The Other America

[denise]

Has anyone read the Hillbilly Elegy yet? The Georgia library system just allowed users to reserve it, and it will be at my local library in a week or so. I can't wait to read it, as it presents a perspective that I only know about through friends and colleagues who grew up similar to the book; a part of lower class Caucasian America. From my understanding, this book does well to describe the circumstances for a part of America that has not been included in political discourse for about 40 years or so now, by either political side. I'm an anarchist, so I don't think much of the current political and social system, but I like to read about what feeds it, and especially understand other groups of people.

If you've read it, what did you think of it?

[jacob]

See viewtopic.php?p=123439#p123439

(I finally made it through the long library holding queue. I'll have the book in my hands early next week.)

[denise]

Interesting take on Trump followers. I don't know many personally, to be honest, I mostly have friends of varying cultures, and since Trump has essentially insulted all of them, they're definitely not inclined to his ideals. The few Trump followers I know, are parents of friends, and do tend to lean how you described them. Although, they never have anything to say when it's pointed out white supremacists are taking over his agenda.

As for the forum topic, I think I'll stay out of that discussion!

[7Wannabe5]

Those interested in memoirs and literature might also wish to reserve copies of:

1) "All Over But the Shoutin' " by Rick Bragg
2) "Bastard Out of Carolina" by Dorothy Allison
3) "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" by Carolyn Chute
4) "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" by Raymond Carver
5) "Mohawk" by Richard Russo
6) The Mattagash Series by Cathie Pelletier
7) "Affliction" by Russell Banks

[Dragline]

Not yet, although DW read it and gave me the low-down. It's basically what you would expect and is consistent with the articles and reviews that you can find on line. It tended to confirm my basic thought that we get too captivated by nostalgia about these places and that the best "fix" for this is to encourage and/or assist people to move to less depressed places with more opportunities, like the author did.

Instead, we seem to encourage people to stay put and "be proud" of living in the same place for many generations. We have created a number of narrative fallacies about claims to victimhood and scapegoating of various "others", instead of just grappling with the basic fact that these places are economically depressed for good reasons relating to uneconomic or obsolete industries and flows of capital. People who continue to live long-term in economically depressed areas are going to have a lot of problems, leaving only two real choices: Subsidize them or Move them. What is not on the table is returning to some idyllic past, real or imagined. Instead, we do enough subsidizing to keep these places on life support, while pretending we are not doing it and telling ourselves fanciful stories about how prosperity is "right around the corner", when the opposite is probably true for most of these places -- i.e., they are going to get worse.

[7Wannabe5]

Only 2% of Americans now work as farmers or ranchers, and over 36% of Americans live more than 10 miles from their nearest grocery store. One thing to take into long-term thinking consideration about the deterioration of rust-belt industry is that there were often very good reasons why industry chose those locations way back when, such as access to large bodies of fresh running water and timber.

[Dragline]

Only 2% of Americans now work as farmers or ranchers, and over 36% of Americans live more than 10 miles from their nearest grocery store. One thing to take into long-term thinking consideration about the deterioration of rust-belt industry is that there were often very good reasons why industry chose those locations way back when, such as access to large bodies of fresh running water and timber.

Exactly. What made a whole lot of sense in one era does not mean it makes sense forever. You live in one of the more interesting areas for re-purposing itself, though, because it definitely has enough going on to support a large population, just not a "really large" population like it used to.

If you hike much of the Appalachian Trail, you will see evidence of many old farms, homesteads and even roads and small cemeteries, and you can imagine that in the 1700s and through most of the 1800s, the area had been cleared and planted. None of the trees are more than about 120 years old. There are no people living there anymore, and its a very good thing, both for the descendants of those who were there and the area itself.

People have gone to live in many places all over America when it became a good idea and abandoned others when they no longer made sense. That's one of the things that has made America a great place to live.

[jennypenny]

I understand what everyone is saying about moving to take advantage of better opportunities. However, if we move around en masse leaving spent cities in our wake--like the migration from the rust belt to the sun belt--doesn't that make us kinda like locusts? That's the image that always comes to mind when I read these stories about forgotten people and places.

[Dragline]

Maybe. But isn't that the fundamental nature of a capitalist society and the idea behind free markets and Schumpeter's creative destruction? People need to follow the capital in a capitalist society and that should be the narrative, not the foolish consistency that staying put has value or nobility to it. Horatio Alger's maxim needs to be reinvigorated.

But you know, I honestly don't mind subsidizing some people to stay in the same place. I really don't, and I suppose that's why I would favor a reverse income tax over general welfare, because the cost of living in many of these places is already very low and dependent on federal dollars coming in in the form of social security, disability and other wealth transfer payments. So long as we are honest that this is a wealth transfer for a specific cultural or humanitarian purpose and the people who receive it accept it as that.

