James Fallows

At first glance the city can seem a shorthand for America’s heavy-industrial distress—a huge vacant downtown factory with broken-out skylights, amid smaller also-abandoned workshops; local news accounts about the latest in the long, sad string of layoffs at GE’s mainstay locomotive plant. (Whose production lines, by the way, are being moved not to Mexico or China but to Texas.) Every social ill of contemporary America has left its mark on Erie: racial polarization and tension (including a recent calculation that Erie was “the worst city for black Americans,” in terms of income gap relative to whites), the abuse of opioids and other drugs, homelessness, job loss, and a cruelly unfair state school-funding system whose consequences were so dire that a few years back city threatened simply to close its public high schools.

Yet on second glance—and fifth, and 10th—this same, battered Erie became even more remarkable to us as the locus of countervailing, creative forces.

I won’t go through the whole list again, which we discussed in articles you can find here (and in our book). But the elements include an ambitious higher-ed establishment, with several liberal-arts universities plus Penn State’s Behrend campus, where I spent an afternoon looking at advanced-manufacturing initiatives (like successful ones I’d seen from South Carolina to Michigan to Kentucky to California). We also witnessed an accelerated version of a formula we had seen in a number of other midwest and northeastern “Rust Belt” cities trying to turn themselves into a “Chrome Belt”: The hope of offsetting the loss of native-born young families by recruiting, welcoming, and integrating immigrants and refugees (as Deb explained here and here). Erie also boasts a downtown revival movement, led simultaneously by the city’s home-grown and downtown-based Fortune 500 company, Erie Insurance, whose longtime CEO and now chairman, Tom Hagen, is in his 80s; by successful tech entrepreneurs like Joel Deuterman, now in his 50s; and by a 20s-and-30s generation of artists, activists, technologists, and business people (who you can see in a great video here).  

Erie has an active performing-arts and music scene. Its Jefferson Educational Society runs ambitious live events and research programs, in a model that is a rough counterpart to California’s Commonwealth Club or the 92nd Street Y in New York. We became fans of the alt-weekly Erie Reader. In the same downtown building as the Reader’s offices is a tech startup space, called Radius CoWork, similar to what you’d find in any hip town. (See for yourself.)

These conflicting trends—so discouraging, potentially so positive—have made the city intellectually compelling. Over our months of exposure, the people, of all ages and a wide range of backgrounds, who have thrown themselves into this renewal effort have won our emotional support.

And one small group of them has won our business support as well.

A cumulative surprise of our travels since 2013 was what I thought of as talent-dispersion, or the “reverse talent flow.” There are more and more opportunities, for a larger range of businesses, in more places away from the big cities, than there were a decade or two ago. A detectable flow of people are taking advantage of them.

Through modern history, ambitious people from the hinterland have sought their fortune in the biggest, most vibrant metropolises. Englanders and Scots going to London, French provincials to Paris, Chinese to Shanghai and now Shenzhen, and Americans to the metropolises mainly on the coasts. For as long as American literature has existed, it has chronicled the movement of people from farm, to village, to each era’s booming urban centers. (Pick your American classic novel, from Sister Carrie to Invisible Man, and you’re likely to find elements of this theme.)

That concentrating flow will of course continue, as one glance at construction cranes in Seattle or housing prices in the Bay Area will confirm. But a combination of those same hyper-inflated real-estate costs, and the rise of location-specific high-value industries (like “precision agriculture” startups in farming areas ) plus ever-improving tools for remote work, have powered what tech entrepreneur Steve Case calls the “rise of the rest.” By that he means increased opportunities for talented people who might have moved to Chicago or Boston or LA, but who decide that the overall prospects are more promising in Birmingham or Columbus or Omaha.

In our travels we have met some of these people, and we’ve written about the new business niches they had found, with: agriculture-related technology, in South Dakota and Central Valley California; aerospace technology, in Minnesota and Oregon; logistics and advanced retail systems in Ohio; high-value manufacturing in Kansas and South Carolina and Kentucky; plus other opportunities elsewhere.

And, in the case of Erie, web-design work from Epic Web Studios.

Epic’s co-founders are David Hunter, now age 34 and CEO, and Shaun Rajewski, now 29 and lead developer. They started the company nine years ago, at ages 25 and 20, respectively (and in the depths of the post-2008 financial crash), on the belief that it would be possible to create a first-tier Internet-design company far away from the normal tech centers, in the place where they had grown up. They had no outside capital or investors, and they ran the company initially on the “self-exploitation” financing model familiar from so many startup stories.

Hunter had worked in New York but wanted to come home to start a business and raise a family (with his wife, Jessica, also an Erie native). “After high school, I left Erie as soon as possible, eager to leave the region in search of ‘bigger and better,’” he told me. “I started college at Fordham in New York. I loved it there, but after a lot of consideration, I realized how important my family and my friends really were to me so during my junior year I decided to move back to Erie with an entirely different outlook on the city.”

Rajewski’s story is like that of some other tech entrepreneurs we met in Erie (and their counterparts in Greenville and Duluth and Redlands and Fresno etc). The similarity is that as Epic has grown, he has continued to re-decide to stay in his small community (with his wife, Karrah and their family), rather than take offers with Facebook, Google, or other big-time companies in the Bay Area or Seattle.

Over these nine-plus years, Epic has become a modest but steadily expanding success. It has some 400 clients for its web work, in North America and internationally. It has developed an app intended to help local newspapers in the pursuit of their Holy Grail (that is, engagement and “stickiness” from local readers), and other apps intended to help local businesses improve their visibility in Google maps. Epic argues that its services match what’s available anywhere else, but that its prices can be much lower, because of the difference in salaries and real-estate costs.

