What the dudes in the diners want is simple: A time machine that will make it 1962, but with more air conditioning, internet porn, good insulin, and cable TV. https://t.co/RghsZLnjzE
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) October 6, 2019
There has always been a strong strain of ‘Who do those snooty eggheads think they are, and why do they insist on shoving their values at us?’ in American culture… and for at least the past sixty years, the Republican party has grown fat feeding on the people most susceptible to that prejudice. Having (no doubt temporarily) exhausted its supply of Good Heartland Diner Voters anecdotes, the NYTimes permits Arkansan Monica Potts to tell the other side of the ‘rural values’ story:
… I returned to Van Buren County at the end of 2017 after 20 years living on the East Coast, most recently in the Washington area, because I’m writing a book about Clinton, Van Buren’s county seat. My partner and I knew it would be a challenge: The county is very remote, very religious and full of Trump voters, and we suspected we’d stand out because of our political beliefs.
Since coming back, I’ve realized that it is true that people here think life here has taken a turn for the worse. What’s also true, though, is that many here seem determined to get rid of the last institutions trying to help them, to keep people with educations out, and to retreat from community life and concentrate on taking care of themselves and their own families. It’s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor…
In April, a local man who operates the Facebook group, “Van Buren County Today Unfiltered,” posted the agenda for a coming meeting of the Quorum Court, the county’s governing body. The library board wanted to increase the pay it could offer a new head librarian, who would be combining her new job with an older one, to $25 an hour.
Only about 2,500 people live in my hometown. The library serves the entire county, which has an estimated 16,600 people, a marked decline from the population at the last census in 2010. The library has historically provided a variety of services for this community. It has offered summer reading camps for children and services like high-speed internet, sewing classes and academic help. I grew up going to the library and visited it often when I returned. It was always busy. I thought people would be supportive.
Instead, they started a fight. The battle began on the Facebook post, which had 240 comments by the end. The first comment came from Amie Hamilton, who reiterated her point when I interviewed her several months later. “If you want to make $25 an hour, please go to a city that can afford it,” she wrote. “We the people are not here to pay your excessive salaries through taxation or in any other way.”
There was general agreement among the Facebook commenters that no one in the area was paid that much — the librarian’s wages would have worked out to be about $42,200 a year — and the people who do actually earn incomes that are similar — teachers and many county officials — largely remained quiet. (Clinton has a median income of $34,764 and a poverty rate of 22.6 percent.) When a few of us, including me, pointed out that the candidate for the library job had a master’s degree, more people commented on the uselessness of education. “Call me narrow-minded but I’ve never understood why a librarian needs a four-year degree,” someone wrote. “We were taught Dewey decimal system in grade school. Never sounded like anything too tough.”…I didn’t realize it at first, but the fight over the library was rolled up into a bigger one about the library building, and an even bigger fight than that, about the county government, what it should pay for, and how and whether people should be taxed at all. The library fight was, itself, a fight over the future of rural America, what it meant to choose to live in a county like mine, what my neighbors were willing to do for one another, what they were willing to sacrifice to foster a sense of community here.
The answer was, for the most part, not very much.
A 2016 analysis by National Public Radio found that as counties become more rural, they tend to become more Republican. Completely rural counties went for Mr. Trump by 70.6 percent over all, which makes my county politically average — Van Buren gave Mr. Trump 73 percent of its vote. Rural America is not a monolith, but a majority of rural counties fit perfectly into Mr. Trump’s preferred demographics: They are largely white (96.2 percent in Van Buren), and rates of educational attainment are low.
People are leaving rural areas for cities because that’s where the jobs are. According to one analysis, between 2008, during the Great Recession, and 2017, the latest year for which data is available, 99 percent of the job and population growth occurred in counties with at least one city of 50,000 people or more or in counties directly adjacent to such cities. It’s hard to generalize what’s happening to rural counties, but many are faced with a shrinking property tax base and a drop in economic activity, which also decreases sales tax revenues.
Many rural counties are also experiencing declines in whatever industries were once the major employers. In Appalachia, this is coal; in much of the Midwest, it is heavy manufacturing; and in my county, and many other counties, it’s natural gas and other extractive industries…
In other words, these rural counties don’t rely on actual farming any more; they’ve become reliant on industries that are not-so-gradually being phased out, either because the raw materials have run out or the cost of turning those materials into finished products locally is too high. (I believe the olde-tymey phrase for this practice is ‘eating one’s seed corn’, but then I’ve always lived in cities.) And, to reiterate, the Republicans are happy to cheat these voters by assuring them that there is a way to return to 1962, in return for the votes that elect GOP officials who wouldn’t live in a place like Van Buren County unless they wanted their own ‘rural retreat’ (private fiefdom).
I have every sympathy for poorly-educated, location-fixated individuals who want things to be the way they have always been (at least for the last 50 years or so), but comes a point, as Potts points out, where insisting that the world oughta change because *you* don’t wanna is… not a practical solution.
trollhattan
And a steel mill for the neighbor to work at. Not for themselves, because nobody needs that mess.
Yutsano
I don’t. I’ve had to adapt to various changes in my life. What makes them so special that they think they can’t advance with the rest of us?
joel hanes
That was one of the most depressing articles I’ve recently read, because it rings so true.
I blame Reagan and Rush, even before Murdoch and Fox, for selling conservatives on the ideas that there is no such thing as the common good, and that our own government is their enemy.
piratedan
sorry… aren’t these the same people who can’t tolerate, blacks, immigrants, gays, jews, liberals and folks who generally want the opportunity to better themselves? Well, fuck those people, I’d rather spend my money on people who are trying versus having their ethno-religious pity party tantrums.
Scott P.
Reading this article, I was reminded of the classic The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, a 1958 book by sociologist Edward Banfield. it looked at an impoverished area in Southern Italy, and examined the internal causes for its apparent stagnation and lack of interest in the common good. There are criticisms that can be made of the study, but in general there are a lot of similarities in attitudes of those living in Montegrano to the Arkansans that Potts interviews — disdain for education, distrust of others in their community, suspicion of government, among others. I encourage folks to read it.
rikyrah
Oh Goody…
Another Cletus Safari…
They long for the Delusional World of Mad Men.
Before all ‘ those people’ decided that they could actually stand up for themselves.
David Anderson
@Scott P.: When I was in grad school, one of the cool projects I worked on was brownfield redevelopment of the heavy industrial sites in the former Mononghala/Ohio River heavy industrial super cluster. The town we were partnering with was ~20 miles from Pittsburgh. It was a company town. The company mill occupied a space about four blocks wide and six blocks long. It was abandoned before I entered kindergarten.
The mayor and city council had a few ideas about what they wanted (take advantage of its location near a highway, rail yard and a barge dock for an intermodal center + light industry). That sounded reasonable and achievable. We prepped for a public meeting. The first half hour of comments was on how to get the mill opened up again. Evidently that was de rigeour for any redevelopment meeting.
SFAW
Stupid, ignorant, and DAMN PROUD of it.
Kylroy
The decline of rural America has been going on for decades. My grandparents left it, my father left it, my cousins left it – we’re getting to the point that pretty much all the ambitious, flexible people have gone to the cities. (And I’m defining “cities” the same way the article does – 50K+ people, not necessarily metropoli.) And the folks you’re left with are…not super great.
Ironic that the far-right National Review, of all places, had these people pegged in the run-up to Trump’s election:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/03/donald-trump-white-working-class-dysfunction-real-opportunity-needed-not-trump/
Citizen Alan
and I have none, in large part because at age 50, I am intensely bitter about the fact that every time I had a chance to get out of rural Mississippi, I was guilt-tripped out of it by relatives who didn’t want me to move away to where better jobs were but who also subtly looked down on me for going to college.
low-tech cyclist
@joel hanes:
I totally agree.
But what makes this so depressing to me is that there’d always been the sense that this was aimed at distant government whose ways were incomprehensible to them. Washington, D.C. of course. And for a lot of people, even their state governments: if you live in Wise County, VA, Richmond is a full day’s drive away. But I’d have figured that at the local level, where people know their elected officials, and can see the local government’s programs in action, it might be at least somewhat better.
Yet it’s apparently just as bad there. Like you, I find that incredibly depressing. And I’m not easily depressed.
NotMax
1962? Nah, the godless commie socialist flaming liberal JFK was usurping the office from its proper Republican occupants.
Oh, and Obama was alive then, too.
;)
Chetan Murthy
Fuckin’ dipshits who bitch about us pushing their values on them. Fuuuuck. They don’t realize that gay people were there at the inception of the Internet, creating some of the most important tools, protocols, systems. They don’t realize how much of America’s modern technological base was created by people of color (including Jewish people, b/c for sure those fuckers don’t think Jewish people are white).
