California has a peculiar peril: Our state is becoming too rich for its own good.

For evidence, just look at Orange County.

The dangers of too much wealth have not been much of a topic this fall as the county of 3.2 million—more than the population of 21 states—hosts a national political war over control of Congress. But they should be. Because, for all the conversation about our state’s considerable problems with poverty, today’s wealth may be a greater threat to California’s future.

By the statistics, Orange County looks as flawless as any of the toned bodies on the beach at Corona del Mar. It has a GDP greater than that of smaller European countries like Greece or Portugal; unemployment is at just 3 percent; and the median income approaches $90,000—which is $25,000 higher than the state figure.

But O.C.’s economic beauty is only skin deep. Beneath the surface lies a heart that is old and beating too slow. Orange County’s comfortable wealth may be robbing it of its dynamism.

The wealth we hold in our housing is central to the problem. Orange County, like California itself, should be a place where everyone wants to live. But it’s so expensive to live there that, for most of the last two decades, more people have been leaving the county for other parts of the U.S. than have been moving into it. Orange County is also a place where you should want to raise your kids; the schools are good, and dropout rates are low. But, with the high cost of living and declining births, school enrollment and the number of young children have fallen.

One result: Orange County is in danger of getting dumber. Some regional analysts have warned of a “brain drain,” as the county’s millennial population shrinks. That means Orange County is not developing its next generation of residents and workers—and is in fact losing many of the young people who graduate its universities with technical degrees.

The problem is not a lack of jobs. To the contrary, the labor market is impossibly tight, with employers in surveys complaining about the extreme difficulties of hiring educated workers with the right skills. A workforce report released late last year by the Orange County Development Board and the Orange County Business Council warned: “A less robust workforce talent pool could make Orange County a less attractive destination for businesses.”

In some ways, there may be too many jobs there. National political reporters, as they descend on the political battleground, lazily call Orange County a giant suburb, but it actually profiles more like an urban job center. While spending considerable time in the county recently, I was struck by all the office space under construction: more than 1.5 million square feet.

The nature of those jobs contributes to the county’s problems. Orange County hasn’t developed the robust and innovative tech sector of other wealthy American places. Instead, what distinguishes Orange County is the high percentage of its workers who are in high-paying professional services posts, from finance to accounting. But those higher-paying job categories are stagnating, while there is robust growth among much lower-paying job categories—in tourism, leisure, construction, and, to some extent, healthcare. The real growth in jobs in Orange County in the next decade, according to state projections, will be low-paying ones in food preparation and service, personal care aides, and retail sales.

Already, many of those workers can’t afford to live in Orange County, so they commute in from neighboring, and cheaper, Riverside and Los Angeles counties. Earlier this year, the UCLA Anderson Forecast found that, for the first time on record, Orange County has more local jobs than it has people to fill them. (Orange County is hardly alone in this; Silicon Valley faces the same problem.)

And that puts pressure on a major Orange County weakness that also hasn’t been much of an issue in this fall’s political campaigns: transportation. Orange County, despite being a job center and a crossroads between counties in Southern California, has been irresponsibly cheap when it comes to building its infrastructure. Orange County residents declined to build an international airport at El Toro when they had a chance. The limited train service in the county doesn’t connect the different parts of the county well, and even its freeways mostly run north-south. It’s nothing close to the center of transportation it should be.

Lack of connection contributes to a divide. Jerry Nickelsburg, the director of the Anderson Forecast, says that Orange County is not one economy but two. There is the low-paying leisure and hospitality economy dominated by Disney on the north side of the county. The other involves finance, aerospace, and some tech around Irvine and Newport (with a branch in Seal Beach).

That north county economy has been getting national attention, via political and union organizing to raise the wages of people who work in and around the Disney complex. But Orange County’s richer southern precincts are aging rapidly into irrelevance. Those communities struggle to find enough construction workers for building projects, especially those that serve the surging population of senior citizens.

