This isn’t a book about gambling or casinos, but it’s one that all of us can learn from. J.D Vance’s life has had an interesting trajectory: born in the heart of the Rust Belt (Middletown, Ohio) to a family one generation removed from the heart of Appalachia (Jackson, Kentucky), his childhood was defined by instability. If not for the care of his grandmother and grandfather, Vance would have likely been swallowed by the cycle of violence and addiction that surrounded him. Yet he finished high school and joined the United States Marine Corps, an experience which helped him overcome the “learned helplessness” that had pervaded his life. After serving honorably, he graduated from Ohio State University and Yale Law School. Today, he is a principal at a Silicon Valley investment firm.
Hillbilly Elegy mixes memoir with sociology. Vance shares the particulars of his own family history, going back four generations to his Kentucky roots, and also traces the migrations that brought large portions of Appalachia into the Midwest as industrial laborers in the mid-20th century. Today, the factory jobs have largely dried up, sharply limiting the prospects for advancement. Vance’s grandparents could count on doing better than their parents. Vance’s parents had a fighting chance to further improve their lives. His generation, except for a few with extraordinary care or extraordinary luck, quite likely will do worse.
The problem isn’t just a lack of low-skill, high-paying employment. It’s cultural as well. Able-bodied adults quit decent-paying jobs because they don’t want to get up early, then complain about the government failing them. People run up too much debt they can’t pay off, buying things they don’t really need and sometimes don’t use. Drug abuse, prescription and non-prescription, is abundant. Domestic instability stacks the deck against the likelihood that the next generation will be able to break the cycle.
Vance made it out, getting into Yale Law School (acceptance rate: 9 percent) and graduating to a solid upper-middle class life. That has given him insights into two worlds: professional, upwardly America, and malaise-afflicted hillbilly America. Out of the many divisions that we are frequently reminded of, the divide of class and culture is too often omitted. Vance makes a case that today there is actually a significant rupture, with no easy solutions. It’s an honest book and a penetrating read.
While this isn’t a book about average daily theoretical calculations or the glories of a casino industry pioneer, I think that people in the casino business can learn much from three aspects of the book.
The first and most obvious is that Vance’s hillbilly friends and family, who spend more than they can afford, who abuse alcohol and drugs, and who binge on salty, fatty foods, sound like a caricature of casino patrons. Consider the question of whether gambling in a casino, a behavior with an expectation of negative financial returns, is rational. The consensus, at least among people who don’t view all gambling as a waste, is that, in moderation, it can be. But it is important to remember that while many casino patrons are well-off, productive citizens who gamble within their means, others are not so careful. In the short run, some might say, that’s not such a bad thing for casinos or society: since the less careful are going to lose their money anyway, they might as well support casinos jobs and state tax coffers while doing so. But if there were some way to help them curb their gambling, that might not be a bad business decision in the long run, because, as Jack Binion once told me, you can shear a sheep many times but only skin him once.
Second, many casinos have opened in places hit by the double-whammy of deindustrialization and decay, and many of their employees are part of Vance’s Greater Appalachia, with all of that area’s cultural baggage. For managers, this book may illuminate what’s behind some employee behaviors, and, while it doesn’t offer any easy answers for the problems of no-call/no-shows, it suggests that job lapses aren’t just about simple laziness. For some people, a generation or more of learned helplessness is dragging on any hopes for self-advancement that might inspire better job performance. Reading about Vance’s voyage may encourage better efforts at motivation and better support.
Third, in the last part of the book Vance examines the barriers that tend to keep people like him out of the elite. Those barriers include a real cultural division between the elite and the hillbillies, one that goes beyond money. Psychologist David Forrest recently told me that, while you can change your economic bracket, you can never leave your social class, and Vance’s book illustrates this. Consider two stories about restaurants: at a law firm recruiting dinner, Vance has no idea how to act, and has to call his girlfriend for tips on which utensil to use. At a New Haven chicken joint, his law school classmates leave behind a terrible mess, confident that their inferiors will dutifully clean up. Only Vance and one other student stay behind to tidy up, knowing that the group’s mess will make someone’s workday that much worse. Granted, the barriers around casino management are not as high as those that surround finance or other professions. But Vance’s book is a reminder that the diversity goes beyond gender and race. A management team with a truly full diversity of backgrounds will be more empathetic to a broader population, more agile, and more equipped to handle the challenges it faces.
Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, then, while valuable on its own terms as both autobiography and sociology, is an important book for people in the casino industry. Depending on their background, it may remind them of their own roots or help them better engage with the others who aren’t like them in terms of class and culture. Highly recommended.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (June 2016, 264 pages) is published by Harper (New York). ISBN 978-0062300546
