these are some e-mails from people who are from town and you read the book and you felt moved enough to write. so i'm just going to quoted a little bit from some of these notes. the first one says, today has been very weird for me. i thought you would like to know why. i got a facebook message from a friend i graduated with in a small town about a book, "hollowing out the middle." as an avid reader i thought i would check it out. and it amazed me to check out the book and watch the little book trailer and see a place just like my hometown. i got to reading the rest of the website and i was very moved by this. and you might think, big deal, i now live and work in a small town and i see everyday howard a disparate people in small towns in iowa to survive, but refused to leave.

my boss is also from a small town. she graduated a few years before me. collectively would like to say thank you for writing this book as he tried to explain to friends who have moved away that we are perfectly happy in small-town iowa and are hoping to keep it alive. your book is hoping to open the eyes of many people as i found out about from one of those friends who just doesn't understand how can live in such a small rural place. after reading your book, she admits she misses the simplicity of it and should visit her parents were often. again, thank you for making our lives a normal and for making small-town life available to people at least are your pages. okay, that was one of them. another note was from a young woman from a small town in western kansas. and she writes, my name is sarah downey and i'm a practicing community planner in kansas and missouri. as i was doing some research this morning i came across an article in your book. i felt compelled to get in touch

with you and express my interest in your research ideas. i am from earl northwest kansas, will be specifically, and i was raised in a working family farm. my father, mother, myself and two siblings ran the farm growing wheat, corn, soybeans, sunflower, and my love. i said that right. within the last past ten years or so many of our farming neighbors have sold or lost their farms. while my father is still operating as farm. i left colby to go to college where i received a ba in political science and a masters degree in regional and community planning. a master's degrees from kansas state, where another rutgers graduate was on my professors. being from a rural era and theme the continuing rapid decline of population, one of my passions is understanding borough population decline and the death of this community. i wrote my master's paper on this topic. focusing specifically on the far

west counties in kansas. because of debility and may feel they came to kansas city to work and have not been able to advance any of my studies on the topic area i would like to offer my help in any way should the opportunity ever present itself. rural america is near and dear to my heart and i would love to contribute to this field of research. okay, so these are just some of the responses that we've received about this book. and it's clear that it's touched a nerve and i figure should hear it because they were ever going to have a conversation and really get serious about small-town america than it has to start somewhere. let me just lay out some of the background to what we see as wide alice matters as what is in many ways a typical small town. and what we can sort of do going forward into the future.

between 1982 and 2000, over 800 nonmetropolitan counties just like the one we're in right now lost 10% or more of the population to outmigration. now this is not natural decrease. this is people actually leaving. okay, between 2200 and 2005, over 800 wirral counties lost 10% or more of the population again. and in those same counties, there were more deaths than births. the median age in these places has also risen pretty dramatically. so that would lead us to conclude that people who are leaving are young and in most cases although we don't have turned it on this, mostly educated people. they are leaving for a variety of reasons. some believe because there are paternity self-love. family because they want to. but the fact of the matter that

is that in small towns in some cases are years away from extinction. and sometimes the final for a town as there are no longer enough children to keep a local school open. and we've seen in many places to that schools don't have enough kids to keep a school viable. so against the backdrop of this, we began a study in the small town of alice back in 2002 and i do have to pay tribute to the macarthur foundation for having the foresight and also the letter just to found a study like this because most foundations don't really care about these issues. most foundations aren't willing to spend what was for a study of its type quite a lot of money. and they were interested in something that wasn't burrell and was in the future of small towns. they were interested in how people come of age in a small town. and we chose the town of ellis

because of some of our ties they are. we chose it because it was in many ways what they wanted, a fairly typical small town far away from a big city that has one school and so on. and so we got in contact with the school they are who are tremendously helpful. we couldn't in the the research about them. and assembled incoming list of high school freshman who entered school to graduate in the late 80's and early 90's with a view to catching up with them in their early and mid-twenties and late twenties. so people who should be adults are under way to adulthood by then. and we found very quickly that coming-of-age in a small town means that you have to face two pretty fundamental questions. and those two questions are, do i stay? or do i go? and the second question is if i go, do i ever come back? and in many ways the pathways of these young adults have taken, sort of fall on the planning of those two very fundamental

