OOTS #1299 - The Discussion Thread

[Peelee]

+1



First: I don't recall any comments about Jon Stewart. He has not been on my radar for decades, so I don't know why I'd care enough to take a stance on whether a comedian lies or not. My only question is, is he funny? And my personal answer is, at first The Daily Show was, but after a while it became repetitive. TV shows tend to do that.

Yes, rural population has declined. So has city populations. People are moving to suburban areas as fast as tract houses can be built.

Bloomberg reports on the issue in the context of the recent pandemic.

But it has been in progress my whole life. I have watched big cities become traps for poor people while those who can move out. As the poor migrate into cities for easy access to public services, their employment opportunities have moved to suburbia.

The Boston Federal Reserve agrees that the urban abandonment has been underway since the 1960s at least.

Access to healthcare in rural America is, in part, the cost of modern medical equipment, (why put an MRI in a town where it will be used five times a month when it can be put in a suburban clinic that will use it five times an hour?) But it is also in part due to the change from medicine being administered by independent practices to medicine being controlled by massive insurance conglomerates which see no financial incentive to invest in underserved rural markets while there are still underserved markets in denser regions. The medical needs of a region are being determined by corporate planners who never go to the clinics they operate rather than by a doctor who lives in the community. While huge advancements in treatments are available, the large corporate model has not produced better results. It seems that in yet another case dispersion is superior to consolidation.

A final note about rural employment: agriculture, mining, and manufacturing are the main employers of rural populations. They are also all the primary beneficiaries of technological improvements that reduce the need for workers. Worker productivity has skyrocketed over 60% in the last few decades with less than a 12% increase in man/hours worked due to technology. Rural employment opportunities are shrinking, and all across America, farmlands near the urban centers are being sold for housing tracts.

What the actual data shows is that people are searching for the good life and finding it in Suburbia. This is the dispersión I've been talking about.

1.) The Jon Stewart comment was from someone else and i misremembered. My bad!
2.) Suburbs exist because of the city. No city, no suburbs. Even if you want to argue against decentralized city with minimal downtown presence and mostly suburbs, that also exists currently and is still a city. There's a prime example of this you've probably heard of, the people who live there call it "Los Angeles".
2.) Your links on medical issues in the US refer to the entire medical industry and not to the difficulties of rural medicine. Rural medicine in the US is, to put it lightly, even more of a ****show than the medical industry overall in the country. Equipment is an issue, but so is the number and specialization of providers. This issue also exists globally, and is hardly US specific.