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What I'm assuming is that Krugman meant something. You might have stopped with "hard to tell exactly what".
Here's the fuller context of the sentence (or phrase) in question:
A century and a half ago, despite the growth of manufacturing, America was still largely a nation of farmers. Today hardly any of us work on the land: Oh, and many, possibly a majority of farm workers are foreign-born, and many of them undocumented.
Although some politicians still portray rural areas and small towns as the “real America,” you don’t hear a lot of nostalgia for the days when agriculture dominated American employment. (If you ask me, Queens, New York comes a lot closer to being who we are now.)
ISTM he's writing about rural vs. urban and foreign-born vs. home-grown. And percentage of people working on farms.
I addressed the foreign vs native, albeit somewhat indirectly. For completeness, let me address the other two metrics. Farming? The only (semi) active farm in Queens is the Queens County Farm Museum. The land, all 47 acres of it, is owned by NYC. I feel confident that far fewer than 1% of Queens residents farm that land (that would be over 20,000 workers). So Queens is not representative of agricultural employment in the US. I doubt anyone would suggest otherwise.
"But there was active farm life in Queens until at least 1910," he said. "The museum is the last existing example of agricultural life in Queens."
The museum site operated as a truck farm from 1850 to 1910. The produce was grown specifically for markets in Manhattan. Crops are still to be found growing on the farm, but now the site is used mostly for educational purposes.
Rural vs. urban? Queens has long been known as the bedroom borough of NYC. That's meant as a put down. But it does mean that Queens does not fit the urban image that many people have of NYC. Why it even has a farm
If you squint very hard, you'll see a few counties that are colored deep purple (2,000 or more people per square mile). Queens has ten times that (22,000). Despite its "bedroom" reputation, Queens is far more urban than is the US generally (who we are).
One aspect of Queens that is close to who we are now is its household income. The Census Bureau estimates the median household income in the US in 2022 at $77.5K. The figure it gives for Queens based on its five year American Community Survey ending in 2022 is $82.4K. While an economist might be very likely to think in terms of numbers like these, this statistic does not fit into the subject matter of his post.
So what do you think Krugman meant by "who we are now"? What metric did his writing communicate to you?
Possibly: smarts, information, education, curiosity, tolerance and intolerance of intolerance?
I just spent a long weekend in Flushing (funeral, receptions): Jews, Asians, some African-Americans; schoolteachers, civil servants, do-good volunteers, urban planners, some lawyers. Next week I spend a week w friends in southern Ohio (including my hometown of Springfield, of Haitian-slandering fame, and a century ago where redlining began): realtors, insurance, rail workers, some teachers; most everybody German-American as to ancestry. Not all Maga.
So maybe I will return with wise observations about something, even ... diversity.
Clemens as an older teen: "Your Eastern people seem to think this country is a barren, uncultivated region, with a population consisting of heathens.” ... [But soon] the seventeen-year-old Sam had bolted East .... In a letter home, Sam complained that the East was too ethnic, too abolitionist, and too dark for his taste.
Comments
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/deindustrialization-causes-and-consequences
What I'm assuming is that Krugman meant something. You might have stopped with "hard to tell exactly what".
Here's the fuller context of the sentence (or phrase) in question: ISTM he's writing about rural vs. urban and foreign-born vs. home-grown. And percentage of people working on farms.
I addressed the foreign vs native, albeit somewhat indirectly. For completeness, let me address the other two metrics. Farming? The only (semi) active farm in Queens is the Queens County Farm Museum. The land, all 47 acres of it, is owned by NYC. I feel confident that far fewer than 1% of Queens residents farm that land (that would be over 20,000 workers). So Queens is not representative of agricultural employment in the US. I doubt anyone would suggest otherwise. https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/06/nyregion/playing-in-the-neighborhood-floral-park-down-on-the-farm-in-the-big-city.html
Rural vs. urban? Queens has long been known as the bedroom borough of NYC. That's meant as a put down. But it does mean that Queens does not fit the urban image that many people have of NYC. Why it even has a farm
Still, in terms of population, it is far more densely populated than the typical county in the US. Here's a 2010 population density map:
https://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/maps/thematic/us_popdensity_2010map.pdf
If you squint very hard, you'll see a few counties that are colored deep purple (2,000 or more people per square mile). Queens has ten times that (22,000). Despite its "bedroom" reputation, Queens is far more urban than is the US generally (who we are).
One aspect of Queens that is close to who we are now is its household income. The Census Bureau estimates the median household income in the US in 2022 at $77.5K. The figure it gives for Queens based on its five year American Community Survey ending in 2022 is $82.4K. While an economist might be very likely to think in terms of numbers like these, this statistic does not fit into the subject matter of his post.
So what do you think Krugman meant by "who we are now"? What metric did his writing communicate to you?
Probably not farmland.
Possibly: smarts, information, education, curiosity, tolerance and intolerance of intolerance?
I just spent a long weekend in Flushing (funeral, receptions): Jews, Asians, some African-Americans; schoolteachers, civil servants, do-good volunteers, urban planners, some lawyers. Next week I spend a week w friends in southern Ohio (including my hometown of Springfield, of Haitian-slandering fame, and a century ago where redlining began): realtors, insurance, rail workers, some teachers; most everybody German-American as to ancestry. Not all Maga.
So maybe I will return with wise observations about something, even ... diversity.
Clemens as an older teen:
"Your Eastern people seem to think this country is a barren, uncultivated region, with a population consisting of heathens.” ... [But soon] the seventeen-year-old Sam had bolted East .... In a letter home, Sam complained that the East was too ethnic, too abolitionist, and too dark for his taste.