Quick Note: Rural Drivers Aren’t Being Oppressed
A new paper is making the round arguing that Spanish rural automobility is a response to peripheralization. It’s a mix of saying what is obvious – in rural areas there is no public transportation and therefore cars are required for basic mobility – and proposing this as a way of dealing with the general marginalization of people in rural areas. The more obvious parts are not so much wrong as underdeveloped – the paper is an ethnography of rural drivers who say they need to drive to get to work and to non-work destinations like child care. But then the parts talking about peripheralization are within a program of normalizing rural violence against the state and against urban dwellers, and deserves a certain degree of pushback.
The issue here is that while rural areas are poorer than urban ones, making them economically more peripheral, they are not at all socially peripheral. This can be seen in a number of both economic and non-economic issues:
- Rural areas are showered with place-based subsidies to deal with poverty, on top of the usual universal programs (like health care and pensions) that redistribute money from rich to poor regardless of location. This includes farm subsidies, like the Common Agricultural Policy, and infrastructure subsidies in which there’s more investment relative to usage in rural than in urban areas. The automobility of rural areas is itself part of this program: urban motorways can fund themselves from tolls where they need to, but national programs of road improvements end up improving the mobility options of rural areas out of almost exclusively urban taxes. In public transport, this includes considerable political entitlement, such as when Spanish regional governors made a botched train procurement into a national scandal and demanded that the chief of staff of the national transport ministry, Isabel Pardo de Vera Posada, resign over something she’d had nothing to do with.
- Rural poverty is culturally viewed as the fault of other people than the residents. Poor urban neighborhoods are called no-go zones; I am not familiar enough with Spanish discourse on this but I doubt it’s different from French, German, and Swedish discourses, in which poor rural areas are never so called. A German district with neo-Nazi groups and majority public sympathy with extremism is called a victim of globalization in media, even left-leaning media, and not a no-go zone.
- Rural areas, regardless of income, are socially treated as more authentic representatives of proper values, with expressions like Deep England or La France profonde contrasting with constant scorn for London, Paris, and Berlin.
- Rural violence is treated as almost respectable. Political and media reactions to farmer riots with tractors as of late have been to shower the rioters with understanding. In France, the government acceded to the demands, and then-minister of the interior Gérald Darmanin forced law enforcement to act with restraint. In contrast, urban riots by racial minorities lead to mass arrests, the occasional fatal shooting of a rioter, and a discourse that treats riots as fundamentally illegitimate, for example just a few months prior.
The paper denigrates rural policies formed with “barely any understanding of how they are conditioned” and says that “an understanding of socio-spatial cohesion needs to look beyond the traditional objectives of equalizing agricultural incomes to consider how these accessibility gaps affect depopulation, young people’s skills, unemployment and low incomes.” But the issue isn’t understanding. Rural areas are not misunderstood. They are dominant, capable of steering specific subsidies their way that are not available to urbanites at equal income levels.
More broadly, I think it’s difficult for critical urbanism to deal with this issue of the permission structure for rural violence, because the urban-rural dynamic is not the same as the classical dynamic between social classes, or between white and black Americans, in which the socioeconomically dominant group is also the politically dominant one. It’s instead better to analogize it in ethnic terms not to American anti-black racism, or to European anti-immigrant racism, but to anti-Semitism, in which the social acceptance of a base level of violence coexists with the fact that Jews are often a more educated and richer group, leading anti-Semites to promulgate conspiracy theories.
The permission structure for rural drivers to commit violence in demand of government subsidies and government protection from competition is the exact opposite of peripheralization. It’s not a periphery; it’s a political and cultural center that faces a fundamental challenge in that it provides no economic or social value and is in effect a rapacious mafia using violence to extract protection money from an urban society that, due to misplaced sentimental values, responds with further subventions rather than with the full force of law as used against urban and suburban rioters with migration background.
Pedestrian Observations 
The EU too partially acceeded to the farmer protesters’ demands, by removing a mention of a reduction in farming carbon emissions from the sustainable growth plan: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-eases-farming-demands-in-2040-climate-proposal/
The preferential treatment farmer protesters get is clear from the fact they were allowed to blackade a major road for the whole day despite only numbering ~1000. The pro-Ukraine with 3000 people could only take side streets.
Or the favourable treatment given to the “sport” of hunting foxes with horses and hounds – supposed to be illegal in the UK, but they’re still largely tolerated in their local areas, despite a level of organised criminality and violence which most urban drug dealers can only aspire to. Ditto gamekeeping, and the practice of illegally killing birds of prey and wild mammals. Blatantly criminal, and it’s well known who’s doing it, but they’re treated as above the law – holding them properly accountable would be “too disruptive to the social order” or some such.
Lets be clear that Gamekeeping is class based privilege.
I am sure the current Labour government will eventually entirely ban fox hunting as the hunts have shown they are completely incapable of following the current laws.
In France there are regular stories of accidental shootings of joggers but gotta protect those hunter rights.
@Diego
Except that it appears it has happened once, ten years ago. Over the past 30 years it also appears to have happened once in Norway and twice in the Eastern US. This is by no means exhaustive research, but I’m not sure “regular stories” applies.
I’m sorry about your research skills, but it literally took me 1 min to find this news about a killing 2 years ago: https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/auvergne-rhone-alpes/cantal/aurillac/randonneuse-tuee-par-une-chasseuse-dans-le-cantal-un-an-de-prison-avec-sursis-pour-la-jeune-tireuse-3043114.html
It’s not even the one I remembered from the far south of the country.
If we want hard numbers, this articles from Le Monde claims 421 deaths in hunting accidents in France over 22 years.
Sorry here’s the link: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2022/02/20/une-randonneuse-de-25-ans-tuee-par-un-tir-de-chasse-dans-le-cantal_6114479_3224.html
May I note they are also politically subsidized? It you wanted to represent particularities of territories, the electoral division would be done my Autonomous Community, but instead it’s done at the smaller Provincia level. As explained in an article that summarizes it better than I would:
https://frdelpino.es/en_gb/conference/spain-and-the-politics-of-blocks-electoral-marasmus-and-its-socio-economic-effects/
Farmers are very very poorly paid given how hard they work, how important their work is, and how much risk as business owners they take. They make like 1p on a loaf of bread. That’s tiny.
So why don’t they quit their badly paid job and go and get a better paid one?
Nobody is stopping them from voting with their feet like they tell almost anybody else who has been displaced by automation…
We would be absolutely completely fucked if they did.
So thank god they don’t.
Why? We’d import a bit more food, prices would go up a bit and then they wouldn’t be so badly paid.
THere are lots of experienced farmers who would love to take over for farmers who want to go do something else. Mostly Central Americans but I’m sure there are quite a few on the Subcontinent who would jump at the chance for North Dakota winters.
farmers in North Dakota are making a very nice income and there are plenty who want to farm there who can’t find land. You can’t make money in farming if you don’t have a lot of land though, and the EU has generally blocked consolidation. The EU also has blocked a lot of farming advances (GMO), and pushed things that are bad (organic – which is falsely sold as universally better for the environment than “chemicals”).
@henry depends on what you want to maximise I think. Like yeah in a war organic and definitely anti-GMO are bad for national security reasons.
Outside that surely if organic farming is more profitable which is what I would expect then I think that has to be a good thing – especially if it leaves the land in a better shape.
With consolidation I am not sure, but clearly a smaller farm will make less money for sure. I do think in general I agree on GMOs though.
Organic doesn’t leave the soil in better shape. Scientific research has been done on how to improve soil and organic doesn’t allow those practices. If you till the soil to eliminate weeds because “chemicals” are not allowed you have made both the soil and the air much worse even though you are organic. some of the organic chemicals are more poisonous than the not allowed substitutes. I’m not saying conventional farming is good – I’m saying that we need real science here, not propaganda that isn’t backed by science.
Organic might or might not be more profitable. It depends on what you are growing and your market. Sometimes it is more, sometimes it is less.
The big issue with organic farming is that the yields are so much less. Modern fertilizers allow for more productivity per acre, while modern pesticides greatly reduce loss and spoilage. Quite frankly based on USDA statistics of food produced per acre the world would face mass starvation if every farm went organic. As @henrymiller notes there is some beneficial middle ground here. Allowing organic farmers to use copper products to control weeds because “they are traditional from the 1800s” is awful, it’s literal heavy metal poisoning. On the other hand some modern pesticides are terrible and could probably be replaced by natural control methods. Plenty of non-organic farmers till the soil too, so no-till methods are universally applicable.
Onux, the Nazi “Generalplan Ost” plan to conquer and depopulate Eastern Europe was heavily influenced by their agricultural minister Richard Walther Darré, who was an ardent believer in organic farming.
For starters importing more food has national security implications.
Also farming aside are we really arguing that the TGV couldn’t serve destinations outside Paris better by running a British service level on the existing infrastructure?
No, we’re not, but remember that the rurbaine rioters don’t think much of the TGV and block roads and throw rocks whenever the state undertakes anything to restrain their car use, whether it’s a speed limit or a tax on diesel.
Alon, the TGV is basically unusable unless you want to go to/from Paris with laughable sub-Glasgow to Fort William service levels on many non-Paris routes.
If you want an Asian example of decent rural service what about Taiwan’s east coast.
