The question might seem daft, given how gravely privacy is endangered in our digital age. Spies in government and the private sector routinely devour data for insights into our behavior, insights that may be used to manipulate our behavior. And privacy’s advocates contend that freedom and democracy are unthinkable without it. As philosopher Michael Lynch puts it, privacy affords us control over our thoughts and feelings, which is a “necessary condition for being in a position to make autonomous decisions, for our ability to determine who and what we are as persons.”

This idea—that privacy is an enduring, universal, even sacred virtue—is seductive. But it is wrong, and in a few ways: Privacy is a relatively recent institution, and less than essential to democracy. What’s more, privacy has never been secure; vulnerability is its native state.

Americans may be forgiven for assuming that privacy is a foundational institution in our democracy. You might have read that the nation was spawned, in part, by privacy concerns: colonists rebelled against British troops occupying their homes and invading their warehouses and workplaces. Privacy may not have been quite so central to our founders’ concerns, however. The term is not mentioned in the US Constitution—a right to privacy is never spelled out. In American constitutional law, this right wasn’t articulated until a century after the Revolutionary War, by future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and his law partner Samuel Warren in an 1890 Harvard Law Review article. And privacy only earned a robust legal defense in the 1960s, when the Supreme Court under Earl Warren held that a right to privacy is presumed by the Bill of Rights.

It actually makes sense that privacy was a late arrival to democracy. It seems privacy was more revered, at least early on, as a spatial virtue, rather than a moral one. Historians indicate privacy was conceived as a bourgeois value in the 18th and 19th centuries, born of relative wealth. Premodern homes had few rooms, and certainly few that were designated for single—private—use, like a bathroom or bedroom. People all over the world generally lived in common spaces, which were also quite narrow.

This changed toward the end of the 19th century when a growing middle class demanded homes with multiple rooms into which residents could retreat. As industrialized societies became wealthier, the working class looked to enjoy the same benefits as the wealthy—including privacy. The English ultimately considered it a basic human right for laborers to have homes with private gardens in front and back.

The development and expansion of suburban architecture, especially in America, reflects the gains privacy made in the 20th century. You might say privacy is the central organizing principle of suburbia: houses are removed from the street; sidewalks are a rarity in many suburban neighborhoods, thus limiting intrusion by strangers; socializing happens in fenced-in backyards and spacious basements. Since, the 1970s, the average suburban home has grown by a third, even while the number of its inhabitants has fallen, meaning that suburbanites are practically swimming in private space, which seems to be a basic need.

It is easy to forget how new such standards of privacy are. In 1972, the British government formed a committee to report on the state of privacy. The committee found that “the modern middle-class family … relatively sound-proofed in their semi-detached house, relatively unseen behind their privet hedge … insulated in the family car … are probably more private in the sense of being unnoticed in all their everyday doings than any sizeable section of the population in any other time or place.”

But even as the “Younger Report” (so named because it was chaired by Sir Kenneth Younger, an experienced politician who led several commissions reporting on the state of British society) was claiming that privacy had been achieved in the 20th century as never before, democratic governments were finding new ways to infiltrate their citizens’ lives. In the U.S., historian Sarah Igo explains, that included surveillance of home populations during World War I, public health initiatives that invaded and exposed the homes and lives of the poor, and a growing bureaucracy that aimed to address a host of social ills, from retirement to unemployment to homeownership.

Said bureaucracy ballooned mid-century when the Social Security program was enacted, and assigned identifying numbers to all citizens, rendering them transparent to the government in the process. Many critics and commentators issued dire warnings that echo current concerns for privacy.

“[Our] wage-earning citizens … may well resent a system of surveillance in which every individual among them is kept under the eye of the Federal Government,” one of Social Security’s detractors claimed. “Our people have been accustomed to privacy and freedom of movement.” Likewise, a newspaper column warned readers that “your personal life would be laid bare,” “your life will be an open book,” and “you are to be regimented—catalogued—put on file.”

Such concerns soon evaporated, however. The dangers of lost privacy were unclear, uncertain, unproven; the tradeoff for being documented—namely, you gained a secure retirement—was evident.

In the digital age, these tradeoffs—often made with the active participation of the public—have so thoroughly routed privacy that people now have little expectation of it. Digital spies do not have to work hard to monitor us; this is a new era of sharing. Over the last two decades, consumers have become accustomed to divulging their data in exchange for the conveniences offered by technology. Many people expose intimate and once embarrassing details on social media, as a matter of course. Digital citizens increasingly live their lives in public, for all to see.

This may not be the tragedy that privacy advocates suggest.

I don’t mean to minimize violations of privacy, or to say that it’s not important or cherished—because surveillance does open the door to being taken advantage of, manipulated, or coerced. But I wish to offer this caution from history: privacy has never been essential to human liberty and flourishing; and it has always been threatened, and exceedingly hard to achieve or secure.

