LOL not even close. I know Trump was well over 60%, it might have been over 70%, in my county. It wasn't much different the last two elections.
The "very rural" population is shrinking, but areas like mine where people can either telecommute or create a small business serving the local community are not. I'm about 60 miles from a big city but really have no reason to go there any more. I'm not into the arts scene, too old for concerts these days, so other than an occasional business meeting or flight, there's just no appeal. My area has about all the shopping I need, anything else is a quick Amazon order.
While neither of the major party candidates got my vote this year, it was people like me and my neighbors who put Trump in the White House, for better or worse.
lol Describes me to a T, except I consider Chattanooga to be a big city. (Where I grew up, the nearest town was maybe 8,000.) But I actually live out in a very small, unincorporated bedroom suburb. All the big city amenities (well, Chattanooga-sized big) for a ten to thirty minute drive.
China is now the largest manufacturer in the world. There has been a paradigm shift that most Americans have not realized yet. China will be a power the likes of which the world has never seen. It is weird to be at the point in history where one empire died and a new one replaced it. Ours lasted for about a century so we didn't do too bad.
It is going to get real friggin scary when China decides to put all their manufacturing expertise into building a war machine that supercedes our own. It is inevitable.
I think we may avoid replaying World War II with us as the technologically advanced but manufacturing poor loser simply because by the time China is capable of projecting that level of force this far against this advanced a military, they'll already own everything here worth owning. Why break your own stuff to gain control of a whiny, entitled bunch of brats?
I agree that education opportunities need to be increased in rural areas but you also have to look at the take up. You pointed out rightly that the current kinds of jobs like lumber or steel or mining are gone. It takes a certain resiliency to channel your skills to a new field and knowing the mindset of people who choose to stay in these areas it's going to be hard. You could argue that if they wanted to keep up the standard of living of their families they would have considered relocating for work.
I won't disagree with your premise about the rate of automation. It's going to take a long amount of time. My point is that rural communities as we know them might not be viable. You can drop server farms on these places but how many actual people would be needed to staff such a highly automated operation? Maybe 20? Is that a community? I see it almost like an oil rig, just drop 20 people in there and cart in all your supplies. Would such a town need a physical bank? It can be done online. Can 20-100 people sustain even one fast food restaurant? You're mentioning things which are highly automated like wind farms. Those will not save communities only prolong them until such time that only the server farm is left. Those sectors need land not people.
Once we are so automated that a basic income is needed then people can live where they want assuming they can afford to have their stuff shipped over to them.
But until then these places will have to shrink as they have been for decades. It wasn't that long ago that more than 50% of people were employed in rural areas in the agricultural sector. Right now maybe 15% of the population lives in these areas. Why? Farming is already automated. It will continue to shrink that way. Someone else made the excellent point that many modern jobs require a certain population density and a certain critical mass of people in an area.
There are rural jobs and its the same story as the cities and in fact its even more stark. In a small town it seems maybe a 100 or people make all the real money: the doctors, lawyers, brokers, business owners and everyone else is working at near minimum wage or generally kept under $50k with no real room to grow that outside of getting to city for either more pay or more experience or both. At least in the cities you can still see people in all parts of the income spectrum. No doubt the disparity is huge even there but at least there are jobs that go above $50k to around $150 to 200k. In a rural area you have to be one of those professional people or business owner to crack a certain income.
The jobs I think that will be last to be automated are the trades like electrician or plumber and healthcare because ultimately its a human contact thing. Robots might do the surgeries and even make the diagnoses and dispense medications but a person would be needed to talk to/reassure the people and double check the robots' work. I just don't see robots going in and figuring out an existing wiring installation and getting in there and drawing wires and doing the connections. The complexity of such a robot going into a myriad of homes and businesses and repairing things would be too high and thus too expensive. They would be great maybe for new electrical installations where the whole system is designed for robots.
Urban jobs especially creativity and collaboration based jobs are pretty immune from robots. We might get Watson to come up with a recipe or even create a cartoon series but it would generally be terrible. Those people who choose to work would be rewarded handsomely. Thus everyone would want such jobs but there wont be enough to go around and the world would be split even further into employed and non working. This would only increase income disparity.
The supply of labor already exceeds what we need that's why so many are unemployed, underemployed and have dropped out of the labor market altogether. That's also why a large proportion of jobs are basically minimum wage or minimum wage plus $2-10.
Some damned good points and well thought out posts here, thanks. I'll point out a couple of trends though. First, both fast food and server positions are squarely in the aim of automation now. Second, one major trend in Japan is in service bots, because of their aging population and desire to severely limit immigration. Nursing homes may soon be reliant on robots rather than minimum wage aides. A lot of city jobs are fairly immune to automation, but highly vulnerable to outsourcing. We already see that in engineering with minority participation, where a talented and entrepreneurial young black or Hispanic PE can get a cubby office in any city and offer both minority and local participation in enough depth for the corporation's coveted handshake photograph. Right now the actual work is typically farmed out to large American firms, with the face taking 5% to 10% off the top for very little work and overhead. But there's no technical reason that work could not be farmed out to India, China, etc. as long as those doing the work are proficient in American engineering and codes. We've already seen that with document scanning, where Indian CAD drafters have largely replaced sophisticated automation programs recreating scanned documents. The firm we use does that and produces a much superior product for almost as low a cost.