questions. this isn't something that's new. i think this is the question that young people are coming-of-age in towns such as this and ellis have always faced. but what we found was that fundamentally different now is that the economy has changed, that opportunities are different, and that staying or leaving now within the context of that is very different than it was 20 or 30 or even 40 years ago. so when we caught up with these young people, we found their stories to be tremendously compelling. we spoke with -- we interviewed over 80% of the total population, which is very, very good. we couldn't have done that without the help from the school. and we did end up with interviews with over 100 young people from the town. we interviewed people in the town, we interviewed people in 50 different states. from new mexico to maine, from florida to minnesota. from new york to kansas.

i put a lot of miles on my car. you know, spent a lot of time in the airports doing this and it really was truly a fascinating study to be involved in. what we found was that the young people sort of -- in many ways, sorted themselves out to various screws. those who leave, those who say, and those who come back. so levers, stayers, and retirees. a believer groups there are two main groups called the achievers. and achievers are young people who are motivated to beat because of mainly opportunities. they are people who normally attend four-year colleges, get to bas. they are people who go on and succeed elsewhere. for the most part, it chivers leave and don't come back. the second group of levers are seekers. they're not quite as academically oriented as the

achievers or don't have may be the same opportunities as these issues. and the seekers use the military as a way to leave and go and see the wide world that's out there. the stayers are young people who never leaves small towns. they are the people who left no desire to go beyond the confines of a small town, for whom life is just fine for they are. and who's working lives start early and revolve around the small towns. of our returners, they are two groups, one we call boomerangs because they are people who go away for a very short time and always really intend to come back and to come back to small towns usually, although not always, with associate's degrees or some college education and settle back down into small towns. and the last group is a small strip of all and those we call the high flyers. they are basically the small number of achievers who come back to small towns.

so doctors, dentists, entrepreneurs, the young people who are very sought after in many small towns. many small town stream of ways to bring these people back. and when we spoke with them, it was very adjusting how nearly every single scheme that a state or local jurisdiction can dream up to bring. they focus on incentives when really people move back for very much effective and/or emotional reasons to be close to family, because they really want to live in small town and want to raise a family. so what's new, what's different, why does this matter, and what is it all has to do with the future of small town america? well, what we found was, in our research was and again to the voices and the words of the young people we spoke with. and giving voice to their

experience. what we found was that in small towns, in small towns i think of always done this. much of the community resources, much of the education resources are focused on the achievers. the young people who are destined to succeed. the achievers put it this way, one spoke about how a whole town has your back. one also spoke very eloquently about how i feel that i am destined to do something beyond your and that i have been set forth to do this. and in many cases, that's very true. and small towns of always done this in small towns of always done this very well. and small towns should do this. young people who have talent should go on and use those talents and should achieve. but what is different now and what is crucial is that for those who say and for many who return the fact that many of the resources are devoted to them means they are badly under

prepared for the economy that is here right now. and by that i need for those who stay and many who return, 30 years ago there was a robust fireman factory in towns like ellis. that's not the case right now. though some towns are managing to make it, many more towns i've seen jobs disappear, jobs outsourced, i've seen jobs become lost to mechanization and agriculture. and in many cases, seen jobs that work solid working-class jobs a generation ago. in agro-industrial economy they are a third of what they are 13 years ago. they don't have benefits. they did have benefits 15 years ago. we talked to one who spoke about how it really rankles with him that he does the job on the same

line with a guy who earns $20,000 more because he was hired at a time when the contract with etter. and the benefits would they are so does the exact same thing as the guy next to them, doesn't have the benefit enders $20,000 less. so that's the reality now. the reality for those who stay and come back there is a shrinking of opportunities. those opportunities that they do exist are as good as they were a generation ago. and again putting it all or many of your eggs in the basket of those who are most likely to leave and least likely to come back is perhaps not the wisest use of reasons. okay, so that's the problem in many ways. what are the points of which you can't intervene and maybe some

