Gentry, Culture, & the "Left Behind" Places
Noodling around what I fear are the most important issues in regional development policy today, at least in America...
Noodling around what I fear are the most important issues in regional development policy today, at least in America...
What society should do for left-behind people—indeed, what society should do for people—is very clear to me: teach them things.
Education is the Royal Road to pretty much everything in modern societies, and will only become more so as we move from the global value-chain into the attention info-biotech mode of production.
Subsidize education! And if you are worried—which you should be—about how with education subsidies more shall be given to those who already hath, subsidize it via income-contingent grants. And if you are worried—which you shouldn’t be—about limited governmental resources—do the same.
But what about people—if there really are any—who are too old to learn? And what about people—and there are very many—who think they are too old to learn? And what about people—and there are very many, and they geographically clump—who do not want to learn to do something new, especially not in a different place, and are very angry because the government owes them the opportunity to make a prosperous living in the place they grew up doing what they, or their parents, have always done?
For those people I find myself more-or-less completely flummoxed.
The extremely sharp Diane Coyle, however, thinks she has an answer:
Diane Coyle: ‘To Fight Populism, Invest in Left-Behind Communities: ‘Western countries must revitalize small towns and rural communities and ensure universal access to essential public services…. There is an economic case to be made for investing in public services and the infrastructure that sustains them. By recognizing that a shared sense of optimism and a basic faith in the possibility of social mobility fuel economic growth, we can repair the economic damage of the past two decades. A country that overlooks “places that don’t matter” risks becoming irrelevant itself… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/improved-public-services-can-reduce-geographic-disparities-by-diane-coyle-2023-12>
And this is so even though such investments in revitalization are rowing against the tide of progressing technology:
Diane Coyle: To Fight Populism, Invest in Left-Behind Communities: ‘Structural economic shifts… have made urban living more lucrative. In today’s knowledge-based economy, where value is increasingly derived from intangible sources, gathering people in densely populated urban areas often results in positive spillovers… <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/improved-public-services-can-reduce-geographic-disparities-by-diane-coyle-2023-12>
Does she?
Certainly very large stakes are at hazard, and they will be lost if something is not done for left-behind people in left-behind communities. There is the waste of human potential. There is the utilitarian disaster of less-flourishing human lives. There is the moral betrayal of people who are effectively excluded from the communal hearth. And there are the larger risks to humanity’s future as a progressive enterprise: the conventional wisdom—which may well be accurate—is that the energy behind modern authoritarian neofascism is the rage of the left-behind who feel poor, disrespected by those who ought to respect them, and believe that what ought to have been their opportunities have been stolen from them by the Blacks, the Jews, the other rootless cosmopolites, and the Woke.
Maybe it would work for Britain. Maybe it will work for Britain. I certainly do not know enough to have an informed view.
But could it work here in the United States?
I look at the height of the hill. I look at the size of the boulder. And I think: if one were to try this, one would be Sisyphus, and one definitely cannot imagine Sisyphus happy—On ne peut certainement pas imaginer Sisyphe heureux.
Let me start with one factor that should make revitalization of left-behind places very possible in America. Those parts of the rich core that are blue states are simply not building at a sufficient rate. Housing costs are thus imposing ferocious incentives. There are now negative incentives for those without strong knowledge-economy chops to move to prosperous blue cities in blue states. And there are powerful incentives for those who have their work-related social networks already in place to move to blue cities in red states, if not to depressed red left-behind areas in red states. It ought to take only a small amount of pushing to create self-sustaining growth poles in places classified as left-behind.
But that factor is overwhelmed by others working in the opposite direction. Here are ten, in rough order of what I guess to be their importance:
Brain Drain: Talented individuals leave for education and short-term job opportunities in larger cities—and they do not come back, no matter what Hollywood movies about the importance of centering yourself and putting the highest priority on yourself say.
Political & Cultural Isolation: Thing are not helped by the fact that politicians and opinion leaders who want to both serve the local gentry class and gain mass support have huge incentives to magnify not economic disparities and failures of local economic growth, but rather the cultural alienness of richer, more urban parts of the country.
Limited Access to Technology: But there is more than just culture: high-paid knowledge workers today need reliable access to information and communication technology, and here the digital divide is a major obstacle.
Educational Disparities: If people do return bearing skills, resources, and the ability to access networks, how are they to provide support? Educational systems are not good in red-state America outside of its blue cities, education is not a priority for either the red-state or the local non-urban governments, and workforce development for the info-biotech world is nowhere
Infrastructure Challenges: America’s infrastructure is subpar everywhere, but the biggest gaps are in the non-urban parts of red-state America.
Limited Entrepreneurship & Innovation: There is often a lack of support and resources for entrepreneurship and innovation. Think of businesses as predominantly things like autodealerships, and their proprietors as something like local gentry: people who have it made, and who more fear than think they can take advantage of change.
Dependency on Single Industries: Where there are non-megacity hot spots in the economy, they often are built around one single industry. That makes prosperity very vulnerable to the “destruction” part of the Schumpeter wealth-generation process. And—a thing I find quite puzzling—empirically, 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.