Such trends, if not reversed, do more than explain today’s political divisions. They foretell a more divided future for one of California’s most beautiful places. How can the poorer north county get the resources it requires when O.C.’s politics and economy are dominated by the richer south? And what kind of representation is possible when more of the people who do the work in Orange County don’t live there?

A recession could further darken the picture, especially if it cuts hard into the professional services sector. Economic slowdown would probably further hurt manufacturing (of things like aerospace parts and nutritional supplements) and local government sectors that have seen declines in employment.

Automation in retail, a major industry for a county with fantastic malls like Fashion Island, also looms as a threat. Even tourism has shown some vulnerability, with hotel occupancy rates and the number of passengers at John Wayne Airport leveling off. (Perhaps Galaxy’s Edge, the new Star Wars-themed land scheduled to open at Disneyland next summer, could spark new growth and a more futuristic local outlook.)

A more fundamental problem is the lack of dynamism. The rate at which Orange County creates new businesses has been on a long-term decline. This reflects aging and slowing immigration in the county. Since those same trends exist across the state, California could become much less vital and entrepreneurial, too.

So while it’s interesting that so many young activists and political operatives from across the country have come to Orange County for campaign season, it would be much better if they could stick around, and start new families and new enterprises.

The post Is Orange County Too Rich For its Own Good? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But that choice was accompanied by a healthy skepticism of the role of money in the halls of government. As the years went by, recurrent scandals prompted rounds of reform, fostering an intricate system of rules to promote ethical conduct.

The result is a daunting interface between private and public life, the line marked by financial investigation, disclosure, and divestiture. Still, from the early 20th century, U.S. presidents began to routinely call on leaders from business and industry to head key agencies of the government. And despite nagging public suspicion, the moguls drafted into service were consistently free of accusations—let alone outright findings—of corruption or misconduct.

Keep in mind, the sort of corruption threatened by the rich and powerful is quite distinct from the more garden-variety graft usually associated with public officials—bribery, principally; or undue allegiance to one political party or another. Such concerns were addressed in the late 19th century by the institution of the civil service, when federal employees were subjected for the first time to entrance exams, and protected from political removal. It marked the advent of a new kind of entity: the career civil servant.

Reckoning with the threat posed by wealthy appointees—that they might place their private interests ahead of the public’s, using their positions to help their friends or augment their fortunes—came later, and required more elaborate safeguards.

It was the onset of the first World War and the attendant task of retooling the nation’s industrial economy for wartime production that brought a surge of business executives into the government. Drafted by President Woodrow Wilson, starting in 1917, they signed on for service in new government bureaus at the nominal salary of a dollar a year.

First among these wartime stalwarts was Bernard Baruch, a financier and speculator known in his day as “the lone wolf of Wall Street.” Appointed head of the new War Industries Board, Baruch recruited a bevy of his tycoon chums and together they put the peacetime economy on footing to produce uniforms, tanks, and ammunition.

Another Wilson appointee was Herbert Hoover. A mining executive then based in London, Hoover emerged on the public stage by leading humanitarian war relief efforts for neutral Belgium. Calling Hoover back to the U.S., Wilson named him Food Administrator, and charged him with limiting domestic consumption and keeping the U.S. Army and its allies fed in the field.

Both of these men—and the dozens of other businessmen drafted to assist them—performed capably. Though these appointments came at the height of the Progressive Era, and the wary view of wealth that went with it, the American public came to accept these appointments as legitimate without audible objection.

Skip forward a decade, to 1929, and wealthy office-holders had become a routine feature in the federal government. More than that, it was a non-partisan phenomenon. Bernard Baruch had become the titular head and chief fundraiser for the Democratic Party, while Hoover, after a brief dalliance with the Democrats, won the presidency as a Republican. When Hoover became president, he decided to continue the dollar-a-year tradition, donating his salary to charity.

During Hoover’s tenure the crisis was not war but the Great Depression, and he again turned to men of wealth. One of Hoover’s principal innovations was to launch the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which would channel bailout funds to foundering banks and railroads. Selected to lead the new agency was Charles Dawes, a Chicago banker with a history of moonlighting for the government—he was the nation’s first Comptroller of the Currency, under President William McKinley, and later elected vice president with Calvin Coolidge. In 1925 he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his adroit management of postwar international debts.

