It’s a cliche but a time-honored one. The poor working class parents who make extra sacrifices for their children so that they can become the first in the family’s history to go off to college and make a better life for themselves. It’s as familiar when the protagonists are immigrants from Haiti as it is when they are a factory or farming family from the heartland. It seems natural that one way to win political support among these types of folks is to offer them free college. Why not fulfill their dreams for their children without requiring all the back-breaking effort on their part?
But, while the cliche may be pleasant and accurate in many cases, these families are not a majority when you look at things from a cultural point of view. Overall, if you enter into a community where people have gotten by without college educations for a long as any they’ve lived there, it’s a safe bet that they’ve found a way to justify the level of education they typically attain. At a minimum, they don’t seek their sense of self-worth in higher education, and more likely they’ve built up defenses that minimize the value of what an education can bring you. Perhaps it’s as simple as corrupting your morals. Or, in today’s environment of exploding tuition costs, maybe it’s just a needlessly risky investment that does not guarantee a more comfortable life.
Polling conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic bears out that this view is pervasive.
Finally, 54 percent of white working-class Americans said investing in college education is a risky gamble, including 61 percent of white working-class men. White working-class voters who held this belief were almost twice as likely as their peers to support Trump. “The enduring narrative of the American dream is that if you study and get a college education and work hard, you can get ahead,” said Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI. “The survey shows that many white working-class Americans, especially men, no longer see that path available to them. … It is this sense of economic fatalism, more than just economic hardship, that was the decisive factor in support for Trump among white working-class voters.”
On the one hand, if you take the financial risk out of college, these folks should not only benefit but they ought to recalculate the cost benefit ratio of sending their kids away to pursue a degree. But the political benefits of enacting such a policy may never materialize, or may take a very long time to overcome the existing cultural suspicion and bias against higher education. As I’ve said, they’ve gotten by one way or the other without college degrees and their values reflect this. To suggest that you need a college education to be worthy is to indict them, their communities, and their common history. In other words, it’s a form of attack on them and it causes not only defensiveness but cultural anxiety.
And cultural anxiety is the real driver of their voting behavior. Here’s more from the PRRI survey data:
Evidence suggests financially troubled voters in the white working class actually preferred Clinton over Trump. Besides partisan affiliation, it was cultural anxiety—feeling like a stranger in America, supporting the deportation of immigrants, and hesitating about educational investment—that best predicted support for Trump.
This data adds to the public’s mosaic-like understanding of the 2016 election. It suggests Trump’s most powerful message, at least among some Americans, was about defending the country’s putative culture.
Obviously, you can’t disentangle race from this mix. But when you see their mood as a broader anxiety about their status and place in America that includes the loss of their traditional vocations and their resistance to the idea that college is the answer for everything, it becomes clearer why talking to them about retraining or free college is met with such hostility.
Of course, it goes deeper. If college isn’t something you think your children should need or, especially, if you don’t think it is something they will ever pursue regardless of cost, then free college becomes one more example of the government spending money on other people. The people who can afford it don’t need the help even if they can benefit from it, and the rest are people from other communities with different values and, perhaps, a different religion, language or pigmentation.
This doesn’t mean that free college is bad policy nor that it wouldn’t help countless folks in these communities lift themselves up and out of their economic doldrums, but it does mean that it isn’t a magic elixir that will win over their political support in the short to medium term.
What they actually want is for their kids to have the economic opportunities they can remember from their childhoods. If that opportunity was a job in a coal mine or an assembly line, it may be that there isn’t a whole lot that a political party can do to restore that, but if we’re talking about entrepreneurial opportunity, like operating a private car repair shop or a local grocery or hardware shop or restaurant or pharmacy or bank, then those are things that can be addressed by a renewed commitment to anti-monopoly and antitrust enforcement. Breaking up the giant retailers (online and off) that have so much market share and purchasing power that they have crushed all competition is way to fight for their old way of life without making compromises or allowances for their cultural conservatism.
