Podcast: Janesville - the decline of the American Dream
Amy Goldstein joins the pod to discuss her 2017 FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year Janesville An American Story.
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The full transcript is available below:
[00:00:10.03] - David Brett
Amy, welcome to the show. So good to have you on.
[00:00:12.22] - Amy Goldstein
Good to be with you.
[00:00:14.04] - David Brett
Yeah. Thanks so much for taking part in this. There's a few reasons from my personal point of view why I wanted you on this. I began reading your book a few weeks ago, about two-thirds of the way through. It's obviously a great book. The personal stories in it, the power of the narrative. They are so powerful. And that's one of the things I want to touch on with some of my questions. Secondly, it's made me think about how and why the populist movement has obviously gained traction over the last few years as well. And that's front and centre of mind, given everything that's going on with elections this year. And finally, for someone like me thousands of miles away, it does actually still connect with some of the things that are going on in my country in the UK and possibly around the world, which we may also touch on a bit later. But before we go any deeper, can I just ask you to give us just a brief synopsis of Janesville and what the book's about?
[00:01:01.01] - Amy Goldstein
Sure. Well, the book is essentially a closeup of what happened during the Great Recession, or you might call it the global financial crisis. As the United States, at least, was coming out of the recession, the recession was from late 2007 to partway through 2009 was the official period of the recession, I have been reading so much about the bad economy, but it occurred to me that what I was reading was largely a macro view. It was about the economy. It was about the political debates over how the government should respond to this terrible financial time. It was about the banking industry. It was about the auto industry. And I didn't see a lot of deep writing about what this bad economic period was actually doing to people and their jobs and their communities. And that's what I wanted to portray.
[00:01:53.10] - David Brett
Okay, so we going talk about Janesville in particular, which is a small town in Wisconsin, well, certainly more than quite a lot of towns and cities in America. So how did you decide to focus on that specific community and their struggles?
[00:02:08.02] - Amy Goldstein
Well, Janesville was not a place I knew. Wisconsin is not a place that I had any real connections to. But I was looking for a community that could serve as a microcosm. And Janesville had several advantages in the way that sometimes what's bad for life is good for journalism and good for writing. Janesville was the home of what at the time had been the oldest operating General Motors plant in all of General Motors. And it shut down two days before Christmas of 2008. And there were 3,000 people who lost their jobs in two shifts that closed down that last year. And in the county for which Jainesville is the county seat, the hub, there were 9,000 jobs that were lost. It's a lot of jobs. Janesville has 65,000 people now it was a little smaller then. So that fit criteria number one. It had lost a lot of jobs. More than that, I wanted to find a place that had not previously been part of the US Rust Belt. I felt like people knew about Detroit and about Flint, Michigan, which had lost their industries earlier. But I wanted to find a place for which economic trauma was new during this bad economic time.
[00:03:29.24] - Amy Goldstein
And that was very true of Janesville. It had been a very comfortable, mostly middle class city with people going back generations who had worked at this plant. And suddenly, the heart of its economy was falling apart. So that was something that was important to me. I also knew that I would want to take a look at job retraining. So I wanted a place that had some kind of a college that was doing this work. And Janesville has a small technical college that was doing tons of job retraining in the few years after all this automaking work went away. It also has an interesting local politics. Janesville is an old democratic-leaning Union town. The Autoworkers belong to the United Autoworkers, which is all over the place, the Union that represents the autowork. It also had a young ambitious congressman who is a conservative Republican named Paul Ryan. Now, Paul Ryan was on his way to becoming speaker of the House of Representatives. I didn't know that when I started doing the research. But even back then, which was in 2011, when I arrived a couple of years after the plant had shut down, I thought there might be some interesting political tension that I could explore with this Democratic-leaning town with a very conservative member of Congress representing it.
[00:05:00.16] - Amy Goldstein
And I should say, finally, it was a place where when I started to visit, people were willing to talk to me. And for that, I am undyingly grateful. Those are some of the reasons.
