The Ruins of Detroit


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What was once a great city, is now a rotting carcass of collectivism.

http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/index.html

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It is complicated. If you understand the roots of political collectivism in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, then, yes, the broad label applies. However, no one political program or social policy killed Detroit. In fact, an equally facile claim can be made that its demise can be attributed to capitalism. in 1900, it was a mid-range, Midwest city of 300,000 with a mix of businesses and industries. The confluence of General Motors and Ford turned it into a one-trick pony. The city rose and fell on the fortunes of a single industry.

More deeply, the industries employed humans as machines with little use for mass intelligence. Alduous Huxley saw Detroit as the seed of a brave new world. It became a by-word that you could get a "good" job (high paying) without a good education. Many did pursue education, of course, but in Catholic schools. They became the white collar workers who moved naturally enough to the suburbs. Detroit, after all, was also the new home of the Burroughs company which made calculators and later computers. As Detroit waned, Compuware was founded there to serve mainframes with software tools. But Compuware's founders also fell in love with hockey, and that blurred their focus in information.

Governments at all levels "invested" in roads to serve automobiles. Almost private efforts such as the Dixie Highway and Lincoln Highway were eclipsed by "free" ways. Balloon tires and bow springs defined the roads; and the nature of roads shaped the design of cars. Eventually, cars looked like rocket ships and jet planes -- and wore out in three years. The capitalism of consumption eventually consumed the capitalism of production.

Following the Bush Bailouts and its bankruptcy, General Motors achieved 14 quarters of continuous profit for the first time in its 100-year history. In fact, the automobile industry was something like a star, accreting to a nuclear furnace, expanding, and expelling energy and matter -- looking like a Red Giant dominating financial space -- and collapsing into a dwarf because in reality, a cup of Antares or Betelgeuse brought to Earth would be a pretty good vacuum. The automobile industry began collapsing during the Great Depression -- and in fact, the Depression began not with the Black Thursday and Black Tuesday on Wall Street in 1929, but with the demise of the Detroit banks in February 1933. A 1:00 AM decree by Governor Comstock ordered all banks closed to avoid a run that began in Detroit. A month later, the rolling effect caused President Roosevelt to make the decree nation-wide. During the Depression, the small car makers were subsumed by conglomerates, a process that continued even as Chrysler absorbed American Motors, which itself under George Romney from the Manufacturer's Association, had been a merger.

All the claims by Keynesians that war brings prosperity originated in Detroit. Tanks and airplanes poured forth. Of course, these were not even consumer goods hopeful of cutting travel time and extending the range of life. They were machines of destruction, themselves to be destroyed, each one representing a loss of labor in its assembly and a loss of life in its use.

Labor unions were another factor, of course -- and an easy target for right wingers and reactionaries who correctly identified the losses in productivity caused by work rules. However, it was a two-way street. Unions invested in the companies; and companies made stock purchases easy on the theory that workers would be more productive if they had a stake in the outcome. It is a compelling theory. Nonetheless, the class war between white collar and blue collar was fought in the manufacturing plants. Supervisors dressed in blue uniforms and reported to each other on radios: they were the production police. And what did they produce? Chrome-plated killing machines beyond the abilities of neolithic people to control in normal use.

Good-paying jobs that require no education attracted people who valued quick money over investment in their own minds. Where previously, Catholic immigrants from Poland, central Europe, Ireland, and Germany once funded their own neighborhood schools, now came hillbillies and negroes from the South. Two huge populations of antithetical and ignorant people swelled the city from 300,000 to 2 million in fifty years. The famous race riot of 1967 was only the second. In a previous generation, Nazi sympathizers attempted to disrupt war production in Detroit. The Belle Isle race riots were white attacks on black citizens. It was easy to do. The last bastion of the Ku Klux Klan was not in Birmingham or Jackson, but in Detroit.

Yes, Detroit was destroyed by collectivism. Humans were reduced to machines in a monomaniacal rush to produce a single product planned to wear out only faster than the mindless drones who made them.

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Interesting gold engraved message in the wooden facade of the balcony of East Methodist Church that cries out:

And You Shall Say God Did It

I do not...

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Cities and regions can lose major industries; the important question is whether they can attract replacements. Pittsburgh lost steel from the 1950s on. New England lost textiles and shoes. Houston lost the space program, and oil has been through some serious downturns in the last few decades. You might even say that San Jose, Mountain View, Cupertino and their neighbors "lost" their farming and orcharding industries. None of them ended up like Detroit, though.

