Education And Economic Development

As Indiana’s legislature continues its multi-year assault on public education, evidence confirming the importance of a state’s educational system continues to mount. (Not that evidence matters to the culture warriors who dominate Indiana’s Statehouse. )

Intel  has announced that it plans to build its twenty billion dollar factory in Ohio–an announcement that business publications have called “arguably the most consequential manufacturing announcement in recent decades.”

Why Ohio? As the linked article notes, Indiana can easily compete with Ohio when it comes to the Hoosier State’s economic development tools of choice:  tax breaks, tax rates and regulatory environment. However,

To attract the kind of high-paying, advanced manufacturing jobs, cities and states need an abundant share of college graduates, a steady flow of new graduates and communities in which these workers will desire to live.

 Indiana  can offer tax breaks, tax rates and  a regulatory environment similar to Ohio’s, but we come up short on such all-important measures as quality of life and the supply of an educated workforce. Ohio offered plenty of fiscal incentives to capture the projected 3,000 jobs–jobs that swill pay an average of $125,000 in salary and benefits– but it is highly likely that Indiana could have matched those financial incentives.

So what were the factors that gave Ohio the edge?

This factory is a 25-minute drive from the College of Engineering at Ohio State University and close to the fastest-growing parts of the Columbus metropolitan area. The entire metro area has absorbed some 130% of the state’s population growth since 2000 .

The salary levels also suggest that the workforce at this plant will be primarily comprised of college graduates.  Ohio workers in the semiconductor industry earned $65,490 per year in the last 12 months before the COVID downturn. To be profitable, this factory will be much more than the clean-room production facilities of a traditional semiconductor factory.  I suspect this site will involve considerable product development and testing.

This evidence points to the need for a large number of college graduates as a driving factor in Intel’s decision. Close to a dozen top engineering colleges are within a five-hour drive.  These include Purdue University, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Kentucky and of course Ohio State.

The only other Midwest location that could boast the same geographic concentration would be Indianapolis.  The fact that Indiana was not chosen in this case offers a harsh lesson for states that rely on incentives rather than an educated workforce as an economic development strategy.  It is the same lesson the Amazon HQ deal provided state policymakers around the nation.

As important as quality of life was, the presence of an educated population was even more important.

Statewide, Ohio just does much better than Indiana on educational attainment.

In 2020, 29.6% percent of adults in Ohio had a college degree; in Indiana, it was 26.9%.  That may seem like a modest difference, but it places Indiana in the bottom 10 states in both college graduates and those holding an advanced degree.  Ohio ranks in the middle third on both measures.

Most troubling, though, is that Indiana’s share of adults with a college degree has been in decline since 2018, a factor that would immediately remove it from the long list of applicants for an advanced semiconductor plant.

The author analyzed the environments/inducements of Indiana and Ohio, and concluded that the “only meaningful difference” came down to  the availability of well-educated workers.  That  one difference made Ohio the beneficiary of the “most consequential industrial expansion in the country in this century.”

It isn’t that more college graduates leave Indiana than Ohio. Neither state has significant levels of outmigration. The problem is that Indiana doesn’t attract many college graduates from outside the state. We also have low numbers of high school graduates who enroll directly in college.  (Ohio has 3,600 more students per year heading to college than Indiana.)

We all know that old political saying: follow the money. In this case, we need to follow the money that isn’t being spent–and where it isn’t being spent– because state spending reflects what that state’s legislators value. Not only does Indiana spend less on education, our legislature siphons off millions of the education dollars that would otherwise go to our public schools, and sends them via vouchers to predominately religious private schools, a significant number of which are of dubious educational quality.

Though Ohio hardly spends a lavish amount on schools, it has allocated $3 billion more to education than Indiana over the past decade. Ohio continues to spend a larger share of its GDP on schooling of all types. Ohio spends almost 20% more per child on education, or roughly $1,500 per kid aged 0 through 24 than does Indiana. That extra spending spending just paid off.

The World’s Worst Legislature never learns…..

