Today’s discourse on struggling rural communities insists they are “dying” or “forgotten.” In her new article, “Distributive Justice and Rural America,” Ann Eisenberg argues that rural communities have not just “died” but were sacrificed:

This post excerpts a section of “Distributive Justice” with particular salience to Youth Circulations readers, specifically the pervasive public claim that rural individuals should “just move.” Eisenberg asks—and indeed, we all ask: Is it ethically objectionable to mandate mobility?

“...This Article is therefore not concerned solely with poverty—an already pressing problem—but also with what appears to be the large-scale, systematic unraveling of many rural local governments and related social and economic systems throughout the country. Rural decline is not necessarily a tragedy per se. Viewed through one lens, it makes sense for people to move to cities with more job opportunities; it also makes sense for obsolete or hazardous industries to be phased out. But approximately sixty million people still live in rural places; one-fifth of these sixty million are more vulnerable, non-white populations. As more young people leave rural America, and the ever-aging rural population’s property values continue to drop, many rural localities will continue to decline. Even if it would be too daunting or irrational to try to reverse these trends, the management of this decline—or the current lack thereof—raises important ethical questions.

First, the de facto policy in most areas to address rural decline has been just this approach: residents in dying or long-struggling communities have been left to their own devices with the hope that they will relocate to more livable locales. Many have indeed moved, but many have not. Those who remain may be unable to move because of a lack of resources or other impediments to mobility. They may also decline to move because they do not want to. The high rates of rural suicides, opioid overdose deaths, and other “deaths of despair” should prompt commentators to more deeply examine the impediments to rural mobility.

This line of thinking also raises the question of whether it is ethically objectionable to mandate mobility, or whether the onus is on public entities to provide basic services to existing communities. It is not necessarily clear that life would be better in a large urban center, where housing costs, long commutes, and a loss of community may bring a qualitatively different form of suffering upon relocation. The “just move” argument also presumes that there will always be a perfect match of opportunities available to those who would seek them, only potentially in a different place. This presumption seems faulty, especially as we move into a future that will increasingly displace workers through automation.

Finally, as this analysis illustrates, the “just move” argument also ignores the structural forces that have shaped the modern rural status quo. It is not the case that well-informed individuals en masse decided to locate themselves in an unfortunate locale and can simply undo the decision. Rural communities have often been crafted over the course of decades in order to create a workforce to provide public necessities. The presumption of perfect individual autonomy seems questionable; many people were born where they are, and after multiple generations became reliant on a local mono-economy that was formed on the basis of public subsidies and other policy drivers. In other words, today’s rural marginalization was not created by each individual’s faulty choices, but by society as a whole. As such, the allocation of resources that shapes rural inequity is worthy of everyone’s attention.

Ann M. Eisenberg, Distributive Justice and Rural America, 61 B.C.L. Rev. 189 (2020):211-212.