De-industrialization all around

Part 2: Insights from There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill; Part 1 here.

The second theme of this fascinating book that I want to highlight is that the people who built the industrial economy and modern world have been screwed similarly in the U.K., the U.S.S.R., and the U.S. by subsequent economic developments. They are all left-behind people.

Fiona Hill comes from Bishop Auckland, County Durham, in the North East of England. The early industrial revolution was based on coal and the labor of the miners who dug it; her hometown was where much of the coal which powered British commerce and military might came from when the empire ruled much of the globe during the 19th century.

But by the time Hill was born in 1965, English coal country was an economic disaster area. She writes:

In the 1980s, during the period when Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s prime minister, we were the pioneers for a unique form of social and economic malaise — a decline from the heyday of the industrial era that would come to define the entire developed world. The local mines closed,  along with associated manufacturing industries. Businesses were shuttered, communities gutted. Family and friends lost their way of life. Bishop Auckland, my once-prosperous hometown, was a forgotten place.

When she came to the United States in 1989 to pursue her professional fortune, she found her parents' coal town had all too many analogues in this country.

In the decades after I arrived in the United States, the fate of my home area in the United Kingdom was that of every major mining community in the Appalachia region, stretching from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia in the south up to West Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in the north. America’s coal country too lost the mainstay of its economy and opportunity.

She had struggled for educational and career opportunities and had the good fortune to find a niche as an expert on Russia. Russian forced-march industrialization was the wonder of the inter-European-war world in the 1930s. But by the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, she recognized familiar situations. Post-industrial misery was

... also emblematic of industrial regions across Russia and the former Soviet Union, and indeed in other parts of Europe. This fact was a significant revelation once I moved beyond the narrow confines of the blighted world that I was from and finally began to understand the forces shaping our lives in the twentieth century.

She points out a pattern replicated out across different countries and economic systems.

Structurally, the United Kingdom and the United States — like Russia and other advanced economies — cycled through a rapid buildup of extractive industry and mass manufacturing in the 1920s and 1930s and again at the end of the Second World War. Our nations began the descent into what became known as the postindustrial era in the 1960s, and especially after the 1970s, when they were hit by successive oil shocks.

... The 1980s were the critical turning point. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of twentieth-century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off. 

... at the end of the 1980s, the Rust Belt was far more like the Soviet Union and the North East of England than most Americans realized. The United States’ big industries had also developed under a fixed set of technological and economic conditions. They were huge enterprises, centers of mass production, purpose-built for a specific time and place in the first half of the twentieth century. They had been built close to major sources of raw materials, energy, and transportation routes, such as shipping routes across the Great Lakes or down major rivers to the ocean. They had enormous sunken and fixed costs. The enterprises had drawn in hundreds, sometimes thousands of workers, often with central state and local government intervention and direction. 

... [These U.S. towns] were in essence the same kind of big company or mono-industry towns as Dnipropetrovsk (now in Ukraine), Stalingrad (now Volgograd), and Magnitogorsk in the USSR. Regardless of the particular circumstances of their individual creation, they were now outmoded and depleted, their big industries shrinking as they modernized and became automated. 

... Mass industries built the cities, not the other way around. When the industries closed, the place-based economies and societies crumpled in on themselves. ...  It was the same in the U.S., the UK, and the USSR. When the mine or the factory closed, there was no work, nothing to do, and nowhere to go. Thriving industry-built cities became shattered ghost town.

Having grown up in Buffalo in the decades when that city was losing its automotive and steel industries, I find it easy to visualize the economic devastation. (Like Hill, I got out ASAP; apologies to Buffalonians who are still today trying to dig the place out of its doldrums.) What I find novel is Hill's documentation that Soviet heavy industrial cities were experiencing something so similar. Using up and throwing away the land and people who do the work is simply the way of heavy industrial development, everywhere, whether under capitalism or "socialism."

Hill explains very clearly how the consequences of de-industrialization were particularly brutal for many workers of the Soviet Union. In the UK, Labour governments had won the National Health Service and some educational opportunity for working class students like Hill. Russians even under the decayed communism of the Brezhnev era, expected to have guaranteed jobs with social subsidies like housing, health care, and a pension. These weren't good lives, but they were lives. The violent imposition of kleptocratic capitalism in the 1990s was literally fatal to people who had once worked in heavy industries which could not be made profitable. Workers were out on their ears, took to drink, died young, and whole cities were depopulated. Sound familiar?

In Britain and the U.S., the people left behind by de-industrialization do still have the chance to to express themselves in free elections. Winners in the contemporary economy may find their choices incomprehensible, but Hill doesn't. Trump's rise made sense to her.

Populists play in the gaps created by generational and demographic change, divergent economic circumstances, competing social and cultural identities, and along the seams of inequality. ... From my vantage point growing up in the industrial North East, it was easy to see Trump’s allure for American workers. ... On trips to visit my family, I heard plenty of complaints in Bishop Auckland, ... about the way local voters were taken for granted by Labour politicians who wanted a safe seat in Parliament to satisfy their own ambitions. In their view, the Labour Party had abandoned the working class. ... Similarly, in the United States, workers believed the Democratic Party had abandoned them .

Hill's clear-sighted understanding of the failures of UK and US governance didn't make her a Trump believer. She joined his National Security Council because she hoped to use her expertise about Russia to avert terrible choices by an ignorant buffoon. She was at the Women's March in DC when she got the call about the job. She's very much a Russia-hawk, but way too well-informed and realistic to be a contemporary Republican apparatchik, even if they'd have her back after her impeachment testimony. She's a patriotic immigrant U.S. citizen who knows we Americans are sometimes neither wise nor good.

And she has a prescription for bringing the places in the first world where de-industrialization has destroyed individuals, families, and communities: more educational opportunity for children and adults. She has a detailed, thoughtful chapter on how community organizing and education might turn the left-behind places around, all drawn from her own experience. After all, education worked for her ... the girl from Bishop Auckland wasn't supposed to go anywhere and ended up testifying before the U.S. Congress ...

Part 1 about Hill's personal struggles is here.