Ryan Streeter on Social Capital, Civic Health, and Quality of Life in the United States

Welcome to the Policy of McCombs podcast, a data driven conversation on the economic
issues up today in this series. We invite guests into our studio to provide a highlight
of their work presented during a visit to the University of Texas at Austin Policy.
Emma Combs is produced by the Center for Enterprise and Policy Analytics at the McCombs School of Business.
I am your co-host, Carlos Carvalho, with my colleague Mario Villarreal.
Hi, my name is Mario Villarreal and I am from the Center of Enterprise and Policy Analytics, and today
I’m here with Ryan Streator. Ryan Streator as the director of the Mastic Policy Studies
at the American Enterprise Institute AEI, where he oversees research in education,
American citizenship, politics, public opinion and social and cultural studies.
Before joining AEI, he was executive director of the Center for Politics and Governance at
the University of Texas at Austin. His recent work includes two interesting
pieces. One is a survey on community and society that is designed to contribute
to the literature and social capital. And the second one is a collection of essays
called Localism in America, where they explore how communities may
work together to solve important problems and issues of local governance.
So thank you for being with us today, Ryan. Thanks for having me. Great to be back. What would
you highlight as the most important lessons of your work about localism and how communities
work together to deal with important social problems? Well, I think that the
first thing that’s worth saying, and this is evident in some of the findings from the survey that you mentioned, which
we did with NORC at University of Chicago, really using a lot of questions
that haven’t been asked in quite a long time as a lot of public opinion research has focused on political attitudes.
We wanted to drill down a couple of of layers and ask people about the quality of their communities,
how they think things are going in their communities. Basic questions like how many friends do you have? How far does it
take you? How long’s it take you to get to the grocery store? We asked all those questions as well as the kind of right track, wrong track questions
that that you typically ask people. And I think, you know, consistent with other survey research
that’s been done, our survey shows pretty clearly that when you ask people about
their communities, they have a first of all, a much higher regard for their communities than they do
the country as a whole. Typically, they they trust their local government significantly
more than they trust the federal government. And that’s that’s been consistent with what Pew found over years.
And our findings are very consistent with theirs. But you also find that people are much more optimistic
about the direction that their communities are going compared to the direction that the country is going. And that has to do
with just the state of things in general. It also has to do with the economy. People are less likely to say
that the economy will be better in 12 months, but much more likely to say that their own personal situation will be better. And
that goes for pretty much every demographic, including working class Americans. And so I think there’s something
fundamental in those findings that gets to the nature of people’s attachment to
place itself. And I think given the, you know, well-documented
and significant divisions that we have in this country right now, politically and ideologically,
that those are very real divisions in the survey, research is very clear about that, too. People think
in ideologically devisive terms in ways that are much more pronounced in stark than than 40 years ago.
I think what there’s what we’ve seen and this is reflected in our localism volume that you mentioned. It’s an edited
collection with people from across the ideological spectrum who contributed to this understanding
that we’ve perhaps tried to nationalize. That’s my term at nationalize issues
on a grand scale. Trust our national politics to deal with them, debate those things in national
forums and look for solutions from the federal government when in fact it might make more
sense on some really big important issues from inequality to even immigration
and even some parts of climate change, for instance, to think again more constructively about what regional
governments, what state governments and what local governments can be doing, perhaps should be doing to combat
these issues. And we might actually have more long term success if we kind of remember some of the lessons of
the past about what it means to meaningfully situate responsible for problem solving at the local level.
So I think, you know, the the the main the main point here is that
local governance and local problem solving is actually very consistent with where most Americans minds and hearts are.
