““Appalachia teaches us that breaking people out of bad communities has more promise than changing those communities wholesale; that encouraging family stability—or at least not discouraging it through the tax code or needless incarceration—promotes upward mobility more effectively than transfer payments; that educating people for employment somewhere other than the depressed local labor market is a better investment than short-term public works; and that helping kids overcome low expectations creates more hope than giving money to those kids’ parents. As a policy agenda, this is a little less ambitious than transforming the mountains from a den of poverty into an engine of economic growth. But if the failures of Appalachia are any guide, a narrower policy agenda might actually serve the poor—white and black alike.””
