That's just a by-product of industrial capitalism wherein people (workers, whatever their ethnicity) are simply unimportant and profit is all.

I'm not sure how much you can extrapolate from Detroit's dire straits: Other cities are still growing- if not "booming". The rust belt may not be unique but it's not wholly representative either.

The author doesn't actually explain how Detroit is a harbinger of things to come, but beyond that his solution is so laughably unrealistic that I was taken aback:

It seems to me that we need to abandon capitalism as production becomes detached from human labor. I think all robot labor should be nationalized and put in the public sector, and all citizens should receive a basic stipend from it. Then, if robots make an automobile, the profits will not go solely to a corporation that owns the robots, but rather to all the citizens. It wouldn’t be practical anyway for the robots to be making things for unemployed, penniless humans. Perhaps we need a 21st century version of ‘from all according to their abilities, to all according to their needs.’

Yeah, that's about as possible as my being elected President. It's irritating to see such pie in the sky "solutions" to real problems and the author compounds that by dissing the modest solutions (or not mentioning them) that are extant, albeit in embryonic form, in Detroit now.

The bottom line is that this is a ridiculous article that doesn't take into account any number of factors:

With robot labor, cheap wind and solar power, and a shrinking global population, post-2050 human beings could have universally high standards of living. They could put their energies into software creation, biotech, and artistic creativity, which are all sustainable. The stipend generated by robot labor would be a basic income for everyone, but they’d all be free to see if they could generate further income from entrepreneurship or creativity. And that everyone had a basic level of income would ensure that there were buyers for the extra goods or services. This future will depend on something like robot communalism, and an abandonment of racism, so that all members of the commune are equal and integrated into new, sustainable urban spaces.

That's just bullshit: It doesn't take into account human nature, history, global warming- to name a few. It's utopian dreaming and that has NEVER worked.

I expect more and smarter from Juan Cole.

in remote possibility. Call it disappointment.

unrealistic.

To the state for the state to maintain ownership of the robots and distribute the profits.

That will NEVER happern. I don't know I you were serious or not.

Look BMW is not going to turn over automation robots in SC to the USA. Ford won't do it either. No same business would.

So how do you force that transfer?

A law would be passed to make it so and the minions of the state would carry out their orders.

As to whether it would ever happen here that's a different question but that's roughly what's happened at other times and places.

that was from the article.

Of course, that's ridiculous, that's what I was pointing out.

I've observed that most of the land in gigantic, vast Detroit, is owned by extraordinarily wealthy people/families... the Ilitches, the Gilberts, the Marouns, to name a few. Only one seems to be interested in economic investment and development: Dan Gilbert. The rest are greedy and will allow a property to sit, unused and decaying, unless the government will give them the money to develop it. These billionaires wouldn't dream of investing their own money in developing the land or bringing business to the city.

With the city's bankruptcy, these greedy assholes cannot wait to snap up even more land, and buy its treasures at fire sale prices to hoard for themselves. And guess what... the land and property will sit and sit and sit, yet again.

The greed of these few selfish people is but a tile in the mosaic of what is holding Detroit back. It's significant, though. IMO.

at the disintegration of this nation, but rarely in the M$M. We read, now with resignation, of school districts operating 'in the red' for the past several years; lay-offs of fire fighters, teachers, and other critical work staff; our crumbling infrastructure...

Yet, the rich get richer, and some of us continue to live vicariously ("I, too, can be rich, if I work hard enough, and save my money!&quot . Yes, the millions of us barely making a subsistence wage will magically have a huge nest egg at the end of -- say, uhm, about --1,220 years?

Meanwhile, we bicker about "Republican vs Democrat" and "Liberal vs Conservative." And, let's not EVEN mention "atheist" vs god-fearin'!

Calhoun's research on overpopulation is made manifest all around us, yet our hedonism continues to blind us to the legacy we're leaving however many generations remain before our species exits stage right (pun intended).

My personal hubris is my determination to live in a rural enclave near a large creek, with a bio-intensive garden. And, a rather meaty collection of good literature and nonfiction. And my art supplies. And--until this, too, is taken from us--my internet connection. And the sincere hope that I'm too poor for anyone to come after my meager belongings.

Every nation that lets greed and unregulated capitalism guide the construction of civilization will produce ghost towns and economic refugees.

Capitalism is bulimic and lacks internal discipline that prevents binge and purge. The 'job creators' only create jobs for profit, and only maintain them while more profitable alternatives are inaccessible. When the costs of staying shave the fuzzy surface of the profits available by leaving, the jobs disappear, leaving ghost towns.

Many of my uncles and kinfolk had moved there during the 1950's and worked in the automobile plants, GM and Cadillac. A couple of uncles, with 7th or 8th grade educations, became managers of Purple Martin Ethyl service stations.

