“My why was: Get the hell up out of this situation.” That’s how Carmelo Anthony described his path to becoming the first NBA Hall of Famer from Baltimore.
Thinking about how Anthony got himself out while so many of his Baltimore peers did not, some will say Anthony is an extraordinary exception. And they’re right.
The extraordinary don’t stand still. They get themselves to where they can achieve.
Which is worth remembering when people attribute the failures of certain people to where they came from, or when failures themselves ascribe their mistakes to where they are. The reasoning is wrongheaded.
Quite unlike in the past, migration is frictionless, and near costless. If opportunity is limited by location, or the people in that location, get out. Middletown, the desperate part of Ohio where J.D. Vance came up, is not far from booming Columbus. Vance eventually took his talents to Columbus for college (Ohio State), and to Yale Law after that.
To which some will say again that we can’t make blanket judgements about human immobility by focusing on the extraordinary and mobile. Except that we can. And it’s not just because opportunities of all kind await even the mediocre who are lucky enough to live in a country where mobility is once again so cheap and frictionless.
Much more important is that the extraordinary once again move. How we know this can be found in the states that lose the mobile. E. Gordon Gee, president of West Virginia University, told the New York Times in 2020 that he wanted to erect a fence around West Virginia to keep its best and brightest in state. He knows that where the talented go, opportunity multiplies.
So, if the extraordinary could be convinced to stay in West Virginia, the state and the less than extraordinary within it would be better off. The problem for Gee is that the extraordinary generally don’t stay.
Which is why some cities and states decline, and others don’t. The closure of a business or a factory could never wreck a city, state or country, but the departure of extraordinary people can and does. People drive wealth and progress, which yet again says something about the people who think enough of themselves to do as Anthony and Vance did, and get out. And it raises yet another question. Think Texas.
For years conservatives have reveled in the outflow of Californians to Texas. To conservatives it has signaled a movement away from high taxes, endless regulation, and other legislative errors. No doubt they’re right to a degree. Policy matters, and it can repel or attract human capital.
What’s notable here is that while conservatives yet again revel in the frictionless movement of Californians to Texas to the betterment of Texas, they don’t think the same about people south of Texas’s border getting out of Mexico and other Central American countries in pursuit of something better in the United States. Except that as Vance, Anthony, and former West Virginians remind us, there’s something different about who say goodbye to what’s dysfunctional. Thought of another way, those who exit west Baltimore, Middletown and West Virginia are nothing like those who stay.
Which means we’ll do better if we think of Anthony, Vance and former West Virginians as immigrants within the United States who thought enough of themselves to leave the bad for something much better. Having seen the genius of Anthony, Vance and ex-Mountain staters, maybe we’ll see former central Americans differently too. They left, which means they’re a lot more like high achievers in the U.S. than we may realize based on a perception of where they came from.
Originally posted to Real Clear Markets.