By understanding the history of privacy, we can better look to its future, and better evaluate proposals about data control. We should be skeptical, for example, about any law’s ability to protect our privacy—and about our own individual commitments to protecting it. We also should be careful not to oversell privacy as eternal and universal and vital.

If anything, privacy might prove to be a dangerous distraction from more important values. In this digital age, privacy itself can be dangerous when, isolated behind our computer screens, we are swayed by, and moved to magnify, all manner of conspiracies and untruths that undermine democracy. It is not surprising that autocratic regimes have thrived on digital communications, and the division, confusion, and alienation they produce.

The health, welfare, and vibrancy of democracy rely more on the public than the private realm—this has always been the case. How citizens organize in public, how they demonstrate, how they muster the tenacity, courage, and creativity to capture the attention of the populace, and sow the seeds of moral persuasion, this is the basis of our common liberty. We would be wise to relearn and apply this lesson.

The post Why Privacy Might Not Be Worth Protecting appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A half-century later, this Gallic version of the traffic roundabout has come to represent a grayer and grimmer France. Instead of lending carnival-like éclat to Tati’s circling vehicles, the rond-point now symbolizes the slow spiral of diminishing means and decaying hopes for Mr. Hulot’s everyman descendants. Since early November, many of these middle-class men and women, hailing mostly from the provinces, have formed a massive protest movement known as the gilets jaunes, or yellow vests, in reaction to President Emmanuel Macron’s economic policies, including increased taxes on gasoline and diesel. Wearing the bright yellow safety vests that French drivers must don when they are outside their cars on a public thoroughfare, these citizens of modest means have taken to the streets and boulevards—and particularly, the ronds-points—to protest their increasingly desperate social and economic conditions.

In fact, the rond-point has taken on both a symbolic and strategic role in these protests—one that Tati would have appreciated. Were he alive today, Tati’s Mr. Hulot might well be wearing a yellow vest, protesting the plight of the everyman amidst the circling cars of modern France.

To understand the sudden appearance of the gilets jaunes, it helps to consider the history of the rond-point itself. A familiar feature of France’s cityscapes, the rond-point has long been a source of awe and anguish to foreign visitors, particularly when, behind the wheel of a rental car, they must face the raging rapids that roar around the Place de l’Étoile and its monumental Arc de Triomphe. In fact, this particular rond-point, the brainchild of the unjustly forgotten urban planner Eugène Hénard, was the very first to be built in France. When he unveiled it in 1906, Hénard expected it would reduce the number of car and pedestrian accidents that occurred at the intersections for the dozen boulevards leading to the arch.

Hénard was proved right: ronds-points are, on average, twice as safe for pedestrians and drivers than traditional intersections. What Hénard perhaps did not anticipate was how popular his invention would prove. There are now more ronds-points than different kinds of cheese in France; for that matter, there are more ronds-points in France than in any other country. More than 30,000 pockmark the French landscape, with 500 more added every year.

But traffic safety alone does not explain the recent rash of ronds-points. City councils and mayors frequently spend significant sums of money—between 200,000 and 1 million euros—to transform the space within a traffic circle into publicity for their towns. Like three-dimensional billboards, the erection of statues or landscapes highlights local traits or wares. For example, the rond-point outside Bondy showcases a statue of black, brown, and white children, thus celebrating the Paris suburb’s ethnic diversity, while at the town of Tinchebray, the rond-point serves as pedestal for an immense rake and pail—not coincidentally, the products of the town’s single factory.

But paradoxically, the blossoming of ronds-points also measures the blight of the French middle-class dream. Since the 1960s, the rise of ronds-points has accompanied the multiplication of housing developments located outside the country’s cities. Between 1968 and 2011, the exurban population in France has grown from 9.4 million to 15.3 million, with the vast majority settling in single residence homes. This demographic bulge represents the so-called rêvepavillon, or suburban dream. Like the dream itself, the pavillon is modest: a small dwelling that is indistinguishable from hundreds of neighboring houses, built on land that once was pasture or farmland.

It is in the spaces between these exurban ronds-points where the dream has become an ordeal. As housing tracts have stretched ever further away from the cities, they have made residents increasingly reliant on their cars. The national rail company, the SNCF, has reinforced this trend by suppressing local rail lines in favor of high-speed lines between major cities. As a result, the government’s plan to increase taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel strikes a nerve already made raw by the declining purchasing power of, and rising tax burden on, what one government minister dismissively referred to as “those French who puff on cigarettes and drive on diesel.”

These are the very same French now wearing the gilets jaunes. The massive protest movement—an estimated 75,000 people blocked 580 roadways over one recent weekend—represents a dramatic shifting of the fault line between what the French sociologist Christophe Guilluy calls the métropole and périphérie. While the former is home to a highly trained and educated elite allergic to smoke and diesel, the latter is home to a struggling middle class alienated from these urban centers. This peripheral France—a socioeconomic as well as a geographic state—is, in effect, la France des ronds-points. In fact, the rond-point has now become a rampart for the yellow vests, who are underscoring that France remains a société bloquée—one dominated by the state, even as they challenge that power. By occupying hundreds of these traffic circles, they have turned them into impasses not just for cars, but also for the government as it seeks an exit from a deepening crisis.

