WHAT’S GOING ON? Take Away and Summary of Chap 2 Culture and Migrations
In an age of multiculturalism, ethnic and religious political cultures seem out of place. Tying religiously derived values to contemporary ED policy/strategies might seem to many a bit of a stretch. But this is the beginning of our ED history. What we have just outlined is the “First Sort,” the foundation for today’s “Big Sort.” ED policy and strategies was first fabricated from the policy systems set up in newly founded cities and newly settled states. That these policy systems produced outputs relevant today will be made more evident in the following chapters. This chapter fleshed out our two ships of economic development, and described the geographies into which they reached and how they institutionalized themselves into state and local policy-making systems. Political culture matters in economic development; different populations, states, regions and cities have their own history and legacy of values which were developed over time and experience by the people who settled them and the people who followed. Structures such as state constitutions and municipal charters are how these initial values were sustained over time.
Political cultures would matter little if they produced roughly similar outputs. Our two ships, however, are sailing in different seas and heading to different ports. The first and fundamental observation is from our very beginning: economic development has included two different policy cultures, each injecting its own definition of what ED should do and whom it should help. Those two ships exist today, and they have not played well in the harbor. Our history reflects the struggle between these almost polar opposite cultures. Pennsylvania Privatism and Yankee Progressivism functioned at the same time, but each produced a wildly different policy system and defined economic development so differently that economic development priorities of either one almost repudiated the priorities of the other. There were other cultures and policy systems which we did not elaborate upon—Charleston for one, New York City for another.
Divergence of ED goals among distinctive political cultures will, therefore, be a central theme in this history. In this history there has never has been a single, universal, nationwide definition of what economic development is, what it should do, who should do it and how it should serve the community/jurisdiction. This theme is in its infancy, however. The story is vastly more complicated as we go forward. In particular, it is more complicated by outlining how political cultures diffused into new territories, established new jurisdictions, and injected cultural values and priorities into structural frameworks central to governance. In most cases new territories were shared with other migrating political cultures and foreign immigrants. Hybrid structural systems resulted.
Population mobility is interrelated with political culture—and through political culture devised the structural framework of governance underlying political and value consensus of the community/jurisdiction, and, importantly, legitimized selected elites to play within the structural framework. From Early America on, not everybody has played ball in the ED policy-making process. In the pre-Civil War period elites were exclusively from the private sector. Professional politicians like Quincy were rare indeed in those years. But we also learned that private sector elites do not inherently share identical values—they clearly do not, never have and likely never will. Business elites travel on each of our two ships. Who plays ball in ED policy-making will follow from distinctly different jurisdictional policy systems.
ED is different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as each of our national regions occupies a different “space,” history, population flow and jurisdictional economic base. One size has never fit all. For more than 70 years pre-Civil War America was two vastly different “nations”—with an undiscovered and largely unsettled third nation (the West) lurking off-stage. North and South were poles apart. Each chose its own path; each path had consequences. At the time many increasingly saw these paths as zero-sum. The South chose a path that developed a feudal agricultural and political system in the nineteenth century. It didn’t go so well—but it left a heritage that affected the course and direction of American economic development.
Ron W. Coan 