A Siberian Curse in America?

View from Amtrak's California Zephyr train.  America's Siberia?

Fiona Hill became an unlikely celebrity during the course of the Trump impeachment hearings.  The expert on Russia rose to national prominence mostly because of her slaying testimony regarding President Trump's actions with the government of Ukraine but also because of the resonance of her biography, the child of a poor family rising through education and hard work to a position of respected authority.  That she came to the United States to escape the enduring class and regional biases of her native United Kingdom was another source of her appeal.

Fiona Hill testifying before Congress

One of her books is The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, about the enduring difficulties of Russia that date back to the state planning era of the USSR during which the nation essentially colonized Siberia.  First populated with the forced labor of the Gulag and then with subsidies to support living where nobody would want to live, Soviet planners created cities to exploit Siberian resources in inhospitable places with infrastructure and transportation costs that today exceed the benefits of such development.  Many cities were even created primarily for the defense industry which declined in scope with the end of the Cold War.  In a closed economy shut off from the rest of the world, such costs were absorbed by the Soviet government.  Since Russia has joined the world economy, the cost of doing business in Siberia has been a long term drag on the Russian economy as a whole.

Hill describes the typical growth of cities in general, explaining the connections between people, resources and production, and trade.  She contrasts the growth of planned Siberian cities with that of cities that developed naturally elsewhere in the world.  As I read about the past difficulties and future challenges of Siberia, I wondered about how the experience of Russia might apply to the United States.  The United States of course did not have an oppressive monarchy followed by decades of oppression and poor national planning by the communist regime.  But I wonder if the immense size of the United States coupled with some historical trends have created a Siberia within the United States.

The creation of cities in the US began during the colonial era with the growth of coastal cities focused on trade with England.  The largest cities of the time were Boston, New York, Baltimore, Providence, Philadelphia, and Charleston.  After the Revolutionary War, colonization of Indian lands in what was then called the "Northwest" (what we call now the "Midwest") brought with it a sprinkling of cities on the Great Lakes and the Hudson, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers.  Cities such as Albany, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and St. Louis grew during this time.   Their principal focus was to supply the colonizing farmers in the interior and newly settled areas in the west.  Cities in the south focused on slavery-produced agricultural trade, rather than industrial growth so, with the exception of New Orleans, they never grew to the size of northern port cities.

For much of American history, tariffs on trade were kept high to protect and foster American business.  Tariff rates ranged from 20% to 60%.  As imports were sometimes prohibitively expensive, industrial development and trade within the country prospered.  As trade was primarily national rather than international, cities centrally located within the United States--at first at confluences of rivers and lakes and later of railways--such as Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis--grew in size.  During the industrial revolution of the 19th century, cities in the midwest with convenient access to coal to fuel the factories grew along with the central trading cities.  By the end of the nineteenth century, the ten largest cities in the US were New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, Buffalo, San Francisco, and Cincinnati, only half are which were coastal trading cities with extensive trade connections to the rest of the world.

The United States fostered a vibrant economy within its borders so that by the turn of the twentieth century, it was the richest economy in the world, yet it's participation in the world economy was limited via severe tariffs which, until 1913 with the passage of the 16th amendment authorizing an income tax, were the principal source of income of the federal government.  As most American economic activity was focused within the US with its intricate rail network, cities within the country grew until the Second World War.  Only at the end of the war did the United States lower tariff barriers to international trade and expand its business and financial connections to the rest of the world.

Today, the ten largest cities are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, and San Jose, most of which are on the coasts with extensive trade connections with the rest of the world.  Cities inland, particularly older cities in the northeast and midwest, have declined economically, gradually and sometimes suddenly, as international economies have grown and the elimination of tariffs has eroded their relevance in both the international and national economy, much the same as the cities of Siberia have declined as the special conditions of their growth have disappeared.

In January, we took Amtrak's California Zephyr across the United States from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay.  The journey takes almost 3 days.  Leaving Chicago in the afternoon of the first day, the train races through the great plains as daylight fades into night, arriving in Denver the next morning.  The second day is spent crossing the Rocky Mountains and mid-continent plateau, truly full of awe-inspiring vistas.  The third day begins in the stunning High Sierra of California and ends on the California coast.  The trip is known for its remarkable beauty, but grim lessons can be learned from it as well.

One begins and ends the trip in two of the great urban centers of the United States, Chicago on one end and the San Francisco-San Jose-Oakland metropolis on the the other.  The wealth and opportunity that draws people to the US from around the world is apparent in both urban areas.  But after leaving Chicago, the first day of the trip passes through town after town of "flyover" America.  Shuttered businesses.  Dormant grain elevators.  Once beautiful train stations now decrepit and empty.  Even the second day has vivid contrasts between beautiful mountains and rivers and wrecked dormant farms and emptying towns.   Riding through the January snow-covered countryside made comparisons to Siberia easy. 

The states the train travels through are among the most federally supported states in the nation in that federal funds coming into the state exceed federal taxes collected from the state.  Beautiful places, but they do not provide much opportunity for people in today's economy.  Young people leave for big cities possessing better chances for living wages and careers.  With economic and population decline comes an accompanying decline in access to basic services such as schools and hospitals (this year will have a near record number of rural hospital closings, problematic in a time with a pervasive pandemic).  Many of the state governments in our Siberia have regressive tax policies and therefore insufficient income to provide many services, therefore passing the burden of supplying such services to the federal government.

How did we allow much of the United States to become an American Siberia?  Did clinging to dogmas of states' autonomy or rewarding political donors blind politicians to what has happened their citizens?  Some have suggested a Johnson-like War on Poverty in rural America or American Marshall Plan, but then how can the American Siberia sustain itself after the money runs out?  Can we encourage people who live in such areas to move to places with greater opportunity with moving subsidies, tax credits, and the like?  Provide job training for people to find new careers or stimulate the economy in areas where typical hubs for development such as universities are not present?  An oppressive autocratic nation like Russia can ignore the suffering of its people even as its elite thrives.  A nation like the United States can do so only as an affront to its ideals and an abandonment of its duty to its citizens.