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Loading... Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope (edition 2020)187 | 15 | 108,624 |
(3.95) | 5 | New York Times Best Seller "A deft and uniquely credible exploration of rural America, and of other left-behind pockets of our country. One of the most important books I've read on the state of our disunion."--Tara Westover, author of Educated The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of the acclaimed, best-selling Half the Sky now issue a plea--deeply personal and told through the lives of real Americans--to address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America." The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. And while these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, ranging from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia. But here too are stories about resurgence, among them: Annette Dove, who has devoted her life to helping the teenagers of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as they navigate the chaotic reality of growing up poor; Daniel McDowell, of Baltimore, whose tale of opioid addiction and recovery suggests that there are viable ways to solve our nation's drug epidemic. These accounts, illustrated with searing images by Lynsey Addario, the award-winning photographer, provide a picture of working-class families needlessly but profoundly damaged as a result of decades of policy mistakes. With their superb, nuanced reportage, Kristof and WuDunn have given us a book that is both riveting and impossible to ignore.… (more) |
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Epigraph |
Be sure when you step/ Step with care and great tact/ And remember that Life's a Great Balancing Act. - Dr. Seuss, 'Oh, the Places You'll Go!'  | |
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Dedication |
For Ladis and Jane, David and Alice, who nurtured us. For Darrell, Sirena and Sandra, who shaped us. For Gregory, Geoffrey and Caroline, who exhausted us and enriched us. / And for all those passing through the inferno who spoke to us honestly about their struggles so that the public might understand and support wiser policies.  | |
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Dee Knapp was asleep when her husband, Gary, stumbled drunkenly into their white frame house after a night out drinking.  | |
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America now lags behind its peer countries in health care and high-school graduation rates while suffering greater violence, poverty and addiction. This dysfunction damages all Americans: it undermines our nation’s competitiveness, especially as growing economies like China’s are fueled by much larger populations and by rising education levels, and may erode the well-being of our society for decades to come. The losers are not just those at the bottom of society, but all of us.  Overall, the Social Progress Index ranks the United States number 26 in well-being of citizens, behind all the other members of the G7 as well as significantly poorer countries like Portugal and Slovenia, and America is one of just a handful of countries that have fallen backward. “Despite spending more on healthcare than any other country in the world, the US has health outcomes comparable to Ecuador, while the US school system is producing results on par with Uzbekistan,” the 2018 Social Progress Index concluded.  One mechanism by which pain on the bottom is transmitted throughout the nation is the political system. Some 60 million Americans live in a rural America that is suffering, and the U.S. political architecture gives the frustrations of these rural Americans disproportionate political influence. They have particular weight in the Senate, where each state has two senators, so a Wyoming voter has sixty-eight times as much clout in choosing a senator as a California voter. This baked-in bias in the Senate and Electoral College in favor of small, rural states will continue to give rural voters outsize influence for the foreseeable future, and rural America has for decades endured economic decline and social turmoil that have left voters angry and disillusioned. The political consequences are visible: Working-class Americans helped elect President Trump. The reasons they backed Trump were complicated and sometimes included nativism, racism and sexism, but about 8 million of these voters had supported Barack Obama in 2012. Many cast ballots for Trump as a primal scream of desperation because they felt forgotten, neglected and scorned by traditional politicians.  When life expectancy declined in Russia, just as it has in America today, that was a sign of systemic troubles that patriotic rhetoric could no longer conceal. It should have been a wake-up call, just as America’s declining life expectancy today should be our own alarm bell.  The people in the top 0.1 percent did fantastically well after 1980, those in the top 1 percent did very well, those below them in the top 10 percent enjoyed incomes growing at the same pace as the economy and those in the bottom 90 percent all lost ground—their incomes grew more slowly than the overall economy—during the last four decades. The Wall Street bonus pool at the end of each year exceeds the combined annual earnings of all Americans working full-time at the federal minimum wage.  When decent jobs disappear, the loss is not just economic but has consequences for self-esteem, family structure, substance abuse, hopelessness and even child abuse. One study found that for each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate in a county, the incidence of child neglect rose by 20 percent.  More than a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt described a similar crisis: “Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit….The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power.”  There’s not much room for scrappy, bright kids whose parents don’t have a book in the house and are indifferent to schooling. College entrance may be based on metrics that seem meritocratic, like board scores and grades, but consider that 77 percent of kids in the top quartile of incomes graduate from college, compared to 9 percent of kids in the bottom quartile.  Today 15 percent of black students attend “apartheid schools,” in which at most 1 percent of the student body is white, and they graduate at lower rates than in integrated schools. Black students are on average two grade levels behind white students, and kids in poor districts are four grade levels behind those in rich districts. “Quietly and subtly, the opponents of integration have won,” writes Rucker C. Johnson in his book Children of the Dream, about school integration.  