Paul Krugman is one of my favorite economics columnists and bloggers.* When he speaks from within his field to explain those abstract market forces, he's great. And he's got a good liberal heart. But his view of the world and the people in it is badly cramped by his identity as an economist. Krugman operates very much from within social science, most especially from within a modern market-oriented economic framework. It's a philosophically a somewhat different place, but pretty much within the same framework that conservative economists work in. They all cook in the same kitchen using the same ingredients and the same tools. The ingredients are social science statistics. Krugman's final product is cooked from data stirred by economic theories. This is important stuff in some contexts, but not in the context of telling how people's lives are actually lived.
And somehow, as he has been cooking away in that kitchen, which seems in fact to be his whole world, he has developed a bitter hatred of Barack Obama, a hatred, in fact, he clings to.
Krugman says,
In fact, the Clinton years.
were very good for working Americans in the Midwest, where real median
household income soared before crashing after 2000. (You can see the
numbers at my blog, krugman.blogs.nytimes.com .) We can argue about how
much credit Bill Clinton deserves for that boom. But if I were a
Democratic Party elder, I'd urge Mr. Obama to stop blurring the
distinction between Clinton-era prosperity and Bush-era economic
distress
Now, for some this was true. New tract housing flooded farmers' fields outside of St. Louis, Missouri where we lived for twenty years. Box stores and malls of all sorts sprang up along the arteries extending in all directions. Families could, on credit, buy not one or two but three or four cars, or, not cars, SUVs. But for many, the story was different. Companies combined and downsized and not only blue collar workers but white collar as well were laid off in one way or another. Christmas became a time of dread, the time when pink slips appeared. Laid-off white collars workers, at least, got accustomed to the idea that they'd be given forty five minutes to pack their stuff and then would be escorted out of the building. All this downsizing was supposed to be good for the economy: making it leaner and stronger. The human costs -- well they were necessary for the good of the whole.
In Missouri and Illinois, small towns had been and continued emptying. Younger people who could drifted to the larger metropolitan areas. Driving through small towns, one saw desolate, often boarded up main streets. Many of the stores that were open served as spaces for social services and Alcoholics Anonymous. Now Mr. Krugman can point out that many of these people left for employment in the malls and box stores in urban and suburban areas--metroplexes--and may have made more than they did in the small towns. But many didn't get full time jobs and didn't get health insurance. Many lost the ties that had made lives meaningful. St. Louis, aside from the total and miserable failure to do anything for its inner city, saw, in its metropolitan area, the decline of inner city suburbs and the rise of ticky tack and not infrequently poor exurbs.
Certainly not all people, or even the majority, felt these consequences, but the people analogous to those Pennsylvania mine and mill workers did, as did people with high school educations or less everywhere. Driving through rural Missouri and southern Illinois in those years you would have believed that the economic miracle of the Clinton years was fiction. Where were the wages that drove that median income up? Not among WalMart workers or McDonald's workers or the vendors at the St. Louis Cardinals' games or the former mill workers.
And that economic miracle, (and it was a bubble, wasn't it, after all?) was responsible for some of the worst environmental and financial and social problems that exist today: the ironically destructive construction of more and bigger cars and houses and yards further from jobs, in places without mass transportation; the creation and consumption of more and more things with which to fill houses, new and better things that weren't really better, stuff that people got into debt to buy, that did not necessarily improve their lives, stuff that filled landfills higher and higher and littered empty lots and fields and poor, mean streets. As did the extravagant, excessive, unbiodegradable packaging it all came in. The manufacturing of all this stuff poisoned the land and water -- including the drinking water -- in the poorest regions, leading to illness and death. The industrialization of agriculture added to greenhouse gases, polluted groundwater and sapped water tables as it did away with family farms. Chemicals added to beef up (hah) animal size and productivity harmed man and beast. And the concrete needed for all the new highways and freeways and giant parking lots caused increased flooding, the destruction of farmland and wildlife and, yes, small towns. Development run amok. Housing in areas where the growth was strongest became impossibly expensive for ordinary workers so that you had people who worked in service industries in Silicon Valley sometimes living in their cars. And we became a country that had to keep these patterns going in order for our economy to survive.
Krugman derides Obama's claim that with economic hardship people "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them. The crucial word here isn't 'bitter,' it's 'cling.' Does economic hardship drive people to seek solace in firearms, God and xenophobia?" I think Krugman is revealing his elitism and out-of-touchness here. I can just hear him say to himself, "why those good small town people, they're no more likely to be driven to guns, church and xenophobia than I am." But they are. Because these are things they do normally. Membership in the NRA, church attendance and antipathy to people not like you are very common characteristics of a lot of people I know in towns outside metropolitan areas, and within some metropolitan areas as well. Gun ownership was, as it still is, a big deal in the nineties, as it was for generations before. One of my bosses in Missouri was an avid hunter, the rack on top of his van often holding a buck or a deer. Many of the people I worked with in Illinois belonged to the NRA. Hunting ran in their families as did the ritual of father taking son (and sometimes daughter) out to learn how to use guns. A good friend of ours hunted sparrows from his living room window, for crying out loud, and then sent his dachsund out to retrieve them. I'm not sure improved economic standing kept people from hunting so much as it gave them the opportunity to buy more and bigger guns. And I have to say here, since I am an effete northeasterner by upbringing, that I came to feel hunting and guns (except for private people owning M-16s and the like) were not instrinsically bad. I came to be a bit ashamed at how easily I accepted the judgments of my Upper West Side New York community of origin on guns and hunting. I don't think I could ever shoot a pigeon or a squirrel let alone a deer, but I didn't grow up in a hunting culture. I let other people kill my meat for me so I only have to see it in its plastic and Styrofoam wrappings.
