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This is something that I tweeted a year or so ago that I think bears repeating now:
During the past few months, I've been seeing a lot of stuff on Tweeter and in other places about the United States coming apart, separating into two or more countries.
By and large, most of the liberals who talk about this, assume that the split would be between sophisticated, wealthy, urban Blue States and the poor, backwards, rural Red States.
Aside from the sheer political fascination of the subject, this has interested me for another reason.
As I've said on Twitter many times, I was an ABD (all-but-dissertation) in my work for a PhD in economic/urban geography when I dropped out of school, ending up as a journalist.
My main area or interest and research had to do with how urban regions functioned, especially in terms of their economies.
Of course, it's been more than 50 years since I've been involved in this in any more than the most peripheral way.
Still, there are a few lessons from back then that are still useful.
One of the most important is that urban and rural are probably not what you think.
Part of this is because there are so many different definitions of what is rural and what is urban.
At first, this seems silly.
New York City is urban and so are its suburbs in their own way.
The problem is just what is rural.
The U.S. Census Bureau explains it this way:
"Rural is defined as all population, housing, and territory not included within an urbanized area or urban cluster."
Seems simple enough.
The Bureau then goes on to define an urbanized area "an area with 50,000 or more people."
Seems simple enough. And obvious, too.
But, then, things start to get tricky when they define urban clusters.
According to the Census Bureau,
"Urban clusters are areas with at least 2,500 but fewer than 50,000 people."
A town with 49,999 people in it is obviously urban, but very few people would think of a town out in the middle of the Great Plains with a population of 2,501 people as being an urban area.
Let's take a simple example.
The township in which I live has just a few under 7,000 people in it spread over about 25 square miles. So, by the Census Bureau's definition I live in an urban cluster.
If you were to drive through it, though, you would see houses along the roadside here and there but behind them you will see miles of corn and soybean fields and behind them not forests but fairly large stands of woodlands.
If you're looking for a business district, we have none except one cross-roads where there is a gas station, an ice cream stand, a tack shop, a car repair shop, an archery supply store, and a drive-thru beer place.
If you know where to look, you'll also find a couple of churches, a day-care center, a neighborhood bar and a campground. In the past year, we've also added a Dollar Tree.
But by and large what you'll see – aside from a reservoir - are scores of farms, mostly small hobby or old family farms in the neighborhood of 40 or 50 or 60 acres, though there are a couple of them that are in the 1,500 to 2,000 acre size.
I should probably add that the fields and woods around our place are filled with deer, skunks, groundhogs, raccoons, possums, squirrels, voles, rabbits, wild turkeys and coyotes. The sky above has dozens of kinds of birds as well as white-tailed hawks, great blue herons and the occasional bald eagle.
At least two of my neighbors hunt the local deer to help feed their families, their sons practice their marksmanship skills shooting groundhogs, and, in season, sportsmen roam our fields hoping to get a wild turkey.
And, if you go a couple a miles up our road, jig west to the next road and then north half a mile, you'll come to a medium-sized reservoir that's full of bass-fishermen and kayakers from springtime till late autumn and ice-fisherman as soon as the water safely freezes over.
Seems pretty much like a perfect definition of a rural community.
And, if you talk to most of our people, they'll tell you that they are farmers or the children of farmers.
Yet, all of my township is part of one of the top 10% largest urban Combined Statistical Areas in the United States.
What most of my neighbors most likely won't tell you is that (like the folks on my road) also include the owner of a large construction company, the vice-president of a large nearby research university, a janitor at the same, an architect, an independent software engineer, the head surgical nurse of a large metro hospital, the builder of custom furniture, the superintendent of county schools, a carpenter, several schoolteachers, a truck driver, a college professor, and a semi-retired investment banker who owns and operates a flower nursery
Furthermore, most of my immediate neighbors aren't full-time farmers, though one of them owns a farm of nearly a thousand acres and another one has an 80-acre farm and rents fields from other people up and down the road so that he can raise crops on them to feed his beef cattle.
I go into all of this detail to explain that the difference between urban areas and much of the so-called rural areas is often not all that great and, fairly often, not quite what it seems.
When blue-staters and liberals, then, talk about how invincible their demographic position is, they usually point out that only 20% of America’s people are rural – hence, of a Red State way of life and thinking while the urban, sophisticated, well-educated, well-off blue-state people make up four times that many people or 80% of the population.
Strictly speaking, of course, they’re right. But that 20%, rural Americans – or 60+ million people – are only those from places that don’t even qualify as urban clusters – that is, areas with fewer than 2,500 inhabitants.
Nor does the typical blue-stater understand that only about 10% or 15% of the American land itself is urban by even the broadest definition.
To better understand what the real Blue State – Red State divide is really like, I’m going to make a few simplifying assumptions.
To start with, I’m going to say that the Blue States are, for our purposes, two distinct clusters of states, one made up of the 13 states that run along the East Coast, starting with North Carolina and stretching north to the border of Canada.
They are North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine.
