Friday, October 23, 2009

Two Views, Two Realities: Rebirth or Failure of Small Town USA?

Thriving neighborhood restaurants are one small data point in a larger trend I call the new localism. The basic premise: the longer people stay in their homes and communities, the more they identify with those places, and the greater their commitment to helping local businesses and institutions thrive, even in a downturn. Several factors are driving this process, including an aging population, suburbanization, the Internet, and an increased focus on family life. And even as the recession has begun to yield to recovery, our commitment to our local roots is only going to grow more profound. Evident before the recession, the new localism will shape how we live and work in the coming decades, and may even influence the course of our future politics.

Perhaps nothing will be as surprising about 21st-century America as its settledness. For more than a generation Americans have believed that "spatial mobility" would increase, and, as it did, feed an inexorable trend toward rootlessness and anomie. This vision of social disintegration was perhaps best epitomized in Vance Packard's 1972 bestseller A Nation of Strangers, with its vision of America becoming "a society coming apart at the seams." In 2000, Harvard's Robert Putnam made a similar point, albeit less hyperbolically, in Bowling Alone, in which he wrote about the "civic malaise" he saw gripping the country. In Putnam's view, society was being undermined, largely due to suburbanization and what he called "the growth of mobility."

Yet in reality Americans actually are becoming less nomadic. As recently as the 1970s as many as one in five people moved annually; by 2006, long before the current recession took hold, that number was 14 percent, the lowest rate since the census starting following movement in 1940. Since then tougher times have accelerated these trends, in large part because opportunities to sell houses and find new employment have dried up. In 2008, the total number of people changing residences was less than those who did so in 1962, when the country had 120 million fewer people. The stay-at-home trend appears particularly strong among aging boomers, who are largely eschewing Sunbelt retirement condos to stay tethered to their suburban homes—close to family, friends, clubs, churches, and familiar surroundings...

---"There's No Place Like Home," by Joel Kotkin, Newsweek (10.19.09)

I guess it all depends on the scope or limits of the topic addressed, through whose eyes the viewing is done, through whose experience what is seen is assessed, and on what supporting data the assessment finds affirmation. Joel Kotkin has captured an attractive, evolving piece of reality for the more economically vital and vibrant suburbs and nearby small towns. For many, it is a welcome observation, a preferred picture of extended and expanded family and social life, and a more stable professional experience. A better, fuller, more socially holistic life can be yours.

The only problem is that it fails to address the very different, more desperate and deteriorating reality in the many small towns in more rural settings. Sociologists Patrick J. Carr (Rutgers University at New Brunswick) and Maria J. Kefalas (Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia) take us there. They are associate members of the MacArthur Foundation's Network on Transitions to Adulthood and authors of Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America, to be published in Norvember by Beacon Press.

The most dramatic evidence of the rural meltdown has been the hollowing out—that is, losing the most talented young people at precisely the same time that changes in farming and industry have transformed the landscape for those who stay. This so-called rural "brain drain" isn't a new phenomenon, but by the 21st century the shortage of young people has reached a tipping point, and its consequences are more severe now than ever before. Simply put, many small towns are mere years away from extinction, while others limp along in a weakened and disabled state.

In just over two decades, more than 700 rural counties, from the Plains to the Texas Panhandle through to Appalachia, lost 10 percent or more of their population. Nationally, there are more deaths than births in one of two rural counties. Though the hollowing-out process feeds off the recession, the problem predates, and indeed, presaged many of the nation's current economic woes. But despite the seriousness of the hollowing-out process, we believe that, with a plan and a vision, many small towns can play a key role in the nation's recovery.

Civic and business leaders in the places most affected by hollowing out will tell anyone willing to listen how it is their young people, not hogs, steel, beef, corn, or soybeans, that have become their most valuable export commodity. Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning observer of small town life, believes that any story of small-town America is, at its core, the story of the people who stay and the ones who go. Yet, what is different at this moment is how, in a postindustrial economy that places such a high premium on education and credentials, the flight of so many young people is transforming rural communities throughout the nation into impoverished ghost towns. A new birth simply cannot replace the loss that results every time a college-educated twentysomething on the verge of becoming a worker, taxpayer, homeowner, or parent leaves. And as more manufacturing jobs disappear every day, the rural crisis that was a slow-acting wasting disease over the past two decades has evolved into a metastasized cancer.

--"The Rural Brain Drain," by Patrick Carr & Maria Kefalas, The Chronicle of Higher Education (10.22.09)

This is a different small town America, a different experience and a different view, and it is supported by a different set of data. Carr and Kefalas have captured a much less attractive, evolving piece of reality for more economically challenged and deteriorating rural small towns. For many, it is an unwelcome and dispiriting observation, a troubling, helpless picture of the flight of the most talented young people, and for those who stay, a more unstable employment experience tied closely to the slow failure of the agricultural economy. And the stability and breadth of family and social life has predictably weakened. Not an attractive picture, whatever the definitions you work with. And the solutions offered by the authors to address the issues appear almost pollyannaish in their suggestion that they can be effected timely enough, expansively enough, and successfully enough to stem this tide of change, this evolution of larger economic and demographic realities.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

America's Flagging National Pride

[From Economist.com:]

JUST as some people have a better self-image than others, so it seems do countries. In a poll of 33 nations by the Reputation Institute, a branding consultancy, people were asked to rate their trust, admiration, respect and pride in their country. The results are presented as an index. By this measure, Australians are almost as exuberant about their country as they are about sport, and lead the list. They are followed closely by Canadians. Americans, normally a patriotic and positive bunch, are perhaps being affected by the recession. The limited self-regard of Brazilians belies their reputation as a sunny, carefree people, but the Japanese are gloomiest of all.

--"Who admires their country the most?" the Economist.com (9.29.09)


Yes, if you click on the link above or below, you'll see the sobering news that America's self image is flagging, lost in the middle of those many countries with a tepid, tentative assessment of their national identity. But, perhaps it's more than the recession. It is possible this is a clear sign of the conflicted, sometimes polarized cultural and political condition of the American public. Almost everyone I know is concerned--or deeply concerned--about some quality of what American is, is becoming, or no longer is. We, as a nation, as a cultural and political collective, are handling national and global cultural, economic and political change poorly, at best.

Of course, to one extent or another, that is the way it has always been with human nature and changes in culture, economics, and the global order--yes, in America, too. The only difference is that we are now the closest thing there is to the leader of the world's market-driven democracies. And even if that global order is unavoidably, necessarily changing toward a broader, shared leadership role for the US, it will make the transition better, healthier for all if our polarized and polarizing political leaders can manage to be more honest with each other and us, and just more constructive about it all--that is, if they will wisely lead. Then the American public can make the necessary adjustments, find our common identity and interest again--and again see ourselves as the great country we all know we should be.

http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14536817&fsrc=nwl