Hunter and Rajewski have created more than a dozen full-time tech jobs in Erie — not many in the grand scheme of things, but a dozen more than would exist without them. Like other locally founded tech firms we’ve seen around the country, they view their own survival and success as being closely connected with the whole city’s prospects. Thus Epic does extensive volunteer work for local non-profits and civic institutions, the value of which Hunter says comes to over half a million dollars of in-kind contribution.

“Epic's workforce includes a lot of folks who are from Erie, moved away to start a career, and were recruited back to the region to work with our team,” Hunter told me this week in an email. “Others were planning to leave the region and stayed because of the opportunity to grow their career while contributing to the growth of Erie, PA.”

Why do I mention all this? Not just because it’s another local data point but also because Deb and I took Epic’s work seriously enough to start doing business with them ourselves, as customers. Two years ago, Epic’s team developed a website for a civic group in Washington D.C. that we are part of, and whose background I have described here. (News updates for the site are here.)

Like all modern authors, we also have a website for our new book. This, too, is something we wanted Epic to develop for us (it’s here). As the months go on we plan to work with them, as normal customers, to expand this as a platform for exchanging the kinds of stories we have heard around the country, connecting people and groups large (like New America or Esri) and small (like the Center for Rural Affairs) that are working toward similar ends in different locations, and using maps and other tools to illustrate both problems and solutions.

Does the business our family provides matter? In any grand sense, obviously not. I mention it to show that our observation about talent-dispersal is more than just talk on our part. We take it seriously enough that we are willing to vote with our personal dollars, to present our own message through this company’s staff and skills.

“I am incredibly passionate about my hometown of Erie, PA,” David Hunter said in  a recent message to me. “The city is a lot of fun (we're one of only 8 cities nationwide that lets you drink in the streets!), it’s incredibly affordable (here's a 5,400 sq. ft. Victorian Mansion for sale at $139,900), and there's always something new going on (here's a sample of the calendar for just one week ).”

The Onion offers periodic dispatches from Don Turnbee, “America’s Fast-Food Critic,” who is always identified as hailing from Erie. Hunter said that he takes perverse joy and pride in those Onion shout-outs, as part of a younger-generation embrace of the city’s defiant-underdog status. (This is an attitude we also saw among Hunter’s counterparts in places like San Bernardino, Fresno, Ajo, and Duluth.) “Erie’s been a weird city (in a good way) for as long as I can remember,” he told me. “I think Erie’s weirdness, though hard to quantify, is one of our greatest assets because it makes us a unique place that’s hard to forget.”

As for the city’s problems, “there are certainly plenty of examples that make it difficult to live here as well,” he says. “To pretend it’s some sort of utopia would never work because the city is full of cold, thankless and unflattering qualities too. But there are countless people who work to improve those things every single day. I am incredibly thankful for their efforts because I see the change happening before my eyes every day.”

How will Erie look 10 years from now? I have no idea, just as I cannot say how the struggle between national-level darkness and local-level renewal will eventually balance out. But I offer the story of Epic Web Studios and its founders and staff as one more illustration of how different the texture of the country can look from a city-by-city perspective, than it does from the bleak prospect of the national news.

The internal politics of that country have produced a centralization of power crucially dependent on support of the Communist Party leadership by the Chinese military. It is the military driving a program of objective-free expansion into the South China Sea, a policy of showing China's power and subjugating its neighbors for the sake of being able to show China's ability to do this.

To this policy Trump has interposed no obstacle. The United States Navy, acting more or less on its own, has maintained the Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs) begun during the Obama administration. But these have limited value, against an adversary that has created permanent land bases to support a larger number of individually less capable ships. Against a united front of Indo-Pacific countries backed by the United States, China might find itself drifting into equilibrium—grating to the vanity of People's Liberation Army leaders, but safe and (more or less) stable. Against individual nations left to face China alone, with uncertain American support, the world will face a crapshoot.

You may have seen Secretary Mattis give a strong presentation to an Asian security conference over the weekend. Mattis was acute in his analysis, firm in his resolve; other nations in the region could rally to him, if they were sure he spoke for the United States Government. How can they be? Trump takes favors from his family from Beijing, and from financial institutions sponsored by the Chinese government. How can our Pacific allies be confident that in a moment of crisis America will stand with them and not with a Chinese state seeking to impose on them? And in the event of an unexpected crisis of the kind from which we have mercifully been spared up to now, how can anyone be sure how America will respond?

I think your initial instinct was correct. The United States was losing ground vis a vis China before Trump showed up, its efforts to facilitate China's peaceful inclusion in an international community compromised by America's long preoccupation with Southwest Asia.

Trump has made everything worse. China, determined to assert its power in the region but not sure what to do beyond that, now has the initiative. The United States isn't even close to being able to seize it back. We are headed toward a situation in which military actions could arise for reasons that in retrospect will look trivial. And if war does come, we might not win.

Finally for today, from a serving member of the military:

I'm a regular U.S. Army officer, meaning of course that my views do not necessarily reflect those of the DoD or U.S. government….

My bottom line up front on U.S. foreign policy: as Thucydides or Kissinger might have put it, it is currently a four-star dumpster fire.

From my foxhole, at least, it isn't worse than it looks because it looks extraordinarily bad. However, much like a lovely house I own in [one of the Plains states], when the foundations and framing are still solid, the right amount of capital and time can turn a ratty flophouse into a desirable property again.

That is not to be glib about the gravity of the situation, or to discount the amount of work that it would take to remedy it, but short of an actual nuclear winter, I believe the U.S. possesses sufficient weight in the world to continue to generate enough economic and moral capital that could be invested productively under future administrations.