Idiots. You don’t get all that good stuff, without making it possible for the creators of all that good stuff to have decent lives, buckos.
catclub
If this isn’t a hat tip to Rip Van Winkle sleeping for 20 years before waking up in a new world, it should be.
Martin
My patience for these people is very thin.
I appreciate wanting to wrap yourself in a Mayberry bubble and pretend the world outside doesn’t exists, because economically that’s basically what they’ve done. The coasts that prospered economically did so by constantly reinventing itself at the personal up through community level. That’s not to say that a lot of people got left behind because they couldn’t or wouldn’t do that, but that is unfortunately how the world works – everywhere. Its like half the country was taken hostage by the Hallmark channel, and doesn’t know how to get out of it. And so much of it was massively counterproductive. University of California had to send a letter to the governor of Kansas after they banned teaching evolution stating that UC had the absolute right to not certify their science courses as science courses and thereby not admit any students from the state. Why the fuck would any startup locate in Kansas with that kind of attitude toward being technologically competitive?
Kay
The young people who stay really are in trouble. It’s bad. Unlike their parents they never knew anything different so they’ve adopted this kind of awful culture where they’re hopeless.
I don’t know if you-all are familiar with Slumericans or if I can explain this but it’s a sort of cynical embrace of places that refuse to invest anything in their children, a weird pride in how bad it is. It’s sad in a way because they’re the now-grown children who came up in places where they simply stopped creating any kind of community and it’s become a kind of identity. They literally refer to themselves as “survivors”.
trollhattan
@NotMax:
How were we to know his Catholic infestation would last until they ran the USSC? [shakes fist at JFK]
Searcher
I know a lot of these people don’t think inflation should exist, but I wonder if you would make any inroads by listing the proposed wage in year-2000-inflation-adjusted-dollars ($16.58 / hour) or even in 1969 dollars ($3.58 / hour or $7160 per year).
I know some of this is the old crabs in a bucket (“I’m not making $15 / hour, why should they?”), but I feel like you get some of these older voters who remember working for $1.50 per hour, and $25 / hour just seems like crazy talk.
Nicole
My red-state-raised-but-somehow-still-turned-out-liberal husband and his best friend (ditto) say that there is a breed of person where they grew up who have zero compassion or empathy and they make the ideal sponge for the Right. They’re also mean as snakes.
Jeffro
These folks need to be told that things only move forward, so they need to get involved and shape their own future. And not just with a vote every couple of years, either, much less a vote for the ultimate retrograde candidate.
It won’t reach all (or perhaps even most) of them, but it might help the rest of us tip the balance, even in red and reddish states.
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
Reminded to mention a fairly recent book whose subject matter sounds intriguing (haven’t yet read it).
American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World by Christina Proenza-Coles
Searcher
Incidentally, I was just listening to Cary Elwes read The Demon-Haunted World, and one of the statistics — albeit from the 90’s — was that basically everyone in the lowest tier of literacy is in poverty, while basically no one in the highest tier of literacy is in poverty.
Correlation, causation, etc, but literacy is basically one of the most powerful tools we know for fighting poverty.
Jeffro
@Kay: That looks like a band website? (But I don’t doubt they have a following and that the concept has a following in general)
“Life sucks, I don’t feel like going to school/getting a job/not tattooing my face, so…let’s go neo-fascist?”
Oh well, at least they’ll be easy to spot…
mrmoshpotato
Forty-plus years of voting for people who repeatedly screw them over. Let me get my violin out from under a grain of rice to provide a soundtrack to the yelling about Killary and the Seekret Mooselamb.
jl
Would be interesting to see how things have changed in these rural areas over last few decades. Was it always this bad?
Krugman has some twitter posts about regional disparities and how they’ve grown. I am sure there has always been White bigotry, xenophobia and anti-intellectualism in many rural parts of the country.
OTOH, the GOP strategy of sucking economic resources out of ordinary people in ordinary areas must have some effect in creating a tribal, closed, and resentful attitude, and more so in areas that have been harder hit. If you go to Krugman’s twitter back to beginning of this month, he has some posted some graphs of growing regional disparities in signs of economic distress, particularly the persistence of high unemployment. IIRC Krugman had a link in one of his tweets to a longer more detailed discussion, but I don’t see it right now. Krugman had identified eras of growing and diminishing regional disparities, and the latest one started in the early 1980s IIRC, the beginning of movement conservative reactionary economics and the trickle down swindle. Krugman is so fatalistic about regional disparities, which he seems to think are caused by some mysterious and unknowable natural force, his thinking about it seems to stop.
It’s not the whole story but I think a part of it. To some extent, this is the result of the depraved GOP wedge strategy of grinding the faces of the lower classes in the dirt, and then for their favored dupes, point at someone else to blame and inflaming them against those bad people. It’s a version of the Southern Strategy, but applied wherever they think it work, all over the country.
delk
There’s probably some hungry leopards prowling around hankering for some tasty face.
low-tech cyclist
It’s like the old joke about “how many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb?”
A. “One, but the light bulb has to want to change.”
And that’s just it with these people. They’re stuck in a shithole where there used to be jobs, but the jobs have all left, and in each generation, the young people with any drive have left as well.
As a (mostly) decent, compassionate human being, I’d like to see us help people trapped in places like this. But they’ve got to want to change. If they don’t, there isn’t a damned thing we can do for them.
NotMax
@delk
They’re stockpiling tubs of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Face.”
:)
jl
The tragic thing is that their great white Trumpster heroes are busy betraying as fast as they can. For example:
Trump’s agriculture secretary warns: Family farms may not survive
“In America, the big get bigger and the small go out,” Sonny Perdue said
‘ “In America, the big get bigger and the small go out,” Perdue said. “I don’t think in America we, for any small business, we have a guaranteed income or guaranteed profitability.”
Perdue’s visit comes as Wisconsin dairy farmers are wrestling with a host of problems, including declining milk prices, rising suicide rates, the transition to larger farms with hundreds or thousands of animals and Trump’s international trade wars. ‘
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-s-agriculture-secretary-family-farms-may-not-survive-n1061381
If these dupes turn out enough in 2020 and Trump stays in office, it will only get worse for them. And Trumpster will think it will be great, as long as they can get some of the cut.
Edit: note that it is Trump’s incompetent and stupid trade war, that has accomplished nothing that has forced may rural areas to ask the government for a ‘guaranteed income’ (actually, to be rescued from Trumps’ gross incompetence’. So Trump’s ag secretary goes out and implicitly accused them of being moochers and tells them tough luck, suckers.
Kay
@Jeffro:
They are a band but it’s a kind of lifestyle. I don’t know how else to describe it. OK, so the general theme is “we grew up poor in chaotic, insane households, we are just barely hanging on, and that is a badge of courage to be embraced rather than changed”
It’s a kind of deliberate not caring. They’re not nostalgic. They’re what happens after nostalgia fades from anyones memory. They didn’t live at a time where people would fund a library.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So the summery is rural America is hopeless because the only people are losers looking for excuses not solutions, because solutions are hard. Take the library thing, while it’s small in the grand scheme of things having the only public library in the county brings business into the town. Nope, can’t have that. Doubtless the same yelling and screaming happens anytime someone opens a new company in these rural town so it’s just not worth doing business in small town America.
catclub
@jl:
wow. I was thinking about rural electrification happening at the same time as unions gained power in that golden age for middle income
people of 1940-1980.
kindness
But do I feel sorry for these Salt of the Earth types? I think there has been some mistake really. They said you were the Salt of the Earth. They didn’t ask you to salt the earth. Why did you do that anyway?
catclub
@jl:
It is the godless Europeans who are actually making sure that small family farms survive with absurd agricultural subsidies. Funny that.
Dan B
I looked up Van Buren County and it is next to where my parents wanted to retire. My father liked the fishing in Greers Ferry reservoir. They retired to Seattle, fortunately.
Van Buren County wasn’t the most racist place at the time but there were the usual strange things. There were still quite a few people who lived off the land and bartered for much of what they couldn’t grow or shoot. Money was not in their vocabulary. And their “tribe” was very small. They were very suspicious and hated that they were forced to attend school.
NotMax
@Enhanced Voting Techniques
“These bootstraps ain’t doin’ jack.”
//
Barbara
My grandfather told his kids in the early 50s that they would work in a coal mine over his dead body. However, he worked mostly before UMWA had won better wages and benefits. Workers deserve to be paid fairly, but one of the perverse effects was to make much of the population accept the inevitability of a natural resource economy, which, in turn, had the effect of reducing investment in the most important resource — people — and especially education. And so here we are, with virtually every emerging industry requiring ever more in the way of knowledge and education.
