Saturday, September 09, 2023
Is the The China Model Dead
China’s jobless college graduates have become an embarrassment to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The unemployment rate among the country’s youth has reached an all-time high, putting the country’s severe economic troubles on display at home and abroad. In August, Xi’s administration decided to act: Its statistics bureau stopped releasing the data.
But Xi can’t hide China’s economic woes—or hide from them. The problems are not just a post-pandemic malaise, or some soon-to-be-forgotten detour in China’s march to superpower stature. The vaunted China model—the mix of liberalization and state control that generated the country’s hypersonic growth—has entered its death throes.
The news should not come as a surprise. Economists and even Chinese policy makers have warned for years that the China model was fundamentally flawed and would inevitably break down. But Xi was too consumed with shoring up his own power to undertake the necessary reforms to fix it. Now the problems run so deep, and the repairs would be so costly, that the time for a turnaround may have passed.
Contrary to the assumptions of many commentators in recent years, China may never overtake the United States as the world’s dominant economy if current trends continue. In fact, it’s already falling behind.
The demise of the China model is in many ways a function of its tremendous success. When China’s free-market reforms were just getting under way in 1980, the country was poorer, per capita, than Ghana or Pakistan. Today, China has an $18 trillion economy capable of devising 5G telecom networks and electric vehicles.
The motor of the China model is investment, and lots of it—into factories, highways, airports, shopping malls, apartment towers, you name it. China was destitute at the outset of its reforms, and much of the new infrastructure was necessary. Better transport systems helped to boost economic efficiency; new housing sheltered families migrating from farms to cities in search of opportunity. The investments turned China into the world’s factory floor and produced eye-popping rates of growth.
The growth rate stayed high, but now the economy was generating wasteful excess that undermined its health. Logan Wright, a partner at the research firm Rhodium Group, estimates that China has 23 million to 26 million unsold apartments. That’s enough to house the entire population of Italy. Many of these apartments will never be purchased, Wright conjectures, because they were constructed in towns with declining populations. China’s automobile industry, figures Bill Russo, the founder of the consulting firm Automobility in Shanghai, has enough unused factory capacity to make more than 10 million cars (sufficient to supply the entire Japanese car market—twice). Beijing boasts about its extensive network of high-speed railways, already the world’s largest—but the state-owned company that operates it has racked up more than $800 billion in debt and posts substantial losses.
The Chinese “continue to invest beyond what they can actually absorb,” Alicia Garcia-Herrero, a senior fellow and specialist in Asian economies at the think tank Bruegel, told me. “This is why their model went wrong.”
As a result of all this unproductive investment—much of it financed by borrowing—China’s debt has expanded much faster than its economy. A decade ago, China’s total debt was about twice the size of the country’s economy; now it’s three times as large.
Politics have exacerbated the debt problem. The Communist Party has trumpeted high growth rates as proof of its legitimacy and competence, so when growth rates have slipped below targets, authorities unleashed credit to pump them back up. The International Monetary Fund estimates that China’s local governments have amassed $9 trillion in debt in the name of financing infrastructure projects.
China’s leadership has long known that its investment strategy carried risks. Back in 2007, Wen Jiabao, then China’s premier, said, “There are structural problems in China’s economy which cause unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable development.” And Chinese policy makers knew exactly how to repair these problems: China had to “rebalance,” as economists say, meaning that it needed to decrease its reliance on investment and foster new engines of growth, especially domestic consumption, which is abysmally low compared with that of other major economies. For that, economists agreed, China would need to liberalize its financial sector and relax the hand of the state on private enterprise.
Early in his tenure, Xi seemed to accept these imperatives. . . . But the reforms never happened. Enacting them would have diminished the power of the state—and thus Xi’s own power. China’s leader was unwilling to trade political control for economic growth.
The more power Xi has commanded, the heavier the state’s hand in the economy has become. Xi has relied on state industrial policy to drive innovation, and he has imposed intrusive regulations on important sectors, such as technology and education. As a result, China’s private sector is in retreat.
Now rebuilding the private sector’s confidence is perhaps the most urgent task facing China’s economic policy makers, the Cornell economist Eswar Prasad told me: “And on that score they don’t seem fully cognizant of what needs to be done, or maybe they’re just not willing to do it, and that I think has some fairly serious repercussions for China’s growth.” Prasad added that the chances of policy makers correcting course are “pretty slim” because they consider private enterprise a “necessary but not really ideal avenue of generating more growth.”