Industry consolidation is so pervasive that it effects people from all regions, from dairy farmers to Korean grocers to Pakistani hoteliers. But it has particularly destroyed entrepreneurial opportunity in the heartland by turning the small-town bourgeoisie and aspiring proletariat into wage-slaves whose kids need to leave town to escape the downward mobility.
The trade-off, which has been lower consumer prices without too much loss in quality and choice is certainly attractive. But it hasn’t worked overall. Quite the opposite, actually. And the sooner the left figures out what is really ailing these communities and comes up with a better solution for them than attacking their values, the sooner it can begin winning back their allegiance.
No one needs to be sold out in this scenario. And it isn’t a massive plan for income distribution. It’s a plan for restoring the American Dream and self-respect, and that’s both what is desired and what is needed.
And those manufacturing and resource-extraction jobs are increasingly going to be eliminated by automation, too.
I’m intrigued by your discussion of the white working class and education as the way up the economic ladder. I come from the immigrant Jewish working class–now basically extinct–and was inculcated with that idea at a very young age: my parents made it clear to my siblings and me, as were all working in the very modest family business, that they did not want any of us following in their footsteps; instead, we were expected to get a college education and move into a profession such as law or medicine. But now in the next generation, one of my nieces dropped out of medical school because she realized she would be carrying a crushing debt after graduation. She has now started a program in a totally different healthcare-related field that will not leave her with $200K of debt upon graduation.
I bring this up because the Jewish obsession with education is pretty well known–yet this obsession is now running into structural economic changes in US society.
Your essay puts me in mind of this (per Wikipedia):
“Reserve army of labour is a concept in Karl Marx’s critique of political economy. It refers to the unemployed and under-employed in capitalist society. It is synonymous with ‘industrial reserve army’ or ‘relative surplus population’, except that the unemployed can be defined as those actually looking for work and that the relative surplus population also includes people unable to work. The use of the word ‘army’ refers to the workers being conscripted and regimented in the workplace in a hierarchy, under the command or authority of the owners of capital.
“Marx did not invent the term ‘reserve army of labour’. It was already being used by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England. What Marx did was theorize the reserve army of labour as a necessary part of the capitalist organization of work.”
For some years now, that reserve army of labor has found its fortunes in the US military. This bit of social engineering, which is not even acknowledged in polite society, is hawked in commercial after commercial on television, yet if you talk to a young man or woman who has done a stint in the military, what you generally find is that the training they received is so narrowly specialized that it doesn’t actually prepare them well for civilian employment. Thus (for example) my co-worker’s son got IT training in the military and now works as…a civilian IT contractor for the same branch of the military. It would be a big mistake to describe him as a “computer scientist”, because he never studied most of what a computer-science major would study.
I don’t see how “we’ll shut down all the stores you’ve chosen to shop at so your children can maybe open a five & dime you won’t be able to afford” is a winning political message.
Perhaps a five and dime is not an apt analogy.
I’m thinking of pharmacies in France, which I discovered (while on sabbatical there) are very different than in the US. For one thing, they’re all independently owned. There is no such thing as a pharmacy chain in France akin to Walgreen or RiteAid or CVS in the US. I can’t tell you what exactly is the legal framework that leads to this situation, but it seems pretty likely to me that there are laws to prevent the formation of those chain pharmacies–akin to what Booman was discussing in his point about antitrust.
There used to be a legal framework in some states called “fair trade” that regulated retail prices of certain classes of items as a way to support small businesses and prevent them from being undercut by large retailers. Elimination of fair-trade laws saved consumers a bit of money, and also drove small businesses into the ground.
You can replace the specific example of the five & dime with any small retail business and the point remains the same.
That both understates the economic benefits of what I’m talking about and uses the most ridiculous talking point you can think of to support it.
Assuming I grant the economic benefit you envision the effects won’t be felt until well into the future, while the pain will be up front and significant. People in rural areas know how valuable Wal-Mart and the like are to them. Rural Democrats have run on a platform of closing down Wal-Mart before. How’d that work?
“People in rural areas know how valuable Wal-Mart and the like are to them.”
