Hillbilly Elegy, by J. D. Vance: on Budget & Economy

JD Vance: Economic collapse due to social decay, not just job loss

I once held this opinion myself. But experience taught me that this story of economic insecurity is incomplete.

Economists worry about the decline of the industrial Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites. They mean that manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and middle-class jobs are harder to come by for people without college degrees. Fair enough--I worry about those things, too. But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It's about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It's about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.