What's the matter with Wyoming (and Iowa)?
The other day Robert Reich, whose writing I have a love/hate relationship with, wrote this article:
What’s the matter with Iowa?
I'll admit that I was prepared to dismiss it when I started reading it, but I can't. It's a well reasoned article.
I don't think it sums up everything that's "wrong" with Iowa, but it gets some things right. This could just as easily be said, about Wyoming, however:
I saw it happen. When I was helping Fritz Mondale in 1984, I noticed Iowa beginning to shift from family farms to corporate agriculture, and from industrialized manufacturing to knowledge-intensive jobs.
The challenge was to create a new economy for Iowa and for much of the Midwest.
I didn’t have any good ideas for creating that new economy, though — and neither did Mondale, who won Iowa’s Democratic caucuses that year but lost the general election to Ronald Reagan in Iowa and every other state, except his own Minnesota.
Yet not until George W. Bush’s reelection campaign in 2004 did a Republican presidential candidate win Iowa again.
When Tom Vilsack was governor of Iowa in the early 2000s and flirting with the idea of a presidential run, he told me he worried that Iowa’s high school valedictorians used to want to attend the University of Iowa or Iowa State, but now wanted the Ivy League or Stanford or NYU. Even Iowa’s own college graduates were leaving for Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and New York.
Vilsack wanted to know how to keep Iowa’s talent in Iowa — a variant of the question I couldn’t answer for Mondale. By this time I had a few ideas — setting up high-tech hubs around major universities, blanketing parts of the state with free wi-fi, having community colleges supply the talent local industries needed — but they all cost money that Iowa didn’t have.
As The New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman noted recently, Iowa continues to lose more than 34 percent of its college graduates each year. Illinois, by contrast, gains 20 percent more college graduates than it produces. Minnesota has about 8 percent more college grads than it produces.
This talent migration has hastened America’s split into two cultures, not just in Iowa and the Midwest but across the nation.
But not entirely.
The thing people like Reich don't get is that much of the country doesn't want to become an upper middle class urban cesspool. Places that people like Reich worship are largely abhorrent in living terms. There's a reason that people look to rural areas and an idealized past.
But people also lash themselves to a dead economy as if it'll come back, even if it means losing track of reality at some point, or even if it means becoming something they claim to detest, welfare recipients. This has happened all over the US.
Something needs to be done to revitalize the main street economy, and people like Reich don't have the answers because at the end of the day, all American economists see things the same way. Everything is corporate, the only question is how much, if any, restraint you put on corporations.
Distributism would cure a lot of this.
If we had a more Distributist economy, we'd have a more local one. For rural areas, that'd mean much more local processing of locally produced goods. There's no reason for the concentration of the meat packing industry, for example. Beef could be packed locally. At one time, my family did just that. And that's only one example.
If the economy was reoriented in that fashion, local industry would expand a great deal. The thing is, of course, not all of those jobs would be the glass and steel mind-numbing cubicle jobs that all economists love.
But here's the other thing. As long as the economy is oriented the way it is, rural states are going to be colonies of urban areas, just as much as, let's say, French Indochina was a colony of France, or Kenya a colony of the United Kingdom. Exploitative, in another word. It's not intentionally so, it is an economic reality.
The problem there is that in those sorts of economies everything is produced for export alone, and everything is precarious. That gets back to my Distributist argument above.
But it also gets to a certain cultural thing in which those deeply aligned with the economy, which includes most people, can't see anything thing else. As long as the economy keeps working, that's okay. But when changes come, that can be a disaster.
Wyoming's very first economy was the fur trade, if we discount the native economy (which is a real economy, and accordingly should not be discounted). Contrary to the popular belief, the fur trade was not displaced, it just was never really very large, and therefore it diminished in importance when other things came in.
The other things were 1) agriculture, which came first, followed by the 2) extractive industries. Both are still with us. Agriculture has suffered to a degree as the naturally distributist industries that support it have been sacrificed on the altar of corporate economics and consolidation. The state, for its part, did nothing to arrest that trend and simply let it happen. In part, that's because the state has always deeply worshiped the thought that the extractive industries will make us all rich and nothing is to be interfered with, including losing local production of the raw resources that are first produced here. I.e., we don't refine the oil as much as we used to, we don't pack the meat, we don't process the wool. . . .
And the extractive industries certainly have made a lot of people and entire communities rich, there's no question of it.
But the handwriting is on the wall. Coal is declining and will continue to do so. And a massive shift in petroleum use is occurring, which Wyoming cannot stop. Petroleum will still be produced far into the future, but its use as a fuel is disappearing. Petrochemicals, on the other hand, are not.
We seemingly like to think we can stop those things from changing in any form. We've tried to through lawsuits and legislation. And yet it turns out that people buying EV's don't listen to our litigation or legislation, any more than they do to Nebraska's Senator Deb Fischer's whining about recharging station funding. Like some who can't face death due to illness, we'll grasp at what we can, rather than adjust.
Part of that is listening to people who tell us what we want to hear. A lot of politicians have tried to gently tell us the truth of what we're facing. Governor Gordon did just recently. When they do that, they're castigated for it.
In 1962's The Days of Wine and Roses the plot follows a man who is a social drinker and introduces alcohol to his girlfriend. They marry, and over time they become heavy drinkers. He finally stops drinking, his wife having left him, and finds her in an apartment, where she is now a hardcore alcoholic. He resumes drinking then and there, in order to be with her.
In the end, however, he reforms and quits. She doesn't. We know how that will end.
That's a lot like Wyomingites in general. We've received the hard knocks and blows. Some of us are going to put the bottle down and face the day, some are not going to under any circumstances.
For some, it's easier to believe that a "dictator for a day" can order the old economy restored and reverse fifty years of demographic change, while reversing supply, demand, and technology to sort of 1970s status. In other words, go ahead and have another drink, it won't hurt you.
But in reality, it might, and probably will.
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