Developing the Underdeveloped: An Antidote to Intellectual Strip-Mining?

While speaking on a trip to India in 2018, Hillary Clinton said this of the 2016 election: “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product...So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.” The message here couldn’t be clearer: the only places in America that matter are the places that drive GDP growth. And as for everywhere else...well, they’re a little like the ominous portions of the map that Simba’s father warns him about in The Lion King.

Here’s the part of the story that Clinton leaves out. Those places that drive GDP growth are dependent on a labor pool perpetually drawn from the undesirable places, a labor pool filled with the deplorables from post-industrial regions who are lucky enough to attend Harvard on a scholarship and are transformed into the kind of Very Important Person whose Very Important Job allows them to live in a Very Important City. Of course, the places that talent leaves are inversely hurt in exact proportion to the gains of the destination cities. When it comes to this kind of labor supply, it really is a zero-sum game. This certainly isn’t a new phenomenon, and while it is easy to pick on Clinton for her lack of tact in cheerfully acknowledging it, her view that this situation is and should be normative is often at least implicitly operative in policy circles, regardless of political affiliation.

I was thinking about this phenomenon—cultural critic Chris Arnade calls it “intellectual strip-mining”—while attending a recent webinar hosted by The American Project at Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy, where I currently study. (Disclaimer: I am a graduate assistant with The American Project.) In the webinar, four panelists —Tim Carney (American Enterprise Institute), John Wood Jr. (Braver Angels), Angela Sailor (Heritage Foundation), and Rachel Barkley (RK Barkley Consulting)—considered the importance of local community as the origin of civic identity, the antidote to alienation and loneliness, and the place most responsive to our interdependence and vulnerabilities.

As I listened, I kept wondering about all the forgotten places that struggle to sustain long-term community, in large part because all their children eventually leave (sometimes as the only economically viable option) for better places in the Very Important Cities that drive GDP growth. During the Q&A portion, I asked the following question: Given the importance of locality, how should we think about geographic sorting based on income? I noted that I’m especially interested in this question because of the research of Raj Chetty at Brookings Institution which highlights how much economic access and opportunity varies on the most local of levels, literally from neighborhood to neighborhood.

In his response, the webinar’s moderator, Rich Tafel (co-founder of The American Project), echoed the concerns implicit in my question. He noted that one of the criticisms of initiatives like The American Project and other communitarian-focused frameworks like New Urbanism is that when we as theorists, planners, and policymakers talk about community, it almost sounds like a codeword for upper-middle-class suburban culture.

Downtown Akron. Photo via Flickr user Jon Dawson.

Jason Segedy, director of planning and development for Akron, Ohio, addresses this kind of implicit bias directly in a recent article for the New Urbanism section of The American Conservative. Segedy writes bracingly of “an unmistakable strain of elitism that permeates many urbanist discussions about planning and public policy issues,” an elitism that too often is “dismissive of disinvested and economically challenged places.” This dismissal of underdeveloped places is likely rooted in the fact that “the most widely read and disseminated urbanist thinking around urban design and public policy...is written mostly by, and for, people who live in economically successful places.”

How do we overcome this bias? That’s one of the questions I didn’t know I was asking, when I asked about how we should think about geographic sorting. Thankfully, John Wood Jr.—one of the panelists, a national leader at Braver Angels, which conducts civic dialogue workshops—cut to the quick in his reply. Wood identified the way we think about success as one of the biggest challenges to community building. We often conceive of success in narrowly individualistic terms, in which it necessarily means leaving or moving out of an underdeveloped area. We think about success in life as fully materialistic, believing it is “the ability to scale the social ladder, and to create circumstances in terms of where you live, that reflect that success.” But Wood warned that this vision of success sacrifices “an understanding of the American Dream that is rooted in connection, where people really do find meaning and fulfillment.”

This response in turn reminded me of one of the most haunting essays I’ve ever read. In an article written for Commonweal entitled ”Somewhere Else,” Ian Marcus Corbin considers the message popular media gives us about where the good life is to be found, and consequently where it is not. Corbin writes:

The public culture we share inevitably communicates certain assumptions about what constitutes human excellence. In 2019, our shared picture of excellence—or at least of success—is Manhattan, or maybe San Francisco. Penthouses rather than picket fences. Money. Glamour. Culturally and racially diverse but uniformly attractive friends. CrossFit. Foreign vacations. Good taste. If you live a thousand miles from all that, if you’re overweight and poor, unfashionable and unsophisticated, living in a trailer park, what is there for you? How can you excel? By buying new threads at Walmart? Waiting tables at Applebee’s? Right.

Wall Street, New York City. Image via Unsplash.

I’ve been realizing in my own life that the myopic vision that can plague us communitarian-oriented theorists is a problem even for those of us who come from underdeveloped localities. Those of us who are the product of intellectual strip-mining are often no less resistant to the perpetuation of strip-mining—and no more committed to the reinvigoration of the places that produced us—than are those who were born and raised in Very Important Cities. I think this is especially true in instances where our place of origin is a source of shame and/or our current home is a source of pride. In other words, to the extent that I have allowed popular media to define the good life in my imagination, and to dictate where this good life can be lived, I am in danger of succumbing to the same problematic valuations of place I criticized Clinton for at the beginning of this piece.

There is a danger that some might misunderstand what I’m trying to say. The cultural dimension for how we think about success, and the dubious valuations of place promoted by popular media, cannot merely be countered by the power of positive thinking. The answer is not simply to tell the talented young person to stay in whatever community produced him or her, regardless of the opportunity costs. The solution cannot simply be to say, “We should simply love underdeveloped places more,” on the basis of mere sentimental attachment.

Instead, our response to the problem of intellectual strip-mining must involve deliberate development in underdeveloped areas. We need a broad commitment to bringing capital back, to investing that capital in diffuse industries and across larger regions. We need sustained efforts to create new jobs, repurpose old properties and underused land, invest in updated infrastructure, and otherwise revitalize areas and regions that have grown stagnant or been sacrificed to globalism. But there are very little short-term profits to be gleaned from this kind of development. And the kind of development I’m talking about here probably won’t garner national press or the kinds of accolades that follow more high-profile development. And so I really do think love of place is especially critical for underdeveloped communities, as both the foundation of and motivation for a slower, less sexy development.

In the end, economists who fixate on strictly defined measurements of overall growth will always gravitate toward valuations of place that are too narrow in scope. But developers, planners, and theorists—particularly those formed more by humanism than technocracy—can and should insist on broader measures both quantitative and qualitative. And we should not be afraid to speak up for the dignity of underdeveloped places that, even in the midst of economic hardships, provide meaning and community and the opportunity for a good life more broadly conceived.

Cover image by Johnny Sanphillippo

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About the Author

Anthony M. Barr is a recent graduate of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University, and a recent Fellow at the Hertog Foundation in DC. He is currently pursuing his MPP at Pepperdine University. Anthony has done research on political theory, education policy, and civic and moral virtue for various nonprofits, businesses, and independent publishing companies.

You can connect with Anthony on Twitter at @AnthonyMBarr.