Why many rural Americans will stay put even when the local economy declines.
As population growth slows in the developed world (population growth everywhere is negative, except in Africa), nations turn to nationalism and populism. This is especially true in rural areas, where populations are shrinking.
There is one obvious contradiction between the two articles. The former article insists that rural people will not move when their economies fail, while the latter article points to the decline in rural populations. However, the first article does point out that the brightest young people are leaving rural areas, never to return.
Now for something that might seem completely different, but which is relevant....
The first animal welfare societies were created in the 19th century mainly to look after draft animals like horses, which were often left abandoned or which died in the streets. At the beginning of the 20th century, these societies began to turn their attention to smaller companion animals like cats and dogs.
When the Hawaiian Humane Society was established in 1883, its mandate included the care of widows, orphans and the mentally ill, functions that passed to the government by the 1930s.
What these articles do not explicitly mention is that humane institutions began to focus on pets because draft animals were becoming obsolete.
Also, if the Humane Society eventuality abdicated its mission to care for widows and orphans to the State, one reason was that there were fewer widows and orphans.
Once Upon A Time, people were constantly dying, and not just old people. Today, we have movies like "Four Weddings and a Funeral", but not so long ago it would have been more like Four Weddings and Four Funerals. Young widows and widowers were not so uncommon. Everyone was constantly dying and people were constantly getting remarried. (Hence, perhaps, the evil stepmother as a staple of fairy tales, who would have been a reality in daily life. Also, hence the high divorce rate found in developed societies today, which mirrors the previous high death rate; "Until death do us part" once referred to a period of years, not necessarily decades.)
Orphans have also become less common. In affluent countries, there is an orphan shortage, with Americans turning to Asian societies (South Korea, China) or Eastern Europe for a supply of adoptable children. As almost all societies have developed, the pool of eligible orphans has dried up.
Westerners have consequently had to turn to adopting extremely damaged orphans in their own countries, children who would have otherwise spent their entire lives within institutions. In prosperous democracies, there is a governing notion that everyone should have an "ideal" life in a nuclear family living in the suburbs, and that any deviation from the norm is a total failure on the part of society. But that notion seems like a delusion as the number of normal children available for adoption shrinks.
This provides a glimpse into the future of animal welfare societies. One future "problem" for them may be their success. The number of animals being euthanized seems to have dramatically declined in the past generation thanks to spay/neuter programs.
The happy problem for shelters is that in the future there may not be any animals entering the shelters. The number of cats and dogs will diminish the way the number of horses and widows and orphans shrank in the past. These organizations will have to reinvent themselves.
How could they reinvent themselves?
One must look to other trends to make an educated guess.
An animal control worker once wrote that up until the 1980s, on the edge of every suburb in the USA there would be a somewhat troublesome pack of roaming dogs, either several large dogs or a half-dozen smaller, terrier-type dogs. In the 1980s, he claimed, those dog packs suddenly disappeared, and for no known reason. One explanation might be that even prior to the spay-neuter efforts of the 21st century, Americans in the suburbs were beginning to keep their pets indoors -- a practice at odds with almost all other societies. For example, the 2011 movie "The Tree of Life" illustrates life in 1950s suburban Texas, with kids and dogs roaming all over the streets. This is so different from today, where even the kids are either indoors or getting chauffeured. Back in the 1950s, people who lived in the suburbs were often from more rural areas, and, importantly, they perceived themselves as living in a rural area. Only later did the suburbs become more refined and tame.
The selling point of suburban life was that it provided the amenities and conveniences of the city, but the wholesomeness and distance of the countryside. In fact, the suburbs were perceived in the 1950s as actually existing in the countryside. Middle-class Americans in the new suburbs were seen to be enjoying the life of the rural gentry -- in a down-sized fashion.
Suburban life was once the equivalent of today's Tiny House Movement. The suburban house was seen as the tiny version of the rural manor -- much the way DIY wooden mobile homes are today seen as smallish houses.
This might suggest that the suburbs are an example of disruptive innovation, in which a cheaper, inferior technology finds a niche, improves over time, then comes to dominate the market (at least at the mid-range, not at the high-end). (This explains the simple, cheap, flimsy nature of the new mass produced houses of the 1950s.)
This kind of disruptive innovation might be evident in certain trends regarding companion animals.
-Animal "rescue" has taken on the sense of purpose and virtue that owning a purebreed dog once had (as opposed to owning a "mutt", which was commonly seen as a sign of irresponsibility).
-Young women are more inclined to get a dog than have a child.
-Small dogs are becoming more popular than large dogs.
-Cats are becoming more popular than dogs.
-Sony has come out with a new model of their robot dog "Aibo".
Following this logic, in the distant future, animal welfare groups may have to branch out into the repair and disposal of companion robots because there will be fewer companion animals, especially dogs. That might sound funny now, but everything changes. (The average household size in Manhattan is 2.1 persons.)
All of these trends signify not only the future decline of companion animal populations, but also a steep decline in the human population and in resource consumption. This would entail a decline in real estate prices.