Kay
@Jeffro:
And it has a kind of membership. To qualify you had to have a horrible childhood, because that’s part of why they can’t get out- they weren’t really raised. So the strivers, the people who get out, generally don’t and wouldn’t qualify and it’s therefore “exclusive”.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@jl: The hilarious part of that article was it was it came across that these farmers were being told “it sucks to be you” as they were making donations to the Trump re-election campaign. That takes a special kind of stupid to do that I think.
Chetan Murthy
@NotMax: It all makes me fuckin’ livid. I came to America as a 4-year-old, with my parents: my father was a doctor, and back then, America was basically hoovering up all the good doctors from India. And then some. When I was growing up, every Indian I ever met was a doctor or a doctor’s kid. Every. One. And here awe are, FIFTY YEARS LATER, and America still can’t generate enough doctors and nurses take care of her own. FIFTY YEARS. And the same is true in every high-tech field. Every. Damn. One.
These fuckers think they can get the fruits of progress, invention, discovery, without paying for it so they import over-achievers from all over the globe. And THEN they have the fucking temerity to complain that we want a place to live in that isn’t a shithole full of fucking racists, misogynists, and homophobes.
They had a fucking choice: they could have allocated the money to train enough doctors and nurses and scientists. They didn’t, and instead CHOSE to import them.
trollhattan
@Searcher:
Reason The Millionth Dolly Parton is a hero.
catclub
@low-tech cyclist:
Rural electrification was just enabling – the bad kind of enabling.
Kay
@Jeffro:
And quite a few of them here ARE on the Right, but they’re explicitly and vehemently not racist. There’s an actual rejection of that- I don’t know if it’s sincere but it is there. I’d be really surprised if they voted, though.
Kent
My grandfather grew up in the 1940s on a farm in rural Oregon with 13 siblings. Yes, they had a huge depression-era farm family of 7 boys and 7 girls. By the late 1960s NOT ONE of my father’s siblings decided to stay home and help take over the farm. Out of 14 kids, exactly ZERO of them wanted to stick around for more of that life. My grandfather was a hard-headed old bastard which didn’t help things. But still. He finally sold off the farm in the 1970s when it got too much to take care of and now it is mostly subdivisions outside of Salem.
The early 1960s were pretty much only good for straight white males. If you were an Hispanic girl from TX who wanted to be a doctor? Or a black kid from Alabama? Or even a wealthy white girl who wasn’t interested in marriage? Not so much.
NotMax
@catclub
“Now we can listen to Father Coughlin regularly in the comfort of our own parlor.” //
Minsa Sands
Seeing some of the world would give people a different perspective on this idea of “saving a town”. Wander through Carthage or Machu Picchu or Ctesiphon or Thebes. Or look at big cities that have shrunk, like Detroit. Places stop being places.
A good rule of thumb from a historian friend: look at a town today that is struggling and ask “if there were no people here, is there any reason you would start a new town here today?” If no, then it’s going to be abandoned, no matter how much your prop it up.
trollhattan
@Chetan Murthy:
Now now, we built enough law schools to fill the joint. The shortage of med school slots in particular is intentional. Which sucks.
Newest University of California campus is 13 years old. Next newest is 51.
Ladyraxterinok
@piratedan:
Can’t understand why they don’t want a better life for their kids.
Wonder if there’ll be a series from this author. Would like some ongoing, in-depth discussion about how what they hear in church is affecting how they vie3 the world
Slacktivist had a post about how decades ago Evangelicals and their churches were leaders in welcoming and settling refugees in their community. Asked what happened to change the culture.
Martin
@catclub: Well, one of the things that tends to work pretty well is regulation around food quality, animal treatment, pesticides, etc. Those regulations tend to favor labor to address and therefore make smaller farms more competitive. Local communities can support farm to table efforts for public schools and other publicly funded entities.
RAVEN
@trollhattan: She had a great quote on the Burns doc, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap”!
And you want to talk about Van Buren County go to Pigeon Forge and see millions of them!
trollhattan
@Ladyraxterinok:
My $0.02 is it requires the young’ns to go to the big bad city, with crime and drugs and brown people and such. Nobody told the folks and grams and gramps that there are just as many drugs in Left Ankle Bone as there are in Kansas City. And higher suicide rates.
Kent
@Chetan Murthy:
That has actually nothing to do with the Cletuses from Arkansas not valuing education. It is because the medical profession artificially limits the number of medical schools in this country. There are PLENTY of young Americans who would love to become doctors. Here in Oregon there is one single medical school for a state-wide population of 4.2 million. They accept 150 candates a year out of nearly 7,000 applicants. And then when all those 150 med students graduate the mostly want to go into higher-paying specialties leaving the lower paying primary care positions empty.
Oregon could EASILY build a whole new medical school and would get flooded with high quality applicants.
Dan B
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: My father helped set up a small rubber plant in Batesville, Arkansas, a town of 7000 on the edge of the Ozarks. It was grueling work getting it started but he said he was glad he was not the personnel manager. Half the employees failed to show up to work after the first payroll. They didn’t know what to do with all the money and 40 hours a week cut into their hunting and fishing.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Chetan Murthy: Wasn’t that what triggered Economically Anxious America mess; American doctors don’t want to work in rural towns but Indian doctors prefer it and Grandma Highschool Dropout Whiterobe can’t stand to be touched by a doctor is isn’t as white as the walls?
jl
@catclub: Sad thing is that a certain type of person will never recognize the social help they get. It’s anecdata, but a Swiss colleague keeps reminding me that the farmers in Switzerland who are most dependent on the subsidies tend to be the most reactionary, nationalist and racist, and talk nonsense about sharia law taking over the country. Maybe not quite anecdata, because he tells me that rural areas elect the majority of the Swiss People’s Party, their version of the movement conservative/Evangelical new model version of the GOP. I haven’t found time to check that, though.
I guess good news is that this type of person, and appeal of that ideology can be contained, appeals to a smaller segment of the population. The Swiss People’s Party has about a third of their federal lower house and 10 percent of the upper. Too big for comfort in the lower house, but they don’t threaten to run everything like the GOP does here, and did from 2017 and 2018.
NotMax
@Kent
AMA policy for decades has been to keep a tight lid on.
Mike in Pasadena
@Searcher: Younger brother teaches reading and simple arithmetic to inmates in an Arizona prison. He says most of them are pretty good students because they finally realize that not having even these basic skills has led to a life in prison. Any numb nutz know nothing can walk into a gas station with a gun or knife to demand the cash. And that’s what illiterates sometimes do to survive. The cameras in many places of business have been improving. Cameras recording license plate numbers help too.
patrick II
There is something I don’t understand. In his book, James Fallows describes how immigration is saving some more forward-looking towns by inviting immigrants. Mayor Pete says the same thing about South Bend. Not a small, small town granted, but still one losing population to larger urban centers. In both instances, individuals who are very smart are saying the increasing population of immigrants caused an upswing in the town’s fortunes.
So, which comes first, the population or the jobs?
Chetan Murthy
@trollhattan:
I don’t know -why- the US chose to not train more doctors. My real point is: after fifty years, you can no longer blame events for the shortage (and/or misallocation away from primary care, etc); you have to blame -choices-, and those choices are OUR choices. When it comes to technology and science though, the problem starts much earlier: the reason we don’t have enough native-born PhD and MS scientists, is that our high schools don’t train people with enough math and science knowledge (esp. math) to be able to do the work in college, and then our economy’s incentives are skewed towards sending anybody who IS capable of doing the work, directly to the finance sector. Heck, the foreign-born grad students who come to America and do their graduate work here, end up being pushed to finance, too — so America gets only a limited amount of value out of that investment, too.
And again, these are choices we made as a nation, and that we’ve kept this way for at least FIFTY YEARS.
P.S. I realize that “STEM degrees” isn’t the answer to all problems. But the root of the problem is not that native-born don’t get STEM degrees, but rather that they’re insufficiently educated in math & science, for those degrees to mean shit, to be worth shit. Being a “full-stack developer” isn’t actually going to help our economy progress, except insofar as it’s the modern version of “secretary who knows touch-typing”. It’s a -floor- of skill, not a ceiling.
RAVEN
@Searcher: Yea and my doctorate was focused on the GED and Adult Literacy Education (being a GED grad and all) but there was no work in that area so I went another way. It’s crucial but not valued much.
RAVEN
@Mike in Pasadena: See “The Autobiography of Malcolm X”.
trollhattan
@Martin:
Set the DVR to record “Country” because why not? Hooked me in the first fifteen and I was glued for the whole thing. Thought he did a wonderful job weaving in the myriad influences and directions and eras. Will bet a hundred artists were left on the cutting room floor because there are just too many. Interesting how so many died as quickly as our many too-soon rock heroes.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
Stephen King’s “normal” people, presumably the people he grew up with and lives around, have always scared me more than his boogeymen.
