Most people agree with me

[desperance]

(via james_nicoll):

According to statisticians, today is the day the world changed. For the first time in history, the urban population worldwide outnumbers the rural. Yay! Now will all those county Tories kindly shut up?

Comments

Now will all those county Tories kindly shut up?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Isn't the British population nearly 90% urban?

Re: Now will all those county Tories kindly shut up?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Something on that order. The monied ruralites just believe they have a divine right to our attention, some kind of innate primacy; and no, being told that they're not just a local but a global minority isn't actually going to make a difference. But a man can dream...

[time-freak.livejournal.com]

Are you touting this as a good thing, a bad thing or just a "thing"? I didn't realise that was the case until I just read that. Is it not a little scary?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Mostly of course it's just a Thing, a fact that is socially significant - but I'm a city rat through & through (despite a recent middle-aged tendency to want to grow my own vegetables), and very much a cyberpunk kid: I do tend to celebrate that sort of metropolitan/multicultural/tech-pervasive vision of the future. It's bleak, of course, but I do bleak. (And I have got very tired of being told that us city types don't understand the country, as though that were some failing in me. On the contrary, I understand 'em very well; all my immediate family lives in the country. I just don't agree with 'em...)

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I would like to be consistent with my past track record and assert that not only is this a thing, it is a good thing for the people involved, since it offers them the hope of trading an awful existance for a slighly less awful one with options to improve.

Mind you, if there's a way to go from "largely rural" to "largely urban" without passing through "vast poverty-stricken slums", that would be nice. To some extent, Canada managed it in the 1930s to the 1950s but there were special circumstances involved (particularly between 1939 and 1945 when Europe arranged a special subsidy for Canadian industrialization).

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Seconded, on the slum-avoidance: even in my favourite fiction, hell, even in my life, the romance of slums has tended to avoid me.

Didn't know about the subsidies. Makes sense in such an industrialised war, when your own industrial centres are being bombed to rubble. Can't help wondering where the money came from, though...?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Suddenly Britain had a sudden need for large amounts of stuff and since our factories were out of bomber range, we benefited from this expanded market without also seeing our industrial base partially destroyed. Between 1939 and 1941, the number of Canadians employed in manufacturing expanded by 50%.

Can't help wondering where the money came from, though...?

Great Britain and the fact that the Canadian government was willing to run large deficits to fund industrial expansion, both in terms of building factories and in terms of training people to work in them.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Wartime economics: I confess, I don't understand how it works. Britain was a trading nation, made rich by empire but suddenly isolated, embargoed, struggling to bring in enough to feed her people - and yet she can fund a major programme of industrialisation in another country. It makes absolute sense to do it, as you say, out of bomber range; and I know the war did leave us pretty much bankrupt, which is also to say that in wartime you do run yourself to the edge of bankruptcy, in pursuit of victory; but how the actual finances are actually achieved...

I guess I should read a book.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

and yet she can fund a major programme of industrialisation in another country. It makes absolute sense to do it

On credit, if I recall correctly, but the war made some things politically possible that were impossible in the context of a mere depression.