I’ll also include the District of Columbia in this group though it’s not a state.
The West Coast agglomeration is made up of the states of California, Oregon and Washington.
Of course, parts of many of these states cannot really be considered blue except for the accident of political boundaries.
The most obvious of these are large parts of Upstate New York and Western Pennsylvania on the East Coast and the eastern two-thirds of the states of Oregon and Washington on the West.
Second, in gathering the data that I'll be talking about here, I've excluded information from the states of Hawaii and Alaska because of their physical distance and separation from the Lower Forty-Eight.
I've also excluded the island of Puerto Rico whose data is often included with the 50 states partly because of its location and partly because it's not technically a state.
That leaves 32 Red States that stretch, more or less, from the Appalachian Mountains on the East to the Coastal Ranges on the West and the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea on the South to the Great Lakes and Canada on the North.
In terms of area, these Red States account for nearly 2,400,000 square miles of the contiguous United States while the Blue States all together only come to a bit less than 600,000 square miles.
In other words, the Red States have four times the area of the Blue States.
Put still another way, the Blue States make up only about 20% of the United States.
That would make the Red States the fifth largest country in the world in terms of area – smaller than Australia, larger than India.
In terms of population, the Red States have nearly 200 million people compared to only about 130 million in the Blue States.
That is 60% of the U.S. population or 3 times what the Blue State liberals think it is. At the same time the Blue State population is only about half of what the liberals think it is.
This makes the Red States the seventh largest nation in the world, ranked by population.
Only China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, and Nigeria are bigger.
By comparison, Japan has only 126 million people, Germany 84 million, the UK 68 million, France 65 million, and Italy 60 million.
The Red States also contain 41 of the 56 metropolitan Consolidated Statistical Areas in the United States with at least 1,000,000 people each.
The Blue Staters also often argue that the Red States are backward economically and that, too, is incorrect.
Last year, the United States had a Gross Domestic Product of a bit more than $23 trillion. Of that amount, nearly $13 trillion came from the Red States and less than $11 trillion came from the Blue States.
That meant that the Red States had the second largest GDP in the world, second only to China with $17 trillion and greater than Japan $5 trillion, German $4 trillion, the UK $3 trillion, India $3 trillion, France $3 trillion, and Italy $2 trillion.
Another example of economic backwardness often cited by Blue State liberals is a comparison of how much a state pays in various Federal taxes as compared to the amount of Federal expenditures in that state.
As might be expected, they claim that the Blue States always come out as subsidizing the Red States.
But they would be wrong.
Coming up with the exact numbers isn't easy to make that sort of comparison, but we do know that in the year 2017 the Red States paid $1,835 billion in Federal taxes while the Blue States paid only $1,709 billion.
The other side of the equation that Blue State liberals like to make is how much more money the Federal government has to spend in Red States to compensate for their backwardness compared to how much it spends in the advanced Blue States.
But once again the liberals's argument does not hold water – though at first it seems to.
In 2013, the Federal government made payments of $1,710 billion to Red States for all expenditures while it paid only $1,409 billion to the Blue States. That would certainly seem to show that the Red States were greatly dependent upon the Federal government and the Blue States for their very functioning.
But if you were to look at the per capita expenditures in the two regions, it's a different story.
The Blue States are subsidized by $11,000 per capita, while the Red States receive only $8,500 per capita.
In other words, the Blue States's citizens receive 25% more money from the Federal Government than do those in the Red States.
There are other measures of economic viability as well.
For instance, in the crucial banking sector of the economy, the FDIC banks in the Blue States had only $9.5 trillion in assets, while that same sort of banks in the Red States had $12.2 trillion.
That's nearly a third more than the Blue States – roughly the same as the GDP of China in 2017 and the combined GDPs of Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Banking is not the only economic area in which the Red States lead the Blue States.
The Red States produced $3.6 trillion in manufacturing in 2016, twice that of the Blue States's $1.8 trillion and roughly equal to the entire GDP of Japan.
When it comes to agricultural production, the Red States had triple that of the Blue States with the Red States's nearly $300 billion worth compared to the Blue States's less than $100 billion.
Another claim often made by Blue State advocates is how much smarter and better educated their citizens are compared to those in the Red States.
That, too, doesn't hold up.
There are 13.9 million people in the Blue States with degrees beyond the Bachelor's level. The Red States, on the other hand, have 14.5 million citizens with advanced degrees.
There is one academic area, though, where the Blue States better the Red States.
The Blue States have 2,848 thousand scientists and engineers while the Red States have only 2,829 thousand of them.
There are scores of other parameters I could use to show that if, God forbid, the Red States and the Blue States were ever to separate, the Red States in most ways would be the better for it – and, at the least, no worse off materially.
But that should not happen. It would be ten, a thousand, ten thousand times worse than cutting yourself off from your family over political, economic and cultural differences.
Still, if it were to happen, the Red States would probably be materially better off as a result.
And, for many other reasons I have not even begun to go into here, the Blue States would be in severe danger of economic and political collapse.
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