My biases in the whole urban vs. rural discussion are well known - I prefer the rural lifestyle. I've experienced both urban and rural settings, and I like rural settings better. Both have their issues, and both have their advantages; for example, it's difficult to find a really good chicken vindaloo in our corner of the Susitna Valley, which prompted my wife to learn how to prepare that dish herself.
I do think rural people tend to have a more realistic grasp on how the world wags, even when it comes to something as arcane as economics, called by many the "dismal science." Economics is something of a hobby of mine, and yes, I know, that's an odd thing to be interested in. But a major flaw in economic thinking lies in what economists deride as a major fallacy, and that is in viewing an economy in zero-sum terms. Now, some of my biases have been confirmed by (of all things) a French study, which has shown that urban, not rural, people are far more likely to buy into this fantasy.
The well-worn stereotypes of urban sophisticates versus country bumpkins took a hit in July when an up-and-coming French economist explained her latest findings in The Economist, a publication with more than 1.2 million subscribers globally and significant influence with policymakers in the English-speaking world.
“Some groups are more likely than others to see the world in zero-sum terms,” wrote Stefanie Stantcheva, founder of Harvard’s Social Economics Lab and this year’s recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, in one of the magazine’s prestigious “By Invitation” essays.
Then came the macroeconomic equivalent of a dubstep drop. “People in cities, for example, tend to think this way more than those in rural areas,” Stantcheva wrote, chalking some of this up to “intense competition for housing and jobs.”
I'm not sure what a "dubstep drop" is, but I can derive enough from context. And here's why the zero-sum presumption is a bad one:
If you are not an economist or at least an econ geek, you may wonder what all the fuss is about, so I’ll clue you in on some jargon: “zero-sum” is practically a swear word among economists. (It wouldn’t surprise me if some economist somewhere bashed his shin and exclaimed, “zero-sum it!”) They regard it as a stupid game that only very foolish people would play. So what, exactly, is it?
“A zero sum game is a situation where losses incurred by a player in a transaction result in an equal increase in gains of the opposing player,” the Corporate Finance Institute’s guide explains. “It is named this way because the net effect after gains and losses on both sides equals zero.”
That's not how an economy works, and that's why this notion has long been a peeve. The zero-sum believers think that wealth and income - they aren't the same thing - are distributed in a society. That's wrong, tragically and comically wrong. Income is earned. Wealth is created. Income is the compensation people get in trade; trading their efforts, their skills, their abilities, their knowledge, their resources, to others, in an open, free exchange in which all parties realize a perceived gain in value. Wealth is the accumulated result of income. And, yes, wealth is created, not distributed.
Zero-sum thinking denies all that. And it's wrong.
Read More: Which States Have the Most Affordable Homes? Red States.
Relax, People. Paul Krugman Is Predicting a Disastrous Recession.
This same study showed an education gap, as well as the rural vs. urban divide, but there's a catch.
The Harvard economist also found that some education can help, but it can hurt even more. “People with more formal education are less likely to see the world as zero-sum,” she wrote, “but the pattern flips among the highly educated: those with PhDs often show the strongest zero-sum beliefs.”
There's missing information here, where the "Piled Higher & Deeper" degrees are concerned. Someone with a PhD in Ethnic Kazoo-Playing will almost certainly hold different, and probably much less realistic, views of the world than someone with a PhD in Industrial Chemistry.
Could the difference be due to the increased competition for resources in cities, wherein people are jammed so close together, competing for apartments, parking places, and even for walking space on the sidewalks? It's possible. Big cities in particular jam a lot of people in small areas, and there are pathologies both political and behavioral that come from crowding. Behaviorally, we aren't as different from rats as we'd like to think.
Big-city politicians, though, routinely and stupidly push zero-sum policies, like rent controls, permissive homeless policies, free housing for illegal immigrants, and government-controlled grocery stores. And voters, adhering to the zero-sum mindset, keep voting these same politicians in, and that may be the answer to that very pressing question we on the right have been asking for some time: Given the self-destructive policies of these people, why do the residents keep voting them in? Are they just not capable of realizing how they are proving out Mencken's caution that democracy is the theory that people "...know what government they want and deserve to get it, good and hard"?
A big part of this is simple: Rural and small-town people are more likely to be people who make things, who grow things. And, I think, a big part of that difference is the innate practicality with which small-town and rural people view the world and its resources. City people see a pie, and start thinking about how to divide it up. Rural people see a pie, and start thinking about how to make a bigger, tastier pie. And that makes all the difference.
