The day after Trump got elected, I went to a panel discussion at Harvard about race in America, where one of the panelists was William Julius Wilson. He was unforgettable.
Some details that stick out to me now: he criticized the BLM activists who pushed Bernie Sanders away from a race-neutral economic message; he criticized social scientists who refused to include data on poor whites alongside poor minorities.
But the most memorable moment was his speech. He mentioned his support for a jobs program in Chicago, and rather than asking the audience to take it on faith, he asked the other panelists if he could have ten minutes to present his case. They gladly agreed. He then walked up to the podium with a binder in hand (I don't know where he got it), and his argument was just overwhelmingly forceful -- not because the conclusions sounded nice, but because his evidence was clearly solid, the result of decades of serious research.
I wish more of my fellow academics would take a page from Prof. Wilson's book and follow the evidence, rather than confabulating arguments to fit trendy conclusions.
The thing that sprung from the page regarding the Gay controversy, for me at least, was not plagiarism, which is just lazy bullshit.
It's that the *methodology* of increasingly wide swathes of the social sciences boil down to "put data into a series of blenders until I get the colors of paint I need to craft the picture I decided I want before I ever started this 'research'."
It's ridiculous, and means that the entire field is untrustworthy in a way which goes far beyond the discussion that Kenny and I were having the other day about "all research can't be trusted until heavily replicated."
I think this is very wrong about Gay. Her most significant publications were written 15-25 years ago, when the sophistication of empirical and quantitative social science was much less. Today, the approaches she used then would not be considered appropriate and assuming that today's papers have those problems would be a mistake.
It's not about citations at all, David R.'s comment was about the methodology in Gay's work.
Over the past two decades, empirical social science has become more sophisticated in using methods like Difference-in-Difference and more sophisticated statistical models to avoid problems like the joint causation one that is worrying in Gay's work on Black representatives. Today, a graduate student investigating that issue would be more likely to look for a natural experiment, adopt a more sophisticated identification strategy, use fancier statistical tools, and handle confounding issues better. In part this is because the software available is radically different than in 1998, making it easier to adopt these methods, but also because it takes time for fields to adopt new methods.
1. It is a success of science when fancy new tools can be packaged up in ways that people who don't understand their details can use.
2. I don't think there's any evidence for the claims you're making, and one should probably not claim malfeasance and malpractice by people you don't know when you have no evidence at all.
She just seems to be bad at her job. Tat doesn’t impinge the field but the hiring and promotion structure at Harvard.
P.S.
That being said. Yes, I think that as a general rule social science quantitative research is overhyped and often ridiculously surface level from a historians standpoint. On the other hand I’m sure our research seems way too niche/based on too little data. The conclusion is that you need both.
You guys at least have the excuse that there're gaping holes in our data for any era more than 400 years ago and all the methods we have of trying to estimate regional populations, population movements, volumes of trade, circulating coinage, agricultural productivity, mining output, forestry clearance, more sophisticated economic activity, free/slave/serf proportions, urban populations, come up with wildly different results that we can only eyeball and gut-check our way to reconciling.
And even then, there are people ("multi-cultural medieval Britain" lady for example) who refuse to gut-check the results of their intentionally shitty, slanted methods.
The social sciences seem to have way too many of the latter type of folks, almost as if to make up for the better data available to them.
I meant that he would potentially get an earful for disparaging the social sciences. (For the last time, THP, I don't mean historians when I slag off on soft sciences. You guys are good.)
You are right. They are far more focused on their social agenda than they are on the science. The rigor and curiosity of science needs to be prioritized.
"Trump’s core base sort of resembles a white version of the people who loved Marion Barry here in DC." My brain went "aha!" after reading this. A very useful comparison that helps me think more critically about both situations.
And this is also a large part of why his base seems to get more attached to him when he says outlandish things and provokes the expected reaction. It's the same way that when Louis Farrakhan goes off about "satanic Jews" and so on it serves as proof to his base that he definitely isn't working for honky.
Another good example would be Sharp James, the long time mayor of Newark that Corey Booker eventually beat. There's a great documentary about that race called Street Fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6EkpsYtrsE
The leftie twitter commentary often demonstrates zero actual experience of being around poor people and troubled areas.
And I admit, I'm doing it to my kids! I was able to escape all that unpleasantness and now I'm raising my kids in a safe stereotypical upper-income suburb. Where it's hard NOT to give them an impression of the lower classes that's either too naive or too paranoid. Tricky stuff.
While it was hardly a consideration when we decided to move here, that our home is in an urban, middle-class black neighborhood and our child will be attending a diverse urban public school should strike a middle path that brings a lot of these problems into her awareness over time without drowning her in them.
That's one thing I like about being in a lottery-based charter. We get diversity, BOTH racial and socioeconomic, but the parents are all engaged and care (since they bothered with the lottery)
We could afford to live in the "best" school district but as long as the charter seems to be doing ok I'm a bit loathe to do that.
Yea, we could liquidate our real estate assets, sell our current home, and just barely squeak the move into an $800k small, beat-up 4 bedroom in the best two districts by accepting a mortgage payment 2.5X as large as our current one with half down.
Or we can stay where we are, put on a nice addition in cash, accept some of the challenges of city life and still have our kids in a good school, while keeping our investments and cash flow and life plan intact.
And that's where the pro-charter argument fails: selection bias exists in just the way you describe, and even parents whose kids are in charter schools without having to enter a lottery may be asked to leave of they're not sufficiently involved.
That is _not_ what I mean by selection of involvement.
Kids aren't asked to leave because the parents aren't "sufficiently involved"
I mean that the act of applying for a lottery indicates a level of parental involvement.
I guess parents technically have to fill out a survey once a year saying they intend to return. That's... a pretty low bar. I wouldn't call that "being asked to leave"
Now it _might_ be fair to say "charters only look good" because they select for involved parents. That's why the lottery studies looked at students who applied but did not make it vs. students who applied and did make it. So you've already filtered for involved parents, and _then_ you look at the outcomes. So yes, they've taken selection effect into account.
I'm applying this to non-lottery schools, or ones where neighborhood families have first priority. Those schools can and do pressure the parents who can't keep up to leave. These tend to be very low-functioning parents whose undersocialized / traumatized children end up in the public schools, with predictable results for school performance.
Once you don't have a lottery, of course selection effects dominate.
I'm specifically defending lottery-based charters, which are the exact ones Matt says seem to be good based on studies that only check lottery charters.
The us really lacks in socioeconomically diverse communities. That’s not great, for many reasons. One good way to overcome this is if you can get your kids to one of those rare (and consistently threatened) exam schools like Stuy in New York. Exam schools are some of the best schools in the country, but since they take kids based on talent (real talent not bs “holistic” admission) they’re truly diverse (rather than skin-deep “dei”) typically with large representation to working class and 1st gen kids.
The problem of course is that there too few of these schools (and also- if done correctly - most kids won’t be able to get in!) so this won’t be an option in most cases unfortunately.
This is kind of what charters do since they admit by lottery. They select on parental involvement rather than academic ability, but that's _also_ a good factor.
I mean, it's kind of a built-in feature of market capitalism, right?
If an area is considered desirable to live in, for any reason (low crime, good schools, proximity to well-paying jobs), the demand for housing in that area will be high. High demand = high housing prices = only rich people can afford to live there. Conversely, if an area is undesirable (e.g., high crime rates), everyone who can afford to move away will do so, and the only people left there will be those who can't afford to live elsewhere, i.e., poor people.
I really don't know how to change this. Yes, we absolutely should build more housing so that fewer people are priced out of desirable areas. But on some level, "rich people live in rich people areas" is a truism, like duh, that's what being rich *means*. You can tweak this on the margins by doing things like rent control, but that creates a new class of economic winners and losers.
This is why the concept of gentrification is so frustrating. We all know that rich people keep the poor people out of their neighborhoods. But poor people also keep the rich people out of their neighborhoods by fighting against gentrification. We’ve all given up on the idea that a poor person could actually live next to a rich person.
If you make it so that public safety and sanitation conditions in poorer neighborhoods don't deteriorate, you make it easier at the margins for richer people who wish to cheap out on housing to live there, and (more normally) for richer neighborhoods to be close by instead of far away. And also for your own talented sons and daughters to come back home and build a decent life.
And, more importantly, you make it so that going to school with "those people" isn't an automatic sentence for kids from neighboring, wealthier areas to be subjected to violence and fail to learn anything, so you get less segregated schools.
Let’s hope Parker proves to be better at governing than Adams. But so far so good, IMO. Good staff picks for the most part aside from some machine pandering where the deputy will be the real boss.
"that conditions in poor neighborhoods don't deteriorate too much" = carceral urbanism go brrrrrr
I totally agree with you in principle, just, keeping conditions from deteriorating is difficult and complicated. Leaving aside the "ACAB/law enforcement is EviL and RaCiSt" crowd, there are genuine tradeoffs here. Say that research shows that stop-and-frisk significantly reduces gun violence but it also hurts innocent young Black men who get unfairly stopped over and over due to profiling; what should you do then? Is stop-and-frisk a net good or bad? And that's just one example.
"The us really lacks in socioeconomically diverse communities."
I'd be interested to understand how accurate this is. I live in what I think of as a pretty diverse community with incomes spread between what I'd guess to be from 15% to 99% of the income range all within a couple of miles. Their kids attending mostly the same schools.
If you’re talking about “a couple miles” that sounds like a larger radius than I was imagining THPacis meaning by the word “community”. I would guess that larger community is made up of a bunch of smaller communities, each much more homogenous.
I know I harp on this endlessly but I like my neighborhood all the more knowing how rare it is to have a place this racially *and* socioeconomically diverse. Half black, quarter white, tenth Asian, probably 20-odd families in the top 5% of the national income distribution like us, a few hundred further professional-class folks, a majority of middle-class homeowners and a bunch of working class renters.
I grew up in the "wealthy" school district in Austin and had a friend who got reduced lunch. We weren't 99%, but were ... 95%? and he was ... 25%(I'm just guessing based on the reduced lunch, I don't know - I know he was noticeably poorer)
Dead on. There are some diverse neighborhoods in some cities but even in these places, the public schools are often nearly all people of color. My own view, based largely on my personal experience, is that racism (and the effects thereof) will continue, as it has for centuries, unless and until all kids attend diverse schools. Living in the same area helps but many essential noneducational after-school activities, such as sports, clubs, theater, music, etc., will reflect the composition of the schools kids attend. Churches, leisure activities and many other aspects of daily life frequently are also segregated -- defacto but with the same result.
Reducing residential segregation remains very important, but does not, by itself, change enough ignorance and racism over generations. Kids are not racist until they are taught or shown how to be so.
This should fairly easy to calculate. Just look at the SES diversity in census block group’s associated with school boundaries. You could do the whole country in less than an hour.
Except in some places the richer segment doesn’t send their kids to the local school. It’s easy to live and close proximity to other people without knowing almost anything about them.
Yep this is the case in my neighborhood. Census tract is extremely diverse; the middle/upper-class white parents send their kids to the Catholic school across the street from the public one.
I was just commenting about my daughter's private school -- I feel like in her world, our family is sort of at the median of income levels.
Which is *fucking insane*. Our family is in the top 1-2% nationally, and probably the top 5% for our high-COL area. When I went to a schmancy private high school, our students definitely oversampled the top range of the income distribution, but I feel like there were a solid number of people who came from ordinary working class families, due to a combination of financial aid and the fact that education wasn't so ridiculously expensive back then. But my daughter I feel like there's exactly one kid in her class who isn't from the top 10% by income (that being the child of someone who works at the school and presumably gets a very heavy discount to tuition by virtue of that).
This kind of segregation into economic class can't be healthy. But I'm like Miles here -- I'm definitely part of the problem, but can't seem to find a way to thread the needle, where you want your kid to have some exposure to stuff from poorer areas without totally giving up the higher-income advantages.
For upper-income kids, the specific school (or college) they attend matters a lot less than the upper-income parents think they do. (Within some constraints, not talking the lowest-performing schools.) Also, the "higher-income advantages" don't disappear if a child goes to a regular, average public school. Heck, the money we save by sending our kids to average public schools may improve the kind of financial help we can give them in adulthood!
This is a tough one. I send/ sent my white kids to urban schools. They have definitely been targeted for their race, but their schools are about 20% white. I am not sure that I would send them to schools that were below 8 or 10% white because they would be a target. I imagine the same is true of non-white students in mostly white environments.
When they were younger, they did have some perhaps racist ideas based on the behavior of kids in their school (e.g. who was likely to yell and swear at teachers), but understood the context of that by middle school.
There are more disruptions in their school than in the suburbs, but the parents are way less annoying, and they don't have the same achievement stress. They also have a much more nuanced view of things than many of their suburban peers - e.g. they have friends who have been in and out of homelessness whose families work hard. They are also much less afraid of going about in the world - my oldest two are in college in Chicago. They do look down their noses and laugh at the many people who are afraid to come to our city in broad daylight since they have been traversing the city by bus, bike, and foot since middle school. I sometimes worry that others' laughable fears have made them too blase about real dangers of crime.
One of the reasons we've decided to stay in the city now that we have our kid in a decent school is that Philadelphia suburban parents in the "best" districts are incredibly illiberal on most identity issues and nearly as status-conscious as the parents of kids in NYC elite private schools.
The city, more diverse both racially and in terms of views and class, is a healthier environment for us and her school is still excellent.
City schools can be a good option if you live in the right neighborhood. Oftentimes individual urban elementary schools are not very diverse because of neighborhood-level segregation, but there are also often exceptions. And once you get to high school, you can usually go the magnet route. Middle school can be fraught though, depending on how the schools in one's city are organized.
In my view the ideal demographic breakdown for a school's student body is (1) No one race has more than 40% of the population, (2) Nearly all kids' families are between let's say the 35th and 85th percentiles of the income distribution. It's hard to find schools like that in suburbs, particularly in places that have a million small gerrymandered school district boundaries - although paradoxically, you *can* find schools that meet those criteria in Northern NJ and no state has more small school districts than NJ.
Ehh, the historically "best" two districts are very white and very liberal. And in any case, avoiding the politics problem still doesn't avoid the "status-seeking insanity" problem.
Is it really racist though if they are consistently observing certain racial groups (and primarily only those groups) engaging in that disruptive behavior?
I get stereotyping from a few isolated incidents is bad, but so is asking them not to believe their “lying eyes.” How have you guided them to think about it differently?
Anecdote, but one of my best friends became a public school teacher last year. Despite coming from an incredibly wealthy, educated background, her experience convinced her that it’s more important to get the underperforming kids up to average than to get the gifted kids to reach their full potential.
At the same time, she’s applied to become a permanent teacher in an overwhelmingly white district, because she says the stereotype is true. The black kids are unmanageable without two teachers in the room. The white kids are better, and the Asian kids are obedient to the point that it’s creepy.
Myself and my siblings moved into an area that was predominantly Latino when I was 9, and we are white. We were absolutely bullied specifically because of our race. As many stand-up comedians have noted, when you grow up in that kind of environment, you learn pretty quickly that if someone says, "hey white boy!" in a crowded room, you're probably being addressed, or if you overhear the word "guero" within earshot you're probably being talked about. I know a lot of white kids who harbor feelings of animosity towards Hispanic people and will cite these situations as their canon events.
It's interesting how that breaks down differently across kids, though, and I'm guessing it's mostly due to parents. When we were kids and got bullied, my dad was always crystal clear to put the blame on the individual and not anywhere else. My dad spanked me a number of times I could count on two hands (and this was the 80s/90s, so, not a ton by the measure of the day) but one thing he was unequivocal about was that if he ever found out we were being racist or prejudiced, he'd get the belt out like his dad did.
My siblings and I all have lots of Latino friends. I've never once heard anyone in my family disparage Latino people as a whole. I speak Spanish, and I married into a Mexican-American family. My kids are half Latino.
a confession I would not make under my real name: I am white, but I do have some bias against poor white people from the way they treated me when I was growing up. More of a classist than a racist, basically.
It's why Trump gets under my skin, even though I know those deplorables love that he's able to irritate me. A vicious circle. But man, my dark heart sometimes does just want to see them lose, to show them I was right and they were wrong.
I also feel this sometimes about rednecks. I grew up around a fair number of poor southern whites, and while I love some things about the culture, I detest other parts of the culture. There is a part of those people that love ignorance, they wallow in it like pigs and it gives them life.
I kind of feel the same way about upper-middle class white progressives! After spending the first half of my childhood peacefully growing up with rednecks and poor black people, experiencing the blatant classism of upper-middle class Democrats was quite shocking.
The grossest thing was how often they would use accusations of racism and sexism against poor people while presenting much more bigoted opinions that were apparently acceptable because they knew the right language to use.
I share this frustration as well. It's a counter balance to my dislike of the worst parts of redneck culture. However, it remains true that I fear a poor and uneducated mob much more than I do a well educated and moderately salaried mob. The more desperate the populism the more violent the revolution.
I think a lot of Democrats feel this way. And these feelings come across loud and clear. The question for the educated is how to rise above these feelings.
Matt talks about doing real things that work, being pragmatic. The real win here isn’t rubbing a loss in their face but figuring out a positive relationship more like Obama had (to some degree).