At least two works, Storm of the Century and The Dome explored whether small town people pull together and go all Norman Rockwell if locked in together.
Spoiler alert: they don’t.
Mary G
We subsidize these people. To quote the late beloved efg, fuck’em.
Kent
@trollhattan: Is that the new Ken Burns documentary or something different?
RAVEN
@Chetan Murthy: A False Dichotomy?
“The emerging and new emphasis on science and engineering is valid, but you still need liberal arts thinkers applied in other fields,” said Alison Byerly, president of Lafayette College, an elite liberal arts school in suburban Pennsylvania. She described the debate as a “false dichotomy.”
“One needs to understand that in many instances this is a false choice between the two,” John McCardell Jr., vice chancellor of Tennessee’s Sewanee University of the South, similarly argues. English lit, economics and international studies are among the Tennessee’s school most popular majors.“But this is not the first time that the liberal arts have been under siege,” he says, pointing to the historical examples of the Land Grant Act of 1862 and the GI Bill of 1944.
Chetan Murthy
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Heh indeed. Yeah, my father moved us to a lily-white town (Mineral Wells, TX) full of shit-kickers with a school so abysmal that after a year we moved one town East (Weatherford) simply for the schools. Jesus that was one shitty town, and that’s in comparison to Weatherford, which itself was so shitty I’ve never been back and never will.
IIUC, Indian doctors move out to the sticks partially b/c of the racism (in a perverse way). Y’see (and this was true in Weatherford and Fort Worth), any wypipo with options, will always choose a white doctor. So the Indian doctors got basically all the poorer old folks, esp. people who were on Medicare (my father would take whatever Medicare paid, and after a while, stopped billing for the rest; not out of some generosity, but b/c that was his clientele).
Just to be clear: those doctors did (and do today) make a shit-ton of money. But, well, there’s just less competition on the sticks, gosh one wonders why ….
Frankensteinbeck
Crucially important. This is a mindset of cruelty.
@joel hanes:
They jumped onto a train already roaring down the track. The anti-government movement took off after desegregation, because the first interaction most rural areas had with the federal government was that government stopping them from sadistically oppressing minorities. Reagan’s whole thing about the scariest words being that someone is from the federal government and here to help? That was what he meant. Here to help OTHER people escape YOU.
@jl:
There may be some vicious cycle aspects, but you’re putting the cart before the horse. The point of this article is that these people demanded the GOP be what it is. They demanded Fox lie to them. They don’t want good economic policy. They want cruelty, and they want the world to validate them by that being the policy that makes their lives better. When cruelty doesn’t do that, they demand more cruelty, because that validation is the real goal.
trollhattan
@Chetan Murthy:
I just have one kid, now an HS senior, and she’s in second-year calc. So my observation is it’s available but just not a path many are motivated towards. “How will this help me become a YouTube influencer?” There are either one or two sections in a school of 2,500.
It’s super-risky angling for med school because if you don’t get in after your BS, what then? I’ll get back to y’all.
Raven
@trollhattan: We finished it last night. I became a country fan when the Dead went that was and then Old and In The Way, Country Gazette, NRPS, the Burritos and so many others hit the groove. I thought the series was really well done even though they did miss some folks.
Ladyraxterinok
@Kay:
Who was it who wrote those great essays about rural culture in th south-east,— WV etc? Bageant? He died way too young.
Had a lot about the kind of schools/education they had or didn’t get. Pretty fascinating/enlightening.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@patrick II: A lot of immigrants are looking to succeed and by the act of migrating means they are willing to take risks. What is one person’s hopeless economic wasteland is another’s low cost business center and a good location for a start up.
Chetan Murthy
@RAVEN:
Absolutely. Absolutely. The problem isn’t merely that American native-born are insufficiently educated in science/math: it is that they are insufficiently educated, FULL STOP. They don’t have the reasoning skills to deal with complex modern societies and the mechanisms that make them work.
[A relevant aside] I read an article recently about grip strength, and how it’s dropping. Also about how overall strength is dropping, as compared to a few centuries ago. And the author was good at pointing out that this is to be expected: Instead of spending our time chucking, carrying, chopping, and plowing, we’re spending our time reading and learning and typing. Upper-body strength is no longer valuable in a modern industrial society. Instead, what’s valuable is an ability to deal with complex bureaucratic processes, and well as complex technical systems. That’s what’s being selected-for.
For sure, this has been going on for too short a time to show up in the genome, but humans are plastic organisms: from babyhood, our environment shows us and trains us to excel in the skills that matter for survival.
To come back to your point: yes, the ability to deal with the complex bureaucracy of life, the complex set of interlocking social constraints that govern our daily existence, requires much more than mere STEM training: it requires a liberal education.
trollhattan
@Kent:
The Burns series, just completed. IDK if there’s a way to see it on demand yet. I may watch it again–it’s pretty densely packed.
Ladyraxterinok
@Chetan Murthy:
Wow. Something we need to hear!
Elizabelle
Quick facts re Clinton, Arkansas:
I rather love that. (1) Named after someone famous for promoting economic and technical progress (that canal was a big deal!, and required a lot of cooperation to get it built and (2) a U.S. Senator from NY.
From here on out, this is Hillary Clinton AR to me. As in, these fucks should be so lucky that they get a president as qualified as Hillary Clinton who might be interested in them.
Trump and his cronies sure aren’t.
rk
I don’t. Who the fuck do these people think they are? No one is entitled to anything. I’m sick of these whining morons who can’t adjust to changes. I’m an immigrant. All I saw during my life were people who adapted to change and did what was needed to be done to survive in a hostile world. Men from rural areas moved to the city to earn a living and sent money home to help support their families. People move to where the jobs are or they create new jobs and industry in existing places by retraining or adapting to change.
Just because grandpa worked in the mines/ manufacturing or elsewhere does not mean that all the males of subsequent generations are entitled to a mining jobs or factory jobs. That’s what they’re crying about. They want the same jobs handed to their kids. They had it good because they excluded women and blacks from so many professions and the govt catered to them and their needs. Don’t want to live with blacks? Sure, the govt will make it impossible for them to live or work near you.
Well the good old days are gone. Time to crack open some books, get an education, get skills or tough luck. If all other cultures can teach the value of hard work and education to their kids so can white rural America. But by electing Trump they’ve shown they don’t value education, knowledge, nor do they have any decency or shame. They deserve everything that’s happening to them and worse.
Jager
A friend of mine from Canada was telling me the other day about his nephew who was just promoted to CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The nephew comes from a large blue-collar, small-town, western Canadian family. Their attitude, “X always thought his shit didn’t stink” or “X is some kind of a big shot now, eh.”. Not one of them was really happy for the guy.
NotMax
Michael Harrington’s The Other America is, unfortunately, not a quaint historical artifact.
RAVEN
@Chetan Murthy: In the army we called it “gettin over”!
jl
@Frankensteinbeck: ” The point of this article is that these people demanded the GOP be what it is. They demanded Fox lie to them. ”
I don’t see that in the article at all. The article doesn’t take the area’s history back further than early 2000s when the gas boom started. Seems to me that is your theory that you tacked onto the article.
Kent
@patrick II:
Both. It is synergistic. An example of what you are talking about is Woodburn Oregon which is between Portland and Salem. The town is now maybe 70% Hispanic and the schools are over 80% Hispanic. Yet they still rate highly in terms of graduation rates, test scores, etc. And they have a killer soccer team.
Yes, Hispanic migrants first moved to Woodburn for the agricultural jobs. But once a core labor pool developed, more companies moved in and a ton of more highly labor intensive agricultural operations moved in like raising nursery stock plants rather than wheat because of the ready labor pool. Now days if you are going to site any kind of low wage high labor facility in Oregon like say a distribution warehouse you’ll look hard at Woodburn because of the Hispanic labor.
sdhays
In 2000, or thereabouts, my midwestern hometown was digging up one of the major streets to repave it. Someone had the idea of taking the opportunity to lay down fiber optic cables to boost internet speeds and improve cable offerings. It would have cost peanuts because most of the work was already budgeted for the roadwork. But people, including the local paper, thought it was frivolous to go to all that trouble for “better cable”, so the measure failed, and the fiber optic cable didn’t get put down.
The very next year, the major manufacturing employer announced they were moving to Mexico. Years later, I see Google Fiber moving in to places just like my hometown would have been if they had spent just a little bit of money 20 years ago. Instead, 25% of the students in my hometown are now free lunch students, meaning that they come from homes below the poverty line. The small local mall that was bustling when I lived there closed down. Every time I go there, it looks a little more hollowed out. It’s very sad. And it at least partially is the fault of the rural mindset of people who just want their town to be the same and never ever change, nevermind how that’s impossible.
