BOOK REVIEW: Rural revival?

OPINION:

HOLLOWING OUT THE MIDDLE: THE RURAL BRAIN DRAIN AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR AMERICA

By Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas

Beacon Press, $26.95, 224 pages

Reviewed by Phil Brand

You’re not in Mayberry anymore. Andy Griffith-style idyllic small towns like the one portrayed in the 1960s TV show - if they ever did exist - are vanishing. Talented young people are fleeing in droves, transforming rural communities into impoverished ghost towns. “Many small towns,” Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas ruefully observe in their new book, “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America,” “are mere years away from extinction.”

The husband and wife research team draw this conclusion after living for a year in the Iowa town of Ellis (population: 2,000), observing and chronicling the residents lives and choices. It isn’t a rosy picture. Rural Americans are poor and getting poorer. The now familiar forces of mechanization, globalization and immigration have decimated the agricultural and industrial economies that once provided a ticket to middle class life in the American heartland. Families and communities are splitting at the seams.

What does this mean for young people coming of age in Podunkville? After all, a wholesome environment for starting a family is an important draw of small-town life, and the authors observe, “the people of Ellis glean tremendous satisfaction from the fact that they are good at raising kids.” The authors interviewed 200 people who had attended the town’s high school in the late 1980s and early 1990s to find out what they had done with their lives.

Interviewees fall into four camps: Stayers, Achievers, Seekers and Returners. The largest group, the Stayers, is composed of those who never left Ellis. They jumped quickly into adult life, working construction or at the local nursing home, getting married and having children. The unemployed or simply bored started meth labs in the abandoned barns on the outskirts of town. About one in five are Achievers. They went off to college after high school, often to the University of Iowa, and then departed for Omaha, Minneapolis or New York, following job and social opportunities.

A small number are Seekers, not college-bound but anxious to see the world beyond Ellis. They joined the military. The rest were Returners, who left for a couple of years but quickly circled back to their hometown. These categories cloud the fact that the authors are really identifying two groups, the leavers and the stayers. And the striking fact is that the young people leaving look “markedly different” from those who don’t. The Ellis high school guidance counselor put it bluntly: “The best kids go while the ones with the biggest problems stay, and then we have to deal with their kids in the schools in the next generation.”

Behind the “class-structured migration patterns,” say the authors, is an education system that efficiently sorts students into one of the two camps. The Achievers, mostly from the prominent families about town, are tagged early and pushed toward college. The town throws its collective support behind these children, who will make it big and reflect well on the town. In contrast, the Stayers view school as an “alienating experience” and wish they had learned concrete skills that would help them find decent jobs. For the authors, this is evidence that small towns need to “equalize their investments across different groups of young people” to correct for the “chronic underinvestment in its non-college-bound students.”

Many non-college-bound students do need more and better educational programs, but the authors’ answers to small-town decay are distinctly unhelpful and reflect their belief that “policymakers” must come up with large-scale strategies and programs to fix problems. Get this: They want a cabinet-level position in Washington to deal with rural America. They imagine a boom in “green energy” and propose niche-market agriculture (think $18/pound blue cheese and craft beer). Even more middle-class jobs will come from rural offices to regulate local working conditions and administer compulsory safety-training programs. These are hackneyed solutions - there’s something surreal about appointing a national czar to promote community.

The authors’ call for “rethinking” and “reinventing” rural America reflects what economist Friedrich Hayek called the Fatal Conceit - the conviction that government can understand social change and plan the future. Traditional Midwesterners are unlikely to buy it. “Conservatism,” Russell Kirk wrote, “always has had its most loyal adherents in the country, where man is slow to break with the old ways that link him with his God in the infinity above and with his father in the grave at his feet.”

Yet “Hollowing Out the Middle” is on to something important. Elites are turning away from large parts of American life. Libertarian author Charles Murray, who grew up in small-town Iowa in the 1950s, writes: “Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble.” It’s not healthy, Mr. Murray concludes. “That is not the America that Tocqueville saw. It is not an America that can remain America.”

While they are sincerely concerned about the plight of small towns, Mr. Carr and Ms. Kefalas lack a gut understanding of the people who choose to live there. Rural folk may recognize many of the book’s characterizations. Most will be put off by its proposed solutions.

Phil Brand lives and works in New Hampshire. He is the author of “The Neighbor’s Kid: School Choice Across America,” forthcoming from the Capital Research Center.