Places or People

Mark Schmitt has an insightful column inspired by "bittergate" that includes the poignant observation that "The problem is none of us have answers that are adequate to the economic circumstances of the depressed Appalachian belt."

One thing that I think is worth saying about this is that it may be a lot harder to help the people who currently live in economically depressed communities than it is to help the communities themselves. Oftentimes the best way for a person to improve his or her economic condition is to move someplace else -- to somewhere where his or her skill set can provide greater rewards. But in the United States, political representation is done by geographical area, so the tendency is for the residents of a given depressed area's representatives to be represented by legislators who want to bring help to the place rather than to the people as such.

This pattern is useful to local political elites, who are thus able to turn their constituents' economic problems into a valuable patronage machine. And it does some good for the people in need. But it often amounts to giving people $20 to stay put, when $10 to facilitate their ability to pursue opportunities elsewhere would do more good. This was one of the things I liked about John Edwards' anti-poverty proposals which were focused, among other things, on helping to break up areas of entrenched poverty. And even beyond the very poor, it's often just not feasible for a broad range of people to leave homes they own in depressed areas in order to seek better opportunities elsewhere. It's hard for me to imagine a government program to turn an economically stagnating area into a growing one -- this just isn't the kind of thing government programs are very good at -- but finding ways to make it easier for people to seize the opportunities that exist around the country seems eminently practical.

Comments

Actually, poor people in lots of communities get better off very quickly as good paying jobs come in which aren't merely transferring in employees from elsewhere. It happened during the Clinton administration when a combination of factors led to the return of manufacturing jobs to many inner cities, and for a while you had employment rates among inner city young black males zoom even though they hadn't gone anywhere, no one had come in and un-learned them their "culture of poverty", etc.

There was a time when the U.S. government was pretty good at having jobs programs (as things go), but then conservatives attacked that as socialism and so instead we got 'welfare' programs instead, and then of course that got attacked, so now there's a mix of waste & nothing.

Posted by El Cid | April 17, 2008 1:31 PM

One thing that I think is worth saying about this is that it may be a lot harder to help the people who currently live in economically depressed communities than it is to help the communities themselves.

(emphasis mine)

I think you mean "easier" rather than "harder".

Posted by right | April 17, 2008 1:32 PM

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the Great Society programs did lower the poverty rate in the U.S. from 25% to 12%, if I recall correctly. Poverty among the elderly was also considered to be an intractable problem until the advent of Social Security. Rural Electrification, rural water districts the Tennessee Valley Authority, even public investments in roads and bridges have all had positive impacts on economically depressed areas. (Please note that this is not a statement that there may or may not be serious problems with these programs. It is just an acknowledgment that some of their impacts have been positive. OK?) That poverty continues to exist is more a function of a lack of political will than not having the tools to address it. Until Edwards latest campaign, I think the last presidential contender to take poverty seriously was Bobby Kennedy. It's been lip service and tax cuts ever since.

Posted by justawriter | April 17, 2008 1:46 PM

Yeah, one of the things that makes one bitter about cultural politics is the way it is used as a screen to destroy cultures.

It is rather amazing to me that the free traders accounting system has always been accepted without question. Culture or community, in this form of accounting, has zero value. If you stripped out intangibles from the accounting of corporations, their valuations would drop by a third - but of course, there it is all right. For as any good economist knows, it is better to shill for the rich than for the poor - the pay is so much better. The science you can pull out of your butt as you go along.

Posted by roger | April 17, 2008 1:54 PM

The Great Society continued the welfare push started by The New Deal. Those were not conservative programs.

Manufacturing jobs rushed into the inner cities employing young black males under Clinton? What cities? What industries?

All that moaning about globalization and NAFTA must be post-2000 after W took office. That's when the inner cities began to decay again?

Posted by El Cid's Horse | April 17, 2008 1:55 PM

This is a good point, and it's one I wish people would keep in mind in the immigration debate. Immigration (not just immigration to the U.S., but the movement of people all over the world) is the best anti-poverty program ever.

