Talk:Rust Belt

Lead sentence
No,, the "Rust Belt" is not a well-established geographical region such as Appalachia or New England. The current lead sentence is about useless: The Rust Belt is a region of the United States that has been experiencing industrial decline starting around 1980 as it even fails to define the subject - which region, where? There are certainly many more regions experiencing industrial decline across the US, but they aren't part of the "Rust Belt". This article could as well be called Economic decline in the northeastern United States – it's mostly about deindustrialization and depopulation of that area, not about physical geography. The #Geography section sums it well: Since the term "Rust Belt" is used to refer to a set of economic and social conditions rather than to an overall geographical region of the United States, the Rust Belt has no precise boundaries. The extent to which a community may have been described as a "Rust Belt city" depends on how great a role industrial manufacturing played in its local economy. I strongly feel that this article falls more under the WP:WORDISSUBJECT category than under the common format of geographic articles. No such user (talk) 09:32, 4 November 2020 (UTC)


 * No,, I did not say that the Rust Belt is a well-established geographical region. The current lead sentence is about useless: "informal term"? Formality has absolutely no relation to anything here. "the region"? Using the definite article presumes familiarity with the concept.
 * You want the first sentence to more precisely say where this region is? That is reasonable. So add it. For example: The Rust Belt is a region of the northeastern United States that has been experiencing industrial decline starting around 1980. But writing "X is a term for Y" is just poor. If X is a term for Y, then X is Y. The only reason to write "X is a term for Y" is if you are discussing the term itself, and not the concept Y. This might apply, for example, to the "Stroke Belt", which is a term you certainly wouldn't be able to use without clarifying that this is a term used in public health to refer to a southern region of the US. Rust Belt is widely used and widely understood, and the article is not about the term "Rust Belt" but the region known as the Rust Belt. Cinagroni (talk) 08:44, 5 November 2020 (UTC)


 * Fair enough, but I do not see a substantial difference between Rust Belt and Bible Belt (or Stroke Belt for that matter, or Tornado Alley, all of those using variations of WP:REFERS, rightly or wrongly). Yes, "Rust Belt" is somewhat more established and better-known term than those, but just how much is open to debate. Rust Belt is widely used and widely understood – in the US perhaps, but worldwide I'm not so sure. I'm currently browsing through British and Irish news sites, and the belt is frequently written about in the election context, and many of them do introduce the term in a single sentence (but continue to use it throughout) (Independent); yet others use it from the outset assuming readers' familiarity (BBC). I'm willing to concede this one, I suppose. No such user (talk) 14:08, 5 November 2020 (UTC)


 * From a British perspective I can tell you that the Rust Belt is a term that would be reasonably familiar here. As you rightly say, the BBC uses it without considering that it needs explaining. For comparison between those terms, ngrams are useful and show that Rust Belt and Bible Belt occur with similar frequency (though Bible Belt is the older term), Tornado Alley occurs about a quarter as often, and Stroke Alley a large factor less often.
 * Meanwhile, I do not think Bible Belt or Tornado Alley should start the way they do either. I edited Tornado Alley. One suspects that a single editor might have been at work in several of these articles and this was their favoured formulation but I think that unless the article is about the words themselves, it's not correct to use the "is a term that refers to" type of formulation, and none of these articles are about the words themselves. Cinagroni (talk) 19:20, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

Population update
Could anyone please replace the 2018 estimates with fresh 2020 census numbers? They often tend to be higher than estimates. Thanks in advance! Ain92 (talk) 11:28, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Map
I would like to raise two issues about the map at the beginning of the article:

1) The source for the 1954 data is simply not specified 2) As this page makes clear, manufacturing decline went into a freefall in the 2000s, and the map stops at 2002

Could somebody please fix that? Esszet (talk) 15:26, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

new jersey?
shouldn't new jersey be considered rust belt the article has trenton listed there and then there's newark and jersey city which were also major factory cities so I'm confused? 142.122.125.164 (talk) 19:11, 16 December 2023 (UTC)