That’s because they’ve forgotten that “People in rural areas know how valuable locally owned businesses are, and how Walmart is an existential threat to those small businesses”.
Rural Democrats ran on a platform of closing down Wal-Mart, in a futile effort to protect those small businesses. Yeah, we all know how that worked.
So you think Democrats should have welcomed Walmart into their communities?
One of the things we’re finding in our rural areas is that what Walmart giveth, Walmart can taketh away – if the profit margins for a store are not to their board members’ and shareholders’ liking. Some communities within an hour’s drive of me have lost Walmarts in the last couple years – mostly Neighborhood Market outlets. That leaves locals without their only grocery store/pharmacy option. In some cases, those properties are being bought up by a small regional chain of grocers, and those communities will be relatively lucky. The jobs will come back and so will the goods and services. Other communities? Not so much.
There are obviously pros and cons. No question places like Wal-Mart have had negative effects on mom & pop retail. But the important point is that the horse has already left the barn. Boo’s looking for a political/economic vision the Democrats can promote to win back rural voters and I don’t see this questionable application of anti-trust law serving that purpose. If anything I think threatening to come in and crush rural big box centers will lose votes, not gain them.
One thing that will be in the next issue of the Washington Monthly is an interview I conducted with Tom Perriello, and I don’t want to step on that by quoting him here.
But, I’ll characterize what he said.
He said that he will go downstate and talk to folks in Appalachian counties in great wonky detail about automation and industry consolidation and utility monopolies during the day and then show up in the northern suburbs at night and have to listen to a bunch of rich highly educated liberals explain to him that that message will never sell and that the rubes can’t understand that stuff.
He’s the one guy campaigning on the message I’m advocating, and he gets this bullshit every day that I get in the comments.
It’s horseshit. People understand what monopoly has done to them. In particular, the entrepreneurial class understands, because their businesses have failed and now they’re in the same plight as the people they used to employ, working night shifts at Kohl’s and taking advantage of the employee discount.
Okay. I believe you. But the problem isn’t some such nonsense about what they believe or don’t believe or understand or don’t understand concerning the local economics, but they don’t base their vote in any discernible fashion on economics as understood by humanity or they would have not been R’s since the 80’s!
What matters is their priority for voting. And no matter what any of them tell you, the vast majority of the don’t vote on economics but social and religious reasons.
If these new Trump voters have started the same trend as their new Republican piers of not voting on a rational basis then there is no point going after them even now because to the best of my knowledge you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
And sadly for Dem’s chances of gaining or keeping power, the Dem’s are just never going to be able resonate as well with irrational people as long as they are still willing to even sometimes tell the truth.
Re: Wal-Mart. This is not my experience. We recently moved our racing operations into a small town near a race track. Everyone in the town resents the Wal-Mart that moved there over 20 years ago. It devastated the downtown mom and pop businesses and downtown remains shuttered. To a person they say if they knew then what they know today they would have found a way to stop it’s construction.
“Finally, 54 percent of white working-class Americans said investing in college education is a risky gamble…”
As close as I am to being one of those “first in the family’s history to go off to college”, I have always had a problem with viewing college as “training for work”.
The intent of college is to teach you how to think, not to inculcate you into being a productive worker bee. It’s not a zero sum game, and I have never bought the idea that “some people are just not cut out for college”. ANYONE can benefit from a little training in the feeding and care of their brain, which notably does not come with an instruction manual.
Or as they say in the mental health field: The brain is a great servant, but a terrible master…
I wrote a diary about this, but I do think this part captures the heart of the issue:
Some of it is as simple as: what jobs exist for someone who doesn’t want to go to school.
Most who are educated are oblivious to the message that is contained in getting bad grades or not succeeding in school.
As I noted, 51% DON”T THINK UNIVERSITY WILL MAKE THEIR LIVES BETTER.
A very good Education week article noted:
It’s surprising that this surprises people.
Ed Week
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/top_performers/2016/12/rust_belt_workers_dont_want_to_hear_about_educ
ation_and_retraining_they_want_their_old_jobs_back.html
Additional article
My diary with the quote:
http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2017/3/18/125836/313
Then they are going to be disappointed because physics and time have already and will continue to kick them in the ass.
