claw of Sacramento. We are a ‘mega region’. Infrastructure, essential services, schools, traffic, housing...everything is failing. Bay Area is starting to rot. One has to live here to feel the despair of the working stiff.
As an example: our city council has meetings every Tuesday starting at 7.00 pm. Nobody can attend and voice their ‘concerns’. Everyone is stuck in traffic. The other day, in one of our neighbourhood boards, a neighbour bemoaned Prop 13 and the retired ‘olds’ who aren’t pulling their weight. He said that he has two kids and his household makes only $500k and by the time he pays taxes and childcare and mortagage, he is broke. I had to shut down my computer and step away from the keyboard for a bit.
And he is not the only one. He isn’t the exception, but the norm. He is a Silicon Valley high tech worker statistic. The 2kid/2car/2million dollar home living/resentful BROKE paycheck-to-paycheck ..waiting for the windfall IPO because he doesn’t have a lifetime pension like the low paid clerk at PG&E or police officer..and is bitter because he is stuck in traffic ..because he is anxious..because he has to keep running faster to stay in the same place...because he can’t quit his job.
Meanwhile the govt is the mafia and we keep paying higher and higher taxes. Cities are getting denser, resources are getting thinner, schools overcrowded, roads are clogged. Everyone feels guilty because the average Silicon Valley worker is the poster child for unchecked privilege and the epitome of evil for promoting inequality.
This is Silicon Valley. This is the Bay Area. Let us contain our curse..our little dirty secret..our infectious virus..I hope we don’t spread it to other places.
How is it just a choice of living in a poor area vs a rich one? What if the people living in the poor areas don’t even have a high school degree? Can they suddenly decide they want to work and live in the rich area?
I’m a couple generations maybe. Moving from a poor area to a rich one and working your butt off for your kid’s education so they can reach professional successes you didn’t have the opportunity to is an archetypical immigrant story.
It's not "move to a rich area". It's "move to an area with good opportunities for production (roughly 'good jobs', although self-employment is also a possibility of course)". That's a very different problem. An area with high cost of living, almost by definition, has a lower margin of production and thus lower real incomes for such, adjusting for productivity.
There are several comments here noting that small towns are pretty well wired. I’m fortunate to have just purchased a vacation home in rural Wisconsin (close to family). In DC, I have 100Mbps fiber, a free upgrade from FiOS from the 25Mbps I ordered, with the option to get a gigabit. At my other house, I have a 6Mbps DSL that only delivers 1.5Mbps at best, with a couple hundred Kbps upload. There’s a cell tower only a mile away, but hills and trees obscure the signal; still with two bars I can get 20Mbps on my iPhone. Can I get a reasonable data plan? No. All the data plans cost a lot for a little, and throttle you to 2G after a hundred GB or so of download per month.
My hope is to spend a good portion of every summer working remotely in Wisconsin. I’ll be hard-pressed to make video conferences and pairing sessions work, and I sure won’t be streaming many shows for entertainment in the evenings.
Different locations have different issues, but I think your potential for great and affordable seasonal broadband is actually excellent. Conferencing, pairing, and streaming are going to be just fine. You're a techie --- you can solve this. Since I'm fond of rural Wisconsin, and have solved similar cellular problems elsewhere, allow me to make some suggestions.
If the tower you are able to hit with 2 bars is AT&T, buy a used/refurbished MR1100 cellular router for less than $150 from Ebay, buy a high gain 4G MIMO antenna and cables for about $100 (try to learn what frequency your tower is on first), and pay $50 a month for an unlimited AT&T data sim (I've used this guy: https://www.ebay.com/itm/4G-LTE-ATT-Unlimited-HOTSPOT-Data-5...).
If your closest tower is not AT&T, there's probably something comparable. There's probably not a great price advantage to the SIM card resellers, but they do make it easier to try things out. I'm currently using an excellent local provider instead of AT&T (VTelWireless), and a speed test just confirmed I'm at a delightfully usable 50/25 Mbit/s.
Why didn’t you buy a vacation home in a place that’s better wired? We stayed at an AirBnB is Putnam County, NY recently that had very solid 100 Mbps cable. You can get 100 Mbps cable throughout Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Easton, a town of 15,000, is upgrading its municipal cable system to gigabit.
What does it say about the importance of high-speed broadband access as a differentiating factor that even someone in the tech industry will move somewhere without it? Is that a compelling fact for towns like Easton who believe that investing in municipal broadband will attract more residents?
Your question comes across as a bit rude. To answer it, because after half a year of looking, it was far closer to the ideal across a range of factors than anything else we’d found. I didn’t really notice how terrible the DSL was until after we purchased.
