The Southern Gap

33.  The southern gap:  In the American South, an oligarchy of planters enriched itself through slavery.  Pervasive underdevelopment is their legacy, by Keri Leigh Merritt and published by *aeon, April 2, 2024.   Linked by Conor Friedersdorf for his weekly Recommended Reading Sunday, April 7, 2024 newsletter.

I think most people have noted the imbalance of wealth in the South of the country from that of the North and West.  We've read it in books like Gone With the Wind and To Kill A Mockingbird and in present day writing like The Warmth of Other Suns.  These are examples that I can recall easily.  Many will name other literary examples.  We know it from movies; as in one of my favorite movies ever, Sounder.  We know it from radio stories such as NPR's Story Corps with Francine Anderson's poignant and revealing childhood story, television and from our own visits to the south.

This essay is a clear and bracing explanation for why this is.  Economics is a challenging academic discipline for most of us.  Economists and historians are our better guides here and the author, Keri Leigh Merritt is an independent scholar and historian who has authored and co-edited books on this topic.  She lives in Atlanta, GA.

I live in a part of the country known as the rust belt.  It's pock-marked with decay and neglect.  I can understand what happened where I live, and am currently seeing successful efforts to finally address the decline.  It takes time for places and things to decay and it takes time to restore them.  But, had they never been developed and built in the first place?  That's different.

The South of our country has ignored economic development (infrastructure, industry, labor unions, education, health) in the former slave states.  Since the beginnings of this country, Southern enslavers have made laws that politically and economically maintain the status quo of the elites who monopolize wealth and power in the south. 

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*The journal aeon:  Many of the recommended reading selections made by Colin Friedersdorf for his weekly email have come from this journal.  I don't read them all, but I have noted that the quality of subject, content and writing is high.