Heard of an interesting study...

...and I'm not trying to be scientific or anything, but some social scientists have been measuring what happens when economic opportunity leaves a place, and they find broken families and drug use and increases in crime and, well, basically, all of the things people use to blame black people for causing their own problems.

So, go figure. Human beings who are robbed of economic activity aren't the perfect "Leave It To Beaver" families imagined earlier.

And it's come full circle. I saw a conservative rag attacking these people for having these problems. And I couldn't help but wonder if there's some added anger, at the thought that they're acting like "those people".

I also had the ugly thought that some of these folks may have been staunch "conservatives" and yet liberal folks still have to fight to try to make their lives better. And if it worked well, in one location, they might go right on back to hating "those people" and scorning folks who have problems with broken families and drug use and crime... something about "no good deed goes unpunished" comes to mind.

But I've also been pondering. Do you know, since NAFTA was signed, Mexico's done a lot more manufacturing? But their GDP per capita hasn't really risen. Someone's making money - but it's not spreading to the people. How does a nation advance, these days?

That's a more important question than it might seem, because the next question could well be "how do we bounce back?"