of the solutions? we think that because this is an issue that had been 50 confluence of things happen in the community level and at the larger level that the change has to happen on both levels. as the community level, we suggest that the resources that are distributed to kids, the investment, the cultivation, the mentoring, the skilling, be equalized across all groups. not that you don't prepare achievers to go off and do wonderful things. you could and should do that. it's a good thing to do. but that you also prepared those who stay for the opportunities that are out there. and they give you a couple of four instances and maybe explain how we see that that could be accomplished. although manufacturing has lost i think at last count 130,000 jobs in the state of iowa. there are opportunities in some

fields. there are goldfields in the state of iowa. those growth fields are in nursing, biotech, wind energy. these are the kinds of opportunities to young people should be prepared for. what are some of the ways that we can prepare them? one of the things that we think is an institution that is underutilized in terms of preparing young people who are not destined for a four year degree for these kinds of jobs are community colleges. community colleges to a pro games, but many of the programs that they think up or link up with high school are college prep programs or college credit programs with the idea that you're going to go on for a four year degree. why not reimagine not? whenever you imagine a situation where young people, not destined for a four year degrees began to take wind energy classes or introduction to computing classes to community colleges. one it had the bureaucracies of local school districts, q&a to

college, and the larger university system in the state of iowa, one of the best in the country, why not have those bureaucracies speak to each other and talk to each other and actually think of ways in which you can productively link up these various pools that operate right now like mosaic. they belsey to each other. they all but 20 cheddar. pie-in-the-sky, maybe. it's already happening. i got another e-mail printed out. e-mail is a wonderful thing. i've learned so much in the last couple of weeks. i got an e-mail from a woman who was the director of the chamber of congress a new tenant who is now the director of the greater new tin development corporation basically a numberless group. and she spoke to me about a career academy program that they had begun they are in newton.

as you recall, newton was a town that had really seen its fortunes decline pretty precipitously when maytag closed. they lost 1700 jobs which worry, size is below a few places if any would be able to recover from. you've got to give it to the people in newton reset his maytag is going to go up and we're going to find a way to bounce back. and they have. they've refitted the maytag plants to produce wind turbines for alternative energy. they've retrained over 500 of those workers. it's not everybody, but a lot of people. and then more latterly they're thinking along the lines of what we've been talking about of having this career academies program where you link high school students into community colleges to prepare them for industries such as that. so that's one thing that you can do at the level of a small town.

there are other things that small towns can do. a group i didn't speak a lot about our speakers, military personnel. we spoke with people who are currently serving in the military or who have served in the military. they are poignant and lots of ways because we are speaking with people who were serving and sometimes just before and also during a time of war. and this is an all volunteer army. this isn't an army that's drafting. people choose to serve. and many people who choose to serve for a combination of reasons. one of the most powerful reason that people choose to serve right now is the fact that this is the best opportunity that's going to come their way. and they do so because they believe that they will get training. they believe they'll get education. they believe they'll get a good

living range by joining the service. and they do and they don't. one of the most poignant things we found we spoke to the people who served in the military and no longer serve in the military was the fault somewhat letdown that the skills they learned while in the navy or in the army or in the air force weren't really transferable once they got out. these were skills that weren't going to get them a job. there was one person who trained in the medical field and you would have to start from scratch to get a nursing degree, after she finished. that's not right. that shouldn't be. there are to be a better way to ease that transition back after you've served. it's heartening to me that there is money set aside for veterans as of last week, i believe there was an announcement by president

obama. i think part of that can be devolved to small towns, just like ellis because ellis has a lot of veterans. you can think of imaginative ways to train, retrained these young men and women to be at least able and available for some of the opportunities that we have in our current economy. a third thing that can happen at the level of small towns i think is in vogue, but is a wonderful opportunity for us. we hear a lot about the green economy. we hear a lot about sustainable agriculture. these are two things that by their very nature need to be decentralized. you can't have your green economy in the big cities. you can't just have wind turbines in philadelphia. it's not going to work. bb there is a lot of hot air that can power them, but in reality you are wind turbines

