Christopher F. Rufo  ⚔️

Here's the problem: our policymakers focused on the spreadsheet logic of anticipated first-order effects, but ignored the second-order effects that ended up creating massive social costs for these places. They didn't just destroy their economies, they destroyed their culture.

Now the same institutions and their scholars—in this case, @AEI and @MichaelRStrain—are making their pitch to simply pay people in interior America to move to more prosperous cities, with the implicit assumption that these people are too lazy, poor, or dumb to do it on their own.

This is a real sentence from the article: "San Francisco has a 2.3% unemployment rate, while West Virginia’s is 4.8%." Ah yes, there would likely be no unintended consequences if we moved large numbers of people from West Virginia to San Francisco! Brilliant!

But here's what's really infuriating: these policymakers take no responsibility for the original destruction of interior America. They simply come up with another idea based on anticipated first-order effects that will simply accelerate the vicious cycle in our declining cities.

They are the domestic policy equivalents of the Iraq War hawks who never took responsibility for the destruction they caused, then expected to still have control of foreign policy. (I'm looking at you, @BillKristol.)

Here's where we need to draw the line: poliycmakers must stop treating the people of interior America as variables in their spreadsheets. Our leaders need to have some humility and work harder to truly understand these places—not simply dictate how their residents should live.