I am trying to follow this advice in my own politics. I have been outspoken against the DEI & woke view of the world. I still feel this way. But as I start to see shifts towards anti-wokeness winning some battles and can see us moving forward I wonder where some of it can be embraced. It isn’t that it’s 100% wrong on everything. Maybe there are olive branches that can be extended. How do we salvage the legitimate concerns and incorporate them into where we go next? We need more leaders who can embrace this kind of thinking.
I grew up in a strict, no tolerance for bigotry household. Funny thing, the only 2 groups of people we were allowed to make fun of: un-educated southern white people and French Canadians.
I'm afraid the reasons for this from my father are lost to time. He and my mother were born in Canada but left for the U.S. in the mid '60's. And though I was born in Canada.... and I get all the milage I can from this fact.... I was quite young when we left Canada. And my dad passed away in 2020 at the ripe old age of 90.
I'm just speculating here, but I think, at least historically, there was tension between French Canadians and English Canadians. Perhaps some older Canadians can speak to this as I am just guessing.
I do remember a joke my father used to tell from time to time, which I thought was quite funny but involved French speakers. But I will keep it to myself as I was never good at telling jokes.
Yes. I grew up in a poor rural community and was middle class (i.e. college educated parents, household income of 60K-80K in the 90s) and better off financially than most of my peers. To the poor white kids I was "rich", to the black and latino kids I was "white." White was better.
"Curated diversity" is taking quite a beating in these comments, so I'll be contrarian and speak up in its favor. I think the point of "curated diversity" is that, when you're surrounded by people who are of diverse races but who are similar to you in other respects - education level, social class, political views - it destroys accusations of racism qua racism. It distinguishes between "I hate XYZ race/nationality" (clearly bad, racist) vs. "I tend to dislike XYZ race/nationality people, because they tend to hold views and/or have habits that I hate" (possibly still bad and problematic, but much more understandable than hating someone simply because of their skin color).
Appreciate the candor. I think this is an unfortunately common experience, which people are (understandably!) pretty reluctant to talk about in Polite Society for fear of being lumped in with capital-R Racists. Lots of "irrational" fears have their genesis in negative childhood experiences. Like I spent decades being deadly afraid of dogs due to one bad experience at 5. It's the mark of a mature adult to move on from such beliefs built on sand - but also deeply unhelpful to be told those events shouldn't have been impactful, that reacting that way makes you a bad person (no room for repentence? blaming the victim?), or that ever having admitted to racism taints one forevermore. People can learn and grow, but only if given the freedom to do so.
Reminds me of a popular pro-diversity argument, that conservatives have no grounds to complain about colored folks because they never interact with them irl. Which, no? That's such a provincial understanding, and also how would you know, and also if the end goal is widespread integration then that's self-defeating.
I don't think you need to send your kids to an "inner city" school, but a better approach to "curated diversity" (if that means what I think it means) would be to either (a) move to a genuinely middle-class neighborhood or municipality where no one race predominates, or (b) send your kids to a Catholic school, some of which have diversity without so much "curation."
He left a high value long comment and you're picking out one line and are making a ton of ridiculous assumptions about all aspects of his life. It is funny to me that you get to make a bunch of assumptions about everyone else’s life but the second someone says anything negative about you freak out and whine to the moderators.
Not appropriate for this comment section and I wouldn’t be surprised if you received a temp ban for this comment chain. I’m sympathetic to a lot of your arguments but you need to dial it back.
You’re being unfair to Danny. He used to be bullied by Black kids in a poor school, so it’s only natural that he wants to spare his children the same experience. No parent wants to see their kids bullied. It’s not “neuroticism.”
I interpreted his use of the phrase "curated diversity" to be an acknowledgement that the "diversity" was superficial but he was still choosing private school over a public school with "true" diversity due to his personal experiences. I did not interpret the "curated diversity" to be part of the appeal. I could be wrong, it's happened before.
Marie, I like your comments and I don't want to come across as arguing in bad faith, so please correct me if I misunderstood you.
It seems pretty clear from Danny's comment that he wants racial/ethnic diversity without the kind of problems that come with, well, a lot of public schools: truancy, low academic performance, behavioral problems, etc.
Are you saying that a school full of high-achieving, well-behaved students who happen to be a combination of Black, Hispanic, Asian and white is "superficially" diverse? How so?
Are you saying that it's not true diversity unless it comes with socioeconomic diversity? But socioeconomic diversity in this country, sadly, often comes with a bunch of problems that tend to be, so to speak, *concentrated* in the lower SES strata, and I can't blame any middle-class parent for wanting to avoid that for their children's sake.
That’s a bit uncharitable. It makes sense for people to go like “I want ethnic heterogeneity in my kids’ school, but not via the ghetto.”
Obviously “diversity curation” is ridiculous in practice (private schools in NYC, when taking brochure photos, will openly shuttle black kids around with the photographer) but there’s an organic desire for the combination of ethnic/national/religious heterogeneity and exclusion of the underclass*.
*Characterized by joblessness, normalization of disorder, and so on.
+100 very well said. That's what I was getting at with my reply to THPacis below. Along these lines, have you read the piece by Scott Alexander on racism? Here's the link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
That screenshotted take is a trip. How someone could watch The Wire and think everything bad is the fault of individuals just making bad choices is a trip. It's rare to see a show address explicitly systemic issues and how those hurt innocent people. The fact that Twitter cannibalized blogging and takes like this now get 116,000 views shows the (political) internet has gotten worse over the past decade.
Yeah. I spent that entire show marveling at how Simon was showing how the system worked and the parallels between the legitimate and criminal power structures.
On the bright side, people have always had dumb takes, and they will continue to have dumb takes. I would bet there's more good writing and solid thinking on the internet than there was 15-20 years ago. But there's demand for the dumb takes too.
I agree with you on the first part, but I'm skeptical of the second (at least if we define the past as 10 years ago instead of 20). When I look at sites like the AV Club, Slate, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, etc., the quality of the culture/arts writing has gone down significantly. Vox's culture writing has long been one of the weakest part of the website. A lot of the current writers were weirdos who marinated in insular communities on Twitter, Tumblr, and LiveJournal before they got hired anywhere.
The moral dimension thing makes me think about how much better our politics would be if the Republican Party hadn’t sought to become “the white party”. Whatever progressives think, the moralizing language is actually pretty popular with African American voters, so long as it’s not coming from random white people.
You could easily imagine a lot of stuff being done that’s largely impossible in the real world simply because both parties have large African American constituencies divided by cultural but united by economic interests.
Nixon’s southern strategy was simply too compelling to resist. The New Deal coalition had dominated American politics for 35 years and kept Congress in Democratic hands for all but a few of them. The only Republican president during that period was a war hero who didn’t even admit to being a Republican until shortly before the election. Without the southern strategy, Republicans might have gone the way of British liberals, and for very similar reasons.
I don't understand Democrats' complaints about Nixon's Southern Strategy. The alternative is the segregationists remain Democrats. Is that a better outcome?
The alternative is that NEITHER party makes white grievance/racism the basis of its platform? You could have two parties, both equally appealing to Black people, that disagree on, say, taxation, the social safety net, and foreign policy.
While ideally that would have the best option, the segregationsts were going to be in one of the two parties for the same reasons Black people didn't form their own party: first past the post elections make it nearly impossible for small, minority parties to have any political power. Southern segregationists and racists (and before them actual slaver-owners) had been a part of the Democratic Party for a 160 years before the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. At that point they were going to remain Democrats or become Republicans.
Fair enough, I was gesturing at a hypothetical scenario in which enough white people realize "hey guys, racism is actually really bad, let's not" that the racists and segregationists become a tiny minority, and that minority splits evenly between Republicans and Democrats, but isn't strong enough to dominate either party.
AEJ had a recent paper linking stories to of local political corruption in Italy making news and shoplifting.
I think the abject descent into moral depravity by the GOP has helped fuel an air of impunity and normalized antisocial behavior. They act like Trump is a moral exemplar to aspire to rather than an unfaithful, mendacious, thin skinned, petty, traitorous, and vindictive con artist.
I agree wholeheartedly, but the left has also contributed to what seems like a broader sense that “the system” is unfair, so you might as well get yours. Of course Trump lacks the character to lead the nation, but there seems to be a kind of perfect storm of antisocial behavior and while the GOP’s tragic descent is a huge part of that, I’m not sure it would have got the traction it has without assistance.
Noah Smith has written on the moral bankruptcy of the left. We all saw than on 10-8. They act entitled to a moral high ground because the GOP has gone so off the rails purely via contrarianism.
Sigh. It boils all down to bully logic eventually.
That was basically Hillary Clinton’s redevelopment pitch. People hated it. So now we’re trying to recreate manufacturing jobs in a cult cargo way even though 1) it won’t scale and 2) we’re trying to do everything bagel liberalism in the process.
I am not sure if I agree or disagree with you (I just don't know), but your reference to cargo cults actually makes a lot of sense and was helpful for me in how I want to think about industrial policy (again not that its all bad but I can see how it could devolve into cargo cultism). Thanks for the insight.
If the last few years haven’t amounted to a “moralizing” politics then I can’t imagine what would. There are lots of varieties of moralizing politics. Some may be helpful and some aren’t.
I'm fine with moralizing politics when it's in the vein of telling uncomfortable truths to people on your side. Not so much when it's preening that makes you and your people feel good about themselves.
I don’t see how the moralizing would actually increase. You’d just have black cultural conservatives in the GOP, changing very little in the culture war except where it touches race specifically.
I worked in shared office space and a fast food restaurant company was holding a training for a room full of black workers. In the screen was a slide of white blonde women exhibiting work-appropriate hairstyles.
It struck me as white supremacy in a way that “show up to work on time” does not.
One of the ironies of the efforts to stamp out racism is the erasure of minority faces from public life. Gone from the slide of how to wear your hair when working the fryer; gone from advertising, etc.
Once you accept that voters are insanely heterodox in why they choose a candidate, it’s easy to see that there’s a large constituency for Politics Dad that this stuff appeals to.
Back when I was a lot less disillusioned and a bit more R-curious, I used to say that conservatives got a lot of things wrong but the most important thing right: culture matters. I thought the evidence pointed in the direction of economic situations influencing culture and not the other way around, but it was a least a debate worth having and conservatives seemed to engage with it in good faith.
Of course, the past 15+ years have been spent proving Wilhoit correct: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
Abbott mentioned the Southern Strategy of the 1970s downthread, but the Republicans had trended toward being "the White party" longer before that in the 20th century, with the racial dimension often intersecting with immigration. And by the 1928 election, Herbert Hoover had even made significant gains in the South, . Had the Great Depression not happened, and thus the New Deal coalition being formed, the GOP's swing in that direction may have looked clearer much earlier.
I think the two of you are getting at the same thing. It’s not that it has to come from a place of *actually* giving a damn, it’s that it has to come from a person that is *understood* as actually giving a damn, which means from someone that is *seen* as part of the community. Matching in race is one asset that can majorly assist being seen that way, but Clinton was seen as “the first black president” in ways that Obama wasn’t, and I think that aspect of the perception gets at some of the relevant points (and clearly isn’t about “my identity” in the sense you are worried about).
I'm still remembering that exchange where someone told me that I wasn't "of the black community" despite living in a black community, so it's possible I'm reading too much into Danny's post.
I don't think he's talking about that sort of high-minded identitarian crap. More how black Americans will make cultural criticisms and so on among themselves but get understandably uneasy when someone else joins in and says "yeah, those ghetto thugs are ruining the country!"
I live in a middle-class black neighborhood and have never had any issue discussing these issues with folks here.
I speak the language of "tough love" that they do pretty fluently, my opinions are mostly rooted in evidence that I try to relay succinctly instead of fluff feelings, and I contribute to our community and participate in our institutions, thus have credibility that I give a shit rather than merely wanting to put "those people" in their place.
It ain't that hard, and it's a singular failure that more white folks don't try to participate in those discussions, especially among those who genuinely do give a shit.
My counterpoint of course is that you're doing this as a personal acquaintance in a private sphere and not a random outgroup voice shouting from the ether. People will make the judgement that you're speaking in good faith.
Christ knows plenty of identiarian-lefty white people feel free to pontificate on this shit, airing views wildly, insanely out of step with black majority viewpoints, and no one backhands *them* over the nearest table and tells them to shut the fuck up.
The people doing the shouting down of "heterodox views" are overwhelmingly white, dammit!
Bravo - really well done and made it worth my $8 for the entire month.
As a center right reader originally from the rural part of the PA rustbelt this hit on a lot of levels for me. Overall though, it just feels like there isn't enough opportunity for too many people that aren't fortunate enough to be born into the suburbs (using that term loosely). While a lot of the jobs issues are more macro issues than any specific policy, there are an awful lot of people who are angry about their perceived lack of opportunity and lack of access to the "system" to fix it and are now turning to politicians like Trump as he has been the only one to date that seemingly hasn't paid lip service to their plight (even picking up votes from a historically entrenched Black voting block). If a politician could eschew the current status quo dynamics and just focus on those two groups you would have a really powerful populist base that I think could win a lot of elections (albeit easier said than done).
Trump politics aside, a couple key pieces stood out to me:
- While this might be unpopular here, I'm in pretty firm disagreement that the average person on the right "hates public services and job programs for the urban poor." That feels like a Dem talking point to color your opponent as the enemy. I think the reality is that there is a lot of easy data available that shows further investment in dysfunctional public programs is a really bad use of money. If you could do a better job proving ROI you would get a lot further here. That said, I know you are arguing in good faith here since you mention Lottery Charter Schools. (As an aside, huge believer in Lottery schools. My wife works for one in Prince William County and the results are stark compared to the surrounding area)
- I had never heard of the book The Declining Significance of Race, but it sounds right in the wheelhouse of what I believe personally and echoes my personal experience much more than many of the other mental models that are being shouted at me on Twitter
- The section on When Work Disappears absolutely should be tied to the Rust Belt as well as inner cities. The town I grew up in vs the town I was born in would be a great case study in the knock on effects that happen when the jobs leave vs when you can keep at least a portion of the core. It is a really vicious cycle and requires innovative thinking to get out of the cycle
>But would conservatives, in fact, favor a significant investment in providing better public services and employment in Baltimore?
How would 'investment' result in 'better public services and employment' in Baltimore? What's the mechanism? This sounds dangerously like suggesting fixing problems is easy, as though public investment is like sticking cash in index funds.
I suppose the deeper question is why has liberal America fallen for the nonsense of Kendi instead of trying to find actual solutions?
All of the hard solutions also require money. A recurring theme on SB is that the details matter - so you can't just dump money and expect it to get 'fixed', but anything at all is going to require an investment.
“Investment” is supposed to mean sustained effort and attention over the long term. Literally putting on the uniform to become part of a community. It’s unfortunate that it’s become a euphemism for throwing money around because it’s a good word.
I just wanted to come in and say I GODDAMN love the 2nd season - I fight with everyone and say it’s so underrated (there’s ‘white ethnic’ politics and union drama, and that awesome ending)
I’m from somewhere very close to Middletown Ohio and I remember reading Hillbilly Elegy and nodding my head. I recognized so much of that story.
I don’t understand the sympathy for these people. Work didn’t go away you just needed to become a nurse in Phoenix. But relocating and retraining that a huge swath of professionals did is somehow a non-starter.
What’s so wrong about wanting the political process to keep jobs in your community rather than expecting you to enter a stereotypically female profession and move to a place where summer highs average 110 degrees?
Because expecting the state to step in and use force to keep you from having to do something girly while raising costs for everyone who doesn't work in your field and all the while literally starving foreigners is so deeply immoral. Especially for a group of people who walk around talking about how much they hate socialism and are capitalists.
I am also from a small town in Ohio. While I share your sentiment that Hillbilly elegy stuck a cord this comment does not. I don’t recall my grandfather or my uncle’s or my friend’s father’s debating becoming a nurse in Phoenix. I also don’t remember any of them complaining about socialism. They worked in factories when they could. Some did move to Florida or Texas and some moved back - some didn’t. I moved away and went to college and didn’t move back.
I really am unsure what I’m trying to say here but your comment landed with me as “I’m from this place and understand them...” and then you go on to make a standard political comment that unnecessarily and weirdly invokes gender norms and is critical of people who were harmed by global economic forces that they had little to do with.
I was taught the basics of free trade using comparative advantage to raise all ships. Okay it does logically make sense and at the macro level probably works. But it comes at a price to many who are harmed by it.
To condemn poor whites from Ohio as not being empathetic to poor people in China seems batshit crazy. Oh they’re supposed to just take one for team humanity and be happy about it.
I couldn’t pay the cable bill but it’s okay because it’s a kind of charity to a Chinese person. I know there is a well paying nursing job in Phoenix waiting on me (even though I struggle in school and may not be able to pass some of the courses to be qualified). So it’s my fault for not moving away from my struggling mother and the rest of my family and friends.
This is the kind of leftist, elite riotousness that fuels people’s support of Trump. It wasn’t that long ago Obama won Ohio twice. He didn’t do it by taking this approach.
I heard him on a podcast recently talking AI. Man I miss that guy. He makes a lot of sense. The current Dems largely do not.
Agreed, the American leftist view here is that less fortunate rural whites should support free trade because it lifts starving foreign populations out of poverty (along with giving themselves cheaper goods). When I was learning this in college little was said about the people who would suffer as the overall good was advanced.
The left is usually very concerned about those kind of issues but not so much for these “folks”. There are other posts here that openly acknowledge that lack of empathy and even reveling in their misfortune.