Ladyraxterinok
@Kent:
Graduated HS in 57. There was a new national program with tests to pass and scholarships to win (Don’t now remember name. Still going strong in 86 when son in HS)
I remember the shock I got reading through the scholarships for math and science programs. NEARLY EVERY ONE was for boys!!!
Frankensteinbeck
@jl:
Republican economics come from the bottom.
TerryC
@David Anderson: Crucible Steel in Midland?
Chetan Murthy
@trollhattan:
Kudos to your daughter for taking calc in HS. Doing the math (heh) on your HS, approx 600 students per yr (4yr) so that’s (30 students per section) 5% of the student body. My high school (1981) had a similar percentage. The problem isn’t that too few kids take calc; it’s too few kids even learn the basic algebra, geometry, analysis, that they’re supposed to *even if* they’re not college-bound.
Here’s an interesting take on the liberal arts (and generally more education) and why they’re important: https://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2007/07/cosma-shalizi-a.html
Kent
@trollhattan:
It’s on my watch list. You can stream it for now off the PBS web site: https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/country-music/ or pay a shit-ton of money to buy it on Amazon Prime.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Muerica has always been this way. go back to the 1850s and the Know-Nothings were losing their shit over the Irish.
Steve in the ATL
@trollhattan:
The explosion in law schools coincided with a contraction in the legal industry. The only people who got lawyer jobs graduating from a fourth tier or unaccredited law school were people whose relatives were hiring them. The quality of these law grads, most of whom aren’t lawyers because they couldn’t pass the bar exam, is appalling.
I would hate to see doctors of this quality.
@Ladyraxterinok:
Based on information and belief, that’s pretty common in white trash families. Loser dads don’t want to be shown up by their kids what with all their book learnin’ and computing machines and store-bought non-blinding liquor.
@Mike in Pasadena:
OMFG do these people know nothing? Always ALWAYS drive to the crime site in a stolen car! Sheesh….
Jeffro
@Kay: a lot to take in and maybe discuss again soon – thanks Kay, seriously. I Think I have some “unfinished learning” to do in this area.
RAVEN
@Steve in the ATL: Boortz
Steve in the ATL
@RAVEN: I know McCardell. He’s a W&L man. And he’s right, at least in this case.
RAVEN
@Steve in the ATL: Did you go there?
mrmoshpotato
@Steve in the ATL:
Are there even any crimes left to commit these days? I thought Dump, etal had done all the crimes.
Kent
@Ladyraxterinok:
“Don’t Get Above your Raisin'”
It’s the mentality of a whole culture summed up by Ricky Skaggs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zHC0fhxEe8
Steve in the ATL
@Chetan Murthy: one of my college friends married a girl from Weatherford. Her dad was running for judge at the time so the wedding had to be a huge production at the Baptist church downtown. Got so bored another groomsman and I snuck out and ran over to Krystal for chili cheese dogs. We were back long before the preaching was done.
Ryan
I think LBJ had this right. Substitute LGBT for colored if you wish.
“”If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.””
RAVEN
@Ryan: Fuck LBJ
TerryC
@Chetan Murthy: I grew up in East Liverpool, Ohio, which has since the 1960s disintegrated as a city. Last time I was there I stayed at a B&B two blocks from where I grew up and was told (a) not to walk in my old neighborhood after dark due to drug issues and (b) how much our host despised the Ayrab doctors down the street at the city hospital.
Mike Furlan
The NYT article is written by the daughter of a board member who stuck the town with a two million dollar library building that they can’t pay for.
And, where did the “requirement” that a librarian needs a masters degree come from? (Wouldn’t a PhD with a minimum of 3 years post doc experience be better?)
Sounds like those people have a reason to complain.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: I guess I didn’t actually address your quote. I’m saying that everybody should be a pre-med. Rather, I’m saying that most American high school and college students are woefully undereducated, full stop. In all senses, not just STEM. But if you’re gong to fit into the modern world, with changing technology, and not be a rote-learning drone, you’re going to have to have a decent amount of STEM training.
BTW, a CS friend told me a few years ago, that his doctor/CS friends were encouraging their children to go into CS, and not medicine, specifically b/c the opportunities were so vast. These are the same folks who, 10-20 years ago, were urging their kids to be doctors. And again, I don’t mean “full-stack developer”, but rather actually learning CS: the stuff that lasts.
I mean, I used BSD Unix in college in 1982, and I’m still using software that is more-or-less the same thing *today*, to write this email. I programmed graphics software in 1986, and sure, the software today is immeasurably advanced, but it’s a lineal descendant of the software I worked with.
It’s the difference between actually learning how to write [which, frankly, I can admit that I never did] and just learning how to write grammatically correct sentences. The former is something that you’ll use the rest of your life. Whereas the latter …. well, it’ll get you so far, but no further.
NotMax
@mrmoshpotato
Doritoism in action. “Don’t worry, they’ll make more.”
:)
Kent
@trollhattan:
I teach HS science. I came into it after my first career as a fisheries biologist in Alaska when my wife’s career brought us to Texas.
But I know a whole bunch of HS science teachers with bio degrees who didn’t get into med school and then didn’t know what else to do with themselves.
mrmoshpotato
@NotMax: Doritoism – the philosophy of chips you can start on fire.
What’s the over/under on how long Dump will take to commit these newly invented crimes?
Steve in the ATL
@RAVEN: I went to W&L, and one of my kids went to Sewanee so I know him fairly well.
Ladyraxterinok
@Chetan Murthy:
My ex, now a retired theoretical in California physics prof, was getting really upset in the 80swith the state of physics ed.
I’ve forgotten a lot of detail. From what I recall, fewer and fewer kids were doing /being prepared for the study of hard science in HS. That meant there were fewer and fewer able to major in physics in college.
From experience of my son who started in physics at prestige collegs. For whatever reason–partly totally poor advising–the programs seemed geared to eliminate as many as possible. ‘See?! Only super smart people can do physics and you bozos don’t qualify!’ It was like they wanted a small, elite groupfjat was better than everyone else.
Needless to say, none of those boys, all outstanding , regional prize winners in physics in HS, went on in physics.
Chetan Murthy
@Kent:
I bet lamh36@ would have thoughts on how things are different today. Certainly the demand for people trained in life sciences, is much higher today. I have a relative who works for a company that makes automated pathology equipment. Think “a machine that fills a room, with robotics, chemistry, biology and computer equipment inside, all being run to exacting standards of precision and sanitation”. The kind of people who operate that equipment, troubleshoot that equipment, not to speak of design and manufacture such equipment, starts with people who are deeply STEM-educated. And of course that includes biology and chemistry.
Heh: back when I was in HS, all the chem/bio teachers were coaches. And it showed.
Kent
@Chetan Murthy:
I’m a teacher and I’ve taught kids who’ve gone onto med school and also into computer science and software development.
They are really two dramatically different fields requiring dramatically different skills. Medicine, especially primary care, is all about interpersonal skills, compassion and communication. Computer science? Pretty much the opposite. The best doctors would make crappy computer scientists, and vice versa.
It isn’t always about finding the most lucrative career with the most growth potential.
lumpkin
@Mike Furlan:
Yep. The article only mentions it but doesn’t really explore the fact that they made the classic mistake of assuming what turned out to be a temporary windfall would last forever. They way over extended themselves by building a too-expensive library and likely some of the anger about the librarian salary stems from that.
I didn’t know the author was related to one of the board members who screwed the pooch. Now it makes sense why she focused on the parochialism of the locals and gloss over the bad judgment on the building.
Chetan Murthy
@Ladyraxterinok:
I hope your son was able to persevere long enough to get a science-related degree? I can relate to your son’s story: I went to Rice, and Physics was *hard*. EE/CS were … easy in comparison. So after 2yr of the physics sequence, I stopped and kept going in EE/CS. But that 2yr was basically the “ante” for every kind of science-related degree and profession one might want to pursue, so it was alright.
Honestly, I can understand why they might want to weed out all but the best of the physics students (and hopefully send them to other science-based disciplines): there’s no job market for BS physicists per se, and precious little job market for PhD physicists. A friend once describe the job market in astronomy as “you go to work at an observatory, and wait for your boss to kick the bucket”. Now, if they literally hounded your son out of science altogether, that was just …. gross dereliction and malpractice, and totally inexcusable.
Darkrose
As a new librarian, this makes me very sad. The librarian there could be making a lot more money somewhere else, but she chose to stay. The library provides services, but people don’t value it because all they see is tax money, and don’t understand that they benefit.