There are 7 fast services a day from Hualien to Kaohsiung for example – and the only real disappointment is that the 8:30am departure from Hualien doesn’t connect properly at Taitung and/or continue through.
At least in Germany, the concept of no-go zones originally was one promoted by the neo-Nazis themselves. Some small cities and rural areas in east Germany had a reputation for being “National Befreite Zonen” or “No-Go Areas” for foreign-coded or left-wing people. See e.g. https://newrepublic.com/article/171675/surviving-germanys-neo-nazi-resurgence
Yes, and my GM, who lives in Cottbus, says landlords there give white Germans discounts on rent in order to keep them in the building so that they can avoid renting to immigrants.
I understand a large landlording corporation would have two separate line items for the (fixed) rent proper and the (highly variable) insurance for business difficulties with the customer (including “staff time spent on them”). This would be the case whether the latter is derived from a separate company or an internal underwriter. Small landlords would naturally merge the two, which looks like a discount to more legible/trusted customers.
I understand that, while it’s a pretty universal phenomenon, the 19th c. US is particularly famous for the operation of this principle creating geographically clustered business networks. With landlords giving discounts to more recent immigrants sharing the same “old country” as them. They (unlike everyone else) had decent legibility into them, thus were willing to underwrite the implicit insurance for cheaper than anyone else would have been.
I’m not European, but I thought that ‘no-go zones’ was not a reference to poverty but to places where the police could not maintain a presence/the government did not have de facto control. Like Rinkeby in Sweden where the police station was ruined by rioting and then they couldn’t get a contractor to rebuild it because of threats against the workers.
Onux, your understanding of no-go zones is correct. They are zones where the authorities (police, fire brigades) are not welcome but otherwise welcoming if you are a client looking for illegal drugs.
Farmers or other protected categories like railroad workers get some slack when their protests cross legal boundaries because they are part of the system. Uninsured, unlicensed drivers who refuse to stop at the police request act as if legal authorities are illegitimate, and are on their own. The urban riots Alon mentioned were not protests about specific policies or poverty but against policing in general. They are self-limiting because they lack support. In the no-go zones, most of the population is law-abiding and would like more police presence while the gangs who prevent regular policing see the income from retail drug distribution drop when there are riots.
Riots happen. The police/government lose control for a few hours, perhaps even days. The no go zones the right wing media screeches about are phantasmagorical places where they aren’t allowed to go. City versions of gated suburbs.
The situation is Rinkeby was not a riot that lasted a few hours. There were multiple riots in 2010 and 2014 that forced the police station to close. When the Swedish police tried to get the police station rebuilt, they couldn’t find a contractor to bid on the job because they received threats from the local gangs. Work eventually started in 2018 – at which point a car was used to break down the gate and then set alight to try and stop work. The new station eventually opened in 2020. So depending on how you look at it the Swedish government had no control for 6 to 10 years. This isn’t some right wing fever dream, the Rinkeby saga has been well documented.
I don’t give a shit that you are pisssing your pants. Wikipedia says the 2010 riot was on June 8 and 9th. I suspect and don’t care – I’ve avoided riots myself – that it was hours and hours from the evening of the 9th to the morning of the 10th. Wikipedia also says it was “up to 100 youths”. Obiviously the end of western civilization.
And that it was dozens and dozens of them in 2014. It was a regular ol’ everyday rioting not the end of western civilization.
Being unable to open a police station for six years because you can’t get anyone to work at the jobsite because of threats of violence is not regular everyday rioting. Regular everyday rioting is “The police/government lose control for a few hours” (source: you, two comments above). In Rinkeby the police lost control for the better part of a decade. They might still not have control, recent articles about the police station refer to employees having to be escorted in and out each shift in a police convoy, like it was some isolated American base in Iraq. It is apparently not safe for police department employees to commute there themselves individually.
Where have I said I was personally scared? Where have I claimed the end of Western Civilization? Alon said no-go zones were purely applied to urban areas based on poverty. I am providing an example where government officials literally could not go due to neighborhood violence concentrated on the police as evidence “no-go zones” are based on different criteria.
@ Onux and Adirondacker. Rinkeby may be an extreme but the issue is diffuse. The first arrests for drug offenses I was aware of regarded two friends who one day hitchhiked their way into The Netherlands. They were streetwise, good looking and decent footballers. They got lucky, stayed at their girlfriends homes, found a football team and spent a few merry months over there. They eventually came back to our high school in a small town of 25000 in the middle of agricultural land with some cannabis for personal consumption. They were not discreet about it and it was taken away when they got arrested. Fifty years later, one does not need to travel to get some weed. The local market place has some of the features of Rinkeby, namely a gang of immigrant origin who does not like to be disturbed. The last time the police made an arrest, two young members of the gang burned to the ground a new concert hall in another part of town. The next municipal election was centered about the topic. The team favoring a laisser-faire approach was re-elected.
To come back on the topic of “rural drivers being oppressed” I think Alon was mistaken in thinking that they get a pass while urban rioters are dealt with severely. In the last fifty years France has cracked on bad driving habits. The driving license test is challenging. With automatic radars galore, drivers are fined and can eventually lose their licenses for the most minute over-speeding. The threshold for intoxication was lowered and barrages are often set up in places where drunk drivers are most likely to be found. Cars must pass a severe safety and pollution inspection every two years. If you play by the rules you are hit by high taxes and the government leans towards micromanaging your life as seen during the pandemic. The “gilets jaunes” protest followed a switch from favoring diesel cars because of their fuel efficiency towards taking away the taxation advantage when diesel cars became so prevalent that refiners had leftover gasoline and diesel fuel shortages.
On the other hand, the justice system is doing its best to be lenient towards other types of delinquency. It seems the thinking is that delinquents are getting worse in jail, a thinking supported by the history of recent French terrorists who lead a westernized life before being convicted of some crime and becoming radicalized in prison. Minors are practically never sentenced to jail. For adults, prison sentences seem to be about 1/5th of US ones. One can collect suspended sentence after suspended sentence. Definitive prison sentences of one year or less are generally suspended sentences under another name. Unless the judge writes a “mandat de depot” the convicted felon is told to go home quietly and wait until a jail place is found, which is practically never. Illegal immigrants convicted of crime are often given an OQTF (obligation de quitter le territoire francais) asking them to leave within 30 days but less than 10% are effective because their countries don’t want them back and refuse to issue a “laisser-passer consulaire”.
For the French citizens, this divergent approach is getting hard to ignore.
I am not aware of any rural areas that are as extreme as the situation in Rinkeby in any developed country.
Swedes can edit Wikipedia too. They haven’t. Perhaps if they had sprinklers it would have helped.
As part of the George Floyd protests in 2020, Seattle activists set up CHOP (Capital Hill Organized Protest) where police were told to vacate. Protesters set fire to the police station and tried to cement the police officers inside. Streets were barricaded, with a mantra of a 50% reduction of police funding. After a couple of deaths over a month-long period, the mayor and police re-took the area. Protests continued with months of conflict with injured police, arrested protestors, fires, and vandalism.
In 1967, President LBJ (D) called in the US Army to fight US citizens on US soil to quell the Detroit riots (after the local/state police and the National Guard were unable to get things under control).
Perhaps the Seattle police decided that mowing everybody down with machine guns would have looked bad. And caused property damage.
1967 was a long hot summer. I don’t know or care how many times the National Guard has been called back to Detriot. Or any of the other places they were called to during the long hot summer. All you can keep clutching at your pearls.
Helicopters and incendiary devices were an option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_MOVE_bombing
Unrelated, but a nice column in Canada’s newspaper of record today: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-what-north-america-can-learn-from-the-greatest-transportation-system/
I feel like this is very Eurocentric? Many large countries explicitly favor urban people. For example, China’s Hukou system results in urban people getting much more welfare benefits than rural people, and rural people are socially peripheral. In Argentina, agriculture has large export taxes which is used to massively subsidize people living in the Buenos Aires metro area. I’ve heard similar things with Namibian taxation of farms being high. Even in the U.S. rural areas are sometimes net contributors due to lucrative natural resource industries. A major factor is that urban people in the capital are a much bigger threat to people in power due to proximity, so it’s more important to keep them happy. In ancient Rome, the people who lived in the city of rome got massive welfare (bread and circuses) paid for by peasants in Egypt.
Also, a lot of these “rural infrastructure subsidies” are really mostly for the sake of urban-to-urban goods transportation, where there happens to be rural people in the middle who can share the roads with trucks.
Transit people act like U.S. farmers get enormous subsidies, but in reality it’s only something like 0.1% of GDP or 10% of farm earnings.
Most people in every society used to be rural, so of course rural areas best preserve traditional culture and values. This is correct.
“no economic or social value” – generally rural areas supply most of the food, natural resources (metals, lumber, energy) and a disproportionate amount of the military. It’s fair to argue that they would still be productive without subsidies, but they clearly do provide value to society. Jobs in agriculture, fishing, logging, mining are also some of the most strenuous and dangerous jobs.
I think it’s very excessive to make an analogy of rural welfare protests/riots to anti-semitism. Also, it’s not fair to say farmers aren’t educated. U.S. farmers have similar education levels to the general U.S. population with many having university degrees.
At least according to wikipedia, the 2024 euro farmers protests resulted in 2 deaths and 3 injuries? While tragic, it doesn’t seem to resemble the scale of violence of the mafia. An EU person having 1/100 million chance of being killed or injured by a farmer isn’t going to disrupt society.