YES! I was there in primary school with these MFs in the 80s and everyone was crystal clear that the era of grunt work was over and an education was critical to success. And yet these kids still phoned it in and teased us nerds!
And now I'm supposed to feel sorry for them? Play stupid games & win stupid prizes, fools.
honestly, I support a strong social safety net WAY MORE than those folks do. My preferences would help them materially, but they are too proud and too misinformed...
They say they do not want my help. They could totally have it if they asked. But they won't get my respect - and it seems like they really want respect for some reason, versus accepting that they were wrong and they lost fair and square.
Regardless of what policies you do or don’t support, it’s wild to use your anecdotal experience as a teenager to make sweeping pronouncements about entire groups of people. “Those folks” are not monolithic. Nobody is!
People want a purpose and a chance to improve social rank, not just a safety net / means of subsistence. I think they correctly identified that cosmopolitans enacted free trade policies over the past several decades against that desire, and are supporting efforts to undo those changes.
Of course people want respect. You can try and ignore them as being bad/wrong, but when it gets to be a significant size of the population, it is not clear that doing so would be wise or just.
I wouldn't say it's immoral, but it's just not practical. This dynamic process has been going on for 100s of years now! And the reason people MUST help themselves is simple: no one is coming to save them. It's sink or swim.
At the same time, I spend a lot of time in Erie, PA (hardcore rust belt) and while it is true the region as a whole has declined, individual incomes are still MUCH higher than they were 30 years ago. (Just not as high as in growing regions.) I actually think it's a taste of the future as we see the population age and decline: fewer people, but the people who are left are much wealthier.
The people I know work as mail carriers, nurses, realtors, auto technicians, construction, social workers, teachers, waitresses, jail administrative staff.
The incomes keep growing because the US and Pennsylvania economies keep growing. Family sizes have decreased A LOT in the past generation. So the local population has aged (into social security, Medicare, and pensions -- all big sources of income for the local economy), it has also shrunk somewhat, and there's been a shift away from manufacturing and toward government/healthcare/service sector employment. Income has certainly grown much more slowly per capita than in California or Texas, but the cost of living is low and people enjoy the benefits of cheap global manufacturing.
You look around and SO MANY middle class people have trucks/SUVs, own their own homes, have a boat and/or a camper/RV. Plenty to eat and flat screen TVs in every room. This was just not true in the 70s and 80s.
What is ALSO true is social capital has massively declined (there used to be so much civic activity that is now mostly gone) and there is a lot of real estate blight from closed factories. So it has sort of a depressing air, especially for old timers who can remember the good old days, when they were young, relatively poor, and went to the Elks lodge and church and bowling every week.
The comment on the decline of social capital makes me ponder. How much of it is an unfortunate effect of larger forces or is instead a choice? That is, how much do people really enjoy or prefer those types of social interaction? Would you (in the abstract, not *you*) give up the large flatscreen TV in favor of one of those 70s versions if you (abstract again) could have activities at the Elks lodge, and church and bowling every week?
The move to Phoenix is probably dramatic, but the point is sound. At a certain point, you gotta recognize that the jobs are gone and not coming back and re-tool your life plan.
If you worked in a factory for 35 years, and it closes, and you're now 65, with health issues and no job prospects, you absolutely have my sympathy. But if you are this person's 40-year old child, who worked there for 10 years and assumed you'd work there for another 25 just because your dad did, eh, less so. You sticking around a dead town, being mad at 70 because the steel mill closed three decades back, and waiting to be interviewed in a diner by someone from the Times is not a failure of government.
I remain sympathetic because the job centers of this country have done everything possible to engineer a housing shortage that keeps that 40 year old out.
The manufacturing areas tried to fight history by keeping the factory, but that failed. The urban areas tried to fight history by blocking new housing, and they succeeded.
I'm not unsympathetic, for a little bit. If someone told me that had a good thing going down at the plant that closed down a year ago and have had trouble finding a steady gig since, I'll listen and buy them a beer. But if that plant closed 10 years ago? Eh. Not so much.
I’m from the Detroit area and feel very similarly about this. My father started out working in a factory (later moved to management in a trajectory that would be impossible now) and it was obvious to me, even as a child, that planning to have a blue collar career as an auto worker was a bad idea. It was never presented to me that way, but my not getting a college degree was unthinkable to my parents (neither of whom had one).
Right. When I was 21 in 2004, minimum wage here in IL was $5.50/hour and I had a job in a factory making $17.00/hr, with a decent amount of OT to boot. That place closed and moved to Indiana. I could've spent time being mad, but instead I got the first job I could find, which was slightly above minimum wage at GameStop, and then progressed from there to working in restaurants, where I eventually became a manager. In order to get better positions, I had to be willing to move or commute, but I know so many people who only want jobs within 10 minutes of their house. That's great for quality of life, but you are really limiting yourself in terms of options.
When my dad was 30, with a wife and three kids, he got a job offer in California. Good money, great opportunity. He took the job. We drove from New Jersey to California in a minivan. A year later, the business was doing well, but the partners who owned it had a major falling out across personal and financial lines, decided to liquidate, and closed the place down. My dad found himself on unemployment for the first time in his life while he worked the phones trying to find a new job. The best opportunity he found was back on the east coast, with a boss he had worked for in the past and hated. So a year after doing it once before, we packed up the five of us (with my mom also now pregnant in the third trimester with twins), and we moved back to the east coast, again via the same minivan, about a year after we first moved out there.
It didn't have to be that way. He could've settled for a job that paid way less, and strung out the unemployment for as long as he could, or done a million other things that people do when faced with that situation, but he and my mom decided moving was the best opportunity, so he took it.
David Autor has written about the disappearance of career ladders like you have described. It is actually a huge problem that large segments of the population that once had more options for upward mobility have now lost those ladders.
Not just that, but flip side of better universal education plus our cultural push for tertiary education as the route to success... is that a lot of the folks who would have climbed those ladders while retaining understanding of and sympathy for blue collar folks are now skimmed off and sent to university.
I don't think it's a coincidence that you don't really have many erudite, self-educated, personable union organizers from blue collar backgrounds, and the white-collar kids trying to figure out how to do it aren't good at barnstorming at all.
Similar to the problem by which a black parallel society exists in many cities (especially the Rust Belt) but then the "talented tenth" gets consistently siphoned off and integrated with the "College-American" mainstream.
It's sad knowing successful people in their 60s who worked their way up the corporate ladder without even a college degree and comparing their competency to so many millennials I know we useless advanced degrees.
People have a right to their feelings whether those sentiments are valid or not. The sad truth is we cannot easily change people’s hearts, especially if acknowledging their own agency and complicity in their own situation hurts.
My one still protectionist view is if a plant/company closes down and lays off people, it should be responsible for it's workforce via the government forcing them to in a structured way - the 60 year old w/ 30 years basically continues to get paid until reitrement, while the 32 year old w/ 6 years experience gets maybe a training stipend for a year or so.
Not just smart but patience and tolerance for those situations are hard. I’m not sure I’d want people who are more at home in a construction or factory floor looking after dementia or NICU cases.
Or aren't able to complete the often bureaucratic administrative processes that permeate all of modern life. Then there are cultural differences between different fields of work.
I believe the argument is that the jobs didn’t disappear by a law of nature, free trade treaties were signed that hurt working class folks but which professions like law and medicine were excluded from. The US uses Chinese manufactured goods much more than Chinese doctors or lawyers. So effectively the country chose to sacrifice these folks. Also, the free trade treaties were supposed to put China on a path to democracy and that hasn’t worked out either.
I mean I do feel somewhat bad about the democracy claims not working out. Shanghai was lovely and man it would have been delightful if it had transitioned to a liberal democratic model along with getting wealthy.
I actually do have some sympathy towards this view that professionals protected themselves. Which is pretty shitty, no one should be protected from competition.
The thesis of “The Dream Hoarders”, by Richard Reeves, is that the upper middle class did engage in a lot of protectionism, but it’s more about zoning and school districts and licensing regulations than about import rules.
At least with lawyers, it's also protection. It's even fairly hard to practice nationally rather than in one state, let alone for a foreign lawyer (even an English speaking British one trained in a similar system) to.
I'm a lawyer and that's not really accurate. You can get any number of big to medium law, in-house, or compliance or contracts or similar type jobs anywhere in the country as long as you are barred in a state somewhere. The restrictions are on things like representing clients in the courts of a state in which you are not barred (though it is often possible to waive in). It's something but it's hardly some major barrier.
Regarding foreign lawyers systems of law even in other English speaking countries really don't translate at all. At my last company we had a subsidiary in Canada and I was reminded of this every time I got on the phone with local counsel.
Interstate practice is a major barrier. For instance, in Florida, they will let you "pro hac" in (i.e., come in to a case as an out of state lawyer) something like 5 times in 3 years. After that, you have to take the Florida bar.
And of course, local counsel requirements mean even when you do come in, your client has to spend extra money hiring a set of local lawyers.
As for your last point, I don't think you are arguing in good faith. Of course there are a ton of tasks that lawyers from other common law legal systems could handle just fine-- your salary (and mine) would just decrease if we let them do it. We're privileged enough, though, as a profession (most legislatures are full of lawyers!) that we only force factory workers in the midwest to do that (so we can pay cheaper prices for stuff) while exempting ourselves.
I visited China right before the Hong Kong crackdowns started, and it really is shocking how close they came to liberalizing before they wound the clock back a couple of decades. The bet almost paid off.
Well said. NAFTA wasn't an executive action, it was ratified by the Senate, which has always had disproportional rural representation. Rural people want to be angry at the urban elite, but it was their own politicians that sold them out. Dishearteningly so.
Slow industrial change is much easier to adapt to than rapid industrial change. So what you’re saying, while true, does not refute the claim that these communities were harmed by those agreements.
China is probably the big one. Without that, you probably have much more manufacturing move to Mexico which would have decreased blue collar immigration to the US.
Get back to me when we have decent licensing reciprocity regimes in either field, or when the lawyers' lobbying arms stop treating the entire field of law as a jobs program at the expense of literally every other outcome on earth.
In the meantime, it's pretty obvious to those of us not interested in defending our own classes perquisites and privileges that a lot of us professionals have buttered the shit out of our own bread.
"There is tons of foreign competition in medicine"
Consumer-facing or in the labor market?
If it's solely in the labor market, I don't think the 1/3 claim holds up because you are probably talking about foreign-born, not foreign-trained, doctors.
Correct. They also need to have graduated from a medical school that meets requirements set out by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates and prove some competency in speaking English. The requirement for completing a US residency is there even if they have already completed a residency program in their home country and have been practicing physicians.
Kevin Williamson is the best (and most entertaining) writer about this area -- better than JD Vance, in my view. The kerfuffle that kept him away from The Atlantic was a disservice to its readers.
I reread ‘I Am Cancer’ once in a while, it’s just good writing.
It’s also odd because I feel he was maybe 5 years too early as right wing writers we t from feigning love for the white underclass to going full on élitist (I.e, Hanania)
Its a fair point that the solution is to move to a thriving area (I did it myself coming from a similar type of town), but not having sympathy is harsh and sounds disdainful for your fellow countrymen. The problem is that globalization (that led to the outsourcing of most manufacturing) was billed as "frictionless" and that new job training would be readily available and cheap. The reality is that moving 1,800+ miles away is in no way frictionless. Add on the cost of college effectively doubling since the late 90s and you can see why people are jaded.
I'm so sick of the constant demand to have sympathy for my abusers. In a very real sense I'm a refugee from a place that was violently intolerant and no one is ever going to be held accountable for the harms done but it's always on me to be infinitely magnanimous to both the literal people and to the people who want to uphold the norms and structure of that time and place.
I agree that some measure of exaggeration was done here. I actually didn't find it that hard to go to college and relocate--I did this later in life having had a genuine career in restaurants for 8 years between high school and college but it wasn't frictionless.
Dude, Ohio is now in favor of gay marriage by like 30 points.
It's a comfortable revenge fantasy to pretend all the people who don't agree with your politics are bigots and deserve for the social fabric of their homes to disintegrate, but... don't pretend it's anything other than a revenge fantasy.
Yes, the reality is that most of these rural places are economically obsolete; the secondary industries which support agriculture and resources extraction, as well as the logistics services to move those products to population centers, have gotten very efficient since 1960. Efficient enough that we no longer *need* towns of 1,000 every 10-15 miles and regional hubs of 30,000 in every county.
So they're going to disintegrate and depopulate because there's no longer a reason for them.
One thing that I like to think I have a good nose for is when someone's politics are primarily informed by experiences of schoolyard bullying. It rarely leads to well-adjusted takes.
Towns don't exist because "we" need them, they exist because people live there. Looking across the world, it seems that the US has decided that disintegrating communities because they are not determined to be economically viable is superior to finding ways for these communities to become first capable of supporting their members, and then able to produce value for the larger world. I don't understand why people don't value the basic human experience of living in a place among people who share similar experiences and values that are tied to geography. Like, SB comments seem to understand why you would live in the Bay Area or NY to share a certain geography with people who share values and experiences, but their minds boggle when anyone thinks that it's reasonable to want to do the same in another setting. It's the same human impulse, but since (theoretically) produces more money, it's given all the moral weight.
Towns exist because people settled there to do something of value. They grow, shrink, shift, move, or simply fade over time.
The US has too short a history to have a lot of this, and history isn't a great guide because we've only had industrial abundance for a bit less than a century.
I don't think it's unreasonable to want to live where you live, not in the least. But I see no practical path to trying to cast rural population distributions in amber. It's a very different story to say "too many people want to live in X so we need to figure out how to accommodate at least some of them" compared to "too few want to or are able to live in Y so we need to prop it up somehow.
About the best I have is to push industrial policies for strategic industries that increase employment in small and mid-sized cities and the exurbs of largers ones, all places in which prime industrial land is found. And also to redistribute the federal workforce to small and mid-sized cities as well.
Those places can exert a gravity well which props up the rural places in their orbit as commuter towns and leisure spots. You see it in rural Hudson Valley towns in NY state, Lancaster and Bucks counties near Philadelphia or Westmoreland near Pittsburgh, Western Maryland and Eastern West Virginia for DC...
But what in the name of God am I supposed to do to revive my mom's hometown of 500 people between Harrisburg and Sunbury? The place was a one-street, ten-house town until the early 1900's, when mechanization in local agriculture drove folks into town from the surrounding farms and necessitated the building of service shops, equipment dealers, small machine shops, a grain processing facility, and a few small logistics companies. Followed by a law office, a few accountants, a civil engineer, four restaurants, a small construction firm, an ice cream shop, a decent medical practice...
But all of those secondary industries are gone, replaced by dealers out of Harrisburg or Sunbury, a single machine shop in the whole valley and a roving team of mechanics, some local, some not, grain processing in a massive, centralized Cargill (or similar, not sure who has the local monopoly there) facility far away to the South in exurban Harrisburg. The equipment is reliable enough that employment in those industries has fallen by 80%. The service industries are gone too, down to a single restaurant running half-hours and the ice cream place.
Social Security receipts are now probably half of local household incomes, and of my mom's generation two-thirds of them left, and none of my uncle's kids and only one or two of their cousins and second cousins are still there.
Cities which are thriving to the point where they get in their own way are a solvable problem, about which we talk a lot because people have ideas.
My mom's hometown is not. There is nothing short of an outright command economy which will provide that town with a reason to exist. The area will inevitably revert to something similar to what it was prior to complex mechanization... a number of farmsteads (much smaller number and larger size than in 1900 of course) and a tiny, tiny village where a couple folks live to a run a general store and maybe a restaurant.
I think you highlight something - in modern economies, skilled people with income are the most important resource. Get a critical mass of that resource and you have a town that will survive. The problem with many small towns is that the one factory or industry slowing down depletes that critical resource to much. The advantage of large cities is that (usually) they are diverse enough that they can survive even dramatic slowdowns in one industry.
In true YIMBY fashion, I'm hopeful that expanding WFH will allow more people to live where they want and not just where they have to live because of work - whether that is in an urban utopia or rural/small town picturesque fantasy.
I actually think this is the core shared message of Christianity and utilitarianism - abusers are people too, and as long as we can stop people from receiving the abuse, we should be figuring out how to make things better for the (hopefully former) abusers too. I don’t necessarily care how you *feel* about the abusers (whether it is hate or sympathy or whatever) as long as you don’t visit abuse upon them.
I don’t think anybody is asking you to be infinitely magnanimous, just pointing out that you’re painting with a very broad brush, and apparently making judgements based on personal bitterness about experiences that happened when you were a teenager. You’re allowed to feel however you want, but what you’ve described here is not a coherent basis for a political philosophy.
Part of the problem is cost of relocation. First & last month’s rent, deposits, etc. If your job is going away, you’re probably not set up to handle all that, especially if you have a family. And housing cost generally, as I think we’re all aware. Your rent in Phoenix is going to be a bit higher than in Middletown.
It’s weird to me that liberals have begun saying this. Growing up in the 80s, I’d hear people in Kentucky as the crack epidemic took off saying “why don’t people just move away from all that to some place like here with no crime? (was a different time in that regard too)” Just wasn’t something I thought of as liberal, given the people that I heard saying it. It’s not easy and most people actually love the places they’re from, and the people there. Something I used to not appreciate as a kid looking to leave home as quickly as possible.
Chris Arnade has some pretty solid insights with the “somewheres/anywheres” dichotomy I think.