At a time when China sorely needed to juice domestic consumption, Xi’s draconian pandemic lockdowns delivered a devastating blow to incomes. The China model has cracked under the pressure: So little demand drives the economy that it has slipped into deflation, which, if it persists, could further discourage the investment and consumer spending that the economy needs to revive. The Peking University professor Zhang Dandan recently estimated that the unemployment rate among youth ages 16 to 24 could be close to 50 percent, more than twice the official figure. Real estate was once a major contributor to economic growth and a store of middle-class wealth. Now investment, sales, and prices in that sector are falling. The largest private developer, Country Garden, is teetering on the brink of default as its Hong Kong–listed shares have lost two-thirds of their value since the beginning of the year.
China’s economy isn’t beyond repair, but fixing it will be costly and painful. The government will have to write off bad debts, close up zombie companies, and introduce sweeping market reforms of a nature that policy makers have so far avoided. Taking these steps would reboot the economy for a new phase of growth—not at the lofty rates of the past, but at a pace that could sustain the country’s economic progress.
The Chinese government has shown no interest in adopting these reforms, however. Various authorities have issued multiple-point plans to support the economy that amount to little more than administrative tweaks and vague pronouncements. Xi’s confidence-inspiring message to the public is, essentially, “suck it up”
Xi Jinping has spent the past decade amassing personal power. Now the yuan has to stop with him. In theory, the economy’s troubles should prod him into a rapprochement with the United States, to stop economic relations with the West from further deteriorating and keep foreign technology and capital flowing to aid the country’s development. But Xi is taking China in a different direction.
The country remains relatively poor, with per capita income of $12,700—one-sixth that of the United States. It may not have the resources to support the continued expansion of its military capabilities, or to underwrite initiatives meant to bolster its influence abroad. State banks have already significantly scaled back development lending to low-income countries, for example.
The slowdown of China’s economy may undercut Xi’s ideological assault on the world order. By example, China has sought to demonstrate to the Global South that democracy and development are not inseparable, and that autocrats can have wealth, international respect, and political power. Those claims are harder to make with a faltering economy. If anything, China’s economic troubles suggest that authoritarian regimes cannot both tighten control and sustain economic progress—that, ultimately, political reform must accompany economic reform.
Xi is unlikely to embrace this inconvenient truth. Rather, he will pursue his anti-West agenda with even greater urgency. . . . For this reason, economic weakness could make China’s leaders all the more dangerous—more prone to champion nationalist causes and stumble into foreign adventures, such as a military grab for Taiwan. One can only hope that Xi will look to history and realize that a nation’s power can be projected only as far as its economic strength allows.
Friday, September 08, 2023
Americans' Disconnect on the State of the Economy
If President Biden loses his bid for re-election, a key factor will be the widespread perception that the economy is doing badly on his watch. Poll after poll shows Americans rating economic conditions as very bad and giving Biden very low approval for his economic management.
The strange thing is that these bad ratings are persisting even as the economy, by any normal measure, has been doing extremely well. Indeed, we’ve just experienced what Goldman Sachs is calling the “soft landing summer.” Inflation is down by almost two-thirds since its peak in June 2022, and this has happened without the recession and huge job losses many economists insisted would be necessary. Real wages, especially for nonsupervisory workers, are significantly higher than they were before the pandemic.
Oh, and to correct a widespread misconception: No, these figures don’t exclude food and energy prices. The government does calculate measures of “core” inflation excluding those prices, but those are only for analytical and policy purposes.
So why are people so negative about an economy that by all standard measures is doing very well?
When I first began writing about the disconnect between public economic perceptions and what appeared to be economic reality, I got a lot of pushback, of two distinct kinds.
First, there was the argument that there were real economic problems that justified public negativity. People really hate inflation, even if their incomes are keeping up, and a year ago real wages were still somewhat depressed. But at this point inflation is way down and real wages are up.
Second, there was the argument that, in effect, the customer is always right: If people feel that they’re doing badly, you should figure out why, not lecture them that they should be feeling better.
But here’s the funny thing: There’s substantial evidence that people don’t feel that they personally are doing badly. Both surveys and consumer behavior suggest, on the contrary, that while most Americans feel that they’re doing OK, they believe that the economy is doing badly, where “the economy” presumably means other people.
Let me run through some of this evidence.
The Federal Reserve conducts an annual survey of the economic well-being of households. At the end of 2022, 73 percent of households said that they were “at least doing OK financially,” down from the previous year (presumably because of the end of many pandemic aid programs) but not significantly below the number in 2019. In 2019, however, half the population said that the national economy was good or excellent; in 2022 that number was down to just 18 percent.
