The shale boom was a corporate raid on rural America.
A Stihl chainsaw chain I bought last spring for forty-two dollars now costs forty-eight. The new tariff surcharges are right there on the invoice from my parts distributor, and the distributor himself is down to one warehouse after closing the Wausau location last fall. Friendship’s labor force participation hovers around forty-one percent. Roughly a quarter of the city’s residents live below the poverty line. I fill up my Silverado at the Co-op and the pump price doesn’t feel like energy abundance. It feels like the same steady squeeze it’s been for years, while the oil companies post record profits and the U.S. just shipped more crude overseas than ever before. I keep thinking about those numbers every time I read another economics piece telling me the American economy is dynamite.
This month the BBC obliged, running a story whose headline calls the American economy the “cleanest shirt in a very filthy laundry.” The argument points to the fracking revolution, flexible capital markets, and a national tolerance for risk as the reasons we’ve weathered global shocks better than Europe. Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, points to capital expenditure running at thirteen point nine percent of GDP as proof of “the underlying dynamism of the American economy.” His colleague in Brussels frames the gap as cultural: “Americans are very solutions-oriented and much more comfortable with taking a short-term risk in service of a long-term advantage.” The line about risk-aversion will land well in a Wall Street boardroom. It lands differently in Adams County, Wisconsin.
The shale boom wasn’t a triumph of American ingenuity. It was a capital strike dressed in hard-hat rhetoric. The same Wall Street money that had spent a decade chasing subprime mortgages pivoted to shale debt, flooding rural Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the Permian Basin with leases and promises. For a few years, land-men cut checks and drill pads sprouted. Then the wells declined, the debt came due, the operators consolidated, and the jobs evaporated. What stayed behind were poisoned wells, busted roads, and a local hospital with no OB ward because the young families had already moved. Eliza Griswold documented exactly this arc in Amity and Prosperity, the story of a single mother in Washington County, Pennsylvania, whose family and livestock fell sick after a fracking operation fouled their water, and who spent years fighting a company that treated her county as a sacrifice zone. The book is eight years old and the pattern hasn’t changed.
The CapEx number the BBC cites deserves a closer look. Thirteen point nine percent of GDP sounds like a country building things. But CapEx in the twenty-first century means automation, software, robotics — investment in machines that do what people used to do. It means robot arms in Spartanburg assembly lines and automated rigs in the Permian that need half the workers the old ones did. That kind of investment makes the GDP line go up. It doesn’t make a county more resilient. The productivity gains the piece celebrates are real, but they flow to the balance sheet, not to the county. The places where production happens are not the places where the profits accumulate. That is not a bug in the model. It is the model.
The energy story is where the piece most deserves scrutiny. The BBC credits the shale revolution with fundamentally altering America’s exposure to energy shocks. Oil’s contribution to GDP per unit has fallen by half over fifty years. But the energy independence that was sold to rural America has never been the energy independence rural America got. The ethanol mandate that was supposed to secure American energy independence now absorbs roughly thirty-five percent of the corn crop — mandated demand that turns the harvest into a fuel input whose profits leave the county along with the ethanol trains, reinforcing the same extractive pattern Wendell Berry named decades ago. The farmers in my county who grow that corn cannot keep their operations solvent on the price it returns. Meanwhile, the shale boom drained rural workers to the Bakken and the Permian Basin throughout the 2010s, and when prices crashed, many came back with little to show for it — truck payments and boomtown rents that outlasted the boom. The energy does flow. It flows past. I can watch the trucks haul it down the highway toward markets where it was always headed, and the price at the pump in Friendship has never once reflected that America is an energy powerhouse. It flows to the export terminal and the refinery margin and the shareholder return, not to the county.
The “tolerance for risk” argument deserves the same skepticism. The BBC’s European expert says Americans are comfortable taking short-term risk for long-term advantage. I’ll grant the observation, but I won’t grant the value judgment. The reason my neighbor Joe won’t start a small business isn’t that he’s culturally timid. It’s that he can’t afford to lose his health insurance. The European countries the BBC dismisses as risk-averse have national health systems, strong pensions, and unemployment benefits that don’t run out after twenty-six weeks. That’s not risk aversion; it’s a different distribution of risk, one that leaves ordinary people with a floor under them so they don’t fall through when a venture fails. The “flexibility” the BBC celebrates is, in the American model, the flexibility of an employer to fire you without cause and the flexibility of a shale operator to walk away from a leaking well. It’s the same flexibility.
The piece does acknowledge, in a single paragraph near the end, that the United States is a land of very high inequality — that the labor market isn’t exactly piling up opportunities for everyone. Then a few lines later it reports 172,000 jobs added in May and calls that smashing expectations. I’d ask where those jobs are. A warehouse gig in a county that just lost its hospital isn’t the same economy the statistic describes. In Adams County, the inequality is not an asterisk on the resilience story. It is the daily operating condition. It is the Dollar General where the hardware store used to be. It is the part-time paraprofessional job Sara holds at the school district because the shop’s insurance premiums exceeded what the shop could bear. It is a labor force participation rate that means roughly three in five working-age adults in this city are not working — not because they lack character, but because the economy the BBC is describing does not extend here.
Berry, in The Unsettling of America, calls the underlying logic the “extractive mind” — the mentality that treats land and people and communities as expendable inputs in a production system that never accounts for what it consumes. The BBC does not use that language. It uses “dynamism.” But the extractive mind is what produces the dynamism the piece celebrates. The country looks resilient when you measure it from the boardroom. It does not look resilient when you measure it from the county where the boardroom’s efficiency gains were extracted.
The BBC closes with Brusuelas calling the United States “the cleanest shirt in a very filthy laundry.” From the bench in Friendship, I notice it is not my laundry that got cleaned. A shirt washed in frack water, worn by a man who can’t afford the doctor, doesn’t stay clean for long. The real measure of an economy isn’t how fast capital moves or how much oil comes out of the ground. It’s whether the county still has a county in twenty years. Whether the wells are safe to drink. Whether the hospital stays open. Whether the kids who grow up here can afford to stay.
Aldo Leopold wrote that “we can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.” The economy the BBC describes is visible from every trading floor and policy desk in the developed world. What is less visible from those vantage points is the place where that economy is extracted from — where the resilience everyone is celebrating was not built, but spent. By that measure, the shirt isn’t very clean at all.