Rural Dark Ages, And The Cities’ r-selected Renaissance

Rural America is suffering:

At the corner where East North Street meets North Cherry Street in the small Ohio town of Kenton, the Immaculate Conception Church keeps a handwritten record of major ceremonies. Over the last decade, according to these sacramental registries, the church has held twice as many funerals as baptisms.

In tiny communities like Kenton, an unprecedented shift is under way. Federal and other data show that in 2013, in the majority of sparsely populated U.S. counties, more people died than were born — the first time that’s happened since the dawn of universal birth registration in the 1930s.

For more than a century, rural towns sustained themselves, and often thrived, through a mix of agriculture and light manufacturing. Until recently, programs funded by counties and townships, combined with the charitable efforts of churches and community groups, provided a viable social safety net in lean times.

Starting in the 1980s, the nation’s basket cases were its urban areas — where a toxic stew of crime, drugs and suburban flight conspired to make large cities the slowest-growing and most troubled places.

Today, however, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows that by many key measures of socioeconomic well-being, those charts have flipped. In terms of poverty, college attainment, teenage births, divorce, death rates from heart disease and cancer, reliance on federal disability insurance and male labor-force participation, rural counties now rank the worst among the four major U.S. population groupings (the others are big cities, suburbs and medium or small metro areas).

In fact, the total rural population — accounting for births, deaths and migration — has declined for five straight years…

Gutted neighborhoods and the loss of jobs and taxpayers contributed to a socioeconomic collapse. From the 1980s into the mid-1990s, the data show, America’s big cities had the highest concentration of divorced people and the highest rates of teenage births and deaths from cardiovascular disease and cancer. “The whole narrative was ‘the urban crisis,'” said Henry Cisneros, who was Bill Clinton’s secretary of housing and urban development.

One thing I have noticed is that as things turn r, the free resources are spent more haphazardly. As a result, whereas in K-selection people spent resources carefully based upon quality and utility of the product in pursuit of a tangible goal, in r-selection people spend their money based upon things like does Kim Kardashian endorse it?

As a result, I see a shift toward an economy based upon the accrual of social status, and the production of cheap and less important products, marketed to less discriminating buyers through the use of the accrued social capital. This favors cities.

I mean, ask yourself, how many products are actually manufactured in cities? It would seem from a national perspective, cities are more about organization, records processing, financial activities, business connections, advertising, media, legal, and so on. But from a national perspective, they aren’t actually making anything and shipping it out in large quantities. Look around your house at the tangible goods, and ask yourself how many of those items were shipped to you from where they were made, in a major American city? TV’s? Cars? Coffeemakers? Phones? Furniture?

Ask why they aren’t made there, and people will say because it is too expensive. But that is the stuff which you buy. So when you buy it, the city is draining off excess resources along the way, tacking it onto the prices, for things like advertising, or banking, which though they guide your purchase, you never see. In a way, the cities are kind of like leeches, attached to the neck of the economy, draining off resources for services you never notice.

One aspect about K-selection is it is minimalist. When resources are extremely shy, the buying motive shifts, and as it does, so does the buying decision. Suddenly, if there is one cheap product, which costs a little more because part of its cost goes to Kim K’s $25 million dollar a year salary for endorsing things, and there is another cheap product which is a little cheaper because it isn’t advertised by Kim K, and there is a third product which costs as much as the first but it is better made, but doesn’t advertise beyond its obvious quality, the product which won’t sell is the Kim K endorsed one. Likewise I expect companies to begin skimping on legal, advertising, and cutting things like diversity staff, as a way to compete.

Think about how that would affect the cities, as all those services you never see are removed from the price, or re-added into the product in the form of quality, in an effort to compete. Now go back and ask yourself what did the cities look like back in 1980 after Carter had worked his magic? What did the rural areas look like? What did the cities look like in the economic downturn around 1990? What did the rural areas look like? What did the cities look like in the mid eighties, as the first national debt surge from Reagan kicked in, and Gordon Gekko said, “Greed is good!”? What do cities look like today in the age of Obama phones, and free heathcare, and zip cars for the poor, and so on?

It is all sort of reminiscent of the quote about r and K-selection, where r is about quantity, while K is about quality. Here I would just add in that r is also about the ephemeral social, while K is about the end result of success.

Way back I had an old freezer handed down by relatives. It was many decades old, but it never had a hiccup, without so much as a wipe down, and was a great deep freeze that kept everything so cold it would last forever. In contrast a new top-line freezer from a very well respected name had no end of minor problems which had to be dealt with constantly, beginning a year after it was bought. One item was made during K-selection, the other was made during r-selection. We hear about this all the time, with people complaining that the stuff made in the fifties lasted forever, while the cheap Chinese crap today falls apart after a year.

They key is, we have not made a one-way trip to poor-quality that our species will never recover from. Some day in the future, we will make quality, long-lasting products again. All that is required is that something has to change in our species – we need to go K again.

When we do, expect the Apocalypse to devastate the cities again, and watch for the rural renaissance – at least relative to what the cities will be seeing.

Spread r/K Theory, because we need quality over quantity in our political theories