Feb 5, JDN 2457790

Are urban people worth less than rural people?

That probably sounds like a ridiculous thing to ask; of course not, all people are worth the same (other things equal of course—philanthropists are worth more than serial murderers). But then, if you agree with that, you’re probably an urban person, as I’m sure most of my readers are (and as indeed most people in highly-developed countries are).

A disturbing number of rural people, however, honestly do seem to believe this. They think that our urban lifestyles (whatever they imagine those to be) devalue us as citizens and human beings.

That is the key subtext to understand in the terrifying phenomenon that is Donald Trump. Most of the people who voted for him can’t possibly have thought he was actually trustworthy, and many probably didn’t actually support his policies of bigotry and authoritarianism (though he was very popular among bigots and authoritarians). From speaking with family members and acquaintances who proudly voted for Trump, one thing came through very clearly: This was a gigantic middle finger pointed at cities. They didn’t even really want Trump; they just knew we didn’t, and so they voted for him out of spite as much as anything else. They also have really confused views about free trade, so some of them voted for him because he promised to bring back jobs lost to trade (that weren’t lost to trade, can’t be brought back, and shouldn’t be even if they could). Talk with a Trump voter for a few minutes, and sneers of “latte-sipping liberal” (I don’t even like coffee) and “coastal elite” (I moved here to get educated; I wasn’t born here) are sure to follow.

There has always been some conflict between rural and urban cultures, for as long as there have been urban cultures for rural cultures to be in conflict with. It is found not just in the US, but in most if not all countries around the world. It was relatively calm during the postwar boom in the 20th century, as incomes everywhere (or at least everywhere within highly-developed countries) were improving more or less in lockstep. But the 21st century has brought us much more unequal growth, concentrated on particular groups of people and particular industries. This has brought more resentment. And that divide, above all else, is what brought us Trump; the correlation between population density and voting behavior is enormous.

Of course, “urban” is sometimes a dog-whistle for “Black”; but sometimes I think it actually really means “urban”—and yet there’s still a lot of hatred embedded in it. Indeed, perhaps that’s why the dog-whistle works; a White man from a rural town can sneer at “urban” people and it’s not entirely clear whether he’s being racist or just being anti-urban.

The assumption that rural lifestyles are superior runs so deep in our culture that even in articles by urban people (like this one from the LA Times) supposedly reflecting about how to resolve this divide, there are long paeans to the world of “hard work” and “sacrifice” and “autonomy” of rural life, and mocking “urban elites” for their “disproportionate” (by which you can only mean almost proportionate) power over government.

Well, guess what? If you want to live in a rural area, go live in a rural area. Don’t pine for it. Don’t tell me how great farm life is. If you want to live on a farm, go live on a farm. I have nothing against it; we need farmers, after all. I just want you to shut up about how great it is, especially if you’re not going to actually do it. Pining for someone else’s lifestyle when you could easily take on that lifestyle if you really wanted it just shows that you think the grass is greener on the other side.

Because the truth is, farm living isn’t so great for most people. The world’s poorest people are almost all farmers. 70% of people below the UN poverty line live in rural areas, even as more and more of the world’s population moves into cities. If you use a broader poverty measure, as many as 85% of the world’s poor live in rural areas.

The kind of “autonomy” that means defending your home with a shotgun is normally what we would call anarchy—it’s a society that has no governance, no security. (Of course, in the US that’s pure illusion; crime rates in general are low and falling, and lower in rural areas than urban areas. But in some parts of the world, that anarchy is very real.) One of the central goals of global economic development is to get people away from subsistence farming into far more efficient manufacturing and service jobs.

At least in the US, farm life is a lot better than it used to be, now that agricultural technology has improved so that one farmer can now do the work of hundreds. Despite increased population and increased food consumption per person, the number of farmers in the US is now the smallest it has been since before the Civil War. The share of employment devoted to agriculture has fallen from over 80% in 1800 to under 2% today. Even just since the 1960s labor productivity of US farms has more than tripled.

But the reason that some 80% of Americans have chosen to live in cities—and yes, I can clearly say “chosen”, because cities are more expensive and therefore urban living is a voluntary activity. Most people who live in the city right now could move to the country if we really wanted to. We choose not to, because we know our life would be worse if we did.

Indeed, I dare say that a lot of the hatred of city-dwellers has got to be envy. Our (median) incomes are higher and our (mean) lifespans are longer. Fewer of our children are in poverty. Life is better here—we know it, and deep down, they know it too.

We also have better Internet access, unsurprisingly—though rural areas are only a few years behind, and the technology improves so rapidly that twice as many rural homes in the US have Internet access than urban homes did in 1998.

Now, a rational solution to this problem would be either to improve the lives of people in rural areas or else move everyone to urban areas—and both of those things have been happening, not only in the US but around the world. But in order to do that, you need to be willing to change things. You have to give up the illusion that farm life is some wonderful thing we should all be emulating, rather than the necessary toil that humanity was forced to go through for centuries until civilization could advance beyond it. You have to be willing to replace farmers with robots, so that people who would have been farmers can go do something better with their lives. You need to give up the illusion that there is something noble or honorable about hard labor on a farm—indeed, you need to give up the illusion that there is anything noble or honorable about hard work in general. Work is not a benefit; work is a cost. Work is what we do because we have to—and when we no longer have to do it, we should stop. Wanting to escape toil and suffering doesn’t make you lazy or selfish—it makes you rational.