Easy for single males to pick up and follow work, as we saw in previous eras. Pretty difficult for everyone else.
I do think there should be some programs to help with this. I don't think it's nearly as impossible as people make it out to be.
I do tend to agree that the anywhere somewhere phenomenon may explain a lot more to this than I'm really wired to my brain. Like I was probably more at home as a foreign teacher than I would have been in the bigger cities near where I grew up. I find being rooted to a place kind of bizarre.
But like that should make sense too. I think we should just see a lot more fluidity in populations moving to new places. I feel like the only people who should be rooted in communities would be like quite wealthy people who don't really have to worry about anything. Being rooted in say Chevy Chase or Beverly Hills makes a ton of sense but I feel like we shouldn't even be rooted to a nation state let alone a community in it.
That sounds completely ignorant of human nature and how we organize ourselves, first into family/kin groups, then into larger towns/tribes. You want to dissolve community between people in the service of economic goals? That's crazy. People want to be close to the people they know and love, and given that the discourse around problems in the US is increasingly about alienation, atomization, radicalization, and distrust, we should be encouraging people to form and maintain stable communities, not to dissolve them constantly.
So, I actually take the unpopular side here and disagree with you. Those kinship/tribal connections are a big problem! That's the social capital that keeps outsiders down.
I absolutely do want everyone stirred around, meeting new people, forming new groups where their backgrounds and histories dissolve. I've posted before that I love how our modern system includes having our best & brightest leave their homes for 4 years to live amongst their academic peers - after which they typically migrate to the cities with the best economic opportunities rather than staying stuck in their original locations. Yay mobility!
Agree alienation is bad, but the solution is people learning how to form communities & having open communities that are not based on "our grandfathers arrived from the Old Country together so now we are a team from now till eternity"
I mean maybe it is human nature but it's horrifying. Yes I want to dissolve community between people, not really in service of economics per se. All interaction should be had on a voluntary basis and to the extent that we can't survive that way well maybe we shouldn't survive at all then.
Sorry if I'm taking you too literally but I don't think I see how this could ever happen. Our very first interactions are involuntary: we meet our parents. Then we meet the people our parents know, and other kids, and our teachers. Over time many of us form bonds with some of those kids and adults. So when the plant closes and the jobs are in another state, some people are reluctant to leave those bonds. So which person is interacting with others voluntarily: the person who stays because they don't want to leave the people they've bonded with, or the person who leaves to meet new people even though they don't want to, out of economic necessity?
We used to though! The chart in this article almost beggars belief, which makes me wonder how much of it is, say, a compositional effect, but apparently up to 40% of people looking for work in the 80s moved for it vs. less than 2% now:
Yeah, you're right, there's been a huge change in this. But as you say, the idea that Americans are a uniquely mobile people who have no problem moving for work is really based on data that's as old as I am. It's worth thinking about why that's changed - and if it's more good than bad or not that it has - but I'm just criticising a line of argument which seems to be like, 'well it would be better if the world worked like this'.
+1. As I've mentioned in previous threads, I come from a working-class majority-white town in Michigan with an economy and population that have been declining for 60-plus years. I stayed in MI several years after finishing school in large part because at the time I graduated, I didn't have the savings I'd need to relocate.
Another factor I haven't yet seen mentioned in this thread is that housing costs in areas with lots of jobs prevent people from following those jobs. This might be one reason why we are seeing Georgia and AZ start to tilt purple; young, broke people who might otherwise have moved to DC or LA head to Atlanta and Phoenix b/c of affordability.
Regarding "somewheres/anywheres" -- if there somehow weren't enough to hate Stalin for already, the fact that the took what *should* be an incredibly punchy phrase for the "anywhere" class and precluded its use in polite company forever by using it as an antisemitic dog whistle is yet one more for the pile.
("somewheres / anywheres" is understandable and simple, which is virtuous, but both words are also intrinsically un-Googleable, which makes it insufficiently specific and IMO a bit vague).
It's not rude to ask at all, I would just prefer not to have it crop up if for some reason people are googling my username in the context of Matt's comments (hence part of being elliptical) without context. It's the two-word phrase beginning with "r" at the end of the first paragraph of this Wikipedia article: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-cosmopolitan_campaign" (the second word being "cosmopolitan.")
I know the area. Ohio is full out burnt out depopulated areas. When all the young people move away it really hurts the community and makes those who remain feel loss.
Many of those people who didn’t move or change careers were too old, had children and were risk adverse, or had some other deep problems (substance abuse.)
Far too many people from my high school have died from overdoses. Most of us left.
So like Harrison should be as empty as those ghost towns in the West. I genuinely find this narrative except maybe around the olds to be like insane. As a people we literally walked across the continent to find opportunity and now expecting people to stop doing heroin and go to work is too much to ask.
That was basically Hillary Clinton’s redevelopment pitch. People hated it. So now we’re trying to recreate manufacturing jobs in a cult cargo way even though 1) it won’t scale and 2) we’re trying to do everything bagel liberalism in the process
Right, but the Senate exists so you can't just ignore the voters of these states, even if they won't do what they're 'supposed to' and migrate somewhere else.
What about people wanting to be close to their families? Allowing people to help out mom and dad in their old age and giving mom and dad the opportunity to be close to their grandkids. Spending time with your siblings rather than only seeing them once a year at Christmas. That seems like a valid political goal to me.
Direct employment would seem to be the preferable option of those two. Given the increased viability of remote work it probably wouldn't even be all that inefficient for many government jobs.
For how many generations should we do this? How far is reasonable to expect people to move? Should the government employment be compensated similarly to a market job, or do we want to make it somewhat less so that there is still SOME incentive to move and get a job in a growing region?
I don't know what the right length of time would be. We can't plan out the politics that far in the future anyway, so it's sort of a moot point.
As for pay the political pragmatist in me says it should be market rate. This is, to some extent, a vote buying exercise and people don't like to think they're undervalued.
This just sounds like setting money on fire to me.
I think if we have a program, it should be grants for assistance with moving. You could maybe pair it with some kind of "sister city" program that tries to keep social networks intact and relocate whole communities (you see this with chain migration when immigrants pull old-country family and neighbors to settle in the same US town). Maybe with special accommodations to relocate aged parents/aunts/etc.
Most people relocate on their own. It's really not the end of the world. We in the US are in a sense fortunate compared to countries like Mexico that have seen enormous out migration.
After all, what those left behind really want is that the employers/entrepreneurs and leadership/professional class never left. But you can't unring that bell
Cutting checks would not satiate the need for purpose in people’s lives. Nor would being retrained to a lower social standing job.
Ideally the decades of globalization created through trade deals would have had a better way to accommodate the needs and desires of broad swathes of the country that were going to be negatively impacted. I don’t know what the answer is to keep globalization while giving domestic voters satisfaction, but I think that not having one is the reason for such ardent support for Trump.
I am maybe a bit skeptical that we need capitalistic ends like this to give people meaning in my life. I mean my career does some of that but I do a modest amount of volunteer work and am a foster parent and the idea that people couldn't find meaning stripped of the daily grind is weird. Though It may be that the kind of people who don't find work are in need of a way to provide meaning is highly correlated. The small number of people on programs for the workless do have a bunch of problems.
Agree that it drives Trump support. I just don't think this is a solvable problem, which is why you see the same exact dynamic in the UK and France. Globalization (or maybe modernity) is a beast driving us to greater wealth and greater mobility, whether we like it or not.
A lot of people don't have the wherewithal to move and do years of schooling to retrain for a variety of reasons, including money, childcare and family, logistics, and so on. This line of thinking basically devolves to the bootstraps cliche. Yes, some people can become more successful under their own power, and we should celebrate them and try to make those paths more accessible. But as soon as you say that for everyone, it doesn't work. Some people are not going to be able to leave the rust belt or whatever small town, and I don't think it makes sense to shrug and say they should have all become nurses.
I think wanting to have roots in your community is human nature. I get that isn’t always possible, but especially once you’re 30 or older, leaving is hard.
The glaring issue I had with Hillbillie Elegy was the lack of awareness of how his good fortune gave him an out. He was born with a mind that made standardized tests easy, and that paved a path to Ohio State and Harvard that was never on the table for most of the people from there.
Great article I had never heard of William Julius Wilson. I feel like Matt could probably do a series of articles on this guy anyway thanks for exposing me to his work!
The argument that industrial jobs going away was the first domino in the chain that lead to disfunction among the urban poor is pretty flimsy. There is evidence that (a) this disfunction predated de-industrialization and (b) economic downturns do not cause crime and, if anything, tend to coincide with lower levels of crime. Job loss definitely made things worse, but I think it’s debatable whether it was a necessary or sufficient factor.
Very underrated perspective that I think I agree with.
Although I think it's wrong, the theory that job losses cause dysfunction remains very attractive and feels intuitively like it should be true. But every time I've dug into the evidence I find what you've described above.
Part of the illusion is that the correlation is real. Impoverished areas are often socially dysfunctional with crime and drugs, etc.. But I think the causality runs mostly in two other ways:
1). Crime, drug use and alcoholism cause poverty in fairly direct and obvious ways. Few people would argue that about the wasted potential, disinvestment and psychological scars. Or consider that a single shooting might tie up hundreds of hours of police, EMT, ER and judicial time, all funded by local taxpayers. And then there's the cost of imprisonment.
2) There's also an illusion in that it's never quite the same people before and after an area goes downhill. I've found counties in West Virginia that have lost 80% of their population since the 60s. The 80% who've left tend to be the ones with a little more motivation and competence. People who don't leave are **disproportionately** more likely to have social problems. The 80% who've left are doing fine in Phoenix or Atlanta and the job losses didn't cause the social decay so much as put it in focus by removing the other 80%.
WJW does a pretty good jobs marshalling a host of statistics proving his theories being correct in his books, you should check them out. And I think it's telling we are seeing similar pathologies play out in very white parts of Appalachia over the past few decades with the decline of traditional blue collar industries.
Reading old JD Vance quotes is so mind boggling to me, is that person still inside him? A piece of me thinks he must be, that this is all a fictional persona. I just don't know though.
JD Vance underwent a religious conversion to Ultraconservative Roman Catholicism a few years after he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Ultraconservative Catholics act and think the way Vance acts now, so I think the change is genuine. I think he really is what he seems to be now. There is no other secret "good" person on the inside.
I think he’s 100% a snake oil salesman. I read Hillbilly Elegy, and even then it read as a political campaign launcher. And he didn’t actually offer any solutions to the dysfunction he grew up. I believe he specifically said better funded schools wouldn’t help, because the kids going to those schools don’t care. Which, maybe true, but like all righwing populists, the actual populist part was missing.
"They characterized that as a conservative view, and certainly the emphasis on moral guidance has a rightward inflection."
In this case, perhaps. But I've noted in, oh a case or two recently, the Left does not much shy away from moral hectoring. You can call that "guidance," I guess. Potayto potahto.
“ The reason isn’t that Trump hates cops, but that Republicans hate giving money to poor cities. And they definitely don’t want to finance inner-city job creation schemes.”
Why would we think dumping more money into underperforming blue jurisdictions materially change anything? Are many of these cities underfunded? Is Chicago underfunded? Is San Francisco underfunded? Underperforming urban school districts often have very high per capita spend.
EDIT: Looks like the City of Baltimore budget is $4.4 billion for a population of 500 some odd thousand people, per capita $8k+. Doesn’t seem particularly underfunded.
Yes, these cities are burning through a lot of cash. But I wonder how much of that money actually makes it to disadvantaged neighborhoods. I think you’re right that a COVID-style local government slush fund wouldn’t help anything, but maybe something more targeted would.
Thanks for providing a comparison. Is Dallas a particularly good comparator for Baltimore?
With regards to your last point, I'm asking a serious question: can you identify any significant problem in Baltimore that can be resolved without spending any more money?
I would argue that, if Baltimore is spending that much more per capital already (and with very little to show for it by way of outcomes), then perhaps the issue is more in the realm of misallocation of resources.
(I know very little of Baltimore other than at a very high level, but I assume that like other east coast cities, it is spending a whole lot to appease generally unproductive, unionized, local/city/state govt workers and other patronage groups.)
I proffered Philadelphia as a much more viable comparison. Similar rates of poverty, demographics, median incomes, historical/legacy economic sectors, population declines from 1950's peaks through 2000, historical problems with disinvestment, redlining, segregation by income and race...
The difference is, Philly has at least *attempted* on occasion to govern itself well since 1990. Baltimore, insofar as I can tell, has not. And the result is that our population has increased and our tax base has strengthened since the 1990's nadir, our crime rate is significantly lower (even these two years with significant upticks in murders still leave us at a much lower per capita figure than Baltimore), we have significantly larger swathes of the city experiencing revitalizations, private sector employment is higher, knowledge work is still growing in fields which are remote-proof, we retain more of the graduates from our similarly great universities, and our transit system and infrastructure are in better shape.
The wealthy suburb I grew up in apparently spends $8K per capita (and city services are less efficient in the suburbs), so Baltimore really is spending a lot.
The day after Trump got elected, I went to a panel discussion at Harvard about race in America, where one of the panelists was William Julius Wilson. He was unforgettable.
Some details that stick out to me now: he criticized the BLM activists who pushed Bernie Sanders away from a race-neutral economic message; he criticized social scientists who refused to include data on poor whites alongside poor minorities.
But the most memorable moment was his speech. He mentioned his support for a jobs program in Chicago, and rather than asking the audience to take it on faith, he asked the other panelists if he could have ten minutes to present his case. They gladly agreed. He then walked up to the podium with a binder in hand (I don't know where he got it), and his argument was just overwhelmingly forceful -- not because the conclusions sounded nice, but because his evidence was clearly solid, the result of decades of serious research.
I wish more of my fellow academics would take a page from Prof. Wilson's book and follow the evidence, rather than confabulating arguments to fit trendy conclusions.
The thing that sprung from the page regarding the Gay controversy, for me at least, was not plagiarism, which is just lazy bullshit.
It's that the *methodology* of increasingly wide swathes of the social sciences boil down to "put data into a series of blenders until I get the colors of paint I need to craft the picture I decided I want before I ever started this 'research'."
It's ridiculous, and means that the entire field is untrustworthy in a way which goes far beyond the discussion that Kenny and I were having the other day about "all research can't be trusted until heavily replicated."
I think this is very wrong about Gay. Her most significant publications were written 15-25 years ago, when the sophistication of empirical and quantitative social science was much less. Today, the approaches she used then would not be considered appropriate and assuming that today's papers have those problems would be a mistake.
It's not about citations at all, David R.'s comment was about the methodology in Gay's work.
Over the past two decades, empirical social science has become more sophisticated in using methods like Difference-in-Difference and more sophisticated statistical models to avoid problems like the joint causation one that is worrying in Gay's work on Black representatives. Today, a graduate student investigating that issue would be more likely to look for a natural experiment, adopt a more sophisticated identification strategy, use fancier statistical tools, and handle confounding issues better. In part this is because the software available is radically different than in 1998, making it easier to adopt these methods, but also because it takes time for fields to adopt new methods.
1. It is a success of science when fancy new tools can be packaged up in ways that people who don't understand their details can use.
2. I don't think there's any evidence for the claims you're making, and one should probably not claim malfeasance and malpractice by people you don't know when you have no evidence at all.
Yeah I guess my question is, have any of these more sophisticated methods led to more replication, or is that problem unchanged?
Yes, empirical political science is very much like similar work in economics (but focused on elections and politics instead of the economy).
She just seems to be bad at her job. Tat doesn’t impinge the field but the hiring and promotion structure at Harvard.
P.S.
That being said. Yes, I think that as a general rule social science quantitative research is overhyped and often ridiculously surface level from a historians standpoint. On the other hand I’m sure our research seems way too niche/based on too little data. The conclusion is that you need both.
You guys at least have the excuse that there're gaping holes in our data for any era more than 400 years ago and all the methods we have of trying to estimate regional populations, population movements, volumes of trade, circulating coinage, agricultural productivity, mining output, forestry clearance, more sophisticated economic activity, free/slave/serf proportions, urban populations, come up with wildly different results that we can only eyeball and gut-check our way to reconciling.
And even then, there are people ("multi-cultural medieval Britain" lady for example) who refuse to gut-check the results of their intentionally shitty, slanted methods.
The social sciences seem to have way too many of the latter type of folks, almost as if to make up for the better data available to them.
Prepare for an earful.
I meant that he would potentially get an earful for disparaging the social sciences. (For the last time, THP, I don't mean historians when I slag off on soft sciences. You guys are good.)
???
I think this is overstated. A lot of social science is still excellent and essential reading for policy analysts.
You are right. They are far more focused on their social agenda than they are on the science. The rigor and curiosity of science needs to be prioritized.
"Trump’s core base sort of resembles a white version of the people who loved Marion Barry here in DC." My brain went "aha!" after reading this. A very useful comparison that helps me think more critically about both situations.
And this is also a large part of why his base seems to get more attached to him when he says outlandish things and provokes the expected reaction. It's the same way that when Louis Farrakhan goes off about "satanic Jews" and so on it serves as proof to his base that he definitely isn't working for honky.
