Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Templet and I are on our third round of coffee and cake, and I want to return to a central idea in General Honoré’s “psychological program”—one that taps into understandable right-wing anxiety about good jobs—that in America, you must choose between jobs or a clean environment. Many Louisianans I spoke with told me that, either by intent or in effect, environmental regulations kill jobs. This was the idea behind talk of “environmental wackos.” But Templet refers me to a 1992 study by the MIT political scientist Stephen Meyer, who rated the fifty states according to the strictness of their environmental protection. Meyer then matched regulatory strictness to economic growth over a twenty-year period and found that the tougher the regulation, the more jobs were available in the economy.