You mention that Detroit itself was once making advances in IT. Keeping an industry going in one place is, holding other factors equal, cheaper than moving it somewhere else, so whoever moved it must have had an incentive to leave Detroit. Approaching the question from the other direction, the car industry didn't fold when Detroit did. It's doing much better in the southeast, where Asian manufacturers didn't have to deal with Michigan's taxes or with unions locked into power in the 1930s.

The ancillary factors you name all raise the question: why did people choose to behave this way? The answer is that government was protecting them, largely through labor-relations laws and protective tariffs, so that for some decades they could get away with it. The process reminds me of the War on Poverty, which (as Charles Murray explains) gives people financial incentives to remain poor which incentives, sure enough, people have responded to.

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"Yes, Detroit was destroyed by collectivism. Humans were reduced to machines in a monomaniacal rush to produce a single product planned to wear out only faster than the mindless drones who made them. "

That is what happens when money ceases to be a medium of exchange or a store of values for future investment and it becomes a fetish.

Ultimately the only sound basis for an economy is to produce for use rather than make short term attempt to garner wealth beyond any reasonable disposition thereof.

One of these days 90 percent of labor, in production, distribution and services will be doable by robots. The "wages" of robots are their immediate power needs and maintenance. When that happens the wages of human labor (of all kinds, including managerial labor) will not clear the market of goods and services produces. How the shall the produce of industry be assigned, allocated, distributed to all of the population?

What happens when you have a shit-load of potential energy and you do not know how to convert it to kinetic energy (kinetic energy, the energy of action and motion is the only kind of energy that produces anything useful to humans)?

Does anyone have an answer. I don't.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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"Yes, Detroit was destroyed by collectivism. Humans were reduced to machines in a monomaniacal rush to produce a single product planned to wear out only faster than the mindless drones who made them. "

That is what happens when money ceases to be a medium of exchange or a store of values for future investment and it becomes a fetish.

Ultimately the only sound basis for an economy is to produce for use rather than make short term attempt to garner wealth beyond any reasonable disposition thereof.

One of these days 90 percent of labor, in production, distribution and services will be doable by robots. The "wages" of robots are their immediate power needs and maintenance. When that happens the wages of human labor (of all kinds, including managerial labor) will not clear the market of goods and services produces. How the shall the produce of industry be assigned, allocated, distributed to all of the population?

What happens when you have a shit-load of potential energy and you do not know how to convert it to kinetic energy (kinetic energy, the energy of action and motion is the only kind of energy that produces anything useful to humans)?

Does anyone have an answer. I don't.

Ba'al Chatzaf

You are falling for the "Luddite Fallacy." New technology may create short term unemployment, but the newly unemployed will cause wages to fall and thereby become employed elsewhere as resources are shifted throughout the economy. There is no need to "clear" goods on the market as Marxists believe; supply and demand are intrinsically linked via Say's Law. Remeber, we don't have 90% unemployment in the Western World despite the decline in agricultural importance.

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Say's Law

Matt:

Might be helpful in the future to provide definitions, or, explanations for items like "Say's Law."

Towards that end, here is the Wiki on it:

Say's law, or the law of market, is an economic principle of classical economics named after the French businessman and economist Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832), who stated that "products are paid for with products"[1] and "a glut can take place only when there are too many means of production applied to one kind of product and not enough to another".[1]:178–9 In Say's view, a rational businessman will never hoard money; he will promptly spend any money he gets "for the value of money is also perishable."[1]:138–9

Say's law was generally accepted throughout the 19th century, though modified to incorporate the idea of a "boom and bust" cycle, which was viewed as natural and inevitable. During the worldwide Great Depression, in the first half of the 20th century, a school of economics called Keynesian economics arose, disputing Say's conclusions. The debate between classical economics and Keynesian economics continues today.[2]

Say was not the discoverer of "Say's law", but the name appears to have stuck to the popularizer of this economic theory, which was in circulation at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.[3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say%27s_law

A...

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I am a fanatic of Google Maps for the geography of urban wastelands.

The riots of the sixties in Detroit were an accelerant for 'white flight' from the city to the suburbs of the metropolitan area in Detroit (as well as many other US cities).

