Brookings recommendations for this year's Farm Bill

Tony Pipa wrote this week on a Brookings Institute blog under the headline, "5 recommendations from Reimagine Rural for the 2023 Farm Bill and federal implementation."  "Reimagine Rural" is Brookings' rural podcast, which was new this year.  Here's an excerpt from Pipa's post, the second in a two-part series of takeaways from the podcast: 

The stories captured in the first season of the Reimagine Rural podcast offer important lessons at a pivotal policy moment for equitable rural development in the U.S. The current Congress is negotiating a new Farm Bill, the legislation agreed upon every five years that sets agricultural subsidies and authorizes the rural development programs managed by USDA (United States Department of Agriculture). Implementation is also underway for some of the most consequential place-based federal resources approved this century through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the CHIPs and Science Act (CHIPS), and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). All these pieces of legislation implicate rural places to a significant degree, either through programs exclusively focused on rural—or through programs that will necessarily include rural to a large degree.

To enable policy solutions that maximize the public benefit of these federal resources, the lessons from Reimagine Rural suggest a multi-pronged strategy that could be effective in the immediate term.

Here are the five items listed.  You'll have to look to the blog itself to learn more of the details on each.

1. Shift the mindset from decline to opportunity

2. Invest in readiness

3. Improve coherence

4. Invest at a meaningful scale

5. Increase transparency

The first post in this two-part series on takeaways from the Reimagine Rural podcast is here. 

Paul Krugman misses the boat in response to empirical work on rural resentment and who gets what from the federal government

I wrote yesterday about a Monkeycage blog entry in the Washington Post about new empirical research regarding rural resentment and its impact on politics  I'd noticed that shortly after the article was posted to the Washington Post website, Paul Krugman tweeted a three-part response in which he wrote, "what's depressing about this is that in reality rural America is heavily subsidized by urban America."  

Then in part 2 of his little tweet storm Krugman continued, "You can see this by looking at states' federal balance of payments--what they receive versus what they pay.  Huge inflows to the most rural states."  Then in Part 3:  "But of course if you point that out rural voters will just see that as another example of elite disdain.  It's really a no-win situation." 

Then on Friday, just a day after the Monkeycage item appeared, Krugman wrote a column titled "Wonking Out:  Facts, Feelings and Rural Politics."  In it, he expands on his dispute with the "feelings" among rural folks that they don't get their fair share from the government.  Here's an excerpt: 

Political scientists have found that rural Americans believe that they aren’t receiving their fair share of resources, that they are neglected by politicians and that they don’t receive enough respect. So it seems worth noting that the first two beliefs are demonstrably false — although I’m sure that anyone pointing this out will be denounced as another sneering member of the urban elite.

The truth is that rural America is heavily subsidized by urban America. You can see this by looking at states’ federal balance of payments — the difference between federal spending in a state and the amount a state pays in federal taxes. Here’s a plot of those balances, on a per-capita basis, in 2020 versus urbanization in the 2010 census (the most recent data available)

Krugman cites the Census and Rockefeller Institute for these data.  

The first problem I see with Krugman's analysis is that he uses the scale of the state rather than, say, the county.  This is ham-handed and lacking in nuance (see more below from Hildreth and Pippa).  That is, it fails to consider what is happening within states--what percentage of federal dollars flow to, for example, metro counties versus nonmetro ones.   It reminds me of when elite colleges brag about their geographic diversity, but it turns out the students they admit from Montana are from Billings and Bozeman, or those they admit from Utah are from Salt Lake City.  

That's one critique picked up in the Twitter responses to the Krugman piece.  Here is a very thoughtful thread from Matt Hildreth of Rural Organizing:  

Krugman "points out that 'rural America is heavily subsidized by urban America' and 'Donald Trump sent $46 billion in aid to farmers.'  Does he really think all rural people are farmers?  WAY more rural people work in the care economy and in manufacturing than in ag."

"Rural and farmer are two very different things.  On-farm employment accounts for only 2.8 million people.  In contrast, there are 60.8 million people in the rural U.S. ... Stereotypes perpetuated by [Krugman] suggesting that 'ag subsidies are the same as 'rural economic opportunity' create even more resentment in rural America.  With the corporate consolidation, ag subsidies go to fewer and fewer people" 

"To really understand rural rage, @paukrugman should look at manufacturing and health care jobs in rural America.  Those industries have a much bigger impact on rural jobs than farming."  

