They would be an extreme disadvatantage. Now I don't disagree that that may be a solution, but seriously take a step back. Ask yourself if you think you just said is empathatic towards people in rural America?

Ask yourself if you had said that about other issues in America. 'Why can't black people just start learning how to code to catch up?' 'Why can't gays just get over not being able to be officially married?'

Basically what you're saying is 'why cant people that aren't me adapt to how I operate?'

I don't have to imagine it. There are 8 cities between my great-grandfather and me.

- Russia (we don't know what city), where my great-grandfather was born.

- St. Louis, where my great-grandfather settled as a refugee from the pogroms (he was Jewish).

- Chicago, where my great-grandfather relocated for work and my grandfather did undergrad->PhD.

- Seattle, where my grandfather moved after graduation and met my grandmother from Ottawa.

- Lawrence, KS., where my grandfather got his faculty job and where my parents met.

- Rochester, NY. where my parents moved after college.

- Milwaukee, WI. because the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle was written during the evenings and delivered in the afternoon, while the Milwaukee Journal was written during the business day and delivered the following morning. My dad was a journalist and my mom was a teacher (they have both changed careers now) and they wanted to have dinner together.

- Chicago again, where I went to college.

- Berkeley, CA. where I now live for my software engineering job in San Francisco.

My family is privileged in many ways (white skin, tradition of going to college, supportive households, etc). But no one in my family's history has had the incredible privilege of being born in a place that remains suitable for an entire lifetime, much less multiple generations of lifetimes. I cannot even comprehend what it would be like to be born in a place I could stay in forever while having a decent career. That must be nice if you can get it.

In terms of public policy, I'd consider that kind of luxury to be on par with owning a vacation home. Yeah, it'd be nice if everyone could have that, but there are much more pressing problems to solve.

Now imagine telling a corporation that 'you must build your factory only in City X' -- why should they? They will build where they find space at good rents and an industrial ecosystem and workers.

What if the factory owner lives in California. So he has to move his life across the country and build in New Hampshire because a rural worker in New Hampshire didn't want to move themselves? How does this make sense?

Viewed by the capitalist system, these communities are useless. People hate feeling useless, even if you give them everything they need to live (the Democrat's solution)

So, how do you make economically irrelevant communities viable?

I have no idea.

The basic income movement beneath a lot of this is meant to, over generations, migrate the culture from one where your work defines your value as a human being to one where you are valued for your non-monetary contributions to society as well.

We will have to do these things due to climate change anyway (create policies to handle migration) if the Agricultural Revolution is to ultimately win over Nomadism, we may as well figure out things that work here and now.

There are plenty of English reading/writing/speaking people in India capable of remote work.

I don't run a factory, but I am a full-time co-founder of a startup. There is no way I'd move our NYC-based operation to some rural area, there is little to no specialized technical community outside the major cities. For example, would I be able to attend weekly Machine Learning meetups in West Virginia? Would I be able to have lunch regularly with VCs in Ohio? I've been overseas doing a parallel medical trial, in a big city, and still it is very difficult to operate here. The depth of community just doesn't exist.

I realize a tech startup isn't a perfect example, but I imagine some of the same concerns would be applicable to factory owners. It is simply not realistic to assume that employers (who already don't have trouble finding talent) should move to where workers are, rather than the opposite.

Yes. There is a fantastic, burgeoning startup community in Ohio. One that seems to be getting traction is Root, an really innovative insurance company (I'm not affiliated with Root).

Reality doesn't really care about consideration.

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world's altar-stairs

That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

-Tennyson

It's not a matter of empathy. There are laws of economics at play. The free market chooses the most competitive products and the most competitive products are made in economic centers. Capitalism favors cities. These economic forces are forces of nature, and opposing them is like opposing the laws of physics.

Now, the government can step in to pump money into rural areas in various ways (direct investment, tax credits, etc.), to make their products more competitive. But that's unsustainable, and once you turn on the spigot you can't turn it off without hurting people even more. You want to know what it looks like when the government makes a determination on which areas are going to make which things, market competition be damned, for social reasons? It looks like the Soviet Union.

We live in some very weird times if Republicans are getting elected to promote Soviet economic policy in America.

