America's Most Hopeless Counties Getting More Hopeless

[Donnachaidh]

http://gawker.com/#!5767129/americas-most-hopeless-counties-getting-more-hopeless

The news out of Real America: Real America is dying. That's a technical term! New census figures show that a full one in four counties in America are "dying," meaning that they have more deaths than births. They're slowly being erased from not only sociopolitical relevance, but from existence itself!

Johnson said common threads among the dying counties are older whites who are no longer having children, and an exodus of young adults who find little promise in the region and seek jobs elsewhere. The places also have fewer Hispanic immigrants, who on average are younger and tend to have more children than other groups.

Crumbling industrial areas. Forgotten farming towns. Even cities that built too fast during the housing boom, like Vegas and parts of California and Florida, are seeing themselves caught in a pattern of shrinkage. (And the majority of West Virginia!) All of the places where all the teenagers sit around and woefully dream of getting out and never coming back—well, they're not coming back any more.

And by the way, you know who's most pessimistic about the economy these days? White people without college degrees. They're almost universally unsatisfied with their economic situation; they say the country's best years are behind us; and they blame Washington for many of their problems.

More at the link --

[gratuitous]

1. Oh noes!

This is horrible! Something Must Be Done.

Waitasecond. We're terribly overpopulated as it is. If we're going to reverse that, there are going to be (hold onto your hats, because this leap in logic may come as a shock) fewer people. One of the places where there will be fewer people will be in rural counties, where there weren't that many people to begin with. Could this possibly be actually good news?

[ixion]

3. If driving off a cliff is good news, it's only because

the healing can begin afterward.

[gratuitous]

4. There are several ways humans can reduce their numbers

War and disease are two that have proven pretty effective, but they tend to be rather horrific, and people start trying to avoid them. Of all the methods available, a voluntary reduction in the number of new people seems the most humane and decent. There are potential troubles there, of course, as some people will be unable to resist the temptation to dictate who can and can't procreate. Others will succumb to the lure of eugenics, seeking to preserve and propagate only the "best" genes, usually of people who look, act and think just like them - a coincidence of cosmic proportions, to be sure. Still others will greet the notion of voluntary reduction of the species with suspicion, either from hard experience with genocide, or some notion that by denying the earth as many offspring as they can humanly generate, they are making God mad.

It's a complicated solution, requiring many things that are anathema to the Land of the Me and the Home of the Ego. Our alternative to doing it ourselves is to let something else do it for us, because our population is not sustainable at this level.

[ixion]

5. While I don't disagree that current levels are unsustainable

two things:

1) What is happening is less about population reduction and more about disaster capitalism and the desire for a Neo-Feudal Age.

2) Be careful what you wish for.

[ixion]

2. Ah, the wonderful effects of outsourcing, disaster capitalism and globalisation.

:puke:

[SheilaT]

6. A decade or so ago someone put forth the proposal

that huge areas of the midwest be totally depopulated and allowed to return to native prairie. Not a bad idea, but there are still several million people who currently inhabit those areas.

There really are too many humans on this planet. We are well beyond sustainability numbers, and someday there will be some kind of a population crash. Disease, war, famine, alien invasion, I have no idea how it might happen, or when, but happen it will.