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You are excluding the middle. It wasn't perfect back then by any stretch, but it was possible to make a good living and all economic growth and innovation was n
by api 10y ago
You are excluding the middle. It wasn't perfect back then by any stretch, but it was possible to make a good living and all economic growth and innovation was not hyper concentrated in less than five unaffordable coastal cities.
If you live in one of these places and have not spent time in the interior you don't get it.
For an example look into the first, say, ten companies to offer viable home computers. They were in places like Albaquerqie (MITS), Dallas (Tandy), Philadelphia (Commodore), Atlanta (Compucolor), Boca Raton (IBM's PC group), etc. as well as Apple and a few others in the Bay Area. Today they would just about all be in SF/SV with maybe one token in Seattle.
Everything is like that. Regular jobs leave the interior for other countries or are replaced by automation, while high end jobs all go to to LA, NYC, SF, Seattle, and Boston.
I am in LA and grew up in Cincinnati and am as guilty as the next person. It's hard to swim against a torrent. When I go back there I see people stockpiling guns and talking about the new record for heroin deaths. Young people talk about escaping.
This is also bad to a degree for people in rich coastal cities since all this is driving real estate hyperinflation there. No jobs or unaffordable housing: pick one.
For average people things have become tangibly worse. It started in the 70s, accelerated after 2001, and became a visceral downward spiral after 2008. Trump and Sanders talked about this. Nobody else cares or even sees the problem.
- breatheoften 10y agoColorado is pretty nice. You are oversimplifying and by doing so basically disguising an argument that seems to be that more wealth should be transferred from coastal cities to the interior. How about the interior elects some reasonable governments, engages in trying to educate their populace, put some regulations in so they can build some decent communities and try to attract talent -- how about the interior starts trying to compete rather than blaming their woes on the federal government while seeking to increase their outsized (and poorly managed) federal handouts (which gets funneled disproportionately toward their tiny economic elite because of their states rights motivated insistence on the freedom to form corrupt local governments.)
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago>How about the interior elects some reasonable governments, engages in trying to educate their populace, put some regulations in so they can build some decent communities and try to attract talent -- how about the interior starts trying to compete rather than blaming their woes on the federal government while seeking to increase their outsized (and poorly managed) federal handouts (which gets funneled disproportionately toward their tiny economic elite because of their states rights motivated insistence on the freedom to form corrupt local governments.) Well, this also requires that the Feds enforce antitrust law.[1] [1] -- http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...