Are people still doing OK? Well, consumer spending has been strong, suggesting that American families aren’t too worried about their financial situation.
What about inflation? According to a recent poll by The Wall Street Journal, 74 percent of Americans say that inflation has moved in the wrong direction over the past year — a result stunningly at odds with the data, which shows inflation plunging. But are people really experiencing rising inflation?
As it happens, several organizations regularly survey consumers to ask how much inflation they expect, and these expectations have come way down, which is completely at odds with claims that inflation is getting worse.
Even better, I’d argue, are surveys that ask businesses not about the national economy but about their own prices or costs.
The National Federation of Independent Business asks small-business owners whether they have increased or reduced prices over the past three months. More businesses are raising than are lowering prices, but the difference is much smaller than it was last year. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta asks businesses how much they expect their costs to rise over the next year; their median answer is 2.5 percent, down from 3.8 percent last year.
[W]hen people are asked about their own experiences, not “the economy,” what they say about inflation is consistent with official data showing rapid improvement.
The bottom line is that there is a real disconnect between what Americans say about the economy and reality — not just official data, but even their own experiences. It’s silly to deny that this disconnect exists.
What explains negativity about a good economy? Partisanship is surely a factor: Republicans’ assessment of the current economy roughly matches what it was in June 1980, when unemployment was twice as high and inflation four times as high as they are now. Beyond that, the events of the past few years — not just inflation and higher interest rates but also the disruption Covid caused to everyone’s lives, and perhaps the sense that America is coming apart politically — may have engendered a sourness, an unwillingness to acknowledge good news even when it happens.
Now Biden administration officials are trying hard to sell their economic accomplishments, as they should — if they don’t, who will? But will public opinion turn around? Nobody knows. We’re living in a world in which what people believe may have little to do with facts, including the facts of their own lives.
Thursday, September 07, 2023
Trump Remains a Malignancy That Must Be Prosecuted
With four separate criminal cases moving forward against Donald Trump, the rule of law in America appears both commanding and startlingly fragile. Small scenes at courthouses from Florida to New York underline the ever-present threat of violence. In Fulton County, Georgia, officials set up bright-orange security barriers around the courthouse in advance of Trump’s indictment there. In Washington, D.C., fences and yellow tape surrounded the U.S. district court. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will oversee the federal case against Trump for his efforts to overturn the election, has received increased protection from U.S. marshals—and perhaps not a moment too soon, as a Texas woman was recently arrested for calling in death threats against the judge. Trump, meanwhile, has been busy attacking Chutkan and other judges on social media, smearing the prosecutors bringing the cases against him as a “fraud squad” doing the bidding of President Joe Biden, and promising to turn the Justice Department against his foes should he win a second term.
It’s a grim picture. “The next 18 months could further undermine confidence in democracy and the rule of law,” The Washington Post warned in June. Some commentators, largely on the right, have cautioned that the investigations and prosecutions of Trump might widen cracks in the already-unstable foundations of the American public sphere.
As the threats of violence and attacks on the justice system show, these concerns are not unfounded—far from it. But worrying about the dangers of prosecuting Trump is a bit like focusing on the risk that chemotherapy poses to a cancer patient’s health. The reasoning isn’t exactly wrong; it just begins the analysis in the wrong place. The chemotherapy might be ugly, but it isn’t the source of the problem. It’s the treatment for the underlying disease.
During Watergate, Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel, John Dean, famously told the president that the scandal had become a “cancer growing on the presidency.” Trump’s presence in American politics is similarly malignant. He has made the country meaner, uglier, and more violent. During his first term, he ate away at the protections guarding the U.S. system from authoritarianism, insisting on his own right to absolute power. For prosecutors to have ignored Trump’s provocations would have been to allow the cancer to progress—to acquiesce to his vision of a fundamentally corrupt politics in which the only constraint on power is the threat of vengeance.
Still, that doesn’t mean the prosecutions will be a pleasant experience. Even under the best of circumstances, the country’s first trial of a former president—especially a former president once again seeking office—would have been a high-stakes test of the ability of American political institutions to hold the powerful to account. Trump, though, seems dead set on making the experience as grueling as possible. Already, he may be headed for confrontations with the three separate judges who have cautioned him against using incendiary language and threatening witnesses—which hasn’t stopped him from attacking the prosecutors and complaining on Truth Social that Judge Chutkan is “VERY BIASED & UNFAIR.”
