On realness in politics, and its links to geography

Paul Waldman writes in today's Washington Post under the headline, "I, too, am a hardscrabble American."  It's about Florida governor Ron DeSantis' effort to brand (or re-brand) himself as what is sometimes called a "real" American.  In any event, the "harsdcrabble" adjective caught my attention.  Here's an excerpt from Waldman's column:

Perhaps that’s why [DeSantis] has decided to search elsewhere for the salt-of-the-earth realness that Florida lacks. In his campaign book, he tells readers that despite a lifetime in Florida, he’s actually from Ohio, kind of:

I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay, but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep. This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.

Apparently, people in Florida do not work hard, fear God or love America — at least not the way they did in the redoubt of Rust Belt customs that was the DeSantis home.

Waldman's column takes up a silly dialogue that's been driving me crazy ever since Sarah Palin declared herself a real American who represented the Joe Six Packs (or was it Joe the Plumbers?) of Main Street, pitting herself and them against Barack Obama and Wall Street types.  I wrote about the recent iterations of who is a real American in my recent law review article on Rural Bashing (with Kaceylee Klein).  There I observe that Mary Peltola, recently elected Democratic congresswoman from Alaska, seems to get away with this sort of "real" people talk--that she's not been attacked from the Left as so many before her have--perhaps because she is a person of color.  

Profspring: Folks with well-educated parents dominate academia

Andrew Van Dam writes for the Washington Post under the headline, "People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows." The subhead is "First-generation academics were always rare. Now they're vanishing."

To understand critical issues facing the U.S. economy — soaring inflation, worker shortages and perhaps a looming recession — researchers must understand human behavior. They need to know how everyday Americans will react when pump prices double or shelves go bare.

That’s why it’s somewhat alarming to learn that academia in general — and economics in particular — has quietly become the province of an insular elite, a group likely to have had little exposure to the travails of America’s vast middle class.

In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts. 

The new analysis comes from Anna Stansbury of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Michigan graduate student Robert Schultz, who got their hands on detailed data on U.S. PhD recipients going back more than 50 years.

* * * 

To an outsider, the long path to a professorship can seem frustratingly opaque, particularly in economics. PhD programs tend to require a hidden curriculum of classes in subjects such as mathematics that are not technically required for economics majors. If you discover economics late in your college career and don’t have expert guidance, it might already be too late to get on the PhD track. Similar hidden hurdles lurk in the job market and academic publishing.

* * *

Stansbury said she also wonders if courses like Econ 101 might put off students from low-income backgrounds. “I also worry that some of the terminology that’s used, like ‘unskilled’ or ‘low ability’ to describe people who are in low-paid jobs or with little formal education, is offensive,” Stansbury said. “And I can see that this would be disproportionately so to people who are coming from backgrounds where these words are describing family members and friends.”

This study is one of the first to describe academia’s struggles with economic diversity, but its racial diversity issues have been well documented.

A literary depiction of the geography of the class culture wars: Groundskeeping by Lee Cole

I've been listening to Groundskeeping, by Lee Cole, which the New York Times reviewed in March.  I was intrigued by the socioeconomic class aspect of the review, set in that fateful election year 2016.  Here's what Hamilton Cain wrote in that NYT review, referring to Cole, the author, and Owen, the novel's protagonist:  

If economic class is the third rail of American life, then [author] Cole eases his hand out, gently, to touch it, his realism a meld of Richard Russo and Anne Tyler by way of Sally Rooney. Despite [protagonist] Owen’s modest upbringing, he’s a striver with scant chill. He’s liberal in his politics and passionate about Walt Whitman and Modigliani, stoking a sense of curiosity and discipline not always associated with his demographic.

And here's a quote from the novel, excerpted in Cain's review, that illustrates the role of place and culture in it.

