I recently finished Hillbilly
Elegy: a Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, by J. D. Vance. It is the autobiographical tale of a man who
was raised in a poor, working class environment that was racked with
unemployment, broken homes, alcoholism, and drug abuse. The extended family that he was a part of had
migrated to Middletown, Ohio
from the Appalachian hill country in Kentucky
in search of work. They found it, for a
while, until the industries that had supported their area downsized, closed
down, or relocated to foreign countries in search of cheaper labor. What these companies left behind were shells
of what had once been vibrant communities, with many of the former workers now
desperately searching for some kind of employment to keep their heads above
water. Families started breaking apart,
as alcoholism and drug abuse set in, along with often violent conflicts in the
home. The author’s own parents were
divorced, and his mother, a nurse, suffered from a string of addictions,
including prescription pills and, at times, even heroin. He hardly knew his real father, and had to
live with a succession of “stepfathers” during his childhood. He and his sister preferred living with their
grandparents, who provided the closest thing to stability and a supportive
environment that they could find. The
author’s story has a happy ending – for him – as he fights his way out of his
dead-end world, first by joining the Marine Corps, and, after finishing his
tours of duty, enrolling in college. He
eventually finds his way into a top flight law school, earns a law degree, and
embarks on a professional career, marrying one of his fellow law students along
the way. His sister, too, escapes from
their traumatic childhood environment – even before he does – through a happy
marriage.
But the real intent of Vance’s book, I think, was to shine a
spotlight on an entire segment – and a growing one – of American culture which
is increasingly finding itself in trouble.
It is the segment of white, blue-collar workers who had once been able to
adequately provide for their families in the factory towns across America. They were patriotic, hard working, religious,
and with strong family values. They
generally mistrusted government intrusion, and particularly resented those who
seemed to eschew their work ethic and instead depended upon the largess of
government spending to sustain themselves.
The paradox, of course, is that as the factory jobs which provided
employment for these blue-collar workers began to disappear, they found
themselves increasingly reliant upon government aid to get by. And, as unemployment and underemployment
became more rampant among them, alcoholism and drug use became more widespread,
and in its wake, the structure of the nuclear family began to unravel. Broken or abusive marriages, unwed mothers,
and criminality became a pervasive phenomenon.
J. D. Vance is much younger than I am, and perhaps it is for
this reason that my own family background, which is in many ways similar to his
own, was not nearly as traumatic. The
decline of factory employment had not begun to play itself out nearly so
dramatically during my own childhood, and my father, who was also a transplant
from the South into the Midwest, had a job up
until the day he died. My family, too,
remained intact during that time, although my father’s tendency to indulge in
alcohol created occasional turbulence in the home. Still, our family got by rather well, as I
never remember any of my siblings or me ever going to bed hungry, or ever even
remotely facing the risk of being removed from our household because of
domestic upheavals. Ours was a
relatively stable home environment, and in fact I think that for this reason we
were actually envied by the children in some of our neighboring households.
But much of what Vance described in his book was evident in
our own neighborhood. There were
families that suffered from domestic abuse at the hands of their fathers. There was drug abuse and juvenile
delinquency. I remember one neighbor
girl who was disowned by her parents when she dated and eventually married
somebody of another race. There were a
couple of suicides as well, by children who would never live to see their
twenty-first birthdays. The author says
that kids in his neighborhood could be stigmatized if they did too well in
school, and in particular boys, who would be branded as sissies. While I don’t remember such extreme
stigmatization in my own schools, I do remember that it generally wasn’t “cool”
to be a good student. We felt that if we
read what we were told to read, and did our homework, we were “collaborating”
with the “establishment”, as if education itself was a sort of brainwashing
that would rob us of our native intelligence and special identity (an ironic
position, since we all came from white Christian families – hardly a minority
group at the time). This attitude stuck
with me all the way into my first two semesters of college, each of which I
flunked out of. (Mercifully, this
institution – which was a local community college –marked each of these
semesters as “incomplete”, which means that they did not count in my grade
point average, after I eventually decided to return to college in earnest.)
