DETROIT — Today is Bastille Day, which I grew up thinking was the day French citizens yearning for democracy rose up and tore down the infamous prison and freed their fellow patriots.
Well, not exactly. The mob that attacked the prison that day was primarily interested in the prison’s stores of gunpowder. While the Bastille once held hundreds of political prisoners in fairly horrible squalor, by 1789 not only had conditions greatly improved, the crowd that swarmed through the gates after great loss of life discovered that the giant fortress held only seven inmates.
Four of those were common crooks, one a sex criminal and the other two mentally ill. Nevertheless, the commandant and a few of the guards were torn to pieces, and a myth was born that helped spur the French Revolution, and has endured through the ages.
We have our own legends today — national, regional and local, myths usually based on a little truth, garnished with anger and resentment. Here’s one you may recognize:
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Back in the 1940s and 50s and 60s, Detroit and other cities of the manufacturing Midwest were booming wonderful places, with lots of good paying jobs for anyone who wanted one. We put the world on wheels and glass in the nation’s buildings and were the center of technology and innovation. The future looked even brighter.
Then, the jobs gradually started to disappear. Cars and other things began coming from and being made in Japan. Factories closed or moved to the South or Southwest, or were replaced by plants in Mexico. People left too, and now we are not only poorer and weaker, but sneered at as the ‘rustbelt.’
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There’s widespread agreement that the above is true, but far less agreement on who’s to blame. Some say it’s the fault of politicians in Washington, who only care about the East and West coasts, and neglect what they sneer at as ‘flyover country.”
Some blame ‘liberals’ for putting too many regulations on business, and making it too easy for lazy people to not work. Some blame businesses for putting profits ahead of people, and moving jobs to where labor is cheaper. Others say the rustbelt’s decline is primarily due to disastrous trade deals like NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement).
So for something close to a definitive answer, I talked to perhaps the leading expert on Michigan’s economy, Charles Ballard, a professor of economics at Michigan State University.
Toledo, incidentally, shares essentially the same economy as industrial southern Michigan. To an extent, he said, the surprising thing is not the recent decline, but the stunning triumphs the area has had over the last century. “When I look at the success of the manufacturing-based economy that flourished in the first two-thirds of the 20th century, it seems almost miraculous,” he said.
“Yes, there were tangible reasons for our success, including proximity to key resources. But some of it is not easily quantified.”
“Something magical was in the air in southern lower Michigan a century ago. Henry Ford, Ransom Olds, Herbert Dow, Kellogg and Upjohn made this part of the country one of the most dynamic centers for innovation in the world.”
“We rode that wave of innovation for many decades, and we succeeded in creating a standard of living for ordinary people that was unsurpassed for its time.”
But why did we lose that? Professor Ballard thinks instead of blaming others for our decline, we should look at our own missteps. “Too many in Michigan have kept their eyes focused on the rearview mirror, rather than on the road ahead.”
Much of this is because Michigan and Ohio have not valued higher education enough. “The returns to (those who are educated) began to skyrocket about 40-45 years ago, and the gap between the earnings of those with a bachelor’s degree and those with only a high school diploma widened dramatically.”
Unfortunately, most people didn’t understand what was going on, the economist said. “If we wanted to move forward with broadly shared prosperity, I think we would have increased our investment in education – but we didn’t.” Instead, his sense is “that we developed a culture where ordinary men thought they had a deal — they were to sit in a classroom until graduating from high school, and then they would have a lifetime job with upper-middle-class benefits.”
However, eventually “the world took that deal away!” As a result, many “went from a sense of entitlement to a sense of betrayal. But neither entitlement nor betrayal is good at motivating constructive change.”
Ballard, who grew up in Texas but now considers himself a complete Michigander, thinks constructive change is exactly what Michigan needs. For one thing, we need to reward not only higher levels of education, but also innovation.
Both racial segregation and segregation by income and a weakened public sector have led to “a huge mismatch between needs and resources,” that has taken a toll. Policies like NAFTA have taken their toll – but primarily because while “globalization in Europe was usually accompanied by a strong social safety net; here it was accompanied by a weak one, and so millions of American workers had little to fall back on when imports decimated their livelihoods.”
But can this be fixed? Could this part of the world become prosperous and competitive again? The answer is a qualified yes …
… if we are willing to drop the petulance and the politics and make the hard choices we so far haven’t had the will to make.