It’s such a contrast with my current job at a community college. There are students here who are immigrants, some undocumented. There are single parents and people caring for older relatives and disabled students. There are students who have been incarcerated; over 40% of our students live in households with incomes below the federal poverty line. And yet they are here because they want to learn, to take control of their lives and reach for goals, whether it’s to learn English or to transfer to a 4-year college or get career training. Unlike the people profiled in that article, they haven’t given up.
We have an antiquated system for printing and copying that requires students to have cash–it doesn’t take debit cards. Since people don’t always have cash, we have a little slush fund that we use if people only need to print a few pages. I spotted a student 40 cents last Monday, and said, as usual, “Next time you’re in and you have 40 cents, we can add it to the fund for the next person.” On Thursday, she came in and gave me a card that said “The world needs more women like you,” containing $2 in quarters. This young Asian woman at a community college in California showed the kind of thoughtfullness and generosity that we’re always told only happens in rural America. That’s the future that liberals want.
Miss Bianca
@Kay:
There is just so much here that makes me sad. At least my little Goobersville ranching community supports its library.
Chetan Murthy
@Kent:
Interesting. I spent a year at An Enormous Internet Search Company, and we had a joke, that the company basically hired Aspies. That the software worked perfectly, but nobody actually knew what people wanted, b/c nobody could get thru to anybody on a human level. And that was inside the company. Of course, when it came to users, it was even worse. Even. Worse. I mean, sure the software worked, but some of it, why did anybody even build it? Nobody wanted it …..
I spent 10yr at IBM, doing troubleshooting [basically, large dumpster fires at banks, insurance, etc]. And almost all of it was a combination of technical skill, and being able to look into the eyes of the [at the moment, crazed with grief and terror] mid/high-level manager at the customer, and figure out what they needed to reach “job done”. I mean, it required significant “bedside manner”, seriously.
I -do- get that most programmers don’t have it. And that in medicine, it’s indispensable. But you can’t be doctor if you can’t -also- do all the complicated reasoning. I mean, someday maybe AI will replace doctors and their differential diagnoses, but it ain’t happenin’ soon, I suspect.
Ladyraxterinok
@Ladyraxterinok:
Son and his friends in HS in late 80s
Elizabelle
@Mike Furlan:
@lumpkin:
Ah, there was a backstory to this one. Interesting. And should have been disclosed. (I still haven’t read the whole article. Stuff like this is enervating, even while important.)
Now: off to see a movie about contemporary vampires. I prefer my monsters fictional. Ciao.
David Anderson
@TerryC: almost but not quite
trnc
Once again, I have to ask – why is it that democratic candidates or officials are always pressured to consider republican voters’ views, but republican candidates/officials are never expected to consider democratic voters views?
Chetan Murthy
@trnc: The contrapositive of Murc’s Law: “Only GrOPer voters have legitimacy” !!
[Murc’s Law: “Only Democrats have agency”]
Jay
HumboldtBlue
Fuck these people, fuck them deep and hard and here’s hoping the misery they willfully inflict on others comes back to them ten times over.
Annie
The library story reminds me of people — not just in the South — who don’t like to pay taxes for public schools because they themselves don’t have kids who attend them.
I grew up in the South and left in 1980, in large part to find job opportunities that would be better for a woman. Whatever the back story for this particular library, there was always a lot of opposition in Southern rural communities to funding for libraries and schools. The assumption was that the boys would be farmers and the girls would get married. And you didn’t need to waste time reading books to do those things.
Chetan Murthy
@Annie:
Poolville, TX, 1981: Senior English class was canceled that year. B/c hey, the boys’ll go work in the oil patch, and the girls will get married and pump out babies. No need for Senior English, nosirree! [And for sure, there were probably tax revenue problems; but foreclosing your own children’s life opportunities for that reason, is just plain ….. criminal.]
Ladyraxterinok
@Mike Furlan:
IIUC librarian jobs at public libraries, corporation libraries, academic libraries, etc REQUIRE at least an MS in library science.
Steeplejack
@Kent:
Side note: Ken Burns’s Jazz*, also excellent, is available to stream for free on Amazon Prime (if you have a membership).
—————
* Lots of information and some video clips at the PBS page, but no full episodes.
Ladyraxterinok
@Chetan Murthy:
My HS bio teacher the coach, not the chem teacher.
In college (57-61) the only Russian teacher was the tennis coach. This was a prestige college, no less!
Ladyraxterinok
@Chetan Murthy:
(I also went to Rice 57-61. Days when ALL students , even lib arts majors, were required to take 1 semester of calculus and 1 semester of analytic geometry. And THREE FULL YEARS of science )
Son went into mechanical engineering,. The school advisor allowed entering students to s take physics course that required calculus as a prerequisite Half of them hadn’t had calculus in HS and couldn’t do the work . They dropped the course. Absolutely incredible advising!!
,
Matt
Nope. Not a goddamn bit of sympathy for people who sit around pining for the days they and the rest of the good ol’ boys ran their county as a de-facto white supremacist police state. I hope these fuckers live just long enough to see their kids die from overdoses.
Jack Hughes
They vote like rubes and should be explicitly condemned for their tribal groupthink. Pandering to them will never break through 30 years of right-wing brainwashing.
frosty
@trollhattan: Country Music is On-Demand from PBS right now. I’m planning to start watching it this week. As soon as I finish reading all these comments LOL.
Chetan Murthy
@Ladyraxterinok:
Fascinating. At Rice in 1982, *many* frosh had no calculus; some (like me) had a shitty HS course that didn’t really teach it. The first-year Physics course required it (everything was taught in the language of calculus), so the math and physics departments worked together to ensure that students learned enough (in the right order) so that step-by-step they could handle the Physics material, even while working thru first-year Differential Calculus.
I cringe as I wonder what school your son went to: your saying it was a “prestige” school makes me wonder if it was a school where the sections were taught by grad students, and the profs all spent their time doing research. Rice wasn’t like that (back then) but I suspect it’s changed since.
Another Scott
@Scott P.:
What a great title!
Thanks for the pointer. Added it to The List.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mnemosyne
@Chetan Murthy:
One of my BFF’s in high school was Indian and the daughter of a cardiologist. Her younger brother and sister are both medical doctors, and she’s a PhD English professor, so a different kind of doctor. ?
Mike Furlan
@Ladyraxterinok:
“IIUC librarian jobs at public libraries, corporation libraries, academic libraries, etc REQUIRE at least an MS in library science.”
Some librarian must have read “The A.M.A. and the supply of Physicians” (published in 1970)
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3288&context=lcp
and decided to do the same thing with librarians. The “common clay” mocked in this article are correct in asking why you need higher education to be able to understand the Dewey Decimal System.
catclub
@HumboldtBlue:
HL Mencken beat you to it.
Mnemosyne
@Mike Furlan:
Explain to me your proposed metadata and file naming schema for digitizing the community archive at your local library. What file format should they be saved at? What resolution? Should they be scanned or photographed? What do you do with negatives that are going vinegar?
If you can’t answer all of those questions, then STFU about how anyone can be a librarian because it’s just so easy.
Another Scott
I haven’t read the article, but …
I lived part of my childhood in a small town in farm country in Ohio, another part in Middletown (down the street from a US Steel plant), part in Dayton. My HS best friend lived in Dayton pretty much all his life and became a Trumper.
There are lots and lots of things going on. It’s not just people being too stupid or stubborn to move to where there are better opportunities. It’s being in an underwater mortgage and having no hope of getting out of it. It’s having spent years caring for older parents. It’s starting a job with the city later in life and having to work until you’re 65 or 70 or more to have a hope of a decent retirement and being able to keep your health insurance. It’s having to drop out of school because your parents couldn’t afford the tuition. It’s not being able to save any money because your job is 100 miles away from where you live and where your kids go to school and you’re driving a 15 year old car that guzzles gas and eats tires and trying to keep your head above water. It’s not being able to work because of an injury you suffered on a previous job makes it impossible for you to stand on your feet for extended periods.
Sure, there are lots of stupid, racist, and overly self-important people out there who only know how to complain. But it’s much, much more. And a lot of it (but not all of it) goes back to economics. If you’re one paycheck away from not being able to pay your bills, it’s nearly impossible to save up for a deposit and first and last months rent and utility deposits and moving truck expenses and all the rest to try to start over somewhere else. And when you’re in that situation, it’s incredibly easy to be angry and to look for someone to blame. In fact, it’s easy to argue that it’s amazing that more people aren’t angry…
“All generalizations are false.”
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Yutsano:
They don’t want to only not advance, they want to “return” to a life that never was. I guess it’s easier to see what’s behind you when you are trying to stuff your head up your own ass.
