WSJ: Rural America Is the New ‘Inner City’

[pbrower2a]

It is sad. Changes need to be made in rural America for all races. They are plenty of black and Latino people living in the rural areas as well. Native Americans as well.

The only areas in which blacks are common in rural areas is in the South. Blacks outside the South are highly urbanized.

First Peoples are in really bad shape in some rural areas, typically the Reservations. As I recall the poorest county in America is in South Dakota.  

Low costs of living attract people on disability. If I am on disability and SNAP, then I am far better off in rural Mississippi than in the San  Francisco Bay Area even if I find life in rural Mississippi empty, stale, and meaningless) -- if the money is the same. But if I am a smart person with a good work ethic and solid talents, I might want to head for the San Francisco Bay Area even with its horrible rental prices.  

Dope? There is a generational factor. People in their fifties through seventies in ghettos have experience with illegal drugs (especially heroin and cocaine) and know what it does -- and they impress upon the young the idea that illegal drugs are to be avoided. Rural areas? Rural low-lives are finding out the hard way what opiates and meth are big trouble.

There is an objective measure of how well large groups of people are doing by state, county, zip code, some urban areas, and Congressional district: human development index (HDI). HDI shows how well people are doing as a group, It is not per-capita income. The range is from 3.81 in Mississippi to 6.17 in Connecticut. (You know the old story about American demographics: if you want to know what is wrong in America, just look at Mississippi). For an example of the contrast, Louisiana has an above-average per capita income but does badly in translating such into human welfare as measured in statistical indices of education and health -- so poorly that the state is toward the bottom in HDI among the states. Much of the income is from oil, revenues largely being siphoned off to other states. Oil exploitation and production is not a labor-intensive  activity; people in the oil business can make above-average pay, but comparatively few people work in it for the revenue that it generates. Most Louisiana residents thus get stuck in activities not closely related to oil production, like tourism. As in many other states, the biggest non-government employer in Louisiana is Wal*Mart. In contrast, Vermont is a poor state in per capita income, but it does well in measures of health and education. There are few ways to get filthy rich in Vermont, but Vermonters seem to keep what they earn. Vermont institutions seem to work well. -- well enough that Vermont has an HDI of 5.31.   Louisiana has an HDI of 4.12, sixth-lowest in America. Schools and healthcare in Louisiana, to put it crudely, suck. Louisiana is fairly close to Mississippi and an HDI of 3.81. For the US as a whole, HDI is 5.06.

OK, white privilege is real. But how much is it worth? In a Pennsylvania, a state near the near the national average of HDI at 5.07 (I could have picked other states, but some of them have small numbers of minorities, like Maine or an unusual distribution of minorities, like Alaska).

White people have an average HDI of 5.31 in Pennsylvania. Hispanics are at 4.40; Asians are at 7.45 (Hey, would-be social-climbers: look for an Asian spouse if you want your life to improve, at least statistically!); blacks are at 3.58. The Asian numbers are solid through most of America. Pennsylvania doe not have enough First Peoples to offer a solid sample. For First Peoples, a possible analogue is Michigan, statistically the second-best state in which to be such (3.89) and is probably the closest analogue to Pennsylvania in institutional practice and state politics, which is still poor.

Blacks are still getting a raw deal in America (judging the results), but some things matter even more than race. White privilege is real -- but Asians do better. But HDI for whites in West Virginia is at 3.97, which is much lower than for whites in neighboring Virginia (5.96), Latinos in Virginia (5.20), or blacks in Virginia (4.07). It is safe to say that West Virginia is not the state in which you want to be 'average', even if you are white. West Virginia institutions must (pardon the indelicate word) suck. Michigan is only two state border crossings away from West Virginia, and Michigan's First Peoples do almost as well as white people in West Virginia.  

Now for a critique of the study: I began a thread on rating the states, and I disputed the idea that income was an adequate explanation of how good life is. $30K a year is very good in rural Mississippi and awful in New York City. But there are likely far fewer ways to earn $30K a year in Mississippi than there are to make $50K a year in New York City. I used the average credit score by state, as poor credit scores indicate economic distress more than that people have splurged at stores. People are more likely to end up broke because they are having trouble with taxes, utility bills, and medical costs; poorer people are more likely to have trouble meeting those costs.  
Minnesota is likely the state in which one would get stuck for high costs of clothing and heating (four distinct seasons including a brutal winter) and need housing with better insulation  -- but Minnesotans have the best average statewide credit score. They apparently get paid adequately on the job to meet those costs. Mississippi residents get stuck with low pay.

[pbrower2a]

- snip -

Thanks for providing your insight, as per usual. That said, I do want to comment on it.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

It's very common to see aggregate numbers for Asian Americans and see "Wow, Asians are doing better than whites." Then the more unscrupulous among us make the conclusion "There must be some form of Asian privilege!" Saying either statement uncritically neglects a few things:
 1.  Asians are concentrated in high-COL areas like California or the Northeast, which makes certain statistics (e.g. Asians' higher than average incomes) seem more impressive than they really are. So be careful with stats like HDI* if they don't take into account COL.

