Average net worth of Americans -- this is a joke, right?

[BRUTE]

sadly, reality is a shitty place.

there is no equality in reality. not all humans get the same chances, and not all strategies work as well as all others. sometimes, humans just get unlucky.

there's also probably not very much humans actually chose to do wrong, because humans rarely actually choose their strategies. typically they follow their cultural programming.

[Jason]

@Jason - For a book length example of the same story (different closing plant), read Janesville.

A few months ago, I tried for an entire afternoon trying to access a full length version of the documentary but couldn't find it.

I had no idea it was a book.

Thanks.

Edit: Documentary entitled "As Goes Janesville"

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/film ... anesville/

[CS]

Wow, that article.

The part that kills me is that she did the training and they recinded the 5k they promised her. That is flat out wage theft. She should contact a lawyer. 2/3rd of 5k would be worth it. Jeezus, people can be asses.

[Kriegsspiel]

Jason's and Jacob's posts made me think of this Luttwak catch-22 from 25 years ago:

... By moving out of industries where they compete directly with cheap Mexican labor to industries that expand their exports to Mexico, workers could find jobs, and at higher wages. In reality, many less-skilled employees cannot seek out those jobs, perhaps at the other end of the country... Because they lack savings to keep them and their families together, they search for jobs hurriedly, not carefully, and even if they have time, they lack information. Those who are hardest hit by trade-induced, or any other structural changes, also have the least flexibility to cope with change of any sort. If their real wages are eroded by inflation, they will accept what they can get rather than face unemployment; if they lose their jobs anyway, they will accept lower-paying jobs to be able to remain where they live, rather than lose even their dwellings, friends, and family by moving away for work.

Economists applaud labor mobility and deplore the refusal of laid-off workers to move away or change industries in search of jobs. [But when Michigan auto workers moved to Texas during the post-1973 oil slump, they got caught in the oil bust of the 1980s and paid the price.] Even if they could keep their new Texas jobs, as many did not, the homeowners among them usually lost their modest, hard-won, wealth- the equity in their homes that was their miserably small share of the wealth of the "world's richest country."

Having sold their houses in Michigan after prices had collapsed because of the car slump, they bought Texas [homes] at oil-boom prices- usually assuming much larger mortgages for smaller dwellings. When Texas real estate prices collapsed in turn, the newcomers were left with negative equity. That, of course, is the common predicament: where there is unemployment, real estate prices are low; where there are jobs, they are high. Thus when workers move, they tend to lose what house-wealth they have.

How risky is home ownership in these times when jobs aren't tied to a particular geography like they used to (with rivers, mineral deposits, etc).

In this regard, he was not so different from other steelworkers’ sons. While daughters flocked to nursing, a job that couldn’t move overseas, sons seemed adrift. Some lived with their parents, picking up odd jobs like painting. Others stocked the shelves of warehouses.

Tyler Cowen talked about the rise of women in service industries in Average Is Over, and how men's identification with "manly jobs" was going to betray them. All the men the article mentioned moving on had gone on to jobs repairing machines; Shannon at least considered going into nursing.

I also thought this quote was really funny:

The sheer variety of bearings, which numbered in the thousands, made it difficult for the trainees to learn them all. Instructions were in English. And not every step had been written down.

Over the years, workers had been forced to make adjustments. “That’s in people’s little notebooks, and in their heads,” said Jim Swain, Shannon’s former supervisor.

The workers in Indianapolis were now needed more than ever, even as their layoffs loomed. They labored seven days a week, hating every minute of a job they didn’t know what they were going to do without.

When I worked in a manufacturing environment, stuff like that drove me crazy. We had written SOPs that would be completely ignored and never updated. This was because the people with the knowledge in their heads think it makes them indispensable, and this quote shows just how futile that line of thinking is, but also kinda shits on executives visions of smooth transitions. I think C40 said he worked in manufacturing on process improvement or something like that, so I'm sure he has tons of stories along these lines.

[jacob]

@Kriegsspiel - The notebook/people's heads issues exists in academia as well even if that place is supposed to be the last one to have that problem given how all that intellectual knowledge eventually and theoretically ends up existing in a published "library form" as the preserve of all human knowledge. Pfffft! Practically, that's not really so, though. Naively optimistic economists pay attention! I actually remember being told/encouraged that not publishing everything would render you (as a academic career cog) indispensable. This was known as the "Russian approach" (This was in the 1990s during the fall of the Soviet Union #cluestick) However, overall due to the publish/perish design of the academic system, just doing the minimum to get published rather than spending time explaining everything to everyone in order for more people to replicate your research was destined to hurt your personal career because of spending too much time writing and not enough publishing/promoting. That [western] approach was known a "skimming" #principalagentproblem and copying others, at least in physics.

