I think Taylor Swift pulled in money that wouldn't have been spent on entertainment in Pittsburgh otherwise. My wife said everyone near her at the concert was from out of town. They found it cheaper to buy a ticket in Pittsburgh, fly to Pittsburgh, and stay at least one night in Pittsburgh than to buy a ticket in Los Angeles or whatever. Arbitrage.
I think much of that money was being wasted on stocks and driving up housing costs before Swift came to increase the velocity of money.
Yes, every town needs an industry or it will eventually be sucked dry. Remote work is changing that, some, but money going out really does need to be replaced by money coming in. When the only money coming in is Social Security checks, it becomes a problem.
The problem is that very often, the only people wealthy enough to bring an industry to a town aren't particularly invested in the well-being of the workers nor the town, and doesn't end up return wealth to the town in a proportional manner.
I guess I should read the OP more carefully, as I see that I already gestured at that.
I think Spike is basically right, but 'industry' needs to be defined broadly: any kind of profitable activity, not just (or even principally) manufacturing
One big change that's relevant here is that there used to be a lot of people employed in farming, fishing, or other random labor-intensive industries which had to be located in remote locations (to take one random example, lighthouse keeping), a lot of which is much more automated now and so can't sustain a population base on its own. Those small towns in the 1800s were being kept afloat by *something*, probably farming.
The main thing that keeps smaller towns afloat economically these days is colleges and universities.
Farming towns have been bleeding population for longer than I've been alive. The one I was raised in has kept its numbers up, but the smaller ones are dying (people live there because they can get a cheap house but no one will build because there's no school) or dead.
Does every town need an industry? Is it true that, at this point, a town can't really generate enough wealth just by supplying lawyers and doctors and plumbers and teachers to itself, to keep itself afloat?
I think that this question is probably one that is very vulnerable to folk-economic answers that misunderstand what money is and how economies work. In particular the idea that money is a physical substance, like fresh water, that flows into and out of a town, and that a town can be drained of money, is very misguided.
So does the even more folk-economics idea that there is "real" money, earned by honest men in overalls doing proper manly work, and "fake" money from weak feminine sources like Social Security or pensions or coffee shops.
I suspect this comes from half-remembered magazine articles about empty calories, or unsaturated vs saturated fats.
That being said, I think it's worth remembering that just "being a town" is an industry, and has been since, well, the dawn of civilisation. Towns are fundamentally places that provide services to the surrounding peasants, in return for food. So you aren't just supplying lawyers and doctors and plumbers and teachers to the town, but also to the small villages and farmsteads around it. If you're a big town ("city") you're supplying the local peasants with a lot more than that - including manufactured goods. And in these days of long-distance ocean travel (Phoenician galleys and so on), you're probably also supplying these to peasants in other parts of the world.
But I don't think there is a useful distinction to be made between towns that only supply lawyers and doctors and plumbers and teachers to the surrounding peasants, and ones that also supply can openers to the surrounding peasants (and to peasants further afield).
The thing is, the number of peasants per acre has been dropping since 1920. So, fewer towns are needed. And some towns were there to provide water for steam trains. They used to need water every eight to ten miles, but that hasn't been true for a while.
As for what might be called "The Economic Consequences of Taylor Swift", it reminds me most of all of the discussion of the (immense) cost and (dubious) benefit of hosting the Olympic Games:
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/economics-hosting-olympic-games
The biggest impact on London was the emergence of a massive Polish community in Newham. Poles (and others, but mostly Poles) came by the thousand in the mid-2000s to help build the Olympic village; they have now settled and are raising families.
The thing is, the number of peasants per acre has been dropping since 1920.
Only if you define "peasant" as "someone who works in farming"! If you define it as "someone who lives in the countryside" it rose steadily to 1990, and has since fallen a bit - but it is still higher (57m) than it was in 1920 (51m) and of course the individual peasant has a lot more disposable income now than he did then.
There was a neighborhood in Pittsburgh where the immigrants who built the cathedral lived. But they mostly moved to the suburbs now.
14: Maybe where you are. My home county is down to 10,000 people. It was 17,000 a century ago.