If you use Google Maps to look closely at the urban fabric of Detroit you can see the marks of destruction which were never rebuilt.

Here is an example of what I mean:




View Larger Map

Arggggh. Of course the new update is defeating my intent to embed the map!

Edited by william.scherk
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I did not indicate that the 'white flight' was also accompanied by a very large 'black flight' -- and 'brown flight' to a great degree.

This Detroit fanatic, a former resident, has charted the tremendous depopulation of Detroit.

Telling figures. The city of Detroit in 1950 had 1,850,000 people. The latest estimated of Detroit population is around 700,000.

Here's a comparison map of population density changes (from another brilliant fanatic's work here):

O7F5.png

O7Fi.png

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"Yes, Detroit was destroyed by collectivism. Humans were reduced to machines in a monomaniacal rush to produce a single product planned to wear out only faster than the mindless drones who made them. "

That is what happens when money ceases to be a medium of exchange or a store of values for future investment and it becomes a fetish.

Ultimately the only sound basis for an economy is to produce for use rather than make short term attempt to garner wealth beyond any reasonable disposition thereof.

One of these days 90 percent of labor, in production, distribution and services will be doable by robots. The "wages" of robots are their immediate power needs and maintenance. When that happens the wages of human labor (of all kinds, including managerial labor) will not clear the market of goods and services produces. How the shall the produce of industry be assigned, allocated, distributed to all of the population?

What happens when you have a shit-load of potential energy and you do not know how to convert it to kinetic energy (kinetic energy, the energy of action and motion is the only kind of energy that produces anything useful to humans)?

Does anyone have an answer. I don't.

Ba'al Chatzaf

They will have to find a way to produce on their own without equivalent technology, or come up with a way to trade value to those who own efficiently running factories. The more efficient industries become the more demand there will be for entertainment and art.

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They will have to find a way to produce on their own without equivalent technology, or come up with a way to trade value to those who own efficiently running factories. The more efficient industries become the more demand there will be for entertainment and art.

I am assuming a degree of mechanization and automation that no human labor can match. What then? Is 90 percent of the population left to starve? That is not going to happen. First there will be riots... Then what?

Ba'al Chatzaf

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They will have to find a way to produce on their own without equivalent technology, or come up with a way to trade value to those who own efficiently running factories. The more efficient industries become the more demand there will be for entertainment and art.

I am assuming a degree of mechanization and automation that no human labor can match. What then? Is 90 percent of the population left to starve? That is not going to happen. First there will be riots... Then what?

Ba'al Chatzaf

We already have a degree of mechanization and automation that no human labor a thousand years ago could match. The result was good, a higher standard of living. Why would more of the same be bad?

Maybe some day the 3d printer being talked about in the news will develop into a relatively low-tech version of the Star Trek replicator. That would be great. It might become a standard home appliance.

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They will have to find a way to produce on their own without equivalent technology, or come up with a way to trade value to those who own efficiently running factories. The more efficient industries become the more demand there will be for entertainment and art.

I am assuming a degree of mechanization and automation that no human labor can match. What then? Is 90 percent of the population left to starve? That is not going to happen. First there will be riots... Then what?

Ba'al Chatzaf

We already have a degree of mechanization and automation that no human labor a thousand years ago could match. The result was good, a higher standard of living. Why would more of the same be bad?

Maybe some day the 3d printer being talked about in the news will develop into a relatively low-tech version of the Star Trek replicator. That would be great. It might become a standard home appliance.

Our economy is based on the premise that the aggregate wages of labor can clear the market of goods and services produced. What happens when the wages of human labor go to zero. Who will buy the goods and how?

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Our economy is based on the premise that the aggregate wages of labor can clear the market of goods and services produced. What happens when the wages of human labor go to zero. Who will buy the goods and how?

Ba'al Chatzaf

Do you mean like open source software?

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Our economy is based on the premise that the aggregate wages of labor can clear the market of goods and services produced. What happens when the wages of human labor go to zero. Who will buy the goods and how?

Ba'al Chatzaf

Do you mean like open source software?

When the aggregate purchasing power of labor goes to zero, NOTHING can be bought. Goods can only be taken or they can be donated by those who make them. Our current economic models -assume- there is enough aggregate purchasing power to keep the pot boiling. What happens when this is no longer the case?

Ba'al Chatzaf

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They will have to find a way to produce on their own without equivalent technology, or come up with a way to trade value to those who own efficiently running factories. The more efficient industries become the more demand there will be for entertainment and art.