And like the author, I was able to turn my own life around
in large part because of encountering positive role models outside of the old
neighborhood, while also getting support from people within my sphere of
friends and family who believed in me and encouraged me. The principal role model was a man who I ended
up working for when I took a factory job: he had a PhD in ceramic
engineering. While I had always talked
about going back to college in earnest some day, I had never really felt a
powerful incentive to do so. He gave
that to me. Because here was a man who
loved what he did for a living (my own work history up to then had been in low
wage, mind-numbing jobs that made me feel like I was just passing time), and
who was paid very well for it. I almost
immediately returned to that community college that I had flunked out of a few
years before, but this time I made straight A’s on all of my classes, and even
eventually took on a full-time course load while still working at that
factory. And when I had finished enough
classes to be able to transfer to a full-year school, it was that same boss who
helped me to take the final leap. I had
been hesitant to do so, because I was afraid that I couldn’t afford to pay for
two years with the savings I had accumulated up to that time, but he set me on
my way with a stern lecture which was as powerful a push as any I’ve ever
received.
As I began my climb, into the white collar world of
engineers, lawyers, accountants, and managers, I had an experience that was
also described in J. D. Vance’s book.
This was the experience of positive networking. People actually helped me along my way,
opening doors for me, and assisting me in navigating through the intricacies of
jumping the various hurdles that had to be passed through on the way to
attaining the brass ring. And, what’s
more, many if not most of these people belonged to groups that I had been
conditioned, in my childhood, to mistrust, as those who might prevent me from
getting a slice of the pie. Because in
my youth I had been indoctrinated in the belief that just about everybody who
was different than me – in race, religious belief, ethnic background, income level, and even
gender – was out to take from me the meager opportunities that might be
available. Around the time that I set
out for attending a four-year university, the “boat people” – refugees from Vietnam – were making
the news, as they began to arrive on American shores in large numbers. I remember somebody from the old neighborhood
joking that the first thing these people learned, when they got here, was to
ask how to get on welfare. But when I
transferred to a four-year college – the University
of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana – my
roommate turned out to be one of these refugees from Vietnam, and I have always, in
retrospect, been grateful for it. We
were both in the Electrical Engineering program at that university, and while I
struggled through the classes in that curriculum, he demonstrated a natural
facility in mastering the subject matter.
In part, this was because of his exemplary study habits, which were so
much superior to my own, and which stemmed in turn from his very powerful
motivation to succeed in his adopted country.
I really believe that I owe much of my own success in getting through
that program to the happy circumstance of my having him for a roommate. He both inspired me and helped me directly in
comprehending what sometimes seemed to me to be an overwhelmingly complex
subject. And when it came time to
interview for jobs in our senior year, I lamented the fact that he was at a
disadvantage due to English being his second language, because he was a far
superior engineer than I could ever hope to be.
Here was an immigrant who, far from stealing a job from me, did much to make
it possible for me to land my first job out of college.
This experience of being helped, rather than hindered, by
others different than myself continued after I entered the professional
workforce. Women began entering the U.S. labor
force in record numbers in the late 1960s, and so naturally many men began to
worry then that these women would take their jobs, or at least make it harder
for them to find a job. This fear
lingered on into the 1980s, when I got my engineering degree, but as I look
over my career since then, I have to say that it has been women more than men
who have helped me to advance – providing opportunities for promotion, for new
positions, and even for taking on special projects that I found personally
rewarding. Members of racial and
religious minorities were also regarded as threats in the old neighborhood: potentially
taking – or stealing – the little piece of the pie that we imagined ourselves
fighting to retain. But two of my
favorite, most respected, and most supportive bosses were black men. And it was an Israeli finance professor who wrote
the personal letter of recommendation that helped to get me into graduate
school. Whatever success that I have had
in my career, I credit much if not most of it to the very people that I had
been raised to fear and/or mistrust.
I laughed, when reading Hillbilly
Elegy, about how the author had to learn subtle forms of etiquette that he
never learned at home when he moved into the professional workforce, because
that, too, struck a familiar chord with me.
He talked about being overwhelmed, while having dinner with a
prospective employer, by the large number of silverware pieces that were in
front of him, as he struggled to figure out which ones to use first. A friend who happened to be at the same
dinner whispered to him that he simply had to start with the pieces on the
outside and work his way in. I think I
learned that lesson from a movie. But I
never realized that one is supposed to balance one’s used pieces of silverware
on the plate until I chanced to pick up and purchase a book called A Gentleman at the Table which I came
across many years ago when buying a suit.