True about cost of living (COL). In recent times the high COL places are the booming areas. Only during energy booms are places of low COL good places in which to live or  start a small business.  People doing well in places of low COL seem either (1) to own much energy-generating property like farmland or ranch land,  (2) have the sort of work (like medicine) that practically ensure a high income, (3) have a (middle) income household as business owners (like a Chinese buffet restaurant in which the family owning it has an impressive income, but divide the the family income by four and the amount per family member isn't so impressive, or (4) have two family members with average or near-average incomes. Such would include two schoolteachers, a skilled tradesman and an accountant, an engineer and a nurse...   such a family could have an impressive income. And this family is lucky.  

In the study I did I looked at the average credit score in a state. Yes, it is possible for some big farmer owning properties from which his family makes a multi-million dollar income, but most of his employees are nearly destitute. You can imagine what the credit score is of the big farmer -- and what the credit scores of his workers are. The average statewide credit scores were still awful for most places with low COL, exceptions being Utah, Minnesota, and generally states in between.

Here is a surprise that I found about credit ratings as statewide averages: they correlated strongly negative -- to cancerweed*** use. Cancerweed use also correlates to poor educational performance as well as (more blatantly) medical distress that everyone knows about. Such was not in The Measure of America, but was in my analysis in a thread that derived from it.

A hint to Republicans -- they could have made Obamacare more effective by slapping high taxes on cancerweed use.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Obviously the category of 'Asian'  includes people as disparate as Pakistani-Americans and Korean-Americans,  people who have less in common than, for example, Portuguese-Americans (or even Jamaican-Americans or Mexican-Americans) and Finnish-Americans. But in general, one expects all Asian groups to cluster in urban areas. (In my case, I am about half from English-speaking and half from German-speaking peoples[ I do not consider Mexican-Americans exotic except in appearance, and most of the blacks from from British colonies often as very, very British.

Asian-Americans seem to do well in the not-so-American genre of classical music. Those who are good in pop music often go to the Far East, where their talents are more marketable. Asian-American news reporters are highly visible in television except for Filipinos with Spanish surnames who can easily be confused with members of another ethnic group. Film? Hispanics and blacks don;t seem to do well there, either -- at least in  front of the cameras. Animation? I see lots of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese surnames.  

Trouble dating? Have you ever heard of 'rice fever'? But the idea that Asian men having trouble getting white or Hispanic women to date them ignores that (1) Asian-American life is generally good life, and (2) the children can be spectacularly beautiful.
 

You must be logged in to read this quote.

The glass ceilings in Corporate America that shut off practically anyone from advancing far in bureaucratic hierarchies in private industry unless one enters through the fast track (by being born into the 'right family' hurts people of all ethnic origins -- including white people. Jobs in Corporate America are simply places for earning bare survival, something very different from the reality of the 1960s when opportunity was more open. I'd suggest to any brilliant person -- it is far better to start a business, become part of the civil service, enter a profession, or latch onto a trade than get a BA degree and take a job as a clerk as a stopgap while you prove your integrity, competence, and loyalty. You can still be a clerk who shows much integrity, competence, and loyalty thirty years later if you are not cast off by then -- and you will still barely survive.

This, I believe, reflects that the executive elite of America has begun to function much like a
Soviet-style nomenklatura. Should there ever be an American revolution analogous to those of 1789 in France or 1917 in Russia, then this class will be the first led  to the guillotine, the firing squad, or whatever means of mass death are then in place for people deemed exploiters.    

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Asian-Americans do worst (in states with an adequate number of them for statistical meaning) in Louisiana, which got a large contingent of Vietnamese refugees who felt that they would be more comfortable with the Francophile culture, the subtropical climate, and the opportunity to do commercial fishing that they would not find in... well, Minnesota. Their HDI in Louisiana (5.69) is still above the American average at 5.06 -- and much higher than the HDI of 4.12 in Louisiana for people as a whole, let alone the 2.73 for blacks in Louisiana.


But going beyond statistics can easily lead one into stereotypes, some of them exceedingly vile. But nonetheless one can figure that respect for formal learning correlates well to success in life. Contempt for learning portends a miserable life. Note well that some states do better than others in meeting basic human needs and some don't.  Some states have grossly neglected some ethic groups.

Anyways, back on the thread topic...

You must be logged in to read this quote.

On top of the usual deprivation found in the Delta, the community has also faced virulent racism; not terribly surprising, unfortunately, but it's interesting to see how racism from the Jim Crow era (and beyond) is experienced by people outside of the black-white dichotomy. That said, the whole article can be a read as a case study of the problems of rural America that have already been mentioned in this thread.

*The measure that you're quoting is not the HDI that people usuall talk about, which is always reported with three digits or decimal places. What you're using is the American Human Development Index, which was developed by Measure of America to be an index similar to the actual HDI.

**If anyone wants to read about extreme deprevation in America, I recommend reading $2 a Day by Kathryn Edin and H. Luke Shaefer. It talks about Americans literally living on less than two dollars a day, usually with no cash income at all, using case studies from both urban and rural America (including the Mississippi Delta, where the poverty and inequities are described quite vividly).
[/quote][/quote]

Poverty is real in America, a consequence of decisions that people have made (like refusing to move out of impoverished areas) and of historical legacies. Discussing such is unglamorous, and it may be that only when mass fear of poverty becomes the norm that people insist that their elected officials do something. There are plenty of blunders possible in life, from misguided loyalty to communities to such calamities as committing street crime, using drugs, becoming a heavy drinker early, siring or having an out-of-wedlock child, dropping out of school, getting a dishonorable discharge... But we can discuss the causes of poverty, both personal and structural, all we want.  

  

***The tobacco industry will never like me.