Also seriously hard to argue farmers don’t care about climate change. It is affecting them disproportionately.
They can eat whatever it is they are mining. They can make their own penicillin too. Even the meth lab someone sets up in the garage needs stuff from those awful people in big cities.
Your penicillin is probably made in in rural India.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/MYC6jUceGKUZs8ka7
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/pharmaceuticals/pm-modi-to-inaugurate-historic-penicillin-g-plant-in-andhra-pradesh-reviving-indias-antibiotic-production/articleshow/113564628.cms?from=mdr
In reality, many factories are in rural areas and have rural workers, as the land required and externalities make them less suitable for dense urban areas.
Rural does not mean “some place without a subway”.
You can look at the google maps link. The penicillin factory is surrounded by farmland in a rural area, not in a city or town.
If you had looked at the map you would have noticed a small town a short walk away. That in addition to detailed satellite views of the closely spaced houses has Streetview on the main highway.Just because someone is growing crops outside the plant parking lot doesn’t make it rural.
That is considered a rural village in India, and is consistently referred to as such on the internet. This part of India has a denser rural population, and people won’t needlessly waste rural farmland and therefore houses are closely spaced.
https://www.onefivenine.com/india/villages/East-Godavari/Thondangi/A.V.Nagaram
https://villageinfo.in/andhra-pradesh/east-godavari/thondangi/a-v-nagaram.html
It’s rural.
Rural does not mean “some place without a subway”.
Urban does not mean “every place that isn’t a swamp or forest.”
Just because someone is growing crops outside the plant parking lot doesn’t make it rural.
Right, because open fields of crops are such a hallmark of city living….
A&P used to sell Staten Island potatoes. That didn’t make Staten Island rural.
Unless the plant is autonomous or they are busing the staff in from distant places it’s not rural.
If your definition of rural is a place where people don’t live and have to be bussed in to do work then your definition is useless for any practical discussion because at that point every single human lives in an urban area by default – because if they live there it is not rural per you. An isolated farm wouldn’t be rural if the farmer lives there on a farmhouse instead of having robots do the work or commuting. The rest of us will operate in the real world where rural areas with population actually exist.
If there were large potato fields growing crops instead of housing people, then yes, that part of Staten Island was rural, back whenever that was. It is actually very normal for rural places to become urban as cities expand. The northern end of Manhattan was rural during the Revolutionary War, nothing but scattered farms and Redcoats digging entrenchments among the woods in Washington Heights.
Then that village within walking distance of the plant is a movie set? Just because some upper middle class symbol manipulator mistakes a vegetable plot for rural doesn’t make it rural.
“Villages” are rural. Urban means “city”. Your utterly useless definition of urban seems ‘you can see more than two buildings at a time’ or ‘there is a street with more than one house on it’ or something else rediculous.
Villages have legal definition in some places.
Great Neck Plaza, New York is a legally incorporated village within the town of North Hempstead. It’s not rural. North Hempstead isn’t rural and neither is Nassau County. Or New York City’s MSA or CSA. Even though there is farmland out in Suffolk County. They just had to euthanize all of the ducks at one of the last remaining duck farms. They still grow potatoes out there too. That doesn’t make Suffolk county rural. Or the town that the potato farm is in.
The link Sid post says the population is 13,566 in 3,903 houses. Big enough to be a micropolitan statistical area if it was in the U.S.. Or a moderately big suburb.
India seems to have some definition too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_in_India_by_population
13,000 people isn’t rural. Your first world symbol manipulator bias is showing. Badly. I don’t care what India thinks. You clueless symbol manipulators can continue your circle jerk of calling it rural or not or whatever you want. Whatever that plant makes it’s not going to take pack animals along the SIlk Road to get to the stalwart yeomanry of rural Germany either.
They can eat whatever it is they are mining.
Actually, they can eat whatever it is they are growing, since virtually all food is grown or raised in rural areas, as with silos, meat packing plants, etc. Rural areas would have absolutely no trouble feeding themselves if needed. It is cities/urban areas that in no way could feed themselves without food imports.
For the record, as I have mentioned elsewhere, I am against this whole urban/rural blame game or otherizing of people who live if a different environment than you. Cities provide valuable things to everyone, the countryside provides valuable things to everyone. That said, however, this has to undoubtably be the stupidest possible comment anyone could ever make in an urban/rural debate given the unquestionable dominance of rural areas in food production.
What part of “mining” got you confused? Alternately can I have your family recipe for coal? What kind of ore do you like to roast?
In the US, tax money flows from urban to rural areas. This is partly Social Security and Medicare, but also specific place-based policies:
* Farm aid, often with special subsidies for Iowa ethanol driving up food prices
* In the West, water allocation that subsidies farmers growing thirsty crops at the expense of everyone else’s water needs
* Highway construction favoring exurban and rural areas
* The welfare state that does exist being heavily gerontocratic, favoring declining places in addition to poor ones
* Military spending acting as place-based pork
Political representation favors rural areas due to the Senate and to some extent EC bias, and in New York State, it favors Upstate even intra-state as much as the courts allow (4% difference in district size); the primary calendar begins with a rural state followed by a suburban one while urban voters are shunted to rule taker role.
Then political discourse treats North Dakota wealth during the shale boom as inherently more moral than New York and California wealth, and exurban Rust Belt poverty as inherently more moral than urban poverty. Rural Americans don’t commit European levels of violence qua rural dwellers – the politically acceptable violence is mediated by party, with an attempt to raid Congress on behalf of one politician having just gotten mass pardons – but they get so much subsidization that they, like their counterparts here, need to be viewed as a culturally and politically dominant group in a tizzy over not being as economically dominant as it thinks it deserves to be.
I mean 2/5 of the items in your post are about subsidising farmers and allowing them to grow crops to feed the people cheaply and without being entirely reliant on imports which also has national security advantages.
I mean like maybe in the US highway spending benefits rural areas more – I am not sure – but also how much road construction is truly for rural areas in particular as opposed to being for people in urban areas to get to other urban areas? Also some of those roads will be about getting food to market which is obviously important for urban dwellers as well.
I only said “sometimes” in regards to the U.S.
If you add all non-SS/medicare rural favoritism (the elderly payouts are the same no matter where you live), it wouldn’t even be 1% of U.S. GDP. It’s not “so much” subsidization, and not a meaningful barrier for any urban project.
Highway construction is cheaper in rural/exurban areas and doesn’t run into nimbys. Similarly rural people are more supportive of the military. The Western water allocation issue could be easily solved with desalination plants and pipelines, the culprit is coastal urban NIMBYs who don’t want that. Farm aid isn’t anywhere near as much as people think, it’s around 0.1% of GDP at $30 billion. That’s not even 1 semiconductor factory in Arizona, or 30 km of NYC subway. Subsidies to one state for one type of use of one crop wouldn’t meaningfully drive up the price of a globally traded commodity like corn.
Rural and exurban areas have cheaper labor, land, and energy, so it’s inherently easier to do stuff there.
Elderly people have to live somewhere, and it wouldn’t make any sense to force them to move to urban areas where real estate is more expensive and better used by workers.
Transit people care a lot about places where rural people get small benefits, but don’t care at all about the injustice of the hukou system or agricultural export taxes. It’s just tribal bias against people who live in a different region and have other occupations.
“the politically acceptable violence is mediated by party” – You’re selectively ignoring left-wing political violence just like how you ignored that the damage and injuries from European urban riots was much greater than farmer’s riots (the 2 riots you referred to in your links). This is just leftist bias.
Re rural people supporting the military more: sort of. There are some NIMBYs in liberal places who use anti-militarism as a veneer for NIMBYism (just noted here), but the bulk of American military spread is a strategy by the military to create incentives for members of Congress to vote against spending cuts rather than a counter-NIMBY strategy. For example, it’s mentioned in Walter Isaacson’s article on military waste from 1983.
It doesn’t have to be like this; IDF headquarters was in the Tel Aviv CBD until recently – and the impetus for moving much of the facilities from the Kirya to the Negev has been a combination of wanting to release the land for commercial development, wanting to do more pork spending in the Negev, and, I suspect, the fact that the top generals have private helicopters and don’t care about the commute convenience of the grunts and junior officers. (In Israel, in response to high train crowding on Sunday morning as soldiers return from their homes on Saturdays to their bases, the IDF banned soldiers from commuting by train on Sunday.)
Uh, the US military headquarters is basically in the Washington DC CBD, or alternatively anchors its own CBD just on the other side of the Potomac. It’s called the Pentagon, perhaps you’ve heard of it?
US military procurement is designed to spread funding around so projects are not cut. Lockheed, Northrop and the rest know to make sure each major ship, aircraft, etc. has a sub or sub-sub contractor in at least every state and as many swing districts as possible so that everyone in Congress has incentive to not cut the program and face backlash from unemployment. But the spread of bases is almost entirely due to the need for large areas of land, which are generally found in rural areas, and more specifically the south and west. If anything basing decisions work the opposite of procurement when it comes to influence on Congress – it has long been assumed that during the cold war drawdown the Navy closed all of their bases in the Bay Area as a way to get back at local politicians like Dianne Feinstein and Ron Dellums who were very critical of the military in the 1980s.