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It’s The Culture, Stupid!

People who follow politics will remember the large sign that James Carville  posted in Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters: “It’s the economy, stupid!” After Clinton won, a number of political strategists have quoted it approvingly, and certainly seem to believe that  economic performance decides elections.

These days, objective performance not so much. Thanks to a media environment that facilitates massive amounts of disinformation, even when the economy is doing very well--as it is now–partisans are able to convince large numbers of Americans otherwise.

So what does matter?

A recent podcast from Persuasion confirmed my belief that it’s the culture. Jonathan Sumption  is a British Judge , author and historian, On the podcast, he and host Yascha Mounk discussed the prospects for democracy in the English-speaking world and the power of strong political conventions.  Several observations during that discussion were intriguing–and I found a couple of them debatable– but I just want to focus on one of them.

Democracies depend on two things. They depend on an institutional framework, and they depend on a cultural background. It isn’t usually the institutional framework that fails. That’s still there. What fails is the cultural background, which is the desire of people to make it work, the desire of people to respect plurality of opinion, and to accept that sometimes they can’t get their way, however important the issue and however right they think they are. In most countries which have lost their democratic status, the institutions are still there, there are still elections of a sort, there are still parliaments—but they are largely meaningless because the culture that sustained them disappeared.

I think this is essentially correct. In the U.S., as I have written (many times!), several of our institutions are getting pretty creaky, but our deeper problem is the erosion of what political scientists call “democratic norms”–unwritten but widespread expectations about proper behaviors. In the Senate, for example, we expect that the chamber will take up a President’s nomination for a Supreme Court seat, and it was shocking–and a very significant blow to the democratic culture–when Mitch McConnell refused even to hold hearings on Obama’s nominee.

The ridiculous antics from the lunatic caucus aren’t simply embarrassing; they constitute daily assaults on longstanding norms of governance and appropriate  official behavior.

Let me suggest a rather odd analogy,  Over the past few years, I have noticed increasing numbers of drivers exhibiting dangerous behaviors: excessive speeding on residential streets and running red lights. (Not simply speeding up through yellow–zipping through intersections well after the signal has turned red.) As such bad road behaviors grow, other drivers are tempted (or encouraged) to ignore the rules. If we can no longer depend upon the vast majority of drivers to observe the culture of “traffic obedience,” driving will become far more dangerous–and vehicular behaviors that traffic engineers depend upon will no longer work.

Culture is also implicated in the reports about Trump taking boxes of Presidential materials with him when he left the White House. As an op-ed in the Washington Post noted, although the retrieval of those documents was relatively cordial,

For all the calm of the retrieval, the very fact that Trump could simply take the records — and that they could remain in his possession for so long — demonstrates that our institutions still haven’t adjusted to the problem of a lawless and disorderly president. The routines of presidential recordkeeping (and presidential transitions) anticipate a generous, bipartisan spirit of cooperation. So ingrained are these expectations that, even nearly seven years since Trump jumped into presidential politics, it’s hard to describe his willingness to take records the way we should: as an alleged theft of federal property.

It is impossible to have formal, specific rules for every aspect of official life. As the author of the Post article noted, numerous general rules rest on our ingrained assumptions about the way elected and appointed officials will behave. With respect to official Presidential records, the norm is “that the physical integrity of the records will be maintained and that they were properly created in the first place.” Neither of those assumptions was safe with Trump, who regularly “tore up briefings and schedules, articles and letters, memos both sensitive and mundane” according to reporting from The Post.”

When the social expectations we call “norms of behavior” are first violated, we are shocked, but when numerous people follow suit, it isn’t very long before those norms simply disappear. It’s one thing when it is no longer the “norm” for men to wear ties–it’s quite another when we lose the norm of obeying traffic laws. Or expectations of Presidential behavior.

The loss of democratic norms and a culture of compliance poses an existential threat to self-government and the rule of law.

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I Love Tom Nichols…..

