Caleb Pollard, the executive director of Valley County Economic Development in Ord, wrote a post on his Ord Sunshine Pumpers blog last week about a fascinating Newsweek interview with Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas, the authors of the new book “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America.” It’s taken me a week to get around to it, but it’s well worth your time.

Carr and Kefalas, a husband-and-wife team, spent six months in a 2,000-person town in northeastern Iowa that they give the pseudonym “Ellis,” talking to just about everybody during that time.

What’s interesting about their findings — from what I could gather from the interview — is that they’re at odds with the recent conventional wisdom about reversing the rural brain drain. In recent years, many rural thinkers, planners and economic developers have latched onto sociologist Richard Florida’s concept of the “creative class,” and the idea that those (mostly young) tech experts, artists and musicians correlate strongly with growing economic development.

Many of those developers have pushed small towns to try to increase their “cool” quotient to attract the creative class — reinventing themselves as smaller, off-the-beaten-path versions of the creative class’s favorite urban areas.

Kefalas and Carr advocate a different way. In the interview, Kefalas says she agrees with Florida about the importance of the creative class, but says that trying to create a community of young, creative people isn’t necessarily the best place for rural towns to spend their resources. Carr puts it simply: If your goal is to create a “cool” vibe, it will fail, because there will always be cooler cities than yours.

So what to do instead? Just about everyone I’ve spoken to in rural development agrees that drawing and keeping young adults is one of the most critical aspects of keeping small towns alive and kicking. But Carr and Kefalas seem to propose that rural areas use their natural assets — their natural beauty, low cost of living, more relaxed pace, their ruralness — to attract young people. Instead of mimicking urban living, they suggest, rural areas should strive to sell themselves as the opposite of the urban life.

They also say towns should focus on students other than the cream of the local high school’s crop, working with community colleges rather than directing their energies strictly toward bringing in “the best and the brightest.”

So what do you think? What’s the best way for towns to attract and keep the people who will keep towns alive? How about combining Florida’s and Kefalas and Carr’s methods? What have you seen that’s worked?