Rural depopulation and the rural-urban gap in cognitive functioning among older adults

Rebecca Glauber, PhD, has published this paper in the Journal of Rural Health:  

Purpose

As the population ages, the number of people with cognitive impairment will rapidly increase. Although previous research has explored the rural-urban gap in physical health, few studies have analyzed cognitive health. The purpose of this study was to examine rural-urban differences in cognitive health, with a focus on the moderating effect of population decline. 

Methods

The study used individual-level nationally representative data from the 2000-2016 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (N = 152,444) merged to county-level contextual characteristics. Hierarchical linear models were used to predict the cognitive functioning of US adults aged 50 and over by rural-urban residence, county depopulation, and their interactions while controlling for individual-level and county-level demographic and contextual factors. 

Findings

Older adults living in rural counties had lower cognitive functioning than urban adults. The interaction between living in a rural and depopulated county was statistically significant (P < .001). The rural penalty in cognitive functioning was 40% larger for those who lived in counties that lost population between 1980 and 2010 compared to those who lived in stable or growing rural counties. These results were independent of race-ethnicity, gender, age, education, income, region, employment status, marital status, physical health, and depression as well as the county's racial-ethnic composition, age structure, economic and educational disadvantage, and health care shortages. 

Conclusions

The results have important implications for those seeking to reduce health disparities both between rural and urban older adults and among different groups of rural people. Interventions targeting those living in rural depopulating areas are particularly warranted.

Pollster Stanley Greenberg on appealing to working-class voters across racial/ethnic boundaries

Greenberg writes under the headline, "Democrats, Speak to Working Class Discontent."  One thing I love about this piece for The American Prospect is his focus on coalition-building among working-class folks, across racial and ethnic lines.  Here's an excerpt (emphasis mine): 

Today, the Democrats’ working-class problem isn’t limited to white workers. The party is also losing support from working-class Blacks and Hispanics—a daunting 12 points off their margin since 2016, according to Ruy Teixeira.

* * *

After studying working-class voters for nearly four decades, I believe the trajectory can be shifted or reversed. But there is no room for error. There is no room for fools. There is no time for strategists who look down on or rule out voters who fail a purist civics test. There is also no room for sensibilities that keep us from clearly understanding our options.

* * *  

The emergence of Barack Obama signaled a shift in Democratic appeals. During the 2008 primary, Obama became the “change candidate” because of his early opposition to the Iraq War, not because he spoke to working-class discontent. At the Democratic Convention four years earlier, Obama had told a unifying story as an African American who saw only one United States of America, not separate Americas divided by race and partisanship. In focus groups before the 2008 convention, I was surprised by how many white workers were open to what would be the first African American president. Many of them would have scored high on any “racial resentment” scale, but they were not blaming Blacks for their current condition. They were blaming high-paid CEOs for outsourcing American jobs, and they were blaming NAFTA. Many decided Obama was different from other Black leaders and might govern for the whole country, not just work for “his own people.”  (emphasis mine).

If you govern for the whole country, you know that two-thirds of all registered voters never graduated from a four-year college. Well before the financial crash in 2008, they were angry. Employment in manufacturing had plummeted after 2000 from almost 18 million to 14 million jobs. Innovations in technology and structural changes in the economy were raising worker productivity, but the top 1 percent and then the top .01 percent were seizing all the gains in income.

During the 2008 campaign, James Carville and I, as heads of Democracy Corps, and John Podesta, the director of the Center for American Progress, convened a monthly meeting at my house in Washington to help fashion a Democratic strategy. Among the attendees was David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign chief. We created an “economy project” whose polling showed what should have been obvious. The Democrats’ most powerful message called for an end to trickle-down economics and a focus on creating American jobs and a government that worked for the middle class again.

But despite a deepening economic crisis, Obama didn’t talk much about the economy in his 2008 campaign. Under the banner “Change We Can Believe In,” he promised to get beyond “the bitterness” that “consumed Washington” to make health care affordable, cut middle-class taxes, and “bring our troops home.”

Greenberg's piece makes four mentions of rural voters specifically, three times clustering them with "working-class white" voters.  Here are the four mentions.  

The first regards the fall 2021 gubernatorial election in Virginia:  

Democrats lost Virginia’s gubernatorial race, where Republican Glenn Youngkin won three-quarters of white voters without a four-year degree and two-thirds of those in rural and small-town Virginia. His campaign generated such high voter turnout in Trump country that it increased the white vote share from two-thirds in 2018 and 2020 to three-quarters. If Republicans continue winning working-class votes at the rate they did in Virginia, Democrats have little chance.