I recently signed up for Peacefield, a newsletter by Atlantic writer Tom Nichols. The name Peacefield is evidently a reference to something that escapes me–but Nichols is my kind of writer: he doesn’t mince words, and he respects language.

And words were the subject of this particular newsletter.

Nichols began by relating his debates with a fellow faculty member during his time as an academic. ( At the time, his colleague was far to the left of him.)

We’d run through a whole lexicon of political insults, but my favorite moment was a day when I exclaimed “Bolshevik!” and he barked “Hun!” and the two of us broke up in a prolonged fit of laughter….

We enjoyed these jousts, in part because we understood the words we were using and knew when we meant them and when we were kidding. We argued over who had the better policies, and over whose view of human nature and the right order of society should prevail. But I didn’t think he was a Communist and he didn’t think I was a Nazi.

Now we use these terms all day long and no one knows what they mean.

Nichols is frustrated by “how much of our public discourse is short-circuited by people who don’t understand basic terminology.”

I share that frustration. It is impossible to have a genuine, productive debate or discussion with someone who is using words that don’t mean what that person thinks they mean. Human communication is difficult even when the parties to a discussion both use language precisely; it’s impossible when one party simply uses terminology as an insulting–and  inaccurate– label.

In the linked article, Nichols gives “quick and dirty” definitions to terms that are often used indiscriminately–for example, Liberal Democracy.

What it is: A system of government that lets you read cranky articles about politics like the one you’re reading right now.

More specifically, democracies derive a ruling mandate from the free choices of citizens, who are equal before the law and who can freely express their preferences. Liberal democracies enshrine a respect for basic human rights (including the right of old cranks to speak their mind). Rights are, one might say, unalienable: The losers of elections do not have their rights stripped away. All citizens abide by constitutional and legal rules agreed upon in advance of elections and are willing to transfer power back and forth to each other peaceably.

What it isn’t: “The majority always rules.” Getting everything you want every time. Governing without negotiation or compromise. Winning every election. Never living with outcomes that disappoint you. Never running out of toilet paper or cat food.

Democracy, in sum, is not “things you happen to like.”

He goes through an entire political lexicon, defining what various terms mean, and especially what they don’t mean. For example, after  defining “Authoritarianism,” he explains what it isn’t.

Any rules you don’t like. Any laws you don’t like. Any election that you didn’t like. Anything that inconveniences or annoys you. Anything that limits you doing whatever you want, whenever you want, in any way that you want. Paying your taxes, obeying speed limits, or wearing a mask in a store are not “authoritarianism.”

He also offers a snarky explanation of libertarianism, and  particularly good definitions of Capitalism and Socialism. And he reminds us that precision in language matters– that everything you don’t like isn’t necessarily fascism or socialism.

The term I wish more people would think about—and this is why I wrote a book about it—is illiberal democracy, because that’s where we’re headed. This is what happens when everything about liberal democracy—tolerance, trust, secular government, the rule of law, political equality—gets hollowed out and all people remember is the word democracy.

And of course, once you dump all that other stuff, democracy means “absolute rule by 50.01 percent of the voters.”

As Nichols notes, this is what we’re seeing now in places like Turkey and Hungary. All that matters is winning elections.

The danger here is not that Donald Trump or Viktor Orbán or others are fascists. They’re not, and unlikely to be, since they lack the infrastructure, mass party, ideology, and absolute cult of personality that we saw in the 1930s. (Trump is far too stupid to be an effective fascist, but he definitely has a cult of personality. Still, the Trump Cult is small potatoes compared with what Hitler or Stalin or Mussolini built. Trump is more like a Mickey Mouse version of Juan Perón.)

The danger Nichols sees is the very real possibility that the extremists will destroy the guardrails of democracy–those democratic “norms” that seem to be eroding in real time.

And as he reminds us, the first step is debasing the language.

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Kentucky–Electing Even Worse People Than Indiana

I’ve been pretty hard on my home state of Indiana, for many good reasons. (We elected Pious Pence, and subsequently loosed him on the nation; our Attorney General is a pandering snowflake with delusions of grandeur; and our Statehouse is home to multiple gun nuts and culture warriors untethered to anything resembling intelligence.)

