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Why They Flee Rhode Island, Economics vs. Culture

I recently read an article that informed me of something I wasn't too surprised to learn:

Rhode Island losing population more than any other state in the country.

The article blamed this on economics, but I was a little put off to see that they weren't talking about a bigger cultural problem in the state.

Ever since I was a kid, I've heard the master plans of my friends all include the following item:

"Move."

The fact is that a lot of people who are born here do not want to stay here.

Why?

Well, for one thing, we're very close to greener pastures.

You can be in Boston in less than an hour, New York in less than four hours, and a lot of other places in less than a day.

It's easy to say Rhode Island isn't as good as other places when those other places are so easy to get to.

We forget that there are places in this country that would make Rhode Island look like Las Vegas in terms of activity. We still have all-night breakfast places, we still had movie theaters with midnight showings, we still have a vibrant theater scene. We're not a desolate prairie town with tumbleweeds blowing through the town square.

And yet, that's how many people who live here seem to view the place.

Conversely, the fact that so many people plan on moving, in turn, creates more people who then feel the urge to move.

It's incredibly difficult to find a person to date or grow serious with in a state where nobody plans on staying for very long.

The amount of twenty-something to thirty-something professionals in this state is almost non-existent. What we're creating in Rhode Island is a state where people feel they can't build a future here, and that's not just economics. We could be the richest state in the country, but why would anyone stay in a place that their kids plan on fleeing as soon as they're eighteen?

We need to do something to change the culture in Rhode Island. Tax breaks may be enough to bring businesses here, but we also need to find a way to keep local teenagers with some entrepreneurial spirit eager to come back here when they're done with school. Considering we have so many colleges in Providence, it's a shock to me that we keep exporting all these students that we're educating. Why not do something to entice those grads to stick around?

Not many of my friends that went off to New York for college came back, and most of them didn't because they had already set up a life there, not just because it was New York. And yet, we have people setting up lives for themselves here and then uprooting themselves because everyone's telling them it's the only option.

We need to start instilling some pride in the children that are raised here. I'm not trying to sound provincial, but I don't think putting all the blame on the economy is going to help the economy get any better.

Fix the culture, and the economy will follow.

Otherwise, we may one day have a state that's financially appealing, but will that really make a difference in terms of the type of people we'll have residing in our state?

New York isn't financially viable for most people, and yet they don't have a population problem, because the feeling is that it's the place to be.

That's a distinction we need to try and attain.

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