Dawes immersed himself in launching the RFC until the bank owned by his family, the Central Republic Bank of Chicago, began to founder. Despite Hoover’s protest, in June 1932 Dawes resigned his post and rushed home to wrestle with panicked creditors. Soon after, now against Dawes’ private protest (he feared, rightly, political blowback), Central Republic was named recipient of the largest loan yet issued by the RFC. Though the bank ultimately closed, the bailout made for an orderly transition and the loans were repaid. But public resentment over what appeared to be an in-house deal damaged the reputation of Hoover and of the relief agency.

Here was just the sort of misconduct that critics had feared from the outset—men of wealth protecting their personal interests. But the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt later that year seemed to clear the air.

Roosevelt was more sparing in his reliance on the men of industry and finance—and yes, all were men—but utilize them he did, especially when faced with a new World War. As the crisis loomed, like President Wilson before him, Roosevelt called on the dollar-a-year crowd. Leading this troop of civilians was Bill Knudsen, then-president of General Motors. An expert in mass production, Knudsen was appointed in 1940 chairman of the Office of Production Management and member of the National Defense Advisory Commission, at a salary of $1 a year.

As production ramped up, Knudsen brought with him executives from car companies, AT&T, and U.S. Steel. New Deal bureaucrats and labor activists denounced the appointments, but despite all the procurement contracts, all the millions spent, there was hardly a whiff of scandal.

By 1942, when Knudsen was awarded with a formal commission as Lieutenant General in the Army, the worst his critics could say was that he had been too slow in converting from peaceful industrial production to a war footing. “We are beginning to pay a heavy price for leaving the mobilization of industry in the hands of business men,” the Nation warned in 1942. Steel makers, in particular, were fighting expanded production “as a menace to monopolistic practices and stable prices,” argued an editorial. It was “Dollar-a-Year Sabotage,” The New Republic headlined.

But those criticisms were drowned out by the din of factory production, the great outpouring of armament that yielded an “arsenal of democracy,” as Knudsen phrased it, that carried the Allies to victory. “We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production,” Knudsen remarked later. For all the fears of conflicted interest, the businessmen had proved their worth.

The dollar-a-year appointment routine went out with World War II, but presidents continued to tap the moneyed elite for advice and expertise, a practice that became the source of a growing thicket of regulations designed to forestall malfeasance. Roosevelt broke first ground here, in 1937, with an order barring purchase or sale of stock by government employees “for speculative purpose.” Later, his War Production Administration required its dollar-a-year men to disclose financial holdings and undergo background checks.

From there, safeguards advanced by stages. John F. Kennedy, during his aspirational 1960 campaign, called for a new standard, by which “no officer or employee of the executive branch shall use his official position for financial profit or personal gain.” Upon his election, he followed up with an executive order barring any “use of public office for private gain,” and then lobbied Congress for parallel laws. The result was new criminal statutes covering bribery and conflict of interest.

Lyndon Johnson was never an exemplar of disinterested politics, but early scandal in his administration, involving influence peddling by Johnson intimate Bobby Baker, a businessman and Democratic party organizer, prompted a new round of rulemaking. Each federal agency should have its own ethics code, Johnson ordered, and all presidential appointees were now required to file financial disclosure statements. In the 1970s, the fallout from the Watergate scandal, together with the troubles of presidential chum and advisor Burt Lance, prompted a new round of reform from President Jimmy Carter.

As with so many things, the status of ethics in an administration tends to reflect the character of the chief executive, regardless of the rules in place at the time. Consider the following exchange, in 1934, between Franklin Roosevelt, Joe Kennedy, and presidential aide Ray Moley, prior to Kennedy’s appointment at the SEC.

As recounted by Joe Kennedy biographer David Nasaw, Kennedy warned Roosevelt that he had “done plenty of things that people could find fault with.” At that point, Moley interjected: “Joe, I know you want this job. But if there is anything in your business career that could injure the president, this is the time to spill it.”