Thing is: Experience is more than what can be written into books + very few care to read books or notes anymore=> it's impossible to rip out and replace highly skilled people ... something that's hard for intellectuals/theoreticians/mbas to accept. The reason that stuff never gets updated is because there's zero incentive for the person who wrote it to maintain it. Maintenance is just a thoroughly thankless job without any future prospects. Everybody knows it.

Another interesting observation from the NYT-article comments which I kinda knew but didn't properly grok is how jobs have been moving from the rust belt to the cheaper southern states since the 1950s (mostly thanks to A/C, as in air-conditioning, and cheaper labor); and how that was never a problem (for US politics) until the same jobs starting moving across the Mexican border or across the Pacific (a very long way way).

So now it's a problem, hence the present calls for walls and immigration reforms from the last ones to figure that out. But none of that helps individuals. If a job moves 1000 miles away and individuals don't wanna move along with it to preserve it, it doesn't matter who "took" it. It's gone, forever. You failed to keep up with it, literally.

Note, for example, how people from Washington state and Texas are always complaining about those "damned Californians" displacing themselves seeking a place of less regulation being willing to accept more risk. Those CA guys are the opportunistic weeds in the ecological sense.

PS: Thanks for the Luttwak reference. Never heard of him before. Looks very interesting. Library, here I come again.

[BRUTE]

How risky is home ownership in these times when jobs aren't tied to a particular geography like they used to (with rivers, mineral deposits, etc).

it always seemed to brute that home ownership was a strategic reaction to the Great Depression. something something fighting the last war.

[Kriegsspiel]

Another interesting observation from the NYT-article comments which I kinda knew but didn't properly grok is how jobs have been moving from the rust belt to the cheaper southern states since the 1950s (mostly thanks to A/C, as in air-conditioning, and cheaper labor); and how that was never a problem (for US politics) until the same jobs starting moving across the Mexican border or across the Pacific (a very long way way).

So now it's a problem, hence the present calls for walls and immigration reforms from the last ones to figure that out. But none of that helps individuals. If a job moves 1000 miles away and individuals don't wanna move along with it to preserve it, it doesn't matter who "took" it. It's gone, forever. You failed to keep up with it, literally.

The South almost WAS a third world country up until the time of WWII, IIRC. Low quality diet compared to the North, lack of electricity and plumbing, endemic disease, lack of roads and rails. So that labor and real estate was cheaper for a reason.

But anyways, at the federal level, they're still getting income taxes, a large pool of people for military duty, a trained/productive populace, etc. Once you offshore, all you get are cheaper goods for your consumers*. Plus all those government-types fap it to Keynes and he'd agree:

"I sympathize, therefore, with those who would minimize, rather than with those who would maximize, economic entanglement among nations. Ideas, knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--these are the things which should of their nature be international. But let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national. Yet, at the same time, those who seek to disembarrass a country of its entanglements should be very slow and wary. It should not be a matter of tearing up roots but of slowly training a plant to grow in a different direction."
- Keynes

* And on that note, it was gross that Shannon was proud of the fact that she was "the kind of person" who buys Heinz, not a generic ketchup.

PS: Thanks for the Luttwak reference. Never heard of him before. Looks very interesting. Library, here I come again.

I've been on the lookout for his The Grand Strategy Of The Byzantine Empire whenever I join a new library, but I've never seen it; I've been reading his other stuff, which I think is very good.

[Kriegsspiel]

How risky is home ownership in these times when jobs aren't tied to a particular geography like they used to (with rivers, mineral deposits, etc).

it always seemed to brute that home ownership was a strategic reaction to the Great Depression. something something fighting the last war.

It seems like the stock market functions as the successor species of that. If you can't count on a house to store your wealth in, the stock market is a good portable alternative that travels around with you. It definitely seems better, but there's a lot that could go wrong with stocks too obviously. How risky is stock ownership when everything's overvalued? When productive, industry leading companies might find it more advantageous to NOT be a publicly traded corporation? When the tax laws regarding capital gains and dividends could change to stockholder's detriment.

[jennypenny]

I've been on the lookout for his The Grand Strategy Of The Byzantine Empire whenever I join a new library, but I've never seen it; I've been reading his other stuff, which I think is very good.

His books are often used as textbooks. Check a large college library near you. Most allow public access but you'd have to read it on the premises. For borrowing privileges, you usually have to make a donation and become a 'friend' of the library although some make exceptions for vets and other similar groups. Your alma mater would probably also grant you borrowing privileges for their online library gratis.

Pardon the OT...