Posted by too many steves | April 17, 2008 1:55 PM

Keep in mind that many economically depressed areas, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, are nicely situated for a peak oil economy. There are lots of existing railways, lakes, rivers, and so forth that benefit places like Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and other areas. The same factors that allowed these places to flourish before cheap oil could benefit them in the near future. It might make economic sense for a family to trot off to a boomtown suburb in Colorado, but will that really be the case going forward? We should all be glad that infrastructure in these places was maintained (American style at least) over the years. Not that anybody planned it that way, and Matt's points are dead on otherwise. Peak oil changes everything, doesn't it?

Posted by RoboticGhost | April 17, 2008 2:01 PM

When I was in graduate school, at a school in Appalachia in the early 1970s, one of the major issues in regional economic development was whether policies should focus on people or on places. The academic consensus was that policies should focus on people--doing things that enhanced people's skills and opportunities, and so on--rather than on places. But the actual policies focused on places (just look at how the programs of the Economic Development Administration worked back then, and how similar programs operate now). So, for political reasons, it was harder to develop people-centered programs, which almost all the academics working in regional development thought would work better.

Nearly 40 years on, and so damned little has changed.

Posted by Donald A. Coffin | April 17, 2008 2:01 PM

where is sam kinison when you want him.

(referring to vast ethiopian famine in the 70s?) ... said something like this and made it sound funny, sad and insightful at the same time:

don't send 'em food, send 'em moving vans. Get 'em out of there, they can't grow food there, it's a fucking desert!

Not very P.C. but sometimes you have to stop saving places and start saving people.

Posted by mike c | April 17, 2008 2:06 PM

Another aspect of the "saving places" approach that sometimes makes it dysfunctional in terms of helping people who've been laid off or whatever is that the next thing to come in might require different skills. Better for people to go where someone is buying what they have to offer. Unfortunately, when what you have to offer is 25 years in an auto parts manufacturing plant, it can be awfully tough to find another buyer--even if you are willing to move.

Posted by THS | April 17, 2008 2:10 PM

I'm with El Cid, especially when it comes to Appalachia. The region is losing people, for exactly the reason that there are no jobs, and a lot of hopelessness, drugs, environmental degradation.

At the same time there is a powerful cultural value placed on staying near family, having roots. It would be a million times better to bring good jobs to the mountains than to encourage more people to leave.

The economic and environmental issues are linked. Somewhere on that site -- can't find it now -- is a representation of the chart on a map. Of course, the highest rates of mountaintop removal and poverty are in the same counties.

But encouraging people to leave just rapes the region even more -- leaves fewer people with less power to oppose the abuse of the land, decimates a priceless cultural region, and so on. Better to bring better incomes to the region so people are more empowered to say "no" to parasitical industries.

If the right voice sold a package of efforts to meet this region's needs specifically, it would all flip Democratic (not that that's the point, but that's the kind of blog this is). I think John Edwards was the right voice. Obama could do it, I think, but he has not.

Posted by rm | April 17, 2008 2:11 PM

How big of a factor is this really? Rust belt coal or factory towns have been losing population for decades, as have farm areas in the great plains and everywhere else. A few people stay behind but others leave for better jobs elsewhere, and kids always leave town. Whatever government programs are geared to giving one more shot in the arm to a half-dead steel mill in Allentown or wherever don't seem to have much impact on what people are doing. They've been voting with their feet for years.

Posted by spokeytown | April 17, 2008 2:15 PM

Huh?

"And even beyond the very poor, it's often just not feasible for a broad range of people to leave homes they own in depressed areas in order to seek better opportunities elsewhere. ... finding ways to make it easier for people to seize the opportunities that exist around the country seems eminently practical."

Or perhaps we scould try giving a damn first? It's not like the poverty of this area has been a big political priority. This has been the focus of media attention for maybe a few months and we've already reached the point where we're considering subsidized evacuations!