16: those are the figures for the US, according to the US Census. (Britain does not have a rural population of 57 million unless you are the sort of person who thinks of it as divided into "London" and "The Country".)
The U.S. doesn't have countryside population of 57 million either. I'm not sure which definition gets you that number, but it's got to be pretty expansive.
If you define it as "someone who lives in the countryside" it rose steadily to 1990, and has since fallen a bit - but it is still higher (57m) than it was in 1920 (51m) and of course the individual peasant has a lot more disposable income now than he did then.
I feel like as a percent of the total population, this might seem less grand.
It's the US Census definition, like I said. Argue with them, not me!
(The link below gives a 2016 figure of 61m from the ACS. I guess it fell by 4m in the next four years? Or there are different methodologies?)
According to this the rural share of the population actually grew slightly in the 2020 census but only because they changed the definition. If you live somewhere with fewer than 5000 people (used to be 2500), you're rural.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html
Also there are a lot more towns than there were in 1920.
But this is slightly off the point, which is that the original purpose of towns is to provide specialist services to their hinterlands in return for food, and that is still what almost all towns do.
Maybe not. So many dead towns in rural Pennsylvania and rural Nebraska. And in Nebraska, Omaha has swallowed town after town.
I suppose. On my commute, there's a town that didn't really exist when I started this commute, in 2006. Back then it was a cluster of antique stores, and now it's a regular booming destination of white flight from scary brown children in the public schools.
Towns plus their hinterlands can have trade imbalances with the encompassing economy. Net outflows, even!
22: Not really. Most small towns don't have that kind of specialist anymore, and if they do, it's because it's the weekend home of someone who works in the city/suburbs. Lots of town still exist because it's cheaper to live there and drive 20+ miles to a job than live near the job. The house is there, but once it becomes too expensive to repair, it won't be replaced unless is it near scenery (and can be someone's cabin).
Also there are a lot more towns than there were in 1920.
Almost certainly true. There are almost four times as many "incorporated places" (19,505) as there were in 1970 (5284). How much of that is just weirdness like one suburb deciding to become its own separate little special place, I don't know.
I'm curious to know how much of the economic underperformance of small towns is due to operating under monetary conditions optimized for the economic centers of gravity (large cities).
One important element is that Amazon fulfills much of the function of the traditional town. Also a lot of towns are now just a Walmart and most of the money spent immediately leaves the area.
Everything I see says most rural counties had significant declines, so if the overall number isn't also declining quickly I'd guess that's about large growth in either touristy places of particular beauty or exurbs of major cities.
I see lots of towns that had doctors and grocery stores when I was a kid that now don't. Even the towns with doctors have fewer of them. And the towns that still have stores often have only Dollar General.
Or white flight in the places that are booming, ie Arizona/Texas/Florida/Georgia/North Carolina.
Have I mentioned that there are now three Dollar Generals on my commute, that are all new in the past ten years?
I have definitely posted on how a new Dollar General is the absolute most depressing thing in the world, because it means that someone is crunching the numbers and saying, "Oh yes! It is a good bet that this place will have lots of poverty in the future!"
In fact, until this new spate, I actually didn't think there was such a thing as a new Dollar General. I thought they only existed in a perma-dusty state, with most of the merchandise untouched aside from the snack aisle and the crappiest of plastic toys and shitty clothes.
In particular the idea that money is a physical substance, like fresh water, that flows into and out of a town, and that a town can be drained of money, is very misguided.
Going back to this. I understand that it's probably wiser to think of it as a rate of change, and a flow in and a flow out, and an amount of churn while you're there. That a single $10 bill can get spent over and over again. Differential equations, etc.
But it's not totally nuts to think of it like a stream that can be drained. Differential equations have solutions.
If one thinks of a town as Ajay does, then the problem for many towns is that they no longer have captive markets, or that functionally, the town has gotten bigger but the competition is Amazon. Revitalizing downtowns isn't about getting the doctors and lawyers back (they're probably still there if it's not completely dead) but turning the old clothing shop into a yoga studio or cafe.