The three linking rural voters to working-class whites are here (with bold emphasis mine):  

Trump’s evangelical style, rallies, TV persona, and reputation as a business genius—however phony—inspired many rural and white working-class voters who had scorned other politicians. Millions of new voters showed up at rallies, caucuses, and primaries to allow Trump to move quickly into the lead in the polls and win the nomination.

here:  

During the general election, [Hillary Clinton] did not campaign aggressively in working-class communities or in rural areas. Her description of some Trump supporters as “deplorables” just baked in the perception that she did not respect working people.

and here:  

The 2016 election did not set a record for turnout, in part because some Sanders supporters stayed home and Black turnout fell from 2012. What was historic was how poorly Clinton and Democrats did in suburban counties in the Rust Belt. She lost Macomb County by about 50,000—a margin well in excess of Trump’s 10,000 statewide margin in Michigan. New white working-class voters and rural voters rallied to Trump’s messianic, racist vision in breathtaking numbers. 

Cross-Posted to Working-Class Whites and the Law. 

Academic research: J.D. Vance, Cultural Alien: On Upward Mobility

 Here's a link to the article by Milena Feldman and Markus Rieger-Ladich, published in Reading the Local in American Studies:

In the US, writing about oneself is still strongly influenced by religious discourses as well as by the idea that an individual’s success is primarily determined by his or her hard work and talent. Hence, focusing on oneself as the object of inquiry often fails to raise awareness of structural disadvantages, such as in the educational system. Against this background, this contribution turns to a memoir that takes a different approach and made its author famous overnight: J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Published at the beginning of the Trump administration, many hoped that his story of social ascent from the milieu of the white underclass would help explain Donald Trump’s success. Why do people have such high expectations when reading a book that focuses on the lives of those who some refer to as “hillbillies,” “rednecks,” or “white trash” but whom J.D. Vance calls “neighbors,” “friends,” and “family”? We read the book as an auto-sociobiographical text to find out what it might tell us about social mobility, educational careers, and institutional discrimination in the US and to examine in how far J.D. Vance’s can be read as a specifically US-American version of auto-sociobiography.

Georgia's rural-urban justice gap

I missed this op-ed by Prof. Lauren Sudeall (Georgia State University) when it was published last fall, so I'm highlighting now.  The headline for the Law 360 piece is "We Must Help Fix Justice Gap In Georgia's Legal Deserts."  Here's an excerpt highlighting some findings of rural-urban difference regarding the justice gap: 

In many of the counties with only a handful of attorneys, some of those attorneys may serve as public defender, prosecutor or judge; others may be functionally retired, working for government entities or otherwise not able to provide assistance.

Therefore, there may be even fewer attorneys available to help with everyday legal needs relating to housing, employment, benefits or family law issues.

Narratives about the availability of legal representation — or lack thereof — are often based on the experiences of urban communities, given researchers' and much of the media's focus on larger cities. For example, in the context of eviction, advocates often lament the fact that nearly all landlords have counsel, while nearly all tenants do not — 90% in both cases.

In more rural areas, however, it is most often the case that both tenant and landlord are unrepresented. In our study of eviction court in suburban and rural Georgia, the county with the highest rate of representation had tenants represented in just 1.2% of cases and landlords in only 12.2% of cases. In more rural counties, representation rates were 0.5% or less for tenants and less than 8% for landlords.

The parties may not be unique in this respect; in many magistrate and municipal courts, the judge is also not a lawyer.

The phenomenon of courts without lawyers is not unique to rural areas. Many smaller, lower-level courts might themselves be considered legal deserts, given the infrequency with which those appearing in court are represented by counsel. And this is true not only in the civil context, but in criminal cases as well.

New Book: Research Methods for Rural Criminologists

That's the title of a book published this week by Routledge.  The volume is edited by Ralph A. Weisheit, Jessica Rene Peterson, Artur Pytlarz.  The abstract follows: 

Conducting rural criminological research exposes researchers to concerns such as absence or inadequate official data about crime and superficial rural-urban comparisons, rural isolation and distance from the researchers’ office to the study site, and lack of services or access to justice. This distinct cultural context means that studying rural crime requires creatively adapting existing research methods. Conducting research about or in rural settings requires unique researcher preparation, as everything from defining the space at the conception of a project to collecting and analyzing data differs from urban research.