“I explained that Cracker Barrel was cheap, and they were working-class people without a lot of money who nonetheless wanted the experience of a family outing,” Owen notes. “They loved the food and the décor not because they had bad taste, but because it was familiar to them. They’d grown up on actual farms, milking cows and pulling the suckers from actual tobacco. They’d eaten stewed apples and turnip greens and ham hock, and the tools on the walls had been the tools their fathers used, in a time that was not, at least in Kentucky, some distant yesteryear. It was recent and vivid, and the ache of its passing away therefore still present, like a phantom limb.” 

Cain's review tells us that the protagonist grew up in "a dot of a town" in western Kentucky.  In fact, there is not a lot of rural in this book--unless one believes, as I tend to do, that rural culture moves to town when rural folks move to the city.  This novel seems to support that thesis.  Or maybe it's more accurate to say this novel illustrates why "rural" is often conflated with "working-class white" in contemporary political discussions.  

The rural culture associated with the flyover states is alive and well, it seems, in places like Louisville, where the novel is set.  That's evident in this conversation between the two primary characters.  One is  Owen, who aspires to be a writer but for now is working as a groundskeeper at a posh Louisville university; that job permits him to enroll free of charge in a class, and he's studying creative writing.  The other is Alma, a professional writer who is writer in residence at the university, an immigrant from Bosnia.  You see here how her parents' attitudes toward education differed dramatically from that of the parents of Owen.     

You'll be able to tell who is who in this dialogue, which occurs at a juncture where they are becoming romantically interested in each other:    

As we walked on, she pulled the sleeves of her sweatshirt over her fists and crossed her arms, shivering a little. Did you go to Princeton? I said.

Yep.

How was that?

She thought about the question a few moments. It was wonderful in a lot of ways, and also evil in a lot of ways. Going there as an immigrant is different than going as a legacy from some old-money family.

Was that where you always wanted to go?

I got into Dartmouth and Penn, too. I might’ve gone to Harvard, but they wait-listed me.

I didn’t ask where you got in, I asked where you wanted to go.

It’s hard to differentiate what you want from what your parents want at that age, you know?

I nodded as if I understood what she meant from experience, but I had no idea. When I was eighteen, all of my energy had been spent maintaining a clear border between what I wanted and what my parents wanted, defending its sovereignty against constant incursion.

No state schools?

She laughed.

Yeah, right.

So it was Ivy League or nothing?

Not even, she said. Cornell is a joke. Stanford would’ve been all right. I would’ve been okay with Stanford.

I can’t tell if you’re being serious.

Why would I not be serious?

There was a finality to her response that made it seem like she’d rather talk about something else.

I always wanted to go to a highfalutin school, I said.

She smiled skeptically. Now you’re just playing it up. You don’t really say “highfalutin.”

I just did, didn’t I?

So what happened, why didn’t you go to a highfalutin school?

I explained to her that I’d wanted to go to a good school when I was young, but by the time I finished high school, my grades weren’t good enough, and anyhow, my parents wouldn’t have been able to afford the out-of-state tuition. I ended up at the University of Kentucky, barely managing to graduate with a degree in English.

Didn’t anyone tell you that you were capable of more?

My parents didn’t want me to go off and become a coastal elite. If they’d had their druthers, I’d have gone to Murray State, an hour from their house.

Their druthers?

Yeah, you’ve never heard that? No, she said, laughing. That’s definitely going on the list. 

When do I get to see this list? 

When the time is right, she said. So what’s wrong with being a coastal elite? 

Nothing, as far as I’m concerned. To them, it’s the worst thing you could be. I’ve wanted to be a coastal elite my whole life.

She looked at me as if she both pitied me and found me adorable—a look I was getting used to.

