(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Times’ Manufacturing Story a Triumph of Hope Over Evidence

Tags

Baltimore, inner cities, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, Marlin Steel, Nelson D. Schwartz, poverty, The New York Times, Twitter, {What's Left of) Our Economy

New York Times economics correspondent Nelson D. Schwartz deserves much credit for engaging me extensively on Twitter last week over his recent article on manufacturing’s potential as an anti-poverty weapon in the United States. It’s just too bad that, in the process, he reinforced the Mainstream Media’s budding reputation as a national institution that’s unusually stubborn about admitting substantive or methodological mistakes.

Schwartz’s October 28 article couldn’t have looked more encouraging. “Small Factories Emerge as a Weapon in the Fight Against Poverty,” declared the headline. And once one read a few paragraphs into the text, the implication was clear: A significant and growing body of evidence is showing that small manufacturing establishments are offering good jobs and the hope of middle class lives to inner city residents desperately needing such opportunities.

But no such evidence was presented. Instead, Schwartz provided a single example of a domestic manufacturer creating such employment and hope – a steel products company in Baltimore.

Schwartz contended that such operations “are vital if the United States is to narrow the nation’s class divide and build a society that offers greater opportunities for everyone — rich and poor, black and white, high school graduates and Ph.D.s.” And I fully agree with the proposition. But the article gave readers no reason to believe that the experience of Marlin Steel and its workers was being replicated anywhere else.

So I considered it entirely appropriate to tweet in response “Boosterish @NelsonSchwartz art on small factories as anti-#poverty “weapon” based on – get this – a single company.”

I was pleased to see Schwartz take the criticism seriously enough to respond. But the response itself was sorely lacking: “I guess you wanted more statistics and fewer people?”

After thanking him for the return tweet, I replied with the crucial question, “Data are always more important than anecdotes. How representative is Marlin’s experience?”

Schwartz insisted “There’s plenty of data in the story. The key is that manufacturing pays much more than service jobs available to the same folks.” But of course, that wasn’t my point. I was asking him for more examples of small factories alleviating urban poverty. And Schwartz never provided any.

I reminded him twice that my expressed concern was that his article never demonstrated that “Marlin’s experience was representative of anything” and that, if that is indeed the case, “then there’s no significant evidence for the claim made in the headline – and for the theme of the story.”

But Schwartz kept his focus on the superior qualities of manufacturing jobs on average versus service sector jobs, and their unique capability to “lead to the middle class” for “most non-college educated workers.”

As I noted to Schwartz, “[N]o one would be more pleased than I by significant evidence that [manufacturing jobs are] coming back to inner cities, or could realistically return.” And there’s unmistakable value in observing that factory work can turn around bleak lives and neighborhoods, and in explaining in detail why – two of the article’s especially strong suits.

But portraying an isolated event as a trend violates a fundamental rule of journalism. Schwartz’s failure after repeated prodding to identify other Marlin-type successes, along with his unwillingness to acknowledge faulty judgment, can only further set back the news business’ ever tougher struggle to maintain its credibility.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Vital but Missing Voice on Urban Poverty

Tags

African Americans, Baltimore, crime, education, Ferguson, infrastructure, inner cities, Jobs, manufacturing, poverty, skills, Trade, unemployment, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Quick – does the name William Julius Wilson mean anything to you? It sure as heck should, especially if you’re concerned about the inner-city black neighborhood woes that have burst into the headlines since Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson shot unarmed African-American teenager Michael Brown last August.

Wilson is a Harvard University sociologist who wrote a landmark 1996 book that shed crucial light on modern urban poverty and its origins. The title said it all: When Work Disappears. It was widely praised and pretty widely discussed when it first came out, but gradually faded into the background, where it seems to have stayed despite the front page news seemingly continually generated these days from places like Ferguson and West Baltimore. I myself had forgotten about it till I saw the paperback at a book sale last weekend.

I haven’t gotten very far into When Work Disappears but its main theme should be powerfully shaping the U.S. public debate over fixing what’s wrong with huge swathes of black urban America. According to Wilson (writing before the two recessions that have struck so far in the twenty-first century, not to mention the financial crisis):

“For the first time in the twentieth century most adults in many inner-city neighborhoods are not working in a typical week. The disappearance of work has adversely affected not only individuals, families, and neighborhoods, but the social life of the city at large as well. Inner-city joblessness is a severe problem that is often overlooked or obscured when the focus is placed mainly on poverty and its consequences. Despite increases in the concentration of poverty since 1970, inner cities have always featured high levels of poverty, but the current levels of joblessness in some neighborhoods are unprecedented.

“The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods – crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on – are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.”

Further, Wilson cited “the increased internationalization” of the U.S. economy as one engine of this joblessness, and to underscore this point, noted that “Of the changes in the economy that have adversely affected low-skilled African-American workers, perhaps the most significant have been those in the manufacturing sector.” Of course, manufacturing is the economy’s most trade-intensive sector.