Everything I see says most rural counties had significant declines
Careful not to confuse "rural counties contain a shrinking percentage of the population", "rural counties contain a shrinking number of people", and "the rural population is smaller now than it was in 1920". Any or all of those could be true without the others being true. Back to the 2010 Census (because I can't find 2020 figures): a rural county is completely rural - it has no urban areas at all. (And an urban area, remember, is any town over 2500 people. Not very big!)
In 2010 there were 704 rural counties in the US. Together, they held 5.4 million people.
So from that you can easily see that more than 90% of the rural population doesn't live in rural counties. They live in villages, in counties which also contain at least one small town. Perfectly possible for rural counties to be declining while the rural population grows.
I see lots of towns that had doctors and grocery stores when I was a kid that now don't. Even the towns with doctors have fewer of them.
This doesn't represent reality. Rural areas have fewer doctors per head of population than urban ones, and this has always been the case, but the number of doctors per head in rural areas has risen slowly but steadily since 1970. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071163/
I kinda root for ajay's contrarian takes when they don't involve touchy topics. He's still wrong, though. Rural counties are sad.
37: yes, this sounds entirely sensible - to go Moby-style datafree for a bit, the town I'm in has a dying downtown because of a combination of Amazon, edge-of-town supermarkets and COVID. It's still providing services (lawyers, healthcare, government etc) to the surrounding countryside but it's a case of what to do with the high street.
Rural areas have fewer doctors per head of population than urban ones, and this has always been the case, but the number of doctors per head in rural areas has risen slowly but steadily since 1970
Funny, seems like all the doctors around here have been replaced with RNs.
Each rural person has 0.8 heads, though.
I kinda root for ajay's contrarian takes when they don't involve touchy topics. He's still wrong, though.
Hey, take it up with the US Census.
Funny, seems like all the doctors around here have been replaced with RNs.
You do know that they let ladies be doctors as well these days, right?
Houses are just part of a town-- trash collection, sewer, water, especially a school, all take funding. I don't know if this harsh version of the future is accurate, but it's often repeated:
The US can't save all of its small decaying places. Choosing how to specialize the viable ones is the best path forward to preserve future options for some.
OK, but accepting that it's not your village that lives and agreeing to help the next place up the road instead would be tough to swallow.
And of course all of this in the context of a flood of stupid waste spending: >1 car/person, how many hectares blighted by cul-de-sacs and parking lots to enamble temporary Mcmansions in the exurbs? (btw, Trap music apparently takes its name from cul-de-sacs in Atlanta being like rural hollers where there's just one road in and out, they're traps)
I'll google streetview in the outskirts of East St Louis or other small places near the southern tip of Illinois every so often, there's a lot of nice early 20th century architecture there, also abandonment. For a while there was no public trash collection in East St Louis, looks like now there is in some places.
One think that I think is killing rural areas is our IRA/401(k) based retirement system. Instead of people earning money and investing capital in their local economy, all that capital gets sent away to Wall Street where it sits in the stock market for years until it can be withdrawn, often after the retiree has moved out of state.
It works out great for real estate speculators in the Villages, but sucks for local economy that originally produced that wealth.
46: I'm not clear on the alternative. You mean as opposed to a meaningful federal retirement plan where the money gets used on social programs in the meantime? Or is there some sort of old age plan where the money gets used by the town in the meantime?
Poking around I suspect ajay is right that it's more of a relative decline than an absolute one. That said, I do think there's a huge decline in under-65 population, and so an absolute decline is on its way when the current old people die.
Yes, the other part of this is that amazon and easy food delivery are killing retail everywhere. In the relatively rich place I live and a few others I know reasonably well, empty storefronts in new buildings are common.
Building housing on top with retail below is not working well to replace strip malls; this because the strip mall rent is lower, and that lower rent is all that can be sustained against contemporary decentralized virtual spending.
40: breweries, restaurants, yoga, coffee, pawn shops/antique stores, art collectives. Walmart on the edge of town and a mall that is half empty but has a department store.