(pp. 87-89) Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition (emphasis mine)

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

Academic research: J.D. Vance, Cultural Alien: On Upward Mobility

Here's a link to the article by Milena Feldman and Markus Rieger-Ladich, published in Reading the Local in American Studies:

In the US, writing about oneself is still strongly influenced by religious discourses as well as by the idea that an individual’s success is primarily determined by his or her hard work and talent. Hence, focusing on oneself as the object of inquiry often fails to raise awareness of structural disadvantages, such as in the educational system. Against this background, this contribution turns to a memoir that takes a different approach and made its author famous overnight: J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (2016). Published at the beginning of the Trump administration, many hoped that his story of social ascent from the milieu of the white underclass would help explain Donald Trump’s success. Why do people have such high expectations when reading a book that focuses on the lives of those who some refer to as “hillbillies,” “rednecks,” or “white trash” but whom J.D. Vance calls “neighbors,” “friends,” and “family”? We read the book as an auto-sociobiographical text to find out what it might tell us about social mobility, educational careers, and institutional discrimination in the US and to examine in how far J.D. Vance’s can be read as a specifically US-American version of auto-sociobiography.

On "Hillbilly Elegy," the film, and cultural and geographical divides in the United States

I published this today in The Conversation, about the new Ron Howard/Netflix film, "Hillbilly Elegy," based on J.D. Vance's book by the same name.  Here's an excerpt:

I admit to delight when I read professional critics trashing the film, which is based on J.D. Vance’s widely praised memoir detailing his dramatic class migration from a midsize city in Ohio to the hallowed halls of Yale Law School. I was expecting the worst based on my dislike of the book, and these reviews confirmed my expectations.

But once I saw the film, I felt it had been harshly judged by the chattering classes – the folks who write the reviews and seek to create meaning for the rest of us. In fact, the film is an earnest depiction of the most dramatic parts of the book: a lower-middle-class family caught in the throes of addiction. 

Everyday viewers seem to find the film enjoyable enough – it has solid audience reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.

So why the big gap between the critical response and audience reaction? Could it be yet another sign of the country’s steadily growing class divide?

I want to be clear that I didn't see the film depicting rural in any sustained or meaningful way.  Middletown, Ohio, Vance's home town is not rural by any measure.  Indeed, it's not even technically Appalachian.  But about the first 10 minutes of the film take place in Jackson, Kentucky, the Vance Family's ancestral home.  That's Vance's real claim to "hillbilliness," and I don't dispute that a certain hillbilly culture followed his family into the Rust Belt.  

Cross-posted to Legal Ruralism.  

The working class and coronavirus (Part I): Higher education

Uneven access to higher education has been a persistent theme in media coverage since colleges and universities began to close down a month ago and, in so doing, sending their students "home," whatever that means.  This phenomenon is closely related to a long-time theme of my research and a personal obsession:  access to higher education and what keeps low-income students from achieving it.  And let me be clear at the outset:  while this blog generally focuses on working-class whites, this post is about the wider working class.   

There is so much to say on this topic, so I'm primarily going to collect sources, beginning with some early stories about what was happening with the elite higher education sector.  The first story that crossed my radar screen was this one by the Harvard Crimson published on March 11, 2020.  An excerpt follows:

Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana wrote to Barton and more than 6,000 other undergraduates on Tuesday morning that campus would not reopen after spring break, which stretches from March 14 to 22. 

Within hours, the email sent students scrambling to pack up all their belongings and make plans to vacate. But Barton and others say it hit one group of undergraduates particularly hard: first-generation and low-income students, many of whom depend upon Harvard for food, housing, and stability. 

“They've been evicted from their stability, they've been evicted from their homes, they’ve been evicted from their ability to live comfortably and safely,” Barton, who is an FGLI [First Generation Low Income] student, said. “There's already enough concern, and now they're concerned about being able to get home and have stable housing and food.” 

Some students must ship or store their on-campus belongings without financial support from Harvard. Others who planned to stay on campus must now book unexpected flights home and accrue additional costs. And those who rely on term-time employment must confront additional financial concerns as they lose their primary sources of income. 

Nicholas T. “Nick” Wyville ’20 called the College’s announcement “outrageous,” adding that he believes it will weigh most heavily on him and his fellow FGLI students. 

