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of this take, but I'm gonna make the boring, ho-hum case for this premise. https://twitter.com/vandrewattycpa/status/1338308262022811648
of this take, but I'm gonna make the boring, ho-hum case for this premise. https://twitter.com/vandrewattycpa/status/1338308262022811648
If you spend a lot of time driving around the Midwest (like @Chris_arnade does), it's pretty clear that it's not just jobs that (famously) have disappeared, it's their local elites.
More concretely, when a NYC, LA, or SF-based (or wherever) MegaCorp buys out a local manufacturing company, the mass layoffs for the workers are devastating, but then they often add insult to injury by reassigning their management staff to their out-of-state HQs.
These managers also *tend* to be the kind of people who use their free time to run volunteer orgs, coach Little League, etc., etc. The Detroit Free Press had a great article about the decline of social clubs in rural MI: https://www.freep.com/in-depth/news/columnists/john-carlisle/2019/11/29/ishpeming-vfw-post-upper-peninsula-michigan/2507193001/
I know and understand the objections. A famous counterexample is the Jim Crow era, when local elites were objectively worse for their communities as a whole than the national elites in DC.
However, context matters, and the modern Midwest is a case study of the opposite dynamic.
However, context matters, and the modern Midwest is a case study of the opposite dynamic.
Pfizer is in the news right now b/c of it's vaccine, which incidentally being manufactured where I live in Kalamazoo, Michigan. This is great for Kalamazoo!
But Pfizer didn't just pick Kalamazoo out of a hat. Their plant is here b/c they bought out the Upjohn Company in 2003.
But Pfizer didn't just pick Kalamazoo out of a hat. Their plant is here b/c they bought out the Upjohn Company in 2003.
The Upjohn Company was founded here in 1886. In its heyday, it's research facilities, HQ, and plant were all in Kalamazoo. Being here in small-city Kazoo didn't seem to dampen their innovativeness: Upjohn created Xanax, Motrin, Rogaine, and many other famous drugs.
After the acquisition, Pfizer shut down the local research labs, transferred out all the scientists, and kept the plant. Keeping the plant is great, particularly for working class folks, but the city definitely suffered nonetheless from the exodus during the '00s and '10s.
Kalamazoo shrank by 2.5% from 2000 to 2010, even as the US population as a whole grew by 9.7%. Kazoo did worse than even MI as a whole, which shrank by 0.6%.
However, it could have been even worse, if it weren't for the fact that Kazoo is blessed to have invested local elites.
However, it could have been even worse, if it weren't for the fact that Kazoo is blessed to have invested local elites.
The Kalamazoo Promise ( @KzooPromise), guaranteeing tuition-free college to anyone who graduated from a Kalamazoo Public HS was announced shortly after the Pfizer acquisition, in 2005.
This unquestionably helped stabilize the situation: https://www.educationnext.org/the-kalamazoo-promise-scholarship/
This unquestionably helped stabilize the situation: https://www.educationnext.org/the-kalamazoo-promise-scholarship/
And, to make matters worse, it's not obvious as a first-order matter that Pfizer benefited in the long-run from redistributing the scientists around, as Pfizer famously favored years doing M&As and neglected its own R&D pipeline: https://www.evaluate.com/vantage/articles/news/corporate-strategy/new-pfizer-same-problem
To wrap this up, sometimes local elites are bad actors. However, they can also be a force for good, b/c ofc people recognize that if your CEO lives where you do instead of (say) NJ or Manhattan, they're going to be more likely to make your town a nice place to live.
