AliHajiSheik
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2012
- Messages
- 12,549
- Reaction score
- 4,369
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Undisclosed
There are tons of stats on this:
https://stateimpact.npr.org/new-ham...-rural-ones-and-new-englands-a-case-in-point/
And its not just true here, its true everywhere:
https://www.oecd.org/swac/events/49008457.pdf
Think about it, why do people move to urban areas? Its for the money and opportunities. I grew up in rural Arkansas, I moved to the KC area 17 years ago because of the jobs and income opportunities. Of the people that i grew up with, the ones that are doing well economically are almost all the ones that moved to a city, the ones that are hardly getting by didn't.
A full 84% of GDP in the United States is generated in our urban centers.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct...uJGUVyHfwNJyt4UVw&sig2=7jBlYwzzZQjjOYCh4UyDwQ
Thank you. The first link is broken, the 2nd link's discussion of agglomeration is interesting, even if a bit dull. The third link is your best but while certainly the most government spending takes place in urban areas which is one feature that makes them urban, I can't help but wonder how GDP is calculates the actual economic aspect of imports and exports from the wide open spaces where farming, oil extraction and other natural resources are gathered. It is easier to just apply the economic functions of ExxonMobil to Irving, TX than it would be to allocated all that activity to the various properties of XOM throughout the US. Obviously that would be extremely time consuming to do that everywhere, that is why the smaller the area, the more skeptical I am of GDP numbers.
As for your point about the maps, 1 vote in rural Illinois counts just the same as a vote in Chicago. It is each states demographic dynamic that plays itself out. I am in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Pennsylvania is has 3 big areas: Philadelphia, Pittsburg, the collar counties of Philadelphia and then moderate and smaller counties scattered throughout the state. Just calling a place a city and rolling it up into urban vs rural doesn't work well in my state when it comes to politics. The Democrat strategy is to turn out the vote in the 3 big areas above in an attempt to overcome the vote in basically all the other areas. That is pretty much the only places Hillary went during the campaign. Trump went more to the smaller areas like Scranton and Lancaster. The map supports this because while she won those areas she was targeting, she did not win by enough.