Anyhow, ajay's right if one keeps in mind that no one outside of the U.S. census thinks a town of 2500 people makes a county not rural. And rural places can be really sad -- but out West at least there's a sense that to get anything done one always had to go into "the city" so there are these places with a small school, cute houses, a gas station, and one inexplicably amazing diner/ice cream/donut shop, but to go to get groceries is an hour on the highway.
You do know that they let ladies be doctors as well these days, right?
My point is that we don't actually have doctors anymore, we have PCPs. My PCP is an RN (or Nurse Practitioner?) and is a dude, although I hardly see him because he's just the head of a staff of other not-doctors, and I usually end up with one of the trainees instead.
Some people say we have the best health care system in the world but I'm not so sure.
46: Farmers sell their land and fuck off to Arizona the same say that lawyers do with their 401k money.
My point is that we don't actually have doctors anymore, we have PCPs.
That may be true for you but it is not representative of the larger picture.
I think the larger picture is skewed by white-flight exurbs and tourist-scenery areas.
I'm not clear on the alternative. You mean as opposed to a meaningful federal retirement plan where the money gets used on social programs in the meantime? Or is there some sort of old age plan where the money gets used by the town in the meantime?
I think you could manage the retirement funding problem several ways.
1) a meaningful federal retirement plan where the money gets used on social programs in the meantime. Basically, there's a state pension/Social Security/whatever you want to call it that is big enough that no one really feels the need to have an additional private source of income in retirement. This means much higher taxes of course. It doesn't exist in any advanced country in the world as far as I know. And it wouldn't ensure that money gets invested in the local economy because it would be pay-as-you-go, and/or with a "trust fund" of government bonds.
2) everyone puts money away for their own retirement in some sort of private account, either run by a bank or investment manager or something (in which case the filthy parasitic financiers of Wall Street get their hands on it) or run by the government, which then invests it in something (in which case, filthy parasitic financiers again). This also would not ensure that the money gets invested in your local economy.
3) everyone saves up for their own retirement in an account held by some sort of tiny local bank that only invests in businesses in the local community. This does ensure that money gets invested locally but it is an incredibly risky and stupid idea because, if your little town has an economic problem - the factory closes or the bank crashes or whatever - then everyone in town with a job loses their jobs and everyone in town with savings loses their savings and everyone retired in town loses their retirement income. It also means that rich communities get richer, because they have more investment from their tiny local banks, and poor communities get poorer.
The idea that Wall Street, and the nasty cosmopolitan cities generally, are siphoning money away from the hard-working sturdy yeomen of the countryside is tempting to a certain sort of person but it isn't really true - in the US, as elsewhere, governments redistribute a lot of money from the cities to the countryside.
Oh the other place I looked at just now because of this thread is Marion KS, 2000 people since 1900, where the sherriff attacked the newspaper, elderly paper owner died in the raid. The sherriff has been fired, and a civil suit has started, but nothing else has happened to him.
I see that Marion is a county seat and basically stable in population when the county population is down by about half. That's the pattern I'm used to seeing in rural, farm areas.
Anyhow, ajay's right if one keeps in mind that no one outside of the U.S. census thinks a town of 2500 people makes a county not rural.
Interestingly, more than half of the US rural population lives in a metropolitan area (MSA) - an area with a city of at least 50,000 at its core. The typical rural American lives close to a city. (Which, again, shouldn't be surprising!)
At this point someone will say "ah well those aren't really rural people, they are probably commuting to the city"... but, well, they are rural people. That is what rural people do, nowadays. They are no longer Jon and Martha Kent on their farm in Kansas. (To be honest, Superman probably grew up in a mostly-urban county. Smallville is pretty big.)
I see that Marion is a county seat and basically stable in population when the county population is down by about half. That's the pattern I'm used to seeing in rural, farm areas.
That example is not representative of what has been happening to the rural population of the US as a whole. And, looking at the article, the population of the county is down by about half from a century ago... when there was a massive spike in population due to an oil boom. Marion County has actual ghost towns left over from the oil boom. It's not exactly a typical example of gradually dwindling rural population!
Heebieville gets targeted semi-inappropriately for lots of rural-improvement programs, because the people in Austin can reach us so easily compared to west Texas and northeast Texas.
