Ryan Streeter
I don’t usually pull material from the Nation, but I thought this Chris Hayes column made a good point. In the following section, he speculates about why leaders in both parties in Washington seem AWOL on a real jobs agenda, and suggests two numbers help explain why:
The first is 4.2. That’s the percentage of Americans with a four-year college degree who are unemployed. It’s less than half the official unemployment rate of 9 percent for the labor force as a whole and one-fourth the underemployment rate (which counts those who have given up looking for work or are working part time but want full-time work) of 16.1 percent. So while the overall economy continues to suffer through the worst labor market since the Great Depression, the elite centers of power have recovered. For those of us fortunate enough to have graduated from college—and to have escaped foreclosure or an underwater mortgage—normalcy has returned.
The other number is 5.7 percent. That’s the unemployment rate for the Washington/Arlington/Alexandria metro area and just so happens to be lowest among large metropolitan areas in the entire country. In 2010 the DC metro area added 57,000 jobs, more than any in the nation, and now boasts the hottest market for commercial office space. In other words: DC is booming. You can see it in the restaurants opening all over North West, the high prices that condos fetch in the real estate market and the general placid sense of bourgeois comfort that suffuses the affluent upper- and upper-middle-class pockets of the region.
What these two numbers add up to is a governing elite that is profoundly alienated from the lived experiences of the millions of Americans who are barely surviving the ravages of the Great Recession.
Now, Hayes uses these data as a way to conclude, somehow, that the union protests warrant our praise, which strikes me as laughable. Government workers aren’t experiencing the “ravages” of the recession in the same way their private sector counterparts are, which is something of an injustice. He also probably overstates the alienation effect on members of Congress, since a good number of them are in touch with their constituents’ concerns more than he gives them credit for.
That said, the point he makes in the section above has a lot of merit.
There is what I would call a horizontal and a vertical disconnect in Washington.
Horizontal: As Hayes implies, the Washington DC area is virtually recession-proof. Not only is unemployment lower than average, the real estate market is one of the only ones in the country to emerge from the bursting housing bubble and recession in good shape. The region is surging. For instance, Arlington and Alexandria are among the top ten-fastest growing cities in the nation. In this regard they have more in common with cities in Texas and the south, where all the rapid growth is, than the east coast.
Geography matters in this regard. While Washington’s prosperity doesn’t imply a disconnect from the rest of the country in a deterministic way, it certainly can’t help. Pundits, advisors, lobbyists, members themselves – they all spend most of their waking hours in a place so much healthier economically than the rest of the nation that distance in heart and mind from the rest of America is unavoidable.
Vertical. The Washington area is a highly educated region on a per capita basis. This also contributes to a kind of “mind meld” among the governing and professional class. In restaurants and coffee shops, you are likely to be sitting next to someone just as highly educated as you. There’s very little demographic diversity in economic terms.
There’s very little we can do about this, other than continue the effort to curtail and limit Washington’s power and try to disperse and decentralize it. But that’s a long-haul effort, and it’s hard to predict we’ll be successful.
At the very least, we should see to it that members can get home to their districts as much and for as long as possible.
For this reason, I don’t really mind that they spent a week outside of Washington amidst the spending showdown. They received a lot of criticism among the punditry (a lot of which, of course, is in Washington and gets its best material when members are on Capitol Hill), but to the extent that they were back in the midwest, south, or wherever sitting next to people unlike themselves in a diner, all the better.
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