As Alice is always saying, "it's about work"

[alice wellintown]

Tracking the Economic Divergence of the North and the South
Coclanis, Peter A., 1952-
Southern Cultures, Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000, pp. 82-103 (Article)
Published by The University of North Carolina Press
DOI: 10.1353/scu.2000.0003

http://americainclass.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Tracking-the-Economic-Divergence-of-the-North-and-the-South.pdf


On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 6:23 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's a review of that Salon article:
>
> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_02/the_original_sin_of_southernom043090.php
>
> Lind quite properly notes that a recurrent theme in southern politics and
> economics has been the desire to pursue “low-road” economic development
> strategies based on cheap labor (and generally poor public services)
> attractive to footloose capitalists who want little else beyond the lowest
> possible business costs. He calls this “southernomics,” and appears to
> attribute it to an inherent regional and perhaps ethnic defect—an “original
> sin.” Lind appears, however, to be entirely unaware there was a fairly
> powerful revolt against this model of economic development in the South
> during the 1980s and 1990s—indeed, it’s one of the things that helped make
> Bill Clinton famous—based on the observation that better and more stable
> jobs paying better and more stable wages tended to be produced by companies
> that valued things beyond low labor and regulatory costs—you know, things
> like an educated work-force and a good quality of living. The revolt died
> out during the last decade, in no small part because Democrats lost their
> competitive status in the region, yielding the field back to atavistic pols
> like Rick Perry and Nikki Haley, to cite the most egregious examples. But
> the recent rapid adoption of the low road to development by Yankee pols like
> Scott Walker is another indicator that it is not some inherent or exclusive
> product of the evil Southern Character.
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 19, 2013 at 3:02 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>> Michael Lind in Salon: " the 'original sin' of the South is not racism, it
>> is " cheap labor".
>>
>> Sent from my iPad
>
>