“Westward the Course...”

All signs and omens are grist for the mill of the social scientist who seeks to trace and account for the pace and sweep of regional change throughout this country.

The moves of the Braves baseball club from Boston to Milwaukee, of the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and the Giants from New York to San Francisco have been noted as signalling some of the great regional changes under way in this country. To paraphrase Bishop Berkeley, "Westward the course of umpire takes its way."

In his preface to a study that he and three associates have just completed [see New RFF Studies, in this issue], Harvey Perloff writes that the reshuffle points up "two of the most significant shifts which have been taking place in recent decades—the particularly rapid industrial growth of the western end of the Manufacturing Belt, and the virtual flood of movement to the Far West and particularly California."

In analyzing events of the past eighty years, the authors recognize that nationwide forces have dominated economic developments in all parts of the country and that the trend has been persistently upward. Still, they point out, some areas have grown much faster than others and often along quite different lines. Nearly all of the "depressed areas," for instance, have experienced some absolute growth: their problems come from having been left behind relatively in the general advance, normally coupled with an inadequate adjustment in one or a very small number of industries. In other areas most of the problems come from growing fast.

The whole story of regional variations since 1870 is enormously complex. Parts of the total picture are as remarkable for stability as for speed of relative shifts. In 1900 the great northeastern Manufacturing Belt that stretches from southern New England to Wisconsin had 49 percent of the nation's population. In 1957, it had 46 percent. A large part of economic growth of the West and South has been based on primary natural resources. Much of the remainder of the expansion in those regions has consisted in the same activities that are important elsewhere—a process of filling in the manufacturing and service activity "gaps" across the face of the country.

Many forces are at work in the shifting pattern. On the upside sometimes it is access to raw materials that has played a leading part, as with the newborn petrochemical industry of the Gulf states; sometimes the impact of growing urban markets, as on the West Coast; sometimes the attraction of ocean beaches and sunshine, as in Florida. On both the up and downsides, the direct impact of technology has often been a strong force, as with cotton farming. Mechanization came belatedly to the Cotton South, but when at length, between the two World Wars, large-scale motorized cotton pickers came into play, the march of the machines drew cotton production away from small hill farms of the Southeast on to the broad and nearly level stretches of the Southwest and into the irrigated valleys of California. As a result, hundreds of thousands of fieldhands were compelled to look for work in other regions.

The researchers have arrived at a number of observations and conclusions, some of which run counter to widely held beliefs about area development. For instance:

1. Sheer volume, whether of population or economic activity, is not always the best measure of an area's well-being. The level of per capita income is important, too. "Every region in the country cannot hope to experience rapid increase in the volume of economic activities and in population. But every region can hope to enjoy a high and rising level of per capita income ... if it is willing to face up to the need for a relative 'emptying out' when the overall situation with regard to relative advantages among regions calls for it."
2. Growth of total income and population has been associated in a general way with declines in the relative importance of agricultural employment and increases in employment in manufacturing and services. Thus "it is true that certain industries are more conducive to regional growth than others." But some regions that lack relative advantages of access to raw materials and markets can expect to grow only on the basis of the industries for which they do have special advantages. "The attraction of industry is a competitive matter." It is pointed out, for example, that "certain types of farming have had rapid and large increases in labor productivity and the areas where these types of farming are located enjoy relatively high levels of per capita income."
3. "Growth industries—those that are expanding in employment or value-added at a rate exceeding the average for all industries—favorably influence growth in the volume of economic activities within a region. But a region may grow by gathering in a greater and greater proportion of the slower-growth industries ... Regions that are worrying about decline can learn some useful lessons from the flourishing firms in generally declining industries."

Metropolitan areas are growing fast and so are their problems. In the next twenty years we expect to see US metropolitan cities increase in number by about 55 millions. Some staggering tasks of finance and adjustment are awaiting local governments...

In financing public education, fire protection, police protection and the like, neither growth alone nor the consolidation of existing governments appears likely to have significant effects on per capita expenditures ...

Services from a multipurpose single plant, such as water and sewage services, will tend to reduce per capita expenditures only in the first stages of growth...

Efficiency considerations, thus, do not warrant across-the-board consolidation ... Consolidation of water and sewage services, preferably into a multipurpose district, can be a move toward greater efficiency and lower expenses. Otherwise, efficiency may be highest in medium sized communities of 50,000 to 100,000 residents.

—Werner Z. Hirsch, in The Review of Economics and Statistics, August, 1959.