Inch-wide and a mile-deep!

Often I have worried that my intellectual preparation has made me a mile-wide and not even an inch-deep.  I might be a flake. A man who knew too little about too many.

And then after a few minutes, that worry eases and I am back to reading, thinking, teaching, and, yes, blogging!

The lack of "depth" is a tradeoff that I systematically made in order to do what I do.  Expertise on the dreaded question of angels dancing on a pin has not ever fascinated me.

Such an approach makes me appreciate life and understand the world.  Like when I read this essay in The New Yorker on how most rural communities in America stagnate, while a handful survive and prosper.

A wonderful essay all by itself, in which the author writes:

In his 1970 book, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty,” the economist Albert O. Hirschman described different ways of expressing discontent. You can exit—stop buying a product, leave town. Or you can use voice—complain to the manufacturer, stay and try to change the place you live in. The easier it is to exit, the less likely it is that a problem will be fixed.

I know what the author is writing about.  In fact, you, dear reader, also know that I know; remember this post of mine in which I paid tribute to Hirschman?  In that post, I wrote that they don't make thinkers like Hirschman anymore? And how Exit, Voice, and Loyalty is one of the few books that I bought and retain?  Hirschman's intellect though was a mile-wide and a mile-deep!

Back to the New Yorker essay:

Americans, Hirschman wrote, have always preferred “the neatness of exit over the messiness and heartbreak of voice.” Discontented Europeans staged revolutions; Americans moved on. “The curious conformism of Americans, noted by observers ever since Tocqueville, may also be explained in this fashion,” he continued. “Why raise your voice in contradiction and get yourself into trouble as long as you can always remove yourself entirely from any given environment should it become too unpleasant?”

The fabled mobility of Americans is rapidly changing.  I routinely ask students in my introductory classes whether they would move to places like Alabama or the Dakotas, or Sub-Saharan Africa, if that's where their economic futures might be.  Rare is a student who is ready to move.

But, in a trump America, it will be interesting to see how Americans react.  We now have a solid blue wall along the West Coast, which is certainly bound to annoy quite a few trump toadies.  Will they pack up and exit?  (I hope and pray they will!)  Will frustrated progressives in states like Texas stay back and voice their opposition? (I hope and pray they will!)

This barely-scratching the surface wannabe-polymath will watch with great interest how Hirschman's thesis plays out in trumpistan, er, America.

Fleeing California. And Florida. And ????

For the first time in the post WWII era, Florida is apparently experiencing more people exiting the state than entering it. The Miami Herald reports that:

the state lost about 58,000 people from April 2008 to April 2009, according to a new estimate from the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research.

``It's such a dramatic shift from what we've seen in the past,'' said Stan Smith, the bureau's director.

``Florida's economy is, in a lot of ways, driven by population growth,'' he said. ``Perhaps more importantly, population growth is a reflection of how the economy is doing both in Florida and in the nation.''

Smith said the decline doesn't look like a trend. Instead, he sees it as a deviation from previous decades of growth upon which Florida's development-based economy relies. He also said the decrease is a ``drop in the bucket'' compared with Florida's 18.3 million population.

Smith said the last time Florida lost population, in 1946, it was because so many soldiers left the state's military bases to go home. This population loss, he said, is solely due to the bad economy.

In Florida's case, it seems to be a response to economic conditions, and nothing else. However, the state of the economy might just be the last straw for many Californians who have endured the chaos in the state for a long time. This LA Times op-ed describes the break-up between the writer and the state:

I've been thinking about this for a very long time, and I've come to the conclusion that we should go our separate ways. I thought I loved you and it would last forever, but I was so very wrong.

I know that our relationship has lasted 50 years and that we should fight to stay together, but you've changed so much that, frankly, I don't know who you are anymore!

When we first met I was young and rather naive, and I loved you unconditionally. I spent years running with abandon across your sandy beaches in the bright sunshine, playing in your beautiful parks and attending your top-rated schools, which were a national model for the other states. For 18 years or so, I can honestly say that I was truly in love with you,

"Exit, Voice, and Loyalty" was how the late Albert Hirschman succinctly described our responses to institutions: We might stay out of loyalty even when we sense that things are going wrong. Later, as the level of discomfort rises, we voice our opinions. And, when nothing works, we exit. We do this to corporations, to municipalities, to states and countries as well.

We better pay attention to the "exit" numbers.