* * *

What are the factors driving the current administration's decisions?…

The first assumption is that American power and resources are infinite or approaching it. But of course Clausewitz (and history) tells us the opposite—resources are vanishingly finite, even for the U.S., so they must be deployed carefully, guarded jealously, and built up among allies so that the greatest mass can be deployed at just the right moment against the right problem…

Another assumption is that, as the exceptional nation, the U.S. really is entitled to demand and get everything it wants, that all our adversaries and enemies must simply give up everything and be thankful that we allow them to continue to exist; it is a natural extension of the chauvinism found in some right-wing foreign policy thought, but about as realistic as putting an invincibility cheat code into a video game.

The last assumption is that military power solves everything, and is the only measure of strength in IR—forgetting that U.S. soft power started in earnest with Wilson's Fourteen Points and ran straight through rock music and Levis jeans to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

These underlying assumptions have mixed into a dangerous cocktail with POTUS' assumption that short-term wins are worth long-term failure, that foreign policy is exclusively a realm of theater, and, perhaps most egotistically, that the world naturally revolves around the whims of the U.S., which can then wall itself off but still call the tune….

* * *

As regards NATO and the EU: one of your correspondents wrote that our relationship with our European allies had been "irrevocably alienated and possibly destroyed."

Perhaps this is a feeling of despair in a dark moment—especially when the EU is creaking under the weight of its own contradictions, and its members probably weaker in the conventional sense than it has been since the end of the war—but I find it hyperbolic.

America has always had a "Mean Girls" sort of relationship with Europe; I just finished Rick Atkinson's The Guns At Last Light, and one of the salient points for me was how difficult it was, even in the truly existential darkness of the war, to keep everybody rowing in the same direction for their very survival. Tom Ricks paints very much the same picture, zoomed in on Churchill and FDR, in Churchill and Orwell. And it was not all that long ago that the U.S. invaded a certain Mesopotamian country and flew in the face of majority opinion among our allies, the U.K. being the notable exception among major European powers. Yet twelve years later, the U.S. was able to pull off a major international policy coup with the JCPOA, something unimaginable in the atmosphere of rancor of 2003 - 2004...

As regards our relationship with Mexico and Canada, [from personal experience with Canadian forces] I can tell you that for better and for worse, the damage to our security relationship is mostly limited to resigned and knowing half-grins between officers in the two militaries…. Yes, the façade and grounds of our foreign policy house are significantly weathered and unappealing, but barring a tsunami (and I mean this in the sense of a major shooting war directly with Russia or China), the structure will remain intact….

I feel U.S. foreign policy is suffering many self-inflicted wounds, while engaging in some very clumsy "discovery learning" about the multipolar, post-post-Cold War world. Some problems are just the natural terrain of a shifting topography, others painful unforced errors from a worldview at odds with reality. Yet despite all this, let's remind ourselves that we are not in the dark days of 1914 or 1939, and that much of the subsurface of our foreign policy is still intact, and that, yes, in two years there is likely to be a shift in U.S. foreign policy. The current U.S. administration only wants to play the hedgehog, but the realities of the world will eventually blunt all the spines; better to play the wily fox, even if it looks less imposing.

I have no doubt that the trade war with China, however stupid and dangerous it is, is not as significant as the unprecedented—at least in the post 1945 world—breach with Europe that Trump has precipitated, one that by no coincidence perfectly dovetails with the desires of the Kremlin.

Make no mistake about it: Trump's dangerous moves could very well bring down NATO, fracture the EU, and leave the US alone against two hostile powers (China and Russia), while our biggest force multiplier and a regional bloc which shared liberal democratic values with us, has been irrevocably alienated and possibly destroyed.

On reflection, I agree. The damage of today’s preening and careening foreign policy is even worse than it looks.

Similarly, I argued a few days ago that Trump’s new war-of-choice trade showdowns with Mexico, Canada, most of Europe, and other countries are self-defeating, pointless, impulsively irrational, and [choose your other synonym for crazy-bad]. Robert Turnbull, a reader in Canada, says that’s not the half of it:

In the article on Trump's recently-imposed steel and aluminum tariffs against Canada, Mexico and the E.U., [you] make the right technical arguments for why the tariffs are misguided (an understatement). But while the tariffs will cause significant damage to the economies of both the U.S. and the target countries, I believe the more lasting and pervasive damage will be the loss of trust in the U.S. among its closest allies.

Canada is by far the largest exporter of steel and aluminum to the U.S. The American defence and auto industries are utterly dependent on reasonably-priced Canadian metals. The overall trade deficit/surplus between Canada and the U.S. is generally balanced, with the U.S. currently holding a slight surplus. As you pointed out, some Chinese steel has been transshipped to the U.S. through Canada. But Prime Minister Trudeau undertook to the President in March to restrict this and succeeded in putting the necessary control measures in place with Canadian steel makers.  

So why would Trump choose to hit Canada with 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum? Ostensibly, because they pose a threat to U.S. "national security". The best words that the ever-polite Trudeau and Foreign Minister Freeland could come up with in response to this were "absurd" and "insulting." Insulting because there is no closer security relationship between two countries in the world. The U.S. depends on Canadian metals to supply its defence industries because it can't meet those demands itself. And after Canadian and American troops fought and died beside each other in two world wars, Korea and Afghanistan, the two country's defence establishments are the most integrated in the world.

In announcing Canada's retaliatory tariffs, Trudeau was careful to point out that they are intended to send a message to the U.S. administration, not to hurt the American people. Of course, this is almost as laughable as the Trump administration's "national security" justification: the retaliatory tariffs are tailored to hurt American workers the most in those states that were instrumental in electing Trump.

Trudeau's careful distinction between the U.S. administration and its people does, however, reflect the visceral response of most Canadians to the current U.S. administration. As much as most Canadians revile Trump and the Trumpists, they continue to cling to the belief that this nightmare can't represent the views of most Americans.