Even so, the notion of the body politic has persisted for a reason. What would happen if the current disease were to go untreated? What might unfold if Trump continues to push the boundaries of what he can get away with—deciding, for example, to skip out on appearing at his trials? The judges and prosecutors would have to decide whether to hold Trump to the standards they would use for any other defendant and reprimand him for his insouciance—potentially, as incredible as it seems, by jailing him. A decision to hold Trump in custody before a conviction would be a bitter and contentious choice: Trump would be sure to complain about the terrible injustice and persecution he faces, eating away at public confidence in the legal system.
Likewise, there’s been a recent surge of interest in the notion that Trump may be barred from returning to the presidency under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, a post–Civil War provision that disqualifies onetime government officials who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from returning to office. Any effort to block Trump’s candidacy on these grounds would surely involve a prolonged legal battle—and raise uncomfortable questions about the wisdom, in a democracy, of ruling out by judicial fiat a serious contender for the presidency. It would make for harsh medicine.
Yet this harsh medicine wouldn’t be necessary if Trump hadn’t brought this challenge to American democracy in the first place. And letting the challenge go unanswered would have far more destructive effects. The idea of the body politic, and the risks of its decay, is a very old one. Trump’s actions are the source of its current illness, and though the treatment may seem extreme—and have unpleasant side effects—it’s what’s needed to stop the disease from taking over.
Wednesday, September 06, 2023
Call Out Alabama’s Defiant Racism
The current US Supreme Court, stacked with right-wing justices, has in recent years dismantled many of the core civil rights programs of the past 50 years, from voting rights to affirmative action to anti-discrimination law. So it came as a surprise — and for many, a relief — when the court handed down a 5-4 decision in June, declining to gut the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Instead, the court found that Alabama’s new redistricting plan discriminated against Black voters and ordered the state legislature to redraw it.
Their new map is out, and it makes clear that the Republican-controlled legislature in Alabama has flouted the court order. Republican Gov. Kay Ivey seemed content to ignore it as well when she signed the redistricting bill (which must now go to a federal court for approval). “The Legislature knows our state, our people and our districts better than the federal courts or activist groups,” she said in a statement.
This defiance of the court by Alabama Republicans is notable not because their objection to the ruling is unique or surprising — there has been widespread frustration with the Supreme Court’s other recent rulings as well as calls to question this court’s legitimacy — but rather what they are defying. They are rejecting an order to stop discriminating against Black people. Understood in that historical vein, the action of Alabama Republicans fits into a long, sordid backstory.
For much of the Supreme Court’s history, the justices were firmly on the side of discrimination. In the years preceding the Civil War, the court decided in Dred Scott v. Sandford that no Black person could be a citizen of the United States, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free. In 1883, it struck down the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 that had “affirmed the equality of all persons in the enjoyment of transportation facilities, in hotels and inns, and in theaters and places of public amusement.” In the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson, the court legally sanctioned the segregation regimes emerging across the South.
That started to change in 1938, when the court began to lay the groundwork for the civil rights jurisprudence of the mid- 20th century. . . . Justice Harlan Stone suggested in his majority opinion that, while the court presumed the constitutionality of many laws, there was an exception: Should the court be asked to evaluate laws that discriminated against “discrete and insular minorities,” it would apply a higher standard of judicial review. That notion of “strict scrutiny” would inform a number of the court’s rulings against racial discrimination in the years that followed, most notably in the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 ordering desegregation of schools.
As the court came to embrace civil rights, racial conservatives began to defy it. Though the right found itself at odds with the court on a number of fronts in the mid-20th century, including on issues like school prayer and abortion, it was on issues of desegregation that they were the most actively in defiance of the court. Massive resistance, the sustained refusal of White Americans to comply with desegregation orders, fueled a generation of activists. By 1963, nearly a decade after the Brown decision, only 1% of Black students in the South went to school with White students. It would take federal troops and the National Guard to enforce desegregation orders in the South, and still, White legislators and parents often opted to close schools entirely rather than desegregate.
The courts historically have faced White resistance whenever they have sided with Black civil rights. The Alabama ruling is no exception. Even in an era when the court is rapidly rolling back anti-discrimination jurisprudence — weakening the Voting Rights Act, greenlighting discrimination against LGBTQ consumers, ending affirmative action — even the mildest move to retain existing protections sparks resistance. That tells us less about the court and more about the political power — and impunity — still wielded by pro-discrimination forces, decades after the Civil Rights Movement.