This book explores the various issues, challenges, and solutions for rural researchers in criminology. Integrating state of the art methodological approaches with practical illustrations, this book serves as an internationally comprehensive compendium of methods for students, scholars, and practitioners. While contributing to the growing field of rural criminology, it will also be of interest to those engaged with the related areas of rural health care, rural social work, and rural poverty.

Here's the Table of Contents: 

Chapter Chapter 1

Defining Rural
By Callie Marie Rennison, Hailey Powers Mondragon

Chapter Chapter 2
Studying the Rural Criminal Justice System
By Kyle C. Ward, Paul Hawkins, Alexandra Swanty

Chapter Chapter 3
An Essay on Theory and Research in Rural Criminology
By Joseph F. Donnermeyer

Chapter Chapter 4
Gaining Access to Rural Communities
By Jessica Rene Peterson

Chapter Chapter 5
Gathering Data on Male-To-Female Violence in Rural and Remote Places
By Walter S. DeKeseredy

Chapter Chapter 6
Investigating Access to Justice, the Rural Lawyer Shortage, and Implications for Civil and Criminal Legal Systems
By Lisa Pruitt, Andrew Davies

Chapter Chapter 7
Researching State Crime in Rural Areas
By Victoria E. Collins

Chapter Chapter 8
Crime Talk in the Countryside 1
By Artur Pytlarz, Matt Bowden

Chapter Chapter 9
Surveying in Rural Settings
By Alistair Harkness, Kyle Mulrooney, Joseph F. Donnermeyer

Chapter Chapter 10
Focus Groups
The Challenges and Advantages of Creating and Using Focus Groups in Rural Areas? 1
By Gorazd Meško, Rok Hacin

Chapter Chapter 11
Geographical Information and GIS in Rural Criminology
By Vania Ceccato

Chapter Chapter 12
Entering the Relational Space
Using Field-Analytic Methods in Researching Rural Security
By Matt Bowden, Artur Pytlarz

Chapter Chapter 13
Interviewing in Rural Areas
By Kreseda Smith

Chapter Chapter 14
Ethnographic Research
Immersing Oneself in the Rural Environment
By Michele Statz, William Garriott

Chapter Chapter 15
Visually Representing Rural
Ethics of Photographing Marginalized People in the Rural South 1
By Heith Copes, Jared Ragland

Chapter Chapter 16
Content Analysis in Rural Criminology
By Stephen T. Young, Brian Pitman

Chapter Chapter 17
Going Global
The Challenges of Studying Rural Crime Worldwide
By Ziwei Qi

Chapter Chapter 18
Future Directions for Rural Research Methods
By Ralph A. Weisheit

Big LA Times profile of the man financing the far-right revolt in northern California

Jessica Garrison offered a deep dive yesterday for the Los Angeles Times from Shasta County, California, about former filmmaker Reverge Anselmo.  The headline is "The ex-Hollywood filmmaker bankrolling a far-right political revolt in rural California."  Mr. Anselmo has been mentioned in recent reporting out of Shasta County, especially regarding the successful recall of Republican county supervisor Leonard Moty in early February.  Read more here and here.  

Before this story, the best explanation I'd seen about Anselmo was from Doni Chamberlain, an independent Redding-based journalist, when she appeared on a Berkeley, California radio program in mid-February.  Sadly, no link to that program is available, but in it Chamberlain made a lot of the points that Garrison echoes in this story, with a focus on Anselmo's axe to grind over his winery, event-business, and a Catholic chapel he built on his ranch east of Redding.  For years, he fought both state and county efforts to regulate his use of the land, ultimately abandoning the property nearly a decade ago.  

Here' s a great quote from Mary Rickert, a member of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, who survived a recent effort to recall her when proponents of the recall failed to secure enough signatures to get it on the ballot.  (This was the same effort that succeeded with Moty's recall).  Regarding the Anselmo-funded effort to take over Shasta County's government:  

I’m watching a county collapse. They want to take over. They want to replace anyone who knows how to do anything with people that don’t know. I’m really scared.

Rickert says she and others in Shasta County didn't know why Anselmo left in a huff, "especially when his business was 'thriving,' his property 'beautiful' and his wine 'wonderful.'”

