Thanks. Your 1st 4 comments look spot on. I was skeptical of the 4th one until googling it:
More government money get’s transferred from cities to rural parts then the other way around.
I was unsure whether the effect I claimed was as large as commonly believed, but I didn’t expect it to be outright false. I’ve found a couple thing confirming your point, and a likely bias page complaining that per capita spending is less in rural areas. Even if that’s true, it would just mean that rural areas collectively weren’t earning enough to pay their “fair share” in taxes. Not exactly prime material for the red tribe narrative.
Shipping rocks around is cheap
As I understand it, the price of things like gravel goes up pretty linearly with the distance to the nearest quarry. But the broader point is valid for lighter materials that you need less of to make something. I’m not sure which category concrete falls into. Ceramics are fairly dependent on use. There’s nothing wrong with shipping ceramics for space shuttle tiles or semiconductors around the world. That’s a bigger issue for large products with higher tighter profit margins.
When Mao prepared his Great Leap forward he thought that it doesn’t make sense to have the factories in the cities. He thought it would be much better to move them to the country-side.
That was one of the worst economic decisions in history, because a lot of those relocated factories stopped working.
It turns out that having factories near other factories is useful. Millions starved.
These days we know how to run a steel mill or a car man well enough to have it in a rural area but in the beginning they had to be in cities.
Thanks. Your 1st 4 comments look spot on. I was skeptical of the 4th one until googling it:
I was unsure whether the effect I claimed was as large as commonly believed, but I didn’t expect it to be outright false. I’ve found a couple thing confirming your point, and a likely bias page complaining that per capita spending is less in rural areas. Even if that’s true, it would just mean that rural areas collectively weren’t earning enough to pay their “fair share” in taxes. Not exactly prime material for the red tribe narrative.
As I understand it, the price of things like gravel goes up pretty linearly with the distance to the nearest quarry. But the broader point is valid for lighter materials that you need less of to make something. I’m not sure which category concrete falls into. Ceramics are fairly dependent on use. There’s nothing wrong with shipping ceramics for space shuttle tiles or semiconductors around the world. That’s a bigger issue for large products with higher tighter profit margins.
When Mao prepared his Great Leap forward he thought that it doesn’t make sense to have the factories in the cities. He thought it would be much better to move them to the country-side.
That was one of the worst economic decisions in history, because a lot of those relocated factories stopped working. It turns out that having factories near other factories is useful. Millions starved.
These days we know how to run a steel mill or a car man well enough to have it in a rural area but in the beginning they had to be in cities.