New Economics and Technology Lead A Demographic Reversal

Already, the growth capacity for “mega- cities” like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles may be approaching their limits as the urban megalopolis of cities, suburbs and exurbs become more crowded and expensive.

As huge urbanized regions become less desirable or unaffordable for many businesses and middle-class families, more and more Americans will find their best future in the wide-open spaces that, even in 2050, will still exist across the continent. The beneficiaries will include places as diverse as Fargo and Sioux Falls in the Dakotas to Des Moines, Oklahoma City, Omaha and Kansas City. _NewGeography

NewGeographyMainstream thought insists that the trend toward urbanisation will continue into the foreseeable future. Mainstreamers cannot envision a reversal of that trend -- a departure from the cities back to small towns and countryside. And yet the economics and demographics of urban hyper-centralisation appears to be failing from Greece to Japan to Russia to Spain to Los Angeles.

One of the least anticipated developments in the nation’s 21st-century geography will be the resurgence of the American Heartland, often dismissed by coastal dwellers as “flyover country.”

Yet in the coming 40 years, as America’s population reaches 400 million, the American Heartland particularly the vast region between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi will gain in importance.

To fully appreciate this opportunity, Americans need to see the Heartland as far more than a rural or an agricultural zone. Although food production will remain a crucial component of its economy, high-tech services, communications, energy production, manufacturing and warehouses will serve as the critical levers for new employment and wealth creation.

...The critical sources for the evolving resurgence of the Heartland lie both in new technology and traditional strengths.

The advent of the Internet, which has broken the traditional isolation of rural communities, has facilitated the movement of technology companies, business services and manufacturing firms to the nation’s interior. This will reinforce not so much a movement to remote hamlets but to the growing number of dynamic small cities and towns throughout the Heartland.

The other critical element concerns the traditional role of the Heartland as a producer of critical raw materials. As world competition for food and energy supplies intensifies, a critical primary advantage for the United States in contrast with China, India, Japan and the European Union will lie with the vast natural abundance of its Heartland regions.

New investment will flow back into the Heartland to tap previously difficult-to-access resources such as oil and gas, while new technologies will exploit prodigious natural sources such as wind. _NewGeography

The New Geography article leaves out an extremely important ingredient which will spur this demographic reversal -- the rise of bio-energy. Airheads such as Obama are still promoting large wind energy, but competent thinkers who are thinking about renewables, are looking toward bio-energy. One day soon, the public will wake up to find that biomass is being co-fired with coal, that waste biomass and dedicated biomass are being converted to energy via pyrolysis or gasification, and that biomass is being converted to liquid fuels, plastics, high value chemicals, and nutritious animal feeds.

Such growing bioenergy industries will be based in the heartland, and will provide the significant economic boost and employment that Obama is falsely promising from his "green jobs initiative." But Obama is an airhead, and not likely to ever grow out of his "unintended consequence" destructive phase.

Western populations are growing older, and smaller, thanks in part to urbanisation and the top down economic and bureaucratic structures that have grown up in nations with a focus on the urban. Getting back to the countryside should provide a resurgence of spirit, of industry, and of fertility which are all badly needed.

The dying, union-dependent urbanised states on both coasts and in the rust belt, will either break their addiction to bureaucratic stagnation and allow the return of individual initiative, enterprise, and new business -- or they will continue to die of their mountains of debt that they have no way of repaying.

The American Tea Party is just the early manifestation of the anger that productive America feels toward freeloader America in Washington DC. If the one-party reich controlled by the US Democratic Party carries through with its plans to try to infiltrate and discredit the Tea Party via "dirty tricks", it will discover hidden depths to America's dissatisfaction with its leadership class.