Like many Canadians, I read, watch and listen to mainstream American media (including the Atlantic) and talk to my American friends and family members for reassurance that the America that has lead the world and generally maintained order for 75 years is still out there—it's just been temporarily hijacked. But this belief becomes harder and harder to sustain as the assaults by Trump pile up. I suspect that the feeling is much the same in those other countries that were, until recently, America's closest allies.   

I’m afraid that he’s right, too.

***

Update A reader in the U.S. chimes in to support these previous views:

I would argue that our relationships with Canada, followed closely by Mexico, are by far our most important and strategic relationships. The truth is that (thanks to being surrounded by oceans) we really could have neutral and minimal, maybe even mildly unfriendly, relations with the rest of the world and still be able to maintain our peace and security, our freedoms, and a reasonable level of economic well-being. . . IF we have good relations with Canada and Mexico.

With our land borders secured, we have the oceans for defense with strategic depth, provided that we invest enough in our navy and air force. With Canada and Mexico as good trading partners, we have enough resources available in North America to sustain an admirable standard of living. Any involvement that we have with the rest of the world outside of North America builds on this foundation and should be seen as optional icing on the cake. Nice to do if we can, but we could live without it if absolutely necessary.

To damage either of these primary relationships, though - even just a little bit - is sheer folly of the first magnitude, and is the strongest and clearest evidence yet that the current US administration, from the top on down, are utterly ignorant and don't have the slightest idea what they are doing.

He continues:

There are also undercurrents in agriculture in the region, which run against the grain of globalism and industrialized commodity production and marketing. These are still very much a minority, but something to watch. They harken to the agrarian populism which began decades ago, and even include some defiant tones against corporatization and economic exploitation.

I understand your issues of trying to make sense of very subtle changes, but agree that the deep-text approach in talking to people is worthwhile.

Rural places have been left out of the national media narrative except as odd or quaint places (conservation stories are sometimes put in this category) with backwards folks. However, in Nebraska and much of the Plains, people are far from backwards; they are well-educated as a whole and retain the strong agrarian values and character of their ancestors. They are stayers. Historically, when they have incorporated as their own some new ideas, from within or from other places, they often created stable and adaptable institutions to survive.

* * *

The mayor of another small town in a Plains state wrote about his mixed reactions in reading the piece. I know who this mayor is; he is from a state and county that went very strongly for Trump; and he asks to have his identity protected precisely so he can keep destructive national politics from undermining constructive efforts in his home town.

In my piece I wrote, “The hardest question is whether something has changed since the last presidential campaign and election to make any optimism about local-level realities outdated, and to suggest that the poison of national politics has seeped all the way down.” The mayor writes about this potential seepage:

I’ve been thinking a lot about your piece on optimism.

My affinity for your themes stems from corresponding things happening here. I work to be sure our government is non-partisan and task oriented. Schools are outstanding and getting better (K-University), immigration is helping us resolve many labor shortage issues and dragging folks into diversity understanding, value-added ag is booming, and there is plenty of optimism. One can go all day without hearing the “T” word mentioned, even though our state’s voters overwhelmingly chose him.

So, I would say [my town] exemplifies your perception.

My concern, however, is dealing with the policy headwinds these good things are fighting.

When speaking, I often ask audiences “What is life like in [our town] for those on the first step of the economic ladder?” Acknowledging that we will always have thousands living on minimum wage. How is their housing, healthcare, daycare, nutrition, transportation, legal assistance, opportunities to advance, inclusion in society, access to those in power? How are poor minorities treated? Do they have hope?

Some will always be at the starting line and we all live among those occupying that demographic—and rely on them to make things work.

Meanwhile, there are daily actions working against them. Cutting SNAP, raising housing costs, cutting heating assistance, limiting access to courts, harassing immigrants and energizing haters, dumping people off health insurance, allowing infrastructure to degrade low-cost transportation, eliminating access to family planning and abortions, degrading consumer protections, degrading environmental protections, subverting public education, degrading enforcement of rights, on and on and on … not a day goes by without another seemingly malevolent action.

(Not even touching on the lunacy of a trade war’s effect on the poor)

* * *

Ideologically motivated incompetence combined with unjustified arrogance is leading our federal government rapidly toward system-wide malfunction.

These things, if not reversed, will unavoidably worsen things for our entry-level households and make my city less livable for all.

If city Department heads [here] were of comparable quality and qualifications to those now in DC, that would turn this city into a disaster in a matter of months. It won’t happen as fast on fed level, but it will happen. Michael Lewis’ articles on the operations of the departments of energy and agricultural were frightening, but not surprising.

This was an important article from you. Shows what’s at stake, what we can see being attacked intentionally, yet is waiting to work if those intentionally trying to sabotage it are stopped.

Thanks to these correspondents and others who have written in. I’ll quote more, day by day.  

(My twin brother Jon went to Middlebury, and got the best education of us all.) I met my wife Amity at Harvard and she went on to earn her Masters and PhD from Yale. Her father was a Harvard graduate and also received his MBA there. Her uncle graduated from Harvard and was awarded the Harvard Medal for his alumni contributions. My father taught expository writing at Harvard for five years. And my mother earned her Master’s in Education from Harvard.

Amity has been a non-tenured faculty at Yale for nearly 20 years. In addition, New Haven is a small city and I have had numerous interactions with faculty and administrators. For many years, I worked on campus for various Yale entities. Over the years, we’ve hosted numerous events at our house for undergraduate and graduate students alike.

I’ve had a front row seat over many years watching how two of our great universities work.

After graduation I borrowed my dad’s Nikon and learned to use it in the Peruvian and Malaysian rainforests, where I learned to climb into the treetops and helped design and build two canopy walkways. Since then, I’ve been working as a photojournalist for news outlets and have photographed 14 children’s books.