There are many things you can beat, but right now physics and time are both things that everyone is subject too with no exceptions.
And the physics currently allow automation on an unprecedented level and that automation level is growing exponentially.
Fully autonomous cars are less than 20 years away unless something exceedingly drastic happens. When we get to that point, well more than 20 million jobs are just going to vanish in a puff of smoke with no replacements in sight. Truckers of all shapes and sizes, taxi drivers, bus drivers (School and commercial), forklift operators, and many more classes of jobs related to moving goods and people from place to place will just go away. Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if construction equipment becomes fully automated and/or remote controlled either.
What are these people going to do then?
Getting people jobs is a very short term priority that is only going to get harder.
The real goal is getting people to understand that there is no dignity in work. That people have dignity even and especially if they don’t have a job. That it is not the job that gives a person dignity.
Post scarcity is coming. And it is coming very quickly. And with it comes a whole host of problems that we as a society are just not prepared to deal with right now.
If these people don’t want to change, they are just going to continue to get fucked over just like anyone else that tries to fight physics and time.
Their concerns are real. But I’ve watched these concerns play out in my own family and it destroyed my Father because he simply couldn’t get the people around him to change enough to keep everyone afloat and he himself couldn’t change fast enough to start trying to get everyone else to change fast enough. So our family restaurant went under, and so did 3 of the local farmers who supplied us with produce but wanted more than the market value for said produce because that’s what they had always gotten for their produce. After all of them went under so too did store the local grocer because the 20 people who previously had jobs no longer did and they couldn’t spend money at said grocer. It cascaded downhill from there for local businesses. The best thing that has happened to that town in the 15 years since that happened was Dollar General opened a store there and now people can get basic groceries without paying the convenience store markup at the only gas station in town and for 15 miles in any direction or going to Wal-Mart which is 16 miles North or stupidly expensive local store 16 miles south that only stays in business because they are the only store for 20 miles in any direction of them not counting the new Dollar General. And all because they people in town couldn’t stand to pay $0.35 more for hamburgers and $0.50 more for the special because “Those have been the prices for 20 years. I’m not paying more today for the same burger I had yesterday.” And my Dad let that go on for 3 years too long. He knew it was killing us, but he too didn’t want to change. And by the time that he started trying he was just too late to get through to them and save the business. Hell to this day some of the people there still don’t think he needed to raise prices even though our costs were going up and blame him for not just keeping the business open even though we were losing money on every meal served at the old prices there at the end. They just want time to stand still and literally can not cope with change.
So I say again their concerns are real. Change is hard. But their concerns are also a logical fallacy because they are a literal Appeal to Tradition. Pointing out their days are numbered is not going to win us their votes. Lying to them by not pointing it out isn’t going to win us their votes either or do them any good, because Dem’s simply can’t compete with Republicans on spewing feel good illogical bullshit.
Comments like this fill me with grief, and also with foreboding. They remind me of a political teaching in Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” (a book considerably more thoughtful than the war movie derived from it). Heinlein was no fan of what he called “warm-blood democracy”: the idea that the vote — which he correctly described as “force, naked and raw, the power of the Rods and the Axe” — belongs to everyone above a certain age who is living and breathing. His ideas for a replacement (essentially, required military service or a really arduous alternative in order to obtain the franchise) are debatable, but his analysis of the result of the delusions discussed in this comment and the original post seems entirely right:
“The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority . . . other than through the tragic logic of history. . . . If [they] voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead–and responsibility was then forced on [them] willy-nilly and destroyed both [them] and [their] foundationless temple.”
Heinlein seems to be describing very well the Trump voters Longman discusses, and this comment illustrates on a local level what their delusions produce. It’s still open how much damage those delusions will do to the country and the world, but the omens right now aren’t comforting.
Totally agree that “Starship Troopers” (the movie) omitted the most important aspect of the book, that voting was limited to military personnel. It’s been a few years since I read it, but wasn’t there also the time issue, where the troopers would go into hibernation for decades just to get to the battle?
Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” is also great social commentary, I highly recommend it. The canard “TANSTAAFL” or “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” is from that work.
However, later in life Robert Heinlein became more than a little paranoid and most definitely racist. Some of those themes showed up in his works…
Booman,
I really appreciate your repeated highlighting of monopolies, consolidation and anti-trust non-enforcement.
It’s a pervasive issue, and it’s wider and deeper than people usually notice.
Take Supermarkets, there used to be a whole slew of them where I live, many locally owned and many from ‘outside’. One by one, the locals were swallowed. Kroger seems to have been the ‘winner’. When you shop at one of the their local stores that still bear the name of the locally owned store that they bought, the will sell you shopping bags. On the bag is a list of all the ‘store brands’ they now operate. There are like 30 of them from all across the country. Each was once a local operation, now run by Kroger, but Kroger is still using that familiar local name, and putting on a fine show about how they are a part of the community.
It’s a complete charade. All those management jobs were sucked away in the merger and prices, naturally they have gone up. Local suppliers to these markets get shafted too. It’s lose / lose / lose. Probably the only local winners are the management of those bought out. Some of these mergers look a little bit like the buyers pays off the management to sell out the business.
If GOP voters could be convinced that these companies are sucking the life out of the local communities it would be a game-changer. And oddly, Trump did do a little of this in his campaign. Let’s hope that his votes notice at some point that Trump’s actions and his words are complete strangers to each other.
Good topic, but too much speculation due to trying to analyze from afar. I cannot emphasize enough the requirement of going out and spending some time in the places talking with people. take the speculative discussion of supermarkets, for example then take a look at Hy-vee
https:/www.hy-vee.com/careers#search
https:
/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hy-Vee
Hy-vee,
well the links have to be pasted in, and since probably few will do that, here’s what the link says: it’s to the careers page, “our employees act like they own the place, and that’s because they do”
explains the set up,
I don’t think GOP voters are making rational choices based on economics.
They hate liberal, so-called elites, African-Americans, immigrants, etc…
As long as Dems are the party of ‘others,’ and as long as we don’t turn out those ‘others,’ in large enough numbers, we’re going to keep losing.
It seems to me that free education would provide some benefits. First, for those WWC who chose to use the opportunity it will provide an avenue out of the sickness of despair that has taken hold over the last decades. The old sayin it still true though. You can take a horse to water but you can’t make him drink still applies. But that leads directly to the second benefit of education. As a society we need to keep up with the world to both maintain our standard of living and to be leaders of a free world.
So I agree free education is not the only thing needed here. A reduction in inequality and better paying jobs ($15 an hour anyone?)would help. And full employment, always more jobs. It couldn’t hurt to go back to the FDR days and get everyone who wants a job something to do. And there is no doubt it can be done, except of course for the folks on the other side of the isle screaming about deficits and debt. (dumb bastards)Also there are many in this country who have college debt that is impossible to pay off either bc their jobs don’t pay enough or they quit before completion for what ever reason. Maybe some help here as well.
I doubt there is any way to knock out the Wal Marts of the world nor am I particularly interested in that. The world has changed. We no longer make buggy whips anymore along with many other trades and businesses. We may even see coal mining go that way before long. I support anti trust actions, since we seem to have been lax over the decades, but that by itself will not allow us to compete in the world markets. And let’s face the truth. People like Wal Mart and so many other businesses – even the freaking Apple phones made in Malaysia.
The problems facing the WWC are multitude but they can be fixed if we only had some people who wanted to help.
Think about the kinds of jobs that can’t be outsourced. You can’t ship your car to Japan for repair, but you can take it to Sears.
You don’t want to buy a bag of dirt online, but you can get it at Home Depot.
You can’t go out to eat in Rome, but you can go to Olive Garden.
You don’t get glasses from an Indian call center, but you can get them at Wal Mart.
What we’ve allowed to happen is to create a system where we lost the industrial base that makes stuff (which is problematic enough) but at the same time wiped out the businesses that sell that stuff.