The Eastern Shore in Maryland can be pretty rural, but it’s still Maryland. Euston is 15,000; my place is between two villages, one of 900 and the other of 1600. In town, Internet access _is_ pretty decent. But the countryside is another matter.
Cities are economic powerhouses because they have network effects. My career has benefited from those network effects, and I think it would be a personal mistake for me to convert to a 100% remote position. But I can leverage a bit of that career capital to be remote sometime and take advantage of the vast cost differences between a coastal city and the rural Midwest, and get some lifestyle advantages from it (most importantly having my children see their extended family members far more frequently). I am going to have to invest a decent amount in equipment and services (e.g., MiFi, antenna, a router that’ll support line sharing with the cell, VPS, etc.) to make it work. That’s not to say “poor me,” far from it, but simply to point out that rural broadband can really suck in some places. And I’m lucky in that the cell signal exists; lots of places it doesn’t.
I'm not sure that there is enough demand for remote work. Many people enjoy and even require the social interactions provided at a workplace and don't want solitary remote work.
I’m currently at my third remote job. The first time, I was 29, newly single and I found it got old real fast. Moving back to an office environment was a major improvement for me. Fast forward 10 years, I’m married again, different living situation (in the city now) and I absolutely love the freedom and lifestyle of working remote again. There are a ton of factors involved but I suspect I’m not alone in finding remote work more appealing as I get older and more settled.
“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” — Western Union internal memo, 1876.
“The problem of TV was that people had to glue their eyes to a screen, and that the average American wouldn’t have time for it.” − The New York Times, 1939
Digital nomads will go to places like Thailand where CoL is cheap and internet is fast, I wonder if a small town could emulate that experience. Doesn’t have to be quite as cheap, but won’t give you food poisoning and could be safer too.
I think a big part of the reason (western) digital nomads go to Southeast Asia is for the tropical weather and exoticism. It would be hard for small town America to replicate those experiences.
Exotic locations stop being so after you live in them for a few years. Time zone issues can end up as a real pain, which makes the US rather appealing.
Weather wise most of Florida is really cheap and Hawaii can be surprisingly affordable a few miles from the beach. So, I suspect the digital nomads living in Asia stereotype is more about them being interesting than that many people actually doing so.
There are probably a lot of other reasons that it would not be socially acceptable to admit to.
Being an obvious foreigner can signal you have money and power without you having to say a word about it. In contrast, relocating to a small town in the US wouldn't bring such perks of establishing that the poverty stricken locals should defer to you and cater to you. Instead, you would be an outsider trying to "prove" yourself and get an in socially.
Going to a less developed foreign country allows some people to impose whatever mental models they desire on the landscape without having to try to understand local culture or respect it. To their mind, a less developed country is a social clean slate and folks their should just be grateful a rich Westerner has showed up with money to spend.
If you do run into problems, you can blame it on cultural misunderstanding and try to get a free "out" that no one would give you in a small town in your own country because you are expected to know better than that, even though the laws vary to some degree from state to state within the US.
For example, articles about Westerners drinking alcohol in a Middle Eastern country and being arrested for it are generally viewed sympathetically in the west. Readers are generally on the side of the person who drank alcohol and are critical of the "backwards" country forbidding alcohol. In contrast, if you smoke marijuana someplace where it isn't legal in the US, you get vastly less sympathy from most folks because you are supposed to know better than that.
The idea of moving to some other country that is super cheap and where the living is expected to be easy if you are a Westerner is rooted in historical colonialism. It's really rooted in an expectation of taking advantage of the locals and of their country while telling yourself you are doing only good things for these uneducated heathens -- so viewed because they are not educated in the same things you are educated in, a point of view that stands in part because of your own unquestioned ignorance of their culture and history that you probably think isn't worth studying.
I have considered relocating to another, cheaper country, both because I come from a multi-cultural household and haven't been out of the US in a long time and because I currently have a limited income and the idea of magically solving my financial problems by moving someplace vastly cheaper sounds like a wonderful easy answer. So I understand the appeal.
But I think a lot of people make it work for reasons I find problematic and can't mentally replicate, in part because my mother is an immigrant, so I can't manage to see the local economy as some kind of clean slate that I can impose myself upon and that appears to be a large part of the appeal for some people.
Readit News
People have these unfounded romantic notions about fiber and economic development. Here in Maryland, more than 60% of households have access to fiber. Has it revolutionized the economy? Not at all. Annapolis is a small city (pop. 40,000) that has had fiber more than a decade and almost all the tech jobs here are connected to the Navy (and we’re already here). What do people do with fiber here? Netflix. Fiber is not a catalyst for job creation and economic growth. It’s a means for content consumption. That makes it an awful investment of public dollars.