Another good example would be Sharp James, the long time mayor of Newark that Corey Booker eventually beat. There's a great documentary about that race called Street Fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6EkpsYtrsE
Or if you want a white example there was a very Trumpish mayor of Chicago in the 20's called Bill Thompson. Jack Shafer wrote a good piece about him and Trump as a big city mayor back in 2017: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/26/trump-president-style-mayor-215294/
The leftie twitter commentary often demonstrates zero actual experience of being around poor people and troubled areas.
And I admit, I'm doing it to my kids! I was able to escape all that unpleasantness and now I'm raising my kids in a safe stereotypical upper-income suburb. Where it's hard NOT to give them an impression of the lower classes that's either too naive or too paranoid. Tricky stuff.
While it was hardly a consideration when we decided to move here, that our home is in an urban, middle-class black neighborhood and our child will be attending a diverse urban public school should strike a middle path that brings a lot of these problems into her awareness over time without drowning her in them.
I hope.
Who knows, with kids?
That's one thing I like about being in a lottery-based charter. We get diversity, BOTH racial and socioeconomic, but the parents are all engaged and care (since they bothered with the lottery)
We could afford to live in the "best" school district but as long as the charter seems to be doing ok I'm a bit loathe to do that.
Yea, we could liquidate our real estate assets, sell our current home, and just barely squeak the move into an $800k small, beat-up 4 bedroom in the best two districts by accepting a mortgage payment 2.5X as large as our current one with half down.
Or we can stay where we are, put on a nice addition in cash, accept some of the challenges of city life and still have our kids in a good school, while keeping our investments and cash flow and life plan intact.
And that's where the pro-charter argument fails: selection bias exists in just the way you describe, and even parents whose kids are in charter schools without having to enter a lottery may be asked to leave of they're not sufficiently involved.
That is _not_ what I mean by selection of involvement.
Kids aren't asked to leave because the parents aren't "sufficiently involved"
I mean that the act of applying for a lottery indicates a level of parental involvement.
I guess parents technically have to fill out a survey once a year saying they intend to return. That's... a pretty low bar. I wouldn't call that "being asked to leave"
Now it _might_ be fair to say "charters only look good" because they select for involved parents. That's why the lottery studies looked at students who applied but did not make it vs. students who applied and did make it. So you've already filtered for involved parents, and _then_ you look at the outcomes. So yes, they've taken selection effect into account.
I'm applying this to non-lottery schools, or ones where neighborhood families have first priority. Those schools can and do pressure the parents who can't keep up to leave. These tend to be very low-functioning parents whose undersocialized / traumatized children end up in the public schools, with predictable results for school performance.
Once you don't have a lottery, of course selection effects dominate.
I'm specifically defending lottery-based charters, which are the exact ones Matt says seem to be good based on studies that only check lottery charters.
The us really lacks in socioeconomically diverse communities. That’s not great, for many reasons. One good way to overcome this is if you can get your kids to one of those rare (and consistently threatened) exam schools like Stuy in New York. Exam schools are some of the best schools in the country, but since they take kids based on talent (real talent not bs “holistic” admission) they’re truly diverse (rather than skin-deep “dei”) typically with large representation to working class and 1st gen kids.
The problem of course is that there too few of these schools (and also- if done correctly - most kids won’t be able to get in!) so this won’t be an option in most cases unfortunately.
This is kind of what charters do since they admit by lottery. They select on parental involvement rather than academic ability, but that's _also_ a good factor.
Not as good as the real thing
I mean, it's kind of a built-in feature of market capitalism, right?
If an area is considered desirable to live in, for any reason (low crime, good schools, proximity to well-paying jobs), the demand for housing in that area will be high. High demand = high housing prices = only rich people can afford to live there. Conversely, if an area is undesirable (e.g., high crime rates), everyone who can afford to move away will do so, and the only people left there will be those who can't afford to live elsewhere, i.e., poor people.
I really don't know how to change this. Yes, we absolutely should build more housing so that fewer people are priced out of desirable areas. But on some level, "rich people live in rich people areas" is a truism, like duh, that's what being rich *means*. You can tweak this on the margins by doing things like rent control, but that creates a new class of economic winners and losers.
This is why the concept of gentrification is so frustrating. We all know that rich people keep the poor people out of their neighborhoods. But poor people also keep the rich people out of their neighborhoods by fighting against gentrification. We’ve all given up on the idea that a poor person could actually live next to a rich person.
If you make it so that public safety and sanitation conditions in poorer neighborhoods don't deteriorate, you make it easier at the margins for richer people who wish to cheap out on housing to live there, and (more normally) for richer neighborhoods to be close by instead of far away. And also for your own talented sons and daughters to come back home and build a decent life.
And, more importantly, you make it so that going to school with "those people" isn't an automatic sentence for kids from neighboring, wealthier areas to be subjected to violence and fail to learn anything, so you get less segregated schools.
Let’s hope Parker proves to be better at governing than Adams. But so far so good, IMO. Good staff picks for the most part aside from some machine pandering where the deputy will be the real boss.
"plentiful housing" = 100% agree! YIMBY FTW
"that conditions in poor neighborhoods don't deteriorate too much" = carceral urbanism go brrrrrr
I totally agree with you in principle, just, keeping conditions from deteriorating is difficult and complicated. Leaving aside the "ACAB/law enforcement is EviL and RaCiSt" crowd, there are genuine tradeoffs here. Say that research shows that stop-and-frisk significantly reduces gun violence but it also hurts innocent young Black men who get unfairly stopped over and over due to profiling; what should you do then? Is stop-and-frisk a net good or bad? And that's just one example.
What is SG? Singapore?
"The us really lacks in socioeconomically diverse communities."
I'd be interested to understand how accurate this is. I live in what I think of as a pretty diverse community with incomes spread between what I'd guess to be from 15% to 99% of the income range all within a couple of miles. Their kids attending mostly the same schools.
If you’re talking about “a couple miles” that sounds like a larger radius than I was imagining THPacis meaning by the word “community”. I would guess that larger community is made up of a bunch of smaller communities, each much more homogenous.
I know I harp on this endlessly but I like my neighborhood all the more knowing how rare it is to have a place this racially *and* socioeconomically diverse. Half black, quarter white, tenth Asian, probably 20-odd families in the top 5% of the national income distribution like us, a few hundred further professional-class folks, a majority of middle-class homeowners and a bunch of working class renters.
You’re in Philly, right?
I feel like my neighborhood in Seattle is pretty similar tbh
The last sentence is key. Are kids of the 99% and 15% going to the same school?
Sometimes?
I grew up in the "wealthy" school district in Austin and had a friend who got reduced lunch. We weren't 99%, but were ... 95%? and he was ... 25%(I'm just guessing based on the reduced lunch, I don't know - I know he was noticeably poorer)
Dead on. There are some diverse neighborhoods in some cities but even in these places, the public schools are often nearly all people of color. My own view, based largely on my personal experience, is that racism (and the effects thereof) will continue, as it has for centuries, unless and until all kids attend diverse schools. Living in the same area helps but many essential noneducational after-school activities, such as sports, clubs, theater, music, etc., will reflect the composition of the schools kids attend. Churches, leisure activities and many other aspects of daily life frequently are also segregated -- defacto but with the same result.
Reducing residential segregation remains very important, but does not, by itself, change enough ignorance and racism over generations. Kids are not racist until they are taught or shown how to be so.
I don’t disagree but I find it interesting that I spoke about class and you switched to purely racial terms.
This should fairly easy to calculate. Just look at the SES diversity in census block group’s associated with school boundaries. You could do the whole country in less than an hour.
Except in some places the richer segment doesn’t send their kids to the local school. It’s easy to live and close proximity to other people without knowing almost anything about them.
Yep this is the case in my neighborhood. Census tract is extremely diverse; the middle/upper-class white parents send their kids to the Catholic school across the street from the public one.
What if they’re not catholic? Is catholic just code for rich people’s school with no theological vestige left?
That's true especially given the "Bowling Alone" phenomenon in US neighborhoods.
I was just commenting about my daughter's private school -- I feel like in her world, our family is sort of at the median of income levels.
Which is *fucking insane*. Our family is in the top 1-2% nationally, and probably the top 5% for our high-COL area. When I went to a schmancy private high school, our students definitely oversampled the top range of the income distribution, but I feel like there were a solid number of people who came from ordinary working class families, due to a combination of financial aid and the fact that education wasn't so ridiculously expensive back then. But my daughter I feel like there's exactly one kid in her class who isn't from the top 10% by income (that being the child of someone who works at the school and presumably gets a very heavy discount to tuition by virtue of that).
This kind of segregation into economic class can't be healthy. But I'm like Miles here -- I'm definitely part of the problem, but can't seem to find a way to thread the needle, where you want your kid to have some exposure to stuff from poorer areas without totally giving up the higher-income advantages.
For upper-income kids, the specific school (or college) they attend matters a lot less than the upper-income parents think they do. (Within some constraints, not talking the lowest-performing schools.) Also, the "higher-income advantages" don't disappear if a child goes to a regular, average public school. Heck, the money we save by sending our kids to average public schools may improve the kind of financial help we can give them in adulthood!
I’ve done the opposite, the burbs are dreadfully boring. Hopefully my kids develop a more nuanced view.
This is a tough one. I send/ sent my white kids to urban schools. They have definitely been targeted for their race, but their schools are about 20% white. I am not sure that I would send them to schools that were below 8 or 10% white because they would be a target. I imagine the same is true of non-white students in mostly white environments.
When they were younger, they did have some perhaps racist ideas based on the behavior of kids in their school (e.g. who was likely to yell and swear at teachers), but understood the context of that by middle school.
There are more disruptions in their school than in the suburbs, but the parents are way less annoying, and they don't have the same achievement stress. They also have a much more nuanced view of things than many of their suburban peers - e.g. they have friends who have been in and out of homelessness whose families work hard. They are also much less afraid of going about in the world - my oldest two are in college in Chicago. They do look down their noses and laugh at the many people who are afraid to come to our city in broad daylight since they have been traversing the city by bus, bike, and foot since middle school. I sometimes worry that others' laughable fears have made them too blase about real dangers of crime.
One of the reasons we've decided to stay in the city now that we have our kid in a decent school is that Philadelphia suburban parents in the "best" districts are incredibly illiberal on most identity issues and nearly as status-conscious as the parents of kids in NYC elite private schools.
The city, more diverse both racially and in terms of views and class, is a healthier environment for us and her school is still excellent.
City schools can be a good option if you live in the right neighborhood. Oftentimes individual urban elementary schools are not very diverse because of neighborhood-level segregation, but there are also often exceptions. And once you get to high school, you can usually go the magnet route. Middle school can be fraught though, depending on how the schools in one's city are organized.
In my view the ideal demographic breakdown for a school's student body is (1) No one race has more than 40% of the population, (2) Nearly all kids' families are between let's say the 35th and 85th percentiles of the income distribution. It's hard to find schools like that in suburbs, particularly in places that have a million small gerrymandered school district boundaries - although paradoxically, you *can* find schools that meet those criteria in Northern NJ and no state has more small school districts than NJ.
Ehh, the historically "best" two districts are very white and very liberal. And in any case, avoiding the politics problem still doesn't avoid the "status-seeking insanity" problem.
Is it really racist though if they are consistently observing certain racial groups (and primarily only those groups) engaging in that disruptive behavior?
I get stereotyping from a few isolated incidents is bad, but so is asking them not to believe their “lying eyes.” How have you guided them to think about it differently?
Anecdote, but one of my best friends became a public school teacher last year. Despite coming from an incredibly wealthy, educated background, her experience convinced her that it’s more important to get the underperforming kids up to average than to get the gifted kids to reach their full potential.
At the same time, she’s applied to become a permanent teacher in an overwhelmingly white district, because she says the stereotype is true. The black kids are unmanageable without two teachers in the room. The white kids are better, and the Asian kids are obedient to the point that it’s creepy.
Myself and my siblings moved into an area that was predominantly Latino when I was 9, and we are white. We were absolutely bullied specifically because of our race. As many stand-up comedians have noted, when you grow up in that kind of environment, you learn pretty quickly that if someone says, "hey white boy!" in a crowded room, you're probably being addressed, or if you overhear the word "guero" within earshot you're probably being talked about. I know a lot of white kids who harbor feelings of animosity towards Hispanic people and will cite these situations as their canon events.
It's interesting how that breaks down differently across kids, though, and I'm guessing it's mostly due to parents. When we were kids and got bullied, my dad was always crystal clear to put the blame on the individual and not anywhere else. My dad spanked me a number of times I could count on two hands (and this was the 80s/90s, so, not a ton by the measure of the day) but one thing he was unequivocal about was that if he ever found out we were being racist or prejudiced, he'd get the belt out like his dad did.
My siblings and I all have lots of Latino friends. I've never once heard anyone in my family disparage Latino people as a whole. I speak Spanish, and I married into a Mexican-American family. My kids are half Latino.
a confession I would not make under my real name: I am white, but I do have some bias against poor white people from the way they treated me when I was growing up. More of a classist than a racist, basically.
It's why Trump gets under my skin, even though I know those deplorables love that he's able to irritate me. A vicious circle. But man, my dark heart sometimes does just want to see them lose, to show them I was right and they were wrong.
I also feel this sometimes about rednecks. I grew up around a fair number of poor southern whites, and while I love some things about the culture, I detest other parts of the culture. There is a part of those people that love ignorance, they wallow in it like pigs and it gives them life.
I kind of feel the same way about upper-middle class white progressives! After spending the first half of my childhood peacefully growing up with rednecks and poor black people, experiencing the blatant classism of upper-middle class Democrats was quite shocking.
The grossest thing was how often they would use accusations of racism and sexism against poor people while presenting much more bigoted opinions that were apparently acceptable because they knew the right language to use.
I share this frustration as well. It's a counter balance to my dislike of the worst parts of redneck culture. However, it remains true that I fear a poor and uneducated mob much more than I do a well educated and moderately salaried mob. The more desperate the populism the more violent the revolution.
I feel this living in Seattle
I think a lot of Democrats feel this way. And these feelings come across loud and clear. The question for the educated is how to rise above these feelings.
Matt talks about doing real things that work, being pragmatic. The real win here isn’t rubbing a loss in their face but figuring out a positive relationship more like Obama had (to some degree).
I am trying to follow this advice in my own politics. I have been outspoken against the DEI & woke view of the world. I still feel this way. But as I start to see shifts towards anti-wokeness winning some battles and can see us moving forward I wonder where some of it can be embraced. It isn’t that it’s 100% wrong on everything. Maybe there are olive branches that can be extended. How do we salvage the legitimate concerns and incorporate them into where we go next? We need more leaders who can embrace this kind of thinking.
I grew up in a strict, no tolerance for bigotry household. Funny thing, the only 2 groups of people we were allowed to make fun of: un-educated southern white people and French Canadians.
What do French Canadians get made fun of for?
I'm afraid the reasons for this from my father are lost to time. He and my mother were born in Canada but left for the U.S. in the mid '60's. And though I was born in Canada.... and I get all the milage I can from this fact.... I was quite young when we left Canada. And my dad passed away in 2020 at the ripe old age of 90.
I'm just speculating here, but I think, at least historically, there was tension between French Canadians and English Canadians. Perhaps some older Canadians can speak to this as I am just guessing.
I do remember a joke my father used to tell from time to time, which I thought was quite funny but involved French speakers. But I will keep it to myself as I was never good at telling jokes.
Americans: “hah hah, funny frogs with le accent”
Anglo-Canadians: “these people are dangerous and biologically alien”
Yes. I grew up in a poor rural community and was middle class (i.e. college educated parents, household income of 60K-80K in the 90s) and better off financially than most of my peers. To the poor white kids I was "rich", to the black and latino kids I was "white." White was better.
That’s how I feel about Christians, unless they’re Episcopalians that are just there for the wine after the service. Those folks are cool.
I grew up around way too many Southern Baptists
Shit, I'm happy to tell anyone that I don't like Boston Irish guys named Jimmy or Danny with flat brim Celtics hats and CZ earrings, or the Quebecoix.
“Curate diversity” - what the heck is the point of that ? Isn’t that the most distorting of all?
Curated diversity means being able to be act racistly while appearing non-racist, an invaluable service for many Americans.
"Curated diversity" is taking quite a beating in these comments, so I'll be contrarian and speak up in its favor. I think the point of "curated diversity" is that, when you're surrounded by people who are of diverse races but who are similar to you in other respects - education level, social class, political views - it destroys accusations of racism qua racism. It distinguishes between "I hate XYZ race/nationality" (clearly bad, racist) vs. "I tend to dislike XYZ race/nationality people, because they tend to hold views and/or have habits that I hate" (possibly still bad and problematic, but much more understandable than hating someone simply because of their skin color).
Highly recommended reading by Scott Alexander on this topic: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
But if they don’t get into the right preschool, they’ll never get into Harvard!
Appreciate the candor. I think this is an unfortunately common experience, which people are (understandably!) pretty reluctant to talk about in Polite Society for fear of being lumped in with capital-R Racists. Lots of "irrational" fears have their genesis in negative childhood experiences. Like I spent decades being deadly afraid of dogs due to one bad experience at 5. It's the mark of a mature adult to move on from such beliefs built on sand - but also deeply unhelpful to be told those events shouldn't have been impactful, that reacting that way makes you a bad person (no room for repentence? blaming the victim?), or that ever having admitted to racism taints one forevermore. People can learn and grow, but only if given the freedom to do so.