Kennedy’s reaction was quick and sharp. “With a burst of profanity he defied anyone to question his devotion to public interest or to point to a single shady act in his whole life. The president did not need to worry about that, he said. What was more, he would give his critics—and here again the profanity flowed freely—an administration of the SEC that would be a credit to his country, the president, himself and his family.”

After an exchange like that, codes and rules might seem superfluous. To outsiders, the Kennedy appointment appeared rash; “setting a wolf to guard a flock of sheep,” one critic charged. But Roosevelt was unfazed. Asked why he’d named such a notorious crook as Kennedy, Roosevelt quipped, “Takes one to catch one.” In the event, while nobody ever proposed Joe Kennedy for sainthood, he was never accused of misconduct or self-dealing while presiding at the SEC.

The post When the President’s Best and Brightest Were Also the Richest appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You won’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary or Merriam-Webster, at least not yet.

It began its life as an epithet, hurled by my oldest son, age 7, at me.

“Don’t be victoriotic!”

I was guilty as charged. I had a long losing streak against him in the board game, “Sequence.” Finally, I had broken that streak, and I celebrated like a Super Bowl-winning quarterback, sticking my finger in the air and doing an elaborate dance in our living room. I also may have stuck out my tongue at the vanquished second-grader.

In other words, I had taken the state of being victorious too far, to the point that it hurt others. I had over-celebrated the routine. I was so immature, even a 7-year-old noticed.

In my own defense, I’m not the only one being victoriotic these days.

You could call this the Victoriotic Summer. It’s an epidemic spreading faster than Zika.

The news media is thoroughly dominated by the Patient Zero of victorioticism—Donald Trump. He’s constantly rubbing his primary victories, his wealth, his hot wife, his surprisingly well-adjusted children, in the faces of anyone who can listen.

Of course, he’s both a politician and absurdly rich—two major risk factors for victoriotic behavior. My son, while sitting in front of the TV last month, noted victoriotic rhetoric in the Democratic convention speeches of the preening President Obama and the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton (whose allies now are describing her, victoriotically, as a cross between Susan B. Anthony and Joan of Arc).

In this over-victorious behavior, such politicians are hewing to professional standards. It’s now standard political strategy to blow any victory, no matter how small, into D-Day proportions, and rub it in your opponent’s face. It’s all in the name of “winning” the ever-shrinking news cycle.

And the rich? While it may be hard to believe, there once was a time when the wealthy downplayed their good fortune. Now much of America seems to run on the victoriotic speeches, books, interviews, and philanthropy of billionaires, who take a victory lap for their own success by telling the world how great they are, and how great the rest of us can be if we would only heed their advice on whatever topic they imagine themselves to be experts in: education, science, environmentalism, media, sports, politics, space travel.

California, with more than its share of rich people and politicians, is our victoriotic global capital. And nobody does victoriotic like the Bay Area, with its new money tech giants. Our social media platforms basically exist for victoriotic pronouncements—about professional accomplishments, vacations, volunteerism, and winsome children and pets.

Still, Silicon Valley lags Hollywood in victoriotic behavior (if little else), which was long ago institutionalized by a culture where every actor is a star, every film is a hit, and everybody is feeling “better than ever.” Just ask them.

California’s public sector is also experiencing a victorioticism bubble.

We are bragging about our job growth and the ever-larger global profile of our economy (and not talking so much about the Census Bureau’s supplementary poverty measure showing that when you account for cost of living and public benefits, we have America’s highest incidence of poverty.) Our elected officials constantly tout our leading role in fighting climate change (even as the state’s regulatory regime for cap-and–trade threatens to fall apart). Our public universities are always described as the world’s best (even as they charge more, and provide less). We congratulate ourselves on our open-mindedness about immigrants (drivers’ licenses for the undocumented, health benefits for undocumented children), even as millions of undocumented Californians live in the shadows.