need to be on the plains. they need to be off the coast. they need to be at or near small towns. this really can be ground zero for rolling out the green economy. we need to rethink the way we produce food. big bag mass production of food. that day is almost over. we just doesn't a matter of our own health and well-being need to do things differently. iowa, trust me, i lived here for a summer and i grew things in the ground here that i didn't think i'd ever have a chance of growing anywhere. i was actually a skilled gardener by the time i left here. lost it all when i went back to the big city. i was like i can grow things and then i started putting things and i said maybe i can't. maybe it was the soil. but joking aside, this again can be ground zero by its very nature. sustainable agriculture, they

are things that need workers, and the people. i was done in iowa city today doing a talk and i went out for lunch "after words" to a café, great food. i can't think the name of it. something with cow in its name. the milky cow, thirsty cow. this is a café that all of its food was organic and locally grown. how about that likes a sickly i looked at a magnet that says he organic food, what your grandparents call food. right? we don't have to be this way. we went this way in the 1970's and mall towns can benefit from the investment that will pay off. and these are labor-intensive things. at the larger national level, there are things that need to happen that the government has

to do to help small towns. part of this is providing the support for the green economy and for rethinking how we produce food. part of this is reforming labor laws and agribusiness. one of the reasons that the wages of a meeting meatpacker are one third is agribusiness can get away with it. and if i can take someone from mexico and pay them $5 an hour that i've been a local guy $15 an hour to ten years ago i will do it. and not only will i do it but i'm going to get away with it. and he has and they say to states like iowa, well if you get these guys organized and let local people organize them and agitate for a living wage, we are just going to move. my question to that is, where are you going to move? the food is here, the land is

here. you think you're going to move somewhere else? you're going to pack meat, you're going to pack it right at the source. so we have to think of ways to do that. and by doing that you do two things. one, you left the boat for everyone. they become real jobs when you pay people properly, when you give them benefits. when you enforce health and safety standards. the plant was closed after the immigration rate. what was lost, one of the things lost in all the ink that was put on that particular raid was that plans had 157 health and safety violations in the previous 18 months. none of which were enforced. that's a disgrace. that shouldn't happen. why not make them good jobs, why not make them safe jobs? is fairly easy to do.

okay, lasley, in terms of there are a couple of other things. i want to give -- i've spoken for too long, but that's the irish in front of me. there's a camera here and i could be here for hours. [laughter] my mother used to joke that when the fridge would open in the light would come on i would be there. song and dance. we do also need to provide support and really sustainable ways for small towns. i think the stimulus is one way of doing it. again, the stimulus in each state delivers differently, but why not have the trickle down to small towns, have real investment. one that i've been investment again also go to some of the community colleges in the past. there is a college graduation this year that was announced over the summer that provides $12 billion for community college development. the news is good.

there are ideas out there. there are ways to attract people back to small towns. they are as varied as the harris on your head. there's tuition remission programs in west virginia and maine. there's the come back to iowa please campaign. quite literally, that's what it was called here it because iowans are very polite or so i'm told, right? we'll find out in a few minutes when we set the q&a. [laughter] where did you say that car was parked? braided the front? you know, there are ways to do this. one of the things we thought about. here's another statistic i didn't use earlier on but i'll throw it out there. over half of all counties in the state of iowa, just the state of iowa will play that missouri and

other states have at least one medically underserved area and that's an area that doesn't have a doctor, nurse, nurse assistant, dentist, so one. so over half of all counties have at least one underserved area and about a third of them have more than one. here's the thing that you can think about. why not again prospectively instead of trying to attract people back once they've gone, right? because he and a little cord gets thinner and thinner. why not identify people who are going to be the doctors and nurses and the dentist and the lawyers and whatever else you need in a small town here it and say right, here's the deal. we'll help you out and will have few do an internship at one of the local profession and will help you out if you go to college and will provide some of

your tuition or older tuition for your professional school. if you sign up to give us ten years after you graduate. that would pay huge dividends for a fairly small investments. and again, you know, think of it as they can to a job quarter or in americorps or whatever it is. think of it as a health court for america. it's quite simple. there are ideas out there. there are things. people ask about this issue and they say well, how bad is that? and surely this has happened before. counts go on the come and they go. and that's certainly true. here's what's different about this. this is a crisis that is slow burning. there's a continuing year from the robust healthy town on one

end into tom on the other end. ellis is on the robust side. you slide inexorably towards the other side. there are thousands of towns dotted along this continuum throughout america. this isn't just a frontier issue. this isn't just a boom and bust cycle that have been so rapidly that a towel springs from the earth and then disappears five years later. this is taken decades to happen. and if we don't start thinking about it now, in ten or 15 years, there will be many more towns towards the shattered end of things.