I was 18 years old and got a job at a meat-packing plant. It was hard work for a 135 lb kid and I worked about 75 hours per week. Sleep and work was my ritual for a few months, then I was drafted.

But Detroit was a place where anyone could find a job in the mid 1960's. However, I could see and feel the racism. Many of the whites started moving to the suburbs and places like Dearborn and Warren.

This was all before the first oil shock in 1973-74 and before people started buying Toyotas in numbers. There were a few but American cars were still the standard at that time. After the shock, Detroit tried to build little compact cars, like Escorts and Vegas, but Americans were not yet ready to give up their gas-guzzling tanks just yet and Detroit continued to make the big cars, even as the foreign companies took bigger and bigger bites out of the market.

In my opinion, that was the beginning of the decline of Detroit.

They turned millions of Americans away from domestic manufacturers to foreign, people who wanted a small yet high quality car turned to foreign.

Thanks for the correction on the Pintos. They were crappy.

the government at that point had a choice

build up Detriot (with a stick and carrot of standards and tarrif protection, or Japan

it chose the latter, and the result is clear

foreign cars on the road, and terminal cancer on the USA's bicep

and the monetization of that debt via inflation

just like we're having with iraq and afganistan, right now

profits privatized, death injury and debt socialized

It may be too late, but putting back the fixes is a first step no brainer.

the peak population was in the 1950 census, shortly before I was born there. Detroit began to lose market share to imports then;

A more relevant event was probably Packard Motor Car going out of business, with it's 80-acre plant in Detroit, in the early 50s. The auto companies moved production out of town, too.

edit to add: other American car companies that went out of business in the '50s included Nash, Hudson, Kaiser, Crosley, and then Studebaker went broke in the late '60s.

This is worse than the blind men and the elephant, Detroit is not a stand in for the USA. Automation is not evil, in spite of automation and the 2008 crash, the percent of adult Americans employed is higher than it was from 1948-1975. Before the crash, it was at post WWII highs. If that's the fault of automation (robotification per the author), then we might want more of it, not less.

The top ten percent is doing pretty damn well, the top one percent extremely so, the bottom fifty percent not so much.

Automation is neither good nor bad per se, but the way the profit from productivity gains associated with automation are distributed tends to exacerbate the already massive income disparity we see in this nation.

into some sort of racial, class screed.
All I can think of when I read your automation stuff is throwing the baby out with the bath water. If you can't defend the articles attack on automation, don't try to blame automation for income disparities. Any human production will create disparities, so I guess we should just stop producing.

Do you know what G Code is?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2996728

Automation is a heavily capital intensive enterprise often designed specifically to reduce the need for labor, of course it's capital friendly.

but , see, it frees up humans to do other things. It allowed humans to support several times as many people on the earth in better living conditions than we had 1 or 2 centuries ago.
If you would be happy to return to those times, I'm not, but I'll bet there are still some remote parts of the world where you could go and avoid the poison fruits of automation. They sure won't have G code.

Other things often means nothing these days and our society is not set up to accommodate a large percentage of the working age population having nothing productive to do as a means of supporting themselves, that's what a lot of our political arguments these days end up having as a root cause.

I personally loathe it but a substantial percentage of the population couldn't be happier if they just did the same thing all day every day at work, they hate learning or doing anything new.

to be a dystopia.

Gotta love American Industrial Capitalism. Use it up then throw it away.

But now Detroit is the world's first Ghost Megalopolis and no one knows what to do with it.

That'll work.

OK, maybe the water and sewer systems are tied, but that could be fixed.

Otherwise, the city is just casinos, restaurants, ballparks, etc. GM could move the remaining headquarters people to the suburbs in a heartbeat.

The surrounding population is much higher than that remaining in the city.

Cleveland, St Louis, Baltimore, and Philadelphia are trending in the same direction, but haven't progressed to the situation of Detroit.

Don't doubt the rest of the City isn't that health, but the downtown Real Estate taxes probably cover a lot of the bills.

But admittedly, the number of blocks with large numbers of vacant lots is a lot less.

I recall driving west from U Penn through the west side of Philadelphian and through Darby -- not so nice.

...but Cities have been founded, prospered, declined and been abandoned worldwide for millennia.

to support the lost income in (temporarily) maintaining a standard of living and that consumer market

debt and bankruptcy are the inevitable result

this isnt something that can or might happen, it's something that WILL happen

every time

will just go away.

Honest.

what i wrote is neither red nor blue, right or left, it's basic fact

but you're right, that a segment of the media has wrapped a chinese made flag around the hollowing out of the USA, and claims that anyone who questions it 'hates America'

even paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan call that out as BS

wealth and ownership will move to the most ruthless, antisocial monsters. We've known this for a long, long time.