Inevitably, the recent scenes of pitched battles between black-helmeted vandals and shield-wielding police along the Champs Élysées, amidst flaming tires and thudding tear gas canisters, claimed the world’s attention. By the early morning of December 1, the historic boulevard, covered in a wintry mist, had again become the stage for social and political upheaval. For some commentators, it is yet another reminder that the French are better at making revolutions than reforms.

But such claims simplify, if not falsify, a more complex reality. A closer look reveals that the vast majority of French have carried on the protests peacefully, at times joyously, at countless ronds-points across the country. They see them less as places of confrontation than reconciliation between those who use diesel and those who tax it. At a critical rond-point outside Gustave Flaubert’s native city of Rouen, the gilets jaunes, whose ranks are weighted towards women, have transformed the space into a camp site. Singing and chatting around a fire, the protestors are given food and support by the very commuters they are blocking.

To the north, in the Flemish town of Hazebrouck, a few dozen gilets jaunes transformed their rond-point into an open grill. Protestors chipped in to buy an entire pig, which they roasted over a fire and invited everyone, including car drivers, to share.

The post How Traffic Circles Became Ground Zero for the French Middle Class appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Just ask its princes and princesses—those fortunate enough to be able to afford to live and vote there. Most of the time, the nearly 900,000 residents can pretend that they live in the country, even though they’re part of greater Los Angeles. Parks or open space or farmland is almost always within easy walking or biking distance. The Santa Clara River, the least developed of Southern California’s waterways, is being protected. The Kingdom of Ventura’s cities remain separate and distinct developments on the landscape—they haven’t sprawled and melted into each other, like cities do elsewhere in Southern California.

Their secret? “No other county in the United States has more effective protections against urban sprawl,” says the web site of SOAR, aka Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources, a family of growth-controlling ballot measures.

Those SOAR protections have been fixed in the laws of the county and its cities for two decades. SOAR permits development only within certain urban cores in the county and makes no allowances for population growth. And if a developer wants to change the boundaries or develop open space outside the areas where growth is permitted, that developer can’t buy off the county supervisors or a city council. SOAR requires any development in protected open space be approved by the voters.

Ventura voters like the results so much they are moving to make them all but permanent this November, when they vote on county and city measures that would extend SOAR protections through 2050.

In practice, this has made the Kingdom a mighty fortress. Those sprawling suburban housing developments that fill up the San Fernando Valley to the east and the Santa Clarita Valley to the north? They stop at the county’s edge. It’s almost as if Ventura County has built a wall against growth along its border—and made neighboring Los Angeles pay for it.

All of which makes SOAR worth celebrating. But there is a problem with those walls, and within the Kingdom. And that problem is not the wonderful things that growth restrictions have done. It’s what the princes and princesses of the Kingdom have failed to do.

A group of SOAR volunteers in Ventura County.

Smart growth strategies like SOAR are not merely supposed to preserve open space. At their best, they are designed to promote smart growth—to drive more creative, dense, multi-family, and transit-oriented development in the urban cores where growth is still permitted. But the Kingdom has been far from welcoming to this type of development.

Yes, you can find smart, denser growth in the city of Ventura, particularly around its downtown. But infill development in Ventura County has lagged far behind what’s needed to serve the Kingdom’s growing population and its housing needs. The same citizens of the Kingdom who back SOAR also have opposed multifamily and denser developments (Thousand Oaks even passed a ballot measure limiting density), and resisted investments in public transit to connect their urban cores.

The results are as obvious as the choking traffic on the 101 Freeway and the astronomical housing prices. Ventura County is one of the 10 least affordable places to live in the United States. It’s been very difficult for middle-class people, much less lower-income people, to make their homes there, and that makes it hard for companies to locate there. Many service workers have to commute from outside the county.

“We need to understand that there is an uncertain capacity within our urban boundaries to accommodate job growth,” Bruce Stenslie, president of the Economic Development Collaborative of Ventura County, said during a public conference earlier this year on SOAR. “Which doesn’t mean that we should tear down the urban boundaries, it means we need to be a little more mature about questions concerning in-fill development and higher density.”

Of course such immaturity about growth—and high housing prices and inequality and traffic—is not limited to Ventura County. What’s frustrating is that after 20 years, the Kingdom doesn’t seem to have learned its lesson. The current proposed renewal of SOAR doesn’t include any new flexibility to account for population growth—and it’s not linked to any broader effort to do more infill development in the cores.

This represents at best a missed opportunity—and at worst an example of mass public selfishness.

Matthew Fienup, an economist with Cal Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting (who likes to talk about how much he loves living across the street from orchards), points out that there are myriad ways to require more regular analysis and adjustments of the boundaries, and to put management of the boundaries in the hands of planners, instead of the hands of people with the money to put questions to voters. Fienup suggests that the county would be better off establishing tradable development rights that would protect the same amount of land while bringing some flexibility to the boundaries.

