Oh, I saw this all, the man was absolutely correct and haters should be ashamed of themselves.

For one he had been talking about small rural towns as useless. As the farmland was settled, these would develop to provide the most ordinary services to farms – seed & feed, railheads, doctors, lawyers, accountants, insurance and purchasing agents.

This was part of a fractal pattern of development where you’ll have a handful of big international trade ports – say NYC, SF, New Orleans, Chicago (which is the keystone of America’s transport networks) where you can find the rarest and grandest services – intercontinental-scale finance, elite specialty artisans. And people who need those services occasionally will come there for them, and thus will stay in areas accessible to them.

Like, say, merely nationally recognizable cities – your Cleveland/Philadelphias, which won’t have all the previous category did but still say art museums, monumental architecture (and fine architects), finance enough for major industry and trade

Then your more regional cities, Canton/Allentown. This’ll at least have infrastructure for sizable land deals, probably its own local department store.

Then big towns. Then small towns. Then villages, hamlets. Details and age/density of settlement matter - the east coast is thicker with settlement, the plains didn’t need quarries (they shipped building materials in by rail!), even small farm towns would have satellite churches placed for all the farms to travel to once a week.

Okay. So they grow up as areas are settled. But as the area ages and densifies, farm households have more than a replacement number of kids. The population grows, kids leave the farms for work, some make it to the city, more to the local town.

Some become washerwomen and barbers. Some become railroad workers or carpenters. A lot become domestic servants for the professionals and businessmen.

And then, someone from the closest city takes advantage of the surplus labor and opens a factory. That’s how you get all these little towns with the factory where everyone works.

Then up until the 1970s that holds. Even as mechanization means farming needs a lot less labor per acre. They suffer through the ‘80s '80s “working man’s rock” is about. Competition from Japan, then Mexico and China.

The plant closes, the town fails, actually, people reconcentrate in the surviving one 25 miles away. WalMart has replaced all their stores with one 35 more away, because through efficiencies of scale they can offer a much more comprehensive selection of goods for significantly cheaper than those stores and still profit.

And then they just stay there and whine and ask when politicians are going to being real jobs back to the heartland. Like, not farm labor, that’s done by Mexicans living in trailers and eating in cinderblock restaurants at about the same level farm laborers were before WWII, honestly. Good-paying middle class jobs, which honestly only ever existed here because of a weird anomaly of the transition from agriculture – which these towns no longer really make sense for either – to industry, which we already transitioned out of anyway, the whole process aligning with American postwar economic hegemony.

Oh, but you have a sentimental attachment to the (generally indistinct and full of identical fields – this is farm country we’re speaking of) land, the way of life? Maybe you should identify with its pioneers and how they settled it, by crossing the country to move somewhere where it made any productive sense to be

He’s a professor who’s clearly exhibited knowledge of all this before, it honestly might be your relative ignorance that leaves you misunderstanding, so I hope this makes things clearer.