They’re there. They’re closer to home rather than than farther away. I see. Now, regarding
attitudes towards optimism within local communities and the way
they interact with each other, that’s a very interesting aspect of it. There is the other aspect
about the possibilities of communities actually coordinating in effective ways
to actually come up with effective solutions. Now, those interactions often
are embedded within a policy framework either dictated by local governments, state
governments or federal governments. In your research, could you highlight some of
the features that you think are useful in public policies to facilitate that process
of communities organizing themselves and making the best out of that close
knit social fabric and features that may impede that
process? That’s a great question. I think that there are some pretty interesting
lessons in. Some a series of public policy reforms in the 1990s, the sort of get
at what these policy features are that you’re talking about, and I’ll come to the specifics in just
a second. But to say more generally, I think looked at from the federal policy lens,
I think what what has worked in the past on federal policy and also state policy
vis-a-vis local communities is to have policies that are that are goal based where you’re trying to reach
certain goals, but allow for and perhaps even require a certain flexibility
in terms of who the players are that actually are helping reach those those goals. And this has been written about another regulatory reform
literature as well, kind of goal based regulation versus overly stipulated
processes. And I think you saw this in welfare reform in the 1990s,
which Republicans passed, Bill Clinton signed it had supporters and detractors on
on both sides. But what what what the policy had that most people talked about
was that it imposed work requirements on people. And that’s been the most controversial thing. That’s what people at debated and people
have studied. There’s a second, you know, in my mind, equally as important, if not more important
feature to that policy, which essentially took the role
of counties and the state government and then subdivisions as the place where that
policy had to be worked out to actually provide services to help people move into the workforce. And there’s some
evidence in the literature that states that did second ordered evolution, where they took the resources
from the federal government, devolve those to the county and municipal level, actually had better employment outcomes because
you had more actors within the community involved. But how they did that, whether it was through partnerships with
chambers of commerce and schools, whether it was through welfare agencies working together with workforce development agencies,
that was really left to the discretion of the local leaders. But they were provided with resources and basic goals
to me. You can actually see those very similar lessons in the community policing movement of 1994
was when the federal law was passed there, which really proliferated around the country after that. Community
policing has a longer history, but the federal government actually by providing resources and goals,
we saw communities adopting this policing model all throughout the country. And to the point
where, you know, the majority of people live in communities where that are are governed by that model in terms of the police
force. You can also see the same thing in public housing reform in the early 1990s, also school reform where
you had basic goals set in place. But there was the expectation that local communities would have some flexibility
in how to meet those goals. It’s probably a good time for us to revisit some of those some of those
discussions in terms of limitations. This becomes difficult when you have
issues where the goals really have to be met in a much broader way than there
are under the control of a municipality. And I think, you know, the most obvious case would be sort of climate change policy, for instance,
that would be a little bit more more difficult to work out at the local level. Having said that, I still think cities
are at the forefront of this debate in terms of innovation, in terms of reducing
the carbon footprint of new construction and the like. That really is is coming about through a lot of innovation
that’s happening at the local level, even in the private sector. We need we need to encourage more of that. So I don’t
think localities don’t have a role to play there, but when you have goals that cross state lines and all of that, you’ll see a limitation
to some of these policies for sure. Now, it seems very natural for for people to think
that complex problem, complex social problems require
some sort of centrally planned top-down intervention to be dealt
with effectively. And there’s a natural thing about that. It’s a matter
of the scale or knowledge. Lin Ostrom, as you you know, she
won the Nobel Prize by pointing out that sometimes commons problems
and governance of natural resources can be dealt with and be
solved by bottom up approaches that tend to be messy, tend to be not neat
and clean, but they’re effective. Now, how would you respond to those criticism?