But in its intransigence, Ventura is an example of the California disease—grab your piece of the Kingdom, and then keep out anyone who might come in after you. And few in Ventura seem to care that the county, like other urban coastal places in California, has seen such a decline in its number of children and young families that it might eventually resemble a well-off senior living community.

In California, local growth restrictions are only one small part of how the old block the young. State laws make housing development slow and costly. Prop 13 provisions keep their property taxes low, encouraging people to stay in their homes longer, which reduces the supply of homes on the market.

This local anti-growth bias is now a major statewide issue as California faces a crisis in housing affordability and availability—for anyone but the most affluent. To push back against anti-growth local communities, Gov. Brown is championing legislation that would exempt many urban housing developments from environmental or local government review.

Many localities have responded to this statewide push defiantly, via local ballot measures that block growth and housing, as the Voice of San Diego documented recently. The least responsible cities are going beyond growth boundaries to impose anti-density restrictions. The most reactionary of these ballot initiatives comes from Santa Monica, which was just connected to the L.A. rail system by L.A. county taxpayers. That rail connection should inspire denser, transit-oriented development. But anti-growth Santa Monicans want to derail all this by requiring a vote of the people on most developments taller than two stories.

The defense of those backing anti-growth measures is disingenuous: If you don’t like restrictions, you can go to the ballot. But that argument is an invitation for development to be determined by a showdown between NIMBY demagoguery and self-interested political money, as opposed to any rational long-range planning.

One lesson from Ventura County is that growth boundaries like SOAR shouldn’t be pursued in isolation. They need to be tied to rock-solid requirements for creating more housing, both for low-income and middle-income people. To put it another way, it’s great if your community wants to protect open space from development, but then you don’t get to block denser development, housing, and transit in your already developed spaces.

If Ventura County wants to wall off growth in its open areas until the end of time, fine. But it must be compelled to open gates in its walls big enough to bring much more progressive development into the Kingdom.

The post The Walls Are Too High in the Kingdom of Ventura appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As their country has become the “world’s factory,” hundreds of millions of Chinese people have been lifted out of poverty. At the same time, China has become one of the most polluted places in the entire world.

In researching a new book, Siqi Zheng and I traced the rise of China’s urban pollution. We were trying to understand three things: Why has pollution increased so sharply? How has pollution impacted the population? And how is the government responding to the issue? In the end, we documented an encouraging trend. Newfound demand for a clean environment—”blue skies”—from the growing Chinese middle and upper classes creates a compelling incentive for Beijing and local officials to clean up Chinese cities.

China’s environmental problems are tied to its rapid industrialization. When Mao Zedong became the leader of China in 1949, he ruled over relatively few cities, and they were not industrialized. Early Communist Party leaders located factories near the Soviet Union, China’s main trading partner at that time, and didn’t prioritize environmental protection. Pollution in the country began to worsen in the 1980s, when then-leader Deng Xiaoping launched a new economic development strategy focused on industrialization and increasing exports. Due to the country’s low wages, subsidized energy prices, and weak enforcement of environmental regulations, China soon became the world’s factory. Everything, it seemed, carried a “Made in China” label.

But Chinese cities soon began to suffer from the effects of the black smoke produced by expanding heavy industry and from burning coal to generate power and wintertime heat. Between 1980 and 2012, China’s annual consumption of coal increased from 679 to 3,887 million tons. Today, China is the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. Based on 2011 data, China produced 28 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions while the United States produced 16 percent of total emissions.

These emissions sharply increase the risk of climate change and greatly decrease quality of life. According to World Bank data from 2013, China’s citizens are exposed to roughly five times the levels of particulate matter as people in the United States. This pollution comes from burning coal as well as a sharp rise in the consumption of high-sulfur gasoline, which fuels the growing number of private vehicles on China’s roads.

Chinese people are noticing the change. Over the last 30 years, China’s economy grew at a rate of 10 percent per year, slashing the share of its population living below the poverty line from 84 percent to 13 percent. Over the same period of time, improvements in medical care and diet have lengthened life expectancy at birth from 66 to 73 years. But despite such progress, Chinese urbanites must reckon with the reality that the nation’s standard of living is not improving as quickly as its economy is growing. In surveys, many report lower life satisfaction than economists typically predict for a rapidly growing economy.

The central government is listening. Since the early 2000s, it has increasingly emphasized sustainable growth and has focused on reducing pollution and mitigating the risk of climate change. On one level, this shift is a surprise: Why would China engage in regulation that could kill the golden goose of industry, raising the cost of production and threatening the nation’s edge as an exporter of manufactured goods? But basic economics provides an explanation. Wealthier people are willing to pay more to avoid risk. They demand safer products, safer food, safer housing, and a cleaner environment. So as a growing middle and upper class demands its blue skies, a central government that seeks to preserve its power and credibility has strong incentives to stop polluting.

