Hillbilly Elegy

cpwill said:

The New Memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" highlights the core social-policy question of our time

The site won't let me copy/paste - but it's a good review to read through.

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A lot of people like the book for its insights into what the white working class sees in Donald Trump and his promises to restore American greatness in the face of malevolent outsiders.

But what I liked best about the book is how it engages with what I see as one of the most important and difficult social-policy questions of our time: How do we unstack the deck and, at the same time, get people to take ownership over improving their own lives and communities even when they reasonably believe that the deck is stacked against them?

Vance has a few policy recommendations to improve the lives of the white working class — in particular, he thinks that child-protective-services departments need reform. But he's a conservative who believes that the government has limited scope to fix the culture, so mostly his prescriptions are about private behavior: Working-class whites from the Rust Belt to the South need stronger community institutions like churches, more positive attitudes toward work, and less defeatism that assumes their fate has been sealed by far-away forces.

Most problematically, he notes that even an accurate belief that forces beyond one's control are causing one's disadvantage can lead to hopelessness and greater disadvantage.

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Redress said:

Looks like I can copy/paste from there. Here is an excerpt from your link:

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Looks interesting.

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cpwill said:

The New Memoir "Hillbilly Elegy" highlights the core social-policy question of our time

The site won't let me copy/paste - but it's a good review to read through.

Click to expand...

I don't know what to do about it, but "Hillbilly Elegy" is a good book that does a lot to diagnose the problem.

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Crovax said:

from the review:

Republicans have been espousing the problem since Reagan and some even before but just like this book(apparently) it falls flat where it really matters, A strategy to implement the change necessary

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cpwill said:

Hard to come up with a political strategy to answer the problem of "people need to take more responsibility for themselves, and stop blaming their problems on others".

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