i guess we have been completely read the book yet but we have skimmed through ed and i agree with a lot of what you are saying. i love small takei wove but because of opportunities as far as college, i have had to leave. however we were talking some in just for one during the kind of

the implications of the labels that you have given like the chief verse and a stayers because of the point is to keep people in small town of iowa and to do that, as far as people saying like i want to be an achiever is and that pulling people out more than the stayer? >> you know, you are right. from the point of view of writing this stuff is an incredibly different line that you walk when you try and describe something. we tried very hard in this book to do several things. one, we had to absolutely respect the confidentiality of the people who spoke with us so in some cases some of the details are doing just that. the other thing we try very hard to do was to give voice to those people in such a way that made sense and part of that was laboring them in an accurate

sort of way and i get your point that an achiever is pejoratively different than a stare but let me counter that by saying that we ask the question very early on in the interviews which i think open the door to a lot of the questions, a series of questions about it, and the responses to that, tell me a little bit about your town and what you like about it, would you ever leave, what would make you believe in what would you miss a few left, that kind of stuff. the answers from the people who left in the people who stayed were as you can imagine just a vastly different and what was poignant about those sets was the believers were very ambivalent about the process of leaving and they spoke, the guys that one off to college spoke, there were a couple of moments for them that they talked about. one was leaving home for the first time in that first night in the dormitory which you all

have experience that, that's the horror that i am away from home and i'm on my own. i have to wash my own stocks. [laughter] and, that is right, or not. hopefully not, if you have roommates please respect them. the second moment was when you leave college and where it you go from there and the feeling that you were getting for those guys ever further away and then speaking about what you miss the, and feeling bad about that, the feeling that that i miss certain things but i will never go back, you know i just feel one person spoke that there's just something taking me away. there just is force i think it takes it away, so piled up against the stayers response to the same question. much less detail because the

question of would you ever leave is almost, why are you even asking me that? that is a crazy question, of course that will never leave. i love it here, this is where i'm from and there is a rifle sense of pride and real love and affection for the place that there are bad things about everywhere. there are things that annoyed is about our neighbors everywhere, although i can't imagine my never-- neighbor has ever been annoyed by me because i'm a perfect neighbor but over and above that this dares talk about it is just a crazy, i can't think of an answer to what would make me leave because nothing would. when guy talked about maybe it's the bomb went off in the time but it was just one of those things, so i think you are right, we are trying to be very

careful. i don't think it is pejorative because of the way these guys spoke about the place and it was funny, maybe john mellencamp is more influential than i thought but people would echo the words of the song small town. i was born in a small town i live in a small town and i'm going to die in a small town and this is a wonderful thing and i couldn't think of anything that is better and then the last response and i don't want to overdo this year, was the high flyers respoke with you came back and these were the people we want to attract the incentives and the bike patch send whatever ells. it is not about that. it is about that effective stuff, i want to be close to where i grew up, i want to be in a place where i can raise my kids the way i was raised. one women talked about how that offer from des moines that wouldn't pay me twice as much so it is not about the money. there was something more

important for her than the money, so i think it's a good sociologists, i am glad to see your classier, you have a right to ask that question but i think it is not pejorative then i think that is the reason why. >> was there an age at which the likelihood of the highfliers returning drastically cut off because it you were saying their reasons for coming back are typically the hartsfeld i want to raise my kids the way i was raised, typically there's a point at which that is no longer an issue and you see the drop-off in the amount of people that would choose then to come home? >> that is a great question and it is funny because here is the thing. a lot of small towns and we have heard this from other places, how did we get these guys? how do we get the doctors back, how do we get the lawyers back? we say we don't really know but we do know everybody is trying so their two main approaches and

