Blue Collar Elegy

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.