Republicans’ defiance in Alabama is wrong not only because it violates a court order but also because it seeks to dilute Black voting in the state, part of a century-long effort to deny Black voters equal rights. As the fight over the state’s redistricting efforts continues to play out, that denial, rather than the Republicans’ defiance, should be the central focus.
Tuesday, September 05, 2023
Ancient Rome Has a Warning for America
America likes to think of itself in garlanded terms. The shining city on a hill. The indispensable nation. The land of the free. There’s something to each sobriquet, to be sure. But there’s another phrase, not always so flattering, that also applies to the United States: global empire.
Unlike the other notions, which originated in the birth struggles of the Republic, this one dates to the final stages of World War II. At the famous Bretton Woods Conference, the United States developed an international trading and financial system that functioned in practice as an imperial economy, disproportionately steering the fruits of global growth to the citizens of the West.
Alongside, America created NATO to provide a security umbrella for its allies and organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to forge common policies. Over the second half of the century, this system attained a degree of world domination no previous empire had ever known.
In the past two decades, however, it has sunk into decline. At the turn of the millennium, the Western world accounted for four-fifths of global economic output. Today, that share is down to three-fifths and falling.
From this view, it can seem that the United States is following the course of all empires: doomed to decline and eventual fall. America, it’s true, will never again enjoy the degree of global economic and political domination it exercised in the decades after the war. But it can, with the right choices, look forward to a future in which it remains the world’s pre-eminent nation.
To call America an empire is admittedly to court controversy or at least confusion. After all, the United States claims dominion over no countries and even prodded its allies to renounce their colonies. But there’s an illuminating precedent for the kind of imperial project the United States forged after the war: the Roman Empire.
By the fourth century, that empire had evolved from a conquest state into one where the Eternal City remained a spiritual center but actual power was shared across the provinces, with two centers of imperial authority: one in the east and another in the west. In return for collecting taxes, provincial landholding elites enjoyed the protection of the legions, their loyalty to the empire cemented by a real share in its benefits and what the historian Peter Heather calls a unifying culture of Latin, towns and togas.
Like modern America, Rome attained a degree of supremacy unprecedented in its day. But the paradox of great imperial systems is that they often sow the seeds of their own downfall. As Rome grew rich and powerful from the economic exploitation of its peripheries, it inadvertently spurred the development of territories beyond its European frontiers. In time, the larger and politically more coherent confederations that emerged acquired the ability to parry — and eventually roll back — imperial domination.
In the same way, America’s decline is a product of its success. Although developing countries grew more slowly in the postwar period than their Western counterparts, they still grew. By the end of the century, they had started to convert that expanding economic clout into political and diplomatic power. Not only had they begun to acquire the capacity to negotiate better trade and financial agreements, but they also had a crucial bargaining chip in the form of two resources Western businesses now needed: growing markets and abundant supplies of labor.
Rome, the story goes, was toppled by so-called barbarian invasions. The truth is more complex. Within a single chaotic generation on either side of the year 400, several confederations crossed into the western half of the empire. On Roman soil, these immigrants then formed themselves into still larger alliances — like the Visigoths and Vandals — that were too powerful for the empire to defeat.
Some commentators have been quick to see modern migration into the West as an equally destructive force. But that’s the wrong lesson to take from Roman history. Its economy was primarily agricultural and steady. If one power rose, another had to fall, since you could not simply expand the resource base to support both. When Rome proved unable to defeat the new contenders, it lost a source of taxes from which it could not recover.
Today’s situation is completely different. Thanks to technological change, economic growth is no longer a zero-sum game, possible in one place but not another. Although Western countries no longer dominate manufacturing and services, they still retain an edge in knowledge-intensive industries like artificial intelligence and pharmaceuticals or where they’ve built brand value, such as in luxury goods, sports and entertainment. Economic growth — even if more slowly than in the periphery — can continue in the West.
But it will require workers. Given that Western societies, with declining birthrates and aging populations, aren’t producing enough workers, they will have to come from the global periphery — both those who immigrate to the West and the many more who stay at home to work in businesses serving Western supply chains. Migration may have eroded the Roman Empire’s wealth. Now it’s what stands between the West and absolute economic decline.
Other parallels with Roman history are more direct. The eastern half of the Roman Empire rode out the collapse of the west in the fifth century and was even able to establish a hegemonic position over the new kingdoms in its lost western territories. This situation could have survived indefinitely had the empire not expended vital resources, starting in the late sixth century, in an unnecessary conflict with its bitter Persian rival. Imperial hubris drove it into a series of wars that, after two generations of conflict, left both empires vulnerable to a challenge that would overwhelm them both in just a few decades: a newly united Arab world.
