For one thing, I doubt it is the case that ‘countryside living has become economically non-viable’. There isn’t a Dust Bowl out there today. But what exactly is the problem? Is there a kind of economic entropy such that all wealth tends to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands? Were the lower classes only useful for a brief post-war period? Is there a cosmological analogy, such that wealth concentration ultimately leads to the big bang of another revolution and the resultant chaotic aftermath?
Anyway, your talk of means-of-production brings to mind Communism more than socialism. But ok, let’s say the Feds implemented a long-term (generations) program to give the blighted populations of the nation the tools to become self-sufficient (the means of production), and even politically empowered. The GOP thinks it has a monster on its hands now? :eek:
Sigh. We’ve been over this before, Sam, and what you keep neglecting to point out is that the bulk of Canadian Atlantic fisheries, unlike US ones, are based on islands. In the North. Access to offseason pursuits like forestry and agriculture is simply not as feasible for the average Canadian Atlantic fisherman as for the US one.
(Note that the Canadian Pacific fisheries, whose fisherman are equally entitled to Canadian unemployment benefits, are both more mainland-based and more temperate climate-wise, and are much less affected by seasonal unemployment.)
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
After WWII noted Keynesian economist Paul Samuelson predicted a massive problem, saying “[The aftermath of WWII] will create the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” After all, one out of every two people was somehow involved in supporting the war machine, and ten million soldiers were coming home and none of them had jobs.
The Keynesian analysis said that putting all those people out of work quickly would create a demand spiral that would be very destructive. Samuelson recommended a whole range of Keynesian stimulus measures including extended unemployment benefits, large one-time discharge benefit checks, direct welfare and work subsidies. He also suggested tapering off wartime production very slowly - in essence turning the war machine into a giant welfare program making useless weaponry just to give people jobs. None of that happened, other than the GI bill which was a much smaller intervention than Samuelson had in mind. He predicted huge unemployment and a very long period of hardship. That never happened. Instead, the economy boomed - just as it did after WWI.
[/quote]
This was partly due (besides the factors noted by Exapno Mapcase) to the fact that women and African-Americans who had been doing the GIs’ jobs were let go to make room for the returning GIs. Women were given all kinds of cultural and political messages about their essential importance in the domestic sphere, which encouraged their marrying younger, having larger families, and working less outside the home. Blacks relapsed into lower-opportunity agricultural, menial and domestic employment, and higher unempoyment.
Samuelson may simply not have expected that good old racism and sexism would “solve” so much of the “social assistance problem” for white veterans.
Yeah, I’m aware of Foxworthy’s shtick, and those are funny, but poking fun at their quirks isn’t condemning them for being lazy, welfare-sucking bums who need to pick themselves up because it’s their own damn fault, like I’ve seen from a few liberals in this thread. That’s the Republicans’ line about the poor. They could sue for copyright infringement when a liberal says it.
I know, I know – “Punch up, not down,” and “sideways” is also acceptable. Still, mocking rednecks/hillbillies/white trash is an ancient and venerable American tradition, regardless of whether those doing it are rednecks etc. themselves or higher in the social scale. Perhaps it is acceptable because white trash are at least white and have always had that minimal claim to some social status – which minimal claim they now are losing, which definitely is at least one of the factors fueling their rage and Trump’s surge.
Well, not from me. Every nasty thing that NR pundit says about them might be largely true, but, even if so, I regard them as mostly victims of environment and circumstances not of their own making, no less so than WRT inner-city project-housed black gangstas on welfare. Even the poor whites’ apparent racial prejudice is a product of their environment – including, as an environmental factor, the influence of cynical pols – such as Trump, though he’s a political parvenu – who have encouraged it and exploited it over the decades, nay, centuries, and ain’t about to stop now.
Apparently. Obviously. That’s capitalism. That’s the Golden Rule. When those who have the gold get to make the rules, they make the rules so that they get to get even more gold – that is entropy, if you like, both economic and, more importantly, political. See Piketty, see Gilens and Page. And entropy can be fought, but it takes work – and imagination.
Well, no. Communism – at least in its 20th-Century Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist form – is undemocratic, is based on giving all and unaccountable power to an in-the-know ideological elite who think their ideas are true to a scientific degree of certainty and therefore owe no more tolerance to dissidents than astronomers owe to flat-Earthers. Communism so defined is one form of socialism. But not the only form, and socialism – even full-bore socialism as distinct from social democracy – can in principle be democratic and based on multi-party elections (and on other forms of democracy, such as workplace democracy, or soviets in the original pre-Bolshevik sense of the word). Democratic socialism is, in fact, the one system that has been conceived but never yet been tried, unless you count such brief and soon-crushed experiments as the Paris Commune or the Spanish Revolution (anarcho-syndicalist in character though the latter was).
I think y’all are misunderstanding the concept of entropy. It is not a good analogy for a tendency for wealth and power to concentrate and to create rules that preserve and further that order within the system.
And to the question of “what exactly is the problem?” No it is not exactly a Dust Bowl. And neither is it completely a consequence of BG’s Golden Rule.
The Dust Bowl though is not so inapt of an analogy. The Dust Bowl was a result of a confluence of poor land management decisions, and circumstances that the world threw at populus that they had no control over. Before the Dust Bowl farmers plowed in the drought resistant prairie grasses that had stabilized the soils for years, and then as markets contracted left them bare or planted with wheat that could only survive with significant water inputs. The combination of economic and physical ill winds with the farming practices caused that environmental and human tragedy.
Part of getting through the Dust Bowl was New Deal investments, including education on soil conservation techniques. Rural Americans had to change how they did things, they had to be convinced about how to adapt.
The migration out of rural America is not at Dust Bowl levels but the displacement and social disruption is just as real.