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Yes, sadly, paved roads are not a magical fairy dust.
No, wait... electrification isn't a fairy dust. My mistake.
No, wait... phones aren't magic.
No, wait...
/s
And this part of the issue. I come from a small town. The “values” of small towns are racist, homophopic, and nationalistic. I’ve known many people who moved away, started dating someone of another race and then come back home with their significant other and feel completely out of place - not because of family, but because of the city. I’ve also had gay relatives who refuse to visit family back home but welcome them to come to where they live in a larger city.
I’m Black and in conversations, when I tell people where I live - an infamous “sundown town” as recently as the 80s - the first thing I hear is “why do you want to live around all of those White folks”. People don’t understand how much of an anachronism small town America is. The brain drain is real, young people who are capable can’t wait to move as soon as possible to experience more of the world.
I can’t imagine anyone who is not a native born American ever wanting to live there.
I also think of all the values small towns have these aren't the forefront.
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Yeah, I'm one of those people, and after I moved I found out that I don't enjoy city life at all. The entire reason I want to go into tech is so I can get a remote job and go back.
Higher population density doesn't mean much for the city I live in now - there's hardly anything to do that I'm interested in, and urbanites are as closed-minded as their caricatures of everyone else. (Not having Netflix isn't as much of a problem as not being a socialist, or not being down with a nationwide gun ban or whatever, but it's in the same ballpark.) I had to abandon all my hobbies when I moved, for lack of space and proximity to the communities. And the threat of physical violence is much higher here - I've learned from experience that I can't go outside after dark.
It’s slso very safe and I wouldn’t be worried about getting robbed at night. I would be more worried about the police being called on me if I’m jogging at night for “looking suspicious” as a minority.
As someone that comes from small towns and lives in the city, I find city dwellers to be much more racist and judging than rural folk. The fact that you put nationalistic next to racism probably tells me trying to get into a intellectual conversation about this though isn't going to get anywhere.
I wonder if a healthy tech economy isn't more of an emergent behavior, and it tends to emerge in cities because there are more people, more resources, and more opportunities all mixing together.
You need good communications infrastructure, not just fiber but cellular too. If all you have available is satellite or (gulp) DSL, it's really painful to get work done. But that requires an enormous financial investment, especially in rural areas where RoI-per-mile is mostly negative.
Often the rural areas already have a culture there, and that culture doesn't necessarily want to get along with tech. Here, cellular providers can't deploy new towers because too many people are convinced that they'll get cancer, including some members of city council. Rural areas will tend to be mostly populated by people who either moved to get away from the city, or have never experienced life in a city. For those people, there's very little about a strong tech scene that sounds marketably attractive.
That also means that the talent just isn't there. And talent isn't there in part because opportunity isn't there. And opportunity isn't there because talent and infrastructure aren't there.
Nobody wants to just pump half a billion dollars or more into a small town just to see what shakes out, and if you did, you'd probably only end up ruining everything that made it an attractive enough small town to experiment with in the first place.
This is all really a shame, because it's contributing to a lot of the political and economic divide in this country, as rural areas are neglected, and shrink, and die slow deaths, while people all jostle for tiny amounts of space at high cost in dense population centers.
Of course, I was in high school at the time, and high school is terrible everywhere; I'm sure it's different for adults. But, point being, at least in the '90s, it was not a place that encourages you to study or engage in intellectual pursuits.
For example, the small town of Hof in bavaria with a population of 45.000. It has a university of applied science (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hof_University_of_Applied_Scie...), which is focused on educating the workforce suitable to the local economy (often in close cooperation). There's some research going on in the university, but it's not a research intensive one. Since the textile-industry in Hof is quite strong, there's a Frauenhofer cooperating with the university of applied science nearby (https://www.htl.fraunhofer.de/en/manufacturing-processes/tex...).
TLDR: I think tech in smaller towns is possible, but it needs a specialized economy, not too-small towns and a close cooperation between the public and private. Tech won't come by itself, it needs to be lured.
Moreover, the US system of government was designed to tilt the scales a bit in favor of rural areas than cities (that was maybe a fair trade-off a couple centuries ago). Combine that structural power dynamic with decades of rural depopulation as smart kids from small towns pursue opportunity in cities (I’m one) and it goes a long way towards explaining why we seem so crazy with our elected officials.
The presented village specialized in silver manufacturing. The example supports your thesis that some form of specialization is needed to be competitive enough in a market.
