"Motor City" was basically the "Silicon Valley" of its day with entrepreneurs and companies. Then it got mired by a bunch of businesspeople rent seeking rather

"Motor City" was basically the "Silicon Valley" of its day with entrepreneurs and companies. Then it got mired by a bunch of businesspeople rent seeking rather than innovating and collapsed. > When I was a kid, Detroit was a symbol of US industry and engineering. All those huge muscle cars. Which was precisely the problem at the time. Detroit was producing muscle cars (with terrible engineering other than gigantic engines) and huge land yachts "Because profit!" when gas was going nuts and got demolished when Japanese cars showed up. Sound familiar? Detroit is producing Brodozers "Because profit!" when gas is going nuts and is going to get demolished when BYD finally shows up. > Now it's a symbol of US decline, I think. It's strange to me that the USA let this happen, or that it didn't have the power to stop it happening. I can't think of any country that managed the transition away from a manufacturing labor dominated economy. All of them wound up with their large employment manufacturing centers completely hollowed out and left to rot. The echoes of this neglect reflect into the anger of the electorate we see today. However, these same people also refuse to embrace working in new fields like renewable energy. They have completely forgotten that even in the 1970s when the auto companies were extremely sclerotic their employees still had to retrain constantly (that was one of the duties of the unions).