I am assuming a degree of mechanization and automation that no human labor can match. What then? Is 90 percent of the population left to starve? That is not going to happen. First there will be riots... Then what?

Ba'al Chatzaf

Why do they have to starve? People have existed since long before technology. If they have no way of obtaining their own technology or producing anything worth trading for the necessities they need, they can produce their own necessities to the best of their capability.

This won't happen though, because if production of anything became fully automated--once people can produce faster than they can consume--the producers would be looking to trade for anything; live entertainment could become more and more popular, for example. This is a very futuristic world I'm talking about, and it would have to be capitalist to get to this point.

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Reidy - Thanks for the replies. Burroughs merged with Sperry Univac to form Unisys and moved the combined headquarters to Philadelphia. But Unisys still has a presence in Greater Detroit. As far as I know,Compuware is still in downtown Detroit. Moreover, General Electric just created a huge international data center in suburban Detroit (Livonia, I believe), and went around like a Hoover vacuum sweeping up the best information technology people available. In addition, in the northern suburbs, close to Pontiac, primarily Auburn Hills, the automotives still have technology centers for advanced manufacturing, robotics, etc.

Several factors pulled people to the suburbs, perhaps the greatest of which was the sheer charm of semi-rural tree-lined streets. One of them, Troy or Southfield, actually blocked off streets from vehicular traffic by permanent design, cute concrete barriers and all, so that certain Jews could walk to synagogue. Mostly, though, being the Motor City, suburban Detroit was wedded to the automobile and nothing is close for walking, except in a couple of tidy nooks "Birmingham" and "Berkeley" for very rich urbanites. Some cities enjoy gentrification. Not Detroit.

The problem is complex. You need to understand the sociology.

A large part of it is the nature of the automobile manufacturers who - as Michael Moore chronicled - grabbed stuff for free, then, not having paid for it, abandoned it. Look up the Poletown Project, and then the failed Chevy Volt plant in Hamtramack. Those tied directly to a corrupt city hall. (And just a quick edit here. You know, the Ford family is still invested in Ford Motor Company and they never screwed Dearborn, the way GM did to Detroit. The tragedy of the commons explains much.)

dlglmut, I apprepreciate your context and generally agree with you that Ba'al's analysis is incomplete and incorrect.

Ba'al - Like Starnesville, all the good people got out. More good people are born all the time, and they do the best they can there until they can leave. The problem is not "government" per se. Denmark has lots of government, but Denmark does not look like Detroit. Mexico has a lower tax rate than the USA and more "favorable" business laws. Mexio and Detroit have a lot in common, including the flight of better people to better places.

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  • 1 month later...

Why do they have to starve? People have existed since long before technology. If they have no way of obtaining their own technology or producing anything worth trading for the necessities they need, they can produce their own necessities to the best of their capability.

This won't happen though, because if production of anything became fully automated--once people can produce faster than they can consume--the producers would be looking to trade for anything; live entertainment could become more and more popular, for example. This is a very futuristic world I'm talking about, and it would have to be capitalist to get to this point.

Long before technology the human population was sparse and the wild open places were full of game and edible plants.

Hunter-gatherer culture was feasible then.

Not now. The game is scarce mostly because of human incursion on their habitat and the population is far too large to be supported by hunting-gathering.

Also people do not learn how to subsist in untechnical nature. The ignorance alone will kill tens of millions if not more.

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Why do they have to starve? People have existed since long before technology. If they have no way of obtaining their own technology or producing anything worth trading for the necessities they need, they can produce their own necessities to the best of their capability.

This won't happen though, because if production of anything became fully automated--once people can produce faster than they can consume--the producers would be looking to trade for anything; live entertainment could become more and more popular, for example. This is a very futuristic world I'm talking about, and it would have to be capitalist to get to this point.

Long before technology the human population was sparse and the wild open places were full of game and edible plants.

Hunter-gatherer culture was feasible then.

Not now. The game is scarce mostly because of human incursion on their habitat and the population is far too large to be supported by hunting-gathering.

Also people do not learn how to subsist in untechnical nature. The ignorance alone will kill tens of millions if not more.

Ba'al Chatzaf

Ah, the world of Soylent Green. Here, now.

--Brant

one half eats the other half--repeat as necessary

veal, anyone?

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