they are both, they occur at different ages. the first approach capture and release after graduation, so you basically stand at the graduation of a big university with a net and it is sort of like, said one of those. i am joking of course but it is kind of like that. can we get you just after graduation so that if you leave now you are gone, so if you cross the state line it is like you are on the run from the state police and if you get across the state line, that is it. the warrant does not apply or whatever and that does not seem to work because let me give you just one instance. the state of michigan has a huge problem losing their technology graduates. michigan, michigan state, western michigan, eastern michigan, the huge michigan state's system produces around 70,000 college graduates a year

and these are people that work in the computer and information fields and so on. only 7,000 stay in the state so they lose 63,000 of those out of state and they have spent a lot of money educating these guys. what do we do? their idea was what we need to do is we need to make the place cooler so up the state is cooler then people will stay because young people like cool stuff. they want ipod's and cappuccinos and bypass and bands and music and whatever else. so they had this thing called the coal cities initiative sobra every can city was going to be a cool city. i don't know what that means that they spend a lot of money on this and said okay city number one what is your cool thing? we have a lot say polis and the roller rink. for years and spending tens of millions of dollars on the cool city's initiative that did not work because you are focusing on

a group that seems to define incentives, they are just not ready to listen to those things on the further end of it is to focus on the young people in their 30's, who are sort of settling into their professional lives and who are ready to start a family and in many ways because people are having kids later particularly if the go-to college. the age of the first child that has gone up, up and those seem to have a little bit more success and to come back to iowa please campaign focused on a bunch of bats, they focused on that and they would have, i thought quite humorous way of doing it. iowa, the sixth day this state in the nation. [laughter] so i did not know that but it is apparently. you live in the sixth save the state in the nation so i never lock my cart anymore. i am and i was, the six safest

state in the nation. i have yet to be in a traffic jam here in iowa. i was going to fairbanks and almost got there. i was that the stoplight for 20 seconds. there were four cars that went by me and i was like of this might be a traffic jam and fairbanks. [laughter] with the idea is when you are ready to have these wonderful examples, so when guy was originally from iowa of and he had gone to california of all places, the hotbed of whatever it is and he was a realtor which is even worse. no, no, no i am just kidding of course but he said here is a guy who's job is to nowhere to live and he chooses iowa and his whole sort of testimonial was you know the same price that i paid for my 1100 sq. feet box

that i lived in in california i have 10 acres and 4,000 square foot house and that is true. this sort of difference, so this seemed to work a little better so what we see as it is almost like a curvilinear thing where it doesn't seem to work it is certain age but that as they age there is an optimal time that you can get them and then it declines afterwards, they have settled somewhere, so a long answer to your short question seems to be the late thirties to early 40's. >> when you were doing your interviewing, did you get anything from this day years-- sub 13 yes to their attitudes about the people who left? >> that is a good question, no. i think all of the group's

talked about the other groups in a way, and i think one of the ways that they spoke about each other was how they were in high school because high school was the crucial age at which-- it is not that you only enter onto the pathway then or that you cannot change or whatever but it seems to be sort itself out. by the time you finish high school you are pretty much in one of the groups. not the change doesn't happen that you seem to have settled into a path, so i think one of the ways that every group spoke was to describe each other in high school. we ask them to say, tell me about what it was like to go to high school in ellis and tell me about the different groups and so on. in terms of sometimes they talked in terms of what people did so the kinds of activities they did. one of the main dividing factors

between stayers and particularly the achievers and some of their terms but the stayers and the cheevers for the bookends, the stayers worked during high school and worked early and worked a lot and that work was something we heard from them-- when guy put it this way. well, you had your prep retyped ender middle types in your work types and i was the work type. and other people would talk about how working with something i was born to do, and this sort of pride in the work ethic. but the undoing of that or the great irony of that was, one of the things that makes it so attractive to work for stayers is that you can earn a decent wage its 16, working 30 hours a week. you can still go to school and some of these people did, worked 25 or 30 hours and still went to