"When a rural hospital closes, i tis devastating for jobs in a rural community of 2,000 rural U.S. hospitals, 150 have closed since 2005, and more than 300 are at risk."

"NAFTA was devastating for rural manufacturing jobs."

Krugman "forgets that Barack Obama had a very strong performance in the rural Midwest.  And Obama said he would 'renegotiate' NAFTA during his primary against @HillaryClinton.  Obama won the Iowa caucus and later abandoned his anti-NAFTA stance"

"The good news is that a new generation of Dems like @RepDerekKilmer, @AngieCraigMN, @RepCindyAxne, @TinaSmithMN, @repohalleran, @repjoshharder, @gillibrandny and @SenMarkKelly understand the real issues in rural America and are focused on solutions."

"The reasons why 'rural perceptions are so much at odds with reality' as [Krugman] writes is because he and the [New York Times] haven't written anything about all of these things Democrats are doing to delivery for rural people.  If the media won't cover it, how do voters know about it."

And this shorter thread is from Anthony Pippa of the Brookings Institute:  

"They lack capacity because of decades of disinvestment by states and feds ini rural local govts, and b/c of their own fiscal policies that have historically depended on industries that have declined or left--and it's been tough to adapt."

"Also a big problem of fed investment in community & econ devp is decided by states and thus v. hard to follow/analyze.  So all of that is missing from [Krugman's] analysis.

"Talk to any local rural leader, and they'll tell you how much of that they get... and it ain't much."

Krugman "himself acknowledges that the balance of payments basically reflects greater social safety net spending.  

"That's exactly it!  Fed $$ are going to rural folks to barely keep their heads above water, rather than offering investment to help their communities succeed." 

Finally, here are some tweets from Kal Munis of Utah Valley University, co-author with Nicholas Jacobs of Colby College of the Monkeycage Blog piece (and a peer-reviewed publication on which it was based)  that kicked off the fight (again, see more about these here).  

"Thanks to [Krugman] for engaging with our piece in @monkeycageblog.  A couple of quick responses, tho:  

1. His balance of payments analysis focuses on the urbanish states vs. ruralish ones.  But there are urban areas in rural states & vice versa.  It depends on how you slice it, but ..."

"there's data showing that, within states (e.g., Florida, Wisconsin, etc), per capita spending to rural areas is lower than in cities.

2.  Relatedly, given that rural areas both fuel and feed urban America, rural states ought to [be] heavily subsidized and maybe aren't subsidized enough.

3. Krugman claims that rural people bash cities as being crime ridden hell holes but he can't recall instances of urban disdain toward rural areas.  This is an incredible claim and evidence that Krugman doesn't read replies and QTs of his own tweets lol.  For example... "

"Hateful people try to justify their hate by telling themselves that the object of their hate hates them." 

"Why aren't rural Americans hustling for work in the cities or studying their asses off to get into top schools, also in cities?  Why don't they learn from immigrants and hustle like them instead of whining?"

"Also, the subhead is 'Many of these voters think they are underrepresented, under-resourced and overlooked' but all of those are the opposite of true. 

"They have a lot of 'feelings' not reflected by reality.  Oh no, am I being elitist?" 

"Economic anxiety, rural resentment... Enough. They're deplorable bigots who want white supremacy via fascism.  it's a simple as that.  Stop pampering them and start treating them as the threats to democracy that they are." 

The Daily Yonder published analysis in 2011 and 2014 about what rural folks get from the federal government government and whether they are "subsidized" by urban folks. Those pieces by Bill Bishop are here and here.  

"Sparse country" at Harvard as derision of rurality and conflation with whiteness

Prof. Jeannie Suk Gersen writes in the New Yorker this week under the headline, "At Trial, Harvard's Asian Problem and a Preference for White Students from Sparse Country."  She is writing about the same landmark affirmative action case I wrote about a few days ago here.  And, as I predicted in that post would soon happen among commentators, Professor Gersen conflates rurality with whiteness.

Prof. Gersen, of Harvard Law, repeatedly uses the phrase "Sparse Country," capitalized even (perhaps for emphasis?  Is there a whiff of disdain--or more than whiff--here?) to refer to the 20 states from which Harvard makes a particular effort to recruit students.  (I want to know what 20 states constitute "sparse country" but Gersen does not list them; elsewhere the New York Times listed a few of them, including Montana and Alabama).

