The Rougher the Country

“Approaching East Kentucky from the Bluegrass,” said Dr. Mary Jean Bowman, speaking informally before an RFF staff seminar recently, “the Knobs and the escarpment back of them are conspicuous. As you ascend this escarpment, the rich farming land of the Bluegrass seems suddenly remote and you enter a country of depleted forest lands and a rural poverty in almost unbelievable contrast to the white-fenced horse farms only a few miles away.”

What word best states the condition and situation of this mountain crescent and its people? she asked. “Backward? Call it that, and you'd better start home right away!" In order to spare the feelings of the People trapped in such sagging sectors of the economy, "underdeveloped" has become the acceptable usage. But is that always precise enough to convey the facts? She has her doubts.

True enough, this area has many earmarks of what is commonly called underdevelopment—lack of heavy industry, low income per person, unstable employment, and high birth rates. But to take the word literally is something else again. "If by underdevelopment we mean a major gap between the economic potential of an area and its realized economic levels, developed.heene it is not at all clear that East Kentucky is under-developed.”

Miss Bowman is professor of economics at the University of Chicago. She made the East Kentucky study with the support of RFF funds. She is now drafting her findings and interpretations. Until that is done, she is not prepared to offer any final conclusions, although she already has definite ideas on the nature of the problem and the direction of realistic steps for alleviating it.

East Kentucky is the Jesse Stuart country, a land of clambering crests, backwaters, coves and hollows, roads that often come to a dead end (some of the infrequent rail lines do, too), patch farming, and marginal mine pits. Early industries—salt mining and iron-workings—have long since vanished; the forests are logged over; coal mining, fifty years ago the bright hope of the mountain area, has contracted sharply, and faces an uncertain future. But in population this lean hill country still is booming; there is heavy out-migration but also a fertility rate that is by far the highest in Kentucky and when job opportunities fall off in the great cities there have been heavy tides of back-migration. With each year's flood of babies and each pause in economic expansion elsewhere, the unemployment gap in East Kentucky becomes a heavier burden.

“The rougher the country”—so a mountain saying runs—"the closer folks stick to it." Even if the old saw is no longer literally true, it still suggests the difficulties of breaking out of a long-established pattern.

The stock remedies—attract outside capital, develop new industries—can help comparatively little, Miss Bowman believes, recalling her doubt that economically the region is truly underdeveloped. It is essential to face up to these limitations. They mean continued high out-migration. They mean also that for a long time to come the mountains will be subsidized in one way or another by state and federal government—even with continuing out-migration. Thus, she notes, the question is not whether the area should be subsidized, but whether the form of the subsidies will merely aggravate the disease while concealing some of the symptoms, or will contribute to a cure.

Along with the highest fertility rate in the state, East Kentucky spends the smallest percentage of local income on education. Nor is any other section so disadvantaged with respect to transportation and communication, or so aware of a distinctive identity. Above all, East Kentucky stands out for its cultural and economic isolation. "De-isolation and improved education are the keys to policy."

New through highways and other closer contacts with the world outside not only would encourage some new economic activity, but also—which seems much more important—would bring the mountain communities into more active participation in the national life.

"People are and for some time will be East Kentucky's most important export." However, in their new setting the emigrants are often only marginally employable and consequently more likely than others to be unemployed. "In addition to their claims on direct public assistance they add to other costs of government at these destinations quite out of proportion to their numbers. There is clearly a national interest in investment in the education of the mountain people."

Timing is important. Policies that might be justified at one time might not at others: the situation must be ripe for chain effects on attitudes and behavior that affect the economic and cultural life of the community. In this connection, Miss Bowman suggested that "the floods of 1957 may have marked a turning point."

In sweeping away hundreds of ramshackle houses along the river bottoms the floods "achieved essential demolition without benefit of economic calculation. . . . In their wake came a surge of activity on the part of both local and state leaders." Through their efforts and the conditions of federal assistance, a return to pre-flood patterns has been prevented. Local pride and determination have found increasingly active expression. For example, at private expense a road has been built to the top of the mountains that hem the town of Hazard in its flood valley. It leads to a modern motor lodge that is attracting tourists. Some of the more prosperous families are building their homes along this road, safe from floods. Until then, "it had been categorically asserted that the terrain forced people to crowd into the river bottom."

Perhaps East Kentucky is at present peculiarly "ready" for the kind of long-term help that encourages more active participation in the national life and also fosters proud self-help in building people and communities for the future. This is "development," though not what is usually meant by "economic development."

Here, then, is an instant; how a question of semantic exactly what is an underdeveloped area?—has a practical bearing the understanding and solution to real and crucial situation. Hat Perloff of the RFF staff recently recognized the same problem from the national view. Low-income sections of the country, he told members of the American Economic Association, "have quite different potentialities for economic growth and improvement. Some have natural resources that have yet to be fully tapped; some have locational advantages for attracting industries; others, however have to face up to their very limited potentialities for economic expansion and to the urgent need for a high rate of out-migration. In the title of his paper, "Lagging Sectors and Regions of the American Economy," Perloff comes with an adjective—lagging—that covers a range of situations yet lacks the sting of "backward." His paper, issued as RFF Reprint No. 19, is drawn from materials in a recent book by him and three leagues, Regions, Resources, Economic Growth.