It also has a better chance of convincing local officials to devote more attention to environmental challenges. In recent years, Beijing has been changing the performance evaluation and promotion criteria for local officials. Instead of rewarding them purely for output, China now includes environmental goals in performance metrics. Mayors, especially in richer and better-educated cities, also face pressure from the public. With the relaxation of the nation’s domestic passport system and the liberalization of the labor and land markets, Chinese urbanites are able to vote with their feet and move to cleaner cities. Just as in the United States, where homes in nicer areas sell at a premium, apartments in Chinese cities and neighborhoods with better air also fetch higher prices.

Chinese urbanites wear air pollution masks when pollution is elevated.

China’s cities track this variation in home prices and have also used more novel sources of information to study the demand for a better environment. In recent years, the rise of the Internet and social media, coupled with new technology such as cheap air pollution monitors, has increased public awareness of local pollution challenges. Many people use Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter, to express concerns about pollution. We have documented that Chinese urbanites purchase more air filters and air pollution masks when pollution is elevated. This shows that people are aware of pollution levels and are willing to take costly actions to protect themselves. The wealthy are the most likely to take such precautions, which suggests that quality of life disparities will worsen unless pollution is improved.

Several promising trends in China’s rich coastal cities suggest that significant environmental progress is likely to take place. Manufacturing is land intensive, so as urban rents rise, industrial activity is leaving the major cities and taking pollution with it. In addition, second- and third- tier inland cities can offer lower electricity prices to manufacturers, making them increasingly attractive destinations for labor and energy intensive industries. Happily, “dirty factories” do not simply migrate from one city to another. The new factories opening up in China’s western cities are more likely to feature clean, modern engineering technology.

China is also making a major strategic investment in the green economy. Since 2007 it has been the world’s largest producer of the photovoltaic cells that produce solar energy; in 2014, exports totaled $14 billion. China’s domestic market for renewable energy is also huge, as the country aims to increase its non-fossil fuel energy capacity to 15 percent of total primary energy consumption. Research and development in renewables is expanding, with the help of engineering professors from top institutions such as Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Science.

China’s post-industrial economic growth will depend on the health, well-being, and happiness of its people—who increasingly clamor for a better environment. It is no accident that so many Chinese people enjoy visiting San Francisco and Los Angeles—high-amenity cities that attract and retain the skilled. Leadership in Beijing has a great incentive to build similar urban centers that could accelerate China’s transition to the knowledge economy.

The post What Does China’s Growing Middle Class Desire Most? Blue Skies. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

After dinner Spiller exuberantly showed off a sample of “cotton ball,” a weird, semi-translucent rock formation containing borax. Spiller suggested to his hosts that fortunes awaited those lucky enough to find a generous deposit of the stuff. He showed them how to test for the mineral’s presence with a combination of alcohol and sulfuric acid. After Spiller left the next day, Aaron told Rosie he had seen a material very similar to this out on the desiccated lakebed of Death Valley.

That morning the couple set off to collect samples of the opaque dirty white bulbous material that resembled a handful of dirty cotton balls spread across the desert floor. They made a camp and (so the story goes) “when the shadows had closed in around them, Winters put some of the salt into a saucer, poured the acid and alcohol on them, and with trembling hand struck a match.” Watching anxiously, Aaron exclaimed, “She burns green, Rosie! We’re rich, by God.”

Getting rich by finding gold, silver, or oil is a California tale as old as the Gold Rush and as new as the Beverly Hillbillies. But the story of 20 Mule Team Borax is also the story of one of America’s defining brands, a product that came to sit on a shelf in every household, offering an only-in-America promise that by using this particular washing powder, immigrants from around the world could share in the heritage of the Wild Wild West and join the upper middle class.

Winters staked his claim in the middle of Death Valley and quickly sold the land for $20,000 in 1883 to William Tell Coleman, a Kentucky native turned San Francisco borax magnate who built Coleman’s Harmony Borax Works on the property. Forty Chinese workers scraped the mineral from the harsh desert floor for $1.50 per day, except when summer temperatures reached above 120 degrees Fahrenheit—not to give the workers a break, but because the borax could not crystallize properly under such extreme conditions.

Coleman used mules to transport the borax 162 miles due west to a railroad shipping spur in Mojave, California. The teams that later became infamous as “20 Mule Teams” in fact consisted of 18 mules and two draft horses. The animals were hitched to two massive wooden wagons with 7-foot-high rear wheels, carrying over 10 tons of processed borax apiece. Two fully loaded wagons with a full 1,200-gallon steel water tank and additional supplies weighed in at 36.5 tons. Just two men operated the wagons—one driving and operating the brake of the lead wagon, the other minding the rear wagon’s brake. The trip took 10 grueling days across the hot desert and was both monotonous—moving in a straight line was not much of a challenge—and dangerous on cliffside curves where an entire wagon train could fall off, driver and all. Specialized sections of the mule team were trained to angle their bodies while stepping sideways so that the preceding animals could navigate curves.