Those who shrug it off when they hear people are getting paid less and less. What it means is consumers have less and less to spend. So businesses WILL fail if they depend on customers, other than an exclusive set of millionaires.

the rest are irresponsible

but too often repeated in societies.
With predictable results, over and over again.

Is it human nature not to learn from history?

they want a gilded existence inside golden gates, with those outside groveling for their approval

In a lot of ways. Some of them make it both victimizer and victim.

The demographic trends have been evident for a long, long time. The city didn't do a lot to accommodate and plan for them. Plan early for problems and usually they're not as bad as they are if you wait for them to overtake you.

White flight was a big problem. Don't know how to reverse it. The city could have used some gentrification. That usually produces protests, though--it did in Baltimore, even though gentrification of some areas might have inconvenienced the then-current residents but in the long run boosted tax revenues. Gentrification also allowed higher tech, professional jobs to be more easily filled, and allowed public transport to get the people to work. Win-win-win for the city, even if it was a lose-draw-draw for many others.

Detroit didn't attract replacement industries or businesses--it didn't have the human capital for it--nor did it fight hard enough to retain those that were leaving. It's not in a horrible location. It probably tried, just not enough--but then there's the whole "I don't want to go *there*" attitude on the part of those who fled the city.

Detroit didn't roll back services. Revenues dwindled, but nobody ever thought they could go this low. Talk about a lack of imagination! Recession really did in the city in the end, helping motivate businesses to leave and reducing the chances for employment of those there.

When they were faced with a crunch--reduce spending or take out loans--they opted for loans to pay for current spending. That's not stable. If you need to put all your food on credit card and only make minimum payments, you'd better have a way out otherwise all you're going to do is run yourself into the ground financially.

In the end, the demographics hurt most. They didn't "fully fund" or sufficiently fund their retirement plans, which were probably not that stingy. They had other pressing, politically important needs. Why put money in escrow when you can spend it on people you want to vote for you? Why be stingy with public salaries when you have the money--after all, you want their vote and you don't want a damaging public battle with the civil servants' union while citizens are denied services. Then they also assumed there'd always be sufficient income to pay benefits, even as they saw the liability increase and future city revenues decrease. So much for planning.

As people moved, revenue dropped--but you could move to Florida or Arizona and still collect your pension, so that expense held steady. As people lost jobs or were reduced to lower-paying jobs, revenue dropped but pensions didn't decline. Now they offer cents on the dollar on pension promises. Had they done this a decade or two back, the offer would have been sweeter. Then again, those who "have" theirs typically don't want to give it up, whether you're making $100 million, $30 thousand, or $3 thousand.

It's a lesson for other cities and other organizations. Be realistic. Don't rob the future to bribe the present. If realistic, pragmatic revenue forecasts say that you can't afford a civil service pension plan increase or a raise for public employees, it's a good place for stand your ground to apply--even if it means getting voted out of office you'll have done what you can. (Yeah, it means long-term-thinking politicians and politicians with a spine built of something other than public opinion surveys. And Cali thinks that the OP is unrealistic!)

But Detroit also faced something that many other cities have faced. Timbuktu was a thriving city with a lot of scholarship. It was part of an empire, but that largely just meant that trade routes went through the city. When the trade dried up, so did Timbuktu.

Leeds and Manchester were thriving cities reliant on textiles and a few other goods. When textile manufacturing became more automated, their fortunes waned as everybody stood around with their collective thumbs up their asses asking, "Huh? What's happening?"

New Orleans' hey-day was when it was the center of Caribbean trade. Things shifted. Miami's more important. New Orlean fell on harder times.

Cairo, IL, was a bustling little city dependent on Mississippi barge traffic and trade. Rochester and cities like Spencerport depended on the Erie Canal and were big wheat centers, they'd mill flour and ship that East to NYC with a lot of other wares from further west--distilled spirits, coal from the Pennsylania coal mines, etc. When the St. Lawrence Seaway opened, big ships could make the journey. Erie canal traffic dried up.

You can't fight some change. You have to roll with it, leverage it, find ways to undo any bad effects. Often that's not possible. Then all that's left is reducing and restructuring--"right-sizing"--in as graceful a way as possible. But Detroit didn't plan for a graceful way of doing this. They've produced a giant helping of ugly. Either they go through bankruptcy and the judge hands out the reductions in services and payments that the politicians couldn't or wouldn't do, or they don't get bankruptcy as an option and some judge will have to decide if pension obligations override the obligation for city services and current employee pay. Either way ... ugly.

...completely inappropriate for this thread.

Yeah, that'll work.

Most Republican states have been being perpetually bailed out via tax outlays for the last 50+ years. Literally trillions of dollars have been transferred from urban (read mostly Democrat) areas to Rural areas (read mostly Republicans).