You’re really allude alluded a little bit to the challenges of large scale problems and to be
solved within localism structures and local governance structures. But how would you answer
that criticism of scale and knowledge in dealing with with
this problems? Well, I would say that you really need to be
focused on the issue at hand and where the solution ultimately comes from or is
most likely to come from. Try to be as honest about that as you can and and deal with these
these problems as public policy matters, sort of with respect to the
issues that essentially define the kind of larger goal. And I think that, you know, for for instance,
we talk about inequality and income stagnation in the middle. You know,
higher gains in the upper upper tail. And this this growing problem of inequality and and most of
the debate that we consume through whether it’s social media or through news
outlets is happy. Thing about federal policy and what we should be doing to the tax code in these sorts
of things. I would say and I used to say this to my my students just to get their eyebrows
to raise would say there is no national solutions. Inequal inequality is a function of all these
regional sort of variations. And I think you can see that. I’ll just give an example. I mean, Raj Chetty,
is Worksman probably the best known in this in this area? So I’ll cite that since since listeners might be familiar
with it. But in his work with his colleagues on the Moving to Opportunity study, which was also created back
in the early 1990s as a part of this domestic reform kind of era that I was talking
about, one of the things I think is really interesting about their findings is that income
mobility from the bottom upwards across the country is very different depending on where you are.
You know, same same federal policies, same payroll tax policy, same income tax policies,
weak. We could argue that those should be different levels and that might affect some some outcomes differently.
But if you expanded ITC, if you increase wages, wage subsidies, if you if you do all of
those things, you’ll make the discomfort and pain of being at a low income
less painful. But if the issue is mobility, then you need to actually look at what drives mobility and what often
drives mobility. Is the labor market where you live, whether or not it’s possible to
be an economy that’s more inclusive. And so to put it very crudely, it’s better to be poor, better to be
born poor in some cities in America than than others in in Salt Lake City. There’s there’s really good
upward mobility for people born in the lower lowest fifth quintile, whereas in some some cities in the southeast
or whatever, it’s very, very hard to get out of that that lowest quintile. So you’re dealing with lower local forces.
And you could you could you could talk about structural racism. You can talk about lack of access
to the opportunity sort of gateways through good post-secondary education, even if it’s a non
four year kind of environment where you have good employer partnerships with a with an efficient
community college system, even very localized within a larger metro area, you see really good outcomes. And so I think
that’s where you need to actually if you really care about this problem, you should be asking questions about how regions can actually
make the mobility environment where they are much more successful than than it has banned. And I just
I’ve been very unpersuaded that there are federal. The federal policies that are being debated. Pick your pick your favorite one
as an as a response to inequality. Well, I don’t think any of them will actually have the effect that having a much
more effective regional system would have. And I think that’s just true empirically and in the evidence,
and perhaps not only about a permanent long term solutions or processes that
facilitate upward mobility, but also ways to
ease the pain of those that they are in less favorable favorable positions. You’ve done
work on charity and solidarity and those kind of things. So I wonder if these surveys
and these essays also touch on how small communities are perhaps
an effective way to deal with these problems and
be helpful of those in need in more effective ways than
large scale federal programs, perhaps? Well, I think that anywhere
there has been success in helping people from the lower end of the income distribution
find ways to move up. There’s a there’s a often an unreported sort of sob story
about the role of civil society in the civic environment. That’s that’s there. The hollowing out of
civic life in working class America is something that seems very real and is problematic.
And so in some parts of the country where we in the same towns are you seeing factories closed and you’ve seen jobs go away.
And the same places where you’ve seen the rise in the opioid crisis, where it’s been the most pronounced.
You also have seen a kind of a dissolution of the civic order in those places. And that’s a that’s a big issue
that no one knows exactly what the right solution is. But when you look at what why people actually
get access to opportunity, how they move into an area, let’s say, to a post-secondary enviroment, actually
finish and then end up in the labor market, a much better position than where their family was when they they started
the role of networks. That’s really important. There’s a pretty big literature on this, too, that networks don’t just matter
for highly networked, more fluid college graduates. I mean, that that is a and in a
very important thing of the post-secondary experience and beyond for for people that come from the upper middle class
and and have got a four year college degree. But there’s there’s a significant body of literature that shows
that even in low income communities, people who have more relationships and more friends and more connections
actually have better labor market outcomes. But in terms of their immediate wages,
the jobs pay better that they get immediately and their long term income gains are higher.
