Rambling Through Irony and Why the Amish May Yet Save New York

New York is a deeply ironic place.  Most of the state is rolling, rural, green, and beautiful.  The Adirondack State Park is massive, historic, rugged, and four-season stunning.  The Finger Lake region is a gem.  The Catskills and surrounding country are a sylvan paradise.

The state is also a financial basket case, and known around the world as the box that the Big Apple comes wrapped in.  In fact, most people in permanent residence think Upstate means Westchester County and think Rochester is in Ohio, if only they could find Ohio.

The New York State I grew up in had a vibrant and diverse economy.  The city was always a financial and corporate hub, but was also the largest small business economy in North America.  Albany was even then a political scorched earth, but much more entertaining than it is today thanks to Nelson Rockefeller.  The cities that stretched along the former Erie Canal were home to a pantheon of iconic American industry and enterprise.  GM, Kodak, Baush and Lomb, Sybron, Carrier, IBM, GE, Xerox, and Alcoa are just some of the names that come to mind. It was a proudly middle class state with a strong rural sub-economy that nicely counterbalanced the political craziness of Albany and the general lunacy that is NYC.

Today, New York State is a hollowed out relic of its past.

When I was growing up, Rochester was defined by Kodak.  You either worked there or for someone who did.  The place fairly teamed with engineers, chemists, and physicists.  A long history of optical excellence built up by German immigrants added to the green house that launched Xerox, the high tech darling of the era.  It was a vibrant, albeit cold, place to live.

Up the road lay the sprawling blue collar Buffaloplex, home to General Motors factories and all that went with them.  Down the road in and around Syracuse, big firms like IBM, GE, and Carrier ran large operations that filled the coffers of town after town.

Today, it’s all nearly gone. Big business has nearly left the state save for a corporate presence in the big city on the Hudson. In every city of significance other than New York, the largest employer is either the government, a university or college, or a hospital: Not a growth engine in the lot.  In fact worse than that, each in their own way defy economic gravity posting annual increases in costs that dwarf COLA and stagger the imagination.

On a recent trip to the Adirondacks, a region that has been in economic recession for decades, it was impossible not be struck by the fact that nearly all the family farms are now owned by Amish or Mennonite families.  They’ve bought completely busted farms for cash and are now the backbone of a thriving organic farming movement.  Give them another decade and the decrepit and wasted buildings they own will be replaced by tidy structures.  And they do it all barefoot and with horses (the Menonites do believe in tractors).

The downtown of one village after another is run down, boarded up, and forlorn.  Even clever college towns like Canton and Pottsdam struggle to maintain a vibrant local retail economy.  There are many causes but blame WalMart for shipping profits and everything that goes with them out of town. Sure it’s great to get a swell deal on goods made in China and food grown ten states over.  But make no mistake, WalMart in particular has fostered one of the biggest wealth transfers in the history of capitalism away from hundreds of thousands of small businesses in thousands of small towns to Bentonville in general and a relatively small number of large shareholders in particular.  Yes it’s an inevitable part of the globalization of the economy but it has come at a terrible cost.

Returning to my opening, the great irony of the hollowing out of New York State is that the hand on the spigot has been the masters of the universe in, yes, New York City.  The insatiable beast that is big money fueled the massive draining of wealth and jobs from across the state through both the much discussed quarterly profit pressure, but also the fabulously lucrative game of mergers, acquisitions, recapitalizaitions, buy-outs, flotations, offerings, and all the other games played on Wall Street.  And then later, when many of those machinations broke or exploded, most recently over the past 18 months, still more wealth was stripped from the state and the people who live in it.

What’s odd and I think noteworthy in all this is that despite the economic ruin–it’s not California and it’s not Michigan but make no mistake, it’s not a lot better–New York is a state with significant advantages.  There’s lots of fresh water, a commodity that will yet be dearer than oil.  Even today there are loads of educated people and first rate colleges and universities.  While not on the same scale as other parts of the country, the land is fertile and productive . . . as the Amish and Mennonites are proving yet again.

And yet the entire state has lost its way because it’s stuck in a political vice and an economic paradigm that has proven manifestly not to work if the point is to benefit “we the people” vs. “we the MBAs” or “we the financiers” or . . . you get the idea.

I don’t really know the answer other than it won’t come from some grand social program or government led initiative.  I think the big clue is actually the Amish, yet another irony if you think about it.  Not that we will have to go barefoot and forswear connections to the grid (though it may come to that). No, I’m thinking about a people who have bought what nobody else wanted and then loved it, cared for it, and brought it back to life, not with the end in mind of scaling it and using it as a platform to rule the world, but because it was a good and sensible thing to do.  Where big failed, small can again have the opportunity to succeed.

Something to think about.

Tags: Amish, Mennonite, Rochester, Buffalo, Syracuse, New York, New York City, masters of the univers, GE, IBM, Carrier, Kodak, Xerox

Be Sociable, Share!

•