Down by 1/2 from a century ago is what I was talking about. 1920 is when the need for farm labor peaked. The corn belt has been dropping in population ever since. Though maybe Marion is wheat?
It's not like oil stopped. My cousin worked an entire career in oil in Kansas, retiring a couple of years ago. I think he was based in Wichita.
That may be true for you but it is not representative of the larger picture.
Maybe, but I live in the county seat of a rural, mountainous area and I'm reporting what I see.
In the newspaper this week they reported that our hospital was having to cancel scheduled surgeries because of the anesthesiologist shortage.
30.last to 59. Exurbs are a thing and they're not the same thing as other rural areas.
The number of incorporated places has grown a lot because of proliferation during white flight and, more recently, the Sun Belt's growth. The decline of small cities and towns in the Midwest is only resulting in full municipal dissolution at the more extreme end of things in my understanding; more often the town apparatus just shrinks.
Ajay is simultaneously arguing that the rural areas are thriving in number and spirit, but also that we'd never recognize them because they're so close to small cities, while everyone else is saying that the rural parts that aren't close to small cities are sad and dying. It's almost like there's no contradiction.
I guess I do understand economics, after all!
No, I'm saying the parts "close" (ie within 90 minutes commute) of *big* cities are fine. The small cities are dying unless they have a hospital or university.
(Or skiing.)
more often the town apparatus just shrinks
The water is cold.
I bet 67 & 69 are using different values of "small".
Like how Taylor Swift grew up in a really big house compared to most houses but a really small house compared to Jake Gyllenhaal's house.
69: what's a 90-minute commute look like? Like in the 80's and 90's my town would have been considered far despite the train, and a lot of people were commuting to 128 engineering office parks. I think door to door in Boston I can do in 90 minutes on a decent day. If you're working near the commuter rail and don't need to take the T, it's an hour. On the express, I can get to North Station in 40 minutes.. Of course, the metro area has other employment areas like Waltham, so not everyone is commuting to Boston proper.
But a place like Springfield is still not doing well, whereas in The SF Bay Area that would be considered commutable. Also, commutes within Boston can take 90 minutes.
I live three miles from my office that I don't go to.
I have very frequently done work for clients in both Boston and the Bay Area, but I've been to neither since I've lived in Pittsburgh.
I have in mind places like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pike_County,_Pennsylvania
The small cities are dying unless they have a hospital or university
What if you've got a hospital and university that are both dying?
What if you've got a hospital and university that are both dying?
The university should go to the hospital, which will give the hospital lots of business.
Wait. That's the Delaware Water Gap.
A lot of this sort of discussion just depends on how you define terms like "rural" and "city." Any definition is inherently arbitrary but where you draw these lines makes a huge difference for analysis.
If the drug of choice is meth it's rural, if it's cocaine you're in the big city.
84 is heroin erasure and as a Scot I will not stand for it.
"The small cities are dying unless they have a hospital or university."
Are there small cities that don't have hospitals? The biggest town over here that doesn't have a hospital has less than 10,000 people.
Most hospitals should have fentanyl, yes.
I meant a large hospital. Our hospital serves a significant portion of the state. Technically there's other hospitals, but to give a sense of size we have just over 200 beds, while the county to the west has 25 and the county to the south has 45. Those counties are dying. To the east things are ok because there's some tourism, a factory, and a hospital of 325 beds, so they'll survive fine even though they don't have a university.
So to make things a bit more concrete, here's PA population change by county from 1970-2021:
You can see here that exurbs are fine (the three counties in the northeast corner are NYC exurbs), some medium-sized cities are fine (York, Lancaster, Harrisburg), but half of the state has dropped population and a third of it has lost a pretty substantial amount of population (note numbers here are average percentage change per year, not total change over the 50 years).
Most hospitals should have fentanyl,
We had a situation where some members of the hospital staff were getting into the fentanyl. The alleged culprit has since died but there was still more missing after that. Just horrible.
Finally read the economic-analysis counterpoint link. It's definitely true that a lot of the spending could be redirected from other places not getting recreational spending, but it's not zero-sum if at least a significant chunk was money that would otherwise have been saved.
