The two of us have been taking a bit of time to explore what our first major topics are going to be. One we keep coming back to is the concept of The Curse of Bigness. The late Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote an anti-monopoly book in 1934 under the same title, after a long legal career of fighting against such businesses - with good reason. Monopoly completely destroys the market, and we rely on the market in this sense to provide some level of balance and a semblance of fairness. Without rules in and for the market, it will never live up to its designated potential. “Rules,” for lack of a better word, act as the guard rails, keeping things on track.
The way we think of this curse, though, is that it applies not just to bigness in the business realm, but to extremes in general. Extreme concentration of anything is particularly unhealthy for society - we tend to perform better when there’s some variation. Extreme concentrations of wealth, power, goods, or any number of concepts tend to have negative fallout. The same goes for the opposites - extreme poverty, power vacuums, food deserts, etc. are also detrimental to society as a whole.
If we go back to this blog’s overarching topic, we can think about extreme sparseness and extreme density of populations. Within the purview of a nation, both tend to be problematic, as we’ve already touched on. One thing to keep in mind is that the vast majority of the United States is sparse - other nations range from very sparse (e.g. Russia) to very dense (e.g. Singapore).
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is what one could definitely consider sparse. 16,377 square miles (42,416 square kilometers) of mostly-forested land with a population of 301,608 - just over 18.4 people per sqmi (7.1 per sqkm).
Michael: I remember my first time in the stands at Michigan Stadium, as a freshman in college. Almost 110,000 people attended that game. More than ⅓ of the population of the UP, all in one place. That was absolutely mind-blowing. Growing up sparse, you can never truly understand just how many people there are out there until you’re in the middle of something like that...
To compare with a European country, the Upper Peninsula is roughly the size of the Netherlands, which has 17.65 million people in the same space (1078 per sqmi / 416 per sqkm) - almost 60 times as dense. The Upper Peninsula is definitely sparse in comparison.
Way back in 2019 (which feels like a decade ago in COVID times), Michael wrote a blog post on The Purpose of Government. To borrow a quote from that post:
[...] the purpose of government, and the regulations it creates, can be boiled down to managing the supply and demand curves for all goods, services, and experiences - ensuring that the citizens it is responsible for have an acceptable range across the board. This includes both direct (food, education) and indirect (national defense, interstate commerce mechanisms) goods and services.
Governments play a role in shaping our everyday lives to ensure that all citizens are given, at a bare minimum, the opportunity to share in and to equally experience the rights we are all granted. We realize there are many who cringe at the idea of the government playing any role in influencing what looks to be the natural tendency or order of things - much preferring to have the government be nothing more than an observer - but with a little further probing this idealized “spectator government” can be antithetical to its actual purpose and detrimental to its constituents.
Unfortunately, we humans are not perfect—far from it, actually—so guidance is often required. Many of our personal decisions are made for our personal benefit. We react to the situations we find ourselves in, not necessarily to the ideal or perfect situation. The rural exodus and slow deterioration of our rural communities is an example of that. People are responding to the situation and leaving, not necessarily because they want to, but because—in many cases—they have to. Their options are limited.
The move of one family from a rural community to a community of higher density has little consequence - their friends may miss them, their employers may have to find replacements, but the big picture isn’t impacted. While a better life may await a family who makes the rural exit - regardless of whether that departure is by choice or circumstance - we must look at the larger picture and see the forest for the trees. Just as one straw in itself is not a burden, there is eventually the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Excess is the accumulation of all those individual movements, and as we approach that horizon we creep closer to an unstable situation. When taken across the entire population these moves can and will eventually add up to reach a breaking point on both sides of the equation.
New arrivals into already-dense urban and suburban areas will either further increase their population density or cause further urban sprawl, both of which increase the natural burden of expansion. These new people require more resources to be brought to the community, exacerbate issues of housing and service availability, and can attract the increase in crime which tends to follow population growth, among other concerns.
On the other side of the equation are the rural communities which people are leaving - and one could argue that the impact is far more significant with them, as they have few resources to offer in the first place. Their already exacerbated strain becomes exceedingly worse. The financial strain on schools, healthcare providers, small businesses, and municipalities approaches the breaking point due to the lack of tax base or paying customers available. There is the emotional strain of families faced with leaving their homes and ways of life, or of having their children leave for greener pastures. There is also political strain where these communities lose their voice as an area of importance worth preserving or saving.
As the United States passed 83% of the population living in urban areas in 2020, up from 64% in the 1950s, we have seen a strong ‘left behind’ feeling from the remainder of the population, with good reason. Rural living is increasingly a minority status (though one that is capable to be exited from - we do not wish to compare with e.g. racial minorities), and the bigness of the space surrounding each individual in rural America is exacerbating the problems of that minority.
The concentration of wealth and the flow of money through the economy is a large factor in determining the path of an area. For urban and suburban communities, there is a steady or increasing monetary base, leading to growth, diversity, and viability. Rural communities experience the flip side to this coin. As wealth, money, and human capital leave the area, so does the incentive and likelihood of success to invest in life support or revitalization efforts. Economic strain compounds and so do the resulting consequences, which in turn require even further investment to prevent the problem from spiraling out of control.
Investing in rural areas is not a philanthropic endeavor. This narrow view of rural as somehow less important than urban is myopic and detrimental to our overall economic and social progress. By investing in these communities we are creating a positive economic and social impact, leading to the revitalization and stabilization of rural areas and acting as a potential release valve for urban areas experiencing the negative effects of excessive population growth.
Bigness has its positives there is no doubt - many people who live in rural areas do so specifically because of the big open spaces around them, while many people who live in urban areas do so specifically because of the number of people they have a chance to meet - but the possibility of negative consequences and unanticipated drawbacks are always out there. What looks to be a benefit very rarely comes without a cost. We argue that the greatest drawback falls on these rural communities which are experiencing population decline - not because people want to exit, but because they are left with no other options. These communities are on the brink of destruction, facing the reality of a world where resources draw people, people draw money, and money drives everything forward.
The responsibility of government, as stated above, is to be supportive of the affairs of its citizens. Not to dictate what we do and where we live, but to be a passive participant in our well-being and a steadfast guardian of our ways of life. This often means standing up for those in need of assistance and acting for the benefit of all, including those living in the minority. In the case of rural communities, preventing extreme poverty and extreme sparseness falls on government entities, because there comes a point where communities cannot act without support to create enough opportunity for people to want to stay.
We shouldn’t be fooled into believing that this is the way things are meant to be - that eventually everyone must live in cities for their own good or for our good as a society. Rural decline is a byproduct of industrialization, but rural communities are not obsolete. They are struggling but, with a little assistance, they can revive and compete, contributing to growth once again as they did in the centuries prior to the industrial revolution. They will never see such economic prosperity as cities can, but that is not what they seek. They seek stability and opportunity - a release from the perpetual uncertainty of their very existence.
We need to help them get there.