***

My life has in some ways been a test of elite college admissions policies.

I was accepted only because I was on the legendary rowing coach Harry Parkers recruiting list. My identical twin Jon, who didn’t row, was rejected. Not only were we physically alike, but our GPA’s and test scores were almost exactly the same. Years later, my mother learned from a Dean that this violated Harvard’s twin policy which said that both twins had to be accepted or rejected. Harry told my brother Ted, a rower a year ahead of me at Harvard, “Boy Ted, it sure was hard to get your brother in!”

I began to wonder at the admissions system when I realized that many of my teammates and friends weren’t as good students as Jon. (Jon has gone on to have at least as successful a life as the rest of us.) They also had gone to prep school, but to more prestigious schools like St. Paul’s and Exeter.

Years later, my daughter Eliza’s college admissions process raised even more questions. Her SAT scores were 800 and 780 and she had straight A’s and she was rejected from every elite school that she applied to. I realized that in my time, she would have gotten into all of them. She ended up attending the University of Edinburgh, where the test-based admissions system doesn’t weigh extra-curricular activities.

Just a year or two before, I had learned from an old high school teacher of mine that Harvard had admitted a junior hockey star who played for my high school, which had turned itself into a sports powerhouse that fed players into multiple Division I sports programs. Harvard wanted him to play together with his two older brothers, but if they had waited for him to play in his high school senior year, they would have graduated from Harvard.  

Intrigued, I began to research how admissions have changed over time and think more seriously about these schools as institutions.  I realized that the U.S. is the only major country in the world that has tied sports so tightly into their colleges and universities. In fits and starts, in between other work, I’m trying to turn this into a significant writing project on the athletic preference in U.S. college admissions.

***

Like many Americans, I've been paying too much attention to politics, in this new Trump reality where time is actually measured in dog years, making one month feel like at least seven.

When I read about the affirmative action case working its way through the courts, it struck me that the very things that make our major universities great—tenured, driven faculty who single-mindedly go about their work; diversity in students and faculty (growing, but too small still); international openness; and a widespread belief in the value of shared knowledge and education—made a perfect target for Trump.

If you've been trained as an intellectual all your life and believe that we should all ground our opinions is reasoned argument, it's likely Trump will make mincemeat of you.

In a perfect storm, this mismatch could combine with the less attractive characteristics of our most selective schools—a perceived liberal bias; opaque admissions criteria that change over time; sclerotic institutional organizations where each professional school and department has their own bureaucracy; the tenure system itself which limits what Deans and Presidents can do; an inherent contradiction between being non-profit educational organizations, while at the same time having huge endowments, for-profit real-estate holdings, and robust systems to monetize scientific research often funded by taxpayer funds; and growing tension with local areas who complain that those huge real-estate holdings are tax exempt—to make the schools easy targets.

Thanks to Michael Doolittle for kicking off this discussion and for this followup. Again, his site about the role of sports in admission is MichaelJDoolittle.com.  More to come.

***

Many of my most memorable moments in China were in the company of Peter Claeys. I originally met him because, after a variety of international careers, he had become the representative in China of Cirrus aircraft, the company I’d reported on and written about in the United States. We became friends because my wife, Deb, and I found him so fascinating, omni-curious, and charming. Peter and I and other aviation-minded friends in China, especially the Italian writer Michele Travierso, went to air shows together and flew around the region as often as its strange regulatory circumstances allowed.

This picture just below is from 10 years ago, after Peter and I flew a Cirrus airplane together from Zhuhai, in southern China, to Taipei, Taiwan, and got out in the teeth of a 40-knot gale.

He was also the protagonist in an episode a few years earlier that was the beginning of my book China Airborne, in which we siphoned aviation gas from some old Soviet fighters and used it to tank up an airplane for a trip from Changsha, in Hunan province, down to Zhuhai. That’s Peter handling the gas barrel.

And, as in the photo that opens this item, this is how we looked at the end of that same trip, which (as I describe in the book) was the closest I’ve come to genuine peril in the air. In the center is Walter Wang, who made the trip with us. Peter was “Pilot in Command” of that journey, which actually was dangerous, and his expression in the picture reflects what he had guided us through.

Peter, a linguistic whiz who was a superb Mandarin speaker (and was originally from Belgium, having mastered all the languages of that part of the world), was also with Deb and me when we were detained by police in Tiananmen Square at a demonstration in 2009 on the twentieth anniversary of the crackdown there, as Deb describes in her book Dreaming in Chinese. In that episode Peter played dumb about his ability to understand everything the police were saying about us, among themselves and over the radio to their supervisors, after their questions to us in English. He relayed their comments to us quietly in French, which they didn’t understand. One of the rewards of expatriation is intense friendships with people who are going through the same experience of making sense of another culture. Peter knew much more about China (and the world) than I did, and I always enjoyed learning from him and exploring with him.

He was generous, humorous, urbanely cultured, and wry. My sympathies to his daughter and relatives, my gratitude for having known him as a friend.

It was a question Colbert asked, came back to, and then drove home the point: The policy of announcing the results of investigations, an established norm, was violated when Comey took it upon himself to go public, and kept the decision from the Justice Department until it was too late for them to do anything about it. He violated a norm.

***

Norms are the accumulated wisdom of all of those who have come before. No individual or group in the heat of a present moment, can know the consequences of a decision, either in terms of present politics or future course of events.

And so, in HUMBLE recognition of our immediate inability to predict the future, we agree to an accepted course of conduct.

We do this for a variety of reasons, depending upon the norm. In the case of this norm, it is an external rule—imposed from outside the current deliberative process—that assures the objectivity and independence of the decision, separate from possible subjective influences.

