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Why is it, do you think, that poverty in cities is often so much more squalid and unpleasant than the same thing in rural areas? I suppose in part because in cities it is so concentrated.

Poverty in the country isn't very pretty, but easier to overlook if the countryside is beautiful. How many cities can be said to be "beautiful", and equal to even the sight of looking across a small valley with a stream at the bottom, and the hills covered in autumn colors? Not many, I would suggest.

Tolkien rightly lamented the encroachment of modernity getting nearer to his beloved countryside, which was mostly agricultural, with small towns thrown in. Did the earlier hunter-gatherers lament the clearing of their endless forests for the tidy farms? Probably, but that was the price of developing more "carrying capacity" that freed more people from spending all their waking hours searching for food, allowing for the surplus energy to be spent on arts, crafts, and industry.

While I love the countryside, and it's still out there, only further away, I know industrialization has been the greatest blessing for the animal I love best, the horse. Prior to the internal combustion engine, the life of most horses was "nasty, brutal, and short", to one extent or another. Horses were organic mobile power sources, and even though expensive, had to be "used", and "used up". And that was in civilian life. Outside of the parade ground, the life of the horse was harder in the military, especially in wartime.

I'm glad that those cars, nasty diesel trucks, and military vehicles have allowed us to "downgrade" the horse to the status of a pet. After being man's chief source of military and farming muscle for 5000 years, it's a well-earned rest. So sometimes that smoke-belching technology brings good with it, too.

"Poverty in the country isn't very pretty, but easier to overlook if the countryside is beautiful"

True, often you see poor households in the country that are the very picture of squalor, trash is piled high everywhere you look, wrecked vehicles all over, the residents unbathed probably.

OTOH, you more often see equally poor households in the country where everything is tidy and picked up, the folk don't have much, but they manage to make a life that is not too terrible.

In post #9, I seem to be thinking along similar lines to you.

Didn't know you were a horseman. I grew up around them, as I grew up in a very rural area, of which they were a part. 'Course I'm allergic to the things. How do you feel about racing?

I love diesel trucks (and diesel engines in general) and drive a diesel pickup.