This is probably the best succinct statement of the problem that I have seen. A few observations based on my own experiences (born and raised in a small industrial city, lived and worked my entire career in the nearest big city in a professional capacity):
The period of time during which small town and rural people built their expectations as to the kind of lives that they believed they were “entitled to” was remarkably short: the golden age of factory manufacturing, mostly automotive, in my small town didn’t really get rolling until after WWI and was already ending by the time I graduated from high school, let’s say 1925-1975. I don’t have anywhere to go with this point, except to note that it may be that people will mourn their disappointed expectations for longer than those expectations were actually met in the first place.
People have always left their small towns to try their luck in the big city. The rate and the flow of outmigration have both been greater in the last fifty years than before, I would suppose. It seems to me that the enhanced brain drain, however, may have been a second-order effect of the decline and collapse of manufacturing.
At least in my personal experience, my peers who left town were never going to work in hourly-wage factory jobs to begin with. It was the gradual disappearance of plausible middle-management, small business and professional careers that pushed us out. The emotional pull of one’s hometown is so strong that, for many people, the economic opportunities at home need not equal or exceed those on offer in the metropolis; they just need to be good enough to tilt the balance in favor of staying.
The funny thing is that I and many of my high school peers never contemplated, even for a minute, making our careers in our hometown, and our parents never made much effort to convince us that staying was the right thing to do. In the higher reaches of my high school class, the people who stayed were mostly the scions of the local gentry: children of doctors, lawyers, or owners of valuable properties of whatever kind.
I don’t think we had very concrete ideas of why we needed to leave town–more of a feeling–but, even in the midst of the golden age, that expectation had already somehow hardened into certainty. And this was fifty years ago!
I have an observation complementary to yours. I grew up in a prosperous highly-educated county. My friends scattered to colleges everywhere, but most returned. I'm one of the very few who bothered to leave the metropolitan area for good.
The problem from the perspective of the gentry -- folks who, say, own the local restaurants and car dealerships -- is that the people you're talking about who moved away were _supposed to be their customers_. And I think that is part of why we see rage among the gentry at the higher ed system; they feel betrayed by their peers who went to college and never came back. The value of their capital has declined because the places they live became less economically vibrant, less popular as places to move to. And they are sad and angry about that, but not willing to do the things that would be necessary to either adapt, or change the place into a destination.
Imagine if America had responded to the Chinese crackdown on Hong Kong by saying, "Hey, Hong Kongers. Yeah, _all_ of you. Would you like to come help re-vitalize the Rust Belt? We've got expedited visas for everyone that wants to move to suburbs of Detroit, Cincinnatti, etc." But some guy who inherited ownership of a car dealership in Gary, Indiana doesn't _want_ Hong Kongers as customers. He wants those kids who moved away, so he can continue to feel like a big man among the social circle he had in high school.
A big point of Autor's "Work of the Past, Work of the Future" lecture was that cities have always offered higher pay to mid-level workers, and the larger the city, the bigger the boost. Maybe it's because there are more middle levels, as cities can support larger organizations.
Three thoughts on left behind country. (1) I live in a small town, and I've been amazed at the lack of human capital, that is, people who know how to get things done. It has been improving, and the COVID refugees have made things even better. (2) A friend of mine argues that the GI Bill led to the collapse of the unions. The guys who had the brains and ability to organize a union went to college instead of getting a job at the factory. (3) I thought left behind country had something to do with the wretched and ridiculous "Left Behind" books. Either that or a bad 1960s Playboy joke.
The US media spends a lot of focus on "left-behind" being the rural and semi-rural (and I live in one, so I do understand) - BUT a lot less energy on "left-behind" being the ghettos and poor areas on urban cities. Those suffer from many similar issues and very little media attention is paid to them - perhaps because we have myths about small-town America, perhaps because the rural areas have an outsized effect on politics, perhaps because of simple racism
The problem is that we can't create all the elements for economic success without creating the cultural and environmental factors which are necessary for that success, and that's exactly what the rural areas reject. There is no "all the characteristics of western KS but with economic opportunities".
