Rationalizing Rural Area Classifications for the Economic Research Service A Workshop Summary (2016) / Chapter Skim
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9 Closing Remarks
9 Closing Remarks
Pages 121-128
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From page 121... ...
McGranahan provided closing remarks. PANEL REMARKS Cromartie said he found very disarming Keith Halfacree's statement that ERS is good at measuring remoteness, population size, and density, but then wondered why it should be labeled "rural." If it is correct that applying the label is an obscuring last step, he asked how ERS can be more careful to keep in touch with what they are measuring.
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From page 122... ...
He said that perhaps disproportionately targeting mobility of younger people might help people move up the income ladder in place rather than having to move to cities in order to prosper. In the larger context, everyone is aware that inequality and widening gaps in income distribution are becoming a major concern, he said.
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From page 123... ...
They might come up with a better measure, but if it is incomparable with the current measures, it may just cause confusion and a long transition period. Plane observed the late Ken Bolding once said "knowledge is always gained by the orderly loss of information." He noted that the workshop did not include a discussion of real estate trends.
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From page 124... ...
Brown stated that in planning the workshop, he was very interested in making sure that the agenda included presenters from the United Kingdom, which he said might help to provide engagement among qualitative and quantitative researchers. He asked how qualitative information about the nature of rural community, community, economy, and society can be merged with quantitative information to develop conceptions of rural structure and rural change.
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From page 125... ...
In the United States, in which some people live differently enough from urban and suburban living arrangements, it makes sense to have a way to characterize those areas. Citro said if it were really true that there were no differences in the consequences of living in a rural area as opposed to an urban or suburban area for such important socioeconomic dimensions as poverty or inequality, then one might ask why have a rural classification.
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From page 126... ...
What does it mean to be rural, not in a metropolitan society, but in a global society where connectedness means different things; where people may be commuting on a temporary fly-in fly-out basis to work, not necessarily to the largest nearest city; or where foodprocessing plants in rural areas are effectively recruiting from a continental labor market, not a regional labor market? Woods suggested pursuing a mixed-methods approach for combining quantitative and qualitative evidence to work through the likely dynamics of rural America over the next 30 or 40 years, the time frame for which a useful classification system would be robust.
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From page 127... ...
Although the discussions at the workshop did not provide specific ideas for developing a new or revised coding system, he commented, they did provide thoughtful insights and the workshop has been quite valuable. He said he views developing a code as a demographic effort to determine the extent to which place, size of population, and distance constrain and permit economic activity, access to services, resilience to problems, and so on.
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