The politics of proximity
The promise of bringing us closer together — and the perils of its opposite
America’s geography is vast. It’s also vastly different.
Striking pines and cedars wind their way up the northwestern corridor; the Great Lakes awash themselves against Midwestern states; a vast ocean draws a scenic boundary around the east coast. America’s geographical distribution is different and therefore offers gateways to vastly different ecosystems. But the differences between landscapes tell us much less about future success — for an individual’s material and social benefit — than the people, and their closeness, that lay on them.
The increasing concentration of wealth and clustering of poverty has meant that one’s fate is tied more deeply to the spaces in which they happen to grow up. Maybe most interestingly, though, is that this is not just true of wealthier people who are born to wealthier areas — it’s also true of poorer people who are most deeply connected to other wealthy people. That is, for poorer individuals, it’s better to live as close as possible to wealthier clusters, interacting with recipients of higher incomes who navigate particular workplaces, supermarkets and neighborhood blocks. The closer we are to people of different economic backgrounds, the more the less advantaged among that group benefit.
This is the basis for the most pressing research and books on economic mobility within the last few years. Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s work (along with a few of his peers) describes how one of the strongest predictors of upward mobility for a low-income individual is the degree to which that individual is connected to wealthier folks. Such also persists in past research by the same economist who found that people who moved out of poorer areas with housing vouchers, compared to those who didn’t, had increased their earnings by 31 percent increase by their mid-twenties.
The more interconnected we are and the more embedded we are with people of cross-class backgrounds, the more benefits permeate to others who live in closest proximity to that hub. In this vein, New York Times columnist David Brooks notes that friendship itself manifestly changes people’s lives. The closer one feels to someone of a different class, the more opportunities arise for that person.
One of the clearest ways to understand this phenomenon is by understanding its opposite. As Robert Putnam writes in “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,” the children facing the bleakest futures are those who live with the least connection to wealthier centers and people. Such is also the experience of many individuals from the hometowns of Kentucky and Ohio that (now far-right-wing candidate) JD Vance writes about in his memoir.
The lesson is clear: those who live furthest away from more densely populated, opportunity-rich areas miss the economic opportunity that simply lays in wait because they are prevented from developing relationships with those succeeding in those spaces.
Fixing the problem: let people live clustered together, regardless of their finances
As explained by a recent slew of articles concerned with mobility and housing stock declines, American movement is good. We move to new places to seek higher wages and to live closer with others doing the same. Because the highest-paid jobs are found in places like Seattle and San Francisco and New York, being able to live in those places and interact with those people creates new pathways of mobility that otherwise couldn’t be imagined.
This is one of the central tenants of the book, “Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success.” In it, authors Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky find that one of the main reasons the children of immigrants do well over a century of research on American life is because they are more willing to move to places of opportunity. Without deep ties to a particular neighborhood or block, they relocate to Houston or Phoenix or wherever the most opportunities are presenting themselves at the time. Easy policy solutions cascade from this phenomenon: make big cities as easy for people to migrate to as possible by building more and different kinds of housing (thereby lowering costs), and further expand public transit where it already exists (again, lowering costs).
But there’s maybe a bigger reason we should encourage people to move to denser areas, and make cities more affordable. It’s not just the material concerns that matter to us.
Humans don’t just want to get by, and have enough to eat. They also want to get ahead. This is the basis of the book, “The Status Game.” In it, author Will Storr explains that humans innately desire to have many different social games to play with each other. To do so, we need enough money and resources.
“It’s about the political groups, it’s about the hobbies, it’s about the jobs that we do, the sports games that we play — it’s all that stuff. And the results and psychology are very significant that the more games that we play, the happier, more stable we are emotionally because we have multiple sources of status in the world,” he said in a WDET interview.
If what Storr’s saying is true, there’s little worse we can do for people in our modern politics than separate them from others. Keeping people apart can and does ruin both the material improvement and social wellbeing of others. This is the brutality of segregation, particularly around the visible-invisible lines of race and class. When we remove others from our lives and prevent them from playing in our games — our games of work, of hobby, of sport, of ritual — we prevent them from being full civil participants, subjecting them to a sideline that is rarely acknowledged except by others marginalized to the same side.
Clustering poverty creates a stronger likelihood of violence, aggression, and disenchantment among those around as people can no longer access the pro-social (though not necessarily “good” or “moral”) games played by others in a world completely inaccessible to them. These spaces cluster violence and material deprivation, making the worlds of residents deeply removed, and markedly separated, from the metropolis in which they live. They live far from opportunity, from cross-class and cultural exchange, from the knowing what is possible beyond the segregated barrier they were shuttered behind.
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America is geographically different, but as humans we’re not terribly so. One of the most profound separations demarcating us from a young age is the amount of money our parents have, and the amount of money our friends’ parents have. Closing those barriers translates to changes in the narratives and enjoyment manifesting in a variety of lives.
That is to say that we fail or succeed, in clusters, together. It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to understand why: we’re social creatures that enjoy acting in tandem with each other. We should encourage people to do better by living in closer proximity to others, regardless of how much they, or their parents, earn.
