How can we understand the anger of Americans who live in the countryside? – 02/27/2024 – Paul Krugman

Will technological progress lead to mass unemployment? People have been asking this question for two centuries, and the answer has always turned out to be no.

Technology eliminates some jobs, but it has always generated enough new ones to offset those losses, and there is every reason to believe that this will continue for the foreseeable future.

However, progress is not painless. Businesses and some economists may speak glowingly about the virtues of “creative destruction,” but the transformation can be socially and economically devastating for those on the destroyed side.

This is especially true when technological change wipes out not just workers but entire communities.

And this is not a hypothetical proposition. It’s a big part of what happened on the ground in the United States.

This process and its effects are detailed in devastating, terrifying and disconcerting ways in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy.” [Raiva Rural Branca: A Ameaça à Democracia Americana]new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman.

I say “devastating” because the plight of American farmworkers is real, “terrifying” because the political reaction to this plight represents a clear and constant danger to our democracy, and “disconcerting” because on some level I still don’t understand the political side of this .

Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. In fact, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the rural labor force has shrunk by about 70 percent over the same period, thanks to machines, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides.

Coal production has been falling recently, but, thanks in part to technologies like the mountaintop removal method, coal mining as a way of life disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling by 80% while production nearly doubled.

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated case, and imports have played a big role in that, but it’s also primarily about technological changes that favor metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly skilled workers.

Technology, then, made the country as a whole richer, but reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t farmworkers go where the jobs are? Some were.

However, some cities have become expensive, in part because of restrictive zoning — something Democratic states get wrong — and many workers are also reluctant to leave their families and communities.

So shouldn’t we help these communities? We help. Federal programs are available to all Americans, but they are disproportionately funded by taxes paid by wealthy urban areas.

As a result, there are huge transfers of money from wealthy urban states like New Jersey to relatively poor rural states like West Virginia.

Although these transfers alleviate some of the difficulties faced by rural people in the United States, they do not restore the sense of dignity that was lost along with rural jobs.

And perhaps this loss of dignity explains white rural anger and why it is so misdirected — since it is quite clear that in this election the majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has tried to create jobs in their communities, and in favor of Donald Trump, a Queens crook who offers little but validation for their resentment.

This sense of loss of dignity may be compounded because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as harder-working, more patriotic, and perhaps even morally superior to big city dwellers—an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts like Jason’s hit song Aldean “Try That in a Small Town”.

In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America should be populated by hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, unlike those big-city people who live on welfare, but economic and social reality does not match this self-image.

Working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their city counterparts to be employed — not because they are lazy, but because the jobs simply aren’t there.

The difference is much smaller for women, perhaps because jobs supported by federal programs tend to be seen as feminine, such as those in the health sector.

Many rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide, and babies raised by single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people, but because social disorder is, as sociologist William Julius Wilson long argued about rural Americans. urban problems, what happens when work goes away.

Draw attention to some of these problems and you’ll be accused of being an elitist city snob. I’m sure the comments in this column will be interesting.

The result — which on some level I still find difficult to understand — is that many rural white voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear.

This helps explain why the Maga narrative [‘Make America Great Again’, slogan da campanha de Trump] It portrays relatively safe cities like New York as hotbeds of crime while rural parts of the United States are victims not of technology but of illegal immigrants, “wokeness” and the deep state.

By now, you’re probably hoping for a solution to this ugly political situation. Schaller and Waldman offer some suggestions. But the truth is, while white rural anger is perhaps the greatest threat to American democracy, I don’t have any good ideas about how to combat it.