by Bill Bishop
The speeding economic collapse in the southern mountains has produced a kind of civic dysfunction. In McDowell County, the state took over the school system in 2001 after an audit found failing students and a school board preoccupied with politics. (Kentucky had ousted the Harlan County school board a few years before for similar transgressions.) In Harlan County, a former sheriff running for his old office was shot and killed in 2002 after he collected a pouch of money from a drug dealer. Just over the mountain, a Wise County, Virginia, grand jury found 1,000 violations of voting laws in one 2004 election—two crimes for every vote cast. The mayor of the town of Appalachia allegedly bought votes with sacks of fried pork rinds. The zombies in the play Higher Ground weren't fictional creations. They were neighbors. In 2005, Federal Express stopped making deliveries of prescription drugs in many Eastern Kentucky counties. Drivers had complained that their trucks had been surrounded by staggering, stumbling people anxious for the deliveries. "If a driver goes up one of these hollows and comes up on six or eight people who know he has drugs on there, they may decide to take them," said one Eastern Kentucky sheriff. "There's a legitimate concern."21
Struggles with addiction are part of everyone's daily life in Harlan County. Just off the wonderful main square in the county seat, a large Christian church has strung a banner over its front door promoting "Recovery Night." Every Thursday, two hundred to three hundred people gather at the church for inspiration and smaller twelve-step meetings. Up the Clover Fork in the coal camp of Evarts, the medical clinic quietly opened a drug treatment program; it quickly filled twenty-two openings and had a dozen people on a waiting list, according to clinic director Dr. J. D. Miller. This in a town of just 1,000 people. "It's been said that every family here is touched," Miller told me early one morning in 2005 at a breakfast joint filled with dust-covered miners just off the hoot owl shift. "Everybody here has a close personal friend or a relative who is on OxyContin. That's true." A few years ago, the local mental health agency needed several vans to transport pregnant women from Harlan County to a methadone clinic in Corbin, a nearly two-hour drive over sixty-three miles of mountain roads. Although Harlan County had a population of only 32,000 at the time, Miller said that forty young mothers were in the methadone program.
The "drug zombie" scene in Higher Ground, with the actors holding aching backs, zeroed in on how Harlan County's uniquely pervasive drug problem began. "In the past, coal miners spent hours each day crouched in narrow mine shafts," concluded a report issued in 2002 by the U.S. Department of Justice. "Painkillers were dispensed by coal mine camp doctors in an attempt to keep the miners working. Self-medicating became a way of life for miners."22 In the fall of 2005, a disability attorney's come-on could be seen on a large billboard at the entrance to town. It showed an old, bent, and particularly grizzled miner and asked, "Broke Down?" OxyContin came to Harlan County because people here have pains—in hips, backs, and shoulders—resulting from working underground. The country wanted the coal, and the miners needed the work. Pain pills were an unstated part of the arrangement—and it probably lowered the cost that the unsavory bargain was struck in a place so far out of sight, a piece of America that is literally at the end of the tracks.
The OxyContin sales force targeted Appalachian doctors. Reports in the Lexington Herald-Leader found that Purdue Pharma's marketing plan for its new medicine was to seek out physicians who were already prescribing large amounts of painkilling drugs. In 1998, according to the newspaper, Purdue shipped more OxyContin per capita to portions of southern West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky than to any other region or city in the nation.23 (In 2007, Purdue Pharma and three of its executives agreed to pay more than $650 million in fines for the misleading ways it had promoted OxyContin.)24 Richard Clayton, an addiction expert who heads the University of Kentucky's Center for Prevention Research, told the Lexington newspaper, "This may be the first epidemic—if it is an epidemic—that started in rural areas."25
Joan Robinett now lives in a brick house perched on a hill above the town of Harlan. She led a decade-long effort in the Dayhoit coal camp that eventually won more than $20 million from a firm that had polluted the town's ground water. The fight changed Robinett from country girl to Kentucky's Erin Brockovich. You have to climb seventy-five steps to get to her house, which also served as headquarters for the Harlan County "listening project." In 2005, Robinett and her coworkers conducted more than 450 interviews with residents about drug abuse and their hopes for Harlan County. The stories are a mixture of hopelessness and horror. A young divorced woman said:
The quality of life is so low. People look ahead and see the mountains blown off and the water ruined. And the drugs come around. When you deal with what people have to deal with here. I don't know how to say it ... Me and my son were on our own and everywhere I went I began to feel like a failure. I never dreamed I would turn to drugs but it seemed to be the easy way out. The Xanax at first I used it to help me cope and later found if you took two you would feel good and later realized if I drank on it I felt really good. Before you know it I began to sell my home interior and then my furniture. Before you know it, I thought I couldn't live without it.
A middle-aged woman with four years of college education said:
Doctors and drug companies feed us drugs just like giving a baby candy ... It's so bad that I can no longer trust some people in my own family. They steal from you—lie. You never know who is on drugs—people drooling—taking from their parents and children. It's awful.
