The Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance provides a personal perspective into the problems being faced by the blue-collar white workers in America. Vance himself, grew up in Middletown, Ohio amidst a lot of domestic upheaval, yet, he pushed through the tumultuous years to join the Marine Corps and later, to graduate from Yale Law School. As someone who successfully rose from the economic and domestic distress that he was born into, Vance provides some unique insights about the current pessimistic socio-political attitude.
The Hillbilly Elegy stood out for me because Vance accepts the problem and acknowledges the problem cannot be solved in its entirety. Instead, he encourages a more piecemeal approach rooted in truly understanding the smaller grievances and hopefully providing some resolution from them. Vance highlights the positive aspects of payday loans, the delusional “truths” that lackadaisical people tell each other and pollsters and how sometimes a system such as foster care, which is built to provide some semblance of security to a child, instead does the very opposite.
The book serves the purpose of providing a microphone to the other side of the poverty debate. However, as Vance highlights himself, his book is a reflection and telling of his life and views. It is a point of reference and as any good story does, it opens the doors for more stories, the book is not an end in itself. It raises questions about the most effective ways of studying the lifestyle of a people when polling has a large margin of error, and about how a deep seated inertia against hard work can be dealt with in the coming days and years, and many more. Overall, it is a great read for those with the intention of gaining a holistic view of the socio-economic problems facing many parts of the world today.