For America, it’s a cautionary tale. In responding to the inevitability of China’s rise, the United States needs to ask itself which threats are existential and which are merely uncomfortable. . . . . As for China’s growing militarization and belligerence, the United States must consider whether it’s really facing Thucydides’ trap of a rising power or simply a country defending its widening interests.
If the United States must confront China, whether militarily or — one hopes — just diplomatically, it will inherit big advantages from its imperial legacy. The country still has sources of power that nobody can seriously rival: a currency that faces no serious threat as the world’s medium of exchange, the deep pools of capital managed on Wall Street, the world’s most powerful military, the soft power wielded by its universities and the vast appeal of its culture. And America can still call upon its friends across the globe. All told, it should be able to marshal its abundant resources to remain the world’s leading power.
To do so, though, America will need to give up trying to restore its past glory through a go-it-alone, America First approach. It was the same impulse that pushed the Roman Empire into the military adventurism that brought about its eventual destruction. The world economy has changed, and the United States will never again be able to dominate the planet as it once did. But the possibility of building a new world out of a coalition of the like-minded is a luxury Rome never had. America, whatever it calls itself, should seize the opportunity.
Monday, September 04, 2023
The Partisan Divide on Life Expectancy
I have long argued that Republicans use racial hatred and religious bigotry/hatred to induce working class whites and large swaths of the population to vote against their own financial and economic interest. Now, a study that is covered in a long piece at Politico Magazine documents that Republican/red state policies literally shorten the life expectancy of their residents compared to those in so-called blue states and progressive regions. Not surprisingly, ranking the worst with a tie for the shortest life expectancy are the Deep South and what the article labels "Greater Appalachia," a region which extends from southwest Pennsylvania all the way down to include the majority of Texas. The longest life expectancy is in the GOP derided "Left Coast" region where life expectancy is almost five (5) years longer than in the Deep South and Greater Appalachia. Why the large difference? Simple, red state/GOP policies that under fund public health and public support in general that cause the citizenry to have shorter life spans. Surprisingly, even the affluent in the Deep South and Greater Appalachia suffer from shorter life expectancy than their counterparts in Tidewater (the region where I live), the Left Coast and "Yankeedom." One has to wonder when, if ever, red state residents will wake up the reality that the policies their elected leaders embrace are literally killing them. Here are highlights from the lengthy article:
On paper, Lexington County, S.C., and Placer County, Calif., have a lot in common. They’re both big, wealthy, suburban counties with white supermajorities that border on their respective state’s capital cities. They both were at the vanguard of their states’ 20th century Republican advances — Lexington in the 1960s when it pivoted from the racist Dixiecrats; Placer with the Reagan Revolution in 1980 — and twice voted for Donald Trump by wide margins. But when it comes to how long their residents can count on living, the parallels fall apart. Placer has a Scandinavia-like life expectancy of 82.3 years. In Lexington, the figure is 77.7, a little worse than China’s.
Or take Maine’s far-flung Washington County, the poorest in New England where the per capita income is $27,437. The county is a hardscrabble swath of blueberry fields, forestland and fishing ports that was ravaged by the opioid epidemic and is almost completely white. It has one of the worst life expectancies in the entire Northeast: 75.5 years. But that’s more than six years better than the equally remote, forested, impoverished, white and drug-battered Perry County of eastern Kentucky.
The truth of life expectancy in America is that places with comparable profiles — similar advantages and similar problems — have widely different average life outcomes depending on what part of the country they belong to. Step back and look at a map of life expectancy across the country and the geographic patterns are as dramatic as they are obvious. If you live pretty much anywhere in the contiguous U.S., you can expect to live more than 78 years, unless you’re in the Deep South or the sprawling region I call Greater Appalachia, a region that stretches from southwestern Pennsylvania to the Ozarks and the Hill Country of Texas. Those two regions — which include all or parts of 16 deep red states and a majority of the House Republican caucus — have a life expectancy of 77, more than four and a half years lower than on the blue-leaning Pacific coastal plain. In the smaller, redder regional culture of New France (in southern Louisiana) the gap is just short of six years. So large are the regional gaps that the poorest set of counties in predominantly blue Yankee Northeast actually have higher life expectancies than the wealthiest ones in the Deep South.
We wanted to answer the bottom-line question: Is your region helping extend your life or shorten it?