Also, CBS's headline "The Federal Reserve says Taylor Swift's Eras Tour boosted the economy" seems a major stretch. Here's the Philadelphia Fed paragraph they cite:
Tourism contacts continued to report slight growth - noting that the recovery was slowing. Business travel continued to recover, but leisure travel was flattening. Multiple contacts reported that the amount of money guests spend at their leisure destinations declined modestly in recent months. Despite the slowing recovery in tourism in the region overall, one contact highlighted that May was the strongest month for hotel revenue in Philadelphia since the onset of the pandemic, in large part due to an influx of guests for the Taylor Swift concerts in the city.
This discussion reminds of me of how back when I was watching tv political news more closely* I would occasionally look up people or places that were featured as small towns or representatives thereof and often they'd be/be from suburbs of big cities that were maybe just far enough away to not think of themselves as suburbs.** A particularly egregious case was a guy interviewed as a "small town mayor" in a story about dissatisfaction with Congressional politics, who was mayor of a town outside Chicago near O'Hare and, according to new reports, rumored to be gearing up for a Congressional run himself. I didn't care enough to check if he actually ran, maybe he's in Congress now.
*Partly related to my job at the time.
**I hereby acknowledge that I'm using "suburb" in an imprecise way, and that often places that seem like suburbs from a distance don't have huge numbers of people commuting into the city center. I still think it's meaningfully different to be within a city's daily economic region vs a much longer distance away.
95: I believe there was a paper showing that masking in public schools in Boston worked - especially important given the fact that their building,dings are older and have worse HVAC.
My high school produced at least one graduate who plead guilty for what he did on January 6, so I figure I'm as well placed to know what a real small town is as Justice Potter Stewart was placed to recognize pornography.
Our local January 6 conspirator spent 90 days in prison and now is running for Congress.
Our guy only got probation, which is has tried to get reduced because he's a self-pitying fuck.
96: That wouldn't surprise me, but I meant places where kids weren't in school.
For a while there, I couldn't tell is this was the Covid thread or the small town thread. I guess it's not the Covid thread.
I believe ours got jail time?
The Biden bus incident was settled out of court recently.
Industry is just a fancy way to say exploitable natural resource. Maybe it's gold or copper ore, coal or oil, trees, scenery. Sapphires. Fossils are part of the economy in some Montana towns. We have a university and two hospitals, and a shit ton of new folks, more moving here every day. Close enough to skiing, I guess.
Great Falls is a different kind of case. Military is off, I think, and the skiing is a little farther away. There's a lot of wind, and as the name implies, plenty of head. For hydropower. Lots of wheat.
Havre has a university, a hospital, and a rail yard. None of them very big.
Glendive is the metropolis of the Far East. They're trying to attract small manufacturing, but their biggest natural resource seems to be rancor. https://montanafreepress.org/2023/10/20/trouble-in-the-badlands-how-glendives-government-turned-on-itself/
You can have an industry that is in no way an exploitable natural resource. Boeing builds airliners in Seattle, but that is not because there are vast seams of raw airliner ore there.
The Seattle airliner seams are healthy, but those of Chicago are exhausted. Hence the struggles of Boeing since the merger.
Anyway, the one indispensable industry is cobbling. Medicine you can take or leave, but without a cobbler you're in the howling wilderness.
For decades after the mid-1950s, the big employer in Columbia Falls Montana was an aluminum plant. Electricity was the principal local ingredient, everything else was shipped from far far away. Bauxite from overseas, via New Orleans, I think. Why so much excess electricity in Columbia Falls? The Feds built the Hungry Horse dam just up the river.
108: And yet -- look closely at Raphael's School of Athens -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_School_of_Athens#/media/File:%22The_School_of_Athens%22_by_Raffaello_Sanzio_da_Urbino.jpg -- the great philosophers are barefoot!
That's not a painting of the real School of Athens. It may contain historical inaccuracies.
And if you think 5th century BC Athens wasn't a howling wildreness I question your judgement, honestly.
Romans had shoes. That's why they won.
112 I don't know, weren't there more than 2,500 people?
(The internet tells me it was twice as many people as live where I live now.)