There are rural areas, with existing military installations in blue states. The base realignment committees somehow manage to find reasons to close them. Very odd.
Israel is absolutely tiny so they have to adapt. Singapore also I am sure has urban military bases for the same reason.
The government publishes actual numbers. You don’t have to speculate, guess, ponder or otherwise get numbers wrong.
I will recap the reasons why “rural areas are subsidized by cities” is a terrible argument on both logical/factual and moral/implication grounds.
First, most of the difference in donor vs recipient states can be tied to rural areas having a higher average age, since so much government spending is in benefits such as retirement or heath care that go largely or exclusively to older people (who if retired are simultaneously not paying taxes on income they don’t have, magnifying the difference. If there are more older people in rural areas than urban areas then a subsidy is a feature not a bug, unless you feel that rural people are less deserving than urban people and should not get the deferred benefit of taxes they paid when working in a city if they later move out of it (more on this below). The facts of net taxes bears this out. The two most rural states are Maine and Vermont (by percent of population living in an rural area) and they also are in the top 5 for median age; they are among the top 13 recipient states (Maine is #8, ahead of Montana or Oklahoma). The largest recipient state is New Mexico by far, even though it is only 25% rural, because of the poverty of its large Native American population and the resulting benefits. Texas is a donor state, just like California, despite popular associations with cowboy life vs big city LA and SF, while Delaware is the largest donor state by far, not New York, because of all of the taxes paid by businesses incorporated there.
Second, many other areas of government spending disproportionately goes to rural areas because there are valid types of spending that should be assigned by area not by population. An air traffic control radar that covers Ile-de-France should cost the same to run as one that covers Landes, but simplistically this is a massive “subsidy” to rural residents because it is spending the same on 12M people around Paris as on 0.5M people in the SW – even though both areas get the same access to air travel as a result. DC, Maryland and Virginia all rate as recipient states because of how much the federal government spends in and around Washington. Pretty rural but small Iowa is a slight donor state, mostly urban but large Oregon a slight recipient. Military bases fall into this category, and not because they are “place based pork” any more than naval bases are a “coastal subsidy”. Modern warfare requires space, which is why every military base almost everywhere is in a rural area these days, not a city.
Next, as many have noted, a rising tide lifts all boats, and spending in one area isn’t necessarily only to its benefit. Farm subsidies are a subsidy to the poor everywhere, urban and rural, because without them food would be much more expensive. If you want a road from Seattle to Chicago, you are going to spend more in Montana building and maintaining it than in Illinois, but it is not to a Montana resident’s benefit when someone from Minneapolis uses it to visit a national park (another spending that validly favors rural areas for obvious reasons). Cities get their food from rural farms, rural farmers use GPS developed from research at an urban university. Natural materials and factories used to make products may be outside the city, but the engineers and marketers designing and selling those products are probably inside it.
Separately from these factual based arguments, there is a more significant moral one. Alon’s argument is essentially a bigoted one, in that he is an urbanite so he looks down on subsidies received by rural poor people because they are not like him. He makes no argument about subsidies received by poor urban areas that are even less productive than rural farmers. This is just simple prejudice, not any sort of logical argument along the line of “productive areas should not subsidize less productive ones.”
This brings up the important implication that making the argument that less productive areas should not be subsidized isn’t going to help cities if followed through to its conclusion, it is just going to help the rich. Alon thinks not paying money to rural US states means there would be more money for NY to expand the Subway, but if one makes the division at a lower than state level what it actually means is that the Upper West Side would get subway stations with marble floors and gold leaf, while the Bronx would get no subway at all. The very poor areas of the Bronx (and South Chicago, S. Central LA, etc.) get a far greater tax subsidy than rural states do. Alon’s argument in this way isn’t something that would necessarily take power from rural voters, but something a far right politician could use to demolish poor urban minorities by taking all benefits away from them. Many rural voters might happily make that trade to express Alon’s bigotry in the other direction – remember from above that the donor/recipient state division is not clean cut along the lines of coastal/liberal = donor and inland/conservative = recipient.
If this thinking were expressed at an individual level it would mean huge welfare checks for Elon Musk – he pays what he pays in should equal what he gets out, right?
Texas is an urban state. It’s also a net donor – the only one, I believe – for highway funds, since the trust fund invests in places with less car traffic (LOS B -> A bypasses in depopulating Rust Belt states), not in places with more and rising car traffic (Texas, suburban Atlanta, etc.). The other examples you give are quibbles – there’s a large net direction in both urban vs. rural and blue vs. red and the counterexamples are just a matter of the correlation being less than 1.
My argument is that someone who throws rocks at me does not get their demands, unless those demands are to be transferred to a nicer prison. When the Gilets Jaunes came to the city to throw rocks, they got most of their demands, not because they were a popular movement (in fact the French people in polls kept saying they opposed the violence) but because the police would not spontaneously repress rurbaine or rural whites and the government was too cowardly to give the order to do so. When urban minorities come to (other parts of) the city to throw rocks, they’re met with batons and guns. It’s the classical conservative line that there are people who the law protects but doesn’t bind and people who the law binds but doesn’t protect.
And re wealth, the point I keep making that you keep ignoring is that those urban-to-rural subsidies flow even when you net out wealth. This can be explicit (farm aid) or implicit (place-based policy; within metropolitan areas, the net direction of subsidies net of incomes is urban to suburban). In the US, federal-aid road money could not legally be spent in cities until almost WW2, and then when it could the share of federal funds that went to urban roads was below the share of urban residents in the national population in 1940, and as it was those urban road funds ended up benefiting suburbanites anyway.
That rural areas are old is part of the racket: one of the reasons the welfare gerontocracies persist is that they are perceived as going to the right kind of people who live in the right kind of places and have the right kind of last name; in the US, poverty rates are lower in the 65+ bracket than 0-18 and 18-65, but the welfare gerontocracy persists.
46 states are majority urban.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States
Except that the correlation between %rural and net return on taxes isn’t just less than 1, it is barely 0.4. As Adirondacker points out almost all states are majority urban, so you cannot say it is an urban to rural flow since most recipient states are urban states too. The counter-examples are not a one off, they are all over the map. Arkansas and S. Dakota are 6 and 7th most rural, but they are both donor states, Arkansas almost as much as New York, and highly urbanized Connecticut is a recipient.
My argument is that someone who throws rocks at me does not get their demands,
No, your argument was “Rural areas are showered with place-based subsidies to deal with poverty, on top of the usual universal programs (like health care and pensions) that redistribute money from rich to poor regardless of location.” while I am stating that imbalance in payments to some states is largely due to universal health care and pension costs being higher in states with an older population (those costs being the majority of federal spending) or things having nothing to do with being rural (N. Mexico as highest recipient because of Native American poverty, Delaware as the largest donor because of lax incorporation laws).
What’s more you complained about the 2024 tractor protest when those protesters . . . did not throw any rocks. The only reference to violence I can find for the tractor movement is the bombing by the left wing decades-old agro-socialist group. The movement was otherwise peaceful blockades of roads. Gilets Jaunes was a different matter, but I don’t see the “police wouldn’t repress them line” as being very valid when the police were liberally deploying water cannons and tear gas (at least in Pais) and two dozen people lost an eye and five people even lost their hands from police sting ball and flash grenades.
And if you feel that people who throw rocks don’t get their demands, then surely you are against any police reform in France and support the police shooting immigrant youth as much as they feel like, right? The 2023 protesters did far worse than throw rocks, and were by any logical or objective standard far more violent than the Gilets Jaunes (burning libraries is the literal archetype of barbarianism from the final destruction of the Library of Alexandria by early Christian patriarchs to fascist book burnings, for heavens sake). By your stated logic police reform should therefore be off the table to avoid rewarding the rioters.
And re wealth
I have never spoken of wealth, but income (my apologies if references to “richer” areas was unclear). Yes many rural areas are poor and receive more welfare as a result, that is the point of welfare to support poor areas. But some urban areas are just as if not more poor, and also receive more welfare, because that is the point of welfare. I can also note here that many poor urban areas are ‘showered with place-based subsidies to deal with poverty,’ such as urban renewal zones, tax incentives, or Michigan propping up Detroit’s budget. Yet you never criticize poor urban areas for being subsidized (even when they riot and claim wealth inequity or economic discrimination as a cause). The only reason I can see for this and the paragraph above is simple prejudice on your point as a city dweller against rural people because they are not like you.
That rural areas are old is part of the racket: one of the reasons the welfare gerontocracies persist
Calling social security, state pensions or healthcare for seniors a ‘welfare gerontocracy’ is quite a take. I would say that this places you in opposition to the Greens or SDP who you normally align with . . . except that the CDU, AfD, US Republicans, Likud and every right to far-right party also broadly support the same policies. Paying into a social safety net when one is younger and productive and generating income, then drawing from it when older and less able to work is a bedrock of every modern political-economic system, and is wildly popular, including among parties whose base is young, not because of some ‘welfare gerontocracy’ to support the ‘right people’ but because . . . wait for it . . . everyone will get old and need that support someday. If people over 65 have a lower poverty rate that is a feature not a bug; in the US Social Security has been called the greatest anti-poverty program ever. Also older people are usually not supporting others/raising children (the 0-18 poverty rate is a reflection of parental income, not anything the kids are doing) which means a similar household income (or similarly sized welfare payment) will per capita be above the poverty line when if the household were larger it would not. Retirees may own their house instead of having to pay the mortgage, should have just finished their highest paying years instead of being low paid and starting out, and be able to draw on saved wealth (stocks, etc.) outside of state funded retirement if they have it, all of which can contribute to a lower poverty rate outside of some gerontocratic government conspiracy theory.
