Re:Suicides in Rural America Increased More Than 40% in 16 Y...
by ryandrake on Sunday March 19, 2017 @02:31PM
(#13908797)
Careful what you wish for. If your job can be done from Nowheresville, Kansas, it can be done from India. My guess is that remote work will bypass rural USA.
Re:Suicides in Rural America Increased More Than 40% in 16 Y...
by loeg on Sunday March 19, 2017 @02:35PM
(#13908815)
Timezones still matter. It is a big pain to work with teams in a timezone 12 hours away.
Re:Suicides in Rural America Increased More Than 40% in 16 Y...
by closeparen on Sunday March 19, 2017 @06:23PM
(#13910029)
People in low COL countries can be paid enough to work 3rd shift for much less than the cost differential between a 3rd world slum and a Nowheresville KS house.
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...