What irritates me is the hypocrisy of people who won't admit they can't compete and refuse to move to greener pastures and then blame the government or other people who are willing to move or who just showed up, or think the solution is going backwards in time. It's the mindset that really bothers me when someone says "My kids can't find jobs here and that's a problem politicians are supposed to fix while indulging me in my fantasies that this is the greatest place ever and we are competitive in the marketplace", when they should be saying "I've been telling my kids they need to get out of here and I'm hoping politicians will make that easier."

I think the framing of the plot in the movie "How Green Was My Valley" provides the correct perspective.

[7Wannabe5]

Dragline said: Maybe. But isn't that the fundamental nature of a capitalist society and the idea behind free markets and Schumpeter's creative destruction? People need to follow the capital in a capitalist society and that should be the narrative, not the foolish consistency that staying put has value or nobility to it. Horatio Alger's maxim needs to be reinvigorated.

Eh, my 76 year old friend who spent his childhood on a hardscrabble farm with umpteen other siblings, and was dead broke in his late 20s eating out of dumpsters after being fired from his first job in the city, and is now worth $50,000,000, would likely credit his success, not so much to hard work as to being intelligent enough to recognize at some point that whoever holds the capital in a capitalist society will tend towards forever holding and increasing their capital. He is always giving my BF, whom he regards as some kind of semi-errant son, lectures on topics such as how he could get to a place where he could be privy to better information and opportunities in relationship to IPOs, etc. etc. etc. He is going to vote for Trump, only because he assumes that it is more likely that he will be heavily taxed under Democratic administration. He thinks Trump did a crap job of acquiring wealth given his silver spoon start in life. He recently went shopping at a retail outlet in which he is some sort of serious minority stockholder, and bought me new winter boots, flannel pajamas, socks and long underwear. I suspect this was his way of winning a minor argument we were having about off-shoring pollution (along with jobs)to China -lol.


Another example would be a moderately wealthy ENTP friend of mine, from a moderately wealthy academic background (father was frugal PhD physicist), who never graduated from college because he was recruited for his mega-brain engineering skills. He mostly slacks about and lives off his investments, but if the job market is particularly strong in a certain way, he might hire himself out directly to make some more money, but if the job market is particularly weak in a certain way, he might go down to the cafe and round up a bunch of young unemployed people with STEM skills and put them together as a contract team to produce a piece of work he can then market upstream. He periodically contacts me to offer me some sort of terrible people-person position on one of his ad hoc tech teams. He will likely vote for Clinton because he likes to smoke pot with the artsy young women with whom he prefers to have sex.

My point here being that no matter where you started from, or what level of capital you currently retain, the main difference is whether you can get outside of your box, observe what resources are at hand, and how different vectors are flowing through your environment, and how you can best create and retain value. IOW, in my humble opinion, based on my observation of how the world really works, it's much less about hard work and optimism, and much more about brains and boundaries. IOW, an individual with brains and boundaries will likely get ahead of the pack in any environment. OTOH, I would agree that if we define an individual's range as the realm over or within which he is able or likely to venture out to forage or compete with others for resources, and an individual's domain as the realm around which he maintains strict boundaries or strong control (Mine!) but also within which he holds responsibility, then it is pretty obvious that the ratio of range/domain will determine the level of accumulation of resources.

So, that is why, for instance, very few affluent American Catholics chose to continue to obey the injunction against birth control which limited their ability to boundary their financial responsibilities in a changing economic environment. A couple of years ago I happened to accompany a friend to a worship-folk-music sort of event at a Catholic Church located in a relatively affluent city in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I was struck by how many families with many children were in attendance. I hadn't seen a gathering like this since my own childhood when I attended events involving the Irish Catholic quarter of my heritage. It caused to me feel rather sentimental for an hour or two, remembering jolly holiday events with hordes of second and third cousins in attendance. It did not cause me to regret my decision to get my tubes snipped after my second child was born.

Another example would be that on the world market grouchy old American men with STEM careers and paunches are regarded as good catches as husbands. But, if you marry a beautiful young intelligent Sri Lankan girl and bring her back with you to America, then you have increased her potential mating and career range significantly, but you only can maintain your boundary until she is granted citizenship. Maybe a bit longer if you manage to impregnate her.

Another example would be that there is a large extended family who recently immigrated from Albania to reside in my neighborhood. If I put on my entrepreneurial thinking cap and pondered all the day long on how I could possibly profit from leveraging them as labor, I would still not be able to afford to pay any one of them even $2/hour to harvest potatoes due to unfortunate combination of extremely low IQ combined with extremely high level of silliness.

