{"id":40137,"date":"2013-11-26T06:00:01","date_gmt":"2013-11-26T12:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=40137"},"modified":"2013-11-26T09:21:08","modified_gmt":"2013-11-26T15:21:08","slug":"todays-news-seven-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=40137","title":{"rendered":"Today’s News, Seven Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I left \u00a0North Dakota in the eighties, it seemed like rural America was on the verge of drying up and blowing away.<\/p>\n

Of course, it was a historically lousy time for farmers and farming – and a time when there just wasn’t much more than that to draw people to a small town, unless one specifically sought out the small-town life.<\/p>\n

Which I, for one, certainly did not.<\/p>\n

Anyway – times have changed. \u00a0Not just in NoDak – perhaps you’ve heard, they found oil – but also in rural Minnesota<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Amid what has been described as a new \u201cgolden age\u201d for farm profits and land wealth, the list of the 50 Minnesota counties with the fastest-growing incomes since 2005 includes only one big Twin Cities county. The state\u2019s net farm income has nearly doubled, from $4.5 billion in 2010 to $8.2 billion in 2012.<\/p>\n

The town of Jackson, in southwest Minnesota, was one of only four rural cities over 2,500 to suffer significant losses in numbers during this century\u2019s first decade \u2014 then it landed a new employer from Europe offering 1,400 jobs.<\/p>\n

Studying trends in retail, Craig and a colleague uncovered what they called \u201castounding\u201d growth in consumer sales in regional centers such as Mankato and Brainerd, and \u201cremarkable\u201d increases in economic activity in many smaller communities \u2014 stiff reproofs to the \u201cmyth of rural decline and ghost towns.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The spread of technology helps, of course. One of the worst things about small-town life, if you weren’t wired to appreciate it or didn’t live to spend your days in deer stands or on fishing boats, was the stultifying isolation. That’s much less a factor these days.<\/p>\n

Oh, yeah – and I wrote about this almost seven years ago<\/a>. Joel Kotkin’s been predicting this for a long time; as technology makes small towns, especially the exurbs, less isolated, growth will shift there.\u00a0 Cities will become playgrounds of the wealthy and warehouses for the poor; everyone else will be living in Watertown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I left \u00a0North Dakota in the eighties, it seemed like rural America was on the verge of drying up and blowing away. Of course, it was a historically lousy time for farmers and farming – and a time when there just wasn’t much more than that to draw people to a small town, unless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-midwest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40137"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40179,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40137\/revisions\/40179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}