We can’t get the industry back, but we can get the businesses back. At the very least, we can begin fighting for that.
BTW HP has a story up about Sinclair Broadcast Group is planning to buy Tribune Media. Sinclair is conservative group owning 173 local stations; Tribune about 43. Together they will control 70% of local media. They own local affiliates of the networks. And there is this:
So how do we fight this sort of shit?
In the case of Sinclair, you fucking vote for Hillary Clinton despite whatever problems you might have.
Short of that, you take the case to the people, but you take THE CASE to them, not a bunch of stuff that you think they should want, but stuff they say they want and deserve and that doesn’t compromise your issues our sell out your loyal base.
As soon as we figure out what that is. But I voted for Clinton in the 08 primary and again in the 2016 election. That is about enough of that.
you go out and talk with people, listen to what they have to say
yes
Whatever you want to call the economic policies of the past half century, whether the Washington consensus, neo-liberalism, or something else, those policies have differential impact on the geography of the US. And just being in a particular location dramatically affects one’s prospects. And one’s prospects affects one’s attitudes toward politics and culture.
In the 1970s and 1980s, I got to see a lot of rural and small town places. What I saw was the dying of community identity as a result of better transportation and government austerity.
What causes communities to die? Well they really don’t but what happens is the secular identity gets reattached to the nearest local churches as nodes of sociality.
The secular institutions suffer these fates. Schools get consolidated and the neighborhood school disappears. If that is a high school, only the local post office or the fact of incorporation saves the community identity. If the community is large enough to have more than one store, when those disappear it is gone; the state road map no longer recognizes it although it might be immortalized in USGS topographic maps. Long before all of this, often it is the loss of the railroad station or railroad flag stop that did it in. These little places have been disappearing (or rearranging themselves for some time. Now only a convenience store/gas station marks where they once were.
There is different kind of community death: being swallowed up the the large regional conurbations that consolidated industries and surbanization brought. All of those defensively incorporated suburban communities seeking not to become the big, bad city but become havens of white flight and small-town American culture have found either that their vision has turned sour or that monoculture is no longer the “exclusiveness” that their betters seek. The globalization of the culture at the top has had its effects.
And locations create their own cultures and demand their own conformity–even in liberal academic meccas.
In 1983, Kirkus Review scanned Richard Louv, America II. Louv assessed where the nostalgia for density, exclusion, and “village life” would lead as those of means were able to get their vision of gated communities and insulation from others and those of lesser means would see their present communities decline and be devalued.
No one sufficiently original and trenchant appeared, sadly, other than Louv.
We inhabit the two cultures he sought to ward off. And the political classes are playing them off against one another.
Until there’s an alternative to what goes on in Washington and most state capitals, these two cultures will be at each other’s throats politically because neither political party can deal with the underlying two cultures without betraying their largest donors. And neither can shut off the media that are profiting from amplifying the cultural anxieties of the two cultures.
We are not only stuck and stalemated at the federal level. The same big donors who created this stalemate are pouring funds into the states and large cities to ensure that there is no state or local initiatives that might undo their current power.
What is ailing these communities is being caught up in a media culture of division, which includes media Christianity and its local acolytes in the clergy. And what is ailing these communities is the profound corruption of all US institutions, ostensibly caused by austerity and the scramble for resources. Corporations, government, NGOs, churches, universities, medical systems, schools systems — very few have escaped the sucking sound that minimizes front-line worker contributions or changes the institutional mission to please outside large donors or stakeholders. Even smaller institutions are on the make regardless of whether they score in the money chase.
Those that aren’t are struggling to make ends meet.
Any reversal of scale must be created locally and essentially begin to boycott the wider markets that seemed to bring prosperity through cheap goods.
This is going to be a very hard slog, and any on the left who don’t realize that will be easily discouraged when politics can’t be wrested from money and media distraction.
That said, attacking racism is not attacking their values. It is attacking their impulse to exert control over other people. We better start getting more sophisticated with sweeping statements like values. Otherwise, we sacrifice our own. Like equality under the law.
