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| How the ruins of Detroit are a warning for America |
economicollapseblog | Once upon a time it was a symbol of everything that America was doing
right, but today it has been transformed into a rotting, decaying,
post-apocalyptic hellhole. Detroit was once the fourth-largest city in
the United States, and in 1960 Detroit had the highest per-capita income
in the entire nation. It was the greatest manufacturing city the world
had ever seen, and the rest of the globe looked at Detroit with a sense
of awe and wonder. But now the city of Detroit has become a bad joke
to the rest of the world. Unemployment is rampant, 60 percent of the
children are living in poverty and the city government is on the verge of bankruptcy. They say that Detroit is just a matter of "weeks or months"
away from running out of cash, and when Detroit does declare bankruptcy
it will be the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the
United States. But don't look down on Detroit, because the truth is
that Detroit is really a metaphor for what is happening to America as a
whole. In the United States today, our manufacturing infrastructure has been gutted, poverty is absolutely exploding and we are rapidly approaching national bankruptcy. Detroit may have gotten there first, but the rest of the country will follow soon enough.
Back during the boom years, Detroit was known for making great cars.
Today, it is known for scenes of desolation and decay. It is full of
vandalized homes, abandoned schools and empty factories. The following
description of what Detroit looks like at this point is from an article by Barry Yeoman...
It’s hard to describe the city’s physical landscape without producing what Detroiters call “ruin porn.” Brick houses with bays and turrets sit windowless or boarded up. Whole blocks, even clusters of blocks, have been bulldozed. Retail strips have been reduced to a dollar store here, a storefront church there, and a whole lot of plywood in between. Not a single chain supermarket remains.
So what caused the downfall of one of the greatest cities on earth?
Well, here is a hint...
Between December 2000 and December 2010, 48 percent of the manufacturing jobs in Michigan were lost.
When you are a manufacturing area, and you lose half of your
manufacturing jobs over the course of a single decade, of course things
are going to get really, really bad.
So just how bad have things gotten in Detroit?
2 comments:
Boo-fucking-hoo. It's a matter of perspective, ain't it? Would you prefer to live in 1913 Detroit? When it was, by today's standards, a city of squalor, disease-ridden, lice-infected, shit-covered, and proudly so, a rotting, decaying, post-apocalyptic hell-hole that people from that giant reeking shithole called Europe fleed to for some work? The problem with these crybaby Jared Diamond po-pitiful-us arguments for collapsitarianism is things have hard time staying collapsed. Dammit! Why even Baghdad is looking better than at the height of its power a thousand years ago!
We should look at the evolution of technology and its impact on economics.
What if computers today are like automobiles in the 1950s? They started making useless changes just to keep people buying. Is that what has been happening to computers in the last decade. Do Ma & Pa grocery stores really need 16 gig of RAM and terabyte hard drives. It's hilarious. So what if the bubble bursts on computers because people understand they don't need bloated software wasting the processing power of fantastic hardware?
But the computer mags want to make money on advertising so they are not going to blow the whistle. It is pretty amazing that a smartphone is more powerful than a mainframe from the 80s. But what to do with them? Create and distribute more infodreck. Waste time looking at cat pictures. You can never have enough cute cat pictures.
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