What would happen to Appalachia if the government really did develop a program to get people to move? It's obvious that not everyone could - what would happen to them?

Posted by berger | April 17, 2008 2:28 PM

Keep in mind that many economically depressed areas, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, are nicely situated for a peak oil economy. There are lots of existing railways, lakes, rivers, and so forth that benefit places like Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and other areas.

I'm waiting for Bloomberg to start advocating a reopening of the Erie Canal -- carbon-neutral transit from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic! Everyone start investing in mules and harness-manufacturers before the stocks zoom!

Posted by Pesto | April 17, 2008 2:28 PM

There are things that could help rural areas, that would also help the economy at large. For example, it's difficult to get cheap high speed internet in rural areas. If there was a program of rural broadband construction, it would create local jobs, and make all the benefits of the 21st century internet available to rural people.

It would also help national companies that depend on broadband to market their services, like Vonage, Youtube, etc etc.

Right now, only expensive satellite broadband is available in many rural areas. This solution has a lot of flaws such as high latency, and well, as already mentioned, cost.

Still, an area like Metro Detroit is neither rural nor undeveloped, and it is economically depressed because of flaws in the management of the domestic auto industry. The tax structure, and the wage structure of Michigan is oriented towards the high wages long provided by that industry. Even the local culture is not entrepreneurial in the way that other regions of the USA are. Even college educations are undervalued since many high school graduates were making $100,000 per year with overtime. The Detroit News did a poll a few years ago, and only 20% of people in Metro Detroit thought a college education was necessary in order to secure a good future for your family or children.

These cultural quirks are a result of the auto industry dominating the local scene in Michigan for such a long time. A hundred years ago, it was Detroit that had thousands of entrepreneurs because of the complete lack of unionization in Michigan compared to the east coast, and the access to capital from New York bankers.

The culture can change, but it seems unlikely in the short term, so this means that Michigan's #1 export has become young people emigrating to other states.

Posted by stm177 | April 17, 2008 2:54 PM

From "Manufacturing Initiatives for Inner-City Workers," from the Center for Workforce Success of the National Association of Manufacturers.

In loose labor markets, such an effort was not likely to succeed, but in the mid-1990s unemployment rates in the United States plunged to levels not seen in generations as the economy entered an almost unprecedented period of prolonged expansion. With labor shortages reaching crisis proportions, employers — and their associations — began to seek ways of reaching out to non-traditional populations of many kinds, including the poverty-stricken who were previously routinely screened out of consideration. This presented a window of opportunity of historic proportions to build employers into the workforce-development system.

CWS contacted NAM-member associations to find out what these associations and their member companies were doing to establish effective pipelines for inner-city disadvantaged residents to move into manufacturing jobs with family-supporting career potential. The goal was to find workforce- development initiatives and activities that involved partnerships between employers and/or their associations and training providers and community-based organizations; that would be instructive examples to other firms and employer associations; and that would demonstrate the potential of such roles to workforce development policy-makers and funders. Five initiatives that met the above criteria were selected for further study. Detailed case studies about these programs are summarized below; their full texts follow this overview.

The Printing Industry in Chicago: Reaching Into the Inner City for Workers

The printing industry is one of the largest employment sectors in Illinois. It is composed mainly of small firms that are adapting to rapid technological changes that are transforming the nature of the industry. According to a 2000 survey of its members by the Printing Industry of Illinois/Indiana Association (PII), the industry’s number one problem in its region is finding and maintaining a qualified workforce. In 1998 and 1999, an unusual partnership emerged between two community-based organizations, a community college, PII, a university-based planning organization, and the Chicago Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development and created GraphicLink. This program trains Hispanic and African-American adults from two inner city neighborhoods and places them into well-paid, fully-benefited printing jobs with promotional potential.

GraphicLink illustrates some of the typical challenges encountered by workforce-development initiatives that bring together diverse organizations in new partnerships to provide technical training.

