Read the whole thread. He raises interesting points about why “We’re gonna bring back COAL!!!” resonates in Appalachia.

By absolutely toppling the returns to education in Appalachia, the coal industry quite accidentally reinforced an existing anti-skills bias.

— Lyman Stone (@lymanstoneky) March 29, 2017

Take home is that because coal put a LOT of people to work, for a lot of years, paying good wages with no education, it created the expectation that this was how things were SUPPOSED TO BE. And as a result, there’s the expectation that it can be that way again.

It can’t.

Somewhat unspoken is the point that the plentiful, well paying mining jobs for the uneducated devalued education among a population prone to mistrust education in the first place, so nobody put money into it.