Which list of donor and recipient states are you using? Arkansas is almost always a net recipient and Connecticut almost always a net donor ($$$).
And re welfare gerontocracy: yes, there’s consensus that pensioners deserve discounts on housing costs (e.g. through undertaxation of property), subsidies for heating fuel, and a growing gap between retirement age and life expectancy – and that’s before we get into the American health care issue. Then there are the special regulations – French rules on housing essentially conspire to make pensioners into more reliable tenants for landlords, since their income is guaranteed, than working-age adults, so that Paris housing is allocated to age groups with, if anything, negative correlation with productivity. Lower-inequality welfare states tend to be characterized by higher welfare payments to non-pensioners, which is a big reason why Northern European welfare states produce more reduction in inequality than the French and Southern European ones – France has Nordic levels of government spending but German levels of disposable income inequality, and Italy has German levels of government spending but the highest disposable income inequality in Western Europe on LIS data.
This also cascades to labor issues – seniority systems are unheard of here. If you’re a train driver or maintenance worker, you live and die as a worker, and you’re decently comfortable, without the American lie that if you put in 10 years in low-seniority positions doing whatever jobs other people don’t, you can eventually be a high-seniority union member and pretend you’re middle-class. The two-tier systems of American unions or France are not normal here – and Macron’s attempts at reforms are resisted, with periodic violence (if less violence than by anti-vaxxers); that said, in terms of party valence, Nordicizing (or Germanizing) the French social system is generally a center-left PS talking point, roughly coincident with the lowest levels of support for anti-Semitic violence, which are high on the Mélenchonite alt-left and throughout the right.
they don’t have to pretend. The Census Bureau publishes median income numbers and if you are earning approximately the median you are middle class. I’m sure you grasp the concepts of median and middle and average etc.
Middle class and median income are two different things. The middle class isn’t defined by the dead middle of the income distribution and never has been. Over here it refers to people who are neither peasants (or near-subsistence urban workers) nor idle gentry. Thus it makes sense to say something like “10% of London households in the 1850s were middle-class” with the understanding that those would be something like percentiles 88-98. In the US or Western Europe, it’s vaguely percentiles 65-95 but it varies, and a person in a fundamentally working-class job who gets a high wage is still working- and not middle-class, just as a journalist who gets paid poorly is still middle-class (or at least intermediate-profession).
it’s income. It’s always been income. No matter how hard you try to make it “symbol manipulators are more worthy”.
Are you under the impression Brits say “middle class” as a laudatory expression?
There you go making it about worthiness (or unworthiness) again. Your symbol manipulator biases are showing again. Some Stockholm Syndrome too.
It’s not a symbol manipulator bias, it’s a European one. It’s not normal to say that a train driver on a comfortable salary is middle-class here, because here middle- and working-class contrast as descriptive terms, whereas in the US both are used to mean “normal.”
It has always been culture AND employment-structure AND income AND a few more things. Naturally, wherever culture is involved, everyone thinks theirs is best, and are some combination of unaware or disapproving of the others. This is relevant for transit-related matters — see the “elite projection” concept of Jarrett Walker — but Alon largely takes care to avoid it. (See the low opinion of US commuter RRs making only middle-class-normative (regular office hours, suburb->city) commutes easy, while differentially making everything else (reverse or off-hours) hard. The one about trip chaining even extends outside this category.)
Uncontroversial example: hippies. Favorite stereotype is “starving artist”.
Highly controversial example: “culture of poverty”. Most descriptions are awful in multiple ways. Many, despite their flaws, also make some correct observations.
“Wait, is that still a thing?” example: Old Money. Some attitudes of the feudal aristocracy preserved in amber, others updated for captains of industry. (Or field marshals of industry, for that matter.)
Highly controversial example 2: small business owner-“operator”. They probably have strong opinions about the moral superiority of not having a boss, as well as a bunch of other things.
My understanding is that it’s a particular Americanism — and AFAIK a middle-class one — to insist that “it’s all income, it has always been income“.
@adirondacker12800, it has absolutely never ever just been about income.
One of the main reasons the farmers are privileged even though they can have very low incomes is because they are rural landowners – that actually makes them pre-industrial old money.
And yes the United States 100% works like that as well, it’s just that some people don’t realise. The people whose families have owned land since before the US existed as an independent nation are still pretty privileged.
One of the reasons people are annoyed with e.g. Just Stop Oil is because they are upper class (i.e. their investments pay for them to live without working a proper job before retirement age) and they are disrupting the ability of working/middle class people from to make a living.
Part of the issue with the tech leaders getting their knickers in a twist is that some pre-industrial money person with a few million dollars, or some industrial money person with maybe tens of millions doesn’t think the tech leaders are worth the time of day – and certainly doesn’t consider them superior.
And just who decides what the culture is. Rich people. Odd isn’t it? And that may have been true in the 18th Century. It’s not the 18th Century anymore. I’m glad you find clinging to antiquated concepts of class comforting. It doesn’t pay bills.
I’ll use small words. Anyone who is starving, even if it’s just in their imagination, not actual starvation, isn’t middle class.
What part of Old Money makes you think it’s not about money? Old money people who lose their money aren’t old money anymore. Because they don’t have any money. And they can’t sneer at the noveau riche if the noveau riche weren’t rich. Being rich is all about money.
The epitome of business is making money. If you aren’t making money, you are doing something but it’s not business.
@adirondacker12800, the “people who decide what culture is” are those with wealth going back several generations not the, actually much richer, nouveau riche.
You want to euphemise it as wealth go right ahead. Wealthy people are wealthy because they have a a lot of money. Even though most of it is not in cash or equally liquid equivalents.
As per https://www.macfarlanes.com/what-we-think/2023/new-rules-for-financial-promotions-for-high-net-worth-individuals-and-sophisticated-investors/ someone with £450k outside of their primary residence counts as “high net worth” – perhaps they would be worth maybe £1.5-2m including their primary residence.
That is perhaps 10x the median which was £125k in 2019 as per https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/bulletins/distributionofindividualtotalwealthbycharacteristicingreatbritain/april2018tomarch2020.
A billionaire is worth 10000x more than the median. These things are very very different.
I’m going to stick with “wealthy people are wealthy because they have a lot of money”. The first source you cite seems to think so. Since they measure it in how many pounds it’s worth.
“Who decides what culture…” — no, I meant differences in culture. Subculture. Including the accent that one speaks with.
The phenomenon you allude to does exist. There is a kind/style of music that has institutional heft behind it, and is taught in K-12 schools. It also has philharmonic orchestras. There is a (different) kind/style of music that has the heft of record labels and copyright law behind it. And there are kinds/styles of music mostly without institutional heft, e.g. country music and rap (yes, rap has for some reason become accepted into the 2nd type of institutionally-supported music, but it has existed before that happened).
The purpose of the whole endeavor of talking about classes is that they let you, depending on how you frame it, compress descriptions (of observations you already collected) and/or make predictions. In particular, by using clustering. What everyone is trying to tell you is that taking into account attributes other than money makes for a much more descriptive map. To be fair, not wanting to know that is exactly the point of the Americanism of ignoring everything beside money.
I’m sure the cat is glad she was two rooms away when I read that. I laughed so loud it would have scared her. Just because you and Hyacinth Bucket are unaware doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Just because it’s not especially popular in ol Bigthy doesn’t mean it’s unimportant either. You do understand that “Keeping Up Appearances” was a sitcom and not a reality show?
The premier country music program is “The Grand Ole Opry”. It’s about to celebrate it’s 100th Anniversary this year. Because it’s been broadcasting from the same radio station in Nashville Tennesse since 1925. On AM, which is odd because most music programming these days is on FM.
Most metro areas have one public radio station that broadcasts classical music. And multiple stations that broadcast country music. Commercial stations that go out of business if they aren’t making money. People go to Nashville in the hopes of becoming a star. ( and making lots of money )
You and Hyacinth want to sit around and admire her Royal Doulton, go right ahead. The subtext is that she has enough money to buy it. And you have been allowed to admire it. And that “with room enough for a pony” means that Violet’s husband is making enough money.
Not caring. And recognizing that being W.A.S.P. isn’t the only way to live. And telling you and your Royal Doulton to fuck yourself if you want to suggest it. Though W.A.S.P. is an Americanism and is becoming obsolete. White Anglo Saxon Protestant. Anglicans and a few select non-conformists who can pass for Episcopal.
….. It’s just occurred to me that a transgender immigrant isn’t very W.A.S.P. -y. though if your Stockholm Syndrome is deep enough you can repress the realization.
@Alon / @Basil,
I see where the two of you are coming from, but from an American perspective Adirondacker is right: middle class is always defined by income and there is no social distinction between middle class and Working Class. Americans will absolutely consider a well paid about-to-retire bus driver as middle class (not “pretending to be middle class”) while a brand-new-journalist scraping by sharing an apartment while freelancing stories will be considered poor not middle class.