What is the problem now? A world in which small rural family farms and businesses cannot successfully compete against Big Boxes and agricultural behemoths. A population that is (sometimes willfully) undereducated and ignorant and thus ill-prepared to compete in the current marketplace (and agreed that that education is not necessarily a liberal art college education for all, but does require science and math and literacy to the level of being able to interface with the technology that today’s and tomorrow’s Blue Collar jobs require). Leadership that exploits them rather than leads them to where they need to go. A cultural tendency to cling to the sinking remnants of what was rather than to learn how to swim or to even accept a life jacket if doing so means accepting that change. Spitting at those who might be the ones to offer or even share the life jackets and a tendency of those with them to then say well then screw you too.
Wealth and income concentration is part of it but only part of it.
No matter what there are gong to be fewer of those jobs. With the right education of the work force and infrastructure rural America can compete for them based on lower costs, but that is then winning often over other American demographics, not just Mexico and China.
Let us assume for the sake of discussion that the new sorts of automation will by raising productivity raise all boats and eventually increase employment (as is often argued). What will those new good jobs look like and how can we help rural America get a share of them as well as suburban and urban America, today and in the future?
The only reason to live on rocks is if something valuable exists under the rocks. That explains Appalachia. Small subsistence farming was feasible there back in the days when a farm could, if barely, meet all the needs of a family. To thrive, an area needs to also provide goods for export. The areas surrounding Appalachia had large amounts of good land, ocean or large river and lake ports, flat lands that allowed transportation corridors, and a need for population that encouraged immigration and new ways of thinking.
Appalachia proved to have rocks. Coal, mainly, with some iron ore and other minerals. Miners has been historically terrible work for humans, but it pays better than subsistence farming and allows workers to stay in their hometowns. Downside, it offers little to no advancement, encourages early school dropouts, and leads to horrifying diseases and short lifespans. It’s much tougher to build communities around mining towns. Factory workers often took classes at night, staged plays or sports or dances for community events, and otherwise expanded their lives in their free times. Miners collapsed. Or got drunk. Appalachia has the highest rates for binge drinking (and cigarette smoking) and now is suffering from the new prescription medication scourge. The only difference from a hundred years ago is one new source of oblivion.
The social matrix of these communities has encouraged short-term thinking for the area’s entire existence. How do you put time and money aside for a better future when your world is so constrained?
There are interesting parallels to black communities in the pre-Civil Rights era. (Not Jim Crow: this was nationwide.) Blacks had fewer job pathways, got the lowest wages, were barred from many schools and organizations, couldn’t get funding for homes and businesses. America still sees relics from this short-term thinking in the relative lack of entrepreneurship in black communities. Other groups - Jews in that past, Asians today - dodged the formal barriers by creating internal structures for funding that allowed small businesses to start and used an extended family to staff them. The difference is sometimes attributed to pre-immigrant experiences brought in with them that Africans had no need to develop pre-slavery.
Hope is needed, yes. Hope can also be created out of nothingness. It comes culturally by deferred gratification, the ability to put aside short-term pleasures for long-term betterment. A few individuals have always done this; we hear their stories all the time as exemplars. For communities to do it is harder. It must be a generally shared positive in a large enough fraction of the community. Whether it can be inculcated is unknown. We need to find out.
As always it’s a pleasure to have a pro add properly contextualized real world history to keep us all grounded in the facts. Thanks for this and so many other good posts of late.
And with that I’ll promptly descend into the depths of non-seriousness …
The remedy to the current malaise is obvious, All we need to do is return to a situation where we are the only functioning manufacturing economy.
Mr. President! We have the means! All we need is the will to do so!!
I don’t doubt that. I don’t think the attitudes of some liberals in this thread are indicative of any widespread trend. But while the social safety net needs to be expanded, that’s just treating the symtoms rather than the disease, IMHO. All of the poor, not just whites, have been marginalized by income inequality. Fixing that would float all boats, as well as reducing welfare costs for the government and increasing tax revenues. And people with no reason to complain have no reason to pick on immigrants and other targets of discontent.
Of course, the easy part is saying it. Doing it is another thing, but it has to be done 1) out of simple human decency, and 2) to prevent more Donald Trumps from gaining traction.
This is true, but also it is very easy to be led to blame someone else for your troubles when you don’t fully understand why you are in the state that you are in. In the last 50 years especially, white working class individuals have been losing jobs and not fully sharing in the proceeds of free trade or the internet economy. Their jobs have been replaced by automation or labor-intensive work being shipped overseas. We, as a society, have not invested resources into retraining these people for the new economy. So they exist in crappy jobs and unemployment, blaming elites in Washington and New York for not caring one whit about them, and it is VERY easy for someone to turn that frustration and rage upon other people. Someone who seems like they care about you and wants what is best for you, as opposed to all the politicians who ignore you or who, sometimes, want to shut down the only thing that brings your area money (coal, tobacco, etc). They start blaming the politicians for only caring about “the blacks” or “the gays” while you are left behind and forgotten and guess what, you are going to start hating these other groups. And sometimes these people who seem to care about you explicitly tell you that it is those other people’s fault. So its very easy to fall into that trap.
This is, btw, a similar reason to why gangs in the inner cities are successful in gaining members - it isn’t because the people who live there are inherently more violent than others, but because the gangs seemingly offer a way out or at least some solutions to your problems, while no one else seems to care.
ISiddiqui, I completely agree with everything you say there, so much so that I think you might have mistaken what I was saying. But it’s good to hear it explained more thoroughly. And better.
but poking fun at their quirks isn’t condemning them for being lazy, welfare-sucking bums who need to pick themselves up because it’s their own damn fault, like I’ve seen from a few liberals in this thread. That’s the Republicans’ line about the poor. They could sue for copyright infringement when a liberal says it.