We could surely be more welcoming—but cities are obviously more welcoming to newcomers than rural areas are. Our housing is too expensive, but that’s in part because so many people want to live here—supply hasn’t been able to keep up with demand.

I may seem to be presenting this issue as one-sided; don’t urban people devalue rural people too? Sometimes. Insults like “hick” and “yokel” and “redneck” do of course exist. But I’ve never heard anyone from a city seriously argue that people who live in rural areas should have votes that systematically count for less than those of people who live in cities—yet the reverse is literally what people are saying when they defend the Electoral College. If you honestly think that the Electoral College deserves to exist in anything like its present form, you must believe that some Americans are worth more than others, and the people who are worth more are almost all in rural areas while the people who are worth less are almost all in urban areas.

No, National Review, the Electoral College doesn’t “save” America from California’s imperial power; it gives imperial power to a handful of swing states. The only reason California would be more important than any other state is that more Americans live here. Indeed, a lot of Republicans in California are disenfranchised, because they know that their votes will never overcome the overwhelming Democratic majority for the state as a whole and the system is winner-takes-all. Indeed, about 30% of California votes Republican (well, not in the last election, because that was Trump—Orange County went Democrat for the first time in decades), so the number of disenfranchised Republicans alone in California is larger than the population of Michigan, which in turn is larger than the population of Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, West Virginia, and Kansas combined. Indeed, there are more people in California than there are in Canada. So yeah, I’m thinking maybe we should get a lot of votes?

But it’s easy for you to drum up fear over “imperial rule” by California in particular, because we’re so liberal—and so urban, indeed an astonishing 95% urban, the most of any US state (or frankly probably any major regional entity on the planet Earth! To beat that you have to be something like Singapore, which literally just is a single city).

In fact, while insults thrown at urban people get thrown at basically all of us regardless of what we do, most of the insults that are thrown at rural people are mainly thrown at uneducated rural people. (And statistically, while many people in rural areas are educated and many people in urban areas are not, there’s definitely a positive correlation between urbanization and education.) It’s still unfair in many ways, not least because education isn’t entirely a choice, not in a society where tuition at an average private university costs more than the median individual income. Many of the people we mock as being stupid were really just born poor. It may not be their fault, but they can’t believe that the Earth is only 10,000 years old and not have some substantial failings in their education. I still don’t think mockery is the right answer; it’s really kicking them while they’re down. But clearly there is something wrong with our society when 40% of people believe something so obviously ludicrous—and those beliefs are very much concentrated in the same Southern states that have the most rural populations. “They think we’re ignorant just because we believe that God made the Earth 6,000 years ago!” I mean… yes? I’m gonna have to own up to that one, I guess. I do in fact think that people who believe things that were disproven centuries ago are ignorant.

So really this issue is one-sided. We who live in cities are being systematically degraded and disenfranchised, and when we challenge that system we are accused of being selfish or elitist or worse. We are told that our lifestyles are inferior and shameful, and when we speak out about the positive qualities of our lives—our education, our acceptance of diversity, our flexibility in the face of change—we are again accused of elitism and condescension.

We could simply stew in that resentment. But we can do better. We can reach out to people in rural areas, show them not just that our lives are better—as I said, they already know this—but that they can have these lives too. And we can make policy so that this really can happen for people. Envy doesn’t automatically lead to resentment; that only happens when combined with a lack of mobility. The way urban people pine for the countryside is baffling, since we could go there any time; but the way that country people long for the city is perfectly understandable, as our lives really are better but our rent is too high for them to afford. We need to bring that rent down, not just for the people already living in cities, but also for the people who want to but can’t.

And of course we don’t want to move everyone to cities, either. Many people won’t want to live in cities, and we need a certain population of farmers to make our food after all. We can work to improve infrastructure in rural areas—particularly when it comes to hospitals, which are a basic necessity that is increasingly underfunded. We shouldn’t stop using cost-effectiveness calculations, but we need to compare against the right things. If that hospital isn’t worth building, it should be because there’s another, better hospital we could make for the same amount or cheaper—not because we think that this town doesn’t deserve to have a hospital. We can expand our public transit systems over a wider area, and improve their transit speeds so that people can more easily travel to the city from further away.

We should seriously face up to the costs that free trade has imposed upon many rural areas. We can’t give up on free trade—but that doesn’t mean we need to keep our trade policy exactly as it is. We can do more to ensure that multinational corporations don’t have overwhelming bargaining power against workers and small businesses. We can establish a tax system that would redistribute more of the gains from free trade to the people and places most hurt by the transition. Right now, poor people in the US are often the most fiercely opposed to redistribution of wealth, because somehow they perceive that wealth will be redistributed from them when it would in fact be redistributed to them. They are in a scarcity mindset, their whole worldview shaped by the fact that they struggle to get by. They see every change as a threat, every stranger as an enemy.

Somehow we need to fight that mindset, get them to see that there are many positive changes that can be made, many things that we can achieve together that none of us could achieve along.