[Jason]

Kriegsspiel assessment in terms of migration patterns made me think of this book:

https://www.amazon.com/When-Work-Disapp ... 0679724176

The sociologist William Julius Wilson attributes the decline, erosion and eventual disintegration of the African American community not to social issues but to the movement of manufacturing jobs from urban areas into rural areas. The African American community fled the South, thrived temporarily in the North, only to see things go back South. The South is now losing the jobs previously lost in the North. On and on.

For a socio/cultural perspective this was the go-to book for those looking to understand the recent election. I believe it is being turned into a movie:

https://www.amazon.com/Hillbilly-Elegy- ... 0062300547

What I learned: the middle class had no aspirations to be upper middle class. They associate the upper middle class i.e. experts, technocrats, lawyers, doctors, upper management with all their ills. They just wanted their way of life to perpetuate which, as the NYC article demonstrated, is replete with their own unique brand of bullshit badges of courage.

[Jason]

Well, FFJ, according to J.D. Vance, its just how the crow flies, so dag nab it, don't go tarnation on me now.

Actually, in many ways, the book is a love letter to his mee maw who protected him while his mother was busy popping vicodins and banging Jethros. And to his credit, last I heard, he is taking his city folk success back to the hollow.

Another recent popular book on the topic is "White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg which also attempts to explain your people to the rest of us NPR listeners. The chapter on why Bill Clinton, not Obama, was the first black President was interesting. And of course, the greatest hillbilly of them all, Elvis.

Then there is "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" by James Agee, the granddaddy of all white trash documents, which IMHO is the most beautiful non-fiction book ever written. It greatly influenced David Simon, who wrote "The Wire." Not to mention the Walker Evans photographs of real hill people. You should pick up a copy, FFJ. Maybe you got kin in there.

[Jason]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDAFy3ASNOo

"American Hollow" - The story of an Appalachian Family that has changed little in 100 years.

It's a great documentary. The sad part was when the son tried to make a life for himself in the 'Natti but came back to the life of fern hunting. Though you can understand why, it's such an insulated life. And one factor that is not often talked about is the beauty of the landscape.

[Jason]

Bottom line, I would not know that people lived like this if this it wasn't for this documentary. This is an off the grid, no infrastructure, ruthless, might as well just dig a grave now poverty. What I saw at the bottom of it all was hopelessness, not exploitation or glamorization. There was no way Clint was going to make it. He's entering another universe once he leaves that place. And if they want to eat cheetos, and drink soda, and smoke, and fuck like rabbits, I understand because what else are they going to do.

And I think we all know by now that Kennedy's are pretty much just like these people except that they can hide behind dynastic wealth.

Endemic poverty, wherever its found possesses its own hypocrisies. Like the inner city person who will eat lobster with his/her welfare check because she knows she's never getting out and she just wants a taste of it. IMHO, "pull up your bootstraps" doesn't work with a situation this deep, and ingrained. This is as much an anthropological, as a sociological study at this point. It's tribal at this point. And what I saw was an inescapable gravitational pull to the only life they knew despite it being marginal. That, to me, was what was powerful about it.

[Riggerjack]

ffj, your desire to play sociologist/documentary film maker is commendable, but you seem to be going about it all wrong.

You seem to want to show how capable and competent you and your fellow rural Kentuckians are, that the current image was crafted in error. Seriously, how are you going to sell that?!? Who is going to pay for a movie that says people are people, and puts stories in a balanced perspective?

That wouldn't inspire false sympathy or baseless feelings of superiority in your audience, nor provide victims with a narrative supporting their feelings of persecution. As near as I can tell, you seem to want to "set the record straight", as though there were an audience for that, or like there weren't a few industries dedicated to building the image you want to tear down.

No offense, but you don't seem to notice the history of dedicated work that has gone into building this image. Accuracy wasn't even a secondary goal, why do you think you could change that, or that the audience would want you to? To kill a mockingbird, was the defining work that set out the rules for stories about the rural south. Incestuous, ignorant, inbred, racist, hateful, despicable, aggressive, lazy, evil, superstitious. Pick any two, and you have the defining characteristics of every white background character, with a possibility of a rogue hero, who must be an outcast, or a knight errant.

Don't get me wrong, I loved to kill a mockingbird, and Atticus Finch is inspirational. But accurate portrayal of rural Southerners? It doesn't match my experience. And the author's best friend, Truman Capote, is known for personal betrayals, and outright lying in his "nonfiction" works. This is what they want. Note the formula repeating itself, every ten years or so. Hillbilly elegy seems to be the latest version of this narrative. Young Southern writers are welcomed in urban northern cities, so long as they can come up with a new version of the "hell is life in the rural South" story.

