End of a Demographic Trend.

            In my previous post, I touched on a subject which I have since decided deserves a separate posting and a more thorough discussion.  Worldwide, the most significant trend everywhere in the world is urbanization. In China, half a billion rural peasants will have become urban in a single generation.  The same is happening in India, Africa, and everywhere in the world—except here. In the United States, we’ve been there--and done that.

            At the time of the American Revolution, 9 out of 10 Americans farmed--to feed themselves and the other 10%.   Today, the entire food industry uses only 10% of our workers, and farming itself uses only about 1%. During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century, farmers squeezed off the farm moved to town and found jobs in industries that mostly didn’t exist in 1790.  And most of them were better off for the change.   While most sociologists who study urbanization study the rural population which migrates to the cities, little study has been given the effect this migration has had on the population of the cities being invaded.

            I’m from Waterloo, Iowa, a manufacturing center located within a vast agricultural area. My own family moved from the farm to the city over a hundred years ago. And since that time we’ve had to compete for jobs with wave after wave of new arrivals.   For the past hundred years, any employer in Waterloo could expect to see a hoard of young high school graduates every summer, applying for jobs and willing to take any job that was offered, at any wage. These were strong, healthy young men and women, used to working 15 hours a day, and graduates of high schools that still taught you something. If they took minimum wage jobs, they would eventually realize that they couldn’t live on such a wage, and they would either find a better paying job or leave the area.   But it took a few years for them to figure this out, during which time they ruined the job market for the people who lived here, by bidding down wages and making labor organization more difficult.  At the time my family moved away from the farm, I’m sure they thought of themselves as boldly perusing the American Dream.  Yet to the townspeople whose jobs they were about to take, they probably seemed like a plague of locusts, devouring every job in sight.  But no more!  The flood of labor being forced off the farm is now coming to a halt, simply because farms are now so large that there are only a few farmers left. These last farmers are all over age 50 and their grown children are long gone.  In the future, if Waterloo employers want manpower, they will have to raise their wage offering to a point that will persuade Iowans who have already left to consider returning.

            So the effect on the job market of the off-farm exodus which began two hundred years ago is over, and is in rebound. While this off-farm migration began in places like Massachusetts, it persisted longer in Iowa because Iowa is nearly 100% tillable, and therefore had a higher density of farm families. Iowa reached its peak population in 1911, and our population has declined ever since.  In 1911, we had thirteen congressmen—today, with the latest re-districting,  we will have four.   But if the trend has run its course in Iowa, then it’s finished everywhere.