In his testimony, William Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions, who has worked in the admissions office since before Bakke, reminisced about his Harvard roommate in the nineteen-sixties, who was “a great ambassador” for South Dakota. He also testified about the letters Harvard sends to high-school students in Sparse Country who have P.S.A.T. scores of at least 1310, encouraging them to apply. The only Sparse Country students with such scores who do not get the letter are Asians; to receive it, an Asian male must score at least 1380. An attorney for the plaintiff asked why a white boy in, say, immigrant-rich Las Vegas with a score of 1310 would get the letter, while his Asian classmate with a 1370 would not. Fitzsimmons responded with generalities about the need to recruit from a broad array of states to achieve diversity.

The quotation marks around "great ambassador" suggest to me Gersen's derision of the rural experience and the notion that kids from rural places might have anything to teach urban kids, who are no doubt the Harvard student body default. 

When asked whether Harvard “put a thumb on the scale for white students” from Sparse Country, Fitzsimmons contrasted students who “have only lived in the Sparse Country state for a year or two” with those who “have lived there for their entire lives under very different settings.” Perhaps he meant that whites are more likely to be “farm boys” or “great ambassadors,” like his South Dakotan roommate. Or perhaps he meant that Asians are more likely than whites to apply to Harvard, less likely to be accepted, and more likely to enroll if accepted, so Harvard saves itself postage costs by reducing its recruiting of Asians. But the exchange highlighted a key question of the trial: whether the Harvard admissions process treats white racial identity as an asset, relative to Asian identity (or treats Asian identity as a drawback, relative to white identity).

This explanation of Harvard's desire to attract students from "Sparse Country" suggests another meaning of the phrase--that the sparseness refers to the dearth of applicants from these places, not necessarily to the low density of the population.

As for Prof. Gersen's conflation of whiteness with rurality, it is arguably supported by Fitzsimmons' distinction between students who have not been in Sparse Country for very long and those who have been there all their lives.  That is, immigrants are moving into "Sparse Country" (as I have written about here and my colleague Michele Statz has written about here), and I would hope that Harvard would not devalue those immigrants simply because they have not lived in rural America for very long.  Indeed, those immigrants are probably valued by Harvard because they represent racial and ethnic groups generally underrepresented at Harvard--regardless of whether they are admitted to Harvard from rural or urban places.

One issue that is not explicit in Prof. Gersen's musings is the distinction between "Sparse Country" as rural and "Sparse Country" as urban.  This gets at the issue of scale:  Is the scale of the "state" helpful if we want rural voices at Harvard and similarly situated institutions?   I have often argued (in conversation, though perhaps not explicitly in my publications) that admitting the children of doctors, lawyers, professors, engineers and such from Billings or Missoula or Bozeman Montana (or, Salt Lake City or Albuquerque or even Rapid City or Sioux City) is really nothing like admitting the real "farm boy"--or, more importantly, farm girl--from one of these states.  So if Harvard sees "Sparse Country" as 20 states, it's missing out on the complexity of the dramatic variations within those states.

The best seller Educated, a memoir by Tara Westover, helps to make my point.  Tara was raised by fundamentalist Latter Day Saint parents in southern Idaho--which is NOTHING like being raised by wealthy retirees in, say, Sun Valley, or even as the daughter of physicians in Boise.  Do we really want to look at issues like diversity of lived experience at the level of the state?  Or do we need to look to a lower scale to achieve more authentic diversity?  Doesn't the phenomenally successful Educated help us to see that distinction quite clearly?

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.

Failing to see childcare and transportation deficits in rural America

I blogged last week about the high-profile media attention being showered on a proposed Michigan law that would exempt counties with high unemployment (8.5% and above) from work requirements being imposed on Medicaid.  Then a related piece was published in the New York Times Upshot.  In "Which Poor People Shouldn't Have to Work for Aid?" Emily Badger and Margot-Sanger Katz quote Heather Hahn, a senior fellow in the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute.

The problem, Ms. Hahn and others say, is that geography captures just one kind of barrier to employment. “If you’re taking only the geography as the structure,” Ms. Hahn said, “it’s really overlooking the much more obvious racial structure.” African-Americans who face racial discrimination in the job market are more likely to have a hard time finding work. 

And people who can’t afford cars and live where public transit is inadequate have a harder time. So do the poor with criminal records, or those without a high school diploma, or people with problems securing child care.