That said, I think research facilities are only needed if the economy is focused on state of the art technology. Otherwise, the joined experience of the businesses seem to be enough to keep them competitive.
What's interesting to me is that the Chinese villagers seem to have jumped on the opportunity on their own, without any government incentives. I would like to know what's holding back other villages in China or around the world to look for their own opportunities?
[1]: https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/085121-000-A/china-doerfer-mit...
Tech infrastructure is only one part of it. North America's rural economy is broken due to land use and industry problems. Once you get out of exurbia or areas that are appealing as retirement or vacation homes, the land is mostly just swathes of cash crop mega farms and towns mostly disappearing due to lack of jobs.
Europe's mostly small towns predate the industrial revolution and the green revolution. They have cultural and economic roots that seem to have persisted better through the 20th century's transformations.
I know they make cars with electronics in them, but honestly I haven't seen a car with electronics that fundamentally changed how most people approached anything (Cruise Control is nice; self-driving would be a fundamental game changer), Apple and Google have done so in my life time.
It is true that cities are the likely home to those with incredible fortunes, but they are also home to many in abject poverty. In fact, while average incomes tend to be higher in big cities, median incomes in big cities tend to be lower. This suggests that you have some people doing really well, and a whole lot of people doing not so great.
Which is all well and good if you are, say, a software developer and can move to the Bay Area to make $150,000+ per year, but that only describes a very small segment of the population who are able to do that. The typical person is going to find themselves in the "not so great" category. McDonalds pays more or less the same whether you are in the big city or in a small town. The average rural (or urban, for that matter) resident is not going to become a software developer on a whim.
Moving from a poor area, where cost of living is generally lower (although not always), to a rich area, where cost of living is generally higher, does not mean that you, yourself, will become rich. For the average person, that only results in skyrocketing costs, leading to a reduction in quality of life.
Maybe? but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many educated people we are near.
The location-based pay differential is much larger for people who don't have a college degree than for those who do.
That's a big part of why I am so stuck on the bay area; I don't have a degree, and I do really well here. All the offers I get from other parts of the country are terrible.
The kid working st Mcdonads in the big city is probably making $15/hour vs. $8 back in their rural home. Still not enough to live in the big city, but then again that isn’t the only thing they are doing there (they didn’t move to the big city to work in fast food, they have their side gig going on, be it acting or education or whatever). Back home, they would simply be stuck with not much hope for improvement. Ya, their chances of striking it rich aren’t great, but in Seattle it is non zero while in Marysville it is pretty much zero.
...partially adjusted for local cost of living, of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balassa-Samuelson_effect Which means that, yes, staying in the city is generally a bad deal for a low-productivity worker in the non-tradable sector. But not as much of a bad deal as it would be if those wage variations did not exist. And they might be able to make up for it and even come out ahead by being super frugal and saving most of their income (this is the archetypical "unskilled immigrant to a rich area" story).
Alternatively, put a tax on rental income then use that to found more buildings. I am not a fan of taxes, but since rents will always expand they aren't a bad subject to tax.
The Dunbar number(for households) is a good number for each self sufficient ‘village city’. That would be 150 households with a max of 4 per household. 4-6 ‘village cities’ will make a networked cluster. They can share some common facilities(schools/parks) And so on.
Currently, in the Bay Area, the problem is centralized claw of Sacramento. We are a ‘mega region’. Infrastructure, essential services, schools, traffic, housing...everything is failing. Bay Area is starting to rot. One has to live here to feel the despair of the working stiff.
As an example: our city council has meetings every Tuesday starting at 7.00 pm. Nobody can attend and voice their ‘concerns’. Everyone is stuck in traffic. The other day, in one of our neighbourhood boards, a neighbour bemoaned Prop 13 and the retired ‘olds’ who aren’t pulling their weight. He said that he has two kids and his household makes only $500k and by the time he pays taxes and childcare and mortagage, he is broke. I had to shut down my computer and step away from the keyboard for a bit.
And he is not the only one. He isn’t the exception, but the norm. He is a Silicon Valley high tech worker statistic. The 2kid/2car/2million dollar home living/resentful BROKE paycheck-to-paycheck ..waiting for the windfall IPO because he doesn’t have a lifetime pension like the low paid clerk at PG&E or police officer..and is bitter because he is stuck in traffic ..because he is anxious..because he has to keep running faster to stay in the same place...because he can’t quit his job.
Meanwhile the govt is the mafia and we keep paying higher and higher taxes. Cities are getting denser, resources are getting thinner, schools overcrowded, roads are clogged. Everyone feels guilty because the average Silicon Valley worker is the poster child for unchecked privilege and the epitome of evil for promoting inequality.
