The 40-Year Robbing of Rural America

Since the 1980s, says Professor Marc Edelman, financial capital has developed imaginative new ways to seize assets from small towns and rural areas.

Marc Edelman is a writer and Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College. In his work, academic and otherwise, Edelman investigates what he terms the underdevelopment of rural America. In a 2021 paper entitled ​“Hollowed out Heartland, USA” he writes ​“Rural decline is not simply the result of deindustrialization spurred by free trade, the farm crisis, or automation and robotization. Since the 1980s, financial capital has developed imaginative new ways to strip and seize the assets present in rural zones, whether these be mutually-owned banks, industries, cooperatively-owned grain elevators, local newspapers, hospitals, people’s homes, or stores located in towns and malls.” In the wake of the fiscal austerity agenda enacted by financial and political elites in the late 20^th century, the vast majority of the wealth created in America’s countryside ​“has accrued to shareholders in corporations and financial institutions headquartered in a handful of distant, economically dynamic urban centers.” The financialization of the American economy, especially in those places furthest from economic hubs, can be extremely opaque. But its repercussions — many of which are often seen as causes and effects of backwardness and small-town decline — are all around us.