Free public college is needed for anybody who has the interest and aptitude for higher education, but this often gets conflated with a message that everybody needs to get a college degree. We still need plumbers, electricians, and other trades (yes, I also support free public vocational education).
If we tell everybody they need college, we end up making college stupid, not making everybody smart. You see this already with college courses that aren’t much more than trades (eg, ‘web page design using latest hot tool/language’ in a computer science program). Students totally uninterested in computer science (the canonical ‘hot area’) only end up with a low GPA and unemployable when they could have been a successful tech. Such students (and there are many) are right when they consider college a risky gamble.
Where we went off the rails is having the business community define what the objectives of free college was.
They wanted free training to their specifications so as to lower labor costs (and wages and salaries) of some skilled trades and college majors.
What a free society needs is people who can master new learning and make critical judgements. And talk to people in other specialties with some degree of understanding.
Unfortunately, what we first got from subsidizing colleges was a professoriat wanting to duplicate itself but on a controlled and guild basis. That collapsed in the 1980s with overproduction of advanced degrees.
Good news keeps on coming. From CNBC:
I don’t see how our current anti-trust laws are enough to end this type of business. The Walmarts of the world or pick something else like Amazon. All have competition, they may not be as strong as we’d like for competition but there’s still competition. So we’d probably need more than just enforcement of anti-trust laws. What we’re really talking about is limiting chain stores of all types.
Secondly, even if we are able to do that. Is there enough population locally in these areas to support these types of small businesses. Part of the reason they succeeded before was there was a large rural workforce (which got automated out of existence) and in some cases an industrial base (which for the most part has been automated out too). Is there enough people still there to support these businesses?
If not then what?
I agree we should fight the large chains and online retailers to help provide this opportunity. I’m just not sure it’s enough at this point to help.
This is an informative post, but I hope Mr. Longman will flesh out these concerns in a longer form, because I’m left with some serious questions.
Longman, for example, refers to the need to tackle on-line monopolies. If he’s serious, that means Amazon; if you’re not dealing with Amazon, you’re not dealing with on-line retail at all. And that seems to raise a whole lot of issues.
Suppose I compare Amazon with the Woolworth’s that existed in my home town of Glendale, California, when I was growing up. (Yes, Woolworth’s was a big soulless corporation itself, and one of the original “category killers” — the category being general merchandise, and the prey being the independent five-and-dime/general store. But it’s as close to those things as anything I or nearly all other Americans have seen in our lifetimes.)
Here I think Longman’s description of what Amazon offers as “lower consumer prices without TOO much loss in quality and choice” is so misstated as to be inapplicable. By comparison to that Woolworth’s, Amazon offers the following:
— Comparable or often lower prices.
— A far larger array of choices, including many items from small American makers that would never be stocked by a local store. (When I buy through Amazon, I often get messages from these folks stressing that they are a small business and really want good ratings.)
— A vastly greater amount of information about the products offered, including not only detailed information from the manufacturer but dozens to hundreds of evaluations from people who have bought and used it, as well as answers from the manufacturer to specific questions and overall product ratings. (Yes, I know these ratings and comments are sometimes misleading, but there is a “verified purchase” system to help reduce gaming.)
— Amazingly fast and inexpensive home delivery, especially via Amazon Prime — which would be one of the best bargains in retail even without the streaming video and other garnishes.
Now if federal antitrust enforcement had prevented the emergence of a company that did all this, my life would have been more expensive and much less convenient, but at least I would not have known what I was missing. But if I’m now told that I should support a political program to break all this up, so that various culturally and economically anxious WWC people could establish financially viable local retail establishments that I will never patronize, I’m not likely to find that bargain attractive. And if I’m further told that one of the reasons for subsidizing these folks (which is what I would be doing) is so they could continue to immure themselves and their progeny in their 1950s-era mental fortress — the better to reject the desirability of greater education than their high schools will ever give them — that bargain is going to look positively repellent.
As I hope these comments indicate, this issue requires a lot more thought than a blog post allows — which is why I hope Mr. Longman and some of the “Monthly” folks will consider it carefully and at the necessary length.