Nothing systemic here, nope
There’s something about these maps.
The legacy of slavery is right there in color. The persistence of poverty across the South is too. It is of course more complicated, as Gordon Hansen of Harvard’s Kennedy School explains.
Well-heeled fans of The Market often treat workers as pawns, abstractions called human resources expected to move about the board of states in pursuit of work when jobs dry up where in places they call home. Relocating requires financial means the poor often lack. Not to mention people’s attachment to place is often more powerful than economics. (Blasphemy, I know.) Donald Trump considers such people losers. They consider him their champion for reasons that have little to do with The Market.
The Market is not some force of nature independent of human control. It is not somehow upset by human attempts to regulate it. That’s the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the financial sector.
Jeremy Ney, author of American Inequality substack, is a former researcher at MIT, Harvard, and Federal Reserve, and creator of the Life Expectancy graphic.
“U.S. manufacturing has had the biggest decline in employment of any sector in the last 40 years. Since the year 2000, the U.S. has lost over a quarter of its manufacturing jobs,” Ney writes. The effects on inequality are stark:
Working in manufacturing used to be a great way to break into the middle-class, particularly for non-college educated Americans. In 1990, manufacturing workers were earning $10.78/hr or 6% more than their peers in non-management roles ($10.20/hr). But by 2018, manufacturing workers were earning approximately 5% less ($21.54) than peers ($22.71).
Trade shocks have contributed, especially competition with China, as has automation and the decline of unions. Ney offers suggestions for reversing the trend. He urges:
Let’s learn from the historical successes of the 1940s – 1960s that allowed manufacturing workers to make wage gains, to thrive in secure job environments, and to build the products and infrastructure that Americans so dearly needed. American manufacturing can have a resurgence (and the Infrastructure Bill and CHIPS Act will help us get there), but we also need to ensure we’re focusing on regions that stand the most to benefit from resurgent American manufacturing.
All good stuff. But Democrats and President Biden are kdding themselves if they think restoring manufacturing will take the hard edge off the hard right, much less eliminate the legacy of hundreds or years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow.
The New York Times finds:
Poverty isn’t simply the condition of not having enough money. It’s the condition of not having enough choice and being taken advantage of because of that. When we ignore the role that exploitation plays in trapping people in poverty, we end up designing policy that is weak at best and ineffective at worst. For example, when legislation lifts incomes at the bottom without addressing the housing crisis, those gains are often realized instead by landlords, not wholly by the families the legislation was intended to help. A 2019 study conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that when states raised minimum wages, families initially found it easier to pay rent. But landlords quickly responded to the wage bumps by increasing rents, which diluted the effect of the policy. This happened after the pandemic rescue packages, too: When wages began to rise in 2021 after worker shortages, rents rose as well, and soon people found themselves back where they started or worse.
Guess who didn’t?
Those who have amassed the most power and capital bear the most responsibility for America’s vast poverty: political elites who have utterly failed low-income Americans over the past half-century; corporate bosses who have spent and schemed to prioritize profits over families; lobbyists blocking the will of the American people with their self-serving interests; property owners who have exiled the poor from entire cities and fueled the affordable-housing crisis. Acknowledging this is both crucial and deliciously absolving; it directs our attention upward and distracts us from all the ways (many unintentional) that we — we the secure, the insured, the housed, the college-educated, the protected, the lucky — also contribute to the problem.
Corporations benefit from worker exploitation, sure, but so do consumers, who buy the cheap goods and services the working poor produce, and so do those of us directly or indirectly invested in the stock market. Landlords are not the only ones who benefit from housing exploitation; many homeowners do, too, their property values propped up by the collective effort to make housing scarce and expensive. The banking and payday-lending industries profit from the financial exploitation of the poor, but so do those of us with free checking accounts, as those accounts are subsidized by billions of dollars in overdraft fees.
Slavery, its legacy of poverty, and the systemic exploitation the Times details are the products of capitalism. As some believe, that’s as American as apple pie.