Small town

My friend Dave Sr. owns the diner up the road and runs it with his son, Dave Jr. The family business is coming up on its fortieth anniversary, and Dave Sr., who’s eighty now — though you’d never guess it — reflected to me recently on the mom ‘n pop shops that have disappeared over the last fifty years or so. He and another local old-timer counted dozens that used to dot the two-lane road between our town and the next town over. “Now, I don’t think you can count more than five or six [small businesses]!” Dave Sr. said. “And they all made a living out of these places. Between government intervention and red tape and so forth, people are afraid to get into small business.” Running a small business is the epitome of the American Dream.

A new report finds that for the first time since these things have been kept track of, rural America’s population has shrunk. This trend is a shame for all Americans (except for a few of us who inhabit rural America and enjoy the solitude). The University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy findings are based on Census data from April 2010-April 2020, pre-dating the Covid outbreak and its dubious effects on people’s migratory habits (a Pew Research survey suggests that reports of a mass urban exodus during the height of the pandemic were overblown).