Living has never been particularly easy in Harlan County, but it had always maintained a connection with the rest of the country. The Big Sort has cut many of those ties. Now the county has fallen away and staggers about in a haze. FedEx drivers are afraid to deliver, and the life expectancy for men is no better than in Ecuador, Turkey, or Colombia.26
Eugene Goss is a Republican, a lawyer on the main square in the town of Harlan, and one of the grand men of Kentucky. To get to Harlan County from Virginia, you drive the smooth Gene Goss Highway. He's lived through the Depression, strikes, and coal mine disasters. Now this, the zombie dance. "We're at the end of the line," Goss told me while munching a biscuit his secretary had made for a midmorning snack. He described Harlan County as a "storage tank" for the rest of the country, a place tapped for its energy and then forgotten. Goss stayed in Harlan County because he saw a future there, but now even hope is gone. He said, "There's a whole lot of feeling that we are the way we're going to be and there isn't anything to be done about it. We are what we are, and that's how it's going to continue."
The Culture of Prosperity
In 2000, Robert Putnam commissioned a survey of 30,000 people in forty American communities. Putnam is the author of Bowling Alone, the book documenting the decline in civic organizations that began in the mid-1960s. His 2000 survey was designed to measure the nation's civic well-being, so he asked people if they went to church, voted, volunteered, donated to charities, belonged to clubs, or attended discussion groups. Putnam asked how often people socialized and how much they trusted others. People living in different places gave widely varying responses. Those living in places such as Bismarck, North Dakota; Birmingham, Alabama; and Kalamazoo, Michigan, exhibited strong social ties; they volunteered, went to church, stayed close to their families, and voted. Based on his earlier research in both the United States and Italy, Putnam assumed that the stronger the social connections, the healthier the community.*
As Bob Cushing and I looked at how the Big Sort was creating greater inequality among cities—in patents, incomes, and levels of education—we wondered whether there was a relationship between culture and economic success. Putnam's groundbreaking analysis gave us the data, and we set to work examining our high-tech cities with his measures of civic health. In fact, there was a relationship between the health of the local civic culture and the well-being of the economy. It was negative. The tighter the social ties, the fewer the patents, the lower the wages, and the slower the rates of gr
owth. Bismarck, Baton Rouge, and Cincinnati all had whopping numbers of civic connections (social and volunteer groups, high rates of voter participation), but they had relatively few patents and showed slow (if any) growth. Cities such as San Diego, Houston, Los Angeles, and Atlanta (as well as Silicon Valley) all had bottom-of-the-barrel social connections but high rates of innovation and growth and high incomes.27 The high-tech, fast-growing cities scored high on only two of Putnam's eleven gauges of social well-being: their residents registered a high degree of interracial trust and were more inclined to engage in "protest politics." They voted less than those in more traditional cities but signed more petitions and joined more demonstrations and boycotts—in other words, they acted politically as post-materialists.
Some cities boasted strong social ties, while others appeared to be flying apart—volunteers diminishing, church attendance declining, voting rates dropping. Our American sense of right and wrong would tell us that the cities with vibrant clubs, full pews, abundant volunteers, and eager voters should be more economically successful than the civic wastelands. They would be the places with strong businesses and high wages. People would be flocking to these good communities. But they weren't.
We examined another database Putnam had used. The DDB Needham Life Style survey28 asked 87,000 Americans dozens of questions from 1975 through 1998 about how they spent their free time—whether they volunteered, visited museums, or worked in a political campaign. Again we found that the cities that needed civic respirators were the most prosperous. These regions were filled with people filing patents and businesses paying higher wages. They were the places where young people were migrating. The civic-minded cities—those with crowded clubs and churches and abundant volunteers—had lower rates of innovation and lower average pay. We compared the 21 cities that had produced the most patents and had the most activity in technology-related businesses with the 138 cities that had the lowest rates of patent and high-tech production. We found that people in the high-tech cities had significantly different answers to the DDB surveys than those in the low-tech cities. The economic differences between these two groups were reflected in the agency's polling.
High-Tech Cities (Compared to Low-Tech Cities)
More interested in other cultures and places
More likely to "try anything once"
More likely to engage in individualistic activities
More optimistic
More interested in politics
Volunteering increasing, but less than in low-tech cities
Church attendance decreasing
Community projects decreasing
Club membership decreasing
Low-Tech Cities (Compared to High-Tech Cities)
More likely to attend church
Club membership decreasing, but less than in high-tech cities
Community projects increasing
Volunteering increasing
More active participation in clubs, churches, volunteer services, and civic projects
More supportive of traditional authority
More family oriented
More feelings of isolation
More feelings of economic vulnerability
More sedentary
Higher levels of stress
Political interest decreasing
More social activities with other people
Within the United States, groups of cities seemed to be developing in radically different ways, moving along diverging trajectories. There were obvious distinctions in the basic ways people were going about their lives, and these social distinctions seemed to have economic consequences.