“Harvard prides itself on having a massive student body that is a large percentage on financial aid,” Wyville said. “I think that they forget that those are the same students who often come from home situations that are uncomfortable.” 

This Harvard Crimson story is rare in that it does mention rural folks and their relative lack of access to technology, especially broadband: 

Wyville — who hails from Anniston, Ala. — said online courses are not feasible for him and some of his peers from rural or low-income areas, where many homes do not have internet access. 

“It's not as if we can just like up and go to the library or the coffee shop every day,” he said.

Even before that Crimson story came this, on March 9,  from the Washington Post.  The headline was "Amherst College switches to online learning, as universities nationally scramble to respond to covid-19 outbreak."  Susan Svrluga and Nick Anderson report:

The announcement was a dramatic stroke from a small but nationally renowned school: A growing number of colleges and universities have announced temporary shifts to virtual classes in recent days in response to the uncertainty and rapid pace of changes with the covid-19 outbreak. Amherst took especially decisive action.

They quote Amherst president Biddy Martin:

We know that many people will travel widely during spring break, no matter how hard we try to discourage it.  The risk of having hundreds of people return from their travels to the campus is too great. The best time to act in ways that slow the spread of the virus is now. Let me make our decisions clear.

* * * 

It will be hard to give up, even temporarily, the close colloquy and individual attention that defines Amherst College.  ... Our goal is to keep members of our community as safe as we possibly can while ensuring that students can complete their coursework for the semester and the daily operations of the institution can continue.

The story reports on many other posh campuses, including Vanderbilt, Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Stanford shutting down early that week, well ahead of many other prestigious institutions and also some that are less so (e.g., University of Washington).

Next I saw this piece in the Washington Post on March 11 which, like the Crimson piece, made the point that these shut downs are a hardship on poor students who don't have much of a place to go--especially if scholarships are paying for their room and board. The piece is actually an op-ed by two Amherst students, and here's a salient quote:

These residential colleges are also undermining much of their own rationale for existing. They are meant to be havens for young people, home-like places with established routines and networks meant to foster learning. They are also sanctuaries for low-income and marginalized students who might not have stable homes to return to on short notice. Students without computers or broadband will be unable to access online courses once they begin. Perhaps worst of all, some international Amherst students may be unable to return to campus, when it eventually reopens, because of the Trump administration’s recently expanded travel ban.

To its credit, Amherst’s administration has set up a petition process for students to ask to stay on campus, and the student government is trying to reimburse some fees to help pay for travel. But the default is eviction. Communications from the school this week indicate that refunding the cost of room and board — but not tuition — is being considered.

Many similar stories have run in the last few weeks.  Here's one about the particular disappointment for first generation college graduates who won't get to have their live commencement ceremonies:

Administrators and college presidents are scrambling to figure out what to do about graduation this year. How can they acknowledge students' hard work and success, while still maintaining social distancing amid the outbreak of coronavirus? 

Many colleges across the country have outright cancelled graduations, others, such as Harvard and Miami University in Ohio, have scheduled virtual ceremonies. Some students have taken things into their own hands and created their own ceremonies — on a reconstructed campus — through Minecraft.

* * *

Celebrating graduation wasn't really about her, says Monica Ferrufino, who's finishing up at California State University, Los Angeles. It was really going to be for her parents. 

"When they cancelled graduation, it was exactly 60 days prior to our scheduled commencement," she explains. She knows that because her mother and father kept track, counting down the days, crossing each one off on their calendar. When she told them it was off, her mom cried. "My parents didn't get to finish high school," she says, "so for them, seeing their daughter graduating college was just beyond their dreams."

And finally, here's one from the New York Times early this week suggesting that college was the great "leveler" or "equalizer" before coronavirus.  Let me begin by challenging that starting proposition, which seems absurd in light of my own research into higher education access and books like Suzanne Mettler's.  Here's an excerpt from her 2014 editorial, "College, the Great Unleveler."

