The Myth of "Dying Rural America"

The idea that free trade has hollowed out small towns is complete and utter nonsense. Not only is there little solid data to support this claim, but I’ve witnessed the opposite firsthand.

From the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, I crisscrossed the U.S., visiting on average ~2-3 cities a week. Many of them deep in rural America. And when you return to the same places year after year, you don’t see decay. You see growth.

Just walk into a local bar and strike up a conversation. Locals will often grumble that they can’t hunt, fish, or off-road in the same areas they did as kids because there are too many houses, too many people, too many buildings.

The irony? Those very complaints point to growth, not decline.

Sure, some towns lost manufacturing. But let’s be clear: manufacturing employment has been declining globally for decades, thanks to automation, technology, and economic evolution. Not because free trade singled out small-town America. Jobs haven’t disappeared; they’ve moved into new industries as America evolved from an agricultural economy to an industrial one, and now into a service-based economy.

This isn’t new or unprecedented. Throughout history, people have always had to move and/or adapt to where the work is. No different than our earliest ancestors had to move to where the food was. This is simply history continuing to repeat itself in newer forms.

Does rural job growth lag metro areas? Sure. It always has. That’s why they’re rural. And when a rural area does grow as fast as a city, it eventually becomes a city. So no matter what happens, someone’s going to complain. Either because their town “isn’t growing fast enough” or because it’s “changing too much.”

The truth is that the claims that “rural America is being left behind” is as American a past-time as baseball and apple pie. Don’t believe me? Look into the Farmer’s Revolt in the latter part of the 1800s which was a populist movement whose goal was to highlight the struggles of rural communities during a time of rapid economic and social change. Sound familiar?

You can also check out the book Broken Heartland: The Rise of America’s Rural Ghetto, published in 1991, three years before NAFTA was even implemented and nine years before China was granted normal trade relations by the US. Same story, same narrative. The 1996 edition just added NAFTA as the latest boogeyman, pretending two years of free trade somehow wiped out small towns. How gullible do we have to be to continue to fall for this recycled panic?

And yet today, the data shows the opposite trend. Young Americans are moving to small towns in record numbers, bringing with them higher city salaries thanks to remote work. A trend which began before the Pandemic. That’s infusing new cash into rural economies, boosting local businesses, fueling construction, and expanding the tax base. Free trade and technology are delivering exactly what protectionists want; opportunity for rural America. But instead of recognizing it, too many cling to a nostalgic, rose-tinted, and frankly inaccurate version of 1950s America.

While people may be saying they want manufacturing in rural communities, the actions of those communities are saying that they want the better alternative and higher paying service jobs by trying to attract businesses such as Buc-ee’s.

At the end of the day, most of the complaining isn’t really about free trade or even jobs. It’s about refusing to adapt. It’s easier to blame external forces than to face the hard truth that the only constant in this world is change.

When change comes, you’ve got two options:

1. Complain about it.

2. Find the opportunity in it.

Those who seize opportunity move forward. Those who don’t? Eventually, they’ll complain about the people who did.

$DIA ( ▲ 0.94% )  $SPY ( ▲ 0.5% )  $SPX ( ▲ 0.52% )  $QQQ ( ▲ 0.34% )  $IWM ( ▲ 0.03% )  

Click the Leave a comment button if you have any questions or comments, or need something clarified. Don’t be shy. The main point here is to improve constantly. Questions and comments help us both and tells me what you are interested in learning/hearing more about.

If you enjoyed this post or found it useful, do me a favor and hit the like (heart button all the way back to the top of the post and to the left) and share it with others.

Learn. Improve. Pass on.