Stated another way, "We will do this the same way, in all circumstances, consequences be damned, in order to assure that no one will be able to question our non-bias or our motives, and what happens in elections will not affect, nor improperly be affected by, how we handle an investigation." Not disclosing information relevant to an election is a Justice norm.

In this case, despite the norm, Comey took it upon himself to weigh the consequences of going one way or the other—i.e., to use his subjective judgment to predict the future of how one decision or the other would affect the legitimacy of the election and the coming presidency.

He saw himself as wiser than the norm. And as is painfully obvious, he completely failed either correctly to predict the future, or to see the myriad of intended and unintended consequences he engendered (e.g., not correspondingly announcing the investigation of Trump seriously biased the electoral process- not an outcome he intended, but an actual, factual bias that the norm was intended to prevent.)

And in making that judgment, he relied upon what was happening in the electoral process—specifically, the tropes being pushed by the right-wing media machine questioning Clinton's legitimacy. And he calculated electoral consequences. In a very direct, substantive way, Comey allowed what was happening in the election to taint how the investigation was being handled.

***

And this, finally, drives home for me the significance of Comey's hubris. I've never quite understood the hubris charge, except as an ad hominem by partisans. But here we have a concrete example of that hubris: He rejects the humility which enshrines the norm—our inability to know or predict all active factors in a decision—and superimposes his higher judgment. And in none of his interviews has he copped to this, other than to note that a reasonable person could have made a different decision. The hubris, and lack of self-reflection, continues. And the results reinforce in a graphic way the importance of norms.

If Comey had kept quiet; if things had been allowed to play out untainted by information about FBI investigations, Trump may still have been elected. Or, on the other hand, the legitimacy of President Clinton would have been questioned. Lynch's credibility and integrity may have been challenged. But the FBI and Justice's processes would nevertheless have followed norms, and would have been much less open to challenge. And the facts being discussed in that event would have been far more relevant and far less damaging to the justice system than what we are going through today. And, most pointedly, by driving Comey to do what he did, the right-wing media tropes swayed Justice, and likely got Trump elected.

This is the thing that I haven't really seen discussed in a direct, pithy, graspable way. Perhaps it's been there and my denseness has only now thinned. But it's been way too easy for him, and others, to slither away from this direct indictment of the integrity of his actions.

I agree with the way the reader states the issue, and about the consequences of Comey’s decision, and about the point he has so far not addressed in his public appearances.

They were surprised I had not heard that saying before. Apparently, I’m not alone in my disdain for the realities of student life in the Ivy League.

I could fill a book with the conversations I’ve had with my mental healthcare providers. A chapter on the social isolation I’ve felt here; on what I should do with my life; on the merits and drawbacks of exclusively affinity group events at an already departmentalized school; on the unhealthy stress of crippling student loans, and my brewing envy (and resentment) of those without them.

* * *

I applied to Harvard seeking academic opportunity, personal validation, and of course, a prestigious pedigree. I was nearing completion of a two-year research fellowship, and, having been painfully pre-med in college, I was finally ready to admit that medicine was not for me (I don’t like hospitals).

I still craved a mission-driven career, and decided the passion for public health I had cultivated as an undergrad warranted further exploration. After informational interviews with numerous public health professionals, who told me the field was dominated by alumni of the highest ranked schools, I made the choice to only apply to top programs for my master’s—a degree required for consideration in most public health doctoral programs.

I was obviously thrilled when I received my acceptance to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Before I was accepted here, I knew I was smart, capable, worthwhile, what have you. But now, I thought, I had irrefutable proof.

While I knew the price-tag for my 1.5 year degree was over $75,000 in tuition alone, I cast that egregious number aside—surely, I would get financial aid from the world’s most endowed University. And besides, according to my family, my friends, and my coworkers, a Harvard degree is an investment, a fast track to a successful future. How could I say no?

When my financial aid “award” arrived, I was met with a heap of federal unsubsidized loans, a smidge of work study, and no grants or scholarships. The total award did not cover my full tuition, let alone living expenses in Boston, one of the most expensive cities in the country.

Naturally, I was disheartened. My grades and test scores were pretty far above reported student averages, and my paltry pay as a research fellow had given me hope for financial pity. I had filled out my FAFSA as an independent (my parents are not funding this), and my expected contribution estimate was $0. But after contacting the Office of Financial Aid, thinking there was a mistake, they confirmed the reality I had previously disavowed: to Harvard, I am dispensable.

* * *

One year after accepting my offer of admission, I question my decision to come here almost every day. On one hand, it was a poor life choice to choose an expensive school for its name, especially for a non-terminal degree. On the other hand, would you even be reading this if I didn’t go to Harvard?

The School knows the Harvard brand is powerful enough to attract the best and brightest. But at times, it feels like I paid full price for a knock-off Rolex. For instance, we recently received news that our School of Public Health email addresses will expire 230 days after graduation, unlike in previous years, when students got to keep their accounts for life. After an uproar from the graduating class, the school extended the expiration date of these networking necessities to—wait for it—a whole year after graduation.

Other students here have expressed similar dismay towards Harvard’s nickel-and-diming. A recent post on our student Facebook group deriding “spurious charges imposed on students” and other “greedy policies,” such as commencement gown rental fees, received considerable attention. I have shared a snippet of the post below:

“These charges may be trivial to some or most, but to me, these charges reflect an inconvenient truth: arguably the most eminent university of the world treats its mission as a mere business. A fact that will not be lost on me and my colleagues when we are requested to make alumni donations.”

I could not agree more. In 2015, our school was renamed to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health after a $350 million gift from The Morningside Foundation, the largest gift in Harvard’s history at the time. When I am told repeatedly by the Office of Financial Aid that “funds are extremely limited,” I find myself wondering: Where did this gift end up?