Mnemosyne
@Mike Furlan:
Because librarians do more than sit around shelving books all day, dipshit.
All doctors do is write prescriptions, so why can’t we get rid of doctors and have pharmacists do everything just like the good old days, amirite?
J R in WV
@Barbara:
My grandmother (a baptist) would rather her son run moonshine into town when her customer for corn had a new batch ready to go, than to go back underground. My grandfather worked at the mine, but was the hoist engineer, ran a steam engine, generator, the whole shebang.
My grandmother got to watch smoke and flame shoot out of the shaft as over a hundred miners were killed from her kitchen window — the whistle blew comtinuously, and she knew from that sound to run to her window and look to see, well horror. Many of her friends and neighbors were dead, one hopes quickly.
Another Scott
@patrick II: The population. E.g. Immigrants set up restaurants.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
Lived/worked just outside of Columbus for 11 yrs. Anything good that came about, even a take it home and bake pizza place didn’t seem to last. Everything had to be cheap. When I moved there 25 yrs ago a new 3500 sq ft house on an acre cost about half of what my house in CA was worth and that house was just over half the size on about a 1/4 acre. The company looked into moving to southern CA 20 yrs ago because most of our customers were here. The cost of payroll would have had to go up about 60% to achieve the same standard of living and the cost of an office would be about double. And I knew two kinds of people. Those who couldn’t think of leaving to anywhere else and those who couldn’t wait to get out.
Mike Furlan
@Mnemosyne: Words fail you, yet again.
Ruckus
@jl:
Yes it was always bad. The difference is that the cities grew because they had or build more schools and got people to move there because they had jobs. I think it’s sad that people will walk a thousand miles for a better life and our rural folks won’t drive or even think of moving for a better life. I mean what could be better than rural life of minimum education, more churches than you can throw a stick at, now a Wally World, and mostly shitty jobs? Who’d want to move away from that?
Back to the question.
The cities grew up with the economy and the 20th century. The rural areas decided to stay in the 18th century and want us to do the same. I call bullshit. And the republican party sold that as AMERICA! And it worked. Well it worked with a lot of cheating.
Miss Bianca
@Mike Furlan: wow, so you really think that all it takes to run a library is knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System? Don’t tell me, let me guess – your next nugget of wisdom is going to be, “why do we even need librarians – I mean, everything’s on the Internet, now, right?”
Ruckus
@Ladyraxterinok:
This was happening even when I was in HS. The whole concept of our HS was that to do anything besides low income labor, like drive a truck, you had to go to college. Except that what they taught wouldn’t get you anywhere near a decent college. You had to go to Jr college for two years to catch up then a 4 yr school. And that was if you knew what you wanted to do. If you didn’t, you were screwed.
Darkrose
@Mike Furlan: Beginning Cataloging was the hardest class I took in my MLIS program, including the Oracle DBM and Python classes. We spent over a month on the Dewey Decimal Classification, which is currently in its 23rd edition. DDC 23 includes 10 categories, each of which has 10 subcategories, plus 9 additional schedules that are required for assigning a number to a book or other item.
Quick, what DDC number would you assign to Jeffrey Friedman’s War and Chance: Assessing Uncertainty in International Politics? Remember that it needs a unique identifier that also tells users where to find it on the shelf. Easy, right?
unrelatedwaffle
I wonder, if these rural areas were still mainly family farms and agribusiness had not obliterated that profession as well, would they still have a sense of community and empathy? I have very little sympathy for these people, because I think many of them know they are being shitty cruel authoritarian fascists and revel in it despite knowing full well what they do and think is morally repugnant, but I do feel for the kids, who will get no education or social services, continue the cycle of poverty, and become shitty assholes themselves.
Mayim
@Mike Furlan:
There’s lots more to being a librarian than basic Dewey.
First, for cataloging, Dewey goes three levels beyond the teeny tiny bit you learned in school; the text book for my INTRODUCTORY cataloging class was {checks catalog} 483 pages. And that was just for the course that those not going into cataloging took. Future catalogers took another couple semesters to really learn the details.
Cataloging also includes all sorts of other stuff that patrons don’t think about unless it’s done incorrectly ~ choosing the proper subject headings, making sure key words are included, that different editions are labeled correctly, the DVD and Blu-Ray versions are distinguished, and so on.
Then there’s collection development (which books to buy ~ much harder than the public thinks, especially on a tight budget), collection management (what books to get rid of!), budgets, programming, community relations, database selection and use, patron privacy regulations (there’s a reason librarians were the one group that stood up to the ‘Patriot’ act), long-term planning, children’s and youth services, building maintenance, data collection, book repair/conservation, emergency planning, and a dozen more topics that need to be learned about to effectively deliver the best library experience possible for a community.
Yeah, many people work in a library without an MLS as paraprofessional staff. But to be an effective librarian ~ a graduate degree covers lots of necessary ground.
Ruckus
When I was in quitting mode at my last job, I had to decide what to do in my mid 50s. First I looked for jobs in the two fields I’d worked in. Zip. Second I figured I’d build custom wood cabinets/furniture. Wood dust played havoc with my actual breathing. Zip. Decided to open a bike/triathlon shop and build steel and titanium bikes. That was actually fun and something I could do. But the question of where to open the store was primary. Took out a map of the US. It took about a minute to wipe about 90% of the country off limits. Below the Mason-Dixon? Nope. Middle third? Nope was living there then. East coast above say VA? Weather takes away too much of the year. West coast it was. I traveled, looked, researched and damn it if CA didn’t win out. More customers, better weather, mostly year round riding. There is a reason there are more people in LA county than in several states and more in CA than anywhere else.
MoCA Ace
@Yutsano:
I know I’m probably not the first but I’ll give it a try… They are white?
What do I win?
seaboogie
@Jager: I lived in Canada for 25 years, and this is one of the most Canadian things ever – maybe Canada is just Appalachia dressed in a sweater. Lemme guess…Ontario or Alberta?
jonas
@Mike Furlan: Libraries are more than just book stacks. They are IT resource centers for the community coordinating multiple activities, budgets, computer services, and educational programs, and for a town of ca. 16,000, it’s not at all unreasonable to ask that the head librarian have an MLS degree and know what they’re doing.
The buried lede in the story, however, is that the town agreed to build a fancy library back when the treasury was flush with fracking money and that revenue stream has dried up and now they’re broke and asking for (mainly) property tax and other fee increases to pay off the bonds they floated to do that library expansion and (also) pay the librarian’s salary and this is what folks are balking at. So when they thought they could afford it, they built a super-nice library! But in a situation where you’re desperately triaging repairing roads, vs. funding schools, vs. supporting a library, because (once again) you were had by an energy company promising you the moon if you just signed over all your mineral rights, can we automatically say the fight over the library is because they’re a bunch of dumb hicks who don’t understand education? I’m not sure nutpicking a few Facebook posts denigrating “book-larnin'” accurately reflects the scope of the debate.
Ruckus
@Darkrose:
@Mayim:
Everything is easy through rose colored glasses. Or something like that. Many jobs that don’t look all that hard take a lot of training to do well. In the navy I maintained and repaired all the interior communications and navigation gear of a mid sized warship. Well 6 of us did anyway. But I was the highest rated for over a year and in charge. The navy sent me to school, 40 hrs a week for a year to be able to do that. I worked for 30 yrs as a mold maker/machinist. I made molds for plastic products, many that you’ve probably seen. I helped build Barbie doll molds. If you had one when they first came out, I build that. My point is that training for that work, to be able to accomplish it on your own without supervision takes about 10 yrs for most people.
Modern life isn’t the same as it was even in my lifetime.
Ruckus
@Kent:
A part of this is that a lot of people think that life is limited, often because they are. And they don’t understand people doing something else than their grandparents/parents/siblings do. Their vision is limited, by education, by not being interested in reading, by not thinking past this week. They are limited. And they may have the capability, they just have never done anything with it. Is it because it’s easier to just coast, because you don’t expect anything anyway? Or are they limited like our new friend Mike who knows how to do everything because he heard a word or phrase once? Living takes energy, it takes effort, and the reward is not a bank book, it’s personal, it’s internal, it’s reveling in accomplishments big and small, it’s the people around you, it’s at least trying to do something rather than just eat, breathe and shit.
Mayim
If anyone wants an interesting contrast, take a look at the Millinocket library. Mill town in Maine that fell on very hard times ~ 5 years ago, the library was closed. But some people in town refused to give it up, and the library is now a model of how to be the center of community revitalization. Millinocket has a long way to go, but the library is currently in temporary housing while renovations to the building are done ;-)
Quote from the library director: “When communities fall on hard times, that’s when libraries become most important.” He’s been very innovative ~ mobile hotspots in an area with limited/expensive Internet connectivity, lending gear to use in Baxter State Park, and so on.