The biggest scam in the history of the world is Republicans claiming to support fiscal conservatism while living off the most massive wealth transfer in the history of humanity.


Edit: It is also worth mentioning that the transfer of automotive jobs out of the Detroit Metro area was largely facilitated by massive tax credits for automakers paid for with federal tax outlays.

American is going to need a new, mass transit (Monorail???) system for the 21st century. An undertaking this big won't happen without government support and funding.

Detroit could be made part of that future.

between areas that are prosperous and areas with depressed economies. It is the only reason most of the South hasn't plunged into absolute poverty decades ago. But now, North and South Dakota have below 4% unemployment AND they still take in over $4,000 per capita (Billion of dollars).


Detroit is in a very similar situation to Greece. They use a currency which is controlled by other people who don't consider the economic implications that other people will experience. In basic and overly simplified terms; Detroit/Greece is suffering internal devaluation/depression to prevent moderate inflation in New York/Germany.

That is the actual problem in a nutshell. Little known, except by gold bugs for some reason, is the fact that in effect the US had multiple currencies before the Civil War: state-chartered banks used to issue their own bank notes, which in effect functioned as local currencies backed by the gold the banks allegedly kept in their vaults. This did bring on a host of problems: counterfeiting, fraud on the part of the issuing banks, who frequently either didn't have enough gold to back up their paper or had none at all. But the easy money these banks created also fueled the rapid growth of the Northwest Territories and NYC.
The South had very few banks doing this because of its stagnant economy, and counterfeiting down there was a capital offense. In New England, where the economy was very strong, the practice of issuing bank notes was strongly discouraged; the businessmen there believed in "sound money".
Unite under a currency union and the effect is to create a cycle of real estate booms/busts in "the periphery" (Florida and Arizona here in the US, among other places) while increasing the economic advantage of "the core" (NYC, LA, some other places). Smaller places with industry but without the critical mass to go up against "the core" shrivel.
Mainstream economists don't tend to analyze things much this way, although now with the travails of the eurozone it may start to get more attention.

yes. as the movement of the middle class out of the cities was largely facilitated by various kinds of subsidies.

and where there are subsidies we can say: it was policy.

is that a small city like Detroit is part of a larger metropolitan area including higher-income suburbs. There is plenty of tax revenue in the Detroit area, but the city collects little tax revenue from workers who commute. Infrastructure costs are higher and property tax revenues are lower for Detroit proper than for the suburbs. The only means of addressing that is through unpopular programs like property tax

Baltimore has a similar situation, and it is no coincidence. What is needed is an initiative at the state level to create a larger Detroit by merging several cities.

disparity.

I'd raze my house to the ground and leave before accepting being forced to join Detroit.

it was apparently initiated by the state government regardless of the wishes of the suburbs. Some of it was undoubtedly timing -- the borders of cities were often fixed long enough ago that belonging to a major city was a positive for an outlying area.

If that had happened when, say, NYC enlarged its borders, Detrioit wouldn't be the same Detriot it is now. It would have more resources spread over a wider area to make an urban comeback more feasible.

billionaires are buying up the downtown & white hipsters are moving into the city proper. whole foods now has a detroit location.

the bankruptcy is just the ruse to break all the union contracts so business can expand unimpeded by such things.

After sucking the life out of places like Detroit and stashing it in offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes, I'll bet they has a sad.

left to exploit. Good old vulture capitalism.

Nothing special about it. Same thing happened to Rochester, NY.
Wringing hands over it accomplishes zip. Better to look to other cities and make sure no one industry takes over everything as happened in these places. NYC right now, for instance, has to worry about overdependence on finance. Silicon Valley is the high tech darling of today; back in the nineteenth century, high tech meant making brass, which was a very valuable metal, and that was concentrated in Connecticut. (http://archive.org/stream/brassindustryinc00lathuoft/brassindustryinc00lathuoft_djvu.txt)
Who remembers that now? Whatever's high tech at any one time isn't later. Overconcentrate in any one industry, and you seal your fate.

destroying unions. this is what the reagan dmocrats got for their piddly tax cuts. NEVER MIND THE RISE OF FEES.

the biggest carny BAIT + SWITCH EVER.

move the people into a sustainable area,recycle what`s not used. use the land for solar and or wind power. indoor food production facilities and other sustainable projects. the creation of thousands of jobs is possible. it can be done and it should be done.

the cost? probably the same one of those wonderful new ships we are building-and airplanes that do`t fly.

15 billion construction cost and 7 million a day operating cost for the new aircraft carrier.

400 billion for the a fleet 35 new jets that so far can`t fly worth a shit.

first chapter of most econ101 books points out that 1 dollar invested in the public good returns 5 dollars. you can do the math.