You’re probably incapable of learning:
When American cities embraced the high cost, high regulation statist model two generations or so ago, they were often the richest and most dynamic places in the country. Increasingly “progressive” policies, with higher wages for unionized teachers, bigger bureaucracies enforcing tighter regulations, more “planning” by qualified technocrats and more government services and benefits to improve the quality of residents’ lives were supposed to take the American city into a new golden age.
It’s hard to think of many social experiments that have more disastrously failed. Now many of these once flourishing cities are hollowed out shells, while around them suburbs and increasingly exurbs flourish away from the deadening influence of urbanist politics. None of this affects the hold of progressive and urbanist ideology on true believers; if anything, they believe even more passionately in the cause. Obviously the problem is that we haven’t spent enough on enough tenured teachers, haven’t written enough new regulations and established enough new bureaus to enforce them, haven’t published enough white papers by enough credentialed planners, haven’t extracted enough taxes and provided enough services. If we could just tax the suburbs and exurbs more heavily and spend more of the money in the cities, all would be well.
It’s a classic case of the definition of insanity.
[Noon update]
No, it’s not just Detroit.
“Statist policies” are not the reason Detroit is a ruin. The government apparatus in San Francisco and L.A. and Boston and Chicago each has plenty of statist policies. Ditto unionized workforces. Ditto high taxes. Ditto most everything else Detroit has.
Rust Belt decay is not the reason Detroit is a ruin. Pittsburgh is in the Rust Belt, too. Steelmaking in Detroit went away in the same fashion the Detroit auto industry went away. Yet Pittsburgh is one of the finest cities in America today.
Why? Why did Pittsburgh and not Detroit survive and thrive after its Rust Belt collapse? Why do other cities with onerous taxes, high levels of unionization, and massive regulatory loads maintain themselves a going concerns?
We all know the reason why very well. But we can’t say it out loud. Because to recognize the truth behind Detroit means recognizing some very unpleasant facts — facts that we have been carefully taught to never, ever acknowledge. To acknowledge these facts would mean risking our careers, our social status, our ability to live the good life. So well have we been conditioned to avoid these facts that those of you who have bothered to read this message are probably feeling uncomfortable just for doing so.
So we ignore the obvious truth, or choose instead a scapegoat, or damn the person who speaks it out loud.
And we can do that. But the facts remain. The truth is what it is. And the fact that we find the truth unpalatable, politically incorrect, or dangerous does not make it any less the truth.
Fnord.
My “uncomfortability” is singularly related to my poor use of time, dude.
+1 to Curt
Wow, you totally refuted my argument. Thanks for putting my head back in the sand, sir!
Perhaps we do refuse to talk about your something, but we can’t accept or deny, because none of us can decipher your vague references.
Have you considered a job writing horoscopes?
Political Correctness consists of knowing what we can’t say, and who we can’t say it about.
“Yet Pittsburgh is one of the finest cities in America today.”
You obviously don’t live here.
Why? Why did Pittsburgh and not Detroit survive and thrive after its Rust Belt collapse? Why do other cities with onerous taxes, high levels of unionization, and massive regulatory loads maintain themselves a going concerns?
Ok, what is the reason?
Disingenuousness: It’s What’s For Dinner.
Well at least RO3 will tell us his dinner plans. Shame he won’t tell us that one thing.
Hmm it reminds me of a tale about a man hunting a whale. The whale had a catchy name but I can’t seem to recall it.
Did you catch the gay subtext?
In the book, or in this comment thread?
Wait–it was a book?
Tamar Jacoby supplied an explanation for Detroit’s total collapse ahead of other “blue state” cities that may be related to what Rob Oculus hints at but does not say. The short version: Coleman Young, who became Mayor of Detroit largely through the loyalty of black voters, proved to be an egregious race hustler who went out of his way to drive white people out of the city and destroy their influence over it. Details may be found in Someone Else’s House.
The special history of Detroit doesn’t invalidate Meade’s argument, though; egregious race hustlers don’t actually run most urban political machines, but they have considerable influence in them and back the “blue state” tax/regulate/subsidize model of government which is slowly poisoning those jurisdictions that use it. Detroit began corrupt, but all urbanist politics have the same corruption now.
egregious race hustlers don’t actually run most urban political machines
What do they run… non-egregiously? Are they at least egregious?
Did you run that through certral casting? What did they say?
As a native Pittsburgher… poppycock and BS. Pittsburgh thrived because CMU and various organizations in the city started pushing the high tech revolution *before* the mills collapsed. When they did, East Pittsburgh was in a terrible state for… a few years. I was a part of one of those early tech companies that were part of the revolution that turned the city from smokestack to technology, a move that replaced most of the lost jobs with new ones within a matter of a few years. It also helps that the city has an incredibly striking natural setting. Oh, and did I mention CMU? 😉