The reason for this is probably two-fold. First, of course, American has never had a formal nobility like European countries. A duke was a duke anywhere in the UK and would have been treated accordingly anywhere they went (and many places overseas) regardless of their financial status. They could also have gotten invitations to places events that no industrialist could have, no matter how much more wealthy (at least during a certain timeframe of history). Although the US has had de facto aristocracies from time to time (Boston Brahmins or “The 400” in New York) wealth has always been the primary driver of social status. Aristocracies were irregular (Chicago never had a similar social class when it was the “Second City” of the US), localized (being a Lowell or a Cabot wouldn’t have gotten spit in the Western boom towns of the 1800s outside of what they could pay) and transient (famously, when the old money of New York wouldn’t let the Vanderbilts or Morgans buy a box at the Academy of Music Opera House – even the Roosevelts were excluded despite owning land in Manhattan since the 1600s – they founded the Metropolitan Opera which soon put the Academy of Music out of business). These factors continue today – when Atlanta became capitol of the New South post civil-rights part of its story was not having the social caste of the Antebellum centers like Richmond, Charleston or New Orleans. The prominent guests at the recent inauguration were tech titans like Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos, not Rockefellers and Astors.
Second, the wealth of the US in the post-war era led to a situation where between one and two standard deviations around the median could feel that they were middle class. If you owned a car and a home, you were in, regardless of profession or luxury, and at the time almost everyone owned a car and the vast majority owned a home or could expect to. There was of course a major difference between people at one end with a two bedroom house and a Ford or Chevy out front and those at the other end with house and a pool and two Cadillac’s in the garage, but in the American psyche both were middle class. This is both fed from and into the American mythos of egalitarianism (see above on no nobility) and as a practical matter was accurate in that most everywhere else even a low American standard of living was middle class or better (whether defining middle class economically or socially).
@Onux, I do largely agree – and it’s an interesting post for sure, but quite a bit of Trump/Musks grievance is that despite being powerful/extremely rich both are kinda excluded from American high a society.
I’m sorry, but I have to interject into this long aside and call BS.
Money may be what gives people the literal, material power to make culture, but what culture they will make is not purely a function of them having money. You find different cultures producing both high and low culture–of the elite and of the masses–in different countries, and the former tends to vary more on a national basis than the latter, but within each culture, elite culture is granted a sense of moral superiority–the “right”, civilized people doing “right”, civilized things–and mass culture is not. It’s not about the gravity of WASPs, which has largely played out; it is about the tendency of elite cultures like WASPs to maintain their aesthetic hold on people even if the financial hold is pretty well atrophied.
The U.S. is different in that our elite culture remains–to this day–almost entirely European, in the vague sense of people think of classical music as “fancy” (or stodgy; there’s that old money, again) and most classical musicians of any resonance are Europeans; and what is essentially folk music as, well, folk music, whether that means country or rap. This is true even to Americans who couldn’t tell Bach from Tchaikowsky, or Balmain from Levi.
The American difference isn’t in the separation of culture and legitimacy of money, but in the refusal to admit that the classic cultural dynamic of money (and therefore class) dictating culture is still playing out (I think in part because we never made our own indigenous elite culture; American nouveau riche have been building neoclassical/Tudorish/chateau-syled McMansions for centuries). Our ultra-wealthy tech bros and Retvrn neofascists just can’t come to terms with the modernist admission that money and adherence to old elite cultural norms hasn’t ever granted people the moral authority to be aristocrats because aristocracy isn’t ever really morally justifiable.
We know that there’s no justification for a caste system, no divine right of kings and thereby no right of his to sustain a courtly class of do-nothing nobilities, but boy does a large sector of America’s wealthy want to act like there is. We can pretend to be egalitarian all that we want, but people like, e.g., Trump are still pretty driven by their desire to be recognized as should-be members of the old elite, and just being stupid about how they might gain that legitimacy. Hell, we have people like Curtis Yarvin on the right now more or less explicitly calling for a return to an aristocratic monarchy–absolute rule by the “right people”–and double-digit-millionaire-and-up effective altruists who only deign to make it rain on the poor who are “worthy”, who are doing the “right” things.
Denying that Americans have always thought in terms of class even if they didn’t know it is a huge and hugely damaging delusion that finds easy denial at every turn. Yes, the wealthy need money to be considered so, but for that wealth to be legitimized–which is their end goal, so they don’t need to constantly defend their position as anything but a product of their natural superiority–they need to make their culture fit in with elite culture as it already exists. You can’t actually be a wealthy elite who lives in mass culture, at least not for long. In a very real sense, it’s a self-destructive combination, because if you’re not going to live “right”, “civilized”, whatever, why should you have more money than anyone else?
what set it off was “high-seniority union member and pretend you’re middle-class. ” Which doesn’t reveal any clues about the union member’s culture. Keep in mind that transit workers in big cities are very very diverse group. Many of them don’t speak English at home. Or tell you what sort of foreign culture they enjoy whether it’s classical music or country and western. Foreign to them anyway.
They are rich. They don’t care what you think.
“They are rich. They don’t care what you think.”
I bear no extra deference to wealthy people. I still think they mostly know the guillotine gets hungry every couple of generations, and it prefers a rich diet.
Not to mention people like Musk, “I’m a pro-video gamer”, obviously care at least about what someone else thinks about them. If it’s not the old aristocracy, it’s because it’s done what aristocracy always done: refused admission to anyone not already in it, and so made itself mostly irrelevant.
@Onux
“[Nobles] could also have gotten invitations to places events that no industrialist could have, no matter how much more wealthy“
And just-scraping-by journalists (even strictly excluding professional invites) can get invitations to places/events that no bus driver could have, no matter how much financially better off, and treated differently there. Read this, please.
Professional invites no matter how amusing, are work. Work eventually involves the exchange of money. The bus driver, when the 40 hours are done, doesn’t have to worry about work. I read the essay far enough to realize she’s desperately attempting to prove how much better her culture is. She can Go. Fuck. Off.
@Basil Marte, I thought that article was very interesting.
I think what adirondacker is saying, or I am inferring, and which is something I can empathise with, is that this kind of thing is a reflection of what divides so much of America. This twenty-something is “studying” psych/soc and supporting herself as a barista and writing this kind of stuff that personifies what gets MAGA America so steamed up. Adirondacker may not be a MAGAiste and neither am I but I can understand the reaction as I had it myself while reading it (skimming it more and more as it went on).
I lost patience with the long piece to know if she suggested solutions. For many, especially psych/soc grads and professional educators it is that everyone should get tertiary education. Or that is the implied message. But that is such nonsense. America leads the world in percentage who go to college but it clearly doesn’t solve the problems. In fact it has not only impoverished a significant fraction of those who end up not using their so-called professional qualifications (and therefore not in a median or higher-paid position*) as well as degrading the quality of degrees and the overall tertiary experience. Plus it makes a country more and more dependent on immigration for the workers needed to run our societies. Once again this afflicts the Anglosphere more than anywhere else: the UK and Australia have very similar problems, and it clearly was a major factor behind the Brexit vote. Australia has had massive immigration the last decade and it has created unsustainable pressure on housing; just like the UK, if we wanted to build a million houses or whatever, we couldn’t because …. we don’t have the workers! It’s a mystery to me; I mean what happened to all the workers who were building all these houses just a few years ago? Have they all died or retired? I guess so, and it seems no one thought about training or encouraging the replacements. In our lazy societies we just rely upon importing cheap foreign labour while all our own next-gen study psych-soc.
But there is one thing the US could do, but won’t, is pay all workers a living wage. Oh, and healthcare that is accessible to all not just the prosperous. Articles like this (A Rhodes Scholar barista and the fight to unionize Starbucks (Washington Post)) won’t even get into Bezos’s WaPo anymore (and it’s paywalled anyway); just last week he pulled all Amazon warehousing out of Ontario because they won the case for unionisation. I hope the Canadians give the adirondacker response to Bezos and to Trump’s tariffs.
……………
*That author, siderea, is a barista but she obviously hopes for much ‘better’ after graduation. She may be disappointed; I mean we cannot possibly usefully employ all the psych-soc grads, though people like that often fill jobs like HR manager where their “skills” at knowing all there is to know about human behaviour drive crazy the rest of us trying to do a job. The real tragedy was illustrated by a Doonesbury cartoon from 30 Jan 2014; unfortunately can’t find it online anymore but here is my transposition:
Scene: generic chain coffee shop:
Indignant customer: Wait, did you put the foam in before the espresso?
Server: It’s possible. What’s the difference?
Customer: What’s the difference? It’s not a latte! Don’t you know anything?
Server: I do. …. I have an advanced degree in micro-robotics from MIT.
Customer: And they taught you nothing about lattes?
Server: Sadly, no. May I keep your change?
…………………….
Pay attention. what gets them steamed up is brown people not WASPs. When it’s not brown people it’s people with vaginas. Brown people with vaginas can be especially disturbing.
They are perfectly fine with Fox News and News Nation being filled with WASPs and wannabe WASPs….. Fox News originates from the heart of Real America(tm), Rockefeller Center, in Manhattan. Where they yammer on about Dear Leader, the Fifth Avenue billionaire. Few if any of them watch Fox Business. Where the nighttime host says the economy is doing much better than expected. And then screeches about how awful the economy is, at night. They are being grifted and they love it.
