11/10/97

KUFM / KGPR

T. M. Power

Hiding from Economic Reality

I recently spent a good part of a week in the Vermillion River Basin in eastern South Dakota. Besides the college town of Vermillion, the river basin is farm country, mostly corn and some dairy operations. The area has experienced increased flooding because of the ongoing conversion of wetlands to farm fields. Every farm seeks to drain the water off of its land which just passes it on down stream to cascading consequences. No land is allow to hold, store, and diffuse the water.

The increasing flooding simply makes a bad situation worse. The farms and the small farming communities are poor and the constant flooding of infrastructure, businesses, and farms and the regular interruption of personal, business and social life does nothing but drain additional resources from the farms and communities. The area has been losing population, some counties as much as a third of their population, over the last twenty-five years. That is not the sort of population loss that can be sustained without the area losing most of the infrastructure that makes a community possible.

When I tried to talk to residents and local government officials about these negative trends and what the public policy response had been, I was astounded to be told that "we just don’t talk about that." Puzzled that a fundamental and obvious fact of economic life was being ignored, I expressed disbelief that citizens and their elected leaders could actually avoid discussing such important economic trends. The response was an even more emphatic statement that pursuing the issue of negative economic trends amounted to a gratuitous attack on these communities, their people, and their way of life by an outsider. "Shut up!" was the message. Don’t ask uncomfortable questions.

Although initially shocked by this "head in the sand" approach to troubling economic trends, I began to realize that this was not the first place that I had run into this approach to economic reality. In fact, across much of the West, including Montana, factual discussions of economic trends are almost impossible. If one points out, for instance, that wood products’ contribution to employment and income in the Pacific Northwest has been declining while the role of high tech manufacturing has been expanding, one is likely to be greeted by emotional outbursts condemning this statement as a scurilous attack on a crucial element of the region’s economic base and a vicious assult on displaced workers and their impoverished families.

Try pointing out the relatively small role played by metal mining in the western states or the modest and declining role of desert ranching and one faces the same vitriolic response. One faces this response at the highest levels of government. A spokesperson for the governor’s office was recently quoted as emphatically denying that Montana was going through any economic transition from being solely a natural resource economy to being a more diversified and less specialized economy. Natural resource industry is all we got and all we will ever have! That’s it! Any suggestion to the contrary is stupid, unpatriotic, and subversive, and needs, as a matter of public policy, to be squelched.

One does not need a social psychologist or an anthropologist to explain this emotional response to statements of fact and this strong social and political commitment to not facing economic reality. People who see their livelihoods and ways of life in decline can be expected to respond with anxiety and distress. It is as if the larger economy is saying that "we do not need you any more; what you have spent you life doing isn’t important any more." Such implied negative judgments are enough to drive anyone to anger.

In addition, there are political implications to any hint of absolute or, even, relative decline in economic importance. To the extent that the political clout of industries is tied to their perceived economic importance, it is important for industries to continue to insist that they are as important as they always have been. As a result, industry organizations are certain to jump into the fray, emotionally beating their chests, and asserting that no one could get along without them.

So the head-in-the-sand and emotional denial approach to economic reality is understandable. That, however, does not make it safe. If we want to be something other than victims of circumstances, constantly taken by surprise, we have to have the nerve to look the present and future squarely in the eye and adopt public policies that minimize the pain and maximize the benefits of the economic transitions we are going to be dragged through whether we want to go that direction or not. Individuals may choose to remain ignorant and live in a fantasy world, but that is an extremely dangerous and dysfunctional path for government and public policy.