This pap is generated so the audience can emote at the screen, never once considering the accuracy of the presentation, or the real factors that perpetuate this storyline. Some audience members will feel superior, and some will feel sympathy, and nobody will have to actually leave their wine tasting to meet anyone outside their comfortable bubbles.

How do you sell reality to that audience? How would they recognize it, if they saw it? Even if they recognized it as the truth, it offers no emotional satisfaction, so it doesn't even provide the basic product they paid for.

Better to let it go, and let people more dedicated to the search, find someone to inspire the common man to feelings of superiority. You know who you are, and who your friends and neighbors are. Why do you care about the opinions and feelings of city folk who wouldn't dare go to your county without a bus full of sign waving, camera wielding, fellow progressive city dwellers for protection? They aren't interested in your reality, other than in getting a selfie they can post of their "outreach" for virtue signalling, when they get back home.

[7Wannabe5]

I don't know why this is particularly a South/North dichotomy. "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" by Carolyn Chute is one of my favorite white rural trash novels. I would also recommend the series by Cathie Pelletier which is set in Mattagash, Maine. Richard Russo, Raymond Carver, Grace Paley and Jim Harrison (off the top of my head, many others) all frequently wrote from the perspective of colder climate, rural, working and underclass characters. The poorest people in most Northern cities are usually African-American or recent immigrants, otherwise their stories would read the same. Just happenstance that the little boy who was called "Dogface" by some other kids because he had to have multiple reconstructive surgeries after the family pet attacked him was one of the minority white population at the school where I taught. Two of the three babies I found playing in the middle of the street unattended were of Middle-Eastern heritage, and one was African-American.

Fucked up stuff happens in places and times where resources are limited. Also recommend"Germinal" by Zola or "Blindness" by Saramago on that theme. As to why many/most writers everywhere choose to write about fucked up stuff, "Happy families are all alike..."

[Jason]

I'm serious about that offer to show you Kentucky first hand, and we can go visit Perry County too. Come on down, it's not just hillbillies living on welfare.

I appreciate the invitation, but I generally try to stay out of neighborhoods where people play the banjo on their front porches.

[Laura Ingalls]

I'm serious about that offer to show you Kentucky first hand, and we can go visit Perry County too. Come on down, it's not just hillbillies living on welfare.

I appreciate the invitation, but I generally try to stay out of neighborhoods where people play the banjo on their front porches.

I’m in. My first exposure to Appalachian culture was my Dad’s Foxfire books (which are basically utube videos on dying arts before we had utube). I also thought the music in American Hollar was good.

I don’t think rural poor people across nation are radically different from place to place. I saw lots similarities to Michigan, Wisconsin, and especially southern Iowa/Northern Missouri.

[Riggerjack]

@7w5,
Fucked up stuff sells. No question.

But tell me, when was the last time you read a story about a competent, decent white man from the South? We don't tell stories with rural southern heroes, unless the forces of evil are the incarnation of wicked, racist, stereotypical Southerners.

I understand, in modern folklore, there are bad guys who are not Southerners. But when was the last time you even saw a story based in the rural South that wasn't a moral tale of racism?

Now, I'm from the PNW, I have no skin in this game. I'm just pointing out the pattern I see. I was stationed in Missouri, Alabama,and Texas when I was in the service, and served with plenty of rural Southerners. What I saw did not match my preconceived ideas of how Southerners would behave. But I have also never lived in the rural South. If I had, I would probably be more exasperated by the constant drumbeat of (ignorance, racist, inbred, blah, blah) our media centers produce on this theme.

[Jason]

@7w5,

But tell me, when was the last time you read a story about a competent, decent white man from the South?

The Jon Voight character in Deliverance didn't seem all that bad, at least comparatively speaking.

[7Wannabe5]

@Riggerjack:

For much the same reason I occasionally indulge in the eating of macaroni salad, I occasionally indulge in the reading of genre romance, so my answer to your question would be that just a couple weeks ago, I read a novel featuring a competent, decent white man from the South. The title was "The Shop on Main" and it is part of the Comfort Crossing series. I wouldn't even recommend as particularly well-written example of this genre, but it was set in the South, and both the heroine and hero were Southern.

Geography is not my strong suit, and I usually remember human interactions more than the setting of a novel, but if I limit my answer to fairly recent fictional works deemed to have some literary merit, some characters in the works of Pat Conroy, Cormac McCarthy or Larry McMurtry might serve. Of course, any character in any modern literary novel is going to be developed with some degree of complexity, so not as likely to be portrayed as entirely decent as the hero of a junk-comfort-food romance.