Also the overall standard of living is lower in cities than in rural areas for non-1% job categories. You'll make maybe 10% more money while paying 20% more and living in higher crime and worse conditions as a welder, for example.

Its not even clear for "computer people" that the overall standard of living is better in a city. We all know there's only one politically correct thing to say about urbanism, but there's a difference between being required to say under social duress vs actually is.

I'm not sure what this means, can you expand on this?

I agree that people should move, but circumstances are different today.

I'd love to see more sociology and economic research in how towns die and recover. Tons of money studies urban poverty and decay, and I suspect rural poverty and decay doesn't get nearly the same attention because it's out of sight and out of mind for those funding the research.

Transportation is easier - but lets face it, it takes money to move now just like it took money to move back then. This is the entire reason we can't expect folks to just be able to move. There aren't jobs coming back, so they have no income. If they are lucky, they make minimum wage. And to make more money, they have to save up first month's rent, deposit, utility deposits, plus the actual moving expenses. All this for a city likely to be more expensive than their rural location. It isn't much wonder why folks aren't moving more often.

Sure, one could find work in the nearest town, but that takes commute money. If one has a friend they can live with, that helps, but many don't.

Sanford Health is particularly noticeable - there are multiple hospitals and research centers there or under construction.

I believe the banking is mostly credit card companies and cheque printing.

It's got a surprising number of amenities for a small city and if you can stand the location and politics it's got relatively high wages and low cost of living.

Sioux Falls is actually a pretty nice town. SD is a bit strange because the capital of the state is such a small town. SD also has no state income taxes for individuals or businesses.

Trump is right to identify insufficient aggregate demand as the cause of unemployment in the midwest and underemployment pretty much everywhere. The culprit is much more China than Mexico. If the administration can significantly reduce the trade deficit it will have very positive effects on US employment and income.

You can accomplish far more today with the advances in robotics and logistics than you could 30 or even 20 years ago.

This is an example of a brewery working at full capacity with a total of 6 people per shift. If this brewery was operated 35 years ago it would be 600 people per shift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tLim5pkfOw

So how exactly are you going to stop these owners of capital that are so rightfully praised in the United States? You have entire cities that will offer free electricity, massive tax incentives, and looser regulations for what? A couple hundred jobs? What about the tens of thousands of people that are out of work? Are we really going to subsidize hundreds of thousands of tax dollars for jobs that barely pay $15/hour?

I don't know what the solution is but I do know it will require massive amounts of tax dollars and it won't be the poor paying it.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/upshot/the-long-term-jobs...

Edited to recognize the open debate on illegal immigration. I don't understand how illegal immigration could lead to a better job outlook for the lower class. If anyone has some info on that, I'd appreciate it.

This seems a bit counter-intuitive to me, could you point me to any research?

Without them, we'd have fewer workers competing for jobs, which seems like a good thing, but we'd also have fewer jobs to go around because of decreased consumption.

Unfortunately, the problem is not about keeping any particular job so much as keeping the American economy vibrant enough to create new jobs as the old ones disappear. This requires the economy to operate at full employment, which requires adequate aggregate demand, which requires... well... there's your problem with the massive trade deficit and Chinese protectionism. Put more simply, if the Chinese were purchasing as much from the United States as they were selling into it, there would be a lot more job opportunities in the industries selling to China. Those would drive up wages and create competition to hire those newly unemployed.

Incidentally, it is worth remarking on the fact that China is going through the same pattern of automation and labor dislocation as the United States. The country also has an endemic problem with rent-capture and corruption that works against an efficient private sector. Despite this, the economy is doing much better at job creation largely because of the country's mercantilism: its politically engineered trade surplus ensures adequate demand in the southern export-oriented parts of the economy, while state control of the financial sector serves to redistributes gains from trade to the SOE sector etc.

Factories were built where it was cheap or where the founders decided, but to be fair, as close to people as possible.

If people are willing to schlep they have the opportunity to feel purpose and a sense of accomplishment, but if they're going to sit idle and/or get wasted, that's the surest path to rusty irrelevancy. Folks need to bootstrap themselves and find/invent useful contribution to society that can turn a profit, rather than expecting someone to show up and hand it to them.

http://mikerowe.com/2016/02/stopignoringskillsgap/