So do they "cling" to hunting? I would imagine they do. People who have less work have more time to hunt, and maybe more need for food, and, yes, for companionship. Hunting offers a lot of companionship. With companionship of work gone, mightn't people seek more of it hunting? And isn't it a commonplace that we retreat to the familiar in the face of threats?
As far as xenophobia, blacks are not welcome to drive through South St. Louis. Italians on the Hill used to blow up houses if outsiders tried to buy them. Efforts to establish group homes for people with mental retardation in ordinary suburbs met with loud protests at town meetings. My father's Jewish relatives didn't like my shiksa mother. They said Arabs smelled funny and were dirty. They panicked over intermarriage.
People of all sorts tend to be xenophobic. The less contact with outsiders, I suspect, the more xenophobic. The less they know and the more they perceive as threats, the more xenophobic. And small towns all over the world, in the face of outsiders, pull into themselves.
Krugman uses some quick statistical brushstrokes to counter Obama's claims about church attendance:
It?s true that people in poor states are more likely to attend church regularly than residents of rich states. This might seem to indicate that faith is indeed a response to economic adversity. But this result largely reflects the fact that southern states are both church-going and poor; some poor states outside the South, like Maine and Montana, are actually less religious than Connecticut. Furthermore, within poor states, people with low incomes are actually less likely to attend church than those with high incomes. (The correlation runs the opposite way in rich states.) Over all, none of this suggests that people turn to God out of economic frustration.
Sociology statistics just don't cut it here. In the "heartland" I know: South Central Texas, Missouri and Southern Illinois, church IS a big deal. Especially outside of university communities or communities made up of people who move often because of work. When you move into a new in a neighborhood, people ask you where you come from and what church you go to. And generally you don't go only on Sundays. Now I think any pastor worth his stuff will tell you that church attendance goes up in hard times: economic hard times, personal hard times. And this is anecdotal, but I know that at my churches, men turned to working at the church when they found their employment gone through retirement or lay off or whatever: they came around to fix things and clean things and build things and teach things. And to attend how to get another job seminars. Not to mention going to churches for food, for social assistance and the like. More people volunteer in churches in hard times, especially if they themselves don't have jobs.
I think it's true: churches aren't such a big deal in the Northeast -- I'm sure of it. I think this may have to do with what kinds of churches dominate there. Some denominations tend to be of a harsher sort than in the south and midwest: a strong tradition of fire and brimstone, Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather and those Puritans. And some of them are more associated with upper classes, not likely to draw blue collar folks. Taverns do the drawing. In the Northeast, maybe taverns stand in for churches. They serve up companionship and sympathy and their own version of communion wine.
All in all, Krugman is attempting to damn Obama by comparing apples to oranges, by using statistics improperly to prove his points. Small town people are not the majority in this country and haven't been for a long time.They don't show up as big numbers in statistical analyses. The population of small town people shrinks as jobs flee, and their jobs certainly did during the Clinton years as they had for years before. There wasn't any retraining for jobs that paid as well as the old ones had, not during Clinton's years. Median income may have risen during the Clinton years, but it wasn't people in mill towns who benefited. Who did push it up? Where did they live? What jobs did they hold? Why wouldn't it make people for whom it all seemed unattainable bitter? Why wouldn't they seek comfort in the familiar and fear the darkness? And if Clinton made it so great for some people, wouldn't the others resent that their situations just seemed to be at a standstill or getting worse?
And let's not forget, our giant market economy, growing, one might almost say like a cancer, during the Clinton years destroyed much that it is good at the same time that it jacked up those median income figures.
My father-in-law was a geologist. He said you couldn't be a good geologist unless you got out in the field and really DID geology. Maybe Mr. Krugman needs to leave Princeton and get out in the field and see what it's like to at leasts visit a Pennsylvania town. Stay at someone's house for a few weeks. Hang out with some un- or underemployed men and women. Shop with their income. They're a minority, but they have feelings, too. Ironically, for all of Mr. Krugman's dismissal of Obama's words, Obama did get out and hang out with the real people behind the statistics in south Chicago. And he learned from it.
*Check out Robert Reich's blog here . Check out especially his post on Obama's use of "bitter," etc.