It's not just a danger of living rurally. Some of the largest cities in my country have been crushed by jobs leaving and either going to London for centralisation or to India/etc for costs, never to return in any case. Your theory only works if you consider anything that isn't a mega-centralised hub city to be 'rural'. And again, it's just theory. Real life has not borne out the concept on a meaningful scale. In most cases it goes in the opposite direction. Major industry leaves a location? Bingo bango bongo get in the unemployment line son, you're in for some generational poverty. The only people who benefit from a major business shutting down are people in megacities to where the job will centralize, or people in 3rd World countries to whom more opportunities will be available as a result of the move to a cheaper location. The original employees in the original city rarely ever recover fully without having to uproot their lives to follow the work, which very few people can manage.