The main draw of cities is higher wages and greater social activity, but these are things that are decreasingly necessary to do in person, especially as VR adoption increases. As it becomes more possible to work and socialize online/in VR the incentives could shift so that it makes more sense for people to work online in high paying information worker jobs but paired with the low cost of living out in the countryside.
If this is the case it would be an interesting reversal of the current historical trend towards greater centralization, but this kind of decentralization wouldn't be unprecedented. I think you greatly overstate the extent to which rural America is doomed. If anything, it would seem that as economic opportunities become more evenly distributed over the globe due to the proliferation of information technology that people would come to prefer living rurally, especially since evidence suggests that people living in rural areas are happier on average[1].
[1] http://www.citylab.com/housing/2016/06/the-price-of-happines...
But I'd at least like to see some people in the cities say 'we honestly don't care about rural people and they need to adapt'. That would sit better with me.
Not necessarily. It might be possible and even desirable to slow some aspects of it down, but not wind the clock in reverse.
> But I'd at least like to see some people in the cities say 'we honestly don't care about rural people and they need to adapt'.
It's not a matter of not caring about rural people (or urban people who have been surviving off industries that are on the way out, or that once survived off industries that are gone that they wish would come back); caring about the people demands dealing with them honestly and doing the things that can mitigate harms to them from the transition, not trying to pretend that the world is going to rewind to some past state for them.
I hung out with plenty of 1%er conservatives (rural Connecticut hedge fund) and plenty of progressives (in my neighborhood in Brooklyn.) I rarely saw any empathy amongst wealthy, elite sub-urbanite hedge fund crowds.
As for quick-fixes, the only quick fix I've seen so far is one that will come at a huge cost -- deregulating environmental controls. I agree this will seriously increase rural job opportunities, but it will come at a long-term cost as those factories dump chemicals into local areas. Now that the EPA is being gutted, I can see that happening.
Nope, Nope, Nope.
See: 1970's, burning rivers, toxic smog, many "Superfund sites" that STILL haven't been cleaned up.
http://americandecadesboyle.wikispaces.com/Environmentalism+...
Not sure if fracking is an environmental issue, but a study says it is.
http://www.newsweek.com/fracking-wells-tainting-drinking-wat...
Being highly educated does not matter if you can't get a job. Also, a balanced economy shouldn't require everyone to be highly educated.
What a willful misunderstanding of the other position.
If someone said to you, while commiserating over some kind of economic hardship you were experiencing, that you ought to move into their town or even live on their street, would that seem to you equivalent to their saying that they "honestly don't care about" you?
There is none. The entire history of civilization is a shift of economic activity from outside of cities to cities, and, in terms of long term trends, is unlikely that ever changes in the foreseeable future.
"Rural America" can't, really, have it's fortunes reversed any more than obsolete industries in urban America can; all that can be done in either case is to help people transition out of them. That's perhaps not the answer people want to hear, but anyone saying anything else is lying to exploit their pain and probably facilitating their destruction.