OPINION: Midwest communities need fact-based leadership, not bromides

This view is common in Muncie and in many other struggling places in the Midwest. I understand the inclination towards optimism. I’m a naturally optimistic guy, and I like and respect many of the anti-bad news advocates in my community, all which has led me to delay writing this column for some time. Over the years that I’ve wrestled with this particular column, I’ve come to believe that an exclusive emphasis on the "power of positive thinking" is not merely wrong, but terribly ineffectual. Here’s why.

I speak in several dozen places each year, and at these events I often take a quick poll asking folks about community strengths and weaknesses. I ask them about school performance, workforce quality, population and economic growth. Inevitably, the strongest communities underestimate their strengths and overestimate their weaknesses. In contrast, struggling communities, with demonstrably poorer public services, a poorly educated workforce and population decline, almost universally hold overly optimistic views of their current situation and future potential. 

Now, I don’t mean that these folks are too hopeful or aspirational; rather, they seem unaware of how current facts and trends impact their choices and options for the future. Maybe the best example of this is a county with welcoming billboards announcing it as “The Education County,” when in reality it has educational attainment levels near the bottom of the nation. I’ve given much thought to this “power of positive thinking” approach, and I think I know why it fails communities so badly. 

Far too many people view their city or county as a business with a marketing problem. This old-fashioned economic development approach creates two problems. It causes communities to dodge tough realities, which – consequently – forestalls realistic, motivating and attainable goal setting. Well-meaning efforts to boost the positive aspects of a community necessarily cause civic leaders to shy away from public discussion of unpleasant facts. 

Consequently, in struggling places most citizens simply have no idea in what ways they struggle. This has a dampening effect on civic participation and generates timid acceptance of the status quo in economic development, school performance and local government operations. This is dangerously counterproductive, since struggling places are in the greatest need of an engaged, informed and civic-minded population. But, there’s more than just my opinions on the matter.

History clearly reports that aggressive optimism in the face of difficult realities is among the most common causes of failure of ventures great and small. Success is always and everywhere a consequence of clear-eyed acceptanceof difficult realities. The model for this is Winston Churchill’s most famous speech, offering his electorate nothing more than "blood, toils, tears and sweat." Cheerful dictums and positive thinking simply cannot overcome the realities in a city with poor schools, declining population, aging infrastructure and ineffective local government. However, there is even more to the story about the need for honest self-assessment.

If economists have learned anything over the past two centuries, it is that people and businesses make informed choices about the places they choose to locate. The corollary to this is that folks who live in your community already have the most optimistic view of the place. They have already weighed the positives and negatives, and they have chosen to reside where they are. There is no need to mislead them.

As for the other 325 million Americans who live elsewhere, most mobile, educated families access information about your community from reliable public sources, not local marketing brochures. Businesses are even less persuaded by local spin.

Refusing to face reality and tackle big, difficult public policy problems out of fear of “looking bad” does nothing to influence families or businesses outside of your town, and only serves to confuse and mislead your current residents about what those big problems actually are. This is not to say that community dialogue shouldn’t be hopeful or forward thinking, but it should always be grounded in truth and reality. Some goals are simply not attainable and others will require many, many years and incremental steps to come to fruition. Short-term, quick turnaround successes for a community are not only rare, but rarely matter. 

In the end, communities who fail to face difficult and unpleasant truths about themselves risk disappearing. Poorly performing schools, mismanaged local government and amenity-starved neighborhoods don’t self-correct. They require active human intervention by an electorate who understands the dimension of the challenge. So in the end, the real reason, maybe the only reason, to set aside the bromides of overt optimism is that you want your community not to improve.