Another supervisor, Glenn Hawes, added, “Golly sakes, everything we did we tried to help him. ... We could never explain why he did what he did. None of us could.”

It's interesting that it was government regulation that enraged Anslemo, given that the northstate of California is notoriously anti-regulation.  Imagine if Anselmo had been building in a more urban setting, with a higher degree of regulation than the likely faced in Shasta County.  Or maybe he expected that, in choosing to move to and invest in Shasta County, he would avoid the very thing in which he ultimately got bogged down.    

Both Chamberlain's and Garrison's reporting suggest that Anselmo is an urban fellow (born in Connecticut and living there now) who is using the rural--here for political gain, or perhaps just pure revenge.  

Postscript:  Capital Public Radio reported this morning that Mary Rickert has been removed as vice chair of the Shasta County Board of Supervisors, a position she rose to in January, before the recall.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CLXXIX): "Rural Adults Report Worse COVID-19 Impacts than Urban Adults"

Here is the abstract for Prof. Shannon Monnat's policy brief, published by Syracuse University's Lerner Center for Public Health:  

COVID-19 infection and mortality rates have been higher in rural than in urban America since late-2020. However, the consequences of COVID-19 extend far beyond the deaths that it has caused. This brief uses data from a national survey of working-age adults (ages 18-64) collected in February and March of 2021 to describe rural-urban differences in reported impacts of COVID-19 on physical and mental health, employment, financial wellbeing, and social relationships. Nearly 3 out of 5 respondents (58%) reported that COVID-19 has had a negative impact on their lives. Across most outcomes, rural residents fared worse than their urban peers. Recovery policies must consider geographic variation in COVID-19 vulnerability and impacts.

Rural NIMBYism strikes planned electric truck manufacturing plant in Georgia

David Gelles of the New York Times reported yesterday from Rutledge, Georgia, population 781, about 50 miles east of Atlanta.  The headline is "How and Electric Truck Factory Became a Lightning Rod in Georgia."  The subhead is "The governor hailed the factory as an economic boon that would put Georgia at the vanguard of the green economy. Not everyone liked the idea."

And here's an excerpt that gets at the essential conflict about the proposed $5 billion Rivian factory, which would produce 400K emissions-free vehicles a year.  

Protests have at times grown vitriolic. At a public meeting with a local economic development group that supported the project, Edwin Snell, who lives nearby, excoriated the officials, removed his red baseball hat and kicked it at them. “It’s a rural area,” he said to loud cheers. “It’s not an industrial waste dump.”

"Industrial waste dump" sounds like hyperbole, but Snell's spin reminds me of the "property" section (specifically on the topic of "nuisance") of my 2006 law review article, Rural Rhetoric.  Here's a quote from that article, which documented how judges and legislatures tended to see rural property as distinct from an implicit urban norm:  

Courts have often distinguished between rural and urban in relation to various aspects of rights in real property. In the nuisance context, for example, the U.S. Supreme Court (incidentally using a rural metaphor) expressed a key principle in an early land use case: “A nuisance may be merely a right thing in a wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.” With respect to the rural-urban differentiation, this means that courts may be more tolerant of agricultural annoyances in rural areas but less tolerant of other irritations that interfere with the perceived rural idyll. Several states have held, for example, that while a race track is not a nuisance per se, it may constitute a nuisance per accidens under certain circumstances, as in a rural area. Many courts thus more aggressively defend rural areas against nuisances, especially non-agricultural ones, suggesting that these presumptively pristine and quiet areas are especially sensitive to the loud, the smelly, and the ugly. (pp. 187-89).

In any event, the proposed plant has split Georgia's Republican candidates for governor.  David Perdue, the recently deposed Republican Senator, now challenging Kemp for the GOP nomination for governor, is quoted: 

We can grow the economy without selling out and giving our tax dollars to people like George Soros. We can invest in rural Georgia without kicking our communities to the curb.

Soros, a major Democratic donor, owns $2 billion in Rivian stock.  As Gelles points out, there are some conspiracy theories swimming around in this story.  

Perdue's opposition is especially interesting because when he was the CEO of Dollar General, he did plenty to undermine rural economies.  

Don't miss the entirety of the Gelles story, bearing in the mind that the factory is the sort of economic development we typically see rural areas fighting to get.  