20 Mule Team Borax Soap Chips

 
Coleman got so much borax out of Death Valley that the market crashed. In 1890, he sold out for half a million dollars to Francis Marion “Borax” Smith. Coleman died broke three years later.

Encouraged by young employee named Stephen Tyng Mather, Smith capitalized on the “lore and mystique” of Death Valley by creating the 20 Mule Team brand in 1894. Never mind that by 1896 borate ore from the region was shipped entirely by rail; the company created personalities like feisty William “Borax Bill” Parkinson, who was hired and trained as a driver for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition and other promotional tour events across the U.S. When Parkinson died suddenly another man became the new “Borax Bill.”

Borax Bill, said an early brochure, spoke to his balky mules in language “that would not sound well in polite society.” If it seems strange that housewives of the time embraced the idea that a man with a dirty mouth would help them get their clothes clean and white, it helps to remember what hard labor laundry was before the advent of washing machines and sophisticated detergents.

Smith’s goal was to “put a box of borax in every home” and he succeeded at doing exactly that. By the 1920s the brand was considered a legendary triumph of American advertising, lauded for creating such demand that prices fell for consumers.

The brand’s popularity coincided with a push toward cleanliness and germ eradication in both the U.S. and Europe. Besides being promoted as a laundry detergent, borax was touted as an essential part of personal health, hygiene, and cosmetics. A 1919 advertising pamphlet titled Borax: The Magic Crystal read, “Perfect health depends on perfect hygienic cleanliness; and perfect sanitary cleanliness is secured by the use of nature’s greatest cleanser and most harmless antiseptic—Borax.” The product materials spoke in a kind of code to hard-working women who wanted to better their lot. Borax pitched itself as “a very popular powder for whitening the faces of ladies who are too much tanned, or have faded in some way.” The pamphlet said the product could remove freckles, be used as a sunscreen—or a deodorant—and soften hands that had done too much manual labor. The message that being clean—and paler—was the ticket to the American Dream was almost explicit in advertising of the time, which was aimed at a big melting pot of recent immigrants. As ad executive Albert Lasker told his staff in the 1920s, “We are making a homogeneous people out of a nation of immigrants.”

In 1930, the company pulled off another trick of turning itself into not just a shared soap but a shared memory of bygone frontier days, producing a radio show called Death Valley Days. These Western morality tales ran weekly for 15 years on the radio and then another 18 years and 600 episodes on television, where it was one of the longest-running Western programs in broadcast history. Ronald Reagan hosted the program from 1964 to 1965, and actors including Angie Dickinson, Clint Eastwood, James Caan, and James Coburn did guest appearances early in their careers.

Death Valley Days was Reagan’s last TV show before he ran for governor of California. In his ads hawking Borax, he is simultaneously a character of the old West, a glamorous actor, and the father of Patty Reagan, who shows how domestic Borax can be. It’s a neat trick, and it foreshadows Reagan’s uncanny ability to evoke a mythic past with a vision of domestic tranquility for political purposes.

But underneath all of the ideals of the frontier, of blockbuster marketing, and of the melting pot, what’s probably given 20 Mule Team Borax its sticking power is that it speaks to the core American value of hard, dirty work—even if it only took 18 mules.

The post How Ronald Reagan Peddled Laundry Detergent appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This abandonment is perhaps most clear in Pennsylvania, a battleground state the polls say Trump will handily win in Tuesday’s primaries. Voter surveys tell us that the best predictor of Trump’s support is how much education a primary voter has. Those who didn’t go to college back him in overwhelming numbers. And two-thirds of Americans over the age of 25 do not have a bachelor’s degree, making them a potentially decisive bloc in this year’s elections.

These are the very households that have been hammered by shifts in the economy over the past several decades. In steel-town Pennsylvania—from Erie in the northwest to Johnstown in the southwest, to Bethlehem in the east—city populations have fallen steadily since the 1960s. Half the state’s manufacturing jobs have disappeared since 1990, wiped away by automation and foreign and domestic competition.

These Trump voters are part of a much larger and worrying story. As a sociologist who studies the working class, I’ve seen firsthand the financial and psychological toll that job loss and economic change have on men and women. In interviews I recently conducted on unemployed autoworkers, I found that as spells of joblessness stretched out into months and years, stress and shame deeply affected these workers, making many of them vulnerable to suicidal thinking and family breakups.

Pennsylvania’s manufacturing cities have had some luck in turning to other industries, such as plastics, wind turbines, and biofuels. Indeed, Pittsburgh is often held up as a national success story—a city that has adapted agilely to the shuttering of its factories by embracing the new economy. It may still be home to the Steelers football team, but Pittsburgh’s recent economic growth has revolved around its booming tech and health care sectors, which have lured a well-educated creative class of young professionals and spurred a downtown revitalization.

But large swaths of the working class find themselves out of the running for many of these new good jobs, which increasingly go to people with college degrees. Nationally, of the 2.9 million good jobs created since the recession, 2.8 million have gone to the college-educated, according to a recent Georgetown study. While wages for men and women with bachelor’s degrees have risen, those for working-class men have plummeted.