Something else began to happen around 1980. College graduation rates kept soaring for the affluent, but for those in the bottom half, a four-year degree is scarcely more attainable today than it was in the 1970s. And because some colleges actually hinder social mobility, what increasingly matters is not just whether you go to college but where. 

The demise of opportunity through higher education is, fundamentally, a political failure. Our landmark higher education policies have ceased to function effectively, and lawmakers — consumed by partisan polarization and plutocracy — have neglected to maintain and update them.

Ah, so elitism in the higher education sector is an extremely important part of the big story here.  And that reminds me of this important NYT story from nearly a decade ago.

But/and let's return to the New York Times story suggesting the contrary, that college is a great leveler.  Here's an excerpt, which is just a teaser to get you to read the rest of Nicholas Casey's story, which speaks to extreme socioeconomic (dis) advantage, race/ethnicity, (dis)ability and a range of other issues salient to an authentic intersectionality:

The political science class was called “Forced Migration and Refugees.” Students read accounts of migrants fleeing broken economies and seeking better futures, of life plans drastically altered and the political forces that made it all seem necessary. 

Then suddenly, the subject matter became personal: Haverford College shut down and evicted most students from the dormitories as the coronavirus spread through Pennsylvania. 

Like many college courses around the country, the class soldiered on. The syllabus was revised. The students reconvened on a videoconferencing app. 

But as each logged in, not everyone’s new reality looked the same. 

One student sat at a vacation home on the coast of Maine. Another struggled to keep her mother’s Puerto Rican food truck running while meat vanished from Florida grocery shelves. As one young woman’s father, a private equity executive, urged the family to decamp to a country where infections were falling, another student’s mother in Russia couldn’t afford the plane ticket to bring her daughter home.

Bottom line:  much as so many in the United States resist this reality, class matters profoundly with respect to higher education access, as with respect to everything else.  And it's consequences are enduring, far beyond the Zoom-enabled classroom.

Oh, and something I learned from Nicholas Casey's story is about the existence of Questbridge, which helps low-income students connect with elite colleges.  Don't think that service was around back in the day I was making college application decisions.

Here's a story from April 6 in the Washington Post about student attitudes toward the widespread move to pass-fail grading. 

Postscript from Politico on April 12, 2020:  "'We're on the edge of the precipice': How the pandemic could shatter college dreams," by Bianca Quilantan.

Postscript from the Daily Yonder on April 13, 2020.

Postscript from Anemona Hartocollis of the New York Times on April 15, 2020, "After Coronavirus, Colleges Worry:  Will Students Come Back?"

And from the Los Angles Times on April 16, 2020, a story about coronavirus's $558 million impact on the University of California system.

Postscript from the The Atlantic on April 24, 2020, "What if Colleges Don't Re-Open until 2021?," by Adam Harris.

Postscript from Christina Paxson, President of Brown University, "College Campuses Must Re-open in the Fall.  Here's How We Do It," a guest editorial in the New York Times.

Postscript from The New Yorker on April 28, 2020, "How the Coronavirus Pandemic Has Shattered the Myth of College in America," by Masha Gessen.

More to follow in this series on socioeconomic class and coronavirus.

Economic anxiety is central to the white working classes attraction to populism

In Joan C. Williams recent article, she posits:

Many decent, sensible people voted for Trump because they believed that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans had stopped the downward spiral of the middle class.

Economics can help explain much of the working-class's support of Trump, and on a grander scale the swing to populism in America, as well as in many other developed countries globally (see commentary on the collapse of established political parties in France, or the rise of the Five Star Movement in Italy here, here, and here).

