I travel a lot. Just over the last several weeks, for example, I’ve been in some rural and redder parts of America (in Idaho, Kansas, Nebraska, Ohio, Texas) and some bluer parts (in California, Illinois, New York). My overall impression is that the social, economic and psychological chasms between these two zones are wider than ever.
Of course, we’ve always had vast inequalities in America, but it used to feel like inequality within a single society. Now it feels like separate societies with almost no social exchange between the two. In parts of the country with fewer college graduates, the towns often look shabbier, they’re poorer, the effects of the opioid crisis are evident, the young are leaving, obesity is more common, the zeitgeist is grimmer, civic life is hollowed out.
We can all list the forces that contribute to this widening divide, but a big one is this: Over the past 70 years or so, America, without much conscious deliberation, embraced its information-age future. In 1973, the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote a book called “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society.” Bell wrote that the leadership in the emerging social order would come from the “intellectual institutions.” He added, “the entire complex of prestige and status will be rooted in the intellectual and scientific communities.”
In the ensuing decades, finance, consulting and tech rose while manufacturing shrank. According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, manufacturing made up 28 percent of America’s nominal gross domestic product in 1953. By 2015 it was 12 percent, and today it is lower still.
During these decades most of us in the news media, government, the academy and other sectors developed a distinct, educated-class way of seeing the world. We assumed, for example, that the best way to expand opportunity and boost growth was through better schooling. The Bushes, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all produced important education reforms. The thinking was simple: If we invested enough in human capital — through preschool, community colleges, research universities and beyond — we could prepare the next generation for the high-tech and service-sector jobs of the future. This idea is certainly central to the way I’ve seen the world over the last few decades.
We were basically telling people in manufacturing regions to get out and shift to services. In a provocative 2023 essay in American Affairs, David Adler and William B. Bonvillian laid out the trends: The vocational education system withered. Financial markets rewarded outsourcing. There was a growing disconnect between the American innovation system and the American production system. That is to say that while America produces new ideas it has not made similar advances in producing breakthroughs in manufacturing processes. In the mid-20th century, America led the world in building cars and ships, but, Adler and Bonvillian write, “As the mass production era was succeeded by new waves of manufacturing advances, America would no longer be king of manufacturing.”
