> Density/proximity are far better incubators for innovation than people being bored and isolated on farms.

That might be the case for you.

I do all my best programming when I'm driving a tractor. When I stop, I just need to type it all in.

Or, driving my car, for that matter. I just need to get from here to way over there, it's maybe 90 miles, something like a two and a half hour drive, during which time no-one can phone me, no-one can come up and hand me something that's Clearly My Problem Because It Has An Electrical Connector, no-one can ask me what's wrong with the printer in the facilities office, and I can just sit and quietly think. I don't even have to put up with braying adverts on the local radio station.

Independently-owned farms aren't slave factories. Sometimes you'll be doing consecutive months of 13hrs/day labour, sometimes you'll have 75% of the day free, every day, for a few weeks. Guess what those with a low budget and an engineer's mind tend to get up to in their free time.

"Independently-owned farms" are the exception, these days, not the people. Every single one I've ever seen has at least one guy on there that performs miracles with PVC pipe, a TIG welder and spare bits of iron.

Freedom as in randomness that was allowed and available in those settings and in those times. I grew up on a farm in the 70's. Observed how mills work. I could simulate and notice a gear error in a complex machine drawing in my engineering class. The teacher had to abandon the class to think it over.

Also, constraints, survival struggle, a bit of wilderness (lack of regulatory reach), forced alertness, exposure to vast variety in the context - they are all ingredients or a green field for innovation. It's like a camping or trekking adventure every day.

The song goes that way because Paris is attractive to young men compared to the American farms. But being attractive may not mean good. Candy is attractive too, to children. And that hard work in farms doesn't necessarily mean being less happier than your modern life, as happiness is more dependent on expectations than what you have. Paris experience raised expectations for army folks.

Sometimes, I think that the modern education setup (schools and colleges) is a recruiting and training mechanism. Bright kids from all over the country side are filtered and sucked away to work in the modern factories. Same as army recruitment camps that go to rural side, conduct running competitions and take away all the strong youth from villages.

Ofcourse, they sell education as knowledge or refinement as a person. But the real goal is to create a workforce.

What problems are left for starting a business? I see only solutions searching for problems. Maybe come up with a competing solution to an already solved problem?

As a technology startup your root goal would be an exit. So you would work on problem which is in the roadmap for a big company and your wish is, they are not agile enough to build it themselves quickly and would buy out your stuff to beat their competition. So it's kind of contract work, with contract coming after the work is done.