For whatever reason, it was a Thing for a while this week to look at whether rural communities are “really” suffering, with a lot of statistics crunched to show that in average economic terms, they’re actually not doing that much worse than more urban areas. But as much as I hate it when people angrily declare that aggregate statistics don’t tell the whole story, this is a case where there are genuinely some subtleties, and Kevin Drum does a decent job with some of them, asking If Rural Communities Are Doing OK, Why Do They Feel Like They Aren’t?.

I’m not going to contribute much by way of statistical data, but as someone who grew up in small town in a rural area in central NY state (here’s a nice photo essay about the town), and who still visits there several times a year, I can at least add plural anecdotes to the story. And, like Kevin says, it’s complicated.

For example, there are a number of things that suggest economic improvement since I last lived there full-time in the 1980’s. The Italian restaurant that opened when I was a kid is still going strong (and making the best chicken fingers in the world, according to SteelyKid), and a number of other eateries have popped up and seem to be sticking around. The dilapidated hotel across the street from Aiello’s has been restored, and there are a couple other places on Main Street that weren’t there back in the day. There are even some chain fast-food places– Arby’s, Macdonald’s, and a surprisingly huge Dunkin’ Donuts. 1987 me would’ve been psyched about those.

Other bits of infrastructure have also improved. The state finally replaced the craptastic bridge across the river from Main Street with one that’s a whole lot more functional, and the facilities in the county park on the lake are vastly improved from the pit toilets they had when I was a kid. The schools are in good shape, physically, and they’ve weirdly turned into a field hockey powerhouse, winning multiple consecutive state titles.

At the same time, there are a lot of other signs that aren’t so positive. Two of the churches on Main Street aren’t churches any more, and the Catholic church I went to as a kid now shares a priest with another town some miles up the road. Where we used to have three weekend Masses within walking distance of our house, my parents now have to keep kind of a weird schedule to catch one on Sunday.

And some of the reasonably positive indicators that Drum cites are, in fact, masking a decline in quality. The cost of health care may not be increasing at a ridiculous rate, but what you get for it has changed for the worse. When I was a kid, there were two full-time GP’s in town, now there are zero. There’s a medical clinic run by a hospital consortium where you can see a physician’s assistant, but if you want somebody with an MD, you’ve got to drive a ways. In purely statistical terms, health care is still readily available and reasonably priced (by American standards), but the process of getting it is significantly worse than it used to be.

I’d also push back a little on the bang-for-buck argument in Drum’s post, particularly as regards computers. It’s absolutely true that a really cheap computer now is way more powerful than you could get at that price a decade ago, but the experience of using a bottom-of-the-line computer or phone to deal with sites and apps designed for top-of-the-line hardware is pretty miserable. And it’s also a lot more essential to life today than it was ten years back, when a computer would’ve been a relatively expendable expense.

So, the state of rural America is really a mixed bag, and depends a bit on what you care most about. If you want to get Chinese food in Whitney Point, NY, life has never been better. If you want to go to church or see a doctor, though, you might very well think that the world is going to shit.