This summer has brought great anxiety about the popular anger in the state and in the country, about the less fortunate lashing back at the more fortunate. Is the reason for the populist backlash the inequality itself? Or is it the endless victoriotic laps being run by society’s winners—on the plethora of media platforms that make the most fortunate among us more in-your-face visible than ever before?

Victoriotic behavior has many motivations. People seek validation, credibility, attention, celebrity, vindication, and even love. Or they may be expressing deep insecurities, as Trump does when he exaggerates his billions. Medical research suggests that human beings exaggerate our victories because of our brain chemistry; victorioticism feels good to us, at least for a while.

But I wonder whether, in a big state or a big country, people need to scream about even the slightest wins just to get noticed. There is so much competition—for jobs, for schools, for mates, for parking spots—that you have to be competing, to be winning, at all times. If you’re not victoriotic, you’re not trying. You may even be made to feel like you’re losing.

One school of thought is that this epidemic, like so many other social maladies, is the product of the ways we’re parenting our children now. Here in the second decade of the 21st century, every major moment of our children’s lives can be documented with a phone, and shared, victoriotically, with friends, family, and the whole world.

Victorioticism begins in the hospital nursery these days.

My son is annoyed by this, quite intensely. He calls out adult behavior for being victoriotic, and is self-aware about not making victoriotic statements himself.

Maybe you shouldn’t do a column about my word, he tells me. It would be victoriotic to brag about coining the term, he adds.

Yes, it would, kid. And I just did it anyway.

The post The Word of the Summer Is “Victoriotic” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Most inquiries ask what makes Cleveland special. Too often, the responses that are given to the media are civic booster-speak. Once the fifth-largest city in the nation, John D. Rockefeller did create Standard Oil while in Cleveland. But one must be be wary about firsts, subjective rankings of contributions, or people that have “changed the way we live.”

Calling the city “special” can be problematic. Cleveland fits the pattern of many other midwestern industrial cities, particularly those situated on the Great Lakes. As a historian, I long for more studies that contextualize not only our industry but also social life, class, and benevolence in Cleveland with other cities, particularly during the years just before and including the turn of the 20th century known as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The Gilded Age intrigues me because it is the era in which landscape, philanthropy, and migration coalesced to make Cleveland an important player in the nation’s economy and political life as well as in culture and education. Landscape, diversity and philanthropy gave Cleveland a significant history and primed the city for future growth—including some of the gains of today’s post-industrial era.

Cleveland’s location, on a lake (Erie) at the mouth of a river (the Cuyahoga), is not special. Classically, many cities were perched on waterways for transit and trade. That’s why Moses Cleaveland, the leader of the first survey party in 1796 and the city’s namesake, decided to establish the town at the site. He expected the community to develop as the mercantile center for a surrounding agricultural hinterland. But, it would become far more than an agricultural entrepot. The discovery of iron ore, coal, limestone, petroleum, and other natural resources in the regions around the lakes in Ohio and Pennsylvania some 50 years later, would transform a community of merchants into a community of industrialists, inventors, and workers. Efficient transport networks, canals, railroads, and lake shipping provided links to markets and resources and by the late antebellum era, created the foundation for a period of immense growth.

A 1917 poster from the Cleveland Board of Education’s Americanization Committee.

Today, landscape and place still play significant roles for the city and the surrounding region, but the impact extends beyond commerce. Like other industrial cities that had a “lock” on business and industry because of their water and rail networks, Cleveland’s jobs and factories begin to exit the area via the new postwar highway networks, and later through channels of global industrialization. But, the lake remains, as does a now relatively clean Cuyahoga River. Both now are seen as lifestyle amenities and while both still carry commerce, they have also anchored waterfront entertainment venues and other recreational attractions. The waterfronts are also an important part of the sales pitch for businesses seeking new workers in the competitive high-tech and medical labor markets. But the lake’s most significant quality is its looming future importance beyond lifestyle given the realities of climate change. There is no shortage of water in Northeast Ohio.