But you have to give props to our neighboring state of  Kentucky. Not only is Mitch McConnell the runaway winner of the “most evil man in American government” designation, Kentucky’s junior Senator–Rand Paul–keeps reminding us that we shouldn’t count him out when the awards for “most slimy” are announced.

Anyone who follows the news even slightly knows that Paul has spent a lot of time attacking epidemiology in general and Anthony Fauci in particular. Those attacks have been particularly distasteful since Paul purports to be an ophthalmologist– board-certified by an organization he invented, but still…theoretically, he’s  sort of a doctor.

Now, according to Talking Points Memo, he’s playing to the MAGA crowd and amplifying his racism by  encouraging Americans to emulate the Canadian Trucker Convoy that has roiled deliveries and other transportation between the U.S. and Canada.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is an enthusiastic supporter of Canadian truckers’ anti-government protests which have been causing major blockages at the Canada-U.S. border, telling the Daily Signal on Thursday that he hopes the so-called “Freedom Convoy” travels down south to congest American cities, too.

Why? Because, Paul said, “civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition” in the U.S., “from slavery to civil rights.”

Black Lives Matter, on the other hand, shouldn’t be “commandeering the microphone” and “bullying people” and behaving like a “crazed mob.”

Well, there’s a difference, you know. Those Canadian protesters appear to be White…

As Paul Krugman wrote a couple of days ago, the U.S. right is loving the convoys’ lawbreaking. “People who portrayed peaceful protests against police killings as an existential threat are delighted by the spectacle of right-wing activists breaking the law and destroying wealth.”

According to Vox and a number of other reports, the protest is widely unpopular among truckers and Canadians.

The so-called “freedom convoy” is nominally protesting a vaccine mandate for truckers, implemented in mid-January on both sides of the US-Canada border. But the demonstrations have swiftly ballooned into a broader far-right movement, with some demonstrators waving Confederate and Nazi flags. Protester demands include an end to all Covid-19 restrictions in Canada and the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

As the Vox article notes, it’s important to understand the broader Canadian context .

News coverage of the convoy, especially from sympathetic anchors on Fox News, may lead Americans to believe that Canada is in the midst of a far-right popular uprising. In reality, the mainstream consensus in Canada about Covid-19, and the nation’s institutions in general, is holding. The so-called trucker movement is on the fringe, including among Canadian truckers — some 90 percent of whom are vaccinated….

The January edition of the Covid-19 Monitor, a regular survey of Canadian attitudes about the pandemic, finds that about three-quarters of Canadians support vaccine passports for indoor dining and gatherings. Strikingly, 70 percent would “strongly” or “somewhat” support a vaccine mandate for all eligible adults — a vastly more restrictive policy than any province has actually attempted. What’s more, the researchers behind Covid-19 Monitor find that, on most issues, “support has remained relatively stable” throughout the pandemic — strong evidence that this isn’t just a short-term blip caused by omicron.

It makes sense, then, that the trucker protest is widely unpopular.

The protest is unpopular in Canada.  In the U.S., however, at least among the MAGA  contingent, it’s a different story. According to reports, sixty-three percent of the donations to the truckers’ now-removed GoFundMe came from the United States, and the American right played an important role in getting the protest off the ground.

The border crossing blockage added to pre-existing supply chain woes. Economists have estimated that it created some $300 million a day in economic damage. I’m sure Rand Paul considers that a small price to pay for the mayhem he applauds–after all, he has been all-in on attacks on vaccines and pandemic rules that demonstrably save lives. Since his ability to generate favorable coverage in rightwing media evidently outweighs any concern about unnecessary deaths, we shouldn’t be surprised that he considers $300 million in daily economic damage a reasonable price to pay for his 15 minutes of rightwing fame.