I understand that Harvard cannot bankroll every student’s education. But at the same time, financial wellbeing affords mental wellbeing, and graduate school is stressful enough without a bulging backpack of accruing bills.

* * *

On a related note, there has been an enormous grassroots push for unionization on campus, led by doctoral and master’s students across all 11 Harvard Schools.  The fate of this proposed Harvard Graduate Students Union will be put to vote later this week (I plan to vote #UnionYes).

It is obvious from the barrage of emails we receive from the Office of The Provost where the school stands on the issue. Just today I received an email from the Director of Labor and Employee Relations ominously titled “Out of Pocket.” The email body discussed the cost of union dues (and nothing else), reminding students that “60% of the dues and fees collected will go directly to the international UAW union—not to local Harvard students.” Well, if Harvard supported us local Harvard students, maybe we wouldn’t be pursuing unionization in the first place.

The larger context here is, of course, how the elite universities that play such an important part in American scientific, cultural, economic, international (etc) strength adapt to the tensions and possibilities of this age. Thanks to Justin Kaplan, and more to come.

You can hear Johnson’s interview with Ross here. (He also talks with Johanna Partin of the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance, and Bill Updike, formerly of the Washington, D.C., government.) If I hadn’t been behind the wheel on the D.C. Beltway, I would have stopped to write down notes at least a dozen times during the interview, because what Ross was saying resembled so closely what we’d heard from his counterparts, Republican and Democratic, across the country.

For example: that the bile and hostility people might bring to national politics could be set aside when they dealt with local issues. And that towns and many states were able to imagine ambitious long-term goals and work toward them, rather than being whipsawed from one short term emergency to another. And that people with different world-views can agree on practical-minded solutions—in this case, Republican voters and leaders in Texas thinking it made good business sense to switch to renewable fuels.

I don’t yet have a transcript of the show, so I’m not calling out specific quotes. (If and when a transcript appears, I’ll do some highlighting.) For now I’m encouraging you to listen to this show. Apart from its specific topic—the business momentum toward renewable power, the role of Texas state policy under Governor Rick Perry (!) in making this possible—it’s the closest thing I’ve come across to the experience of hearing local-level mayors, business people, and civic leaders talk about their ambitions for their towns. Spend a few minutes listening to this broadcast, and you may have a better sense of why we’re making the case that we do.

She continues:

I received an amazing financial aid package and I grew so much between freshman year and graduation. Yale was extremely generous and I feel very fortunate and grateful.

While I was a student at Yale I also attended the state university in my hometown (Kutztown University of Pennsylvania) because my mom had worked there and I then received a tuition waiver. I wanted to study criminal justice, and Yale didn't have this program. I took classes online over my winter and summer breaks and then I took two semesters off from Yale to take classes in person while living at home. I earned two bachelor's degrees in five years from two different institutions.

* * *

It wasn't Arizona State, but it's the same idea that you discussed in your notes. I wanted to share a little bit about my experience.

I chose to study at university because I genuinely love learning and I have to admit—I love achievement. I feel lost when I'm not pushing myself towards some new pursuit. I wanted the best education I could get, and I definitely noticed that both Yale and Kutztown had their advantages and disadvantages.

I was very lucky to experience both institutions, but I can't deny how different they are. Yale was more academically demanding, but it can be a bubble. Kutztown provided more practical opportunities and specialization within my major, but there's a lot more responsibility on the individual student to do more than just pass or meet the minimum mark. There are great students and faculty at both schools, but I absolutely was pushed much harder at Yale.

I'm all for the idea of exchange programs, but I'm not sure it would change people's perspective of Yalies. I was a neurotic, overachieving nerd in high school, and I was a neurotic, overachieving nerd at both colleges. I am still a neurotic, overachieving nerd in my twenties who spends Sunday afternoons reading The Atlantic online and writing lengthy responses to its writers.

Education was never about getting a job for me. I just really, really, really love school and learning. I am always driving myself to work harder, to do more, to learn something new.

It was interesting that the writer of the message you received said "When you hear how great you are over and over again, you tend to come to believe it," because I've never felt that way at Yale. I have always felt that I needed to prove my ability to call myself a Yalie.

This is what I wish people who criticize the Ivy League would understand. I worked my ass off to get there, and because I'm there I feel I have to be even better. I often wonder what I need to do to prove to the red states, Trump associates, GOP members, etc. that I am worthy.

I went to Kutztown and I succeeded. I went to Yale and I succeeded (although I always think I could have done more). I never think that I am part of the global elite. I'm just a small town girl striving to be the best I can be.

On the larger question of the connection between educational pedigree and occupational ability (or success), another reader writes:

It is "common knowledge" that having a bachelor's (or higher) degree increases your chances for better jobs, higher income, and all that is associated with those things.

And that going to a "better" university amplifies the effect.

I ask: Why is that? And here is what I believe.

Before WW II and the GI Bill, not that many people attended college, and having a degree was something special.

People noticed that and concluded, "Aha! Something magic happens at college to these people. Have it happen to you and you will join their ranks!"

But in my belief, it is not the case that these universities are machines that take whoever gains admission, perform some magic on them, and produce graduates who now have "what it takes to succeed" in life.

Sure, spending four years in that environment, taking the classes, studying, writing papers, and so forth, has a lot of value to it, as does simply maturing from an 18-year-old to a 22-year-old, but much of what you learn does not have much direct application to most jobs, or much else in life….

But employers seek out these graduates, preferring them to others.

* * *

I believe much of the reason for that is that the university ecosystem is a screening process as much as it is a bunch of knowledge and skill factories.

Knowing a lot about Shakespeare is not all that useful.

Being someone who could learn and understand a lot about Shakespeare is.

That person can learn other things, too, and more readily than Joe Shmoe off the street.