[00:05:10.04] - David Brett
Yeah, exactly what you need as a journalist. You need all those quotes of the people that are willing to give over their stories. Exactly. Did you know what to expect before you got there? Had you ever been to Janesville before?
[00:05:21.20] - Amy Goldstein
No. I had done a little bit of reading, and I was looking at a few different places that all more less fit these criteria that I just mentioned. I made a first exploratory visit to Janesville in July of 2011, and I had lined up a few people to see who I thought might have an interesting vantage point. An old-time journalist in town, the guy who... He's a character in the book who ran what was called the Job Center, which was ground zero for where you went when your job that you thought was going to last your whole working life suddenly vanished on you, you didn't know what to do. So a few people like that. I met with some of the Union leadership. At this point, it was retired auto workers who were filling in the offices of the Union because there weren't any more active workers to be filling those jobs. So I just began meeting with people and asking them, who else should I get to know? And I was a little worried because usually, even for a newspaper story, I do a lot of compare and contrast. Where's a good setting for the story.
[00:06:31.08] - Amy Goldstein
And something in me just kept saying, Janesville's the place. And I thought, am I being unsystematic, uncharacteristically about that? But I just thought, there's a lot of interesting stuff here, and eventually I decided I'm just going to keep going.
[00:06:48.15] - David Brett
So more than a hunch, but there was a little bit of a hunch in there as well?
[00:06:52.03] - Amy Goldstein
Yeah. There was a hunch and some good, educated reportorial guesses.
[00:06:56.07] - David Brett
Absolutely. Absolutely. And you obviously keep mentioning the people, and anyone who hasn't read it does need to read it. There are so many characters in there. And I just wondered how you narrowed it down to maybe the relatively few that are in there or the relatively few that ended up missing out in the book.
[00:07:14.04] - Amy Goldstein
Well, I got to know a lot of people in town, and I was not quick or efficient in deciding who the main characters were going to be. I knew from the outset that one thing that would disqualify somebody from being my book, not that I have people lining up on the sidewalk waiting to be part of my book, they didn't know me. But one thing that I felt strongly about is that I wanted people who would be comfortable letting me use their real names. Not all books do that, but I felt if this was going to be or portrayal of a real place going through hard economic times, I wanted the people to be real, and there's nothing more real than seeing somebody's real name. So that was an important consideration for me. Beyond that, there were a couple of things I was thinking about I wanted this story to feel like a kaleidoscope, in which when you turn the kaleidoscope, you were seeing the story from different vantage points, just like in a kaleidoscope. So I had people I was getting to know, some of whom ended up in the book who weren't the workers themselves, but were in different positions to see what was happening in town and try to do something about it.
[00:08:24.14] - Amy Goldstein
So for instance, in addition to the head of the Job Center, I got to know the woman who at the time was the main banker in town. And she formed with another very affluent businesswoman, one town over, an economic development coalition to try very hard to bring new work to town. It was hard to do and how they were doing it, some people liked and some people thought was polarising, but they really had their hearts in it. Another woman who ended up in the book is a social studies teacher who really was very attuned to her high school kids and was realising that some of them just didn't look like they were doing as well when they came to school in the morning. They were sleepy, their clothes weren't all that clean. And she realized that these formerly middle class kids were now in families that were poor. And on her own, she began collecting donations for... The school is called Parker High School, and she created something called the Parker Closet, which exists to this day and is filled with jeans and school supplies and the toiletries so that kids could quietly get what they need.
[00:09:35.15] - Amy Goldstein
And she was very sensitive to the fact that teenagers didn't really talk with each other about the fact that their families were struggling, even though many of them were having this experience. It was something that you kept hidden at home. And she was very careful to quietly ask certain kids if they need a little bit of help. So that gives you some feel for the diversity of people I was getting to know. And then there was a core ring of people who were the workers themselves and their families. And I met a lot of workers. And as I said, it took me quite a while to decide who I wanted to focus on most close up. And the way that I thought about it was families that had answered the question, what do you do when there are no good choices left in different ways. So there was a Union family in which the guy who had been the top Union guy at a seat-making plant that was the biggest supplier to the General Motors assembly plant, ended up training for human resources management. So his transition was to go through a big identity realignment and feel comfortable after three generations as family had been with the United Auto Workers, becoming a management guy.
