I Just Had an Epiphany

Leftist hyperbole is just parochialism

Editor’s Note: This is the product of a late night, some home made alcohol and an actual mini-epiphany. I have cleaned it up to not be quite so mean and a little more coherent, but since the questions hinted at are so varied and large I haven’t worried about tightening it up too much. Better to get it out there and let you guys fisk it a bit instead of worrying about it until it dies in the editor.

I have done a fair bit of work digging into the American welfare system, specifically around how people perceive it. I wrote my dissertation on the topic of why state provided aid should get people so upset with each other when everyone agrees that helping the less fortunate is good¹.

Anyway, one claim that has always rankled me was the “People are literally starving in the streets!” claim. I have lived in some poor areas, and… no, not really? Food is relatively easy to come by for the indigent, so much so that many cities limit or outright ban private donations so that they can better control the homeless’ diets. Almost all programs are directed at food support, from food stamps to soup kitchens. If nothing else, I have frequently seen people give food to pan handlers, and almost as often seen the pan handlers pick at it a bit then throw it out or just leave it behind. People balk at handing money to someone if they think it will just buy alcohol or drugs, but just about everyone will buy someone a sandwich if asked. Why make up some nonsense about people starving in the street when food isn’t the problem, but there are lots of more important issues at hand?

Then I read Nellie Bowle’s description of How San Francisco Fell over at Common Sense, and it clicked. In really dysfunctional cities like San Fran, people lying dead in the street for long periods of time really is not uncommon. What I would have written off as hyperbole was actually observable in the places leftist elites congregate: the cities. That is, leftists talk of people dying in the street (whether from hunger or ODs, or starving because they are too high to eat, is questionable) because that’s what happens where they live and they have never spent time in places where it doesn’t. If someone has always lived in an LA, Atlanta, New York, or any of the big metropolises following the San Fran model, they are simply under the impression that everywhere functions like their home. The notion that the rest of the nation isn’t so dysfunctional as the Democrat run cities could never occur to them, the same way it wouldn’t occur to someone growing up in the USSR that Walmart isn’t for the elite².

I of course was falling prey to the same mistake, although my parochialism was rather wider ranging. Many towns and cities do not have the problems the biggest have managed to create. That so many cities were so rotten was not entirely outside what I would accept, but I figured if the leftists thought their Democratic leadership was doing a great job, and believed people were starving in the street, well then they must believe people were starving in the street somewhere else, right? I mean, I had been to various cities, and while I avoided the really bad parts like any sane person, it seemed reasonable that people from the city would come out to the rest of the world and notice that there were remarkably few human corpses lying around in the street. I just assumed that big cities must work about as well as everywhere else, or everyone would just flee them, right?

Yet recently I have noticed that I meet a lot of people who don’t actually leave the big cities. Sure, maybe to drive to another city and visit friends, or go to the beach, but very rarely for any length of time. Life in small towns or even moderately large cities, much less rural areas, is entirely foreign to many. We can see this in electoral maps, where cities go deeper and deeper blue while the rest of the country is more and more red. People don’t change their political beliefs because they move, so if there is increasing sorting on politics happening it is because people are generally staying put in the type of area they fit.

Electoral map. I don’t know where the rest of the west went… we can probably assume there is a lot of blue in a somewhat smaller sea of red.

Apparently people don’t change their political beliefs because the result of them is dysfunctional urban hell holes, either. Instead they generalize their experience to everywhere else. They simply don’t notice that the problems plaguing their home do not occur everywhere else, and ask why that might be.

That has some disturbing implications for governmental competition. I haven’t really thought through them yet, but at first glance not noticing that your city is underperforming compared to neighboring regions until things pass an absolute threshold is not a good sign.

This is not limited to bad things like drugs, or gang related gun violence. I have noticed that many people are surprised at e.g. the low percentage of homosexuals in the USA, or the number of unarmed black men killed by police every year. Some of that definitely a question of “seems like a lot of it happens here,” because, yes, more homosexuals live in cities than elsewhere³, and more police abuse happens in cities too⁴. Yes, America’s cities are very different from the rest of America across many different margins. The interesting question is why.

1. That’s the short version… if ever there was a document resistant to an elevator speech…

2. I wrote this recalling anecdotes from both Tyler Cowan and Russ Roberts about having either relatives or sponsored families from the USSR go to Walmart to get groceries for the first time and having to explain “No… this isn’t just for the super rich… this is where poor people shop.” I should have predicted that I wouldn’t be able to find a link to the anecdote.

A similar anecdote comes from my sister’s father in law. Their family hosted an African family for a few months in conjunction with their church. Short version is that it took a little while for the African family’s kids to absorb the fact that they didn’t have to stash food for later, that all the food in the kitchen was available, and if something ran out it could be replaced easily. Not knowing where their next meal was coming from was so deeply ingrained as a simple fact of life that it was long time before the kids stopped putting food in their pockets as they ate.

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States

4. As an absolute number, possibly not relative to population. Numbers on police violence and abuse are rather difficult to come by, as one might expect.