there are the incentives for economic development awarded by states and local areas, often never made public. Oregon awarded Nike $2 billion for five hundred jobs, or $4 million per job. Meanwhile, Louisiana paid $15 million for each of fifteen jobs with Valero Energy. In 2013, Washington State granted Boeing subsidies worth $8.7 billion over sixteen years, the largest subsidy in history for a company. By late April 2016, Boeing had laid off 5,600 workers.  It is difficult to imagine a more self-defeating strategy. Federal, state, county and city governments incur vast costs in running jails and prisons. Sometimes these costs are “recovered” from the prisoners, thus fuelling the latter’s cycle of poverty and desperation. The criminal records attached to the poor through imprisonment make it even harder for them to find jobs, housing, stability and self-sufficiency. Families are destroyed, children are left parentless and the burden on governments mounts….In the United States, it is poverty that needs to be arrested, not the poor simply for being poor.  Our political system responds to large donors, so politicians create benefits for the rich, who then reward the politicians who created them.  As hostility toward government spread in America, there have been determined efforts to cut taxes, particularly for the wealthy, and then “starve the beast”—using reduced revenue to justify cuts in services for the disadvantaged. This is both disingenuous and cruel, as well as out of step with the advanced world.  Repeated psychology experiments have shown that fear makes us more conservative in our political beliefs, and Richard Nixon seized upon the fears in 1968 when he ran for president with coded dog whistles playing on white apprehensions of black unrest. This “southern strategy” turned the South into a GOP bastion, and the fearmongering has often extended into social policies as well. Welfare was portrayed as handouts to lazy blacks, and immigration as a threat to American culture and jobs. The lack of social-support policies then led to a certain despair and disintegration of traditional communities, amplifying fears that traditional values were being lost and pushing states that once had progressive streaks, like Iowa and Oklahoma, firmly into the Republican camp.  Our international competitiveness is damaged because the American economy has created a Hobbesian world in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” As the business writer Steven Pearlstein put it: “What began as a useful corrective has, 25 years later, become a morally corrupting and self-defeating economic dogma that threatens the future of American capitalism….Our current prosperity is not sustainable because it is not producing the kind of society that most of us desire.”  there’s far more anger at perceived welfare abuses than at larger subsidies for private jets. The resentment is more visceral when it is people around them who are bending rules and benefiting unfairly.  The government failed him, blamed him and jailed him. A couple of generations ago, the United States rewarded veterans by affording them education and housing benefits. More recently, the United States helped get veterans hooked on drugs and then incarcerated them.  Purdue was later convicted of a felony for fraudulently marketing its opioids by downplaying the risk of addiction. The company was vigorously defended by Rudy Giuliani, and its $600 million fine was negligible compared to the $35 billion that it is estimated to have earned from OxyContin. Individual executives from Purdue were also convicted and made to pay substantial fines, but they never served a day of jail time. Purdue was allowed to continue selling opioids, and the Sackler family is now worth $13 billion.  Without much discussion, we have created a two-tier justice system. If you shoplift at the grocery store, you can be carted off to jail. But if you steal tens of millions of dollars from the tax authorities or fraudulently peddle dangerous drugs from a corporate suite, you’ll be hailed for your business savvy.  Crackdowns on small-time drug offenders in the United States devastated many low-income families, especially in African-American communities, and the resulting felony records left black men in particular less employable and less marriageable. The United States has spent more than $1 trillion on the war on drugs, money spent locking up two-bit users rather than educating children. The war on drugs has been perhaps the worst single policy mistake of the last half century.  Outpatient substance abuse assistance costs about $4,700 a year; incarceration costs five times as much, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. It says that a dollar invested in addiction treatment programs saves $12 in reduced crime and court costs, plus health-care savings.  Over the last fifty years, poverty has come to be seen not just as an economic failing but also as a moral one, prompting a pervasive suspicion that the poor are secretly living cushy lives on government benefits. A Pew poll found that wealthy Americans mostly agreed that “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.”  Humans are moved to help individuals, not to address structural problems.  America’s health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system. —WALTER CRONKITE, former anchor for CBS Evening News  The bottom line is that since 1970 we have seen American exceptionalism in health care in multiple ways: we lack universal care, we spend more on health and we get worse results.  Rent control doesn’t increase the supply and tends to constrict it because people don’t give up bargain apartments, and developers are wary of building if they think their returns will be held down. In some cities, owners can also convert rentals to unregulated condominiums. Meanwhile, rent control tends to increase demand, so you have more people competing for fewer apartments.  Everyone knows that there are government housing programs for the poor, like Section 8 (costing $30 billion annually), but few Americans realize that in recent years we have spent more than twice as much on subsidizing housing for mostly affluent homeowners ($71 billion annually through mortgage interest deductions and other benefits).  Poverty is the mother of crime. —MARCUS AURELIUS  private prisons lobby for harsher sentences to increase their occupancy rates and improve their profitability. The two largest for-profit prison companies have devoted $25 million to lobbying.  