Far too many people in my close family with too many consonants or too many vowels in their last names. Who spoke languages other than English, at home, when I was younger. I could tell Miss Bourgeois Burgundy Blazer to go fuck off in many languages. But I suspect the poor thing is monolingual, so I’d stick to English, with her.
Michael: absolutely, this is “dividing” American society. Causing tensions in it.
The article didn’t contain any proposed solutions for that, as far as I noticed. However, I think it’s fairly obvious that solving the problem needs to start from recognizing the problem. To the extent someone takes for granted — exactly adirondacker’s former opinion — that money is the only attribute of interest, that once we know two people have the same money (at the same point in their careers) we can conclude that they belong in the same class, that person is utterly incapable of solving the problem, because any actual solution seems like nonsense to them. Since that would involve making non-money-based distinctions between people, probably.
Frankly, I think this college-educated class merely “admitting”, so to speak, the state of affairs would be beneficial. By this I don’t even mean an apology, just the “conspiracy of blindness” going away. Because currently: 1) there is an elephant in the living room, noticeably not trampling the college-class but varyingly trampling other classes; 2) the college class insists there is no elephant; 3) the college class is proud and loud about holding principles (anti-hierarchy, anti-violence) implying that “if there were such an elephant, it would be unambiguously bad and should be fought against”. This combination is indeed aggravating; I wonder whether siderea’s own position of straightforwardly cheering the elephant becoming widely adopted would decrease tensions purely because it is at least honest.
Other than that, I’m rather light on solutions. Though all the various “bowl” metaphors for how to address the multiethnic nature of American society (or, likewise, religious pluralism, the issue with which old-school liberalism started in the 17th century) should be applicable.
Incidentally, more than half of the housing problem is class-related! Especially in the early 20th century, the Progressives (ahem!), paaartly out of honest pity for the unhealthy conditions the poor lived in, banned all that. Famously this is worst in the US (and Canada), but leaked to other places as well. So, when you today cannot accommodate an increasing population by: subdividing existing buildings (either into “proper” flats or HMOs/SROs/boardinghouses), or tearing them down and building a larger building on the site, or building standalone “tiny houses” for the homeless, instead the only way you are allowed to house new people is to build new houses of a sort that is acceptable to upper-middle-class sentiments, it’s sort of obvious who to blame.
Why is being different a problem and why does it need to be solved? It’s a problem if you think everybody should have the freedom to be exactly like you and the liberty to promulgate only that.
It’s all money-related. You have enough money you can live anywhere you want to. With some minor exceptions for people with mental health issues that make them difficult neighbors.
Working plumbing isn’t a middle class sentiment. It’s a health issue. Safely installed working electricity is a health issue. So is a place to cook safely.
@adirondacker12800, housebuying is to a great degree about inheritance not income. That makes it a class issue.
Also a house doesn’t need to be 1200sqft or 110sqm to have safe indoor plumbing and electricity. I kinda assume these tiny houses had that.
Inheritance is about money, money or money. When the inheritors have a dispute the courts don’t divide up fond memories they divide up real property. The court doesn’t care about your race, gender, religion etc. All they care about is who gets what money.
If you had read the link Basil posted they are slapping up poorly made garden sheds without any utilities. Or to quote the article
though apparently you did read the article because it mentions 1200 square feet. So you cherry picked what you wanted to see very very very hard.
I understood the article as saying these were “garden sheds” without water/sewage/kitchens. But this didn’t matter; the outcome would have been the same if they did have these things. In fact, I think this situation makes for a nicely sharp scissor.
Namely, the residents of these houses were otherwise HOMELESS. If you forbid the construction of (or demolish erected) residential garden sheds, their living conditions will be: a tent. They don’t have indoor plumbing and HVAC in either case. (As a somewhat hypothetical matter, you can also imagine that if the municipality didn’t demolish the sheds, the residents and/or the benefactors would have gradually improved the facilities. Once they could sort out the paperwork with the utilities, they would have built a shared wet-block. If the utilities stalled, they would have built a water-tank (replenished by truck) and dug a latrine.)
Are these facilities materially worse than what is prescribed in the code? Yes, they are less convenient and less private. (Probably 99% of the US population values both convenience and privacy.) But the starting point of the entire exercise was that these otherwise-homeless people (and/or their benefactors) cannot afford up-to-code construction. They wouldn’t be homeless if they could afford it. That option is not available. The options that are available are “tent on a sidewalk” and “garden shed with shared outhouse”. Of these, the latter is the better one. Regulators are throwing these people under the bulldozer by outlawing and actively removing all the less-bad options available to them.
Tangentially, housing isn’t a typical money/”inheritance” issue. It’s a land == transportation issue. “Metroland”, “streetcar suburbs”, “post-WW2 car-dependent suburbia”. New transportation infrastructure and/or service brings a large quantity of formerly-agricultural land within acceptable commuting duration. For the cost of: a small bit of farmland + house construction + NPV of commitment to commute by Underground/streetcar/automobile — for that you can live in the new suburb, and therefore you are only willing to pay more to live closer to downtown to the extent that offers superior amenities (such as a shorter commute). This accordingly limits within-city costs, even for people who don’t move. (It limits them so much that most American small towns’ urban cores simply die, and the municipal government goes bankrupt.) Remember how the “baby boom” was called that because children significantly outnumbered their parents, i.e. a large fraction of boomers didn’t inherit a house because another sibling of theirs did, but that largely wasn’t a problem, mostly they could just buy houses for reasonable prices.
On the other hand, if you can’t build new automotive sprawl because: greenbelt, congestion charge, no new roads because that’s infrastructure and you can’t build that; and you can’t build rail-commuter suburbs because that’s infrastructure; and you can’t build aviation-commuter suburbs because that tech doesn’t exist yet (and you wouldn’t be able to build the aerodromes for it if it did); and you can’t replace Victorian two-storey terraced houses with midrises due to zoning (that would be more expensive than greenfield construction, you buy out not farmland but a house, N flats in the new building each pay 1/Nth of the previous house price before construction even begins) — in that case, you have a fixed supply of land, each tagged with a legally allowed maximum number of units, thus a legally fixed maximum total supply of units. As you approach it, the question looks increasingly like e.g. organ donation. “We have X to somehow distribute among the population.” Price becomes an artifact, a resultant variable, purely an indicator about how much people bid (“my kingdom, my kingdom for a house!”) rather than an indicator about how much it costs to build one. (It costs infinite money. If the limit is a stupid law, then for any finite amount of money you can get zero new houses built.)
But as soon as you can unstupid the laws and/or build some infrastructure, the price can come back down. And when you aren’t trying to outbid yourself anymore, the perceived importance of non-market allocation mechanisms goes way down. It’s not that lotteries, waitlists, feudal retinues, etc. completely disappear, it’s that most people lose interest in them when they don’t appear relevant to them or their relatives/acquaintances/etc.
If they are capable of working a full time job that shouldn’t be their problem. It means they aren’t getting paid enough. Giving them subsidized housing is a subsidy to their employer. So is any other benefit like Supplemental Food Assistance Program a.k.a. food stamps. If they aren’t capable of working full time why is the richest country in the world making disabled people live without running water? You have it backwards. It’s not that they can’t afford it. It’s that the rich people don’t want to pay for it.
They didn’t inherit a house because their parents were still living it. If they were lucky enough to not have medical bills get most of it.
The rent isn’t too damn high the pay is too damn low. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party But then it seems you have fallen for the fallacy that it’s the low paid employee’s fault not the employer’s.
Or the pay can go up. Things are unaffordable because people aren’t be paid enough.
@adirondacker12800 There are a lot of people who can work a full time job, but not a good one. “I’m all for helping the disabled until I need to raise my prices above what my competition with full automation is charging” is all too real is business.
The vast majority of people are capable of working a good full time job that could support themselves to a minimal apartment at least. However there are a also a lot of lazy people who despite this ability are trying to freeload.
The line is often a case of “I know it when I see it”, but I have observed a lot of both of the above groups in my life. Rich object to the latter, particular those who got rich by their own hard work and savings. However society has not found an objective way to tell the two groups apart. Perhaps the best sign I’ve found is if you can figure out how to get help you don’t need it – which is all kinds of awful (but does point to one of the big problems: we need to find the people who really need help)
@henrymiller74, its not just automation. Restaurants compete with home cooked food. The trades compete with DIY etc etc.
And I mean 110sqm is basically a rich persons home for one, it’s not a sensible sized home for a poor/middle class person living on their own or even in a couple.
Plus those people would undoubtably rather spend their money on other things rather than the property taxes, maintenance, mortgage and utilities for an unnecessarily massive house.
The most biased political representation of rural areas is by no means found in the US but in Norway, where seats in the Storting are assigned based on a point system where each person counts as one point but each square kilometer counts as 1.8.
You are correct that political violence is mediated by party, but this does not favor rural voters. Just weeks before Trump pardoned the January 6 prisoners Biden was handing out pardons like cheap party favors to people on his side; perhaps more relevantly Clinton commuted the sentences of members of the FALN who set off more than 100 bombs across the US and Carter commuted the sentences of four people who opened fire inside of the US Capitol shooting five Congressmen, a far worse act of political violence than anything that happened on January 6th.