Economic Transition: This is part of a broad point: difficulty in transitioning from traditional industries to new economic sectors that have to be built up ex nihilo. This is the big advantage of the Big City, where at least the germ of lots of other industries is always present nearby.
Healthcare Access: Limited access to healthcare impacts overall community well-being and economic productivity. And this difficulty has just been squared by the blocking of reproductive health services in red states. In a quarter of America, today, god help you if you start to miscarry late in pregnancy, for the state will treat you like a criminal.
Vice Signalling: 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.
The thing that struck me most strongly reading Carr and Kefalas (2010) was that adults often played a pivotal role in the small-town decline by encouraging their most talented young people to leave. In large part, this is because of what seems to be the increasing salience of agglomeration economies.
But there is, culturally and politically, a great deal more. There was an insurgent candidate in the Georgia Republican Party last election cycle who genuinely thought he could become Governor by driving electric vehicle-manufacturer Rivian out of the state. And hje came close. The feeling of being ‘left behind’ is not just economic but also cultural. And the cultural factors do a lot to quench what might be embers of economic development. Annoying as the authorial voice is, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy can still be read with profit—perhaps more profit when you overlayer it with J.D. Vance’s decision to try to make a political career in Ohio by specializing in attacking Ohio cities’ culture, and thus attacking tjhe productivity of the Ohio economy.
But why would he do this?
Well, as Patrick Wyman writes of his red area in blue-state Washington, his birthplace of Yakima:
Patrick Wyman: American Gentry: Local Power and the Social Order: ‘Yakima is a place I loved dearly and have returned to often… but I’ve never lived there again…. Most of my close classmates in high school: If they had left for college, most had never returned for longer than a few months…. All of them now… in major metro areas… not our hometown with its population of 90,000…. Talented and interesting people… why they haven’t come back…. For the most part… work…. The kinds of jobs they were now qualified for didn’t really exist in Yakima. Its economy revolved then…. Those who have [returned] seem to like it well enough; for a person lucky and accomplished enough to get one of those reasonably affluent professional jobs, Yakima… isn’t a bad place to live….
But… a city… dominated by its wealthy, largely agricultural property-owning class… fruit companies…. The other large-scale industries in the region, particularly commercial construction, revolve at a fundamental level around agriculture….
Commercial agriculture is a lucrative industry, at least for those who own the orchards, cold storage units, processing facilities, and the large businesses that cater to them. They have a trusted and reasonably well-paid cadre of managers and specialists in law, finance, and the like…. Ownership of the real, core assets is where the region’s wealth comes from, and it doesn’t extend down the social hierarchy. Yet this bounty is enough to produce hilltop mansions, a few high-end restaurants, and a staggering array of expensive vacation homes….
This class of people exists all over the United States… wealth derive[d] not from their salary… but from their ownership… a bunch of McDonald’s franchises in Jackson, Mississippi, a beef-processing plant in Lubbock, Texas, a construction company in Billings, Montana, commercial properties in Portland, Maine, or a car dealership in western North Carolina…. Their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society…. Because their wealth is rooted in the ownership of physical assets, they tend to be more rooted in their places…. Gentry classes are a common feature of a great many social-economic-political regimes throughout history. Pretty much anywhere you have a hierarchical form of social organization and property ownership, a gentry class of some kind emerges….
It’s easy to see the structural parallels… when we look at a heavily rural and agricultural region…. It’s not hard to spot vast apple orchards or sprawling vineyards and figure out that the person who owns them is probably wealthy; it’s harder to intuitively grasp that a single family might own seventeen McDonald’s franchises in eastern Tennessee, or the kind of riches the ownership of the third-biggest construction company in Bakersfield might generate…. There are an enormous number of organizations and institutions dedicated to advancing the interests of this gentry class…. The gentry class can and usually does wield significant power to shape society to their liking…
A gentry-dominated yuppie-hostile local power structure makes efforts at development especially hazardous. The effectiveness of investments is contingent on meticulous implementation. Misallocation of resources, bureaucratic inefficiencies, and lack of local engagement—those are all all but guaranteed.
While the economic rationale for investing in left-behind communities is sound, the practical challenges in the United States context are truly formidable.
I really do not see a way forward here—any more than there was a way forward for the U.S. south up until the 1960s.
References:
Camus, Albert: 1942. Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Paris: Gallimard. Trans. Justin O’Brien in: Camus, Albert: 1955. The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. <https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus_and_Other_Essays.html?id=SWs0MhTn05IC>.
Carr, Patrick J., & Maria J. Kefalas: 2010. Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain & What It Means for America. Boston: Beacon Press. <https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hollowing-out-the-middle-patrick-carr/1100313378>.
Coyle, Diane: 2023. "To Fight Populism, Invest in Left-Behind Communities." Project Syndicate, December 28. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/improved-public-services-can-reduce-geographic-disparities-by-diane-coyle-2023-12>.
Fallows, James, & Deborah Fallows: 2018. Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America. New York: Pantheon Books. <https://archive.org/details/ourtownsa100000milejourneyintotheheartofamerica>
Vance, J. D.: 2016. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family & Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper. <https://archive.org/details/hillbillyelegyme0000vanc_h8i1>.
Wyman, Patrick: 2020. "American Gentry: Local Power & the Social Order." Perspectives, September 17.
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!
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