The results show enormous gaps between the regions that don’t go away when you parse by race, income, education, urbanization or access to quality medical care. They amount to a rebuke to generations of elected officials in the Deep South, Greater Appalachia and New France — most of whom have been Republican in recent decades — who have resisted investing tax dollars in public goods and health programs.
“We don’t have these differences in health outcomes because of individual behaviors, it’s related to the policy environments people are living in,” says Jeanne Ayers, who was Wisconsin’s top public health official during the Covid pandemic . . . . The social and political determinants of health are overwhelmingly what you’re seeing in these maps.”
I shared these maps with cardiologist Donald Lloyd-Jones, a past president of the American Heart Association who chairs the preventive medicine department at Northwestern University in Chicago, who said they didn’t surprise him at all. “There’s a reason why the Southeastern portion of this country is called the Stroke Belt: It’s because the rates of stroke per capita are substantially higher there and mirrored by rates of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and other risk factors.”
Maybe the differences between the regions would go away if you compared just rich counties to one another or just the poor ones? Nope.
We used the prevalence of child poverty as our metric and compared the life expectancy of the least impoverished quartile of U.S. counties — the “richest” ones, in other words — across the regions. As you see in the graphic below, the gaps persisted: 4.6 years between the rich counties in the Left Coast and Deep South, for instance. . . . . We saw similar patterns when we repeated the exercise using education levels. When it comes to life and death, some regions are less equal than others.
The same went for relative access to quality clinical care. CHRR assigns every U.S. county a ranking for this based on a combination of 10 factors, including the number of doctors, dentists, mental health professionals, mammography screens, flu vaccinations and uninsured people per capita, as well as how often Medicare enrollees wind up admitted to hospitals with conditions that should be able to be treated on an outpatient basis, an indication the latter services weren’t available. We compared those counties in the top quartiles of this ranking system to one another across the regions and found the gap between them not only persisted, it actually widened, with the Deep South falling about two and half years behind Yankeedom, El Norte and the Far West, 4.4 years behind New Netherland and 5.1 behind Left Coast.
Turns out even the “haves” are not doing better in the “laissez-faire” regions. One of the most arresting facts that emerged from our analysis was that the most impoverished quartile of U.S. counties in Yankeedom (ones where around 30 to 60 percent of children live in poverty) have a higher life expectancy than the least impoverished quartile of U.S. counties (where child poverty ranges from 3 to 15 percent) in the Deep South by 0.3 years.
“There are regions of the country with structural barriers to health, where types of long-standing discrimination and disinvestment have occurred through policies and practices applied and reinforced by people with more power. … Counties in these regions have fewer social and economic opportunities today.”
One example: States that have expanded Medicaid eligibility have seen significant reductions in premature deaths while those that have not have seen increases. At this writing, 11 states still haven’t expanded the state-implemented program even though almost the entire burden of doing so comes from the federal government. All but two of those states are controlled by the Deep South and Greater Appalachia.
Five years ago, University of Cincinnati sociologist Jennifer Malat and two colleagues probed a related question: Given the legacy of white privilege in American society, why do white people have lower life expectancy than their counterparts in Canada and Western Europe, as well as per capita suicide and psychiatric disorder rates far higher than their Black, Asian or Latino peers? Their conclusion: “Whiteness encourages whites to reject policies designed to help the poor and reduce inequality because of animosity toward people of color as well as being unaware that the poor include a great many white people.” Other wealthy countries, they noted, produce poverty rates similar or greater than ours, but they have stronger welfare systems that buffer much of the population from the health problems that often flow from poverty. Whatever the reason, our data definitely show a relationship between social spending and health outcomes for white people across regions.
Again, residents of these less healthy regions have only their own politics and prejudices to blame for their shortened lives.
Sunday, September 03, 2023
The Decline in "Civics Education" Fuels the Culture Wars
Free speech is once again a flashpoint on college campuses. This year has seen at least 20 instances in which students or faculty members attempted to rescind invitations or to silence speakers. In March, law school students at our own institution made national news when they shouted down a conservative federal judge, Kyle Duncan. And by signing legislation that undermines academic freedom in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis is carrying out what is effectively a broad assault against higher education.
We believe that this intolerance of ideas is not just a consequence of an increasingly polarized society. We think it also results from the failure of higher education to provide students with the kind of shared intellectual framework that we call “civic education.” It is our responsibility as educators to equip students to live in a democratic society whose members will inevitably disagree on many things. To strengthen free speech on campuses, we need to return civic education to the heart of our curriculum.