It turns out that when communities of any race lose jobs and self-esteem, people are more likely to soothe themselves with narcotics, drift into crime and suffer family breakdown. And it doesn’t much help to hear Horatio Alger pieties about personal responsibility from those who have made it.  Same-sex couples seem to have slightly better outcomes for their kids than heterosexual couples, perhaps because no gay couple ever had a child by mistake.  One of the most infuriating elements of American myopia about investing in at-risk kids is that politicians often insist that they don’t have the funds to pay for social services—but they somehow find the resources to pay for prisons later on. Republican lawmakers don’t want to pay for $500 IUDs for low-income women, so they pay $17,000 for Medicaid births. They don’t want to pay to reduce lead poisoning, even though that means paying for special-education classes for years to come; one study by the Pew Research Center found that every dollar invested in large-scale efforts to reduce lead poisoning saves $17 in public money later on.  It’s perhaps telling that the United States for years was, embarrassingly, the only country in the world besides Somalia and South Sudan that had not ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child. That has now changed: the United States is the only nation that hasn’t bothered to ratify it. Maybe that’s a symbolic matter, but here’s something profoundly real: children make up almost one-third of Americans living in poverty, and on any given night some 115,000 children are homeless in the world’s most powerful country.  While poor Americans may have a color TV and access to hospital emergency rooms, they also have a life expectancy similar to that of Mongolia, a homicide rate higher than in Rwanda and an incarceration rate that is the highest in the world. What we found everywhere in our journey, in white communities or black ones, in cities or rural areas, was that the defining ethos of life in the homes of kids like Emmanuel is disorder, dysfunction, despair and danger.  political scientists have found that even in a democracy, inequality awards the wealthy not only with more wealth but also with more political power. The rich then use this power to consolidate their own wealth. The upshot is that the more urgent economic justice becomes, the less likely it is to be pursued.  | |
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Last words |
We can shore up the American dream so that the children today climbing aboard the Number 6 school bus - and skipping into schools all across the country - achieve more of the dreams that animate them, so that this truly becomes, in Woody Guthrie's vision "a land made for you and me." (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.) | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources. Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions New York Times Best Seller "A deft and uniquely credible exploration of rural America, and of other left-behind pockets of our country. One of the most important books I've read on the state of our disunion."--Tara Westover, author of Educated The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors of the acclaimed, best-selling Half the Sky now issue a plea--deeply personal and told through the lives of real Americans--to address the crisis in working-class America, while focusing on solutions to mend a half century of governmental failure. With stark poignancy and political dispassion, Tightrope draws us deep into an "other America." The authors tell this story, in part, through the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, in rural Yamhill, Oregon, an area that prospered for much of the twentieth century but has been devastated in the last few decades as blue-collar jobs disappeared. About one-quarter of the children on Kristof's old school bus died in adulthood from drugs, alcohol, suicide, or reckless accidents. And while these particular stories unfolded in one corner of the country, they are representative of many places the authors write about, ranging from the Dakotas and Oklahoma to New York and Virginia. But here too are stories about resurgence, among them: Annette Dove, who has devoted her life to helping the teenagers of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, as they navigate the chaotic reality of growing up poor; Daniel McDowell, of Baltimore, whose tale of opioid addiction and recovery suggests that there are viable ways to solve our nation's drug epidemic. These accounts, illustrated with searing images by Lynsey Addario, the award-winning photographer, provide a picture of working-class families needlessly but profoundly damaged as a result of decades of policy mistakes. With their superb, nuanced reportage, Kristof and WuDunn have given us a book that is both riveting and impossible to ignore. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
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The policy prescriptions are quite muddled, arguing for a greater collective response from the public sector but never mentioning how Congress and state legislatures have onerously de-funded or blocked the solutions they lift up as effective. And even the specific popular policy proposals of the final chapter are introduced as "big steps we urge the country to take" while ignoring that if not for obstructionist governors, legislators, and presidents we would have these already. This is my pet peeve, clearly, but if really sincere about selling these, two renowned authors and public figures wouldn't write them in great detail in your popular nonfiction book, instead putting them into policy briefs with evidence and sending to the White House and Congress, then asking in the book (and your op ed column) that your readers lobby their representatives for their passage into law! That would seem to be a more effective way to ensure that Yamhill and places like it have a promising future. Still, the authors do have it correct when they say "helping people is harder than it looks." Nonprofit and front-facing social service agency staff frequently burn out and leave their jobs because of the constant challenges of what they do, and we can do better by them.
In any case, two sources they reference are probably the most relevant texts on this topic: the National Academies' 2019 study "A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty" and the Boston Globe's in-depth survey of the life outcomes of valedictorians of urban high schools 10+ years on. Unless you are specifically interested in this corner of rural Oregon, I'd read those instead. (