First, what does it mean to be a populist? The underlying characteristics of populism are an ideology that pits a good and moral population against a corrupt elite. This ideology then takes on many moving parts like socialism, nationalism, or anti-imperialism to explain the world around them and to justify specific agendas. For example, in Poland a religious-nationalist populist, Mr. Kaczynski, pushes for a Catholic takeover of the country's institutions from the elite secular liberals. In Netherlands, Mr. Wilders, is demanding a crackdown on the "Islamization" of Europe in defense of women's rights and LGBT rights. In Spain, Podemos - a socialist populist party, is aiming to seize vacant buildings owned by banks and distribute them to the poor while attacking the elite groups.

In America, populism means a division of a virtuous general population against corrupt elites that constrain the will of the people. On the right, this can also be spun as the people, including the white working class, against certain ethnicities identified as foreigners who are thought to be the enemy (Latin Americans and Middle Easterners). So why have these sets of ideas become increasingly potent and prevalent in American politics?

The economic pain of blue collar voters - largely the white working class - can illustrate the populist movement in the United States. Following the Great Recession, citizens experienced many economic struggles. Unemployment skyrocketed and entire job markets were lost. Journalists have found that some companies used the recession as an opportunity to fire low-skilled workers and replace them with labor-saving machines. The financial crisis not only shocked the United States financial system, it damaged citizens confidence in the policymaking elites. The people who feel these problems the most are those in the working-class who have not received any "bail-outs" similar to those the largest banking and regulatory institutions did receive.

A Harvard study (by Raj Chetty) documents the sharp decrease in social mobility in recent decades (1940's children broadly out-earned their parents, but only half of those born in the 1980's will). Mr. Chetty finds that this change in mobility is largely a response to automation in factories and the widespread use of computers. Advancements made computers technologies have replaced many jobs that used to be done manually by low-skilled workers. Those jobs are now replaced with a computer engineer, or other high-skilled worker, who uses advanced technological skills to work these technological jobs.  The low-skilled workers remain in labor, but there is a sharp decline available jobs.

Mr. Chetty's study illustrates a wide gap of "middle-class" jobs that have effectively vanished. An increase in international trade has allowed job making companies to offer low-skilled jobs to those who can do the work the cheapest, which often is someone who lives outside of the United States. This results in jobs being outsourced to other countries where the cost of labor is lower. Economic data suggests that outsourcing is good because it is the most cost effective and efficient way to produce goods and services. However, that fails to address the individual citizens concern that there are fewer and fewer jobs in the United States for the low-skilled worker.

The result of both the Great Recession and advancements in computer technology is a large population of working-class people who have been left behind by the elite policy makers of the country. These very real struggles have spurred a populist movement of voters who have aligned themselves with a figure head who has publicly and fervently opposed elite policy makers, President Donald Trump.

There is a need for politicians to discuss the economic issues faced by the populists' opposing the elite policy makers. Trump, however, has used his alignment with the populist movement to further his agenda and maintain a voter base. His rhetoric claims the loss of jobs in America is due to illegal immigration and the "others".  This separates the populist citizens (the good and moral population) against "others" in order to maintain the support of the populist movement. He holds that the failure of the financial system and resulting outsourcing of jobs are the fault of the "policy making elite" or the "swamp" in Washington. Putting the pure and decent population against the "other" is a great and effective fear tactic. Trump expertly fed into these ideas with his drain the swamp and build the wall campaign strategies. Trump and the right even succeeded in goading elite white people into dismissing non-elite white people as racist and ignoring their economic concerns.
All of this creates a populism movement that may have lasting effects for years to come.

The economic concerns of the working-class in America has moved beyond trade and immigration (see commentary in this article) because job losses consistently result from technological advances as opposed to disruption by an "other." As a nation, we should strive to raise skill levels through better education and skills-training programs. This administration seeks to avoid education and give low-skill workers their old jobs back (for example the re-opening of coal mines) without regarding this advance in technology as a driving force. The left has proposed little to combat this problem besides expanding job training at the corporate level. How we decide to cope with the economic woes and the surge of technological advances will dictate how our society responds to the populist movement in the United States.