Re: WHATS going on in rural USA

Posted by Matt from CT on June 19, 2007 at 20:07:56 from (76.204.149.160):

In Reply to: WHATS going on in rural USA posted by marlowe on June 19, 2007 at 17:49:28:

Some of it is Wal*Mart effect.

A lot of it is the same reason we *perceive* a decline in U.S. manufacturing.

Even though we produce, inflation adjusted even, a greater value of manufactured goods today then ever in the past. We even make more steel domestically today then in the 1960s.

But between better machines, bigger machines, and increasing robotization...don't need nearly as many people to do the work. So there's a big perception American manufacturing is declining, and while it is in many sectors...in others in makes increasingly valuable products with fewer and fewer workers.

There's a company near me that makes something as relatively simple as fire department hose couplings; their machines run unattended on 2nd and 3rd shift as well as over the weekend. The guys just load up blank stock before they leave for the day and lock the doors. The next morning the baskets are full of items to go through quality assurance and be shipped.

Mechanization and similiar efficiency gains (chemical fertilizers, pesticides, better genetics, better processes) mean fewer people grow more food.

These small towns grew up in a time when you'd hire on crews of drifters and other laborers to work on threshing crews or other farm labor. Today one person in a combine does the work of dozens a century ago, or of several people even 50 years ago.

Combine that with your typical Western Developed World syndrome of not making as many babies as the economy gets going good, you don't have near the employment or the need for employees or the production of kids in rural areas you did years ago.

My "rural" area is disappearing for different factors as suburban populations push into it more and more -- the fields I used to go shooting in as a kid they just announced is going to become a 27 hole golf course and other recreational stuff. Hey, better then tract homes...still the 400 acres was one heck of a nice piece of farmland. All the cornfields in town are now gated off...kind of funny to see the teens who used to hang out in them now stuck in parking lots in the commercial strip in town during the evenings!

Replies:

• Re: WHATS going on in rural USA Blue3992 (N Illinois) 08:58:24 06/20/07 (1)
  • Re: WHATS going on in rural USA Matt from CT 10:56:03 06/20/07 (0)
• Re: WHATS going on in rural USA Spook 21:22:07 06/19/07 (0)

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