Policies that exempt high-unemployment places, but not people who face other obstacles to work, selectively acknowledge barriers for only some of the poor. In effect, they suggest that unemployment is a systemic problem in struggling rural communities — but that in poor urban neighborhoods, it’s a matter of individual decisions.

They then quote David Super of Georgetown Law, who studies public benefits programs.    

The hardships of areas that have seen industry leave are very real; the hardships of rural areas that have had jobs automated away are real.

* * * 

But so are hardships that come from a lack of child care or transportation, he said. “It is troubling that one set of conditions are being taken seriously and another are being scoffed at.”

One thing both Hahn and Super seem not to realize is that public transportation and child care deficits are much more acute in rural communities than urban ones (a point made, with lots of data back up, in my 2007 piece on welfare reform as a mismtach for rural communities."  And the problem of criminal records looms large for the chronically unemployed in rural places, too.  Employers don't want to hire these folks, even when they're white.  (And I do acknowledge that the criminalization of poverty and the war on drugs have had a disproportionate impact on communities of color).

I agree that we should attend to all of these barriers to employment, but the "rural v. urban" and "black v. white" framing is divisive.  It echoes the "who's worse off" or "ranking of oppressions" frame that has become too common amidst the proliferation of identity politics.  It fails to seek common ground.  Which reminds me that today is the second Monday in the 40 days of action invoked by the revival of Martin Luther King, Jr., Poor People's Campaign.

Cross-posted to Working Class Whites and the Law.

Michigan law waiving safety net work requirement would have disparate impact on urban (blacks), favor rural (whites)

I'm in the process of writing a book chapter about how work requirements for SNAP and Medicaid--the legislative and administrative "flavor of the month" in Trump's America--are a mismatch for rural America, where labor markets are thin and the few jobs available are often mis-matches for local labor forces.  Another problem is that poor public transportation infrastructure makes it difficult for folks to get to jobs or the substitute training requirements imposed by some states.  This book chapter will follow up on a 2007 article I published about how welfare reform's work requirements were a poor fit in rural America.     

That's all background for why a colleague called my attention to this NY Times op-ed this week.  It it titled "Michigan's Discriminatory Work Requirement," and the authors are a pair of University of Michigan law professors, Nicholas Bagley and Eli Savit.  The core argument is reflected in this excerpt:

Last month, the [Michigan] State Senate passed a bill that would require Medicaid beneficiaries to find work or else lose their coverage. The bill, now under consideration in the Michigan House, has come under fire for harming the poor and disabled, as well as for burdening struggling families with needless paperwork. More than 100,000 people may lose health instance if it passes. 

There’s another flaw in the bill, however, one that exposes it to serious legal challenge: It’s racially discriminatory. 

Many of the legislators supporting Michigan’s work requirements come from rural districts with high unemployment. Many of those districts are predominantly white. To protect their constituents, these legislators have included a safety valve in the bill: If you live in a county with a high unemployment rate (over 8.5 percent), you’re exempt from the work requirements. The rationale? When there are no jobs to be had, it doesn’t make sense to punish you for not working.

Yet that safety valve does not apply equally. Specifically, it does little for Michigan’s black residents, who are concentrated in cities like Detroit, Muskegon and Flint. Those cities suffer from chronically high unemployment rates, but they’re all in counties with low rates.

The Washington Post followed up a few days later with this analysis from Jeff Stein and Andrew Van Dam. The headline blares: "Michigan's GOP has a Plan to Shield some People from Medicaid Work Requirements.  They're Overwhelmingly White." 

Medicaid enrollment data provided to The Post by the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services shows that this exemption would overwhelmingly benefit white people while leaving the work requirements in place for all but a sliver of the affected African American population.

Without the exemption, the work requirements are projected to apply primarily to approximately 700,000 Michigan residents enrolled in Medicaid under broader eligibility rules passed under Gov. Rick Snyder (R). 

African Americans make up about 23 percent of that population, but they would make up only 1.2 percent of the people eligible for the unemployment exemption. White people make up 57 percent of the total potential affected population, but they make up 85 percent of the group eligible for the unemployment exemption, according to an analysis of the state's data.

I read both pieces to imply that the proposed law's sponsors intended to discriminate against African Americans living in the state's major cities.  That is entirely possible, but another explanation is also possible:  the legislators were simply trying to do a good turn for rural folks facing crappy labor market opportunities.  Perhaps this is just an illustration that the scale of the county is a poor one for these purposes.  That is, the scale of the county makes some sense in relatively rural areas where the employment rate doesn't vary much across the county.  It's a poor proxy for the robustness of the labor market in a county that includes both core urban and suburban (and even exurban) areas.