I’m pretty sure that the renovations are funded from grants and donations, rather than loans/bonds, so the Millinocket won’t end up in the position that library in the other article had.
Mnemosyne
@Mike Furlan:
Your lack of reading comprehension is not my problem. Maybe a librarian can help you with the hard words.
Jager
@seaboogie:
Small town Manitoba
Anne Laurie
@Ladyraxterinok:
Yup — Deer Hunting with Jesus.
Recommended it here, back during the Obama years, and got yelled at by quite a few people. IIRC, half of them thought I was excusing Bageant’s subjects’ racism, and the other half thought I was being patronizing towards either him or the commentariat…
Anne Laurie
@lumpkin:
IMO, you’ve got it backwards — it’s the parochialism of the locals that, given what any half-bright planner would know was a temporary windfall, they chose to blow it on a big shiny building they couldn’t quite afford to finish. Given the choices, would’ve been infinitely better to upgrade the support staff and the internet connections, which would’ve been useful a lot sooner and go on being useful a lot longer. But ‘built a big shiny new building’ looks impressive in the local weekly & on the planners’ resumes, while ‘gave our kids a better chance to compete in the real world (and get out of this sh*thole), well…
J R in WV
@Mike Furlan:
ETA remove ignorant sentence about Dewey Decimal System.
I have a cousin who is a librarian for a medical center — his work is involving research doctors are doing to attempt to save lives. Finding relevant research documents to people in the hospital, sick, right now! Fuck you for wanting high school graduates to be attempting to do that work!!
There are other remarks about the various needs for senior librarians which I recognize but could not have listed. Once you look into any field of enterprise in depth, things people not familiar with the enterprise are totally unaware of pop up for the experts to cope with.
What kind of technical work do you do, ass?
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
That was good for a nice laugh.
Do you think he can figure out who is the librarian is or even where the library is?
Don K
@Barbara:
A guy who worked for me in the mid 80s grew up in a UAW family in Macomb county. When he was in college his Dad got him a summer job in the plant. He came home after the first day and said, “Dad, this job really sucks!” Dad said, “That’s why I got you the job, so you’d stay in college and not have to work in the plant.” I’m not seeing much of that attitude anymore in the Detroit area. The working class doesn’t seem to want more for their kids than thay’ve had.
barbequebob
@Nicole: snakes are not mean. They’re just defending themselves
mlc
Let’s be clear.
The diner guys, and rural folks (who surround me in my rural community), know that financially, things are never going to get measurably better. They will always be scrambling to pay bills. They will never have extra money for non-necessities. Trump or no Trump — they know Trump will not change it, they know no politician will change it. They KNOW this.
And so it is enough that Trump makes some other, non-financial part of their lives “better.” He makes it “better” by making them feel free to say bigoted garbage out loud, wherever they want and even straight to the faces of the people targeted by their bigoted garbage. That’s how he makes their lives better.
And that’s enough for them.
Unsympathetic
Can’t make someone care.
If they want to spend their entire life complaining rather than figuring out what it takes to succeed, then they’ll always be failures, and those rural towns won’t have anything resembling a tax base.
One fun aspect of “conservatism” as it’s sold in the US is that you get to complain about what people are trying to do – including those who have the temerity to try to govern. It’s much easier to sharpshoot than to even attempt to solve a problem — and get exposed for your own inability to solve any issue.
Come for the assured acceptance of not trying, stay for the fun of insulting those who do!
Mike Furlan
@J R in WV: The article, which it seems I am the only one here who had read it, talks about a small town library.
The people of that town are not ignorant in pointing out that you don’t need a masters degree to run that library.
Unsympathetic
@Mike Furlan: You’ve said that already, and it’s just as objectively incorrect now as it was before.
They don’t need a masters’ degree if they want someone to sit around and do nothing. They do need a masters degree if they want the library to run.
If you want something to function as intended, you need to pay for skills.
mayim
@Mike Furlan:
My neighbor John took shop in high school and does his own electrical work. But I’m still going to hire a licensed electrician to work on my house.
My good friend Mark tinkers with his antique (well, 1980s) car. But I’m still going to take my car to the licensed mechanic for the work it needs ~ while Mark could likely fix some things for me, he has neither the tools nor the expertise to work on a modern car.
Yeah, you are right ~ you don’t need a master’s degree to run a library. But it sure helps. For my job, I deal with library staff all around the state. I can almost always tell who has a degree and who doesn’t. In fact, I spent over an hour yesterday fixing a mistake (with serious implications for that library’s funding) that the library director made that almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if the director had an MLS.
Side note: Maine is the most rural state in the country, in terms of percentage of the population that lives outside metro areas. Our libraries are at the town level ~ no county-wide systems for us. Maine is also a poor state ~ if it weren’t for being Vacationland, we’d be right up there with Mississippi and Alabama in the poverty statistics. But we do libraries fairly well ~ even our previous mini-Trump governor figured out that he shouldn’t mess with library funding ;-) But the actual/practical threshold for a library to have at least one staff member with an MLS is a legal service population around 5,000 or so ~ which is only a third of the library’s service area in the the article.
So why am I beating this close to dead thread? Because it’s part of an overall harmful pattern ~ American devaluing of expertise. It’s pervasive, but especially true when it comes to government provided services ~ it’s (in many ways) how we got to Trump. Run a business? Yup, you can run the country. Run a race course? How about being in charge of FEMA?
One of Obama’s virtues: while he was likely often one of the smartest people in the room, he knew he wasn’t the only smart person around and that he wasn’t an expert in everything ~ so he hired Nobel-winning physicists (and not a has-been TX governor who is friendly with oil companies) to run the Dept. of Energy.
And that devaluing goes at least double ~ and maybe even triple or quadruple ~ for occupations that are traditionally done by women: teaching, nursing, librarianship. Dismissal of expertise plus sexism/misogyny is a really bad combination….
Also ~ factual bit here…. universities with ALA-accredited library science programs are expanding, despite there actually being a glut in many places with people with an MLS. So not a medical school type of restriction at all :-(
Soprano2
It’s not just small towns – that kind of Facebook thread could happen where I live, which is a city of 250,000 with a metro area of probably 300,000 in the MO Ozarks. Lots of people would post just like that – comments like “Why do they need to make that much money, most people don’t make that and what good are libraries anyway?” would be prominent. The difference is, the librarian would probably get the raise here, since there are enough people living in Springfield who understand the use of libraries to offset the people from the rural areas who resent anyone with a degree who makes more money than they do. My father was a school superintendent – he told me that it was his observation that the further you got from Springfield, the less the people valued getting an education. They figured they made it fine with only an 8th grade education, so it would be fine to pull their child out of school to work on the car and take care of the younger kids while mom and dad work. He said it was hard to fight against that attitude. I hope it’s changed a little bit since the 1970’s, but I’m sure a lot of it is still out there.
The devaluation of expertise and knowledge is a real problem in our society, and I’m not sure what we do about it. You see its ultimate realization in Trump, who believes he knows more than all the experts in the government who are there to help him. All his worshipers think that’s just A-OK, because what do scientists and generals and diplomats know anyway? You also see it in the current veneration of “real-life work experience” over education that’s in some parts of our culture.
blackcatsrule
@mayim: Excellent response! You should consider posting it in the NYT article comments as well.
Soprano 2, same applies to your comment as well!
jamey
@Yutsano: My career has been a continuum of looming redundancy. I studied journalism and spent most of my working years in NYC’s publishing industry. Have thrice (!) been laid off, and each time needed to acquire completely new skills and perspectives. I ain’t an obsolete coal miner; there was/is no political movement to support my “right” to be aggrieved over the media’s shift to digital platforms and the resultant need for content that best serves the audiences for those platforms. I adapted, learned, thrived, but still live under the Sword of Damocles, at least psychically.
But my weird-ass sojourn as a “knowledge worker” has also endowed me with the desire to make things better for other persons left behind the curve. I was smart, but mostly I was lucky. This, in essence, is why I’m a liberal Democrat.
Nevertheless, I have extremely limited patience with folks like those in Van Buren Co, as described by Potts. There’s a calculus to their passivity–to vote only for leaders who will guarantee that the very limited resources available to persons at their socioeconomic level are given to white Christians.
Panurge
@NotMax: Nope–plenty of Reaganites and Trumpers love to claim JFK as their own and insist he wouldn’t even be for universal healthcare.
Panurge
@Kay: Obviously it’s been a handy marketing tool for a while, too–to say nothing of a running theme of rock’n’roll cool. They’re very proud of being TOUGH.