THE SPITFIRE GRILL BACKSTAGE GUIDE 13 But factory jobs can no longer keep small-town America afloat. Even after a robust eight-year growth spell, there are fewer than 13 million workers in manufacturing across the entire economy. Robots and workers in China put together most of the manufactured goods that Americans buy, and the high-tech industries powering the economy today don’t have much need for the cheap labor that rural communities contributed to America’s industrial past. They mostly need highly educated workers. They find those most easily in big cities, not in small towns. Consider Lake County, in Tennessee. Some 7,500 people live there, about 500 fewer than in 2000. Lake County is betting on a new industrial park on Cates Landing on the Mississippi River. But it will be tough to reverse years of declining employment. Between 2013 and 2017, the county averaged fewer than 250 manufacturing jobs, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. That’s half as many as it had in 2000. What to do? Since the presidential election in 2016, when small town voters enthusiastically endorsed the populist campaign of President Trump, policymakers and academics have thrown themselves at understanding the economic backdrop to their frustrations. They have come up with no shortage of proposals for how to turn rural America around, from offering a tax credit for employers that hire workers in distressed communities to designing investment funds to draw venture capital into rural areas. [However, there is] the inescapable reality of agglomeration, one of the most powerful forces shaping the American economy over the last three decades. Innovative companies choose to locate where other successful, innovative companies are. That’s where they can find lots of highly skilled workers. The more densely packed these pools of talent are, the more workers can learn from each other and the more productive they become. This dynamic feeds on itself, drawing more high- tech firms and highly skilled workers to where they already are. In hindsight, no amount of tax incentives would have convinced Amazon to expand in a medium-sized city such as Columbus, Ohio, rather than Northern Virginia and Queens, which sit in some of the largest pools of talent in the country. If even medium-sized cities find it difficult to compete, what are the odds that, say, a small town like Amory, MS, where 14 percent of adults have a bachelor’s degree and a quarter of its 2,500 workers work in small- scale manufacturing, have a chance to attract well-paid tech jobs? There are, to be sure, some rural communities with productivity as high as some big cities. But they rely on heavily mechanized and automated industries that support few jobs: oil extraction or large-scale agriculture, in which tractors talk to satellites and no drivers are involved. Excluding these places, the United States is still left with 50 to 55 million people living in rural communities that no longer have much to offer them economically. Still, there are compelling reasons to try to help rural economies rebound. What’s more, the costs of rural poverty are looming over American society. Think of the opioid addiction taking over rural America, of the spike in crime, of the wasted human resources in places where only a third of adults hold a job. The distress of 50 million Americans should concern everyone. Powerful economic forces are arrayed against rural America and, so far, efforts to turn it around have failed. Not every small town can be a tech hub, nor should it be. But that can’t be the only answer. A working farm in Pennsylvania.