David Brooks illustrates how clueless Easterners can be without local knowledge about My Midwest

A frequent theme in this blog is the importance of local knowledge for development. David Brooks helpfully illustrated in his column today on my home region the Midwest. He brilliantly demonstrates how outsiders can get lost in the jungle in a region not their own.

Brooks’ Midwest is:

that region of America that starts in central New York and Pennsylvania and then stretches out through Ohio and Indiana before spreading out to include Wisconsin and Arkansas.

Mr. Brooks is apparently unaware from his vantage point?on the Far Eastern Coastal Rim?that central New York is still in the East, not the Midwest. And there has never been a single Midwesterner in two centuries who ever thought they were in the same ?region as Arkansas.

The Midwest has lost a manufacturing empire but hasn’t yet found a role.

Um, Mr. Brooks, were you aware that the Midwest has a few farms? Actually some of the best farmland in the world? and that it produces gigantic agricultural exports for the whole world?

Describing the electoral losses of the Democrats, he says:

The old industry towns in the Midwest were the epicenter of the disaster.

Great insight, except for the fact that the only places Democrats won?in the Midwest?were in the old industry towns.? Mr. Brooks, you have just earned a one-month scenic tour to chat with the nonexistent?Republican House members in Cleveland, Youngstown, Akron,?and Toledo, Ohio;?Detroit and Flint, Michigan; South Bend and beautiful Gary, Indiana.

So just to sum up how far a columnist can get without local knowledge, Mr. Brooks has produced some interesting facts that were not facts about a Midwest that was not the Midwest.

If you need a local guide through those remote wastelands, Mr. Brooks, ?I am at your service.?I’d like to talk to you about?some of your other columns I really like about things you know about.

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OK let’s get really rigorous about using local knowledge on US regions

One great response to Friday’s post on David Brooks’ less-than-perfect-knowledge about the Midwest was a Discover Magazine blog post by Razib Khan that provided the following evidence-based map:

and for those who missed it in the comments section, here’s a story from my favorite news source:

“I long suspected something was there,” said Franklin Eldred, a Manhattan native and leader of the 200-man exploratory force. “I’d flown between New York and L.A. on business many times, and the unusually long duration of my flights seemed to indicate that some sort of large area was being traversed, an area of unknown composition.”

Though the Midwest territory is still largely unexplored, early reports describe a region as backwards as it is vast. “Many of the basic aspects of a civilized culture appear to be entirely absent,” said Gina Strauch, a Los Angeles-based anthropologist. “There is no theater to speak of, and their knowledge of posh restaurants is sketchy at best. Further, their agricentric lives seem to prevent them from pursuing high fashion to any degree, and, as a result, their mode of dress is largely restricted to sweatpants and sweatshirts

“We must remember that these people are not at all like us,” Conde Nast publisher and Manhattan socialite Lucille Randolph Snowdon said. “They are crude and provincial, bewildered by our tall buildings and our art galleries, our books and our coffee shops.”

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