How about instead we buy out all those failed farms and towns -- pay them generous above-market prices -- and re-wild the Great Plains? If those folks choose their next best option, say, mid-size cities with the elements for success (call it Ames, IA), then everybody wins because now those mid-size cities start to gain the ability to create their own virtuous cycles because the basics are already there and now the population will be too. But again, it won't be rural and it must be relatively open and tolerant; whether they accept those characteristics is not within our control.
Invest in smaller MSA's which are still affordable, have room to expand, and often border rural areas. Many people in rural areas and rust belts can move or commute there without the price and culture shock of going to a top tier MSA.
On at least one point, Brad is wrong. Until recently, the Big Square States did very well educationally, despite their agricultural focus. They were better than average on the K-12 level, and were proud of their many strong state research universities: e.g., Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, Wisconsin. And that's excluding those in the currently blue states: Minnesota, Colorado, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (terminal cow country).
Often I think that economics is downstream of culture. Has the spread of Southern culture preceded an economic and educational decline?
Culture is definitely important. Note that North Dakota school kids manage to achieve above average grades and test scores even though the state spends far less per pupil on education that large urban states.
"You try to start a growing-sector business in a non Big CIty part of a red state, and lots of people around you will try to find some way to take you down with glee."
As my ex used to say - "These people are like crawdads in a bucket. Try to climb out and you get pulled back down."
The health care services desert is an issue that is problem unsolvable. It has been growing over the last 30 years driven by four factors: (1) consolidation of hospitals, clinics, and now even general practices into huge conglomerates which ruthlessly close smaller and less profitable facilities (2) growing unwillingness of medical school graduates to "go back to the ole hometown" and take over for the retiring family doctor on Main Street (3) medical school admissions having been essentially frozen for 50 years while the overall population of the nation has tripled (4) and now the red states and rural areas of purple states going all-in on banning medical care for women and criminally prosecuting doctors who provide it.
I don't see any of these factors reversing, at least not in the next 30 years.
This is very good. A quick anecdote. Me and my co-founders piloted an alternative to debt program for students graduating from a mid-coast community college in California that was designed to carry them through two more years of State University or UC system. Of the ten we funded all ten finished their programs. At least five returned to their town and are still there as far as I know. The five that returned, from what I heard, didn't see the upside of going elsewhere. Family and community were more important. The world away from their agriculturally based town didn't seem to have a space for them and they viewed a job as a job, not as a career. Years ago I would have thought they made a mistake. Today, I'm not sure. But we do have a problem if the only way you can "make it" in the US is by leaving home and not going back. BTW - they are all from Hispanic farm working families.
Thanks - this is a great topic and great selections, I will think more.
I've never really believed that economies of agglomeration matter in an Internet-connected economy, and the success of remote work, in the face of unremitting hostility from managers confirms me in this.
z To attract skilled information workers, what's needed is an attractive place to live, decent Internet and, ideally, access to a major city (100k plus people, big hospital, university, substantial airport etc) within a couple of hours travel.
The big difficulty here is "attractive place to live". That includes culture, broadly defined, as well as climate and amenities. It's easy to see a vicious circle emerging in this respect, as rural resentment feeds, and feeds on, the flight of educated young people.
It was a big deal when they lit up fiber to our town. There was a modest celebration featuring the local politicians who helped get it put in place. One point was a ring structure so there was a redundant connection. It wasn't the magic internet, but 20 years later we got a lot of happy COVID refugees, many of who have settled in for the long run.
"It is quite hard for even highly productive blue-collar workers in one industrial cluster to find a way to apply their skills and energy to gain comparable earnings elsewhere in the economy." It's also a cultural issue. You can't expect a laid off steel worker to retrain as a home health care worker emptying bedpans, even if the pay was good - which it's not.
True, but the loss of industrial jobs is largely a story of the late 20th century. Employment in the steel industry roughly halved in late C20, and has been more or less stable since then. The "left behind" story is more complex
People talk about automation as if it were the future. It's more in the past. By the 1990s white good appliance manufacturing had gotten 5-10 times more labor efficient than in the 1960s. Small computers made a big difference in simplifying the wiring. The business consolidated. A lot the appliance makes nowadays are just brands. Meanwhile, towns like Amana in Iowa lost their bread and butter. It was a long term trend. China entering the WTO was just the coup de grace.
Ahh, I read Wyman's essay in The Atlantic on the topic of gentry when it first came out and thought it one of the best essays I had come across in a long time. Thank you for featuring it.