One symbol of where things are headed is Bethlehem Steel. Once a global powerhouse, the company was dissolved in 2003. Six years later, the Sands Casino Resort Bethlehem opened for business on the former grounds of its historic steel plant.

Recently, there has been much happy talk in this country of a bonanza from fracking and a trend toward “reshoring” manufacturing jobs. Pennsylvania’s boom in fracked natural gas was supposed to deliver good jobs to the countryside. The state negotiated hard to get Shell to build an ethylene plant in the western part of the state that was expected to create more jobs in plastics. With natural gas prices falling, however, the jobs have dried up and Shell has not built the plant. At the same time, the state’s manufacturing sector has never recovered from the recession, with job growth flat since 2010.

Today, many of the new manufacturing jobs being created in this country pay lower wages and are located in the South, where state laws make it harder to organize workers. Meanwhile, new industries are emerging that seem to herald worse times ahead for the working class. In Nevada, Daimler, the German carmaker that owns Mercedes-Benz, is testing driverless trucks, which may put in jeopardy at least some of the country’s 1 million truck-driving jobs. And trucking is the most common job to be found in Pennsylvania, as well as many other states. Last year, Uber poached a third of the staff at Carnegie Mellon’s robotics center. (The university, which is based in Pittsburgh, was an early pioneer in developing self-driving cars.) If Uber successfully implements this technology, legions of human drivers will be out of work.

In this context, working-class desperation is hardly irrational, as some media have portrayed it.

Recent research has uncovered spikes in suicide and drug poisonings over the past few decades, particularly among the white working class. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide rates—which have risen across demographic groups since 1999—are higher in smaller cities like those in Pennsylvania’s heartland. Meth is a booming business in the Rust Belt, and overdose deaths from opioids and other drugs have soared.

The biggest issue motivating Trump voters is, of course, immigration. While his supporters may see the threat it poses more in terms of culture—concerns that immigrants are challenging their way of life and, in some cases, flouting the rule of law—the perception that these newcomers drive down wages for the already dispossessed can stoke the anger. In the Rust Belt, these fears also fit a narrative of decline. The country’s economic center of gravity has shifted to states where immigrants dominate—led first by California, and now by Texas. Meanwhile, their region, once the world’s workshop, has been passed over, and their communities, once vibrant, have been left to rot. No wonder the white working-class in inland Pennsylvania and other links of the Rust Belt are feeling left out and riled up.

Even if they reject Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, other politicians can learn something from the deep well of despair and outrage he has tapped. For one thing, there needs to be much more investment in working-class communities. Government can play a major role here by better funding the nation’s frayed and patchy network of job centers and retraining programs while making tuition more affordable at community colleges, which teach vocational skills for the sorts of industries that are growing in today’s economy. (Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s push last year to lower the costs of community college met a wall of congressional resistance.)

More broadly, the middle class needs to take the issues of the working class seriously—and condescendingly. Part of Trump’s appeal is that he speaks in ways that acknowledge the pain of the working class—at least the white portion of it. Sure, he is a billionaire from a wealthy family, but he treats working people as adults who have real concerns. Contempt among the well-educated for those who lack college degrees or live in the “flyover” country of America’s midlands can heighten the appeal of demagogues who speak the language of working-class pride and nativism, as George Wallace did in decades past, and Trump does today.

In places like Erie and Johnstown and Bethlehem, there is desperation and anger—and this election may hinge on who can best channel it.

The post The Pain Behind the Pennsylvania Primary appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I know this isn’t true. For the past two years, I have been working with archivists Michael Dolgushkin and Shelby Kendrick, sifting through old files and records on employment from the 1970s and 1980s. The work is part of a California State Library research effort to catalogue employment-training strategies in California. I have worked in and with local job-training projects in California since 1979, and the archival project involved my papers on job training and employment programs and the papers of other practitioners and researchers over the past four decades. For the 1970s and 1980s, we collected hundreds of reports and articles about specific projects aimed at youth illiteracy and unemployment, retraining laid off workers, and welfare-to-work approaches.

That era feels very familiar, since people were worried about the same big issues that we are now—growing wage inequality, the hollowing out of the middle class, chronic unemployment. But it’s also encouraging, since our responses to those big problems back then actually made a difference.

The 1970s and 1980s are a peculiar and urgent time to visit via an archival time machine. Government and academic papers were being written about the elimination of middle-class jobs, particularly manufacturing jobs available to workers without college degrees. Rising teenage pregnancy rates and welfare rolls fueled predictions of increased urban violence and a growing “underclass.” “Deindustrialization” was a popular topic, with essays such as “America’s Changing Economic Landscape” and “The Declining Middle.”

