Tightrope is an examination of the forces that brought the United States to where it is today, including the disappearance of good manufacturing jobs. Increasing opioid use, and a dissolution of community ties.
Tightrope, by New York Times op-ed writerNicholas Kristoff and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, is similar to two books that I previously described, Alienated America (conservative writer Timothy Carney) and Fault Lines by two Princeton professors (Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer). Carney wanted to figure out why Trump won and the professors wanted to understand why our country is so fragmented, said fragmentation being a key to the 2016 election result. The two books end up in the same place, referencing the erosion of a sense of community and declining social capital among many people who fell behind as the economy changed, and the ascendancy of hundreds of media echo chambers that reinforce a person’s beliefs and biases.
Tightrope gets a bit more granular in identifying the specific reasons why a nation that provided so much opportunity for so many people for so long morphed into a country where many people lost access to the up escalators that made it possible to improve their lot in life. Nicholas Kristof was born and raised in Yamhill, Oregon, a fading manufacturing town that once had provided great opportunity for blue-collar workers to live a middle-class life. By the time Nick was in high school in the mid-1970s, the good jobs had left, many families were financially stressed out because of no jobs, and people started to drink (and later do drugs, especially meth and opiates), get divorced, and do stupid stuff.
Nick’s family was different in that his parents were farmers who were relatively unaffected by the fading local economy. They were avid readers and insisted that their kids take school seriously, which is why Nick ended up as an award-winning journalist. Most of the families in Yamhill weren’t like the Kristofs and their kids didn’t have “gold-plated parents” to use Nick’s term. That’s why eight kids that he played with in two families ended up dead at relatively early ages from the ravages of alcohol, drugs, obesity and despair.
The authors frame the story through school bus Number 6 that Nick and his friends took to school. One in four of the students on that bus ended up dead at an early age. Some survived only because they served long prison sentences that kept them away from the drug scene back home. In the late1970s after Nick’s friends had graduated from high school, there weren’t too many good jobs available, and very few of the kids had any chance to go to college.
This scene was happening all over the country. Since 2007, over half of the zip codes in the US have lost jobs, often in rural areas. In contrast, folks who live in Boston, San Francisco, NYC, the DC suburbs, Portland and Seattle are experiencing strong growth in jobs across the employment spectrum.
Besides the loss of good jobs, drugs have warped the land. The authors see the opiate industry as the main culprit here although local meth heads certainly have contributed to drug addiction. Over two years, one opioid manufacturer shipped 9 million pills to a pharmacy in Kermit, West Virginia, population 400. It’s no surprise that the state has been ravaged by addiction.
Another problem is that public education doesn’t work well for kids who don’t learn well. Many of Nick’s friends had special education or other learning needs that were ignored, with the remedy being for the system to wait for the troubled students to hit 16 and drop out, which they did. Not having a high school education is a big barrier to earning a decent living.
As a result of a lot of bad things, today American kids are 55% more likely to die by age 19 than their peers in Europe. That is pretty shameful.
The authors make the point that between the 2008 and 2016 elections, something happened to a lot of Americans who saw their opportunities fade – “They felt ignored.” Eight million people who voted for Obama in 2008 voted for Trump in 2016. Trump did especially well with white males, age 40 to 64, a group with a lot of problems and a very high death rate.
Kristof and WuDunn argue that to turn things around we need universal early childhood education, a lot more drug treatment that isn’t centered around incarceration, a wider range of educational opportunities focusing on providing access to technical and vocational schools, and better access to health care since many of the physical problems that less successful people have can be treated relatively easily early. There are a lot of obese people in this book who die young.
