Posted on 03/30/2017 6:23:33 AM PDT by Kaslin
I noticed similar things when I was living in the Detroit area.
I got sent down South on business for a few months. Was struck by the fact that in the former home of the Confederacy, Slavery and Jim Crow, black people were far more willing to smile and strike up a conversation with me.
When I got back to Michigan we were checking each other out for weapons again.
Yes, and has been for a half-century.
Paraphrasing a WSJ article I read a few years ago:’
“In 1950, one-third of all the manufacturing capacity on the face of the earth was in the states that were on the Great Lakes - Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, etc.
Thirty years later they were calling it the Rust Belt.”
In a famous 2002 article in the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, Harvard scholars Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer named the so-called “Curley Effect” after its prototype, James Michael Curley, who served four (non-consecutive) terms as mayor of Boston between 1914 and 1950. This phenomenon, the authors explain, is the strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.” Forbes magazine puts it this way: “A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth. Counterintuitively, making a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.”
I spent two weeks with my oldest brother and his wife in St Louis in 1964 or 1965. It was very nice and we had a lot of fun ‘seeing the sights”.
The way to do it is “pays more in taxes than receives in benefits and has done so for at least five years”
I presume you’re referring to St. Louis, MO, not East St. Louis, IL.
I said St. Louis so no presumption is necessary.
Nothing will change until they’re forced to file for bankruptcy.
The city as a whole is rising. Areas formerly deserted and unsafe are now renovated, re populated, and enjoyed by families with small children playing. University Circle is thriving as a unique landmark to the generosity of private citizens from the glory days of a century ago to the present day.
The downtown, deserted as late as the 80's and 90's is bursting with redevelopment and waiting lists for upscale apartments being produced as fast as the construction industry can make them.
The cost of living remains among the lowest of cities of similar or greater size.
Yes, and has been for a half-century.
LBJ’s Great Society did wonders./s
I recently talked with an elderly gentleman who worked in Cleveland for a steel company after WWII. That one corporation alone ran a fleet of over 60 freighters on the Great Lakes, and that was only a subsidiary of the main business.
Friends (actually the wife was a friend & her husband a foaming at the mouth liberal idiot) visited with me a time or two here in the South from their home on Staten Island.
She made the observation that back home, the different ethnicities had their own employment niche, meaning the same sort of job like waiter or behind-counter retail, and not a whole lot of variance between job strata.
Down here, you’re going to run into a mix of races on staff no matter where you go. Tho we do have, for instance, Middle Easterners running the local tobacco shop & Central/South Americans at field work & creeping into construction. I especially hate that because construction used to be a way for an un-degreed but hard working American to earn a decent living.
The cliche I often hear is that the Democrat party is for the poor, and the Republican party is for the rich.
My answer to that has always been that if this is true, and if it also true that the party with the most votes wins an election, then the Democrat party has a vested interest in creating more poor people, where as the Republican party has a vested interest in creating more rich people.
I had never heard of the Curley Effect, but it seems to mirror my line of reasoning. It’s nice to have a reference to fall back on.
I would modify this to allowing the vote to those who put into the system, more than what they take out of the system.
IE, net producers can vote, net consumers cannot.
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