[BRUTE]

However, if we move around en masse leaving spent cities in our wake--like the migration from the rust belt to the sun belt--doesn't that make us kinda like locusts?

what's wrong with locusts?

[denise]

Many species have to migrate when their food source is low, or when the weather changes, so I don't see anything wrong with people having to migrate when communities are failing. I work in urban planning and transportation engineering, and sometimes communities do not want to do what it takes to stay competitive. Since we live under capitalism, that results in less than desirable outcomes. You have to have the right political, and communal climate to entice industry to a certain area, whether offering tax incentives or other arrangements.

I think the biggest problem is that people either become entrenched in their towns, or, they can't afford to move. I don't mind government assistance for those wanting to move, but for those entrenched, I'm a little annoyed if they receive government assistance. It's really hard to convince me to pay for someone else, because of a choice they knew or could have researched the consequences of making. But that's another topic.

[jacob]

I finished the book. I stand by much of my initial post: viewtopic.php?p=123439#p123439 ...

I think the most important take-away is that this is not a geographical problem but a cultural problem. It is, therefore, not solved by moving elsewhere. Nor is it solved by throwing money at it. Relocating still means relocating one's values and [family]-relations and the fact is that the world has evolved to a point where the old value-set of honor, loyalty, toughness, etc.(*) trumps the value set that is compatible with the new economy, i.e. education, reliability, civility(**). One of the few strategies that works, and that was also the one that worked for the author, was simply to move out and assimilate into another culture.

(*) This kind of nostalgia seems to be closely associated with the whole "make America great again". There's a longing for the time when that culture kicked ass ... 75 years ago.
(**) This also means that there's a strong distrust of the institutions associated with the new values. This means that the culture can't be changed by institutional means. Also, it means that it can't be changed by education, jobs (of the kind where an employee is valued by their ability to show up and work hard 9-5), ... because these are all part of a distrusted culture.

[Ego]

It is, therefore, not solved by moving elsewhere.

and

One of the few strategies that works, and that was also the one that worked for the author, was simply to move out and assimilate into another culture.

Hum. Please expound.

[jacob]

If the problem is [a defective/outdated] culture(*), moving doesn't work if one brings the old culture along and keeps it when moving to a place with a different culture. It's quite hard to change one's culture in the first place but it becomes especially hard if one brings along family/friends to reinforce one's old patterns or one moves into the local enclaves that inevitably seems to form from similar people who also moved. See, e.g. immigrant ethnic/"ghettos"/neighborhoods in Europe; here it's possibly to move to an entirely different country but yet manage to recreate one's old culture/country/language in a small area.

(*) Talking about the "Scottish/Irish warrior culture" found in Appalachia or one of the "nations" in the book mentioned below, i.e. hillbillies.

Going alone puts more pressure on the person to assimilate, especially if they stay out of the "ghettos". Same reason that it's better to travel around the world alone instead of a group if the goal is to broaden one's perspective.

In the book, the author's grandparents move to Ohio in the hopes to escape the poverty, but they (the family) didn't fit in, so no change. It's not until the author joins the Marine Corps and later goes to college, especially Yale and finds friends/structure outside the old culture, that cultural values begin to change.

[jacob]

I would also recommend reading the Hilbilly Elegy along with this: https://www.amazon.com/American-Nations ... 0143122029

[CS]

I find it fascinating how the Egyptians moved whole cities based on leadership changes, and of course the Nile.

Regarding the book, I don't see how they are going to assimilate anytime soon when they are hunkering down with their guns. Online groups aren't helping, since it makes it look like a whole world just like them. At least in this group it's clear most others are different.

[Chad]

What irritates me is the hypocrisy of people who won't admit they can't compete and refuse to move to greener pastures and then blame the government or other people who are willing to move or who just showed up, or think the solution is going backwards in time. It's the mindset that really bothers me when someone says "My kids can't find jobs here and that's a problem politicians are supposed to fix while indulging me in my fantasies that this is the greatest place ever and we are competitive in the marketplace", when they should be saying "I've been telling my kids they need to get out of here and I'm hoping politicians will make that easier."

This is part of why I grew up in a small town. My father worked construction around Pittsburgh, but lived an 90 minutes away without traffic. He spent 3 hours on the road every day. I always thought this was ridiculous, as I was young enough to have zero memory of them moving to a town much closer. It kind of makes me angry, because growing up that sheltered adds more hurdles you have to over come.

[7Wannabe5]

The first time I heard the term "hillbilly" is was used by my mother to describe a neighbor who stood on the porch and yelled at her children. I was also led to believe that it had something to do with leaving your dog out in the yard all day to bark. Also often associated with bad teeth, fetal alcohol syndrome, incest and rickets.

[George the original one]

@7Wannabe5 - you left out speaking with an undecipherable accent.