Bagley and Savit do at one point acknowledge that discriminatory intent may be absent here, and they also helpfully explain that it doesn't matter under the relevant federal law, where the test is discriminatory impact.  The authors close with reference to bigger picture issues that implicate the ease (or lack thereof) of mobility to places with better job markets.  They also then highlight rural-urban differences and, as I read it, effectively and unhelpfully pit rural and urban against each other:

If work requirements were a good idea, conservative Michigan legislators wouldn’t need to exempt their rural constituents. They’d just offer a tough-love message: If you want health insurance on the public dime, you should move to a place where you can find work. 

That’s not the message, though. The message, instead, is that work requirements are good for people who live in hard-bitten cities and bad for those who live in hard-bitten counties.  

Given the lack of political power I perceive to be held by rural people and places, I'm surprised the Michigan legislators thought of them at all.

Rebuffing locals—and their local knowledge—in northern NY manhunt

The New York Times reports today on the disputes between different law enforcement agencies—and scales of government—in the manhunt for two men who escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility more than three weeks ago.  The story told by Benjamin Mueller represents many things, among htem urban hubris and a power-struggle between scales of government.  Mueller reports, for example, that Governor Cuomo ordered "a large cadre of non-state law enforcement personnel"—an apparent reference to local law enforcement personnel—out of the command center early on in the manhunt.

A friend of Clinton County sheriff David Favro relates the story thusly:  

Sheriff Favro’s frustration was compounded when Mr. Cuomo arrived at the command center and told him and all the other non-state employees to leave, said a close friend of the sheriff’s, David Andrews, the director of the local radio station WIRY. Mr. Andrews said Mr. Favro was angered at being notified of the escape so late, and was astonished that Mr. Cuomo had asked him to leave. 

“At first they were asked to leave, and he said, ‘But I’m the sheriff,’ ” Mr. Andrews recalled. “Then they were told they had to leave. He was furious and went home.”

Further,

in the swamps and forests where the inmates hid, investigators sometimes spurned the assistance of local officials and hunters.

Another local official's anecdote tells of

state and federal officials gathered around the back of a pickup truck, scrutinizing a map whose scale he said was too small to show the uneven geography.

That official commented that the "command and control did not seem in my opinion to be real firm."  

Governor Cuomo's office issued a statement on the matter:

It is customary for state officials to do confidential briefings to relay sensitive information to other state officials during the initial stages of any investigation.  However, the State Police and other state agencies have coordinated extensively with local and federal law enforcement authorities.

This reminds me of some of the power struggles b/w local and federal officials in my own home county.  Read more here.   

Parsing the Colorado recall election

The results of the Colorado recall election are in, and two Democratic lawmakers have been ousted.  Now the analysis begins. The New York Times published this yesterday.  The headline is "Recall Vote on Guns Exposes Rift in Colorado's Blue Veneer," and its analysis makes scant reference to the rural-urban divide.  Jack Healy and Dan Frosch write:

While some voters in the two districts groused about the flood of donations Mr. Bloomberg and outside groups made in the recall campaigns, analysts in Colorado said the election results were shaped by an eruption of local discontent from voters who say their leaders are ignoring the concerns of gun owners and abandoning Colorado’s rural, libertarian roots. 

After years of gains propelled by shifting demographics and voter attitudes, Democrats now control the state legislature and the governor’s mansion, and make up most of Colorado’s Congressional delegation. But state officials said that the recalls showed how Colorado’s political pendulum could still swing in surprising directions, and that deep rifts still lay beneath its increasingly blue veneer.

They quote former Democratic governor Bill Ritter:

This is a state with a wide variety of interests at stake.  The Democratic Party cannot be the party of metro Denver and Boulder. It has to be the party who understands the values, views and aspirations of people who live outside of those areas.

"Hard Lessons of the Colorado Recall" is the headline for a Times editorial also yesterday.  It seeks to diminish the significance of the recall vote by referring to "two small districts in Colorado."  It closes with these lines:  

In truth, the recall fight showed that something sensible and stirring could emerge among politicians, at least in Colorado, even if two worthy incumbents were sacrificed. The state’s new laws survive, and Colorado residents are safer for them.

