Specialization and high-productivity? Try that in a small town! By Matthew Yglesias

The deep roots of the urban/rural divide

MATTHEW YGLESIAS

AUG 17, 2023

∙ PAID

It’s not really my genre of music and it’s definitely not my politics, but I appreciate that Jason Aldean’s song “Try That In A Small Town” does what art can sometimes do — express how things feel to a person who’s very different than you.

A lot of listeners hear bigoted or hateful intent in the song’s lyrics (even without considering his poor choice of music video location), but I think it’s actually instructive to take what Aldean is saying at face value without attempting to discern his intentions. In his account, the great thing about small towns is that they have this close-knit quality of universal surveillance and comprehension. If you transgress, there will be no bystanders. Everyone knows who you are — and if they don’t, they know that you’re a stranger who doesn’t belong — and everyone knows the person you transgressed against. What’s more, they all know each other so none of them can get away with shirking their responsibility to punish you. It’s the ultimate fuck around and find out scenario, and to Aldean, it is completely unproblematic.

Consider the specific things he says you can’t get away with in a small town:

Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk

Carjack an old lady at a red light

Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store

Cuss out a cop, spit in his face

Stomp on the flag and light it up

Four of these five actions would be near-universally condemned, and even though flag burning has its defenders, they are rare and idiosyncratic. Aldean is looking at transgressions that would prompt all kinds of folks to say “I wish this didn’t happen,” and then smiling happily at the way he believes small-town conditions prevent them from occurring.

The trouble here isn’t really anything he says explicitly — it’s the whole range of scenarios he just doesn’t consider at all.

The city as a liberator

A song I love that’s very much in the opposite vein is CSS’ “City Grrrl” about a teenager from Brazil dreaming of following in her brother’s footsteps and moving to New York.

Critically, CSS and Aldean don’t disagree analytically about the difference between small towns and big cities. Lead vocalist Lovefoxxx says the following in praise of city living:

I wish I could dye my hair pink

Put on black lipstick

No one would give a shit

Short shorts, short skirts

Flower tops, denim shirts 

In the big city, nothing hurts

Aldean does not notice or care about the things that make lots of people want to abandon the small-town panopticon that he adores. If you happen to be a very conventional person, then having everyone constantly watching and judging you seems fine. But if you want to wear weird clothing or experiment with unusual hairstyles or makeup, it’s better to be in a place where “no one would give a shit.”

It’s of course not literally true that nobody sees and judges what you look like, but “in the big city, nothing hurts” — you’re not bound by a claustrophobic cycle of surveillance and gossip.

This is an interesting disjuncture because the artists are talking about the same thing while talking past each other entirely. Aldean is not specifically praising the way small towns can make people feel put upon, isolated, and oppressed. And Lovefoxxx is not saying it’s good to visit violence on strangers with impunity. But to Lovefoxxx, achieving a degree of anonymity is crucial to her self-actualization, while Aldean just sees city folk letting criminals run free.

That’s one big reason why, traditionally, cities are home to lots of artists and creative types — people who put a premium on self-expression and are willing to make some sacrifices in order to obtain it. Urban environments were also, of course, a relative haven for gay and lesbian Americans long before it was remotely acceptable to be “out” in most of the country. Before marriage equality or any other formal legal protection, there was a sense of the city as a place where people mind their own business. And of course the city is also a locus of niches. If you’re gay, you might want to go to a gay bar. But relatively few people are gay, so you need there to be a lot of people around before it makes sense to open a gay bar. And just going to one bar all the time is boring, so ideally you’d like to live somewhere with multiple gay-focused establishments. That’s only going to happen in a place that’s big.

Deep division of labor? Try that in a small town

The gay bar situation actually speaks to a crucial non-psychometric aspect of city living: more people means more potential for specialization in locally focused services.

American cuisine has improved enormously in the past 40–50 years, and these days even a modest community like Kerrville, Texas has restaurant offerings like sushi and Thai food. But there’s still no Indian or Vietnamese restaurant. You just can’t have everything in a community that small. And to be clear, though Kerrville (with a population of roughly 25,000) has a lot of the small town amenities people enjoy — it’s easy to get a big yard, you have access to a lot of nature-oriented recreation, it’s not crowded — it’s not nearly small enough to manifest the virtues Aldean is lauding. In a truly small town, there just aren’t that many businesses. People who like variety will find that boring; you’re just going to the same couple of spots over and over.

But in economic terms, the biggest issue is that you have very weak competition and very low levels of specialization.

In a larger community — by which I mean not so much a central city as a whole metro area knit together with transportation infrastructure — a place that’s just meh may not be good enough to stay in business. Less efficient operations are put out of business by more efficient operations. And businesses are encouraged to find particular market niches to specialize in. In a city, you get things like competing outlets that specialize in children’s haircuts. In D.C., we don’t just have a place where you can get sushi, we have a lot of places where you can get sushi. Some of them are casual neighborhood spots, some are high-end destinations, some are traditional, some are innovative, some are highly specialized in raw fish, and others offer a wider range of Japanese fare. Plenty of places serve the standard Thai food that you see in American restaurants, but we also have a place specializing in Northern Thai dishes, one that offers Lao food, and also a more casual Lao place. There’s a lot going on!