• Each partner in the program had its own expectations, role, funding sources and already-existing relationships. There were differences in mission, location and socioeconomic character and thus some rough spots in working out relationships.

• The partners and funders of GraphicLink had to have the patience to get through the understandable beginning strains until the relationships were clarified and lessons learned, applied and fine-tuned. For a complex and difficult initiative, this developmental period can be more than two years, which can exceed the institutional patience of funders seeking quick success (fortunately, that does not appear to be so in this instance).

http://www.nam.org/s_nam/bin.asp?CID=183&DID=223776&DOC=FILE.PDF

On Ethiopia & famine, Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize in Economics in part for pointing out that famines tend to occur not when food supplies are necessarily low or extremely low, but when poor people are unable to buy food or do not have access to it.

Malawi, another poor African nation, recently went from being in a state of dramatic food insecurity and loan-propelled imports to leaving the illogic of market fundamentalism and directly helping its farming sector with fertilizers, water, infrastructure, distribution, etc., and now it is not only producing enough to take care of basic food needs but is a major regional exporter.

Of course, we could have just told all those people and small producers to get the hell out of their stupid damn country, citing noted economist Sam Kinison, but for some odd reason they seem to be happier fixing the problem.

Posted by El Cid | April 17, 2008 3:07 PM

Neat study, but's not "lots of communities" or "many cities", nor does it show that unemployment rates of inner city minorities "zoomed." It's an ancedote of a pilot attempt to find workers in the printing industry starved for low-wage workers that hasn't found a way to do things cheaper elsewhere. (Pulp from Canada is expensive to move to Mexico, only to have to ship the end product back the the consumers in the states).

People need to move to where the jobs are. Trying to force jobs to go where the unskilled people are is putting El Cid's horse before the cart.

But I am sure liberals will try, because, like the welfare programs of the past 40 years that have rippped the heart from the urban black community, its "compassionate."

Posted by El Cid's Horse | April 17, 2008 3:36 PM

Neat study, but's not "lots of communities" or "many cities", nor does it show that unemployment rates of inner city minorities "zoomed." It's an ancedote of a pilot attempt to find workers in the printing industry starved for low-wage workers that hasn't found a way to do things cheaper elsewhere. (Pulp from Canada is expensive to move to Mexico, only to have to ship the end product back the the consumers in the states).

People need to move to where the jobs are. Trying to force jobs to go where the unskilled people are is putting El Cid's horse before the cart.

But I am sure liberals will try, because, like the welfare programs of the past 40 years that have rippped the heart from the urban black community, its "compassionate."

Posted by El Cid's Horse | April 17, 2008 3:40 PM

Nice try, Babieca Douchebag, but (a) you didn't read the actual study; (b) you didn't prove the contrary, either, and there's certainly no reason to assume the conservative / libertarian opposite merely on the basis of a sneering tone of rightness; (c) since I also work, I'll see when I get the time to personally convince you, since obviously until then we must automatically assume that large, sophisticated, and powerful governments are incapable of doing anything directly or indirectly to facilitate jobs because, well, ideology says so.

Posted by El Cid | April 17, 2008 4:04 PM

Jobs don't move mysteriously - they moved from the industrial midwest as, after all, part of a very open policy. The only way to combat inflation, according to the Reaganites, was to break the bargaining power of labor. That had a domestic component and a international component. I mean, for Christ's sakes, the Commerce department would hold seminars about moving your company to Mexico. And this Reaganite idea caught on with the neo-liberal crowd, who added to it the humane notion that human beings were fungible - you could train them and re-train them to do anything, since their skill preferences counted as nothing. Which is, of course, just the opposite of how they view themselves. I have doubts that Yglesias would like to be retrained as, say, a computer programer and shipped to Silicon Valley, but I have no doubt he would recommend policies to retrain, say, carpenters in Appalachia that way.