Small-town government run amok (Part IX): California sheriff charged with voter fraud

The Sacramento Bee reported late last week from Del Norte County, in the far northwestern part of the state under the headline, "California sheriff charged with voter fraud, perjury in vacation rental address dispute."  Here's the lede:  

Less than six months after he took the job, the sheriff of Del Norte County was charged Wednesday with felony voter fraud — the latest scandal for the small North Coast department whose previous sheriff resigned amid a flurry of staff departures and internal dysfunction. 

District Attorney Katherine Micks charged Sheriff Randall Waltz with perjury and filing false voter registration and nomination papers, court records show. Prosecutors say he knowingly listed an address that was not his permanent residence, a violation of election laws, and thus did not meet the requirements to run for sheriff. 

The address that he gave, which is listed in the documents, is for a short-term rental suite along Highway 101, a half-mile south of the Oregon border in Del Norte. Reached by phone Thursday, the property owners told The Sacramento Bee that Waltz turned in a security deposit last month, moved in shortly after that and has been living there ever since.

Given that the sheriff is from another part of the state, far away from Del Norte County, I wonder what role the rural housing shortage in places like Del Norte County will ultimately play in adjudication of this case.  That is, what if the sheriff couldn't find a place to live?  Curious to know where Waltz was living before he took this short-term rental, which he did only recently.  

A post from last fall about dysfunction in the Del Norte County Sheriff's department, which led to Waltz getting the Sheriff's job, is here.  

Coronavirus in rural America (Part CLXXIX): Vaccination rate in my tiny home county creeps up by a point, to 34%

I've been waiting for months for the vaccination rate in Newton County, Arkansas, my home county, to rise.  It finally did yesterday, on Saturday March 12, when it inched up a notch from 33% to 34%.  It had been at 33% since December 29, 2021, the day it ticked up from 32%.  The current vaccination rate for all of Arkansas is 54%.  

Screenshot of New York Times email Saturday March 12, 2022

Screenshot of New York Times email of March 11, 2022

Screenshot of New York Times email of December 28, 2021

Screenshot of New York Times email of December 28, 2021 

I can't help wonder what forces are keeping the vaccination rate ticking up, however slowly.  You can see that between late December and last week, the death rate has also crept up, from 1 in 180 to 1 in 172. 

Meanwhile the death rate in Sacramento California, where I live, is now 1 in 574.  In the United States as a whole, it is one in 344.  The vaccination rate here for all ages is double what it is in my home county, at 67%.

Screenshot of New York Times email, Saturday, March 12, 2022

These next two screenshots show vaccination rates in the United States and in Sacramento metro area as of Dec. 29, 2021:  62% (U.S.); 63% (Sacramento metro); and 66% (all California).  The death rate in greater Sacramento at that time was 1 in 684 with 1 in 9 infected.  The death rate for the United States then was 1 in 405 with 1 in 6 infected. 

Screenshot of New York Times email, December 29, 2021

Screenshot of New York Times email, December 29, 2021

Newton County, population about 7,000 (down nearly 1K from 2010 Census), is a high poverty county with a low rate of formal education.  Just over 20% of the population have a bachelor's degree or better, and the average individual income is just under $20,000.  

California's wolf pack another target of misinformation

The New York Times published a story out today under the headline, "Wolves, and Misinformation About Them, Make a California Comeback."  The subhead is, "For the past 10 years, wolves have been steadily returning to the state after being wiped out a century ago. But not everyone is rolling out the welcome mat."  This caption for one of the photos caught my eye as perfect for the blog; it's a quote from a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife:  

Wolves have been politicized because they are right in the middle of this divide between rural and urban.

Here's the story's lede, also featuring the same wolf biologist:   

Kent Laudon, a wolf biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, woke up one morning last year to a flurry of text messages from a rancher in the state’s northernmost county. He was asking about a post with wildly specific details spreading across Facebook that urged people to find a red truck that was transporting breeding wolves along Route 97 into Siskiyou County, Calif. Mr. Laudon was not surprised. This wasn’t the first post of its kind, and it wouldn’t be the last.

“Wolves make people crazy,” he said of these persistent rumors. “And for the record: No, we’re not importing wolves. That never happened.”

Wolves don’t need to be dropped off in California because they are returning on their own.

I guess misinformation is everywhere--and about every topic.  It's not only about a purportedly stolen election and how ivermectin helps cure COVID-19.  It's about wolves, too.  

You can find prior posts about wolves here, and prior posts about Siskiyou County here.