"Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South?"

[applegrove]

Why Is the American Dream Dead in the South?

by Matthew O'Brien at the Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/why-is-the-american-dream-dead-in-the-south/283313/

"SNIP.....................................

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1. Race. The researchers found that the larger the black population, the lower the upward mobility. But this isn't actually a black-white issue. It's a rich-poor one. Low-income whites who live in areas with more black people also have a harder time moving up the income ladder. In other words, it's something about the places that black people live that hurts mobility.

2. Segregation. Something like the poor being isolated—isolated from good jobs and good schools. See, the more black people a place has, the more divided it tends to be along racial and economic lines. The more divided it is, the more sprawl there is. And the more sprawl there is, the less higher-income people are willing to invest in things like public transit.

That leaves the poor in the ghetto, with no way out for their American Dreams. They're stuck with bad schools, bad jobs, and bad commutes if they do manage to find better work. So it should be no surprise that the researchers found that racial segregation, income segregation, and sprawl are all strongly negatively correlated with upward mobility. But what might surprise is that it doesn't matter whether the rich cut themselves off from everybody else. What matters is whether the middle class cut themselves off from the poor.

3. Social Capital. Living around the middle class doesn't just bring better jobs and schools (which help, but probably aren't enough). It brings better institutions too. Things like religious groups, civic groups, and any other kind of group that keeps people from bowling alone. All of these are strongly correlated with more mobility—which is why Utah, with its vast Mormon safety net and services, is one of the best places to be born poor.




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[applegrove]

1. And there is more divorce in the South.

[Art_from_Ark]

2. I'm not sure if there is any correlation

Lots of parents of my Arkansas classmates got divorced after their kids graduated from high school, and nearly all of them were middle class.

[applegrove]

3. They said single parent homes were an issue.

[1000words]

4. Because far too many still wish it was the Confederacy?

[cordelia]

5. No

[Art_from_Ark]

8. That stuff gets kind of old after a while, doesn't it?

[CherokeeDem]

10. Extremely old... nt

[DemocraticWing]

6. The Southern economy has long been based on cheap labor.

It started out being slave labor, but after the Civil War, the elite in the South constructed a just as elaborate system to keep making massive amounts of money on the backs of the poor. It was actually a better deal for them because they could practically enslave the poor white sharecroppers just as easily as the poor black ones. That's why poor whites who live in areas with a lot of black people are poor: by about 1880, they were both working the fields and both lived in horrid conditions.

Things have changed a bit, or at least the economy has, but basically these really poor areas are simply full of poor people with few wealthy people. They've already moved to the cities or elsewhere, and a lot of the best workers fled North decades ago. What's left are impoverished communities (both black and white) with little or no functioning economy, a miniscule tax base, and horrible infrastructure and social services. The state governments are fine with preserving this because these people can work for minimum wage and keep the elites wealthy, and the federal government stopped helping around the time Ronald Reagan came to power.

Politically, poor people are less likely to vote everywhere in America, and nowhere is this more true than in the South. This is partly be design, since poor people being prevented from voting means they're not likely to vote out those who create their conditions. For a long time the elites in the South functioned in the Democratic Party, and now they've moved to the Republicans, but in essence the deep south (and much of the upper south) functions as a one-party state where the government serves only the rich and prevents the poor from bettering themselves or voting in people who would allow them to.

Racism is but one tool the Southern elites use to keep the status quo, but it's traditionally been their most effective. Religion has become more and more effective in recent years. The Southern form of religion is truly the opiate of the masses that Marx warned about: the elites tell the proletariat that they can stop being poor if they pray hard enough, and so they are distracted from what really keeps them poor.

This is American capitalism in its most pure form. The South has gotten their first, but the North and the West are heading that way quickly. We've got to stop it before it kills us.

[applegrove]

9. +1000 except the part about all the talent leaving. Are not people of all stripes moving back to the

Last edited Wed Jan 29, 2014, 01:22 AM - Edit history (1)

South?

[Art_from_Ark]

11. Just remember that the "elite" in the South were not all locals

One thing that drew so many "carpetbaggers" to the South after the Civil War was the fact that they could buy up all sorts of properties on the cheap.

[Barack_America]

7. Antipathy to unions should be numbers 1-3, followed by this stuff at 4-....