What I read in 2023 (Part 3 of 7)

This is the third part of my annual reading review for 2023. You can read the other parts here (Part 1, Part 2). You can find all of my reviews so far on my Substack here. LinkedIn articles are served in bite sized portions :)

The third part of this review discusses a book that introduced me to a new field of applied economic and sociological research. Back in early 2000s, economics was all about finding better ways to slice data to prove/disprove theories. Today, with so much data around us, perhaps we need to do the opposite - come up with theories, rooted in context, which explain a pattern. It is where the field of ethnographic research, which is the main style of this book's author, becomes salient. Overall, I found this book useful, but not as hard hitting as its American reviewers found it. Maybe I might not have felt its context as powerfully. In that sense, this is an outsider's view of the American Midwest's economic deprivation since the Global Financial Crisis.

Janesville: An American Story: Amy Goldstein

Janesville is the story of an American town in Wisconsin which was built around a single industry - auto assembly and manufacturing for General Motors. It follows the lives and careers of families over a period of five years between 2008-13, to understand the impact of the shutdown of the General Motors plant and its suppliers in the city. It shows us why solutions suggested by the policy wonks and business consultants, which seem very plausible on paper, are under-questioned and often do not stand the rigors of transplantation and implementation in a real context.

Especially enlightening for me was to understand why job retraining programs, through the formal education process, do not work so well for people who have not been to a college in decades. Notable are the challenges to general cohesiveness and lifelong learning that a weakening in workers’ unions brings to a manufacturing community. The results are irremediably painful when an organization/ community suffers an external shock like the Global Financial Crisis.?

If you are an economist, a sociologist or even a data scientist looking to understand methods of collecting data for policy research, this book is worth your time. Strangely enough, you might find it extremely thin on figures though. But that is the point. Janesville, alongside The Life Project (which I am due to read soon), is a great book to understand ethnographic research. This is? a method in which a researcher lives with their subjects for an extended time to understand the context in which they are asking questions. This is primarily for the purpose of questioning the priors of their research design, rather than to collect more data to prove or disprove one’s hypothesis. That makes it an important interventional method that data scientists and applied economists/ business students should have in their toolbox.?

For economists, this book also is an illustration of why development measures geared towards the extreme long-term prove insufficient, and eventually detrimental to an already suffering community. Unless there is a short-term effort to bridge the gap created by joblessness by creating extra demand.

The accelerated de-industrialization of the American Midwest is brought into sharper relief when we look at the human cost of these misplaced incentives. General Motors and the local government provide a sub-optimal severance package to the families laid off, promising a greater investment in “high-tech”, “digital” jobs for the Industrial Revolution 4.0. People with rudimentary digital literacy are sent to schools where everything is done on computer. There is a limited appreciation of the mental impact of unemployment on the laborers. And entrepreneurs from far off areas are brought in as role models, to emphasize the importance of taking personal initiative. All the while as wages in the local community continue to be nowhere near the levels they were before the auto industry shut down.?

That said, as an Indian, it is easy to understand the appeal for a more granular study of economic displacement through globalization that the author makes. It is difficult though, to empathize with the plight of those who lose their jobs in Janesville. Perhaps that is because our threshold for grief is fairly higher than that of an average auto worker in that motor-town. As people who have little, we have little to complain about what has been taken from us. East of the 82.5 degree east longitude, the India that lives sees a dozen Janesvilles being created each month. Families lose their livelihoods all of a sudden, pack up and leave. Every year, close to 90 million of us move within the country, mostly from the dark hinterlands of northern, central and eastern India to the dazzling cities in the west and the south.? Hearing those stories, even partially, makes the tribulations of the workers of Janesville feel like garden variety fever compared to raging malaria. A former technician has to drive four hours to go to a new factory each day. Well at least that is in his own car and not on the top of a bus. A mother worries about not having enough to send her daughters to school prom…, wait what is that? Is that now being counted as a problem?

But that is not Goldstein’s fault to be honest. Our lives are like vessels and grief and sadness are like gas. Whatever the amount of grief (trivial or profound) it will fill up the vessel of our life entirely and push against its walls from all sides.

If there is a book waiting to be written about the economically displaced in Asia, then it is up to scholars on this continent to do it. And there is much to write about, because somehow both these stories are related. The ledger which debited the manufacturing jobs in America, credited them to sweatshops and call centers in Asia. But the benefits that were lost there, were never fully gained here.

The aspirational workers in Asia, who for a while feel good as their wages play catch up with that of their global peers, soon find they are as unfortunate as someone living in that antipodal location. I can attest to the fact, very personally, that they end up hitting a glass ceiling and being treated as a “cost center resource”, their entire talent being reduced to a padding on the margin of the bottom lines of? offshoring companies. Perhaps that is where Janesville’s sequel should begin.