Throughout the 20th century, many colleges and universities had a required first-year course that honed these skills. Typically, this course was known as Western Civ (short for “civilization”). Such courses became standard during the interwar period, as immigration transformed the student body and liberal democracy itself was under threat around the world.
Western Civ also served another, often unintentional, purpose: It provided a mutually intelligible set of references that situated students’ disagreements on common ground.
Generations of students grappled with Socrates’ argument that the rule of law cannot survive if people simply ignore laws they don’t support. By debating plausible answers, students learned to see disagreement as a necessary ingredient of both learning and of life. They also confronted hard questions about civil disobedience and social change. And the common references that students picked up in their first year provided a foundation for future conversations and courses.
The limitations of Western Civ are evident from its title. It exposed students to Western ideas only, implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) suggesting that these ideas were superior to those from other cultures.
Eventually, these limitations proved intractable. In 1987, activists at Stanford denounced the “European-Western and male bias” of the university’s first-year requirement, then called Western Culture. The course was replaced with a program that had no Western focus.
From 1964 to 2010, almost all selective schools (Columbia being an exception) abandoned first-year requirements featuring a common humanities curriculum. Instead, they opted for a “buffet” model, in which students could choose from various curricular tracks.
Many colleges said the change was a pragmatic one, given the disagreements about which texts should be mandatory. We believe there was another reason universities turned toward an à la carte curriculum: They had come under the spell, like much of society at that time, of a free-market ideology. In this vision, individual choice and individual advancement take center stage. Requirements are recast as paternalistic; freedom is understood as doing as one pleases.
Freedom of choice is an important value. But without common foundations, it can lead to people shouting one another down. An educational model that leaves no room for a core curriculum shaped by the demands of 21st-century democracies leaves students woefully ill equipped for dealing with disagreements. In a world where individual choice is supreme, how do we learn to accept that there are alternative perspectives to our own that may also be valid? If my goals are the only ones that matter, those who do not share them can too easily be viewed as obstacles that need to be swept away. In the educational context, the invisible hand can turn into an iron fist.
The widespread adoption of a free-market approach to the college curriculum has had other noxious effects, as well: It has fueled a rampant vocationalism among students, leading them to desert humanities classes in favor of pre-professional tracks aimed at lucrative careers. When universities do not signal the intrinsic value of certain topics or texts by requiring them, many students simply follow market cues.
Civic education, by contrast, is a public good. Left to the market, it will always be undersupplied. It is rarely a priority for employers or for job seekers to promote the skills of active listening, mutual reasoning, respecting differences and open-mindedness. We need to reinvest in it.
In the absence of civic education, it is not surprising that universities are at the epicenter of debates over free speech and its proper exercise. Free speech is hard work. The basic assumptions and attitudes necessary for cultivating free speech do not come to us naturally. Listening to people with whom you disagree can be unpleasant. But universities have a moral and civic duty to teach students how to consider and weigh contrary viewpoints, and how to accept differences of opinion as a healthy feature of a diverse society. Disagreement is in the nature of democracies.
Universities and colleges must do a better job of explaining to our students the rationale for free speech, as well as cultivating in them the skills and mind-set necessary for its practice. The free-market curriculum model is simply not equipped for this task. We cannot leave this imperative up to student choice.
At Stanford, since 2021, we once again have a single, common undergraduate requirement. By structuring its curriculum around important topics rather than canonical texts, and by focusing on the cultivation of democratic skills such as listening, reasonableness and humility, we have sought to steer clear of the cultural issues that doomed Western Civ. The new requirement was approved by our faculty senate in May 2020 without a single dissenting vote.
Called Civic, Liberal and Global Education, it includes a course on citizenship in the 21st century. Delivered in a small discussion-seminar format, this course provides students with the skills, training and perspectives for engaging in meaningful ways with others, especially when they disagree. All students read the same texts, some canonical and others contemporary. Just as important, all students work on developing the same skills. Preliminary assessments and feedback suggest that our new program is meeting its goals.
To be clear, our civic education does not aim at achieving consensus among students, nor at producing moderation. Our students, like all of us, will continue to disagree on many things. Nor are our students the only ones in need of such civic skills — numerous members of Congress and governors could no doubt use this curriculum, as well. (We’d be happy to share it.)
But it is our belief that by restoring a common curricular foundation centered on the democratic skills our students need to live in a diverse society, they will turn to more constructive ways to engage with those with whom they disagree than censorship or cancellation.
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