Clinton commuted the sentences of people who’d served years in prison on his way out, yeah. Biden, same thing; the most controversial of his pardons was the judge who sold kids to human traffickers, who served 16 years and was due to be released two years later and is in his 70s. This is not at all a cheap party favor. Nor was the commutation of federal death row (excepting three terrorists) much of a party favor.
The pardons/commutations are very much along party lines. Puerto Rican nationalism is viewed as a left wing issue in the US, and it was two left wing presidents who commuted the PR nationalists that shot up Congress or went on a bombing spree across the country. As further evidence of the politicization, the most common charge against the NALN was illegal weapons possession/smuggling, and despite gun control being a major democratic issue in the 90s Clinton still commuted them, which I’m guessing was a deal not offered to right-wing rural survivalist or militia types also convicted of gun charges while seeking to overthrow the government (although to be fair, Clinton’s commutations were widely criticized and Congress passed a resolution condemning them almost unanimously in both houses).
Similarly, Biden said he was commuting every death sentence on principle, but the death sentences of the two white supremacists (obviously on the far-right) were not commuted. I’m not sure if leaving the death sentence for the Boston bomber was to give cover for wanting to execute the right wingers (i.e. terrorism), or because it was thought it would bring too criticism because the Boston bombing is famous. Marvin Gabrion probably killed more people than the Tsarnaev’s, including drowning his rape victim alive and almost certainly her 11 month old daughter as well, but his is not a household name so he got a commutation.
Cheap party favor was a poorly worded reference to the fact that thousands of pardons were given in a few weeks, including the the most expansive pardons in history and multiple preemptive pardons, previously virtually unheard of. In other words he was giving them away as if they had not value, like a disposable party favor. The poor wording comes from the fact that ‘party favor’ could also refer to doing something for people aligned with your political party. Although I suppose the blatantly political preemptive pardons of family members, certain administration staffers and members of Congress who spoke out about January 6 could be both.
Clinton pardoned members of FALN who had already served 19 years in prison. Wikipedia tells me he overall gave 450 pardons, comparable to Carter or Reagan. It was controversial at the time, but by Obama-Trump-Biden standards it wasn’t much. It’s not at all the weaponized mass pardons of the 1/6 attackers, who did not serve long sentences and are not required to show remorse or become ambassadors for nonviolence.
Biden kept three federal death row inmates, yeah – two right-coded terrorists, but also Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; it’s much less about left vs. right than about keeping the three most infamous terrorists on death row, either because he believes that in terrorism cases the death penalty is appropriate or because he worried that commuting them would be unpopular (thus, that the American people believe the same). Gabrion, as you note, is not a well-known name, and what he did was not terrorism; he also was only convicted of a single murder – he’s suspected of having killed more people than Tsarnaev, but he wasn’t convicted of such.
Biden also did mass pardons, but 6,500 of them were for marijuana possession, which is not something most Americans even think should be a crime, and excluding those, his pardoning rates are unremarkable by Obama-Trump standards (or by postwar standards).
You are ignoring the most famous pardon given by Bill Clinton. Marc Rich was a financier charged with tax evasion, racketeering, and trading oil with Iran during the embargo. He went to Switzerland to avoid prosecution. His wife made a $1 million donation to the Democratic party, and on Clinton’s last day in office, he gave Rich a pardon (Rich never made it back to the US and died in Switzerland).
Its not Eurocentric you see a similar process in Asian 1st world countries which have even more extreme rural subsidies than Europe (Japan, Korea, Turkey, Malaysia, Taiwan).
Its also important to keep in mind farming is a minority of rural economic activity nowadays in 1st world countries. Tourism and Pensions are the big two. There are places that’s exception but they tend to be low population peripheries.
There are definitely states with ongoing extractive relationships to their rural hinterlands, Russia, China, Thailand to a certain extent. If anything your rural periphery becoming a subsidy hog is probably one of the signs you’ve made into the first world.
India is a interesting, farmers are simultaneously given disproportionate access to state resources via various agri subsidies compared to non-farmer poor, and also massively screwed by the state’s incompetence at organising land rights, commercial incentives etc. Its a clusterfuck and a major reason why India’s industrial economy underperforms as agricultural sector is unable to release land for other things. The exceptions are telling Gujarat (i.e. where Modi gave the Patels ghettoised Muslims, Tribals and Dalits) or Tamil Nadu (linguistic cross-caste solidarity).
Also if in Britain we are serious about rural tourism then the A82/A9/A87 road improvements in the highlands and the A30 road improvements at least as far as the A39 splits off were actually pretty important/essential.
No one is serious about rural Tourism. The central state steals the money and offloads the cost onto local communities so they actively resent it. Especially in Southern England (Scotland of course gets Barnett and the right do its own Tourist taxes).
Britain isn’t serious, hence magic asterisk cures like Austerity, Brexit, now AI and “deregulation” and abasing themselves to Trump because otherwise we’d have to chose the EU. And the EU is worth siding with what is the point of the UK? Its just a crappier version of the EU with a monarch.
Turkey’s rural subsidies are not higher than Europe. Total agricultural subsidies are 2.4 billion. The major infrastructure projects like the airport and HSR primarily benefit urban people. Malaysia has enormous export taxes on agricultural products like palm oil. Japan/Korea/Taiwan do have substantial farm subsidies, but it’s clear that rural people are worse off than urban people in those countries. I would also dispute that the subsidies are worse than Europe, around 40% of the EU budget goes to agriculture.
https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/068/2024/002/article-A001-en.xml
On India, you’re incorrect. There are other groups besides Patels (Modi isn’t one), and treatment of minorities has nothing to do with agriculture or industrialization. The easier explanation is that Gujarat is arid so agricultural land values are lower. Therefore farming isn’t as lucrative and it’s easy to sell to industrialists. Tamil Nadu also has caste issues. There are quite a few states wealthier than both Gujarat and Tamil Nadu. But the obvious advantage of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu is a large coastline that’s suitable for ports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_union_territories_by_GDP_per_capita
No comment on whose farm subsidies are the biggest. However the EU budget is tiny compared to a nation states.
Political and media reactions to farmer riots with tractors … In contrast, urban riots by racial minorities lead to mass arrests
Are you seriously comparing the 2024 tractor protests to the 2023 riots?!?!?! The farmer protests were not riots, they were blocking freeways and border crossings, analogous to a sit in. There was a single bombing, but it was by an Occitan terrorist group active since 1975, not by the tractor crowd (it is also a far left terror group, not some rural conservatives). The two deaths were a farmer and her daughter who got hit by a car that crashed into one of the roadblocks.
The 2023 riots by comparison saw 800 injuries just to police officers, up to 1900 businesses looted or damaged (including 25 supermarkets burned to the ground) and 5600+ cars burned. Insurance claims ran to 650 million euro and some estimate total damages to be 1 billion. 40 libraries were attacked, including one burned down (how is attacking a library a meaningful protest?!) Someone tried to kill a mayor’s family by running a car into their house and setting it on fire while the mayor was at city hall responding to the violence. A holocaust memorial was vandalized, four police officers shot with a shotgun, and reports of AK-47s on the street.
My sources: the two links you provided in your post.
How many governments in Europe see rural areas as a place to cheaply warehouse non-productive populations: the retired, the disabled, single parents, asylum seekers?
None. They use decaying industrial towns for that. UK the most extreme case. One could add Russia maybe.
Rural areas have naturally more retired people the world over, and not because of any government policy but because cities have more jobs and attract workers while retirees are older and more often prefer quieter lifestyles. Contra Alon’s argument that rural areas are somehow unfairly financed by city people, the difference in pension and heath care funding (since older people need more medical care) accounts for almost all of the “subsidy” to rural states because almost all government spending is on benefits.
None? Germany did try in 2015 to coerce asylum seekers to stay in rural areas to stem their depopulation, but as soon as the program ended they moved to the cities and found work. (The Syrians from 2015 in Germany are on track relative to when they came with the Bosnians of the 1990s in employment rates, and by now the Bosnians have overtaken native Germans in employment rates; this is not an unproductive population.)
I was thinking of cases (obviously not Germany) where asylum-seekers are prohibited from getting jobs, because the government wants to appease unemployed locals who don’t want to compete with asylum-seekers.
Which ones are you thinking of? In the US it’s complicated whether asylum seekers are allowed to get jobs and depends on the exact status, but the US also has an extremely low share of asylum seekers in its overall immigrant population. In general, schemes for putting asylum seekers in camps in poorer countries like Albania are motivated more by hostile environment and less by a focus on job competition (“Oh, you’re here for asylum? Prove it by forgoing a regular human need, and be thankful we even allow you to wear shoes”).
I was thinking primarily of the UK and France.
Asylum seekers are not prohibited to work in France. Those who entered France with an asylum-seeker visa are allowed to work for 6 months while their status is being reviewed. Asylum-seekers who entered illegally or under another pretext are not allowed to work during the first six months after they made the asylum demand but can receive financial aid. After 6 months, asylum-seekers have the status of foreign workers.
Actually, asylum-seeker in Germany are not allowed to work at all in the first three months. After that it gradually becomes possible, starting with hard-to-get approvals. It takes four years before all restrictions are lifted.
I think the value of “rural” I was thinking of in the first place was more like “former mining villages”.
So that is kind of “decaying industrial towns” but in a more dispersed form.