Reminds me of a popular pro-diversity argument, that conservatives have no grounds to complain about colored folks because they never interact with them irl. Which, no? That's such a provincial understanding, and also how would you know, and also if the end goal is widespread integration then that's self-defeating.
I don't think you need to send your kids to an "inner city" school, but a better approach to "curated diversity" (if that means what I think it means) would be to either (a) move to a genuinely middle-class neighborhood or municipality where no one race predominates, or (b) send your kids to a Catholic school, some of which have diversity without so much "curation."
You've seen and verified White Fragility?
When they’re not plagiarizing…
He left a high value long comment and you're picking out one line and are making a ton of ridiculous assumptions about all aspects of his life. It is funny to me that you get to make a bunch of assumptions about everyone else’s life but the second someone says anything negative about you freak out and whine to the moderators.
Not appropriate for this comment section and I wouldn’t be surprised if you received a temp ban for this comment chain. I’m sympathetic to a lot of your arguments but you need to dial it back.
You’re being unfair to Danny. He used to be bullied by Black kids in a poor school, so it’s only natural that he wants to spare his children the same experience. No parent wants to see their kids bullied. It’s not “neuroticism.”
I interpreted his use of the phrase "curated diversity" to be an acknowledgement that the "diversity" was superficial but he was still choosing private school over a public school with "true" diversity due to his personal experiences. I did not interpret the "curated diversity" to be part of the appeal. I could be wrong, it's happened before.
Marie, I like your comments and I don't want to come across as arguing in bad faith, so please correct me if I misunderstood you.
It seems pretty clear from Danny's comment that he wants racial/ethnic diversity without the kind of problems that come with, well, a lot of public schools: truancy, low academic performance, behavioral problems, etc.
Are you saying that a school full of high-achieving, well-behaved students who happen to be a combination of Black, Hispanic, Asian and white is "superficially" diverse? How so?
Are you saying that it's not true diversity unless it comes with socioeconomic diversity? But socioeconomic diversity in this country, sadly, often comes with a bunch of problems that tend to be, so to speak, *concentrated* in the lower SES strata, and I can't blame any middle-class parent for wanting to avoid that for their children's sake.
That’s a bit uncharitable. It makes sense for people to go like “I want ethnic heterogeneity in my kids’ school, but not via the ghetto.”
Obviously “diversity curation” is ridiculous in practice (private schools in NYC, when taking brochure photos, will openly shuttle black kids around with the photographer) but there’s an organic desire for the combination of ethnic/national/religious heterogeneity and exclusion of the underclass*.
*Characterized by joblessness, normalization of disorder, and so on.
+100 very well said. That's what I was getting at with my reply to THPacis below. Along these lines, have you read the piece by Scott Alexander on racism? Here's the link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
Yeah, it's good.
That screenshotted take is a trip. How someone could watch The Wire and think everything bad is the fault of individuals just making bad choices is a trip. It's rare to see a show address explicitly systemic issues and how those hurt innocent people. The fact that Twitter cannibalized blogging and takes like this now get 116,000 views shows the (political) internet has gotten worse over the past decade.
Yeah. I spent that entire show marveling at how Simon was showing how the system worked and the parallels between the legitimate and criminal power structures.
On the bright side, people have always had dumb takes, and they will continue to have dumb takes. I would bet there's more good writing and solid thinking on the internet than there was 15-20 years ago. But there's demand for the dumb takes too.
I agree with you on the first part, but I'm skeptical of the second (at least if we define the past as 10 years ago instead of 20). When I look at sites like the AV Club, Slate, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, etc., the quality of the culture/arts writing has gone down significantly. Vox's culture writing has long been one of the weakest part of the website. A lot of the current writers were weirdos who marinated in insular communities on Twitter, Tumblr, and LiveJournal before they got hired anywhere.
When you can't make a living doing something anymore, only the trust fund weirdos will be interested.
Vox used to be my favorite news source, and now I don’t bother with it at all. Such a shame.
Right. I actually just started watching the Wire again and the theme is the exact opposite.
Not only that, Simon is a well known progressive!
I'm just here for the perpetual "Wire" citations.
Clay Davis raining down on everybody
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4UXJZgOiVAI&pp=ygUPQ2xheSBkYXZpcyBzaGl0
What we need in American policing is more cops who communicate during investigations primarily through the f word: https://youtu.be/m5ksTY6Dvf0?si=tRTdpgULuR9iwK1K
The moral dimension thing makes me think about how much better our politics would be if the Republican Party hadn’t sought to become “the white party”. Whatever progressives think, the moralizing language is actually pretty popular with African American voters, so long as it’s not coming from random white people.
You could easily imagine a lot of stuff being done that’s largely impossible in the real world simply because both parties have large African American constituencies divided by cultural but united by economic interests.
Nixon’s southern strategy was simply too compelling to resist. The New Deal coalition had dominated American politics for 35 years and kept Congress in Democratic hands for all but a few of them. The only Republican president during that period was a war hero who didn’t even admit to being a Republican until shortly before the election. Without the southern strategy, Republicans might have gone the way of British liberals, and for very similar reasons.
I don't understand Democrats' complaints about Nixon's Southern Strategy. The alternative is the segregationists remain Democrats. Is that a better outcome?
The alternative is that NEITHER party makes white grievance/racism the basis of its platform? You could have two parties, both equally appealing to Black people, that disagree on, say, taxation, the social safety net, and foreign policy.
While ideally that would have the best option, the segregationsts were going to be in one of the two parties for the same reasons Black people didn't form their own party: first past the post elections make it nearly impossible for small, minority parties to have any political power. Southern segregationists and racists (and before them actual slaver-owners) had been a part of the Democratic Party for a 160 years before the dawn of the Civil Rights movement. At that point they were going to remain Democrats or become Republicans.
Fair enough, I was gesturing at a hypothetical scenario in which enough white people realize "hey guys, racism is actually really bad, let's not" that the racists and segregationists become a tiny minority, and that minority splits evenly between Republicans and Democrats, but isn't strong enough to dominate either party.
Yes, I think most Democrats preferred the career arc of Robert Byrd and George Wallace over Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms.
AEJ had a recent paper linking stories to of local political corruption in Italy making news and shoplifting.
I think the abject descent into moral depravity by the GOP has helped fuel an air of impunity and normalized antisocial behavior. They act like Trump is a moral exemplar to aspire to rather than an unfaithful, mendacious, thin skinned, petty, traitorous, and vindictive con artist.
I agree wholeheartedly, but the left has also contributed to what seems like a broader sense that “the system” is unfair, so you might as well get yours. Of course Trump lacks the character to lead the nation, but there seems to be a kind of perfect storm of antisocial behavior and while the GOP’s tragic descent is a huge part of that, I’m not sure it would have got the traction it has without assistance.
Noah Smith has written on the moral bankruptcy of the left. We all saw than on 10-8. They act entitled to a moral high ground because the GOP has gone so off the rails purely via contrarianism.
Sigh. It boils all down to bully logic eventually.
That was basically Hillary Clinton’s redevelopment pitch. People hated it. So now we’re trying to recreate manufacturing jobs in a cult cargo way even though 1) it won’t scale and 2) we’re trying to do everything bagel liberalism in the process.
I am not sure if I agree or disagree with you (I just don't know), but your reference to cargo cults actually makes a lot of sense and was helpful for me in how I want to think about industrial policy (again not that its all bad but I can see how it could devolve into cargo cultism). Thanks for the insight.
I genuinely find it scary as fuck as a bisexual atheist. I know what a more moralizing politics is like and you know it's not great.
If the last few years haven’t amounted to a “moralizing” politics then I can’t imagine what would. There are lots of varieties of moralizing politics. Some may be helpful and some aren’t.
I'm fine with moralizing politics when it's in the vein of telling uncomfortable truths to people on your side. Not so much when it's preening that makes you and your people feel good about themselves.
They're coming to take your fedora!
I don’t see how the moralizing would actually increase. You’d just have black cultural conservatives in the GOP, changing very little in the culture war except where it touches race specifically.
I worked in shared office space and a fast food restaurant company was holding a training for a room full of black workers. In the screen was a slide of white blonde women exhibiting work-appropriate hairstyles.
It struck me as white supremacy in a way that “show up to work on time” does not.
One of the ironies of the efforts to stamp out racism is the erasure of minority faces from public life. Gone from the slide of how to wear your hair when working the fryer; gone from advertising, etc.
This is a bizarre take. I feel like a majority of ads I see involve someone who isn’t White
Once you accept that voters are insanely heterodox in why they choose a candidate, it’s easy to see that there’s a large constituency for Politics Dad that this stuff appeals to.
Back when I was a lot less disillusioned and a bit more R-curious, I used to say that conservatives got a lot of things wrong but the most important thing right: culture matters. I thought the evidence pointed in the direction of economic situations influencing culture and not the other way around, but it was a least a debate worth having and conservatives seemed to engage with it in good faith.
Of course, the past 15+ years have been spent proving Wilhoit correct: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
Abbott mentioned the Southern Strategy of the 1970s downthread, but the Republicans had trended toward being "the White party" longer before that in the 20th century, with the racial dimension often intersecting with immigration. And by the 1928 election, Herbert Hoover had even made significant gains in the South, . Had the Great Depression not happened, and thus the New Deal coalition being formed, the GOP's swing in that direction may have looked clearer much earlier.
"it has to come from within"
No, it has to come from a place of giving a damn about the people in question.
Enough of this bullshit whereby my identity determines what I can and cannot say, who I can and cannot criticize.
I think the two of you are getting at the same thing. It’s not that it has to come from a place of *actually* giving a damn, it’s that it has to come from a person that is *understood* as actually giving a damn, which means from someone that is *seen* as part of the community. Matching in race is one asset that can majorly assist being seen that way, but Clinton was seen as “the first black president” in ways that Obama wasn’t, and I think that aspect of the perception gets at some of the relevant points (and clearly isn’t about “my identity” in the sense you are worried about).
Fair enough.
I'm still remembering that exchange where someone told me that I wasn't "of the black community" despite living in a black community, so it's possible I'm reading too much into Danny's post.
I don't think he's talking about that sort of high-minded identitarian crap. More how black Americans will make cultural criticisms and so on among themselves but get understandably uneasy when someone else joins in and says "yeah, those ghetto thugs are ruining the country!"
I live in a middle-class black neighborhood and have never had any issue discussing these issues with folks here.
I speak the language of "tough love" that they do pretty fluently, my opinions are mostly rooted in evidence that I try to relay succinctly instead of fluff feelings, and I contribute to our community and participate in our institutions, thus have credibility that I give a shit rather than merely wanting to put "those people" in their place.
It ain't that hard, and it's a singular failure that more white folks don't try to participate in those discussions, especially among those who genuinely do give a shit.
My counterpoint of course is that you're doing this as a personal acquaintance in a private sphere and not a random outgroup voice shouting from the ether. People will make the judgement that you're speaking in good faith.
Christ knows plenty of identiarian-lefty white people feel free to pontificate on this shit, airing views wildly, insanely out of step with black majority viewpoints, and no one backhands *them* over the nearest table and tells them to shut the fuck up.
The people doing the shouting down of "heterodox views" are overwhelmingly white, dammit!
Wilson's ideas, like those of Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph, are out of fashion with white liberals these days. And it's too bad.
I appreciate SB highlighting these important thinkers.
Bravo - really well done and made it worth my $8 for the entire month.
As a center right reader originally from the rural part of the PA rustbelt this hit on a lot of levels for me. Overall though, it just feels like there isn't enough opportunity for too many people that aren't fortunate enough to be born into the suburbs (using that term loosely). While a lot of the jobs issues are more macro issues than any specific policy, there are an awful lot of people who are angry about their perceived lack of opportunity and lack of access to the "system" to fix it and are now turning to politicians like Trump as he has been the only one to date that seemingly hasn't paid lip service to their plight (even picking up votes from a historically entrenched Black voting block). If a politician could eschew the current status quo dynamics and just focus on those two groups you would have a really powerful populist base that I think could win a lot of elections (albeit easier said than done).
Trump politics aside, a couple key pieces stood out to me:
- While this might be unpopular here, I'm in pretty firm disagreement that the average person on the right "hates public services and job programs for the urban poor." That feels like a Dem talking point to color your opponent as the enemy. I think the reality is that there is a lot of easy data available that shows further investment in dysfunctional public programs is a really bad use of money. If you could do a better job proving ROI you would get a lot further here. That said, I know you are arguing in good faith here since you mention Lottery Charter Schools. (As an aside, huge believer in Lottery schools. My wife works for one in Prince William County and the results are stark compared to the surrounding area)
- I had never heard of the book The Declining Significance of Race, but it sounds right in the wheelhouse of what I believe personally and echoes my personal experience much more than many of the other mental models that are being shouted at me on Twitter
- The section on When Work Disappears absolutely should be tied to the Rust Belt as well as inner cities. The town I grew up in vs the town I was born in would be a great case study in the knock on effects that happen when the jobs leave vs when you can keep at least a portion of the core. It is a really vicious cycle and requires innovative thinking to get out of the cycle
>But would conservatives, in fact, favor a significant investment in providing better public services and employment in Baltimore?
How would 'investment' result in 'better public services and employment' in Baltimore? What's the mechanism? This sounds dangerously like suggesting fixing problems is easy, as though public investment is like sticking cash in index funds.
I suppose the deeper question is why has liberal America fallen for the nonsense of Kendi instead of trying to find actual solutions?
All of the hard solutions also require money. A recurring theme on SB is that the details matter - so you can't just dump money and expect it to get 'fixed', but anything at all is going to require an investment.
“Investment” is supposed to mean sustained effort and attention over the long term. Literally putting on the uniform to become part of a community. It’s unfortunate that it’s become a euphemism for throwing money around because it’s a good word.
I just wanted to come in and say I GODDAMN love the 2nd season - I fight with everyone and say it’s so underrated (there’s ‘white ethnic’ politics and union drama, and that awesome ending)
Yes, season 2 is brilliant and only idiots don't like it.
Anyone who watched and likes the wire is already in my good books. But yes season 2 is very memorable.
It’s up there for the best season. Easy top 2.
I’m from somewhere very close to Middletown Ohio and I remember reading Hillbilly Elegy and nodding my head. I recognized so much of that story.
I don’t understand the sympathy for these people. Work didn’t go away you just needed to become a nurse in Phoenix. But relocating and retraining that a huge swath of professionals did is somehow a non-starter.
What’s so wrong about wanting the political process to keep jobs in your community rather than expecting you to enter a stereotypically female profession and move to a place where summer highs average 110 degrees?
Because expecting the state to step in and use force to keep you from having to do something girly while raising costs for everyone who doesn't work in your field and all the while literally starving foreigners is so deeply immoral. Especially for a group of people who walk around talking about how much they hate socialism and are capitalists.
I am also from a small town in Ohio. While I share your sentiment that Hillbilly elegy stuck a cord this comment does not. I don’t recall my grandfather or my uncle’s or my friend’s father’s debating becoming a nurse in Phoenix. I also don’t remember any of them complaining about socialism. They worked in factories when they could. Some did move to Florida or Texas and some moved back - some didn’t. I moved away and went to college and didn’t move back.
I really am unsure what I’m trying to say here but your comment landed with me as “I’m from this place and understand them...” and then you go on to make a standard political comment that unnecessarily and weirdly invokes gender norms and is critical of people who were harmed by global economic forces that they had little to do with.
I was taught the basics of free trade using comparative advantage to raise all ships. Okay it does logically make sense and at the macro level probably works. But it comes at a price to many who are harmed by it.
To condemn poor whites from Ohio as not being empathetic to poor people in China seems batshit crazy. Oh they’re supposed to just take one for team humanity and be happy about it.
I couldn’t pay the cable bill but it’s okay because it’s a kind of charity to a Chinese person. I know there is a well paying nursing job in Phoenix waiting on me (even though I struggle in school and may not be able to pass some of the courses to be qualified). So it’s my fault for not moving away from my struggling mother and the rest of my family and friends.
This is the kind of leftist, elite riotousness that fuels people’s support of Trump. It wasn’t that long ago Obama won Ohio twice. He didn’t do it by taking this approach.
I heard him on a podcast recently talking AI. Man I miss that guy. He makes a lot of sense. The current Dems largely do not.
Hear hear!
Just a quibble that there’s nothing leftist, properly understood, about “I got mine, and everyone else can screw themselves”.
Agreed, the American leftist view here is that less fortunate rural whites should support free trade because it lifts starving foreign populations out of poverty (along with giving themselves cheaper goods). When I was learning this in college little was said about the people who would suffer as the overall good was advanced.
The left is usually very concerned about those kind of issues but not so much for these “folks”. There are other posts here that openly acknowledge that lack of empathy and even reveling in their misfortune.
YES! I was there in primary school with these MFs in the 80s and everyone was crystal clear that the era of grunt work was over and an education was critical to success. And yet these kids still phoned it in and teased us nerds!
And now I'm supposed to feel sorry for them? Play stupid games & win stupid prizes, fools.
Yes, that’s a great political philosophy—let’s punish large groups of people forever because some kids were mean to you in high school!
honestly, I support a strong social safety net WAY MORE than those folks do. My preferences would help them materially, but they are too proud and too misinformed...
They say they do not want my help. They could totally have it if they asked. But they won't get my respect - and it seems like they really want respect for some reason, versus accepting that they were wrong and they lost fair and square.