NPR's coverage, 6 Lessons from the Colorado Gun Wars, doesn't reference rurality at all, and it focuses more on voters' upset over outside efforts--namely of those NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg--to influence the election's outcome with his $350K donation.  The heading for this lesson was "Grass Roots vs Greenbacks":  

The election was widely seen as a proxy battle between the National Rifle Association and the new group created by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg called Mayors Against Illegal Guns. In fact, Bloomberg contributed $350,000 to try to defeat the recalls. There was plenty of outside money spent in the fight: Denver political analyst and pollster Floyd Ciruli said the airwaves were so saturated with ads it felt like the frenzied height of a presidential election in parts of this battleground state. Gun rights groups were significantly outspent, explains Ciruli, but carried the day mostly through a very effective grass-roots campaign.

I am reminded of this post, which illustrates on a smaller scale how rural folks can bet their backs up when urban folks--or any outsiders--assert themselves.

While the NPR story didn't use the word "rural," it uses some proxies for rurality in writing of a "Western state with a strong gun culture" and libertarian rejection of the "nanny state" associated with Bloomberg's efforts to stop the sale of huge sugary drinks in NYC.    

Keystone XL grand deal may be in the pipeline ... but what about those who will have the pipeline in their backyard?

Pun intended.

The New York Times reported today on the front page of the business section under the headline, "Foes Suggest a Trade-Off If Pipeline is Approved."  Here's the lede:

President Obama’s first major environmental decision of his second term could be to approve the Keystone XLpipeline, profoundly disappointing environmental advocates who have made the project a symbolic test of the president’s seriousness on climate change. 

But could some kind of deal be in the offing — a major climate policy announcement on, for example, power plant regulation or renewable energy incentives — to ease the sting of the pipeline approval? 

White House and State Department officials ... say the pipeline is not a fundamental piece of the nation’s climate policy nor is it a political bargaining chip to trade for other measures. 

* * * 

But to many environmentalists, including some of the president’s most active campaign supporters, the issue has huge symbolic and political importance.

So, some are suggesting that if President Obama approves the Keystone pipeline, he use the occasion to announce major new pro-environment policies, like new regulations for coal-fired power plants or a national clean energy standard.

Those sound like great policies for the nation--and the world.  But that sort of "deal making" at the national and global scale leaves me wondering: what about Nebraska? specifically, what about the rural Nebraskans and others living on the plains, along the pipeline's path, who bear different risks from the Keystone XL pipeline--on-the-ground risks, not just the global climate change risk we all share.  Read more here and here.  Is there something more for these folks in a possible grand compromise?

California's Great Central Valley: "the largest human alteration of the Earth's surface"

Verlyn Klinkenborg, author of The Rural Life, writes in today's New York Times of his trip this past week down California's San Joaquin Valley, along I-5.  The headline is "Lost in the Geometry of California's Farms," and in this essay he compares this recent journey to one he took with his family in 1966, as they contemplated a move from Iowa to California.

Klinkenborg borrows Joan Didion's phrase to describe the Great Central Valley: "the trail of an intention gone haywire." He calls California's history "a story of feverish intention, a tale of almost manic possibility and reinvention."  And he describes some consequences of that intention and reinvention.  Klinkenborg's tale is essentially that of a land abused, and paying the consequences. For example, he says orchards planted high above the irrigation line have "become firewood," and--perhaps more shocking: "The entire valley has sunk in on itself over the years as the aquifer beneath it has been siphoned off."  He notes that the U.S. Geological Survey has labeled the Valley "the largest human alteration of the Earth's surface."

He calls the Valley a "biological desert," where only a few species are allowed to thrive, a place "utterly alien" to all except a few machine operators "wearing hazmat-like suits."  Like Wendell Berry, Klinkenborg laments the separation of people from food systems.

The picture Klinkenborg paints is of agriculture on a massive, almost unimaginable scale, a scale the author implies is inappropriate and certainly unnatural.  

There is something stunning in the way the soil has been engineered into precision. Every human imperfection linked with the word “farming” has been erased. The rows are machined. The earth is molded. The angles are more rigid, and more accurate, than the platted but unbuilt streets out where easy credit dried up during the housing crisis. This is no longer soil. It is infrastructure, like the vast concrete sluice of the California Aqueduct, like the convoluted arrays of piping that spring up everywhere at the corners of fields.

