Falling Down The Economic Scale

George Packer on Charles Murray's latest book:

Visit most towns or rural areas where factories are boarded up and all the economic life is confined to strip malls, and you have to acknowledge the force of Murray’s picture. Rampant drug use, high dropout rates, out-of-wedlock births, epidemic obesity, every other working-age person on disability—it’s true even though Charles Murray says it’s true. And the predictable left-right argument over causes and solutions doesn’t help. Is it disappearing jobs, or disappearing values? This isn’t an analytical choice I find very useful. Jobs and values are intertwined: when one starts to go, the other is likely to go with it, and the circle becomes truly vicious. A textile factory moves south of the border, and a town loses its mainstay of employment. Former textile workers scurry to find fast-food and retail positions. The move from blue-collar to service work is brutal, and over time some employees lose the will to stick it out in a hateful job. Their children do even worse. Soon enough there are two or three generations of one family on government help, and kids grow up without a model of the work ethic. When a technology plant opens in the area (with a fifth the number of jobs as the textile factory), few locals are remotely qualified to work there. It’s a dismally familiar story—but is it a story of jobs or values? The obvious answer is both, which is why no one’s five-point solutions or three-word slogan is convincing.

A lot of things figure into the mess we're in.  Downward pressure on most wages, not only for low-skilled jobs.  Breakdown of families.  Drug use.  I disagree with Murray that one of the biggest problems is government anti-poverty programs.  There are some people who abuse the system, but they weren't avoiding lucrative jobs to do it.  Most people want to be self-reliant, but in the downward-pulling economic circumstances, they can't be.  The presence of government programs doesn't seem to be a large factor in that, unless a bare bones safety net makes corporate titans feel more comfortable about squeezing wages and outsourcing jobs.  Really, I don't think corporate executives really understand that they won't continue to be able to move their junk to American consumers if there aren't more jobs and higher wages here.  They'll just keep their optimism about the business climate until it becomes obvious they've driven the country into a ditch.  Then they'll ask for government assistance.