Hola amigos! Angry New Mexican here. Once again our beloved AOC is too busy writing to the other Angry Men to post his own darned messages. Anyway, I had sent out this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on the death of rural America via Brain Drain to urban/suburban America. Without further ado, here’s AOC:

Angry Overeducated Catholic

The whiny tone of the article, especially early on, tempted me to write a mean 2 sentence summary. But the good practical ideas later earned the whiny academics a reprieve.

Example good ideas:

  • Having small town high schools provide a focus on vocational and professional education as well as college prep, so that they can prepare those who are most likely to stay in the town after HS.
  • Extending job retraining to HS students as well as displaced workers, so that they can tune their education to the burgeoning job markets in their regions.
  • Attracting immigrants (as in “to the US” and not just “to the town”) to replace emigrants with hardworking lower income types and foreign professionals who may well be more than happy to build the local economy.

Now, if only the article weren’t laced with the standard “woe is me, the area I study is changing, and the stress of change is ruining lives, how can we preserve these areas for their people (and my continued study)” of sociologists the world over. Sadly, of course, progress does indeed march on—bringing generally greater prosperity and disruptive change to isolated enclaves—no matter how much academic luddites would like to freeze it to preserve their areas of interest.

One also wonders if they realize just how much their “destroy agribusiness and replace evil factory farms with organic free-range farms” vision would hurt those other poor folks they mention in passing, the ones in inner cities…

Of course there is a good way to reduce factory farming while keeping food prices low: repeal the stupid farm subsidies and our outrageous tariffs on foreign food. But I don’t think we’ll hear those ideas any time soon from these academics.