The American City Is Dying-And why the country will inevitable follow

FrontPage Magazine ^ | January 30, 2013 | Daniel Greenfield

[blueunicorn6]

“When you’re alone and life is making you lonely you can always go...downtown.
When you’ve got worries all the noise and the hurries seem to help I know...downtown.”

Petula Clark, Futurist

[9YearLurker]

True.

[familyop]

"The American city is dying. It used to serve as a center of transportation and industry."

True.

"Today the city holds a few knowledge industries and some secondary industries catering to them,..."

Beside the point. Those are not industries relevant to building or sustaining a strong economy. Manufacturing is. So are agriculture and energy, but some of the poorest economies run on agriculture and energy without much manufacturing.

"It’s easier for cities like New York City and Chicago to shake down their remaining financial industries..."

Those are not relevant industries. They don't exist much without a large manufacturing base. On agriculture and fuels without much manufacturing, we could live in squalor like the other slave populations of the planet. But America won't be another Asia for long. Neither will Asia.

[familyop]

"In other words, the majority of the population becomes too lazy to perform the work necessary to provide for themselves and what’s left of the strong/productive/intelligent refuses to continue to do it for them."

How many PhD. administrators or clerks would be needed to index a gear? The truly productive members of the population are here and there in the majority that you speak of, but the "strong" political/regulator class--sturgeons of recirculating debt--have outlawed new, small manufacturing starts in local governments--even in the middle of nowhere.

Tomorrow, the technically inclined will do well, and we'll learn once again about what a real technocracy is. [Clue: not nearly as socialist or lazy as any of the current leadership. See technically inclined.]

[DJ Taylor]

JCBreckenridge!!!!!

Dang it, you just gave me a flashback. As a young Marine Corporal, I crossed the Pacific in July (Typhoon Season) 1961 on the Troopship USS General J. C. Breckinridge and I still have unpleasant memories of the experience.

That ship was infested with body lice from bow to stern, and when I finally got off in Okinawa I had crabs on me from head to toe. The memory of thirty days of being locked up below deck in a troop compartment with a company unbathed Marines while a Typhoon tossed the ship around and I scratched my crab bites is still with me.

[Oatka]

Sadly, I can foresee a world where an increasingly intelligent AI infrastructure takes care of an increasingly degenerate human population.

There was a Twilight Zone episode called "The Little Black Bag" wherein Chill Wills, a drunkard. discovers a doctors bag, full of special tools, from the future. It seems that the population had been dumbed down to such a degree that the tools had to have intelligence built into them. He started out making big bucks with the tools but then . . .

At the time, 1970s, I thought it was pretty far out. About a year or so later I was at a MacDonalds and saw a cash register with nothing but pictures of their wares on it. I asked the young girl what that was all about and she said that she no longer had to know the prices of the burgers, etc. - all she had to do was press the picture.

Soon after I quit reading Sci-Fi because all the things they were predicting were coming true within a year or so - and some of the things weren't pretty.

[Paladin2]

"Every year, the outlaws swing out of the trees, rob the merchants and ride back to Washington D.C. for a glorious feast over the stolen goods"

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/06/lawless-society.html

[coydog]

That question of yours was dealt with by a science fiction author, James P. Hogan, in The Multiplex Man. Interesting take on the issue.

[x]

It can be argued the cities are obsolete. The reasons compelling businesses gathering in close proximity are gone. The need to have people very close to the jobs gathered in close proximity is gone. The skids greased over and over to make the system continue have become worn and rough.

Cities nowadays are less for production and more for consumption. That may not be sustainable, but a lot of people have moved back to the cities over the last 20 years or so.

[Alberta's Child]

Great article, but the author overlooks a very important point about cities: For all their flaws, they still offer a major advantage of economies of scale in many things. A lot of the things people take for granted in a city -- like grocery stores and restaurants all over the place, first-class hospitals, etc. -- are non-existent in rural and even many suburban areas.

[SauronOfMordor]

There is no solution which does not involve making it unattractive to have a child you cannot feed through your own labor