A number of years ago I tried to talk my wife into moving to Minot, North Dakota (actual city marketing slogan: "Why not Minot?"). Instead we spent four years in Lawrence, Kansas. My wife says that counts.
For much of this current recession*, North Dakota and Montana have been relatively spared. I read an article** several months ago about the energy boom creating a high demand for strippers, and now here's an article in the New York Times about the influx of cash and people creating more crime.
Two points I found interesting: the first is that the increase of crime has come with an increase in wealth. This is perhaps counter-intuitive. We like the Jean Valjean story, and we tell ourselves, "If only the criminal wasn't destitute, he wouldn't be a criminal." But this might not be so. Pat Buchanan once said (in a quote I used to have saved but have since thrown out and can't find online) that there's something fundamentally wrong with this country that wasn't wrong when we were a much poorer nation.
Of course, the second half of that point is that there's no indication how the new-found wealth of the high plains is distributed. As with any boom, I assume there are winners and there are losers. Perhaps the crime is loser-on-winner crime (or, more probably, smaller-winner-on-bigger-winner crime). I don't really want to steal your stuff until you have stuff sufficiently nicer than mine.
My second point is from the very end of the article, where Sidney, MT, mayor Bret Smelser says, "Nobody knew anybody anymore." I'm not the first person to recognize that anonymity brings out the jerks in people--visit any online discussion thread. Since the 1950s we've vilified small-town America as oppressive. Everybody's in your business, deterring you from living how you want. But that's because some of how you want to live should be deterred. Disapprobation often is an effective deterrent, but it's lost when your town doubles in size in five years.
* = I know the BLS has an official standard of what makes a recession, and according to that standard, we're no longer in a recession. I say nuts to that. Using the 2008 labor force participation rate, unemployment has been above 10% for nearly five years now, and that's even allowing for the Census Bureau faking the jobs numbers in the fall of 2012. Disability is up, welfare is up, food stamp usage is up, poverty is up, and the number of households is down. This recession is not over.
** = I know it's a BuzzFeed article, and since reading it back in July, I've instituted a personal boycott of BuzzFeed. Partly based on an article I can't find right now about the unprofessional treatment a writer received from folks at BuzzFeed, and partly from my hatred of slideshows of numbered lists masquerading as articles (Six Ways Global Warming Is Making You Poorer!).
via oneofthebest
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