I wonder what we can learn from the collapse of the small farmer and small farm towns earlier in the 20th century. Midwestern farming was lucrative back when the sharecropping South had to import food. Small towns and small scale farmers prospered. When the Depression hit in the 1930s, cotton and tobacco sneezed and midwestern farming caught the flu. Those farm towns never really recovered. There is still a lot of farming wealth. There are a few really rich zip codes in the small town midwest, and they're all about farming money. The money just doesn't get spread around the way it used to.
By the 1980s, the small farm had more or less vanished and the Reagan era was about choosing a nice coffin. Farm Aid anyone? That culture is long gone.
I agree, although there are a few intervention points. a) preferential (activities with NPV < 0) support for intermediate center pre-K-12 education, infrastructure (including especially connectivity) and health care b) SMR, solar, wind, geothermal, and CCS are all land-intensive/decentralized economic activities favored by taxing net emissions of CO2, c) lower/zero federal deficits => lower interest rates => weaker dollar => better TOT for agriculture/manufacturing.
Not really an "intervention," but it would help if urban elites did not, and could be seen as not, displaying the disdain that politicians claim that urban elites supposedly feel toward the "left behind."
I find it interesting that the reverse was true - rural people had disdaib for "city-slickers" as rubes in the country environment. Maybe what goes around, comes around. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, they don't like it.
I would also point out that Republican farmers are some of the biggest beneficiaries of government welfare through farm support programs. Certainly big ag dominates and continues to drive out small farmers, but why would such farmers vote for a party that encourages this?
I take as given that the essential political division is not economic interest. Nevertheless I think making economic more salient would favor Democrats, as would better message discipline regarding Social Issues. People in KS shroud not have heard os AOC. :)
This is probably the best succinct statement of the problem that I have seen. A few observations based on my own experiences (born and raised in a small industrial city, lived and worked my entire career in the nearest big city in a professional capacity):
The period of time during which small town and rural people built their expectations as to the kind of lives that they believed they were “entitled to” was remarkably short: the golden age of factory manufacturing, mostly automotive, in my small town didn’t really get rolling until after WWI and was already ending by the time I graduated from high school, let’s say 1925-1975. I don’t have anywhere to go with this point, except to note that it may be that people will mourn their disappointed expectations for longer than those expectations were actually met in the first place.
People have always left their small towns to try their luck in the big city. The rate and the flow of outmigration have both been greater in the last fifty years than before, I would suppose. It seems to me that the enhanced brain drain, however, may have been a second-order effect of the decline and collapse of manufacturing.
At least in my personal experience, my peers who left town were never going to work in hourly-wage factory jobs to begin with. It was the gradual disappearance of plausible middle-management, small business and professional careers that pushed us out. The emotional pull of one’s hometown is so strong that, for many people, the economic opportunities at home need not equal or exceed those on offer in the metropolis; they just need to be good enough to tilt the balance in favor of staying.
The funny thing is that I and many of my high school peers never contemplated, even for a minute, making our careers in our hometown, and our parents never made much effort to convince us that staying was the right thing to do. In the higher reaches of my high school class, the people who stayed were mostly the scions of the local gentry: children of doctors, lawyers, or owners of valuable properties of whatever kind.
I don’t think we had very concrete ideas of why we needed to leave town–more of a feeling–but, even in the midst of the golden age, that expectation had already somehow hardened into certainty. And this was fifty years ago!
I have an observation complementary to yours. I grew up in a prosperous highly-educated county. My friends scattered to colleges everywhere, but most returned. I'm one of the very few who bothered to leave the metropolitan area for good.
The problem from the perspective of the gentry -- folks who, say, own the local restaurants and car dealerships -- is that the people you're talking about who moved away were _supposed to be their customers_. And I think that is part of why we see rage among the gentry at the higher ed system; they feel betrayed by their peers who went to college and never came back. The value of their capital has declined because the places they live became less economically vibrant, less popular as places to move to. And they are sad and angry about that, but not willing to do the things that would be necessary to either adapt, or change the place into a destination.