Klinkenborg acknowledges his nostalgia (with specific reference to his high school days in Sacramento), and he contrasts that nostalgia with the apparent lack thereof by most Californians, who simply "marvel at the rate of change."  Klinkenborg suggests that "the logic and illusion in so much of California, urban and rural" is to see agriculture on this scale as inevitable and necessary, whether or not that is objectively so.  

As always, Klinkenborg's prose is beautiful, and the entire essay is thought-provoking, if a somewhat depressing, read.  

Census naïveté

I have to admit my considerable naïveté when it comes to the U.S. Census. I filled out my first Census within a year from moving to the United States, and was puzzled by several of its questions. We filled out my husband's ethnicity as Spanish-Mayan-Aztec Hispanic Non-White, and mine as Caucasian-Jewish (making plenty of use of the write-in space for "Other").  Even the word Caucasian caused me some serious head-scratching, as without Wikipedia back then, I could not easily understand how the term became associated with the (relatively) light-skinned people populating Europe (because, honestly, our connection to the people of Georgia and other truly Caucasian nations is at best attenuated).  It turns out, the term is now largely disfavored, and justly so... now we use terms that are more descriptive of people geographic origins, than their perceived "race."

And now, I have to further educate myself to understand what the New York Times means when it says that Nadine, N.M. is now a "Census Designated Place." It means that they will be counted as a separate place, even though unincorporated, and not as an extension of another place, the nearby town of Hobbs.  Great.  Does this mean they were not really counted before?

It does mean that, precisely.  The New York Times writes:

With only a few hundred souls, it was counted, if at all, as an extension of Hobbs, the nearest real city of about 34,000 people just to the north. (emphasis added)

New, more sophisticated Census rules now allow smaller places, or "hamlets" as the Times says, to be counted on their own right.  The Times argues that this speaks volumes about "ethnic and economic identity in post-recession America" and I tend to agree with this summation.  But it does speak volumes about the whole Census process, as it was at least viewed until now.

In a nutshell, the revised Census rules uncover a greater truth about the bias in Law and Government: we (as a society) were not counting small places because they seemed not to matter to us.  The absence of law and state in rural places is frequently mentioned on this blog, for example here, and here.  That the government turns around and changes policy to include places with lesser population is surely a positive sign, is it not?

Oh, wishful thinking.  It wasn't the Government who changed its mind spontaneously and said: "Forgive our ignorance, we want to learn about your predicament, small hamlets."  The Times article reveals that the change in Census counting rules was the result of relentless lobbying by the "hamlets" throughout the country.

The region made a concentrated effort to get everyone counted, hoping to make the case that the area was ripe for business investment. Given the ferocious competition among small communities for chain stores, restaurants and manufacturers, “everyone got involved in pushing,” said Bob Reid, a board member at the Lea County Community Improvement Corporation.

Encouraging residents to fill out their census forms included a door-to-door campaign and a parade to the post office in Hobbs organized by the Hobbs Hispano Chamber of Commerce, followed by a cookout.

The drumbeat for participation worked: Hobbs’s population, in the new count, grew nearly 17 percent, as did the county’s as a whole. And fingers are crossed: A new farm equipment supply store opened in Hobbs last month.

An inspiring story about grassroots organizations standing up to Big Government! As a result of their lobbying, I am able to correct my naming of the town, per our blogging conventions: Nadine, N.M. (population 376).

Widening spatial inequality and what to do about it

Wealth and income inequality have been getting a lot of attention in recent months--at least in the New York Times. Op-Ed columnist Bob Herbert has been especially persistent about keeping the topic on readers' radar screens; read some of his columns here, here, here, and here. Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, and Robert Frank have had a say, too. Wealth inequality was also the subject of a "Room for Debate" feature a few weeks ago.

But geographic analysis of inequality has been little examined in the mainstream media until The Economist Magazine ran a couple of stories about uneven development and spatial inequality in the March 10, 2011 issue. The first "Internal affairs: The gap between rich and poor regions widened because of the recession," analyzes various nations' spatial inequality as measured by income and GDP. This analysis shows that Britain is the nation with the widest geography-based income gap: the per capita GDP is nine times greater in central London than it is in some Welsh regions. The smallest regional spreads, on the other hand, were in Italy and Germany, where "incomes in their most affluent areas are [nevertheless] almost three times those of the poorest." The United States falls at the British end of the spectrum, coming in second for inequality across regions among the nations studied. The District of Columbia, for example, is five times as rich as Mississippi. Further, the situation has worsened in the past few years.