[00:10:53.11] - Amy Goldstein
But he thought this was work that could use the union skills he had developed. There's another family in which the guy ended up very reluctantly starting to commute to another General Motors plant several states away in Indiana. And the reason he did this is because his family was really worried about losing their house. And this is a way he could get his income back to good GM wages. And he's been doing this for years now, leaving home on early Monday morning, driving to Indiana, spending in the work week in an apartment that he doesn't really think of his home after all these years of doing it, and then driving back to Janesville late, late on Friday night. So that was a different choice, and it was a choice that other people in town made, too. And then the final family I focused on is the one that most thoroughly fell out of the middle class. The husband in that family who had been a GMer did not want to leave his family for a job out of town. He had started retraining, but it wasn't going that well for him. And he just bumped in and out of a lot of bad paid jobs.
[00:12:05.04] - Amy Goldstein
And when I met them, two of their kids who were twin daughters, who were seniors in high school back when I first ran into them, were working five part-time jobs after school and on weekends to help the family pay the bills.
[00:12:23.12] - David Brett
Yeah, I think that's certainly what I've read so far. It's the balance you get caught really nicely in the book. There are some absolutely heartbreaking stories in there, some really, really tough stories to read. But there's also some of the optimums as well, the way the community gathers around each other to try and make things better for each other.
[00:12:50.23] - David Brett
I haven't got to the end of the book yet, so I don't know how it finishes in the book, but I did notice that you've written something on it quite recently where you've gone back in 2024. Particularly, obviously, you picked out the case that it's a middle class person's story in terms of they used to know what middle class is like, and now they're feeling what it's like on the poverty lines. They've gone from one class, and it's taken them out of that. What did you find in 2024 when you went back to Janesville?
[00:13:16.07] - Amy Goldstein
Well, I had not been back in Janesville for about five years. I'd stayed in touch with some people, but I hadn't physically been there. And I went back there because I had agreed to be on a panel of authors one night. And before I went, I started just looking up, what could I find about how the economy was doing now, in particular, what had happened to the site of this enormous General Motors plant. The last time I'd been there, which was in 2018, the plant was being demolished. It had been sold to a company that specialises in decaying industrial property and redeveloping it, cleaning it up environmentally. And I had expected that by now there would be some new use for it. Except what I started to read before I went back there for a few days, a couple of months ago, was that the land was still sitting fallow. And there was a political fight going on between the town government, the city government, and this company that owns the property, over whether the company was doing well enough to try to get it reused. And they insisted that, to this day, that they're doing everything they can And the city was saying they weren't trying very hard.
[00:14:32.18] - Amy Goldstein
Well, this perked my interest. So I did some research as to how the economy is doing overall. And it's a very mixed picture. I mean, obviously this blank piece of land that used to be the heart of the economy is still what I call a psychic and economic wound in the middle of town. But otherwise, Janesville has recovered fairly well. I mean, it's a very resilient, persistent place. You shouldn't generalize about places, but I met a lot of people who had those qualities. And what I found was that the unemployment rate was as low as it is now in most of the United States. The percentage of the labour force that was actually working, I mean, labour age people that was actually working was very good. Some new jobs had come to town, but there were differences. There aren't many people making wages as good as the old GM pay. There are fewer jobs that are unionised, so they tend not to have as good benefits. And the amount of work that consists of manufacturing is substantially less. So it's not like a ghost town. The population hasn't fallen, but it's not doing perfectly.
[00:15:54.09] - David Brett
Yeah, and when I was reading the piece that you wrote on in 2024, it did remind me of quite a lot of the stuff I've read about major cities in the US, in London, across the world, which hollowed out during the pandemic, and now I'm trying to find different ways to use the space that is left over from the people that did leave. It left a little bit of a mark for me.