Imagine if America had responded to the Chinese crackdown on Hong Kong by saying, "Hey, Hong Kongers. Yeah, _all_ of you. Would you like to come help re-vitalize the Rust Belt? We've got expedited visas for everyone that wants to move to suburbs of Detroit, Cincinnatti, etc." But some guy who inherited ownership of a car dealership in Gary, Indiana doesn't _want_ Hong Kongers as customers. He wants those kids who moved away, so he can continue to feel like a big man among the social circle he had in high school.
That’s an excellent point
A big point of Autor's "Work of the Past, Work of the Future" lecture was that cities have always offered higher pay to mid-level workers, and the larger the city, the bigger the boost. Maybe it's because there are more middle levels, as cities can support larger organizations.
Three thoughts on left behind country. (1) I live in a small town, and I've been amazed at the lack of human capital, that is, people who know how to get things done. It has been improving, and the COVID refugees have made things even better. (2) A friend of mine argues that the GI Bill led to the collapse of the unions. The guys who had the brains and ability to organize a union went to college instead of getting a job at the factory. (3) I thought left behind country had something to do with the wretched and ridiculous "Left Behind" books. Either that or a bad 1960s Playboy joke.
The US media spends a lot of focus on "left-behind" being the rural and semi-rural (and I live in one, so I do understand) - BUT a lot less energy on "left-behind" being the ghettos and poor areas on urban cities. Those suffer from many similar issues and very little media attention is paid to them - perhaps because we have myths about small-town America, perhaps because the rural areas have an outsized effect on politics, perhaps because of simple racism
The problem is that we can't create all the elements for economic success without creating the cultural and environmental factors which are necessary for that success, and that's exactly what the rural areas reject. There is no "all the characteristics of western KS but with economic opportunities".
How about instead we buy out all those failed farms and towns -- pay them generous above-market prices -- and re-wild the Great Plains? If those folks choose their next best option, say, mid-size cities with the elements for success (call it Ames, IA), then everybody wins because now those mid-size cities start to gain the ability to create their own virtuous cycles because the basics are already there and now the population will be too. But again, it won't be rural and it must be relatively open and tolerant; whether they accept those characteristics is not within our control.
As much as I sympathize, I can't see this working well. The issue isn't economic but cultural.
I agree. I just don't have any better ideas.
Invest in smaller MSA's which are still affordable, have room to expand, and often border rural areas. Many people in rural areas and rust belts can move or commute there without the price and culture shock of going to a top tier MSA.
On at least one point, Brad is wrong. Until recently, the Big Square States did very well educationally, despite their agricultural focus. They were better than average on the K-12 level, and were proud of their many strong state research universities: e.g., Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Texas, Wisconsin. And that's excluding those in the currently blue states: Minnesota, Colorado, Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (terminal cow country).
Often I think that economics is downstream of culture. Has the spread of Southern culture preceded an economic and educational decline?
Culture is definitely important. Note that North Dakota school kids manage to achieve above average grades and test scores even though the state spends far less per pupil on education that large urban states.
"You try to start a growing-sector business in a non Big CIty part of a red state, and lots of people around you will try to find some way to take you down with glee."
As my ex used to say - "These people are like crawdads in a bucket. Try to climb out and you get pulled back down."
The health care services desert is an issue that is problem unsolvable. It has been growing over the last 30 years driven by four factors: (1) consolidation of hospitals, clinics, and now even general practices into huge conglomerates which ruthlessly close smaller and less profitable facilities (2) growing unwillingness of medical school graduates to "go back to the ole hometown" and take over for the retiring family doctor on Main Street (3) medical school admissions having been essentially frozen for 50 years while the overall population of the nation has tripled (4) and now the red states and rural areas of purple states going all-in on banning medical care for women and criminally prosecuting doctors who provide it.
I don't see any of these factors reversing, at least not in the next 30 years.
The failure of certain states to expand Medicaid makes it even worse.
This is very good. A quick anecdote. Me and my co-founders piloted an alternative to debt program for students graduating from a mid-coast community college in California that was designed to carry them through two more years of State University or UC system. Of the ten we funded all ten finished their programs. At least five returned to their town and are still there as far as I know. The five that returned, from what I heard, didn't see the upside of going elsewhere. Family and community were more important. The world away from their agriculturally based town didn't seem to have a space for them and they viewed a job as a job, not as a career. Years ago I would have thought they made a mistake. Today, I'm not sure. But we do have a problem if the only way you can "make it" in the US is by leaving home and not going back. BTW - they are all from Hispanic farm working families.