This is Silicon Valley. This is the Bay Area. Let us contain our curse..our little dirty secret..our infectious virus..I hope we don’t spread it to other places.
My hope is to spend a good portion of every summer working remotely in Wisconsin. I’ll be hard-pressed to make video conferences and pairing sessions work, and I sure won’t be streaming many shows for entertainment in the evenings.
If the tower you are able to hit with 2 bars is AT&T, buy a used/refurbished MR1100 cellular router for less than $150 from Ebay, buy a high gain 4G MIMO antenna and cables for about $100 (try to learn what frequency your tower is on first), and pay $50 a month for an unlimited AT&T data sim (I've used this guy: https://www.ebay.com/itm/4G-LTE-ATT-Unlimited-HOTSPOT-Data-5...).
If your closest tower is not AT&T, there's probably something comparable. There's probably not a great price advantage to the SIM card resellers, but they do make it easier to try things out. I'm currently using an excellent local provider instead of AT&T (VTelWireless), and a speed test just confirmed I'm at a delightfully usable 50/25 Mbit/s.
What does it say about the importance of high-speed broadband access as a differentiating factor that even someone in the tech industry will move somewhere without it? Is that a compelling fact for towns like Easton who believe that investing in municipal broadband will attract more residents?
The Eastern Shore in Maryland can be pretty rural, but it’s still Maryland. Euston is 15,000; my place is between two villages, one of 900 and the other of 1600. In town, Internet access _is_ pretty decent. But the countryside is another matter.
Cities are economic powerhouses because they have network effects. My career has benefited from those network effects, and I think it would be a personal mistake for me to convert to a 100% remote position. But I can leverage a bit of that career capital to be remote sometime and take advantage of the vast cost differences between a coastal city and the rural Midwest, and get some lifestyle advantages from it (most importantly having my children see their extended family members far more frequently). I am going to have to invest a decent amount in equipment and services (e.g., MiFi, antenna, a router that’ll support line sharing with the cell, VPS, etc.) to make it work. That’s not to say “poor me,” far from it, but simply to point out that rural broadband can really suck in some places. And I’m lucky in that the cell signal exists; lots of places it doesn’t.
“The problem of TV was that people had to glue their eyes to a screen, and that the average American wouldn’t have time for it.” − The New York Times, 1939
Weather wise most of Florida is really cheap and Hawaii can be surprisingly affordable a few miles from the beach. So, I suspect the digital nomads living in Asia stereotype is more about them being interesting than that many people actually doing so.
Being an obvious foreigner can signal you have money and power without you having to say a word about it. In contrast, relocating to a small town in the US wouldn't bring such perks of establishing that the poverty stricken locals should defer to you and cater to you. Instead, you would be an outsider trying to "prove" yourself and get an in socially.
Going to a less developed foreign country allows some people to impose whatever mental models they desire on the landscape without having to try to understand local culture or respect it. To their mind, a less developed country is a social clean slate and folks their should just be grateful a rich Westerner has showed up with money to spend.
If you do run into problems, you can blame it on cultural misunderstanding and try to get a free "out" that no one would give you in a small town in your own country because you are expected to know better than that, even though the laws vary to some degree from state to state within the US.
For example, articles about Westerners drinking alcohol in a Middle Eastern country and being arrested for it are generally viewed sympathetically in the west. Readers are generally on the side of the person who drank alcohol and are critical of the "backwards" country forbidding alcohol. In contrast, if you smoke marijuana someplace where it isn't legal in the US, you get vastly less sympathy from most folks because you are supposed to know better than that.
The idea of moving to some other country that is super cheap and where the living is expected to be easy if you are a Westerner is rooted in historical colonialism. It's really rooted in an expectation of taking advantage of the locals and of their country while telling yourself you are doing only good things for these uneducated heathens -- so viewed because they are not educated in the same things you are educated in, a point of view that stands in part because of your own unquestioned ignorance of their culture and history that you probably think isn't worth studying.
I have considered relocating to another, cheaper country, both because I come from a multi-cultural household and haven't been out of the US in a long time and because I currently have a limited income and the idea of magically solving my financial problems by moving someplace vastly cheaper sounds like a wonderful easy answer. So I understand the appeal.
But I think a lot of people make it work for reasons I find problematic and can't mentally replicate, in part because my mother is an immigrant, so I can't manage to see the local economy as some kind of clean slate that I can impose myself upon and that appears to be a large part of the appeal for some people.
There's the rub. Starlink can't come out fast enough!