And so was the fear that technology was eliminating a wide swatch of jobs in all sectors, leaving a mismatch of too many workers for not enough jobs. In a 1984 report, “Forecasting the Impact of New Technologies on the Future Job Market,” Stanford researchers Russell Rumberger and Henry Levin warned that the high-tech sector, seen as a font of replacement jobs, was actually creating a relatively small number of jobs, and was unlikely to be a major employer in the future.

None of the specters of those days have materialized, though. To the contrary, we have seen improvements. Welfare rolls have dropped dramatically, as have teen pregnancy rates. Job growth has outpaced job loss due to technology and other forces. The middle class has shrunk by some indicators, but remains robust, and new mid-level jobs are being created.

Where did we go right? There is no one answer. Success came as a result of a complex mix of influences: government, private sector, and volunteer education and training programs; demographic shifts; macro-economic policies. But that’s not enough of an explanation. All the improvements are linked in ways to a dynamic that too rarely gets mentioned in policy discussions: the willingness of people (policymakers, practitioners, and ordinary citizens) to stand up to then-dominant ideologies and refuse to be paralyzed when problems are described as intractable. Below is a very brief sketch of this dynamic in California.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the consensus on welfare held that expanding government benefit programs was inevitable, that entrepreneurship would be replaced by the collaboration of big government and big private-sector companies, and that the country’s employment future lay in a model of big government, big labor, and big private sector companies. It was a consensus adopted by top officials in government, private foundations, large non-profits, and the prominent think tanks of the time. Welfare rights organizations and advocacy agencies, with funding by private foundations and government, opposed any attempts to rethink the welfare system (they sought to expand it), and they and others dictated to the Democratic-controlled state legislature what to do.

How was this consensus broken? Slowly, by people on the left and the right challenging the establishment. Welfare reform only began its first steps when a few elected Democratic officials in Sacramento, such as then-State Senator John Garamendi, were willing to break ranks and join with Republicans, national thinkers such as Lawrence Mead, and local practitioners to establish welfare time limits and redirect welfare agencies to become job placement agencies. Eventually, a different way of approaching welfare took hold—one that aggressively pushed welfare recipients into the work world. Caseloads, which reached a high of more than 900,000 cases by July 1996, started a steady drop over the next eight years to fewer than 500,000 cases by July 2004. (During the Great Recession, the number of cases rose, but has leveled in the past few years, at around 560,000.) Whereas previously welfare caseworkers looked at welfare recipients and asked, “How can we take care of these people?” after the implementation of welfare reform, the caseworkers began to ask, “How can we build on the strengths these people possess and help them become more self-sufficient?”

Welfare reform had many other moving parts, and the case reduction had greater complexity. But at core it was the rejection of a liberal ideology of expanding government benefits.

Similarly, teen pregnancy rates went down sharply. The California teen pregnancy rate, following the nation’s rate, rose through the 1980s until reaching 72.9 births per thousand in 1991. It then began a steady decline down to 45.2 births per thousand in 2001, and further on to a low of under 30 births per thousand today. Part of the teen pregnancy reduction resulted from programs of additional services and opportunities—at my job training agency, San Francisco Renaissance Center, we had a “Parents of Success” program for many years, assisting teen mothers in obtaining GEDs and job placement. But a main driver of reduced teen pregnancy involved breaking a consensus that it was a “cultural norm.”

Regarding job numbers, deindustrialization and technological advances did produce the envisioned job losses in California. But they also produced unexpected job gains that replaced the losses. In September 1980, payroll employment stood at 9,829,000 jobs in California. This September, payroll employment was up to 16,199,000 jobs. California had over 1.2 million manufacturing jobs this year.

The main driver of this job growth has been entrepreneurship, that supposedly disappearing value. Its promotion came not from the federal government or other elites connected with employment strategies, but from outside practitioners and thinkers—again, on both the left and right. Non-profits such as the Corporation for Enterprise Development, minority business development groups, and local community development corporations pushed forward strategies on local levels emphasizing entrepreneurship such as the expansion of inner-city loan funds, and purchasing networks for fledgling businesses. The developing market-oriented think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, identified the tax changes and culture changes necessary for entrepreneurship to expand. George Gilder’s 1981 best-seller Wealth and Poverty was also crucial in creating an argument and language to explain the value of entrepreneurship.

The history of the past three decades in California shows that in the areas of welfare, teen pregnancy, job growth, and new business generation, improvement is possible. But there is no room for complacency. Today, California’s foundations, social welfare non-profits, and government entities continue to be led by persons who see their role as expanding government benefit programs or adding free community college or other free goods to reduce income inequality or poverty. These approaches, not anchored to employment, business growth, or entrepreneurship, won’t have any more success than similar programs of the 1960s and 1970s.

Today’s job training and anti-poverty practitioners and policymakers rarely study the efforts of previous decades. That’s unfortunate, and the California State Library archival project is aimed at showing how much there is to learn from the past. We will need to keep to true to the values that drove our social and economic successes of the past three decades. If we do so, in another 30 years we’ll be able to revisit our current employment approaches, and see that, once again, we made progress.

The post This Is How We Saved the Middle Class in the 1980s appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.