school. kids in suburbs and cities would have no conception of that. they would be dead even thinking about working 30 hours and going to school but again it was a fairly normal thing where a guy would talk about i get up at 4:00 and work here for five hours before going to school and after-school i go to my other job. i would be dizzy even thinking about doing that. so the of the warhead is there to do that because you can earn f-16 what a 25-year-old burns and that feels good. you feel like a man or woman, right? utah are taking home a big paycheck but when you are 25 and you are still earning what you learned when you were 16 that is where the road comes then so the answer to your question really is yes they spoke about each other, but really in terms of villains of a high-school. less than the one it to say on that was there was an acute awareness of the stayers of what

they lacked in terms of the skills that they needed to compete so for example one young man, we talked to him and he said look, and we ask, the question may be a list of response, how could your high school have imparity for the rest of your life? >> he said we did not do computers and high school. it just wasn't done at the time because he graduated in the early 90's or late 80s. he said no days either you are a laborer or working on a computer and you know if you don't have a lot of skills like i don't than you had better get them fast because that is what you need, so he was very much aware that these were the kinds of things that he would focus on, so there was that awareness that in some ways we talk a little bit in some of the, some of the book and some of the presentation how

work sometimes betrays these guys because they bind to the idea that work will save you. if you work hard, he will make it. yes and no. the will make it but one other guy, and this one really sticks with me. he says here i am and i am earning the same 40 years later. there is no benefits and it burns me that this is the first generation that won't do better than our parents. that is again something that is very poignant so i hope that answers your question. in the front here. >> i am curious if you did research are any percentages on older people that return back to their hometown? >> we didn't, but there are a

couple of responses to that. we didn't because of the way the initial study was designed to focus. however, when we were writing the book one of the things we did find was of the non--- that head people migrating so more people coming and then leaving, these were mainly retirement destinations of these were places where people were coming back to retire to, and of the town's-- there is a wonderful report actually i read recently from the university of north carolina that basically focuses on, i think it is about 30 small towns that are making it, and they divided into three groups. of those 30 towns one of the things that struck me, only four were in the midwest so a lot of these four towns in sort of the north carolina area of

anti-so-called mountain west of colorado or utah and so forth, but in the midwest, focusing on the midwest because that is rarely are the counties that are gaining population are gaining population because people are coming back as retirees. in some places in western kansas and this has actually been very beneficial to towns. and, they want them to come back because there is wildlife or hunting and fishing and so forth. here is the thing up. for the overall health of the small town we believe that is great but it has to be balanced with the young people and you need to have young people better going to have kids in school, who are going to be on the pta, who were going to be volunteering at their local library like this wonderful place and so on. it is important because retirees bring money, they bring

expertise, they bring all of their social capital with them but you need to balance that out as well. but yes you are right there is a lot of research out there. >> thank you. >> good question. >> my name is dale and i am in 1951 graduate of sumner high school. lifetime resident of sumner. any time i read or hear criticism of sumner i have a tendency to be taking it somewhat personally. i came with a list of things that i want to share with your presentation. has blown most of them away so i compliment you on your presentation. i do still have two things-- [laughter] no, it is fine. i have two things. i'm assuming that the book was

based on your findings here in this town, not the entire midwest. fair statement? >> i can't speak about the town. based on the findings in the town called ellis okay, that answers my question. based on that then in one paragraph in the article in the local paper, it quotes that the book gives an accurate review of all the heartland is committing suicide by sending the best and brightest the way and neglecting its less gifted to our condemned to blue-collar jobs with stagnant wages or to poverty. i think that is overly critical of this area. >> you are probably right. if you take just that one-- >> i appreciate that. that is what i am doing, i am

just taking bits and pieces. >> i wouldn't disagree with you. why don't you and i take it outside. [laughter] your absolutely-- can i respond in a way that maybe catches what we are trying to get that there? one of the difficulties in doing this, again you are trying to get the conversation going about the issue. here's what i think about ellis. ellis is a wonderful place. it is also a relatively healthy place. the young lady, sarah who wrote from colby hands is, if we had done the research in colby hands is it would be much more bleak but they are both on this continuum as i was talking about earlier on so when you go from the health this small town to the one that is finished, and i