Essentially, people who can a) get in, and b) earn a degree, are just smarter people to begin with, and will do better (given the chance) regardless of how they spent their undergraduate years.

They will also have a good start on a network of similar people, also launched on successful careers. That alone is a big part of the value of that degree.

The higher up the food chain a school is, the more competitive the admissions process, and the more selective they can be, thus choosing smarter entrants, and spitting out smarter graduates.

One reason for that is "educational inflation", by which I don't mean just grade inflation. With a much broader college-going population, the average quality is bound to be lower.

Evidence of that can be found on many campuses, especially those megasized state Universities, where, alongside many serious, dedicated students, there will be plenty of others just getting by in their classes, while pursuing their 'real' major: Budweiser.

Let me cite a pair of anecdotal examples to make my point:

Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg both entered Harvard as undergraduates, but both also dropped out along the way to pursue “other activities.” For each of them, those “other activities” turned out rather well.

I conclude it was not any Harvard Magic that turned them into who they became, but rather it was already in them, and the fact that gained entry into Harvard in the first place marked them as capable people.

As it happens, and as a reminder that there are only a handful of central arguments in American life, which constantly recur in slightly different guises, I went into this very issue several decades ago, in an Atlantic article called “The Case Against Credentialism,” and then my book More Like Us.

* * *

One more for now. Another reader writes:

• On the issue of "affirmative action"… [it can be argued that] these elite universities are largely seeking to admit and graduate students that promote the brands and reputations of these institutions. The notion of "merit" should be viewed through that lens.
• The risk to the present activities of these institutions is not coming because of "The Trump Years" but has been building for decades. From Bakke, through the U. of Michigan through Fisher v. U of T, there has been a long, multi-pronged effort to attack *certain* preferences and to use those attacks for electoral gains by stoking tribal resentments ... Trump's role is simply to co-opt these existing goals and resentments for his own ends.
• Your correspondent talks about the concentration of elites through the Clinton-Bush-Obama years and some sort of push-back in the Trump years. How many Goldman Sachs appointees [by Trump] do I have to name to undermine that premise? …
• I laughed out loud at the suggestion that elite universities are opening satellite campuses to provide study-abroad opportunities for their students. These campuses are extensions of the brands of these institutions and are intended to capture the money and loyalties of future leaders from capital-rich portions of the world. It's building the brand and bringing wealth and influence into the global network.
• I agree that these universities would serve their students and the U.S. well to foster access to other parts of the country. In fact, I am aware that one such institution has had an exchange program with an HBC since I was an undergraduate. Using Occam's Razor, I will assert without proof that this is not the only elite university in the U.S. that has an exchange program with a school from an under-represented part of the country. I suggest, respectfully, that your correspondent is mixing too very different goals of these institutions and is under-informed with respect to the activities towards one of those goals.
• In summary, I agree with your correspondent that the forces building against "affirmative action" will see significant victories in the years ahead. [But] I believe that these victories have approximately "zero" to do with the excesses of Bob Rubin or any of the technocratic elites who did well while supposedly doing good during their government service over the last few decades. I believe that the individuals who will be hurt by these developments will be non-white citizens of middle class or more modest means who are unable to participate in the expensive competition of producing elite college applicants.
• The elite institutions themselves will be FINE. Yes, there will be on-campus protests against the reactionary victories. There will be a tremendous push towards needs-blind admissions, economically-focused affirmative action policies AND admissions of international students from the southern hemisphere. But the business of educating ambitious, book-smart students and feeding them into select opportunities within business, government and elsewhere will continue unfettered. After all, these institutions do not create demand for so-called "elite university" graduates, we do.

Thanks to these readers. I’ll have more to say about the New Haven-based author of the previous dispatch, including his real name and background, in upcoming reports.  

Susan Straight grew up in Riverside, California, in the same county as Coachella, and still lives there. She has written novels mainly set in inland California—The Gettin Place was the first of them I read and admired. She wrote the narrative for this story map, “In the Valley of Coachella,” to accompany the dramatic pictures by Douglas McCulloh and the sequence of aerial photography and illustrated, interpretive maps. The narrative is organized around intersections of Coachella’s “president” streets, named for presidents from Washington onward.

In the description of the woman in the photo above, Straight writes:

At Brown Date Garden, palmeros will climb the date palms and put paper bags on the ripening fruit in August. This part of the valley is called One Hundred Palms, and the palmeros will go up one hundred feet of ladder with the paper bags, in one-hundred degree weather. In March, they’ve just finished the harvest, cutting each heavy bunch of dates with a knife fashioned out of steel, lowering each bunch on a hook to a man waiting at the bottom.

The first time we visited Brown, in 2012, Big Donna Fish corrected me: “It’s a garden – not a grove, not an orchard,” she says firmly. Standing under her canopy of fronds, she said matter-of-factly, “I’ve never seen a gringo go up a palm tree. Never.”

The first date palms were imported from Algeria to the valley in 1903. Presently there are 7,000 acres of date palms producing one of the most expensive, time-consuming crops in America.

And, another photo, of Jose Arroyo preparing fencing for the music festival:

The whole production is very much worth checking out — above all, if you’re at the festival, have been before, are considering going in the future, or are at this moment getting off a plane at the Palm Springs airport, Coachella-bound. Congrats for this view of Americana to Susan Straight, Douglas McCulloh, Allen Carroll of Esri, and their colleagues and collaborators.

* For the record, about “our friends” at Esri: For many years I’ve known the founders of Esri, Jack and Laura Dangermond, whose historic $165 million gift to preserve a huge stretch of coastal land in California I wrote about several months ago.  Allen Carroll and others at Esri also worked with me and my wife, Deb, on maps for early posts in our “American Futures” series in the Atlantic, which led to our forthcoming book Our Towns.