Between 2007 and 2009 real GDP per head in the five richest states actually rose by an average of 2%, but fell by 3% in the five poorest. Both groups outperformed the national average, a fall of more than 4%. (The biggest slumps, both by more than 10%, were in Michigan, the eighth-poorest state, and in Nevada, site of the biggest house-price crash.)

The Economist notes that this is merely a continuation of a long-standing trend, and it attributes the phenomenon, in part, to the "dependence of poorer states on manufacturing, which has suffered big job cuts over the past decade." The feature concludes that "the income gap between richer and poorer areas is likely to widen further as government-spending cuts disproportionately hurt less prosperous parts."

One of the story's big attention getters is its comparison of GDP among regions and cities of different nations.

[O]ver a quarter of regions in Britain and Italy and one-tenth of those in Germany will this year have a lower GDP per head than the municipality of Shanghai. All the American states remain richer, but Shanghai looks set to overtake Mississippi by 2015; within ten years half of all the states, including Florida, Michigan and Ohio, could have a GDP per head lower than Shanghai and Beijing.

If the comparison were at the scale of the county rather than that of the state, these Chinese cities would no doubt be shown well out-pacing our nation's persistent poverty counties.

The second Economist feature on spatial inequality, "Gaponomics," takes up the question of what should be done to respond to this problem, particularly in the context of Britain. Instead of investing in particular regions or giving tax breaks to "enterprise zones" in these downtrodden areas, The Economist offers this proposal:

[M]ake it easier for people to move. Given inherent gaps in regional productivity prospects, there is a case for boosting mobility from declining regions to prospering ones. In Britain the main problem is the fetish for home-ownership and high house prices in the south-east, partly the result of severe shortages of supply. Easing planning restrictions below the Watford Gap would be a better way of helping Britons than propping up the north.

As a ruralist, I am immediately suspicious of policies that would aggravate uneven development. Among other things, they ignore those who will remain immobile and inevitably left behind. They also ignore attachment to place as an aspect of the political economy of rural areas in particular.

This story's second proposal is far more palatable: invest in education because it results in "the single biggest reward" for the nation--even if northerners then move south with their enhanced human capital. (Regarding the latter, I am reminded of this book on the rural brain drain).

Indeed, a recent New York Times editorial echoes the second of these ideas in relation to New York's funding scheme for education. In "Rich District, Poor District," the editorial staff consider how two of the state's school districts will fare under the Cuomo budget: "Ilion in the economically depressed Mohawk Valley, and Syosset, a wealthy town in Long Island’s Nassau County. " Needless to say, it's not a pretty picture. Here' a summary:

The cuts would scarcely affect wealthy districts that rely primarily on local taxes to support lavishly appointed schools. But they would be catastrophic for impoverished rural districts that have been starved of state aid for decades and are still reeling from cuts levied last year .... Already struggling to furnish even basic course offerings, the poorest districts would need to cannibalize themselves to keep the doors open and the lights on.

As the editors express it, the $1.1 million cut Ilion is being asked to take to its $25 million budget "would not even come to a rounding error in the state's richest districts," like Syosset, which is being asked to absorb only a $1.4 million cut to its $188 million budget. But the New York Times editors aren't just arguing that school funding should be more equitable because "it's the right thing to do," they make an argument grounded in economics: Depressed regions like that around Illion "stand[ ] little chance of attracting high-skill jobs if [their] schools are allowed to deteriorate."

Going back to The Economist articles for a moment, I noted that enhanced investment in education is one reason for the income convergence across Germany, even as spatial inequalities become more acute in other nations. The story describes "huge national and European Union funds for infrastructure, R&D and education, as well as the transfer of some manufacturing jobs from factories in the western states to the east." For some reason, Germany sees reasons to take care of its citizens where they are--not to create incentives for residents of the less affluent East to move West. I'd like to know more about those reasons because I suspect they go beyond a sentimental desire to permit people to stay where they are and the attractive orderliness of a more evenly populated. I am guessing these policies are based in part on economic calculations about the value of existing infrastructure and human capital in the historically deprived East. Better understanding those reasons might inform debates in the United States about why regional development and reducing spatial inequalities--not fueling them--makes good sense from myriad perspectives.

Some of my writings mapping the socio-geographic concept of spatial inequality onto legal conceptions of (in)equality are here, here, and here.

Cross-posted to ClassCrits, SALTLaw.blog, and UC Davis Faculty Blog.