Specialization and the division of labor are core drivers of productivity.

When it comes to highly tradable goods, small towns can achieve plenty of specialization — maybe the town has a factory that makes one specific thing or is located in the world’s greatest cherry-producing region. Maybe they’re drilling for oil, whatever. The point is a small town can achieve high productivity when they specialize in producing something that serves the wider world.

But most people work producing locally traded services these days, and most of what people buy is locally traded. And in practice, there tends to be an interplay between the local and the global. Hollywood films play all around the world, but Los Angeles has a unique local ecosystem of companies that support film and television production. Houston does that for the energy industry. Country music is produced not in the actual country, but in Nashville, because a small town does not have high-end recording studios, marketing specialists, or other things you need to become a big star.

The city as an entrepot

At the intersection of the city as a haven for eccentrics and the city as a domain of economic specialization is the city as a destination for immigrants.

Interestingly, immigrants themselves are often closer, in terms of personality type and outlook on the world, to Aldean than to Lovefoxxx. The recent Pixar movie “Elemental” was dismissed in a lot of quarters as excessively simplistic, but I thought they did a good job of illustrating this point. In the specific context of Element City, the educated upscale members of the dominant ethnicity — the Water People — are much more culturally liberal than the foreign-born Fire People who moved to the city for pragmatic reasons. Off-screen somewhere, I assume there is a different group of Water People who prefer to live in small homogenous towns. But the Water People who live in the city are “woke” aesthetes who enjoy the diversity of the big city, while the dad who moved from Fire Land to seek prosperity for his family actually clings very tightly to traditionalism.

The difference is that as a member of an ethnic or cultural minority group, you have an easier time sticking to your traditions in a big cosmopolitan city than you would in a small town.

In a big city, even a numerically small minority group can have the critical mass necessary to sustain its own churches, cultural institutions, ethnic groceries and restaurants, and other mainstays of traditionalism. That’s something liberal cosmopolitans like about big cities; they get to enjoy the varied cultures on offer. But for the immigrants themselves, the appeal is the opposite — they get to form an enclave in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a small town.

The upshot is that even though everything Aldean says about small-town virtues is in a sense true, the lure of modernity tends to overwhelm their appeal. Big urban agglomerations — by which I mean the suburbs of Dallas as much as the narrow streets of Paris — attract lots of different types of people, including people who just enjoy being around lots of different types of people, and have a profound economic logic that tends to pull in lots of people who are torn or indifferent in terms of personal preferences. There are only four states that rate as majority rural according to the Census Bureau, and the list includes the two poorest states (West Virginia and Mississippi) along with below-average Maine (39th) and Vermont (36th).

Lessons for everyone

I think one of the most overrated political ideas of our time is the notion that economic deprivation leads to reactionary cultural politics. The moral of all this about how urbanization is good for growth is that the opposite is true — getting deeply invested in reactionary cultural politics is bad for the economy.

Beyond the economic geography, you end up with strong selection effects. A place like Southwestern Virginia is full, by definition, of people who are so committed to small-town stasis that they refuse to move to the D.C. suburbs and secure lucrative job opportunities amidst the rich men north of Richmond. That’s a very grumpy set of people who end up with limited economic prospects. Like everyone, they deserve a national economic model that lifts all boats. But under any system, the largest rewards will go to the people interested in seeking them, and those rewards typically are not in small towns absent some specific situations related to natural resource extraction.

All that being said, Aldean is correct that there’s something unique about a small town.

Or to look at it another way, for the vast majority of human history, the vast majority of people were living in small towns. Even a farming village is probably larger than the circumstances that prevailed for most of our species’ existence. Living in a world of strangers carries many rewards, but there’s something unnatural about it — it breaks our basic modes of conduct.

I think that’s why throughout American history, urban areas have featured more regulation and an electorate that’s more statist in its inclinations.

It’s not that the countryside exists in conditions of anarchy, but the kind of informal enforcement mechanisms that Aldean loves and oddballs and minority groups fear only work in communities of a certain scale. The more people there are around, the more norms shift toward “mind your own business,” but the more you need formal rules and regulations. There’s some tension between the extent to which non-conformists are drawn like a moth to the flame of the city and the reality that the city only functions if there’s a Health Department and a municipal trash agency and lots of rules about who can park where and when and other stuff that can be mostly dispensed with in a small town. In rural Maine, they still make budget decisions via town meetings and rely on volunteer fire departments. It’s adorable, but you just couldn’t do it in D.C.

We’ve gone a little bit off the rails in the past few years, though. The same city-based political movement that broadly appreciates the social benefits of rules and regulations (wear a mask! don’t spew greenhouses gas into the air!) embraced the odd idea that it’s bad to have a uniformed agency charged with vigorous enforcement of the rules. Whether you’re talking about fare evasion on transit, complying with license plate regulations, or prosecuting illegal handgun possession cases, it’s unusually important to have actual enforcement of formal rules in big, crowded places.