Thanks - this is a great topic and great selections, I will think more.
I've never really believed that economies of agglomeration matter in an Internet-connected economy, and the success of remote work, in the face of unremitting hostility from managers confirms me in this.
z To attract skilled information workers, what's needed is an attractive place to live, decent Internet and, ideally, access to a major city (100k plus people, big hospital, university, substantial airport etc) within a couple of hours travel.
The big difficulty here is "attractive place to live". That includes culture, broadly defined, as well as climate and amenities. It's easy to see a vicious circle emerging in this respect, as rural resentment feeds, and feeds on, the flight of educated young people.
And seriously, good internet access - generally it sucks in a lot of semi-rural America (and in many inner cities as well)
It was a big deal when they lit up fiber to our town. There was a modest celebration featuring the local politicians who helped get it put in place. One point was a ring structure so there was a redundant connection. It wasn't the magic internet, but 20 years later we got a lot of happy COVID refugees, many of who have settled in for the long run.
There's also what Joel Garreau called "nice" in his book "Edge Cities". New Hampshire, he pointed out, was never "nice". Vermont, in contrast, was.
"It is quite hard for even highly productive blue-collar workers in one industrial cluster to find a way to apply their skills and energy to gain comparable earnings elsewhere in the economy." It's also a cultural issue. You can't expect a laid off steel worker to retrain as a home health care worker emptying bedpans, even if the pay was good - which it's not.
True, but the loss of industrial jobs is largely a story of the late 20th century. Employment in the steel industry roughly halved in late C20, and has been more or less stable since then. The "left behind" story is more complex
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPUEN3311W200000000
Great chart...
People talk about automation as if it were the future. It's more in the past. By the 1990s white good appliance manufacturing had gotten 5-10 times more labor efficient than in the 1960s. Small computers made a big difference in simplifying the wiring. The business consolidated. A lot the appliance makes nowadays are just brands. Meanwhile, towns like Amana in Iowa lost their bread and butter. It was a long term trend. China entering the WTO was just the coup de grace.
Ahh, I read Wyman's essay in The Atlantic on the topic of gentry when it first came out and thought it one of the best essays I had come across in a long time. Thank you for featuring it.
UR very welcome... Brad
Here's a poignant article about the 1984 coal miner's strike in the UK. Another example of left behind places. https://unherd.com/2024/01/britain-is-still-scarred-by-the-miners-defeat/
I wonder what we can learn from the collapse of the small farmer and small farm towns earlier in the 20th century. Midwestern farming was lucrative back when the sharecropping South had to import food. Small towns and small scale farmers prospered. When the Depression hit in the 1930s, cotton and tobacco sneezed and midwestern farming caught the flu. Those farm towns never really recovered. There is still a lot of farming wealth. There are a few really rich zip codes in the small town midwest, and they're all about farming money. The money just doesn't get spread around the way it used to.
By the 1980s, the small farm had more or less vanished and the Reagan era was about choosing a nice coffin. Farm Aid anyone? That culture is long gone.
I agree, although there are a few intervention points. a) preferential (activities with NPV < 0) support for intermediate center pre-K-12 education, infrastructure (including especially connectivity) and health care b) SMR, solar, wind, geothermal, and CCS are all land-intensive/decentralized economic activities favored by taxing net emissions of CO2, c) lower/zero federal deficits => lower interest rates => weaker dollar => better TOT for agriculture/manufacturing.
Not really an "intervention," but it would help if urban elites did not, and could be seen as not, displaying the disdain that politicians claim that urban elites supposedly feel toward the "left behind."
I find it interesting that the reverse was true - rural people had disdaib for "city-slickers" as rubes in the country environment. Maybe what goes around, comes around. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, they don't like it.
I would also point out that Republican farmers are some of the biggest beneficiaries of government welfare through farm support programs. Certainly big ag dominates and continues to drive out small farmers, but why would such farmers vote for a party that encourages this?
I take as given that the essential political division is not economic interest. Nevertheless I think making economic more salient would favor Democrats, as would better message discipline regarding Social Issues. People in KS shroud not have heard os AOC. :)