Rural Development is viewed as a process of improving the quality of life of rural residents. Quality of life has a number of aspects, but the economic is viewed as a particularly strategic one for promoting overall life quality. The economic is defined as providing jobs for rural residents. Two techniques for doing this, inducing firms to locate in rural areas and rural residents' commuting to jobs in urban centers, contain economic disadvantages. An alternative is to have rural residents work at home and send the effort of their work to firms in urban centers via electronic communications systems. This alternative depends on the distinction between jobs and firms. It also depends on being able to view many jobs as essentially consisting of information processing. The input to the output from the rural worker flows over a national network termed the "total electronic information system." (Author)