{"id":9465,"date":"2014-06-27T09:21:26","date_gmt":"2014-06-27T13:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9465"},"modified":"2014-06-27T09:21:26","modified_gmt":"2014-06-27T13:21:26","slug":"of-people-things-and-places","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/06\/27\/of-people-things-and-places\/","title":{"rendered":"Of People, Things, and Places"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not quite awake enough yet to deal with reviewing copyedits and reformatting figures for the book-in-process, so while I wait for the caffeine to kick in, let’s talk something simple and cheerful: rural poverty. This week, Vox and the New York Times both touched on this, the former with a story about the food stamp cookbook<\/a> and the latter with a magazine story about Clay County, KY<\/a>, spinning off a statistical study of the hardest places to live in the US<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The Vox piece is mostly on poverty in general, and how there’s more to the bad diets of poor people than just lack of money– something I’ve written about before<\/a> but also includes a brief acknowledgement that poor people in rural areas face different problems, something that’s not handled very well in most discussions of inequality. The Times piece gets more to the heart of the issue, though, noting that the biggest problem with rural areas is that they’re, well, rural. They’re not on major highways, or close to cultural centers, and thus it’s hard to do anything that would draw industry there. As the author notes, this leads to an uncomfortable conclusion:<\/p>\n

\nThe queasy answer that economists come to is that it would be better to help the people than the place \u2014 in some cases, helping people leave the place. Generally, the wealthier and better educated the family, the more mobile they are. It takes resources to pack up all your things, sign a new lease, pay for gas or a flight and go. That might help explain why more Americans aren\u2019t flocking from places with high unemployment rates to places with low ones, even if those places are surprisingly close together. College graduates, for instance, are several times as responsive to differences in labor demand as those who completed only high school, according to a study in The Journal of Human Resources.<\/p>\n

But government policy based less on place and more on people might help ameliorate that trend. \u201cLet\u2019s say I was a hardworking person who lost my job in Harlan, Ky. \u2014 the ideal place, really, to go is Williston, N.D.,\u201d Senator Paul said. \u201cPeople need to be mobile to go there. Some government programs prevent mobility or discourage mobility.\u201d And none encourage it: There are scant federal resources to help the unemployed or the poor in rural areas move to a job or even just a better neighborhood.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a topic that’s relevant to my interests because of where I grew up, in a small town in central New York state, during a time when the local industries were all packing up and moving away. I’ve seen a lot of people struggle with this– when I was a kid, it was a rare year that we didn’t see a classmate or two move away as IBM (the biggest white-collar employer in the area) shifted most of its operations to North Carolina– they moved so many people from the Binghamton area down there that in the mid-90’s, you could find Salamida’s Spiedie Sauce in Food Lion supermarkets on the Outer Banks). And now, the high school classmates I’m in contact with on Facebook are spread over a huge range, many down South, but a lot still in the Broome County area.<\/p>\n

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Times article about stuff on the far side of the Tappan Zee bridge without a couple of bits that get my back up a little– though it should be noted that this is vastly better than the usual pith-helmeted anthropological reporting they churn out. The chief problem is the way this is treated as a purely abstract economic issue. There’s a faint tone of puzzlement that it’s difficult to get people to move, and a quote from a Kentucky official saying “People are really connected to place here.”<\/p>\n

But this sort of circles back around to the problem noted in the Vox piece. It’s not just the place, but the people in the place<\/em>. The resistance isn’t just that a Kentuckian moving to North Dakota would hate the winters or miss having scenery with more topography, it’s that moving a single family out is often taking them away from a deeply rooted support network. Which is, in large part, how rural families cope with issues in the Vox piece, of lack of time and so on– if you’re in a place where you have lots of close relatives, you can help each other out with extra food and emergency child care and so on. And even less tangible stuff like general emotional support– the benefits of just having somebody close you can vent to over coffee or beer after a bad day are tremendous but hard to quantify.<\/p>\n

And that’s what makes this a harder problem than the raw numbers might suggest. While on paper it might seem like a no-brainer to move from collecting disability in Kentucky to working a better-paying job in North Dakota, there are a lot of difficult-to quantify other factors that play in. The pay might be better in North Dakota, but if moving means finding and paying for child care that used to be provided free by a nearby relative, well, the pay better be a whole lot<\/em> better. There are also cascading effects on folks left behind– if moving away means leaving a less-mobile relative without somebody to run errands and help around the house, that has negative consequences for others that might outweigh individual financial benefits. And so on.<\/p>\n

So, while I agree that the Times piece correctly identifies one of the issues at the heart of this, I don’t think they’ve really grasped the full dimensions of the issue. Particularly in small communities, people aren’t just isolated units, but are bound into a whole web of interactions that go beyond the readily measurable economic factors (which is not to say that they couldn’t be measured, just that it’s not as straightforward as comparing salaries). And given the background you need to have to end up writing for a major national media outlet, or working on government poverty policy, there’s a systematic bias that prevents this from being fully grasped and incorporated into the discussion.<\/p>\n

This has consequences in policy areas beyond simple economics, too– it’s a big and underappreciated factor in things like the debate over fracking (a major and continuing issue in Broome County), as I’ve written about before<\/a>. A lot of the unpleasantness in the arguments over fracking come from a lack of understanding of the connection between people, places, and things– on both sides of the debate. On the pro-fracking side, I got in a shouting argument over this with some college friends who said “People in that area should sell the drilling rights for shitloads of money, and if the drilling wrecks the local environment, well, they’ll be rich enough to move away.” They were boggled at the idea that “just move away” wasn’t a trivial matter for people in the affected area, in a way that seemed to me to be condescending and borderline insulting. <\/p>\n

And on the anti-fracking side, while as a scientist and a squishy liberal I agree that it would be better to leave that gas underground and switch to energy sources that don’t drive climate change, as someone who grew up in Broome County, I totally understand why people are in favor of drilling. It’s not just laziness or Fox News brainwashing or simple greed– shale gas might be the first good economic news for that region since I’ve been aware of economic news. To a lot of people in those communities, fracking represents a lifeline, an infusion of cash into the community that can prevent the need to make the wrenching decision of whether to leave. A lot of the environmental anti-fracking arguments end up in that same condescending “just move away,” because they don’t understand what it’s like to be in that position.<\/p>\n

For all that the national political rhetoric pays lip service to salt-of-the-Earth rural communities as the wholesome core of our national character, there’s basically no understanding of the ground-level issues and concerns of those communities. Because the people who are involved in national-level politics and the discussion thereof are, more or less by definition, not the kind of people who understand what it’s like to be strongly tied into that kind of community. The terms of the debate, and the policy options, are set by the class of people who feel free to move away to the cities where policy is made and chin-stroking think pieces about the problems of the rural poor are published.<\/p>\n

And that, right there, is probably the biggest infrastructure problem facing rural American communities: that they’re not the sort of places that people who write for the New York Times live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not quite awake enough yet to deal with reviewing copyedits and reformatting figures for the book-in-process, so while I wait for the caffeine to kick in, let’s talk something simple and cheerful: rural poverty. This week, Vox and the New York Times both touched on this, the former with a story about the food… Continue reading Of People, Things, and Places<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,2,28,81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class_issues","category-personal","category-politics","category-economics_1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}