To be sure, Wilson doesn’t seem to have recommended any trade policy changes to fix these problems, preferring to focus instead on a raft of domestic policy responses like better job training, more family-friendly benefits for workers, a greater Earned Income Tax Credit, and more infrastructure programs (an idea that I’ve endorsed). In these respects, the 1996-vintage Wilson sounds a lot like President Obama during his years in the White House. Indeed, in a conference on poverty held two weeks ago in the wake of the Baltimore riots, Mr. Obama mentioned Wilson and touted the potential of these programs to heal inner cities.

Yet Wilson was writing when the current era of U.S. trade policy, launched with the negotiations to create the North American Free Trade Agreement, was just beginning. So he couldn’t have known that such purely domestic policy fixes have failed. President Obama, however, keeps pushing more of the same on the trade side despite the devastating impact on the inner city as well as on the economy as a whole – and insists that there’s no contradiction.  According to the president, what he has re-labeled “21st century trade agreements” are “as important to helping the middle class get ahead in this new economy as things like job training, and higher education, and affordable health care. They’re all part of a package.” What’s his excuse?

Just as important, however, where has William Julius Wilson been over the last year as Americans have struggled with these issues?  His insights are needed now more than ever.      

Im-Politic: Thinking Big to Help Our Country’s Baltimores

Tags

Baltimore, Im-Politic, infrastructure, Jobs, prisons, wages, welfare

I’m getting to think that one of the best signs that Americans have no clue how to solve a major public policy problem is lengthy debate that has changed absolutely no minds whatever. If true, then Americans have no clue how to solve the urban poverty problems responsible for the Baltimore riot, and some totally outside the box ideas are urgently needed. Here are some I hope can get the nation started.

First, let’s stop obsessing about what’s mainly to blame for the degraded state of Sandtown and neighborhoods like it all around the country. Any environment this dangerous and dysfunctional by definition inevitably has multiple and deep roots. Why debate whether the main issue is terrible policing or high crime or drug use or family breakdown or rotten schools or lack of jobs or historic official discrimination (like mortgage red-lining)? Who can doubt that all these pathologies and misdeeds have played a part, and have often enforced each other? The main issue is what to do now.

Second, let’s stop kidding ourselves about the merits of the main current ideas on how to improve the Sandtowns of America. It’s not a lack of money; for example, Baltimore city spends more per pupil than all but one major Maryland school system. But it’s also completely unrealistic to think that largely free market solutions are the answer. No matter how much taxes or regulations are cut (or how many incentives are offered), viable businesses that can create good jobs simply have no reason to move into very low-income urban areas. In fact, given the crime and the shortage of workers with even rudimentary skills, productive capital has every reason to stay away.

Third, nonetheless, good jobs are clearly the best hope for fixing inner city problems. Individuals in solid economic situations stand the best chance of forming stable families, sending to schools children capable of learning from reasonably good teachers, and luring businesses to supply their needs. And if the private sector can’t plausibly be relied on to create these jobs, then it’s up to government.

Fourth, despite the limited middle-class employment opportunities currently generated by the U.S. economy for Americans with relatively low levels of skills and education, there’s a super-abundance of work for these individuals to do: It’s fixing the nation’s lousy traditional infrastructure and building out the systems of tomorrow.

As widely recognized – except on the libertarian or just-plain-angry Right – today’s rock-bottom interest rates mean that the money’s available without further stressing taxpayers. The economic payoff, meanwhile, is well established – in terms of not only more employment, but stronger current growth, higher productivity, and greater healthy future growth (which generates more tax revenues and therefore healthier national finances).

So there’s no good substantive reason not to launch an historically unprecedented campaign to rebuild America’s roads, bridges, airports, and ports; to maintain them properly once they’re repaired or refurbished; to increase their intelligence with high tech sensors and controllers and the like, and with all the power transmission systems they will require; and to bring the nation’s communications systems up to twenty-first century standards.

And there’s no substantive good reason not to offer inner city residents the jobs needed to meet this challenge at middle class wages, complete with generous benefits.

Conservatives will of course doubt that these programs can be run responsibly, and thus have made them non-starters politically in Washington. But truly functional and properly maintained traditional infrastructure, at least, is hardly rocket science, and the economic benefits would compensate for much of the waste. Just as important, these conservatives need to realize that the money is going to be spent anyway – and has been spent for decades. It’s gone to prisons, which are fantastically expensive, and which arguably worsen the criminality and threats to public safety they’re supposed to be reducing by serving as graduate schools of crime. And it’s gone to various kinds of welfare, whose track record is just as bad, but which most of the public apparently has decided shouldn’t be significantly reduced.

An infrastructure boom wouldn’t solve all of the economic problems besetting U.S. inner cities. But it would be a great start. So the choice seems pretty clear. Americans can keep hurling stale slogans at each other, and trafficking in magical solutions. Or they can focus on empowering their disadvantaged fellow citizens to meet a vital and staggeringly huge but technologically and managerially unexceptional national challenge. The latter is an obvious winner for all Americans – unless you belong to our hopelessly partisan political hustler class.