[00:16:18.17] - Amy Goldstein
So that's exactly right. And what I came away thinking, and I should say this piece ran in the Financial Times at the beginning of last month. It was the cover story in the weekend section for anyone who was in interested in what we're talking about. But what I ended up thinking was that if Janesville was a pretty good metaphor for what happened to certain communities during the Great Recession, it's still a good metaphor for what's happened to the economy lately.
[00:16:45.01] - David Brett
Yeah. It's a way of showing that towns, places, cities, countries find a way of bouncing back. It may not be the old way of doing it, but they might find a new way of doing it.
[00:16:56.17] - Amy Goldstein
Or a partial way of doing it.
[00:16:58.22] - David Brett
Yeah, exactly. It's still a bit of way to go. How has writing Janesville and the stories you encountered changed your perspective of the American economy, the social issues, and communities you came across?
[00:17:11.12] - Amy Goldstein
Well, I don't think it changed as much as deepened it. I mean, one of the things we've already been talking about, which is that falling out of the middle class is different from having been poor all along. And one of the things that I did, in addition to getting to know a lot of folks in town, I did a couple of more quantitative pieces of work, one of which was a survey of just the county that Janesville is in. And this was with some folks I got to know at the University of Wisconsin Survey Research Center. And we wanted to take a look at what people's economic experiences and perceptions were like five years after all this economic trauma happened. And what was really striking is how many people told us that if they or someone in their home had directly lost a job, which was a lot of people, they were fighting with their family, they were avoiding social situations, they felt ashamed, which was particularly striking since this was all going on at a time when the nation, the United States, was going through the worst economic time since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
[00:18:24.24] - Amy Goldstein
And a lot of their neighbors, right oin Janesville, were experiencing the same thing. But people take losing work very, very personally. And that's one of the things that I learned.
[00:18:34.14] - David Brett
Yeah. Again, I haven't got to the end of the book. Is the message of the book that there is hope, or does that only come when you went back in 2024?
[00:18:44.14] - Amy Goldstein
Well, you'll have to finish the book.
[00:18:45.22] - David Brett
I can't wait to finish it.
[00:18:48.20] - Amy Goldstein
No, it's neither totally up nor totally down.
[00:18:53.05] - Amy Goldstein
Okay. I just wanted to create a vivid portrait and let people take away from it what they would.
[00:18:59.13] - David Brett
Well, you You've certainly absolutely achieved that.
[00:19:11.11] - David Brett
So we've been finishing these podcasts with a little bit of reflection on what the award, because you've won the FT business Book of the Year Award in 2017. I want to start with the first question, what do you think makes an award-winning book?
[00:19:26.16] - Amy Goldstein
Well, in terms of writing books, I've got sample size one, and we're talking about it. And I haven't been the judge for this contest. But I would say a couple of things. A book that's about something that really matters in the world and is told in a way that people can grasp. In my case, I tried to tell this story through the eyes of people who are going through this hard experience and hope that people could identify with the struggles some of these people and the heroic efforts of some of these people. So I think that matters. I think being well-written matters and having something to say.
[00:20:12.15] - David Brett
And how has the award impacted your career or the reception of your book?
[00:20:18.03] - Amy Goldstein
Well, this made a big difference in the reception of my book. I had been already doing a lot of traveling within the United States, talking about this book at universities and really bookstores and a couple of book festivals. But after this Book Award, I started getting international invitations. So I always say, Janesville has taken me far. I spoke at the London School of Economics. I spoke at the OECD Forum in Paris. I spoke at Book Festival festivals in Australia and New Zealand. I mean, I've gotten around, and Janesville has gotten around. And I think one of the things that I've really been exposed to through these travels is the subtitle of my book is An American Story. The title is Janesville: An American Story. But what I've really learned, and you referred to this at the very beginning of our chat, is that the kinds of economic experiences that this small city has gone through is not unique to the United States, is not unique to Southern Wisconsin. I remember being on a stage at a book festival in Sydney, Australia, with a well-known journalist from that country interviewing me as part of this book festival.
