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FT.com, July 29 2017
New Hampshire: a tale of two Americas
‘Our community is segregated — there are large and gracious properties,
rentals and trailer parks’
by Rana Foroohar
In Russell Banks’s powerful 1989 novel Affliction, which chronicles the
downward spiral of a blue-collar everyman from New Hampshire, one of the
characters speaks of an “invisible line” that divides the violently
beautiful mountains of the hardscrabble north from the rolling and
prosperous hills of the south. The same line runs through the population
today. New Hampshire is a tiny state but it boasts the seventh-highest
number of millionaires in the US. In the dog days of July and August,
affluent Bostonians and New Yorkers retreat to summer homes by its
picturesque lakes. But New Hampshire is also filled with people
like Affliction’s protagonist, Wade Whitehouse, the police officer cum
snowplough operator cum handyman struggling with three jobs,
trailer-park housing, single parenting and addiction.
My own recent summers by Lake Chocorua have become a window on to this
type of economic and social bifurcation, which has become more and more
common in America. My husband, a writer who inherited our lake home,
employs cleaners, plumbers and tradesmen, some of whose parents worked
in the same jobs for his mother. It’s hard not to think of this as a
kind of neo-serfdom, given the lack of other options for those without a
college degree. Decades ago, the state had a flourishing manufacturing
industry but much of that work has since decamped to southern American
states, where wages are lower.
New Hampshire ranks higher than average in terms of “knowledge workers”
when compared with the US as a whole. But many of these people are
actually employed outside the state, at least some of the time. Our
neighbours include financiers, film producers, successful artists and
entrepreneurs on the one hand, and retail clerks, handymen and house
painters on the other. Several underemployed and debt-ridden graduates
serve $6 lattes at the one nice coffee place in the area, where you can
also buy $100 handmade leather bags, artisanal chocolate and not much
else. Other nearby retail outlets include a dollar store and a Dunkin’
Donuts. Exquisite produce and small-batch cheese can be purchased for
handsome sums at the Sunday farmers’ market but the only real grocery
store is a half-hour’s drive away.
This sort of economic divergence has been well reported over the past
year, given that the long-term decline of rust belt and New England
states such as New Hampshire was one of the factors in Donald Trump’s
victory. But it’s worth noting that the loss of old line-manufacturing
jobs isn’t the only reason behind the state’s problems. Policy choices —
such as having no income tax and subsequently underinvesting in both
healthcare and education — have exacerbated things. New Hampshire funds
its limited social services with business and property taxes. The latter
are, of course, high and, along with strict zoning laws, drive up the
cost of getting on the housing ladder. The community where we live is
thus segregated — there are large and gracious properties, rentals and
trailer parks.
***
A few years back, when I drove one of my daughter’s summer-camp friends
home, I was greeted by her mother, who had the blackened teeth of a
(hopefully former) meth addict. That’s not unusual either. New Hampshire
is number two in the nation for opioid-related deaths and number one for
fentanyl-related fatalities (a cheaper substance people often use
alongside heroin or meth). These deaths of despair aren’t just about the
economic hopelessness chronicled by researchers such as Angus Deaton,
the Nobel Prize-winning economist, or the cultural meltdown covered in
JD Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. It’s also about the state not
investing in its own human capital. New Hampshire has the second-lowest
rate of spending on substance-abuse prevention, which is a key reason
for drug fatalities. It also fails to invest enough in the only proven
way up and out of poverty — education. College students who manage to
graduate do so with the highest average levels of debt in the country,
since state funding has been so dramatically cut over the past several
years. Meanwhile, roughly half of the population has only a high-school
degree, which guarantees them a $15-an-hour future.
As Peter Temin, an MIT academic who connects these dots eloquently in
his new book The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual
Economy, puts it: “None of this bodes well for democracy.” Temin and a
growing number of other economists see America not as a single country
but as two — an upper 20 per cent who live, metaphorically anyway, by
the lake, and a lower 80 per cent who, hamstrung by a lack of education
and unable to build an asset base, are increasingly despondent. Given
this, it’s perhaps no wonder that the county where my husband and I will
spend the next two weeks voted Trump. Sadly, if the president has his
way, the policies that have helped create New Hampshire’s bifurcated
economy will be rolled out to the rest of the nation. That’s an
affliction we will all have to deal with.
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