Rural poverty seems (to my casual knowledge) to be very intractable—that’s part of why poor people move from farms to cities. On the other hand, the problem may be more political than I realize.
I’m definitely not an expert in this sort of sociology, but I have lived in rural areas for a good chunk of my life and I’m familiar with a variety of ways of living under those constraints. The impression I get is that rural poverty is largely due to infrastructure and availability issues, and to lack of economies of scale.
Ten miles outside my hometown there’s still electricity and good roads, and the people making their living there (as opposed to people that prefer rural life but work in town) tend to be fairly affluent ranchers and vintners or their lower-middle-class employees. Twenty miles outside town there’s no central electricity let alone water, the roads are dirt tracks or poorly maintained asphalt and don’t get plowed in the winter, and about the only commercial enterprises worth talking about are forestry and a couple of mines. The few people living permanently under those conditions are truly poor. Not because of lack of marketable skills—I spent one summer staying with a family friend who lived in a one-room log cabin, and he was one of the more gifted mechanics I’ve met—but because lack of infrastructure makes labor-saving measures a lot harder and more expensive, and because low population density makes niches for comparative advantage a lot rarer and shallower.
These problems strike me as technical more than political, and I’m not aware of any candidate technical solutions that’d level them completely. But there are some technical advances that’d mitigate them considerably. Affordable and reliable wind and solar would make labor-saving technology less dependent on the power grid and would enable network connectivity; network connectivity allows some knowledge work to be done rurally, makes education a lot easier, and makes distribution of goods simpler (you still have to ship out production, but payment, marketing, and some support can be done digitally). If we’re really interested in tackling rural poverty as a political issue, any of this could be subsidized, although that doesn’t strike me as a great utilitarian move given the greater efficiency of urbanized settlement.
I’m definitely not an expert in this sort of sociology, but I have lived in rural areas for a good chunk of my life and I’m familiar with a variety of ways of living under those constraints. The impression I get is that rural poverty is largely due to infrastructure and availability issues, and to lack of economies of scale.
Ten miles outside my hometown there’s still electricity and good roads, and the people making their living there (as opposed to people that prefer rural life but work in town) tend to be fairly affluent ranchers and vintners or their lower-middle-class employees. Twenty miles outside town there’s no central electricity let alone water, the roads are dirt tracks or poorly maintained asphalt and don’t get plowed in the winter, and about the only commercial enterprises worth talking about are forestry and a couple of mines. The few people living permanently under those conditions are truly poor. Not because of lack of marketable skills—I spent one summer staying with a family friend who lived in a one-room log cabin, and he was one of the more gifted mechanics I’ve met—but because lack of infrastructure makes labor-saving measures a lot harder and more expensive, and because low population density makes niches for comparative advantage a lot rarer and shallower.
These problems strike me as technical more than political, and I’m not aware of any candidate technical solutions that’d level them completely. But there are some technical advances that’d mitigate them considerably. Affordable and reliable wind and solar would make labor-saving technology less dependent on the power grid and would enable network connectivity; network connectivity allows some knowledge work to be done rurally, makes education a lot easier, and makes distribution of goods simpler (you still have to ship out production, but payment, marketing, and some support can be done digitally). If we’re really interested in tackling rural poverty as a political issue, any of this could be subsidized, although that doesn’t strike me as a great utilitarian move given the greater efficiency of urbanized settlement.