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Related to what we might label "modern" infrastructure, I just got back from a trip visiting the outskirts of Illinois. The towns there are small, but full of
by tannerc 9y ago
Related to what we might label "modern" infrastructure, I just got back from a trip visiting the outskirts of Illinois.
The towns there are small, but full of people hungry for opportunities and good work.
Yet everywhere you go there is no work to be done. Businesses—even big box stores like Walmart or Target—are closed down. Homes lay vacant despite their reasonably cheap (at least for someone living in Silicon Valley) $20,000 price tag. Even churches in the area have to close their doors but leave their steeples standing, unable to draw in an audience or—and most importantly—any money to maintain things.
This isn't Detroit I'm talking about, it's a fairly typical suburb of a larger metropolitan area in the midwest.
The answer for many of these people has largely and loudly been: "Bring back jobs from overseas! Stop outsourcing work to China!"
But of course that's not a valid answer, since the problem is that the jobs these towns once knew now belong to machines which can work tens of times harder and longer at a fraction of the cost of their former human counterparts. Yes, some of the work has gone overseas, but much of it has just become "modernized" by technology.
And here's the thing: the infrastructure for things as simple as Internet access in these parts of the US just isn't there.
So nobody goes to school to learn programming or design or how to be a modern entrepreneur because they (the individuals and schools) just don't have any connection to those parts of the landscape. And when they do, their model is wildly out of date.
One of the Universities I visited and, later, a high school had each just opened a computer lab for students in which the goal wasn't to help students learn programming, or design, or anything like that, but merely how to type.
This of course added on top of the decrepit roads, buildings, etc. The state is wildly out of money because it can't put people to work, and the people can't work because the infrastructure just isn't there. It's depressing to see, really. I want to know how we can improve this, and what someone living on the other side of the country might do to help.
- amyjess 9y agoI have to wonder how much of this is the result of population migrating from the Midwest to the Sun Belt. It used to be that the Midwest exemplified "typical America". Now, that role belongs more to the Southwest, Texas, the New South, etc. Dallas and Phoenix probably represent the average, everyday American more than Chicago and Detroit do nowadays.
- TulliusCicero 9y agoI think what's really interesting is that the US seems to have so many of these economically broken places, and yet GDP per capita in the US is the highest of any large country (and higher than all but a handful of small countries). I'm not saying you're wrong, I just think it's interesting that we can have these obvious large problems and still be economically successful in spite of that.
- TillE 9y agoThat's just a description of huge inequality, though. The "economic success" is largely concentrated in a tiny pool of the extremely rich.
- elevensies 9y agoOne of the reasons capitalism is so efficient is because of how quickly it deallocates from failure. Abandoning failed areas allows resources and people to be redirected to more profitable areas. Keep in mind the places we are talking about were quite possibly wilderness 200 years ago, and 200 years from now they could be again.
- Decade 9y agoThe weird part, to me, is that we have people here, so there is obviously a market. At the very least, in a functioning economy, they could be working to help each other. Why should everything be about big supply chains run by big business powered by big finance? Maybe the Amish have the right idea.