think we use the research in ellison to speak to this and the passage you quote speak to that wider issue, where we do believe that in the current socioeconomic contest, where opportunities have shrunk, where there just isn't a safety net for those who aren't going off to college, there is a the fae tibbles hdnet. think about when you were young and what opportunities there were for you when you graduated high school. they are very, very different now and they require different skills and they require that people be prepared for them, so our point was that if you are going to disproportionately allocate your resources, your precious resources in a town towards the kids were going to go and not come back, then

basically you were literally taking your money in chucking it away because that is a akin to what you are doing, and we don't believe that you shouldn't help people achieve. you should, but you also need to prepare the ones you are staying and the ones who are most likely to come back for the opportunities that are there. and in that context you are absolutely right. i would take the same as you did and be much less polite about it probably, but that is the wider context again of using the case study here to speak to the wider issue. look, ellis is healthy but warner too bad things happen and that process we talk about, it is slow. it is like a thread in your sweater, it unravels a bit by bit by bit by bit and you have

to address that or else you are in trouble. >> i have one other comment of a critical nature. it covers, in the paper it covers a quote from richard brodsky in the book which states the best kids go well the ones with the biggest problems day and then we have to deal with their kids in the school in the next generation. thy hope that very few people agree with that statement. enough said. i don't agree with that and hopefully no one else does. >> can i address that? >> yeah. >> i think you are right. i think very few people did agree with that. he did say it and began i think it is an extreme point of view. but it is an extreme point of view that speaks to a deeper truth in some ways that there are people who hold that view and again, one of the reasons

for including it, we thought about it. we thought long and hard. we thought it is pretty harsh and a lot of people don't feel that way and as a matter of fact a lot of people don't feel that way. but here is a person who is positioned at the school, is a pivotal position and went on the record to say that with, and that was the reason we included it and again, to speak to this wider thing that you are right, if you are absolutely right most people would not agree with that. >> in other words it is part of the conversation. >> it is part of a conversation. >> one more common. >> you are on a roll, keep going. >> it is not addressed to you. as evidenced by this fine library our aquatics center, our school system, our hospital, are res tom, our churches parks and trails are ambulance service and

fire department etc. etc. etc. we are not a dying town. in fact that all feel we are even six. thank you. >> amen to that. [applause] just to reiterate,-- just to reiterate i was in colby, kansas this summer. we might have a little sniffle, but they have pneumonia. >> exactly. >> it is really sad and i think things have happened here that have had to make us look inward, the potential closing of rockwell. you can't just say well it won't make any difference. it will. it is part of the unraveling. >> right and again, let me just share a little further tidbit about colby and i feel like i am

harsh on called the kansas but it is, it is so much further down that line and this woman sarah, she shared with us i think while she was doing her part she went back to colby and it was christmas of 2007. she stood in main st. colby on a saturday afternoon for three hours and she met one person in three hours. she said the bank had piped christmas music coming out on the loudspeaker and it was at going off of this emptied town and she said it was the erie is the thing she ever saw. again it was a very poignant way of giving you a window onto what can happen when you don't think about what the future can hold that if you don't take action. that is what we are trying to sort of get started here.

>> i have got a question. on the research that you have done was basically on the group that graduated in the late '80s and early '90s and that is when the computer age was just coming about. when you were in high school you did a little bit on it but not a whole lot. really the big wide web and the social networking, around you. do you see that changing things and how would you see that changing things for younger people now making that decision to stay or go? does the internet and does connections make a difference? beith i think it does. i think it does for several reasons. part of what we are probably talking about is a period effect said the young people we spoke with were sort of as you have correctly identified sort of and that period as technology is expanding but before it became with something that every household has to have so we all

have dial-up, not broadband now and we have facebook and twitter and all that kind of stuff. so it has been a. i stay away from facebook, but i think it is different for several reasons. i think these young people coming of age now should be more prepared. i still think there is work to be done so it is not like the completely lack the skills they need. some of these guys we spoke with did because they just weren't available so they found themselves in the workplace that needed that kind of stuff and said i don't do any of that. that is part of the answer. the other part of the answer is, i think building a digital infrastructure also allows you to do two things. it makes you more