The politics of somewhere

At Free Exchange, Ryan Avent has an interesting comparison of the film industry, higher education, and the concentration and mobility of skills concluding in this statement:

We’re all attached to our hometowns and want them to succeed, but efforts to spread economic activity out artificially are costly. It would be better to move more people to the growth than growth to the people.

This, to me, is a pretty good one-sentence distillation of the ideological mechanism by which economics has run roughshod over geography. In the economics view, geographic location is little more than a mute Cartesian variable: labor should move freely to areas of economic growth, rebalancing uneven distributions of unemployment and wage rates. Settling into a single place creates ‘stickiness’ in the economy, and stickiness is bad, as it impedes the dynamic reconfigurations and flows of economic production and consumption on which liberal capitalism depends. This ideology is evident in a whole host of modern economics shibboleths: renting is better than owning, skilled immigration should be nearly unrestricted, and structural support for regional dying industries should always be eschewed. Perhaps more than anywhere else it is concretized in the fetishism attendant on ‘global cities’ and the Friedmanesque heroization of the infinitely mobile businessman. Thus, as in Avent’s phrasing of it, the fact that “we’re all attached to our hometowns” gets argumentatively steamrolled by the crisp economic logic that “it would be better to move people”.

Let me start by suggesting that I do not doubt the underlying quantitative argument being made here. I believe in free trade and the real efficiency of open labor markets. It is one of the components of my ideology where I have genuinely allowed persuasive facts to change my firmly-held opinions.

But I think we give economists too much of a pass when we assume, as is implicit in Avent’s reasoning, that we can dismiss the attachment to place as a mere sentimental nostalgia that ought to be discarded from the scope of policymaking. Economists, many of whom are highly mobile themselves, and, more importantly, professionally hitched to models which greatly simplify human behavior, tend towards thinking of the labor force as sim-people who can and should be moved effortlessly across a flat surface. But that’s just not the case—we are attached to our hometowns, and we do want them to succeed, not out of some provincial backwardness, but because human societies and relational patterns are situated in places, and we weave patterns of meaning and value into them. There’s a reason certain landscapes get put up on display in the National Galleries in capital cities; there’s a reason why local sports teams churn up such vigorous displays of hot-bloodedness; and there’s a reason why hundreds of thousands of humans have shed blood throughout history for an economically useless sliver of ground surrounding Jerusalem. You may, as perhaps an economist would, call these behaviors irrational. But they exist, nonetheless, and they exist because much of the value we extract from life is intimately bound up with constructing ideational value in places.

And this isn’t something that you have to rely on social science to believe in, either. Increasingly we are reaping the benefit of discoveries in neuroscience and cognitive psychology that show that spatial thinking and emplacement within certain physical surroundings operate at a deep level of human sentience. Our distant ancestors were programmed to look for certain habitats in order to survive, and defended territorial claims just as closely as they defended familial and productive (that is to say, economic) domains. So it should be no surprise that we are still wired to care deeply about the places we live in. We do not yet have good ways of measuring and quantifying the ways in which locational affinity provides us with value—yet we can be fairly certain that the value is there.

The ‘attachment to our hometowns’ that Avent so casually brushes off, then, should not be treated with such cavalier dismissal. Thought it may not yet be, to borrow John Muir’s word, ‘dollarable’, it nonetheless has real value. So while the most efficient outcome according to a narrow economic logic might be for labor and economies to skip unencumbered from place to place, a broader view might suggest that we look more closely at the reasons behind geographic ‘stickiness’.