The Wall Street Journal used Natchez in a front-page story this week to illustrate the economic decline of the South over the past decade, but it really could have chosen any Mississippi city.
Every place in this state knows full well the story of how light manufacturing has fled out of our nation’s borders — and can tell the painful, first-person stories of jobs and business opportunities lost.
Yet the reporter, Sharon Nunn, did an outstanding job synthesizing nearly a century of history of a large region into one digestible package, called “The South is Falling Behind.”
A brief summary: Through the early 20th century the South’s economy greatly trailed that of the rest of the country because it was largely dependent on agriculture. In the 1940s the per capita income in the 12 Southern states was 66.3 percent of the national average. But the region began a rapid rise thanks to the efforts of people like Gov. Hugh White of Columbia to attract factories from the North, where wages were high and unions troublesome. It was a huge success and by 2009 that per capita income rate had reached 88.9 percent. But the aging factories opened in the 1930s to 1950s have mostly closed, the death knell coming from cheap labor in the developing world. The per capita income in the South had dropped to 85.9 percent in 2017 and no doubt continues to fall.
Seeing the big picture of the situation is helpful, I think, to figuring out a way to escape from the cycle of losing population and businesses. I propose three broad areas:
1. Education: Nunn’s article points out that the South has invested less in education than other regions, in part because of lingering racial divides. But I think a good model of how to do education right in the rural south can be found here in Columbia and Marion County. Both districts have really worked hard to succeed despite always-uncertain state funding and standards and a deterioration of the home that has left students less prepared. Both have managed to maintain significant white and black enrollments, which many other districts in the South have failed to do.
It should be noted that the Columbia School District has some of the highest property tax rates in the state. It takes money — serious money, not the let’s-sell-donuts-for-a-field-trip variety — to have a successful school district. That’s an investment this community has made through its tax dollars, and I think it’s one that will continue to pay off as the years go by.
The Marion County district lacks the industry and wealth that the city has, yet it’s done in my view a remarkable job educating students with the resources that it has. Credit should go to the leadership of both districts.
2. Infrastructure: Businesses need passable roads and bridges to function. Mississippi is not spending enough to maintain what it has right now, and the obvious solution, championed by business leaders but rejected by the state’s toothless Republican leadership, is to raise the gas tax. Until that investment is made at a state level, it’s going to be hard for individual communities to keep up with the wear and tear.
3. A unique selling proposition: Light manufacturing is gone permanently to low-wage nations, and advanced manufacturing in the United States is all centered around large hubs where there are big pools of potential employees to draw from. The market isn’t a charity, and it’s going to go where the best opportunities are.
The rural South, therefore, must find an advantage in attracting jobs. What can it offer that makes it a place where it makes financial sense to do business? Good weather and much lower home prices than the rest of the nation are a good start. That’s why so many retirees move South when jobs are no longer an issue. If you can add a solid education and infrastructure system to that mix, the pendulum might finally swing back in our favor.
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him at (601) 736-2611 or csmith@columbianprogress.com.