What I think is is part of our problem is we don’t have enough. Bridging social capital is, as some
social scientists have called it, within communities to help that student in a low income community. Going to a school
with mostly low income classmates have relationships with people in the post-secondary
environment who themselves are connected to employers in much the same way that. Kids from low
from higher income families have. And some communities do a better job of making of bridging those connections.
And and I think instead of relying on just local ingenuity and
basically accident’s of local entrepreneurship and leadership to produce these outcomes, we had to factor
those into our into our public policy. We ought to, in our post-secondary public policy environment,
learn some of these lessons that we’ve we’ve learned from some of the policies I was talking about earlier,
where the role of the community is actually presupposed and perhaps even required in the implementation
of those of those policies. Yeah, perhaps there’s some of his small thinks may not be a small at the end,
right. Especially and certainly in individual cases that’s that’s really, really true. You can look at two kids
who start out in equally challenging circumstances. One does much better than other.
Certainly there are natural things, natural belittles that that play into that. But often it’s a it’s a function of the
community. Where they are does sort of, you know, take a village after all. And that’s evident in
Shetty’s research to write that it’s just this the students that moved into communities where they had
more intact neighborhood dynamics, better school systems, the kind of social capital
where the expectation among their classmates was that they would go to college and all that their outcomes now
match the students where they went to school with in those new communities more than
than the outcomes of the students in those neighborhoods that they that they left. So communities matter.
Yes. Ryan? Yeah, fascinating. Perhaps us as a way to to wrap up
our conversation. Where would you like to see these research going here at SIPA?
We value empirical research a lot and we
think that there is an important aspect of actually assessing the real impact
of public policies in certain aspects of social life. From an empirical
point of view, of course, this type of research is hard to assess empirically. But
I don’t want to lead dancer. But but it will be interesting in learning. What
are the next steps? What what Ryan and I believe are the next steps in this
type of research? Yeah, great question and really important. A couple things come to mind right
off the bat. One is, I think, more research consistent with your own colleague
here, John Hadfield, who’s a political economist here at McCombs. He’s done some interesting work on
subdivisions of local government and the relationship to economic performance in an area. And his
is where he and he contributed to our volume as well. And his work has shown that when you have this competition
of municipalities within a larger region, you you actually get better economic
outcomes around the region for a variety of reasons that he explains. I think that just that
area itself kind of calls for our research. And his his research has really kind of opened the door to some of these
larger questions about with the relationship between where governance for certain types of policies
is situated and the kind of outcomes that are all hoping for economically and socially in an area is important
and there could be more in that field. I also think that the role
of locally generated and state generated
regulations and and and related statutes and ordinances
there, their effect on mobility, I think is really an important thing for us to be studying right
now. So everything from occupational licensing to non-compete agreements to land use policies
and what their what their effect is on people’s ability to actually relocate to areas where
there’s opportunity, their ability to actually start new firms and new new enterprises, I think needs
needs to be studied even more thing with a growing awareness that some of these problems, many of which are actually generated locally, then raises questions
about what the state’s role is in that regard. How much those things are actually inhibiting access to opportunity
is something that I think, given the scale of that problem state by state around the country, I don’t think there’s quite enough
empirical research in that area. So that that would be another one that I would look at. And then the third one would be just this whole
realm of post-secondary education that’s not just for your college degrees, but those whole
non-accredited certifications that employers value, training institutes and community colleges.
There’s a lot there’s a lot of more interesting work that can be done in that area
related to how to assess where labor markets are changing and growing, where opportunities are and what schools
are actually doing. Can they read those signals? You know, and and I think that that’s an area where,
again, given the importance that it plays, I think in in regional public policy right
now, there’s not as much literature there as it should be. Well, for grad students listening,
I think to Ryan just set up like at least five or six dissertation topics
right here, hopefully. So hopefully you’ll get some takers that. That’s correct. Thank you very much for being with us today,
Ryan. Great to be with you. Thanks. Before we wrap up, you can get more information
in our medium page. Thanks for listening to Policy Imogen’s. See you next time.