While acknowledging the importance of the lake and river, many citizens still lament the loss of industry and the extravagant lifestyle they link to the industrial barons who lived in the region, with a palpable nostalgia for old Euclid Avenue, once known as Millionaires Row. The area once hosted dozens of spectacular homes that were ostentatious showcases of Gilded Age wealth. Several remain, but the splendor is gone. Yet, the legacy of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era wealth of the city is embedded in many of Cleveland’s cultural, medical, educational, and social service institutions.

One can argue that the barons of the Gilded Age should have paid their workers more and spent less on dividends, charity, and culture. That’s an interesting question for me, given that my immigrant grandfathers worked in the steel mills, and that today, I work for two institutions, Case Western Reserve University and the Western Reserve Historical Society, whose growth was supported in large part with Gilded Age money. The futures of those institutions depend on a continuity of a local philanthropic tradition.

This legacy money—which also created Severance Hall, the home of the Cleveland Orchestra, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and University Hospitals—is now being joined by funds provided by a more diverse set of donors. A drive or bus ride down Euclid Avenue today shows not mansions, but an always-evolving medical, educational and cultural complex. The names (such as Ahuja, Seidman, Mandel and Wolstein) on the newer buildings on the avenue and in University Circle indicate the manner in which the New England tradition of community stewardship has been augmented by communities that arrived in the years since the 1830s. Call it what you will: stewardship, tzedakah, or charity, these traditions of altruism have been central to the city’s history and have created institutions that seem to be anchoring its future.

The diversity of names on the buildings on Euclid Avenue and in University Circle is the result of a process that the founders never expected. They envisioned Cleveland as an outpost of New England. That’s why they laid out a town square at its center. But the growth of commerce and industry attracted a global population. The immigrant and migrant flow provided not only cheap, replaceable labor in the factories, but also skill sets and ideas critical to innovation. In 1920, two-thirds of the population of nearly 800,000 was of foreign birth or foreign parentage. Another 35,000 residents were African-Americans, the majority having come in the years since 1900. As was the case in Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, and other cities, they created a web of neighborhoods anchored around their workplaces and a network of culturally attuned stores and businesses.

Today, some of the “Ellis Island” neighborhoods endure, their identities marked not so much by the ancestry of their current residents, but by structures, stores, and restaurants. They are home to the city’s evolving “foodie” culture, to many young professionals, and to the beginnings of gentrification. That diversity also colors memory—in positive and negative ways—among Clevelanders with deep roots in the city. There is still, despite recent demographic changes, a local passion for remembering roots and ancestry. The question often asked of a newcomer in Cleveland is not “What do you do for a living?” but “What are you?” in terms of one’s ethnic identity.

All of this is happening in a city and region in which the percentage of foreign-born is now well below the national average, whereas between 1860 and 1950, the city was well above average. Yet, the number of national/ethnic identities is now larger than ever before. Some estimates put it at over 110. So, on one scale the city is not as “ethnic” as it was in terms of numbers, but on another, the region is more globally representative than ever.

Here too, some see the future in the past, arguing that immigrants can bring new skills and viewpoints to the city and to the workplace, and that a more globalized Cleveland would better reflect the broader world in which it exists. Some local groups focus on attracting skilled immigrants, while others see the city as a home for refugees who could acquire skills and settle in the city. Indeed, there are many open spaces in Cleveland, a city that once housed over 900,000 people and now has fewer than 400,000. Perhaps those spaces could provide refuge. However, the matter of diversity is encumbered by political rhetoric. There is also the question of who would be displaced in the job market if there were an influx of new job-seekers competing for the non-technical, less skilled jobs in the region.

Yet the city has “been there” before in this regard. In some instances—industrial strikes and urban unrest—the consequences have been brutal. Yet, what was to be a bit of old New England did transform itself and survive. Cleveland’s future will need to echo a past in which it transcended the location that gives it an identity and came to embrace ideas, skills, and concepts of altruism from around the globe. Does that make it different or special? Perhaps. But even if not, it is a city with a history that begs for further exploration.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post Cleveland’s “Millionaire’s Row” Still Glitters With the Gilded Age’s Unanticipated Legacy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.