RWL #165 - collapsing communities, local news, and men without work
Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Wow! All kinds of badness happening all around the world with Covid 19. Speaking from the economist part of my soul, I had to share the above chart as this week’s picture. The plunge in the 10 year rate says a lot about the amount of fear in the world right now. That large of a drop represents a significant flight to safety by investors - and a lot of investors. (You can access the chart live here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qisU ). As I was explaining to my students in my finance class, the bond markets don’t lie. Politicians can say whatever they want, but the bond markets reflect the true sentiment because there is real money on the line.
I feel like I need to apologize for this week’s links in advance - I didn’t intend for them to come out gloomy, but I’m afraid they did. They are loosely linked by the theme of local community decay. Perhaps appropriately so with Covid 19 advancing and perhaps preparing to create significant economic disruption.
Enjoy the links! (sorry… next week will be happier, I promise)
Read
What: Pro Publica, Forced to Choose Between a Job — and a Community
Why: I started working at UNH in January of 2015, a little over five years ago. This is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere, ever. Moving here was my 20th move (not counting college, or moves in the same city). I can intellectually appreciate the kind of connection some people have to a community, but I can’t say I’ve experienced it. I’m hoping to stay here until the “final” move, but we’ll see. When I read articles like this one that tell a story of commitment to a community, even when that community is dying, makes me sad, but I don’t really understand why people don’t just pull up tent stakes (as we used to say in the Army) and move. Fewer and fewer Americans are moving, as the article notes:
As recently as the early 1990s, 3 percent of Americans moved across state lines each year, but today the rate is half that. Fewer Americans moved in 2017 than in any year in at least a half-century.
What I find interesting is this restatement of the American dream as stasis rather than change and growth (and the author seems to agree with me):
“The American dream is kind of to stay close to your family, do well and let your kids grow up around your parents,” he says. It was a striking comment: Not that long ago, the American dream more often meant something quite different, about achieving mobility — about moving up, even if that meant moving out.
I note below in Listen (below) that foreign born citizens chase the American dream by moving. They’ve already left everything behind. Maybe that’s our problem - we’ve become too complacent?
Watch
What: TED Talk, When local news dies, so does democracy, Chuck Plunkett
Why: I’ve subscribed to the WSJ for years, but that’s a national paper. As an Army officer moving all over the country, I didn’t have a great deal of interest in the local politics of whatever community I happened to be in for a couple of years, so I never got in the habit of reading the local paper. I have maintained my WSJ subscription despite sometimes going a week with barely reading the headlines because I believe that newspapers are public goods - they hold politicians and the powerful accountable. But I’ve been thinking, particularly since watching Spotlight, that I wanted to support a local paper, too, I just hadn’t gotten around to doing so until I watched this video.
I remember discussing voting in my economics PhD program and most of the professors said that voting was a waste of time, but if you were going to vote, you should only vote in local elections, since your vote actually carried some weight. They also argued that local politicians had far more impact on your daily life than those at the national level. Who the local dog catcher is has more impact on most of our daily lives than who the secretary of agriculture happens to be. Now that I’m settled (I hope) for the long haul, I guess it’s time to start paying attention. So I’ll be getting the New Hampshire Union Leader delivered starting this week. Do you get your local paper?
Listen
What: The National Affairs Podcast, The crisis of men without work with Nicholas Eberstadt
https://www.aei.org/multimedia/the-crisis-of-men-without-work-with-nicholas-eberstadt/
Why: I was teaching my students some of the basics of labor economics this week and specifically unemployment. This podcast talks about the declining rate of workforce participation among men. The decline is particularly high among men from lower SES backgrounds. Eberstadt cites 7M men of prime working age (25-54) are not in the workforce. This is not the same as unemployed - to be unemployed, you have to be looking for a job. These men are not employed and not looking for a job. I don’t have access to that data readily, but I can point you to this chart on labor force participation rates that shows the male labor force participation rate has fallen from 86% in 1950 to 63% today. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qist
Time use surveys from the BLS indicate that the bulk of these men are not engaged in pro-social activities such as being stay-at-home dads. Instead, most of them are single and live in households without children. On average they spend 2,100 hours per year (close to a FTE) “watching”. Apparently the “watching” is inclusive of all passive entertainment. So these men spend the amount of time nearly equal to a full time job doing nothing more productive than watching cable news. Women out of the workforce often have meaningful roles in families; men tend not to. One of the interesting points Eberstadt makes is that foreign born men who are high school dropouts have the same labor participation rates as native born college graduates, so something cultural is afoot here. Low labor force participation rates lead to alcohol and drug abuse, and to “deaths of despair.” Eberstadt makes the argument that this rate is linked to changes in disability policies, making it easier to get disability. Whether it is or it isn’t, there are millions of men who are being lost to society.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
Also, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/markbonica
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." - Henry David Thoreau