CNBC, describing the results of a survey it has been conducting since 2006, reported the following last week: “A record 69 percent of the public holds negative views about the economy both now and in the future, the highest percentage in the survey’s 17-year history.”
Paul put it this way in his most recent newsletter:
… it’s always important to bear in mind that G.D.P., at best, tells us how much a society can afford. It doesn’t tell us whether the money is well spent; high G.D.P. need not translate into a good quality of life. Individuals can be rich but miserable; so can countries.
And there are good reasons to believe that America is using its economic growth badly.
Conservatives sometimes respond to this data by trying to separate the economy from the rest of society. The former, they argue, is performing magnificently. The latter is beset by fraying social bonds and other ills.
But I think it’s a mistake to imagine that the economy is somehow distinct from living standards. The unequal American economy continues to churn out an impressive array of goods and services while also failing to deliver rapidly improving living standards. And polls suggest that most people aren’t fooled.
Voting with their feet
So is the solution simply more government intervention in the economy — following the model of Europe and U.S. states that are run by Democrats? Not quite. Consider these facts, from another recent column of David’s:
Between 2010 and 2020, the fastest-growing states were mostly red — places like Texas, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and South Carolina. During the pandemic, that trend accelerated, and once again, most of the big population-gaining states are governed by Republicans.
If you go back farther, you see decade after decade of migration toward the more conservative South. The Brookings Institution demographer William Frey has noted that in 1920, the Northeast and the Midwest accounted for 60 percent of America’s population. A century later, the Sun Belt accounts for 62 percent of the nation’s population. These days we are mostly a Sun Belt nation.
I found some of the reader comments on that column to be jarring. They didn’t grapple with why so many Americans, including young families and immigrants, were moving to Republican-run states. These comments instead argued that blue America was better and red America was backward. “I, for one, will never live in a red state,” read the comment that has received the most endorsements from other readers. “Never have, never will.”
Evidently, growing numbers of Americans feel differently.
Red America offers less expensive housing partly because its zoning laws are less onerous. To over-generalize only somewhat, blue America believes in NIMBYism (“not in my backyard”), while red America is more comfortable with YIMBYism. Red America also reopened its schools more quickly during Covid, and long school closures appear to have been one of the biggest policy mistakes of the pandemic.