The problem, of course, is that the computer programming will also be shipped to Singapore eventually. But by that time, we will all be retrained in - oh, I don't know. As mercenary soldiers?

It is considered a good policy because it enormously rewards a small section of the population, targets a large section of the population that the policy makers have no liking for or familiarity with, and provides a consensus core that think tankers from Heritage and Brookings institute can agree on - and ain't that centrism?

Posted by roger | April 17, 2008 4:06 PM

Some interesting comments, but I'm surprised nobody knew that the State of Kentucky did (does? I live in KY but have no idea) have a program which would move people from the hills to, say, the Cincy area. The article I read about it talked about the challenges one woman had with it. I don't know much more than that, other than it's been tried, or is actually going on.

There's also the Louisville neighborhood that was completely moved to somewhere else because of airport noise, that's similar but different.

Posted by American Citizen | April 17, 2008 4:16 PM

Traditionally, blue collar guys in the Rust Belt and Appalachia would profit from the construction bubbles in the Sun Belt by moving to places like Las Vegas and Phoenix and California's Inland Empire to work in construction. Typically, people need a premium in their wages to get them to leave their family and friends and move to more economically dynamic areas, but labor shortages in the hot markets would cause wage premiums.

However, in the latest boom, the huge number of illegal aliens in the construction industry in the booming parts of the country and the resulting downward pressure on wages meant that this normal process didn't work well for working class American citizens in the recent bubble. And, now, we're not likely to see another construction boom for a long time.

Posted by Steve Sailer | April 17, 2008 4:48 PM

Who's the douchebag?

You're arguing with a horse.

Posted by El Cid's Horse | April 17, 2008 4:57 PM

"As has been pointed out elsewhere, the Great Society programs did lower the poverty rate in the U.S. from 25% to 12%, if I recall correctly."

Not true; that conclusion requires taking a way-too-short sample of poverty statistics that further assumes the 1950s poverty level was a stable, flat rate. Actually, the long-term trendline for poverty was -1% a year from 1900 (when it was roughly 80%, by modern estimates) to the late 1960s.

(It spiked up when the Great Depression started, then dropped down during the WWII, and resumed the same downward slope in the 1950s that it had from 1900-1929 . . . oddly enough, at the same place it would have been had the Depression and the wartime boom not happened.)

On the 1900-1964 trendline, poverty was going to be eradicated by 1980. Then LBJ declared war on poverty, and we've been stuck at approximately 12%, the "1968" level, ever since.

I'm not going to go so far as to claim the War on Poverty, which subsidized poverty, accordingly created more of it. There might be an intransigent permanent natural poverty rate that we simply hit by coincidence at the same time that the War on Poverty was declared.

However, it is clear that the War on Poverty was an utter, absolute, and complete failure when it came to its declared objective. At great expense, it did nothing to reduce poverty.

Posted by Lunatic | April 17, 2008 5:33 PM

bite me.

Posted by North End of South Facing El Cid's Horse | April 17, 2008 5:37 PM

I have a quibble with Matt's argument. He seems to believe that we do not know much in terms of governmental public policy on how to make a geographic region wealthier.

I beg to differ. We have really only two examples of geographical economic development over the last 100 years in the US-New England and the South. Both were poorer relative to the rest of the country's regions until the mid-to-later 20th century. One thing that really helped those regions improve economically was the relativley high amount of DOD spending that was directed to them. And DOD spending made the relatively rich West Coast even wealthier.

One major way to help say the Industrial Midwest would be to move or create DOD facilities in those states, or concentrate a lot of DOD contracting there, in contrast to a place like Atlanta or Washington DC.

Posted by Frank | April 17, 2008 6:09 PM

Frank, sounds like a wonderful idea. Unfortunately defense contractors don't like doing business where a large minority of the population has brown skin and a large minority of the population that has white skin, has funny last names. Places like the Midwest and the Northeast....