[00:21:44.13] - Amy Goldstein
And he was telling the audience about Australian towns that had lost auto jobs as analogies. And it really drove home that this de-industrialisation is not unique to any one country.
[00:21:59.23] - David Brett
Yeah, absolutely. And did it, you like, or me like you, did it give you a bit of appreciation of this populism movement and why it's accelerated so quickly over the last few years?
[00:22:14.03] - Amy Goldstein
Well, yes, but. So the yes is that there are a lot of people whose personal, financial and work circumstances aren't what they used to be or what they would hoped to be. So that, one can understand, can fuel a the populist political view. My book came out in 2017, and people always say, "Oh, does your book help explain the rise of Donald Trump?" Well, that's the no, because Janesville has stayed a Democratic leading place. We'll see what happens in the election this fall with fewer union jobs in town than there used to be. But it doesn't exactly explain why people pivoted to Donald Trump. But I think it explains the disappointment that people in other communities that may be more politically conservative found appealing.
[00:23:06.18] - David Brett
Absolutely. Obviously, we've been talking about the personal stories within the book. So this next question is probably a bit obvious, but were there any challenges or memorable moments writing the book? Because as I said, there are some quite harrowing experiences that you write about within the book.
[00:23:21.21] - Amy Goldstein
Yes. So one thing, whether we're talking about people who had extremely hard experiences or just hard experiences was winning the trust of a place that wasn't my place. I didn't get to know everybody in James, Wisconsin, but I got to know a good number of people. And auto workers who had lost their jobs might not be the stereotype of somebody who's lining up to get publicity. So I had time on my side, and I got to know people gradually, and I didn't ask them the hardest questions first. But it was really a process of hoping that people would understand that I was serious about this and really wanted to both understand their experiences and portray it honestly. So that was one level of hard. I'm going to give you a second technical level of hard, which is, as I said, I arrived in Janesville the summer 2011. The plant closed the end of 2008. Now, I knew the story had to start in 2008, but I hadn't been around. So I had to do enough research and figuring things out so that the parts of the story that predated my arrival on the scene felt equally vivid to things I witnessed firsthand.
[00:24:53.24] - Amy Goldstein
So that was a second layer of challenge.
[00:24:57.08] - David Brett
You certainly achieve everything I you set out to achieve. So what is your one piece of advice for any inspiring writers?
[00:25:09.21] - Amy Goldstein
Persist. That's a one-word answer, but I'll try to explain it. I had this notion that this was going to be about a year long project. My book ended up coming out almost six years after I had started this work. And about a year and a quarter in, I had taken a one year's book leave from the Washington Post, and I had an academic fellowship with a little bit of grant funding. So I was fine the first year, but I knew I had a lot more work to do. So I took a second year off. My editors at the Post at the time were very kind. I didn't have a book contract yet. I didn't have much of an income. I didn't know how I was going to buy the time to finish what I had started, but I was deep into it already. And I remember calling a mentor and a friend who is a very eminent book author and saying, I don't know what to do here. This is just a mess, and I don't know how to get into this and out of this. And he said to me, You've got to find a way to do it.
[00:26:16.04] - Amy Goldstein
He said, this matters. It matters to you. I can hear that it matters to you. And I think what you're working on is really worthwhile. And whatever it takes, find a way to keep doing it.
[00:26:26.03] - David Brett
I thought that was good advice. Well, it definitely was. So I guess the obvious question is, if you knew it was going to take six years, would you have started it in the first place?
[00:26:35.20] - Amy Goldstein
Luckily, that's a hypothetical I never had to address.
[00:26:39.09] - David Brett
Brilliant. Excellent. Well, I'm so glad you did because it is a fabulous book. Amy Goldstein, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:26:45.19] - Amy Goldstein
Thank you.
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