Regardless of what policies you do or don’t support, it’s wild to use your anecdotal experience as a teenager to make sweeping pronouncements about entire groups of people. “Those folks” are not monolithic. Nobody is!
People want a purpose and a chance to improve social rank, not just a safety net / means of subsistence. I think they correctly identified that cosmopolitans enacted free trade policies over the past several decades against that desire, and are supporting efforts to undo those changes.
Of course people want respect. You can try and ignore them as being bad/wrong, but when it gets to be a significant size of the population, it is not clear that doing so would be wise or just.
Population-level disrespect is a moral and political dead end.
I wouldn't say it's immoral, but it's just not practical. This dynamic process has been going on for 100s of years now! And the reason people MUST help themselves is simple: no one is coming to save them. It's sink or swim.
At the same time, I spend a lot of time in Erie, PA (hardcore rust belt) and while it is true the region as a whole has declined, individual incomes are still MUCH higher than they were 30 years ago. (Just not as high as in growing regions.) I actually think it's a taste of the future as we see the population age and decline: fewer people, but the people who are left are much wealthier.
Can you say more? What has kept Erie incomes growing? What do people work at now that they didn't do before?
The people I know work as mail carriers, nurses, realtors, auto technicians, construction, social workers, teachers, waitresses, jail administrative staff.
The incomes keep growing because the US and Pennsylvania economies keep growing. Family sizes have decreased A LOT in the past generation. So the local population has aged (into social security, Medicare, and pensions -- all big sources of income for the local economy), it has also shrunk somewhat, and there's been a shift away from manufacturing and toward government/healthcare/service sector employment. Income has certainly grown much more slowly per capita than in California or Texas, but the cost of living is low and people enjoy the benefits of cheap global manufacturing.
You look around and SO MANY middle class people have trucks/SUVs, own their own homes, have a boat and/or a camper/RV. Plenty to eat and flat screen TVs in every room. This was just not true in the 70s and 80s.
What is ALSO true is social capital has massively declined (there used to be so much civic activity that is now mostly gone) and there is a lot of real estate blight from closed factories. So it has sort of a depressing air, especially for old timers who can remember the good old days, when they were young, relatively poor, and went to the Elks lodge and church and bowling every week.
Thanks. Very informative.
The comment on the decline of social capital makes me ponder. How much of it is an unfortunate effect of larger forces or is instead a choice? That is, how much do people really enjoy or prefer those types of social interaction? Would you (in the abstract, not *you*) give up the large flatscreen TV in favor of one of those 70s versions if you (abstract again) could have activities at the Elks lodge, and church and bowling every week?
The move to Phoenix is probably dramatic, but the point is sound. At a certain point, you gotta recognize that the jobs are gone and not coming back and re-tool your life plan.
Tom Nichols had a good article about this in the Atlantic about the town where he grew up. People he was actually friends with as children have memories of adults having well-paying jobs in factories that were closed before well before the author and his friends were born. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/the-american-obsession-with-decline/619656/
If you worked in a factory for 35 years, and it closes, and you're now 65, with health issues and no job prospects, you absolutely have my sympathy. But if you are this person's 40-year old child, who worked there for 10 years and assumed you'd work there for another 25 just because your dad did, eh, less so. You sticking around a dead town, being mad at 70 because the steel mill closed three decades back, and waiting to be interviewed in a diner by someone from the Times is not a failure of government.
That's a silly image: a bunch of rural diner patrons all desperately trying to get the attention of an NYT reporter who walks into the restaurant.
Dall-E agrees with you, apparently. Those images will now haunt me forever. Thanks, Ben
I remain sympathetic because the job centers of this country have done everything possible to engineer a housing shortage that keeps that 40 year old out.
The manufacturing areas tried to fight history by keeping the factory, but that failed. The urban areas tried to fight history by blocking new housing, and they succeeded.
I'm not unsympathetic, for a little bit. If someone told me that had a good thing going down at the plant that closed down a year ago and have had trouble finding a steady gig since, I'll listen and buy them a beer. But if that plant closed 10 years ago? Eh. Not so much.
I’m from the Detroit area and feel very similarly about this. My father started out working in a factory (later moved to management in a trajectory that would be impossible now) and it was obvious to me, even as a child, that planning to have a blue collar career as an auto worker was a bad idea. It was never presented to me that way, but my not getting a college degree was unthinkable to my parents (neither of whom had one).
Right. When I was 21 in 2004, minimum wage here in IL was $5.50/hour and I had a job in a factory making $17.00/hr, with a decent amount of OT to boot. That place closed and moved to Indiana. I could've spent time being mad, but instead I got the first job I could find, which was slightly above minimum wage at GameStop, and then progressed from there to working in restaurants, where I eventually became a manager. In order to get better positions, I had to be willing to move or commute, but I know so many people who only want jobs within 10 minutes of their house. That's great for quality of life, but you are really limiting yourself in terms of options.
Yeah you were 21! Of course it was easy to pick up and move away.
I'll use a better example than myself.
When my dad was 30, with a wife and three kids, he got a job offer in California. Good money, great opportunity. He took the job. We drove from New Jersey to California in a minivan. A year later, the business was doing well, but the partners who owned it had a major falling out across personal and financial lines, decided to liquidate, and closed the place down. My dad found himself on unemployment for the first time in his life while he worked the phones trying to find a new job. The best opportunity he found was back on the east coast, with a boss he had worked for in the past and hated. So a year after doing it once before, we packed up the five of us (with my mom also now pregnant in the third trimester with twins), and we moved back to the east coast, again via the same minivan, about a year after we first moved out there.
It didn't have to be that way. He could've settled for a job that paid way less, and strung out the unemployment for as long as he could, or done a million other things that people do when faced with that situation, but he and my mom decided moving was the best opportunity, so he took it.
Sure. But I'm 40 now, with wife and kids, and I'm just as flexible now with moving as I was then.
David Autor has written about the disappearance of career ladders like you have described. It is actually a huge problem that large segments of the population that once had more options for upward mobility have now lost those ladders.
Not just that, but flip side of better universal education plus our cultural push for tertiary education as the route to success... is that a lot of the folks who would have climbed those ladders while retaining understanding of and sympathy for blue collar folks are now skimmed off and sent to university.
I don't think it's a coincidence that you don't really have many erudite, self-educated, personable union organizers from blue collar backgrounds, and the white-collar kids trying to figure out how to do it aren't good at barnstorming at all.
Similar to the problem by which a black parallel society exists in many cities (especially the Rust Belt) but then the "talented tenth" gets consistently siphoned off and integrated with the "College-American" mainstream.
(That's basically an ethnic group at this point.)
It's sad knowing successful people in their 60s who worked their way up the corporate ladder without even a college degree and comparing their competency to so many millennials I know we useless advanced degrees.
People have a right to their feelings whether those sentiments are valid or not. The sad truth is we cannot easily change people’s hearts, especially if acknowledging their own agency and complicity in their own situation hurts.
My one still protectionist view is if a plant/company closes down and lays off people, it should be responsible for it's workforce via the government forcing them to in a structured way - the 60 year old w/ 30 years basically continues to get paid until reitrement, while the 32 year old w/ 6 years experience gets maybe a training stipend for a year or so.
So if the State destroys my industry with, say, tariffs, I'm on the hook for years and years of ongoing costs out of pocket?
Wow, I can't wait to start a new and innovative manufacturing plant.
Unemployment insurance is structured better. Save up money when times are good instead of forcing already bankrupt companies to make big payouts.
A lot of people aren’t smart enough to be a nurse.
Not just smart but patience and tolerance for those situations are hard. I’m not sure I’d want people who are more at home in a construction or factory floor looking after dementia or NICU cases.
Or aren't able to complete the often bureaucratic administrative processes that permeate all of modern life. Then there are cultural differences between different fields of work.
I believe the argument is that the jobs didn’t disappear by a law of nature, free trade treaties were signed that hurt working class folks but which professions like law and medicine were excluded from. The US uses Chinese manufactured goods much more than Chinese doctors or lawyers. So effectively the country chose to sacrifice these folks. Also, the free trade treaties were supposed to put China on a path to democracy and that hasn’t worked out either.
I mean I do feel somewhat bad about the democracy claims not working out. Shanghai was lovely and man it would have been delightful if it had transitioned to a liberal democratic model along with getting wealthy.
I actually do have some sympathy towards this view that professionals protected themselves. Which is pretty shitty, no one should be protected from competition.
I'm not sure professionals protected themselves so much as manufacturing can be outsourced much more easily than personal services.
The thesis of “The Dream Hoarders”, by Richard Reeves, is that the upper middle class did engage in a lot of protectionism, but it’s more about zoning and school districts and licensing regulations than about import rules.
Yea, I find that thesis to be a lot more plausible even if I'm not sure I always think the characterization is quite right.
At least with lawyers, it's also protection. It's even fairly hard to practice nationally rather than in one state, let alone for a foreign lawyer (even an English speaking British one trained in a similar system) to.
I'm a lawyer and that's not really accurate. You can get any number of big to medium law, in-house, or compliance or contracts or similar type jobs anywhere in the country as long as you are barred in a state somewhere. The restrictions are on things like representing clients in the courts of a state in which you are not barred (though it is often possible to waive in). It's something but it's hardly some major barrier.
Regarding foreign lawyers systems of law even in other English speaking countries really don't translate at all. At my last company we had a subsidiary in Canada and I was reminded of this every time I got on the phone with local counsel.
Interstate practice is a major barrier. For instance, in Florida, they will let you "pro hac" in (i.e., come in to a case as an out of state lawyer) something like 5 times in 3 years. After that, you have to take the Florida bar.
And of course, local counsel requirements mean even when you do come in, your client has to spend extra money hiring a set of local lawyers.
As for your last point, I don't think you are arguing in good faith. Of course there are a ton of tasks that lawyers from other common law legal systems could handle just fine-- your salary (and mine) would just decrease if we let them do it. We're privileged enough, though, as a profession (most legislatures are full of lawyers!) that we only force factory workers in the midwest to do that (so we can pay cheaper prices for stuff) while exempting ourselves.
I visited China right before the Hong Kong crackdowns started, and it really is shocking how close they came to liberalizing before they wound the clock back a couple of decades. The bet almost paid off.
Well said. NAFTA wasn't an executive action, it was ratified by the Senate, which has always had disproportional rural representation. Rural people want to be angry at the urban elite, but it was their own politicians that sold them out. Dishearteningly so.
Pet peeve, but the Senate and Electoral College do no such thing. It's absolute population that matters.
A surprising number of mountain west states have surprisingly high urban population shares, for example.
It's my understanding that more jobs have been lost to automation than to outsourcing, and that's probably not going to change.
Slow industrial change is much easier to adapt to than rapid industrial change. So what you’re saying, while true, does not refute the claim that these communities were harmed by those agreements.
China is probably the big one. Without that, you probably have much more manufacturing move to Mexico which would have decreased blue collar immigration to the US.
Get back to me when we have decent licensing reciprocity regimes in either field, or when the lawyers' lobbying arms stop treating the entire field of law as a jobs program at the expense of literally every other outcome on earth.
In the meantime, it's pretty obvious to those of us not interested in defending our own classes perquisites and privileges that a lot of us professionals have buttered the shit out of our own bread.
"There is tons of foreign competition in medicine"
Consumer-facing or in the labor market?
If it's solely in the labor market, I don't think the 1/3 claim holds up because you are probably talking about foreign-born, not foreign-trained, doctors.
As of 2021, 1 in 5 US physicians were born *and* trained abroad per the AAMC.
This is way less than the competition manufacturing faces from abroad. Closer to 100%.
Don't they still need to complete a US residency?
Correct. They also need to have graduated from a medical school that meets requirements set out by the Educational Commission for Foreign Medical Graduates and prove some competency in speaking English. The requirement for completing a US residency is there even if they have already completed a residency program in their home country and have been practicing physicians.
Kevin Williamson is the best (and most entertaining) writer about this area -- better than JD Vance, in my view. The kerfuffle that kept him away from The Atlantic was a disservice to its readers.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/12/white-ghetto-kevin-d-williamson/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/underclass-character-eviction-court-native-born-americans-entrepreneurial-immigrants/
I reread ‘I Am Cancer’ once in a while, it’s just good writing.
It’s also odd because I feel he was maybe 5 years too early as right wing writers we t from feigning love for the white underclass to going full on élitist (I.e, Hanania)
Its a fair point that the solution is to move to a thriving area (I did it myself coming from a similar type of town), but not having sympathy is harsh and sounds disdainful for your fellow countrymen. The problem is that globalization (that led to the outsourcing of most manufacturing) was billed as "frictionless" and that new job training would be readily available and cheap. The reality is that moving 1,800+ miles away is in no way frictionless. Add on the cost of college effectively doubling since the late 90s and you can see why people are jaded.
Ro Khanna's advice to Democrats in the NYT today: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/04/opinion/artificial-intelligence-truckers-writers.html
I'm so sick of the constant demand to have sympathy for my abusers. In a very real sense I'm a refugee from a place that was violently intolerant and no one is ever going to be held accountable for the harms done but it's always on me to be infinitely magnanimous to both the literal people and to the people who want to uphold the norms and structure of that time and place.
I agree that some measure of exaggeration was done here. I actually didn't find it that hard to go to college and relocate--I did this later in life having had a genuine career in restaurants for 8 years between high school and college but it wasn't frictionless.
Dude, Ohio is now in favor of gay marriage by like 30 points.
It's a comfortable revenge fantasy to pretend all the people who don't agree with your politics are bigots and deserve for the social fabric of their homes to disintegrate, but... don't pretend it's anything other than a revenge fantasy.
Yes, the reality is that most of these rural places are economically obsolete; the secondary industries which support agriculture and resources extraction, as well as the logistics services to move those products to population centers, have gotten very efficient since 1960. Efficient enough that we no longer *need* towns of 1,000 every 10-15 miles and regional hubs of 30,000 in every county.
So they're going to disintegrate and depopulate because there's no longer a reason for them.
But your glee at the prospect is just sad, dude.
One thing that I like to think I have a good nose for is when someone's politics are primarily informed by experiences of schoolyard bullying. It rarely leads to well-adjusted takes.
Towns don't exist because "we" need them, they exist because people live there. Looking across the world, it seems that the US has decided that disintegrating communities because they are not determined to be economically viable is superior to finding ways for these communities to become first capable of supporting their members, and then able to produce value for the larger world. I don't understand why people don't value the basic human experience of living in a place among people who share similar experiences and values that are tied to geography. Like, SB comments seem to understand why you would live in the Bay Area or NY to share a certain geography with people who share values and experiences, but their minds boggle when anyone thinks that it's reasonable to want to do the same in another setting. It's the same human impulse, but since (theoretically) produces more money, it's given all the moral weight.
Towns exist because people settled there to do something of value. They grow, shrink, shift, move, or simply fade over time.
The US has too short a history to have a lot of this, and history isn't a great guide because we've only had industrial abundance for a bit less than a century.
I don't think it's unreasonable to want to live where you live, not in the least. But I see no practical path to trying to cast rural population distributions in amber. It's a very different story to say "too many people want to live in X so we need to figure out how to accommodate at least some of them" compared to "too few want to or are able to live in Y so we need to prop it up somehow.
About the best I have is to push industrial policies for strategic industries that increase employment in small and mid-sized cities and the exurbs of largers ones, all places in which prime industrial land is found. And also to redistribute the federal workforce to small and mid-sized cities as well.
Those places can exert a gravity well which props up the rural places in their orbit as commuter towns and leisure spots. You see it in rural Hudson Valley towns in NY state, Lancaster and Bucks counties near Philadelphia or Westmoreland near Pittsburgh, Western Maryland and Eastern West Virginia for DC...
But what in the name of God am I supposed to do to revive my mom's hometown of 500 people between Harrisburg and Sunbury? The place was a one-street, ten-house town until the early 1900's, when mechanization in local agriculture drove folks into town from the surrounding farms and necessitated the building of service shops, equipment dealers, small machine shops, a grain processing facility, and a few small logistics companies. Followed by a law office, a few accountants, a civil engineer, four restaurants, a small construction firm, an ice cream shop, a decent medical practice...
But all of those secondary industries are gone, replaced by dealers out of Harrisburg or Sunbury, a single machine shop in the whole valley and a roving team of mechanics, some local, some not, grain processing in a massive, centralized Cargill (or similar, not sure who has the local monopoly there) facility far away to the South in exurban Harrisburg. The equipment is reliable enough that employment in those industries has fallen by 80%. The service industries are gone too, down to a single restaurant running half-hours and the ice cream place.
Social Security receipts are now probably half of local household incomes, and of my mom's generation two-thirds of them left, and none of my uncle's kids and only one or two of their cousins and second cousins are still there.
Cities which are thriving to the point where they get in their own way are a solvable problem, about which we talk a lot because people have ideas.
My mom's hometown is not. There is nothing short of an outright command economy which will provide that town with a reason to exist. The area will inevitably revert to something similar to what it was prior to complex mechanization... a number of farmsteads (much smaller number and larger size than in 1900 of course) and a tiny, tiny village where a couple folks live to a run a general store and maybe a restaurant.
This is a great mini-essay.
I think you highlight something - in modern economies, skilled people with income are the most important resource. Get a critical mass of that resource and you have a town that will survive. The problem with many small towns is that the one factory or industry slowing down depletes that critical resource to much. The advantage of large cities is that (usually) they are diverse enough that they can survive even dramatic slowdowns in one industry.