Birmingham, Alabama, scored high in Putnam's survey on church attendance, civic leadership, volunteering, and club membership, but below the national average on interracial friendships and protest politics. On Putnam's measures of civic vitality, Boulder, Colorado, scored above the national average only on protest politics and interracial friendships—and the per capita rate of patent production in Boulder was four times that of Birmingham. Young people were particularly attracted to places with low levels of social capital. (Perhaps the massive inflow itself created problems in maintaining close social ties.) The number of Generation Xers (ages twenty to thirty-five) increased by 9 percent in Birmingham in the 1990s (well below the national average); the number in the Denver/Boulder metro area increased by more than 50 percent.
The calculations that Bob Cushing's computer was churning out backed up Richard Florida's argument that there was a link between talent, technology, and tolerance—that educated young people in the "creative class" would flock to places where they would not be bound by old ideas or tight social ties. (Florida used our analysis in his book The Rise of the Creative Class.)29 Certainly, none of the old explanations seemed to apply to these socially fragmented but economically thriving cities. Indeed, this wasn't the way economies were supposed to work at all.
In the 1970s, cities were dying—at the same time mainline churches, civic organizations, and political parties also were dying. People were moving out. Most cities had their lowest population growth in the 1970s. For the ten largest cities (except Houston), each showed a decline in per capita income relative to the rest of the country. In four of the five largest cities, housing prices plummeted. (Only Los Angeles escaped the 1970s house price slump.) Crime rose in the 1970s, and metro areas bled people.30 Everyone pretty much concluded that cities were dead, murdered by the automobile; phones, faxes, and computers; and the rush to the Sun Belt suburbs. People didn't have to cluster in one place. There simply wasn't much need for cities or for people to be close to one another. People could scatter; they could live anywhere because distance no longer mattered.
Or did it?
A New Theory of Growth
Paul Romer, a Stanford University economist, delights in using everyday items to construct mathematic formulas that end in inconceivably large numbers. In a favorite example, Romer presents a child's chemistry set stocked with 100 substances. If someone set out to test all the possible combinations of these items, that would be a very time-consuming chore. There are 1030 possible compounds in the box (and that's without changing proportions). "If every living person on earth (about 5 billion) had tried a different mixture each second since the universe began (no more than 20 billion years ago)," Romer wrote, "we would still have tested less than 1 percent of all the possible combinations."31
Romer's point isn't just to show the power of exponential multiplication. The chemistry set is a metaphor for the story he has to tell about the sources of economic growth. If one looks at each possible formula from a child's simple chemistry set as the equivalent of a new idea—a potentially economy-changing compound—it becomes clear that the stock of potentially valuable knowledge in the world is quite literally infinite. Only a small percentage of those "ideas" have economic value, but a small percentage of such a large number means that the potential for growth and wealth from those new ideas is still limitless.
Until 1957, the prevailing theory was that increasing the application of labor and capital—more coal, ore, machines, and workers—made economies grow. That year, economist Robert Solow wrote a paper arguing that labor and capital alone couldn't account for the continuing expansion of the economy. Solow argued that a third factor, technical knowledge, combined with labor and capital to increase economic productivity.*32 In the 1980s, Romer refined that concept. "We now know that the classical suggestion that we can grow rich by accumulating more and more pieces of physical capital like forklifts is simply wrong," he wrote.33 Economic growth wasn't a function of forklifts. Nor, to the disbelief of several generations of southern governors, was prosperity a function of the accumulation of Yankee smokestacks lured by low taxes. Counting physical assets missed what development was all about, Romer said. Using a Betty Crocker analogy, Romer insisted that an abundance of great ingredients—lots of oil, deep ports, or fertile ground—didn't make a place rich. The source of wealth was having the right recipe. Th
e places that grew wealthy were those whose people learned to arrange their ingredients in ever new and economically useful ways.
According to Romer, not every idea (or new recipe) was big or even based on scientific discovery. Economies grew because people were constantly incorporating new ideas into all aspects of work. If a guy on a loading dock figured out a better way to pack a truck, that idea could increase profits throughout a firm. And once an economically useful idea was hatched, it could be used and reused without wear and tear. An idea, unlike a forklift, also could be put to work simultaneously by a limitless number of people. Eventually, other companies would pick up the idea about packing a truck. Then it would be modified for use in warehouses. Everyone using the truck-packing idea would benefit. The entire society would be more productive and richer because of one person's new way of arranging a limited set of ingredients.34 "No amount of savings and investment, no policy of macroeconomic fine-tuning, no set of tax and spending incentives can generate sustained economic growth unless it is accompanied by the countless large and small discoveries that are required to create more value from a fixed set of natural resources," Romer wrote.35 According to Romer-inspired "new growth theory," ideas were the essential factor in increasing economic returns.