Thoughts After Reading Hillbilly Elegy
JD Vance tells a tale that resonated with me of decay, determination, family dysfunction, hope, drive, and the crucial role of grandparents and siblings. He describes the crumbling and resilience of the tough hillbilly culture under the onslaught of Midwestern economic decline and the opioid crisis. When I go back home to the same area he grew up in, I see the same economic decay he describes, but I also saw new growth downtown, over the Rhine and around the University of Cincinnati.
I grew up in Cincinnati during the 50’s when the region was thriving with manufacturing jobs. Norwood and Evendale were huge factory towns for cars and plane engines. Now hollowed out Ohio towns and cities were then bustling with big factories, and the communities large and small were doing well. My Dad’s best friends from law school lived and practiced law in Middletown Ohio and Huntington West Virginia respectively, then thriving communities where we visited often, now shades of their former selves due to the decline of local steel manufacturing. The Ohio River was filled with barges of coal and steel coming down river from Pittsburgh and West Virginia and grain coming upriver from Saint Louis.
The Ohio River was not swimmable due to all the pollution coming downstream, same with most of our local creeks and rivers. In my memory Mill Creek and Duck Creek were the worst. We shoveled and burned coal in the furnace throughout the winter; the Cincinnati air was dark and filthy and hard to breathe during the winter fogs. Racial segregation was practiced widely and enforced violently throughout the nation. Class segregation and discrimination were pervasive. The pervasive lies of McCarthyism resonated in our state and local politics.
My family was deeply involved in local manufacturing of musical instruments for about 100 years. I remember my father’s trips to Japan and Korea in the mid 60’s to share his company’s expertise in manufacturing and selling musical instruments, and I remember a ground breaking trip to China with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1979. That company, DH Baldwin morphed into a financial services conglomerate, went through bankruptcy in the deep recession of the early 80’s and a second bankruptcy in the 90’s. Yamaha is now a world leader in piano manufacturing, and Baldwin Pianos are being built in China.
During the 50’s and 60’s Americans enjoyed high economic growth and post war affluence compared to the struggles that JD Vance depicts for his family, his culture and the communities we shared at more than a fifty years distance as the region’s manufacturing base declined. Federal taxes on the wealthy were much higher then and the proceeds were used to build the societal infrastructure of fast, safe travel (interstate highways), strong public educational institutions, urban infrastructure, public social safety net and medical services (Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Head Start), and cleaner air and water. Canvassing door-to-door in poor, rural Virginia counties on the need for what later became the food stamps program drove home to me society’s systemically disgraceful treatment of poor American citizens.
So what has happened in the last 50 years to bring our shared region to the lows described by JD Vance. Over that time frame, the Midwestern auto and steel based economies stagnated economically while both coasts and portions of the South and Rocky Mountain regions grew faster. Factory jobs were moved from the North to the under-developed South in search of lower wages, lower taxes and non-union workforces, before they were then moved overseas to Asia in search of still lower wages and tax burdens. At another level, federal tax cuts feathered the already quite comfortable beds of the wealthy, increased the income, wealth and opportunity gaps between rich and poor to the now unfathomable levels, stagnated the real incomes and wages of all others, and strained the finances and ability of all levels of government to invest in our shared future. At yet another level, automation and technology and a globalized economy eliminated many US factory worker jobs and upgraded others to require a higher level of education and training. The great US automotive industries and steel and glass and rubber industries in the Midwest declined in importance as Germans and Japanese built better cars at lower prices, with higher quality, better driving performance, and greater fuel efficiency. The decline in the US car manufacturing industry was due to many years of bad decisions by management and by unions that continued to plague US carmakers, and the internal triumph of finance over automobile engineering so well portrayed by David Halberstam in the Reckoning. Modern production techniques requiring fewer workers and modernized plant and equipment hammered employment in the traditionally powerful US steel industry. They are mirrored in the decline in US apparel, textile and footwear manufacturing. In their wake, families were devastated, addictions prospered and life expediencies fell. Yet some of our local industries, like Procter and Gamble, were apparently immune and prospered greatly during that same time period, only to fall on harder times more recently. Jobs shifted from manufacturing to health care and education yet pensions vanished in the wake of departing industries.
Our economic problems in the Midwest are not due to low wage labor in Mexico or in China or in India; President Trump, the unions and US manufacturers are creating false bogeymen. German and Japanese manufacturing thrived during this same time frame that American manufacturing prowess fell off. They rebuilt their factories, improved their engineering and automotive technologies and improved their K-12 educational systems after the devastations of World War Two at a time when we in the US were losing our large competitive edge as we failed to invest in and upgrade plant, equipment and personnel. We have seen a wholesale economic disinvestment in our region for nearly a half century. As a nation, we have become an economy dependent on high levels of consumer spending on low cost goods and products that are produced elsewhere, on our dominance in global finance, in the excellence of our retailing, on the strengths and productivity of American agriculture, and in the path-breaking development of our new technologies. Our over priced and under performing health system disadvantages American employers competing in international markets. Our industrial productivity once the engine of our nation’s enormous growth is lagging, and our GDP is growing at only 1/3rd the rate of emerging China. And no, the Trump Administration is not rebirthing American manufacturing prowess; in fact we have been in a period of manufacturing recession due in no small measure to his trade wars and tariffs. His corporate tax cuts have not lead to increased business investments as one might have hoped, but rather to stock buy backs and consequent run up in stock valuations.
We do need to re-industrialize in the Midwest; we need to clean up a mess nearly fifty years in the making, but we cannot do it without first assessing what works here and elsewhere and what is not working here. Pittsburgh has recovered and transitioned from steel to health, education and technology; Columbus is thriving due to its diversified economic base; parts of Cincinnati appear to be in recovery mode; Morgantown West Virginia has been a bright spot. We do not need, nor do we benefit from high tariffs, from starting economically destructive trade wars with our trading partners, from absurd and racist immigration restrictions at a time of declining birth rates and an aging population, from nationalist restrictions on fair global competition with our allies and trading partners, from senseless withdrawal from global trade agreements, from sugar water stimulus. We need to gain some humility and learn important lessons on manufacturing success from Germany and Japan, Korea and China. The Germans for example have apprenticeship programs beginning as young as 15 to help develop their skilled manufacturing workforce. We have a skilled but aging manufacturing workforce and lots of the infrastructure needed to accommodate an economic resurgence in the region; we need to build on our strengths not let them decay and fall into disuse. We need to invest in promising technologies of the future like electric cars, autonomous transportation, fossil fuel free energy, rather than pretending we can or should roll back the clock to the economy of the 50’s. We need to encourage start-ups and facilitate worker transitions from sunset to sunrise industries. We will all benefit from wiser public policies, from longer-term investment horizons, from well-designed investments in human capital and new technologies and innovations, from better education and improved vocational training and from better corporate decision-making. We need Presidential candidates who can candidly and truthfully explain our domestic challenges and opportunities to the American people and inspire them with a vision for economic growth and the road ahead. We are being poorly served by our incumbent President, whose incessant, utterly ill-informed, stream of consciousness lies are polluting the national and international discourse, and whose policies on trade, immigration, taxes, climate change, racial and ethnic divisiveness, and the environment are wreaking terrible, long-term damage to our region, to the nation’s economic future, and to the future of our cherished democratic institutions.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: 2/4/20
PS: See the excellent Brookings Report on states, counties and regions innovative rebuilding efforts at https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/2018-04_brookings-metro_older-industrial-cities_full-report-berube_murray_-final-version_af4-18.pdf#page=34