getting coal.out of ground capitalism ii game

But Krugman can’t say that, so instead he has to keep it real. We could help you, Krugman clearly wants to say, but you’re going to need an attitude adjustment first. Every election, liberals watch conservatives come up big in rural areas, and it annoys them.

As good liberals, they don’t agree with their political beliefs, but they do believe rural Americans should be helped. They’ve read about these people in books like Hillbilly Elegy and in the pages of the New York Times. It concerns savvy liberals that people are going to be left out of these patterns of migration simply because they can’t afford to move to where the jobs are. Rural jobs are declining as the nation continues to deindustrialize and more young people flock to the cities. Rural people do desperately need things like healthcare and social welfare benefits. The thing is that Krugman is right, up to a point. His reasoning was that some places are sacrificed every now and then to the “shifting tides of globalization.” As a pragmatic economist, Krugman understands that it’s not wise to entirely throw these people away indeed, you have to preserve some semblance of a labor force in the event that the tides of globalization shift back in their favor.

In 2015, he wrote about how the only solution for the deindustrialized wastoids still living in places like Puerto Rico and Appalachia is better social security payments, healthcare, and public services. So he half-asses a few articles every now and then about expanding the social welfare state and increasing governmental spending in rural areas.

He sees deindustrialization-capitalism’s logical consequence -leaving people behind in rural areas, but he doesn’t have a way to square this troubling fact with a worldview that ostensibly honors the rights and dignity of all people. It bothers him because he’s both a liberal and a true believer in capitalism. What are we supposed to do with rural America? This is a question that keeps Paul Krugman up at night.

Getting coal.out of ground capitalism ii game