{"id":5598,"date":"2019-12-19T01:08:38","date_gmt":"2019-12-19T05:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/?p=5598"},"modified":"2022-03-17T15:46:18","modified_gmt":"2022-03-17T19:46:18","slug":"appalachia-poverty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shortform.com\/blog\/appalachia-poverty\/","title":{"rendered":"Appalachia’s Poverty\u2014Welfare Can\u2019t Save these Hillbilly Towns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Why is the Appalachia poverty level so high? What can we learn about poverty in Appalachia from JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy<\/em>?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis <\/em>examines the spiritual and social decline of the Appalachian white working class<\/a> through the life story of its author, JD Vance. Growing up in a post-industrial Ohio town, Vance encountered the symptoms of Appalachia’s poverty and at a young age started analyzing the source of Appalachia’s poverty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The Source of Appalachia’s Poverty?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Although Vance eventually escapes Appalachia’s poverty and the dysfunction of his roots, attending college and Yale Law School, he finds that even economic mobility<\/a> can never permanently erase the social markers of his hillbilly upbringing. With hindsight, JD attributes this poor record of educational attainment<\/a> to a culture of low expectations<\/strong>. Children saw Appalachia’s poverty, high unemployment, and drug addiction all around them growing up, often in their own immediate families. With such poor models of adult behavior, they never came to expect much from themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Death of American Manufacturing<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Towns like JD\u2019s all over Appalachia are struggling with a new economic order. <\/strong>The Armco<\/a> steel mill that had drawn countless Appalachian migrants like Vance’s Mamaw<\/a> and Papaw to the town was suffering from the same manufacturing decline that plagued Rust Belt towns all across the country. This was one source of Appalachia’s poverty.
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In an era of globalization<\/a>, where cheap inputs and labor could now be sourced from all over the world, domestic manufacturing concerns were at a heavy disadvantage. <\/strong>Companies could now easily offshore jobs to low-wage countries, leaving American blue-collar workers high and dry.
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The only way they could <\/em>survive was through mergers and the downsizing of their workforces. Armco merged with Kawasaki in 1989 and began drastically reducing its investment in Middletown<\/a>.
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Seemingly overnight, this pillar of the regional economy had become a shadow of its former self, contributing to Appalachia’s poverty. Armco hadn\u2019t just been an employer: it was the lifeblood of the community<\/strong>, funding parks, libraries, schools, and other public facilities through tax revenue and private contributions.
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\u201cHard Working\u201d Welfare Cheats<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the raw economic misfortunes of the town, JD began to notice that hard work and initiative were almost entirely absent<\/strong> in many of the adults around him. This may also have contributed to Appalachia’s poverty. Despite this, people made a point of playing lip-service to these ideals, even when they seldom lived up to them in practice.
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He recalls one woman who was always hounding Mamaw, either to borrow her car or sell her food stamps to Mamaw for cash. Despite this woman\u2019s lifestyle of welfare dependency, her eagerness to defraud the social safety net, and the fact that she\u2019d never worked a day in her life, she viewed herself as a model of industriousness. Indeed, she saw herself as a <\/strong>worthy <\/em><\/strong>recipient of government help, while it was those \u201cother\u201d lazy moochers who were gaming the system<\/strong> and making it hard for decent, honest people to get by. 
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There was simply an absence of work and an acceptance of unemployment or underemployment as a way of life. <\/strong>30 percent of young men in Middletown work under 20 hours per week, which may contribute to Appalachia’s poverty.
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Cognitive Dissonance<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

JD now sees the lies and blame-shifting as ways of coping with massive cognitive dissonance: the gap between the community\u2019s professed <\/em>values and the actual <\/em>lived reality of their lives.<\/strong> There must <\/em>be some oppressive, outside force at work if so many self-described hardworking and industrious people are mired in Appalachia’s poverty and social dysfunction. Believing in a nefarious conspiracy that\u2019s keeping you down is far more comforting than confronting the true scale of the devastation in your life. There\u2019s massive power in delusion.
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Destructive Values<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The deindustrialization of Appalachia has led to a serious lack of opportunity<\/strong> for people entering their prime working years. People can\u2019t work when there are no jobs to be had: the Armcos of the world aren\u2019t going to provide employment for all the young men to support a family the way they could have a generation ago.
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But based on his own experiences, JD now believes that today\u2019s hillbillies have responded to the economic crisis in their communities and Appalachia’s poverty the wrong way: by building a set of values that justifies and even celebrates the avoidance of work,<\/strong> while blaming nefarious outside forces for their problems.
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\u201cAn Amateur Sociologist\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As a teenager, JD got a job at a local grocery store. From this vantage point, he got a firsthand look at Appalachia’s poverty and many of the social ills that he would later identify as key sources of the problems plaguing his community<\/strong>.
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He noticed that poorer customers tended to pile their carts with unhealthy prepackaged, canned, or frozen foods. The more affluent customers, meanwhile, bought more fresh meat and produce. More importantly, he saw how financially irresponsible so many of his neighbors were. Many of them were dependent on government assistance, but they were adept at gaming the system.
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For example, they would use their food stamps to buy soda, and then sell them at a discount for cash. It was all profit, since they weren\u2019t paying for the soda in the first place\u2014the government was. Even as a teenager, he could astutely observe that people living off cash assistance programs were living at a level of material comfort that he couldn\u2019t even dream of<\/strong>. In this sense, Appalachia’s poverty was deceptive.
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He saw destitute people still throwing their money away on luxury items like iPhones and big screen TVs, usually financed through high-interest credit cards and payday loans. Nobody seemed to save for a rainy day: as soon as you got some money, you squandered it on something frivolous.<\/strong>
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There were other examples of self-destructive behavior in the community, outside of the customers at the grocery store. <\/p>\n\n\n\n