I never finished that book, and maybe I should have, because
there is apparently one other piece of table etiquette that I never
learned. I’m sure it must be some type
of etiquette, because I’ve seen this particular behavior at the table practiced
almost universally, and especially among the well-to-do. This is the habit of leaving the meal that
was served partially uneaten. And
usually this doesn’t mean just a scrap or two, or maybe a particular food item
– like a vegetable – that the eater might have disliked. Often a sizable chunk of the main course –
the beef, or chicken, or fish – is left on the plate, and I have seen half the
meal abandoned. If this behavior were
only practiced by petite women, I could understand it, but I have seen tall and
burly men exhibiting the same bird-like mannerisms. At any rate, this is a practice that goes so
against the grain of my upbringing that I have never been able to mimic it:
I’ve never even wanted to attempt to
do so. I have memories as a child being
told by my mother to finish everything on my plate, because there is a starving
kid somewhere in Korea who would give or do just about anything for what I was
eating. (I’ve wondered, in recent years,
if affluent parents in South Korea
tell their kids that they should eat everything in front of them because some
starving American kid in Appalachia would be
overjoyed to have what they had.) And I
remember one time in particular when my mother forced me to stay at the dinner
table for well over an hour after everyone else had left, because I refused to
eat one of the things on the plate. (I
think the offending item was a vegetable – probably spinach or Brussels
sprouts.) We never went hungry in my parents’
household, but still the idea that a regular meal was something to be grateful
for – and something never to waste – was ingrained in me. And so, to this day, regardless of what
social setting I’m at – a fancy restaurant, a lunch or dinner at a conference, or
just a dinner at the house of a friend – I never let anything remain behind on
my plate.
I can only assume that such behavior is a social “no-no”
because I have found myself ostracized for it on many occasions, ranging from a
mild rebuke (a fellow diner saying “Wow, you must have really enjoyed it”) to
something a little more pointed (“My, my, you must have been very hungry”) to a blatant
criticism. The most memorable instance
of this more extreme variety of criticism happened when I was having dinner with
several colleagues while we were preparing to participate in a regulatory
hearing in our state capital the following day.
After I had finished my meal, the attorney who was supervising our
testimony remarked, in reference to me, “I’m surprised he didn’t lick the plate
clean.” But no matter. Even if this is a social faux pas, I
adamantly refuse to correct it. I can
only assume that leaving a meal partially uneaten is supposed to serve as some
sort of courteous complement to the host, signaling that the host has been more
than generous in the portions provided.
But I can hardly imagine that the owners of a restaurant take note of
such behavior, and I am sure that the wait staff don’t appreciate having to
collect and dump out all of that leftover food.
The only beneficiaries of this custom, as far as I can see, are the rats
that get their meals from the restaurant dumpster outside. And even in the case of a private host,
wouldn’t they be far more flattered if they saw that their guests had eaten
everything that had been provided to them?
I know that if I had gone to great lengths to prepare a good meal, I
would not feel complimented at all if half of it was left over by those who had
been at my dinner table.
Another familiar chord struck by the author was the
description of his problems with anger management. While I was growing up, arguments were never
simply disagreements. One didn’t argue
well with somebody, in my household, and in my neighborhood, unless one did tangible
and lasting damage to the other’s self esteem.
There was no such thing as a verbal “fair fight”. I laughed when the author described how his
horrified wife (who had been brought up in a much different social environment)
once had to restrain him from getting out of his car during a fit of road
rage. There have been many times in my
own life when just a little bit less self restraint while encountering bad
driving behavior might have landed me behind bars. I’ve often wondered if my career suffered
because I treated every disagreement, no matter how minor, as if it was mortal
combat, and often fell into the mental trap of regarding my coworkers as rivals
fighting for slices of that limited pie rather than collaborators who together
could make the pie grow larger. Of
course, as is so evident in the higher echelons of American business and
politics today, not all bad and even boorish behavior can be attributed to a
modest upbringing. I have seen, time and
time again, that the rat race runs all the way up the ranks to the boardroom.
While J. D. Vance finds some humor in the tales of his
upbringing, he always makes it very plain that there was much more tragedy than
comedy in the old neighborhood. Here I
think is where our backgrounds differed, because things have definitely gotten
worse in the world of the white working class between the decades that I grew
up in it and he did. All of the families
in my neighborhood had both fathers and mothers, living together, and all of
the fathers had jobs. We never really
lacked anything – at least anything important – particularly when it came to
food and clothing. And although most of
my friends from the old neighborhood never went to college, they all landed
jobs that could support them and their families. There were drugs, and alcohol, but addiction
was still a relatively rare phenomenon.
In the world of Vance’s childhood, alcohol and drug abuse was much more
rampant, as were families without fathers, and widespread, habitual unemployment. Someone growing up in that environment could not
count on the fact that they would find decent work when they got out of high
school (if they even got that far in their education), let alone aspire to have
a standard of living better than that of their parents. And this has created a paradoxical cause of
resentment and psychological conflict among those living in this
environment: For generations, the white
working class had been proudly individualistic: openly resenting others in
society who they felt were living on the government dole. And yet, in recent decades, they have found
themselves increasingly dependent on government programs of one form or another
just to get by. It grates on them, and
drives them to search about for a scapegoat.