Posted by Adirondacker | April 17, 2008 7:19 PM

"How 'Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?"
(After They've Seen Paree)

Published in 1919

If I pasted the lyrics here, you wouldn't see a great sheet music cover illustration, so go to the link.

Posted by artappraiser | April 17, 2008 7:26 PM

Frank, sounds like a wonderful idea. Unfortunately defense contractors don't like doing business where a large minority of the population has brown skin and a large minority of the population that has white skin, has funny last names. Places like the Midwest and the Northeast....
Posted by Adirondacker

God, is that ignorant and insipid.

Despite his name tag, Adirondacker has never been to the Northeast, Midwest, or the Adirondacks to check out the "evil" white skinned ones to "noble brown peoples" ratio.

Posted by Chris Ford | April 17, 2008 7:28 PM

Re: leaves fewer people with less power to oppose the abuse of the land

??
The more people leave the fewer there are to stress the local environment. Granted, we're just transferring the stress to some other area, but some places were never meant to host large populations. Unfortunately some of them (the Southwest) are still booming, while areas like the Great Lakes which do have the resilence and resources for a large population are bleeding people.

Re: The problem, of course, is that the computer programming will also be shipped to Singapore eventually.

Unlike manufacturing, where you can send a whole factory abroad, it doesn't work too well just shipping a few jobs overseas while keeping others here. There are too many frictional problems with time zones, language and culture. The outsourcing of white collar jobs fad has pretty much run its course and many of them have quietly been brought home as all but the largest businesses discovered that outsourcing of this sort was a major money looser. The fad nowadays is to bring foreign workers to the US, hence the push to increase H1B visas.

Posted by jonf | April 17, 2008 7:40 PM

jonf, I was talking about coal mining.

Posted by rm | April 18, 2008 12:08 AM

"Mark Schmitt has an insightful column inspired by 'bittergate' that includes the poignant observation that 'The problem is none of us have answers that are adequate to the economic circumstances of the depressed Appalachian belt.'"

Because ??? the people of east Kentucky et al are hanging on the words of pointy headed Washintonians who write white papers for a living?

It's funny - really, almost.

My mother was born in Hazard, K.Y. (look it up; it isn't a suburb of Lexington). All her side is from that part of the world. There are outrageous numbers of cousins. There are disturbingly few ancestors.

My mother's father's father's father's father's father's father was this rich preacher kid from east Virginia rebelling against his Anglican parents who bought an entire county. For decades there were enough people coming through on their way west to sustain yourself selling ammunition, provisions, liquor (the federal booze tax was one of the best things to happen to the mountains).

But then the railroad came. And with each generation there were fewer and fewer acres of land to dole out.

By the time of my mother's parents it was all about who you knew and what you were willing to do for a living. Her father was killed by a bullet. Her uncle - a likely bootlegging kingpin and municipal judge who bought up a good portion of east Kentucky for pennies on the dollar during the Depression - died in a suspicious hotel fire possibly set by Standard Oil; the men who visited her by private plane to service his will were greasy-haired Tennessee goombahs.

In any event it's silly to talk about how fucked these people are and think you're doing them a favor.

They'll vote for Mrs. Clinton because they already know she's full of shit. Her opponent only pretends not to be.

Posted by Linus | April 18, 2008 12:49 AM

Why do we WANT to preserve the small towns? Would it not be highly desirable to allow the most economically unfeasable ones to fade back into the wild?

Would it not be a desirable scenario for the vast majority of the country to dwell in dense urban environments with the majority of the land allowed to run wild except for those small parts that are efficiently harvested for raw materials or a much vaster amount that is dedicated to low impact use like tourism and vacation cottages etc? How could any environmentalist not favor it? Perhaps the time has come to accept that the economies are moving us towards greater urbanization? It's not likely higher energy (and thus transportation) costs are going to encourage economic development in far flung small communities.

I say this as a person who was raised in a small town. Though, full disclosure, I hated the place passionatly and wish it would sink into the sea.

Posted by Minnesota | April 18, 2008 8:47 AM