Why is the rural Midwest "easier" to live in than the rural/suburban South?

[pbrower2a]

Many rural counties of Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and northern Maine are awful. Although the urban areas of California are good, the Central Valley except in the I-80 corridor is a poor place to get a start.

Rural areas have lower costs of living. They also have more farm laborers whose kids generally do badly in school, especially if migrant. Farm families do about as well as their urban counterparts.  But remember -- farm and ranch families are generally middle-class. I figure that farm families are able to control what their kids get access to.

Southern cities, with few exceptions, are awful places in which to live. They get large numbers of people leaving rural Southern towns and collect people who came in with no advantages. Texas and Florida (if you call them Southern) don't do so badly. But those cities  (like Dallas, Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Miami, and Tampa-St. Pete) do OK. Georgia does have Atlanta, which apparently does OK. They can attract people from the Midwest.      

The rural South has little to attract anyone from elsewhere. It is a cultural void; it has few recreational activities.  
  

[pbrower2a]

Conventional wisdom would suggest

I'm sorry, but what conventional wisdom? Urban and suburban convictions of their own surpreme splendidness?

A lot of rural places have a surplus of jobs compared to their population due to natural resources. Housing and living costs are a lot cheaper so you get a lot further on a smaller income than you would in a big city. A family in the rural Midwest can live a comfortable middle-class life style on the same income that would leave a family in New York barely scrapping by. 

I recall a study that suggested that $100k in NYC would buy roughly the same lifestyle that $38k would in a small city in the South. If you're a service worker making not much over minimum wage, you'll stretch your dollars much further outside the major metros.

If one actually paid rent to live in NYC and worked for the minimum wage, one would literally starve to death unless one did dumpster-diving.

As a rule, a high cost of living correlates with economic opportunities. The opportunities in New York City are far more varied than those in the Rural South. New York City is a tough place to live if one is not from there and is not at the top of his game.

On the other side -- what is so easy about making a living as a farm laborer? 

 

[pbrower2a]

Could it be differences in the cultures of more cosmopolitan Midwest and the more provincial South?