Maastricht Treaty revisions needed?

[Jester]

OK, we split this one. The manufacturing takes it up to 18.8%, slightly more than 5 to 1.

I guess, yeah, 5 jobs lost for every one in the "base" economy. I was counting "other jobs" lost, but that's not the right number to count.

Really, do you think people move to or stay in a region because of government support? I'd suppose that it might influence some not to move away, but even that would probably marginal in an area where there are few other services for the indigent.

"Marginal" is exactly right. The question is the marginal effect - when do all the factors attracting people to the region attract one more person to live there, and when do all the detracting factors cause one more person to move out? Obviously not everyone in the region lives there exclusively for one reason. But government cash makes life more liveable, it injects money into the economy, it creates jobs. So more people live there, even if you can't pin down precisely who.

I suspect a number of reasons. First, logging is only one of the base occupations. And logging was hurt, not destroyed; the logging plant was hurt, but not shut down. So, there are a lot of reasons to stay, hope being one of them.

Also, if it's anything like the Okanagan in Canada, there are a lot of intangibles. It's a nice area. But yes, I'm not suggesting the area should be a ghost town. Only that, if people are desperately worried about keeping an uncompetitive business afloat so that they have jobs, it just naturally leads to the question as to whether there should be that many people there at all. Canada could run a manufacturing town on Baffin Island if we paid people enough to live there, and threw up super-high tariff walls - but what would be the point?

In the rational sense, the choice between staying while hoping that the old ways will return and leaving to face the uncertain unknown is quite simple. Emotionally, it is not. The question is not why so many Irish moved to the USA (and elsewhere) during the potato famine. The question is, why did so many stay.

In a word? Money. 1840 is pretty early in the history of mass migration. Moving to the new world was always something that a middling slice of the working population did, not the poorest of the poor subsistence farmers. To move, you had to have enough money to leave - to buy a trip, to feed yourself in the meantime. Even knowing your options in the world beyond your county was connected to being a certain class of worker. Those who were relatively richer had better connections in the new world (those who were able to leave even earlier), and could make a better start of it. The rest stayed, and a lot of them starved.

-Jester