104: Silicon Valley is not there for the silicon.
I don't know whether there was the same kind of thing in Nebraska, but in Montana we have so many counties -- there are 56 when it ought to be 15-20 tops -- largely because of the efforts of one guy. He developed a cottage industry of going to small towns and convincing people they ought to be the seat of their own county. Local newspapers thought the idea of being the county's official printer sounded like a good gig, so they'd sign on. A great way for local people to capture some state money -- funnel some of that big city wealth to rural hinterlands.
I'm not clear on how the guy got paid -- I'm sure that's a 3 minute internet research project, but . . .
I never heard of anything like that in Nebraska.
Texas suffers hugely from having too many tiny counties, at 254. Everything is uncoordinated and too many tiny populations are trying to do too many things, poorly.
Actually, this reminds me that my dad said the idea was that everyone should be a days traveling time (by wagon) from their county seat. Except for Cherry County.
MA has 351 towns and cities, and no counties as meaningful units of government, so even though nothing is very far away it's also subdivided much too finely.
God's own narcissicism.
Allegheny County has 130 municipalities, which seems like a lot.
119 I would read a book about that. It could make a great film too (docu or fictionalized)
California's counties have a median size of 185,000 -- and the median Californian lives in a county of 2 million - so it makes some sense that they're mostly empowered with the apparatus of social misery: jails, probation, child services, social welfare, Medicaid and SNAP enrollment, aging/adult services, etc. But they range all the way down to one county of 1,200, and eight under 20,000, so many club together to provide these functions.
I'd guess in the states without functional counties those functions are usually state-level, not city? Cities, here and most places, are mostly empowered with the regalian functions that existed in the 19th century - police, fire, streets - plus the great* 20th century innovation of zoning and planning.
Ohio had county groupings for mental health services in the less populated counties. I don't know what they do now.
The 'way too many counties' thing does seem to be a particularly American phenomenon. Ontario has 51 'first-level administrative divisions' for a population of over 15 million and a land mass almost twice the size of Texas. And several of those 51 are just *cities*, with no higher-level county or regional government.
"The apparatus of social misery" is a great turn of phrase.
126 Dan McKay. http://www.bigskywords.com/montana-blog/montana-county-splitting-and-its-consequences
The author of this blog is a crank and a nut, and everything he writes about anything should be taken with a lot of salt. The basic facts in this one are probably sound, though.
I'd heard of this many years ago, and it came up, as you'd expect, at the annual Montana water law conference last month. Water rights used to be organized by county, and the process of getting everything into a single state system has been a huge effort from the early 1970s into today. (I worked on that in the 80s, before law school, and have had water cases in this decade that are part of the same thing.)
"The social apparatus of misery" might have been slightly more descriptive/accurate.
I'm not clear on how the guy got paid -- I'm sure that's a 3 minute internet research project, but . . .
Was this before or after the shift from public servants being compensated by the fees they collected to straight salary? If before, maybe he just arranged a cut for helping.
"everyone should be a days traveling time (by wagon) from their county seat."
IANAMathematician or topologist but this seems impractical as stated. Maybe if you mandate slower wagons for those who lived really close it could work, though.
My college's most notorious Jan. 6 guy got 28 months in federal prison, sentenced in late 2021 so maybe he'll be out soonish? (Hmm, article says he had already served 11 months by then, so maybe he's out now.) When the feds busted him he had "a cache of guns, 2,500 rounds of ammunition and high-capacity magazines."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/12/14/pelosi-threats-sentenced-meredith/
He didn't even make it to the insurrection, either.
No less practical than pivot irrigation. Americans do that all the time.
At least in some parts of Louisiana the rural areas are literally disappearing into the sea, so there's less debate about whether or not they are declining.
I'd guess in the states without functional counties those functions are usually state-level, not city?
This is the case in Alaska, where I think everything on your list in 127 is primarily managed by the state.
138: All the cool people use furrow irrigation too.
137.1: I thought there was a requirement (from the truth in sentencing era) that in most cases you serve a minimum of 85% of your sentence.