I have always been a strong believer in the positive benefits
that immigration confers upon the American economy, and upon American culture
itself. It seems that a drawback of
being a “native” American, which means being somebody whose immediate ancestors
did not come from a foreign country, is that it fosters a sense of entitlement,
which grows with the number of generations that have lapsed since one’s
immigrant ancestors first arrived in this country. How quickly we forget that we are a nation of
immigrants. In a presentation that I
gave a few years ago, I pointed out that over 40% of Fortune 500 companies,
which collectively employ over ten million workers, were founded by U.S. immigrants
or children of immigrants, and that 12% of all businesses in this country with
employees are owned by immigrants. But this
message tends to fall on deaf ears among white working class Americans today,
when they see their children struggling to find a job. It particularly grates on them to see
Hispanic workers doing work that they imagine their own children could be doing. They look back to a happier time, when it was
so easy for them to find work, and when all signs were posted in English, and
compare it to the present day, when every sign and every product label is now
written in both English and Spanish, and other foreign languages as well. In the region of the country where I was born
and raised, northern Illinois,
even the grocery stores now post all of their signs in English and Spanish:
something that would have been unheard of when I was a child. This, to many, is the “smoking gun” that
something has happened which has robbed native white working class Americans of
their livelihood. But it is not just the
perceived threat within that is robbing our working class youth of jobs, but
the perceived external threat as well: the “off-shoring” of jobs to factories
in other countries where people are willing to work at assembly lines for much
lower wages.
As an economist, when I try to argue against this logic, I
am rarely successful. Another slide that
I liked to show in some of my past presentations is that the total amount of
wages paid in support of producing the Apple iPhone to American workers exceeds the
total amount of wages paid to all other countries in the world combined. Yet if you count the total number of employees
who are involved in the production of this product, there are far, far more of
them in foreign countries than in America. The reason for this is that the American
workers tend to be more skilled, and are paid higher wages. The American workers are engineers, computer
programmers, and designers, while those in foreign countries such as China tend to
be unskilled assembly line workers who are simply putting the components
together. If the working class in our
country is being left behind, it is because they are not seeking, or getting,
the kind of training that they would require to get the more lucrative jobs
that are not being “off-shored”.
And, of course, many of the jobs that our fathers worked in
are no longer available because they no longer exist. They were not “off-shored”, or taken over by
eager immigrants willing to work at any price, but were simply eliminated due
to automation, and the continuing advances of information technology. No government policy short of opposing
science itself will ever bring these jobs back.
But the reason that these arguments ultimately prove hollow is
that they ignore the fundamental truth that white, working class America is currently in a state of crisis, as is
much of black America,
and even the Latino-American community. When
I look to history for a parallel, the one that comes uncomfortably to mind is
the last days of the Roman
Republic. Ironically, the societal breakdown that led
to the fall of the republic was caused by the very success of that republic
itself. For as it grew militarily
powerful and brought more and more of its neighbors into annexation,
subjugation, or submission, a consequence of this was that there was a large
influx of slaves. This free labor
eliminated the need for many of the jobs that had been held by Rome’s working class, and the result was a
growing mass of the population that was unemployed or underemployed. The political leaders of Rome attempted to placate this increasingly
restive segment by distributing free food and by distracting them with
extravagant public entertainments and spectacles (“bread and circuses”). But as the gap between rich and poor widened,
each of these two classes actively sought out champions among the politicians
and, ultimately, the military, until finally the military dictatorship of
Julius Caesar led to the birth of imperial Rome (and the death of the republic).
America’s political system seems to be hopelessly deadlocked,
and the frustration of the working class can be seen in how its loyalties shift
across both ends of the political spectrum, from avowed socialists to big
business plutocrats, simply based upon how bold their promises are to upend the
current state of government paralysis and affect real change. I feel a sense of despair, because even as an
economist, I don’t know what policies would restore the ability of my younger
contemporaries in the old neighborhood to find good work, and to rescue
themselves and their children from the debilitating effects of broken families,
domestic and urban violence, and drug and alcohol abuse. One thing is certain, however. If this condition continues to expand and
worsen, it will ultimately prove to be the undoing of the American Dream. America cannot be sustained simply
by noble ideas and military might. It
only works if it is supported by the working men and women who have always made
up the foundation of its very existence.