In true YIMBY fashion, I'm hopeful that expanding WFH will allow more people to live where they want and not just where they have to live because of work - whether that is in an urban utopia or rural/small town picturesque fantasy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/rural-america-cities.html?unlocked_article_code=1.LE0.IU7W.gErQmiiZy591&smid=url-share
I actually think this is the core shared message of Christianity and utilitarianism - abusers are people too, and as long as we can stop people from receiving the abuse, we should be figuring out how to make things better for the (hopefully former) abusers too. I don’t necessarily care how you *feel* about the abusers (whether it is hate or sympathy or whatever) as long as you don’t visit abuse upon them.
I don’t think anybody is asking you to be infinitely magnanimous, just pointing out that you’re painting with a very broad brush, and apparently making judgements based on personal bitterness about experiences that happened when you were a teenager. You’re allowed to feel however you want, but what you’ve described here is not a coherent basis for a political philosophy.
This comment captures pretty well how identity politics warped economic liberalism into something unrecognizable.
The virgin "basket of deplorables" commenter versus the chad "my hometown deserves more fentanyl and fewer jobs because I got shoved into a locker."
Part of the problem is cost of relocation. First & last month’s rent, deposits, etc. If your job is going away, you’re probably not set up to handle all that, especially if you have a family. And housing cost generally, as I think we’re all aware. Your rent in Phoenix is going to be a bit higher than in Middletown.
It’s weird to me that liberals have begun saying this. Growing up in the 80s, I’d hear people in Kentucky as the crack epidemic took off saying “why don’t people just move away from all that to some place like here with no crime? (was a different time in that regard too)” Just wasn’t something I thought of as liberal, given the people that I heard saying it. It’s not easy and most people actually love the places they’re from, and the people there. Something I used to not appreciate as a kid looking to leave home as quickly as possible.
Chris Arnade has some pretty solid insights with the “somewheres/anywheres” dichotomy I think.
Easy for single males to pick up and follow work, as we saw in previous eras. Pretty difficult for everyone else.
I do think there should be some programs to help with this. I don't think it's nearly as impossible as people make it out to be.
I do tend to agree that the anywhere somewhere phenomenon may explain a lot more to this than I'm really wired to my brain. Like I was probably more at home as a foreign teacher than I would have been in the bigger cities near where I grew up. I find being rooted to a place kind of bizarre.
Yeah, how does 'move out of your old Kentucky home and get a job, idiot' not also imply 'just move out of the ghetto' as a solution to urban problems?
But like that should make sense too. I think we should just see a lot more fluidity in populations moving to new places. I feel like the only people who should be rooted in communities would be like quite wealthy people who don't really have to worry about anything. Being rooted in say Chevy Chase or Beverly Hills makes a ton of sense but I feel like we shouldn't even be rooted to a nation state let alone a community in it.
That sounds completely ignorant of human nature and how we organize ourselves, first into family/kin groups, then into larger towns/tribes. You want to dissolve community between people in the service of economic goals? That's crazy. People want to be close to the people they know and love, and given that the discourse around problems in the US is increasingly about alienation, atomization, radicalization, and distrust, we should be encouraging people to form and maintain stable communities, not to dissolve them constantly.
So, I actually take the unpopular side here and disagree with you. Those kinship/tribal connections are a big problem! That's the social capital that keeps outsiders down.
I absolutely do want everyone stirred around, meeting new people, forming new groups where their backgrounds and histories dissolve. I've posted before that I love how our modern system includes having our best & brightest leave their homes for 4 years to live amongst their academic peers - after which they typically migrate to the cities with the best economic opportunities rather than staying stuck in their original locations. Yay mobility!
Agree alienation is bad, but the solution is people learning how to form communities & having open communities that are not based on "our grandfathers arrived from the Old Country together so now we are a team from now till eternity"
That's the tension of modernity: direct trade-offs between economic dynamism and long lasting ties to a place and to other people.
reminds me of one of my favorite Slow Boring headlines: "Specialization and high-productivity? Try that in a small town!"
I mean maybe it is human nature but it's horrifying. Yes I want to dissolve community between people, not really in service of economics per se. All interaction should be had on a voluntary basis and to the extent that we can't survive that way well maybe we shouldn't survive at all then.
Sorry if I'm taking you too literally but I don't think I see how this could ever happen. Our very first interactions are involuntary: we meet our parents. Then we meet the people our parents know, and other kids, and our teachers. Over time many of us form bonds with some of those kids and adults. So when the plant closes and the jobs are in another state, some people are reluctant to leave those bonds. So which person is interacting with others voluntarily: the person who stays because they don't want to leave the people they've bonded with, or the person who leaves to meet new people even though they don't want to, out of economic necessity?
This is completely fucking insane.
Batshit, pants-on-head, drugged-out, shitting-in-aisle-nine insane.
Stop trying to get us to act as your therapist and go see them.
'I think we should just see a lot more fluidity in populations moving to new places.'
Well, you don't, so what are you gonna do about it really
We used to though! The chart in this article almost beggars belief, which makes me wonder how much of it is, say, a compositional effect, but apparently up to 40% of people looking for work in the 80s moved for it vs. less than 2% now:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/moving-for-work-mobilty-record-low-1-6-percent-challenger/
Yeah, you're right, there's been a huge change in this. But as you say, the idea that Americans are a uniquely mobile people who have no problem moving for work is really based on data that's as old as I am. It's worth thinking about why that's changed - and if it's more good than bad or not that it has - but I'm just criticising a line of argument which seems to be like, 'well it would be better if the world worked like this'.
+1. As I've mentioned in previous threads, I come from a working-class majority-white town in Michigan with an economy and population that have been declining for 60-plus years. I stayed in MI several years after finishing school in large part because at the time I graduated, I didn't have the savings I'd need to relocate.
Another factor I haven't yet seen mentioned in this thread is that housing costs in areas with lots of jobs prevent people from following those jobs. This might be one reason why we are seeing Georgia and AZ start to tilt purple; young, broke people who might otherwise have moved to DC or LA head to Atlanta and Phoenix b/c of affordability.
Regarding "somewheres/anywheres" -- if there somehow weren't enough to hate Stalin for already, the fact that the took what *should* be an incredibly punchy phrase for the "anywhere" class and precluded its use in polite company forever by using it as an antisemitic dog whistle is yet one more for the pile.
("somewheres / anywheres" is understandable and simple, which is virtuous, but both words are also intrinsically un-Googleable, which makes it insufficiently specific and IMO a bit vague).
I have no idea what phrase you're talking about - maybe my company is too polite?
Is it too rude/antisemitic to repeat here for clarity? - I'll be surprised but I'll accept that as an answer.
It's not rude to ask at all, I would just prefer not to have it crop up if for some reason people are googling my username in the context of Matt's comments (hence part of being elliptical) without context. It's the two-word phrase beginning with "r" at the end of the first paragraph of this Wikipedia article: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-cosmopolitan_campaign" (the second word being "cosmopolitan.")
Thanks for the link. I don't think I've ever heard that phrase, but I see how it could be useful(without the baggage) in this discussion.
Yes, that's exactly the problem! It's an actually-useful phrase made useless by the baggage.
I know the area. Ohio is full out burnt out depopulated areas. When all the young people move away it really hurts the community and makes those who remain feel loss.
Many of those people who didn’t move or change careers were too old, had children and were risk adverse, or had some other deep problems (substance abuse.)
Far too many people from my high school have died from overdoses. Most of us left.
So like Harrison should be as empty as those ghost towns in the West. I genuinely find this narrative except maybe around the olds to be like insane. As a people we literally walked across the continent to find opportunity and now expecting people to stop doing heroin and go to work is too much to ask.
Most of those people who migrated and settled were the youngest sons of families who had no assets and nothing to inherent.
So... the very people who should now also move. No assets and nothing to inherit = move.
As it has been and as it will be.
That was basically Hillary Clinton’s redevelopment pitch. People hated it. So now we’re trying to recreate manufacturing jobs in a cult cargo way even though 1) it won’t scale and 2) we’re trying to do everything bagel liberalism in the process
Right, but the Senate exists so you can't just ignore the voters of these states, even if they won't do what they're 'supposed to' and migrate somewhere else.
What about people wanting to be close to their families? Allowing people to help out mom and dad in their old age and giving mom and dad the opportunity to be close to their grandkids. Spending time with your siblings rather than only seeing them once a year at Christmas. That seems like a valid political goal to me.
So should the government employ them directly or just cut them a check every month?
Direct employment would seem to be the preferable option of those two. Given the increased viability of remote work it probably wouldn't even be all that inefficient for many government jobs.
For how many generations should we do this? How far is reasonable to expect people to move? Should the government employment be compensated similarly to a market job, or do we want to make it somewhat less so that there is still SOME incentive to move and get a job in a growing region?
I don't know what the right length of time would be. We can't plan out the politics that far in the future anyway, so it's sort of a moot point.
As for pay the political pragmatist in me says it should be market rate. This is, to some extent, a vote buying exercise and people don't like to think they're undervalued.
This just sounds like setting money on fire to me.
I think if we have a program, it should be grants for assistance with moving. You could maybe pair it with some kind of "sister city" program that tries to keep social networks intact and relocate whole communities (you see this with chain migration when immigrants pull old-country family and neighbors to settle in the same US town). Maybe with special accommodations to relocate aged parents/aunts/etc.
Most people relocate on their own. It's really not the end of the world. We in the US are in a sense fortunate compared to countries like Mexico that have seen enormous out migration.
After all, what those left behind really want is that the employers/entrepreneurs and leadership/professional class never left. But you can't unring that bell
Cutting checks would not satiate the need for purpose in people’s lives. Nor would being retrained to a lower social standing job.
Ideally the decades of globalization created through trade deals would have had a better way to accommodate the needs and desires of broad swathes of the country that were going to be negatively impacted. I don’t know what the answer is to keep globalization while giving domestic voters satisfaction, but I think that not having one is the reason for such ardent support for Trump.
I am maybe a bit skeptical that we need capitalistic ends like this to give people meaning in my life. I mean my career does some of that but I do a modest amount of volunteer work and am a foster parent and the idea that people couldn't find meaning stripped of the daily grind is weird. Though It may be that the kind of people who don't find work are in need of a way to provide meaning is highly correlated. The small number of people on programs for the workless do have a bunch of problems.
Agree that it drives Trump support. I just don't think this is a solvable problem, which is why you see the same exact dynamic in the UK and France. Globalization (or maybe modernity) is a beast driving us to greater wealth and greater mobility, whether we like it or not.
A lot of people don't have the wherewithal to move and do years of schooling to retrain for a variety of reasons, including money, childcare and family, logistics, and so on. This line of thinking basically devolves to the bootstraps cliche. Yes, some people can become more successful under their own power, and we should celebrate them and try to make those paths more accessible. But as soon as you say that for everyone, it doesn't work. Some people are not going to be able to leave the rust belt or whatever small town, and I don't think it makes sense to shrug and say they should have all become nurses.
I think wanting to have roots in your community is human nature. I get that isn’t always possible, but especially once you’re 30 or older, leaving is hard.
The glaring issue I had with Hillbillie Elegy was the lack of awareness of how his good fortune gave him an out. He was born with a mind that made standardized tests easy, and that paved a path to Ohio State and Harvard that was never on the table for most of the people from there.
Where are you from? I also grew up pretty close in West Chester.
They should learn to code. We’ll call the initiative “Silicon Holler!” [1]
Seriously, Ro Khanna has a whole chapter on it in his book!
Great article I had never heard of William Julius Wilson. I feel like Matt could probably do a series of articles on this guy anyway thanks for exposing me to his work!
The argument that industrial jobs going away was the first domino in the chain that lead to disfunction among the urban poor is pretty flimsy. There is evidence that (a) this disfunction predated de-industrialization and (b) economic downturns do not cause crime and, if anything, tend to coincide with lower levels of crime. Job loss definitely made things worse, but I think it’s debatable whether it was a necessary or sufficient factor.
Very underrated perspective that I think I agree with.
Although I think it's wrong, the theory that job losses cause dysfunction remains very attractive and feels intuitively like it should be true. But every time I've dug into the evidence I find what you've described above.
Part of the illusion is that the correlation is real. Impoverished areas are often socially dysfunctional with crime and drugs, etc.. But I think the causality runs mostly in two other ways:
1). Crime, drug use and alcoholism cause poverty in fairly direct and obvious ways. Few people would argue that about the wasted potential, disinvestment and psychological scars. Or consider that a single shooting might tie up hundreds of hours of police, EMT, ER and judicial time, all funded by local taxpayers. And then there's the cost of imprisonment.
2) There's also an illusion in that it's never quite the same people before and after an area goes downhill. I've found counties in West Virginia that have lost 80% of their population since the 60s. The 80% who've left tend to be the ones with a little more motivation and competence. People who don't leave are **disproportionately** more likely to have social problems. The 80% who've left are doing fine in Phoenix or Atlanta and the job losses didn't cause the social decay so much as put it in focus by removing the other 80%.
WJW does a pretty good jobs marshalling a host of statistics proving his theories being correct in his books, you should check them out. And I think it's telling we are seeing similar pathologies play out in very white parts of Appalachia over the past few decades with the decline of traditional blue collar industries.
Reading old JD Vance quotes is so mind boggling to me, is that person still inside him? A piece of me thinks he must be, that this is all a fictional persona. I just don't know though.
JD Vance underwent a religious conversion to Ultraconservative Roman Catholicism a few years after he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Ultraconservative Catholics act and think the way Vance acts now, so I think the change is genuine. I think he really is what he seems to be now. There is no other secret "good" person on the inside.
I think he’s 100% a snake oil salesman. I read Hillbilly Elegy, and even then it read as a political campaign launcher. And he didn’t actually offer any solutions to the dysfunction he grew up. I believe he specifically said better funded schools wouldn’t help, because the kids going to those schools don’t care. Which, maybe true, but like all righwing populists, the actual populist part was missing.
"They characterized that as a conservative view, and certainly the emphasis on moral guidance has a rightward inflection."
In this case, perhaps. But I've noted in, oh a case or two recently, the Left does not much shy away from moral hectoring. You can call that "guidance," I guess. Potayto potahto.
“ The reason isn’t that Trump hates cops, but that Republicans hate giving money to poor cities. And they definitely don’t want to finance inner-city job creation schemes.”
Why would we think dumping more money into underperforming blue jurisdictions materially change anything? Are many of these cities underfunded? Is Chicago underfunded? Is San Francisco underfunded? Underperforming urban school districts often have very high per capita spend.
EDIT: Looks like the City of Baltimore budget is $4.4 billion for a population of 500 some odd thousand people, per capita $8k+. Doesn’t seem particularly underfunded.
Yes, these cities are burning through a lot of cash. But I wonder how much of that money actually makes it to disadvantaged neighborhoods. I think you’re right that a COVID-style local government slush fund wouldn’t help anything, but maybe something more targeted would.
'Doesn't seem particularly underfunded' compared to what? And which of Baltimore's problems can be resolved without spending any more money?
Philly spends much less per capita and, as bad as we are, seems better at resolving problems?
Our budget is $6.2 billion for 1.58 million people, about half, per capita, what Baltimore's is.
And we get much less state help from our divided and/or red state government, to boot.
Local budgets are trapped in path-dependence. Doing something difference is likely going to need outside investment to overcome self-interest.
City of Dallas, for one:
“ The Fiscal Year 2023-24 operating and capital budget is $4.63 billion compared to the total budget for the current year which is $4.51 billion
“ With a 2020 census population of 1,304,379, it is the ninth-most populous city in the U.S.”
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“ And which of Baltimore's problems can be resolved without spending any more money?”
Very old school thought here, throw more money at a problem you’re already throwing a lot of money at.
Thanks for providing a comparison. Is Dallas a particularly good comparator for Baltimore?
With regards to your last point, I'm asking a serious question: can you identify any significant problem in Baltimore that can be resolved without spending any more money?
I would argue that, if Baltimore is spending that much more per capital already (and with very little to show for it by way of outcomes), then perhaps the issue is more in the realm of misallocation of resources.
(I know very little of Baltimore other than at a very high level, but I assume that like other east coast cities, it is spending a whole lot to appease generally unproductive, unionized, local/city/state govt workers and other patronage groups.)
FWIW, I'm a unionized govt employee.
Most of my colleagues put in about as much effort as their private industry equivalents.
But being in a very bureaucratic and risk/blame-averse system inevitably results in lower productivity.
I proffered Philadelphia as a much more viable comparison. Similar rates of poverty, demographics, median incomes, historical/legacy economic sectors, population declines from 1950's peaks through 2000, historical problems with disinvestment, redlining, segregation by income and race...
The difference is, Philly has at least *attempted* on occasion to govern itself well since 1990. Baltimore, insofar as I can tell, has not. And the result is that our population has increased and our tax base has strengthened since the 1990's nadir, our crime rate is significantly lower (even these two years with significant upticks in murders still leave us at a much lower per capita figure than Baltimore), we have significantly larger swathes of the city experiencing revitalizations, private sector employment is higher, knowledge work is still growing in fields which are remote-proof, we retain more of the graduates from our similarly great universities, and our transit system and infrastructure are in better shape.
While we spend half as much per person.
The wealthy suburb I grew up in apparently spends $8K per capita (and city services are less efficient in the suburbs), so Baltimore really is spending a lot.