The New Fuji was the occasion of a scandal only seven years after its founding, when Kondo - Ju- zo-'s son killed a neighboring farmer and his family in a dispute over the right to sell souvenirs to mini-Fuji visitors.
Who sells to the full-sized tourists?
127: Medicaid and all that is state. I'm not even sure if we have county jails. District Attorneys and Land records seem to be about it.'
Various state agencies like the Department of Mental Health (DMH) have different regions with Area directors ("Metro Boston" or "Northeast") but I do not know if other agencies, e.g. Department of Children and Families (DCF) have the same internal boundaries.
From my rather limited experience of Vermont, although it has the New England town structure, the counties seem to provide more of the services. This may just be Chittenden (Burlington).
I think it's the most urban New England states where counties are completely gone - Massachusetts, Connecticut. Maine still has some level of county government. Vermont makes sense too. Especially as their county sizes are more uniform - all >25k and
||
The Russian Northern Fleet (NF) will also lose its status as a separate military-administrative unit equal to a military district effective December 1, and its ground, aviation, and air defense forces will be transferred to the newly re-created Leningrad Military District. TASS noted that this information has not been officially confirmed.Interesting.
I thought they were back with "St. Petersburg."
The city is. The oblast and military district aren't.
Not dead yet!
Yeah, they had a referendum on it in the early 1990s and the vote went one way for the city (only city residents voted) and the other way for the oblast (all oblast residents voted). City's always been one of the more liberal bits of Russia (which really is setting the bar pretty low)
142: I hope so, though if it's 28 months from his pre-trial incarceration starting in January 2021, he'd have served it all by now.
Parts of his family alerted the FBI and got him arrested, so I guess there's at least some hope that he will be/has been drawn away from QAnon after release.
149: Finnish sniper capcha.
Meanwhile, a US ally which benefits from billions of dollars in US aid and arms sales is about to carry out the biggest act of forced deportation since the 1950s - two million people will be affected.
No, a different one.
147: When my Dad was in Maine, I noticed more county structure. Does Rhode Island even have more than one county? (Haven't bothered to google - just saying that it's tiny and mostly Providence)
There's a kind of regional organization of 3 counties in Western MA that are not as far west as the Berkshires.
I learned when buying a house that the kind of deed you get in Eastern MA is different from what you get in Worcester and points west.
156 reminds me of what my half-Tamil half-Ashkenazi friend said in grad school: "I'm opposed to all the religious separatist states that the British set up as they were leaving, both Israel and Pakistan."
|| $23,500 in Coins to Pay a Settlement? Judge Says Keep the Change and Try Again.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/30/us/coins-lawsuit-payment-colorado.html
This was discussed here not long ago, right?
My favorite part was about another case, "In June, a federal judge in Georgia ordered the owner of an auto-repair shop to pay nearly $40,000 in back pay and damages after he paid a former employee's wages with about 91,500 greasy pennies left in his driveway." ||
159 reminds me that I should order that T-shirt I saw with a huge union flag and the slogan "WE'RE SORRY YOUR ANCESTORS WERE CRAP AT WAR".
162: I would like to have such a shirt to wear in the Deep South, though I suspect either it's vanished or that's not quite the wording, because "crap at" is more naturally British than American.
I'm sure there are some good other triumphal ones out there. Here's one, although it says "The North" rather than "The US".
This could also do (with a better color).
Speaking of the subcontinent, people keep calling me and asking if I speak Hindi. I've taken to asking them if they wanted to teach me. I'm not sure why they are calling me. It's a number I've owned for over twenty years.
Meanwhile in other county governments, the heavy hand of the state is the best thing around.
Shasta County economy: education, government, tourism.
132.2: The author of this blog is a crank and a nut, and everything he writes about anything should be taken with a lot of salt.
162-7: I've always loved this one.
https://www.zazzle.ca/gen_sherman_heat_a_peach_tour_1864_shirt_light-235515826151588940
168 He was a perennial candidate here, and we stopped letting him come to our forums.
161 That nice young man -- that's what Michael Lewis says -- seems to have gotten into trouble. Maybe listening to the lawyers (who surely told him to behave differently) would have been a good idea?