So–fair is fair. Indiana’s Senators may be feckless and undistinguished (Braun is actually pretty embarrassing), but on the scale of truly despicable, they can’t hold a candle to Kentucky’s entrants in the American Hall of Shame.

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Building Barriers

A few months ago, I came across an article by an anthropologist who was trying to make sense of the enthusiasm people displayed  for Trump’s border wall. If I were still teaching, I’d have used the article to reinforce a couple of important lessons: (1) most issues are more complex than most of us realize, and (2) cultural attitudes are the product of multiple elements that may seem unrelated but really aren’t.

We need to connect those dots.

The anthropologist’s investigation was triggered by a conversation at a trade show.

The border’s like our back door,” a concrete salesman named Chris told me in January 2017. “You leave it open, and anyone can walk right in.” It was the day of Trump’s presidential inauguration, and we were chatting on the exhibition floor of a trade show in Las Vegas, called World of Concrete. Circular saws, cement mixers, gleaming new trucks – it was an unusual place to talk about the politics of immigration.

But the simple promise of a concrete wall between the US and Mexico had flung a business tycoon into the White House, and I wanted to understand what this was about.

Chris was a millennial from a small town in western Ohio. With a trim beard and short, sandy hair, he projected an air of casual self-sufficiency. “I don’t really like neighbors,” he quipped, speaking with a dose of wry humor about how far he chose to live from other people.

The author was perplexed by the appeal of what he termed “the fantasy of sealing off the country with a stark, symbolic barrier.”  What he discovered in his subsequent investigation was that walls and barricades appeal to so many Americans because they “resonate with familiar boundaries in their daily lives.” He concluded that cultural and economic forces have operated to divide insider from outsider, fueling political polarization in ways we don’t always realize.

He focused especially on America’s ubiquitous gated communities. And when I say  “ubiquitous,” the data bears me out: one out of every six American houses in a residential community is secured–gated– by community walls or fences. 

Contemporary gated communities build on a century of intentional segregation and suburban white flight. Suburban interiors were designed as “escape capsules to enable their independence from the outside world”, architectural historian Andrea Vesentini has shown, built as shelters from the unpredictability of urban life. The pandemic has magnified the appeal of such distance and defense, with more features like security cameras, video doorbells and HEPA air filters built into new houses than ever before.

These histories have profoundly reshaped how Americans live in relation to each other, as much as where. So much of everyday life and leisure now takes place in secluded spaces. The front porch sessions with neighbors and passersby that once epitomized American social life have given way to more private gatherings on the backyard deck, or time with the television and other screens indoors. These changes lessen the chance for happenstanceconversation with neighbors and strangers.

There’s much more in the article, detailing the various ways today’s Americans wall themselves off from their fellow citizens. (Drive a Hummer?? Talk about separating yourself…)

I was particularly struck by the discussion of gated communities, because early in my academic career I became fascinated by the literature about social capital–especially the distinction between bonding and bridging social capital.

Social capital refers to the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society. Bonding social capital contributes to the “us versus them” phenomenon so pronounced in today’s America–it refers to the “bonds” formed within a group or community. Bridging social capital–essential in a diverse society– refers to the weaker but extremely important connections between people in different social groups.  

I wanted to research a “chicken and egg” question: did the people who chose to live in gated communities make that choice because they had already developed “us versus them” tendencies, or did the experience of living in such a community inculcate such attitudes? Unfortunately, I discovered there was no intellectually-honest way to conduct such research. Too many variables and much too much subjectivity…

The author of the article notes that our fractured media has deepened the existing fissures of American society, helping to shield us from exposure to uncomfortable ideas, unfamiliar people and perspectives. As he says, 

There’s a deep and pernicious history at work here. Longstanding patterns of neighborhood racial segregation have inflamed the prejudice against outgroups, bolstering stereotypes…. When such divisions are reproduced at an everyday scale, the gulf between self and other widens even further, and everyone becomes a potential outsider.

As my architect husband has taught me, the built environment matters, not just aesthetically. It profoundly shapes–and reflects–the culture.

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