#economic decline

[manicpixiesithlord]

so desperate to enjoy theatre, I miss film...I miss going to the movies...but under the current conditions it's clear they're even trying to buy us out from entertainment too. forget concert prices, movie tickets are getting ridiculous (and let's not even discuss the quality of production these days) how are going distract me with circus if I can't even afford it anymore?

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Worse still, our ruling classes don’t appear to be fully cognizant of the second- and third-order effects of their actions. They only react to events in anger, and if these reactions harm ordinary Americans or Europeans more than they do Russia’s rulers, then that’s just too bad. European dependence on Russian natural gas, for example, wasn’t something that happened suddenly—it had been a known security risk for years. But nothing was ever done until it was too late. We are used to talking about a conflict between the “somewheres” and “anywheres,” but this conflict—embodied by the Brexit vote, the rise of populist parties, and the election of Donald Trump—occurred during a time of peace. Now there is war, and we are ruled by people who, for the longest time, spat upon the ideas of shared sacrifice and national unity. The “anywheres,” who believe even national flags are too redolent of racism, parochialism, and resistance to the postnational order, are forced to appeal to those very same flags, in an attempt to goad others into accepting runaway inflation and energy austerity.

Malcom Kyeyune, “The West’s Hollow War Economy” (March 29th 2022).

[zwischenstadt]

Corporate capitalism had a twofold effect on local economies: it both undermined and strengthened them. In the cases of Trenton, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Chicago, corporate scale and scope economies weakened central-city locational assets. In some cases, this led to firms’ moving out of the city. In others, firms slowly disinvested, causing plants to fall into physical disrepair and productive inefficiencies. Factories closed as production was transferred to newer sites in the suburbs or other areas across the country. The more flexible and smaller staple producers that dominated sectors such as textile, clothing, furniture, and machine tools were unable to implement the strategies used by the bulk and staple firms found in other sectors. In his analysis of Philadelphia’s textile industry, Scranton notes that flexible and batch producers “simply ran down their capitals, liquidating on the death of the proprietor or when insolvency threatened.” These trends did not occur at the same time in all sectors. Decline was lagged and sequential within and between sectors, occurring in different ways at different times. Nevertheless, these processes contributed to the decline of central cities’ industrial bases after 1920. In other words, a different picture emerges of the industrial histories of US urban districts after 1920 if we view the city and suburbs as different places with different industries. To understand the long histories of (de)industrialization forces us to explore the impact of differential place-based economic growth. Several writers have noted that the suburbs became home to an increasing share of the nation’s industry after 1920. This work, however, has ignored the connection between industrial decline and suburbanization, and has not taken note of differential sectoral trajectories. Rather, the focus has been to describe and explain industrial decentralization, with the aim of showing how industrial clusters emerged on the metropolitan fringe. The notion that postwar suburbanization before 1945 was linked to deindustrialization has not been pursued. A key finding of this book is that industrial decline in Chicago had a specific intrametropolitan geography from the early twentieth century. While the forces driving deindustrialization after 1970 may have swept across many of the older industrial regions of the United States, industrial decline before then operated at a different spatial scale. The closing of factories, the loss of employment, and low reinvestment in older facilities that haunted the Rust Belt after the postwar glory days had its parallels in the pre–World War II period. The suburbs become the growth engine of metropolitan development, leaving the central cities behind. As industry flocked to the Chicago suburbs from the 1920s, the story in the city of Chicago was quite different. Industrial growth in the suburbs after 1945 was paralleled by large-scale decline in most of the central city’s industrial districts.

Robert Lewis, Chicago's Industrial Decline: The Failure of Redevelopment, 1920–1975.

  Came out 2021!  Robert Lewis is a beast

[p4radox99]

Capitalism is failing you.

Despite whatever the republicans say. Socialism is for the people. We take care of each other through our taxes, allowing us free healthcare, free education, free childcare, maternity leave and so much more. Capitalism is not the way out of this. It has never been. It will only get worse, if you do not change something.

[wotfigo]

ECONOMIC COLLAPSE. As a percentage of GDP, wages have been declining since the 1950’s. In the 1950’s an average wage earner, let’s say a teacher, could be married, buy a house, have two kids, buy a car, have a cheap holiday with the family every year ALL ON ONE WAGE. The woman in most households did not work or earn outside of the home. In other words, that lifestyle could be maintained by one salary. Today, two standard salaries barely maintain it.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

American politics is little more than the internal politics of the overclass, now that the working class majority has lost the grassroots, mass-membership institutions that once gave it collective bargaining power—private sector trade unions, influential religious organizations, and local political parties. Members of the working-class majority play no role except as occasional voters. They tend to be ignored, except during election seasons, when they are targeted by manipulative appeals based on race and gender in the case of the Democrats and religion and patriotism in the case of the Republicans...At the risk of being overly schematic I would suggest that the “center,” “left” and “right” of America’s top-thirty-percent politics can be mapped imperfectly onto the managerial elite, the professional bourgeoisie and the small business bourgeoisie. In particular, both DSA progressivism and Tea Party conservatism can be understood as different strategies for enlisting the power of government to stave off the proletarianization of the constituents of the two bourgeoisies.

Michael Lind, “The Double Horseshoe Theory” (July 16th 2020).

[the-funtime-autocrat]

China’s $40 Trillion banking system dwarfs the American system at double the size, with over 4,000 small, medium and massive, state-owned banks. The world’s four largest banks, including behemoth ICBC ($4TN), are all Chinese. The failure of just three banks was important enough that Chinese regulators submitted Chinese banks to a stress test and the results were shocking. China’s central bank admitted that China’s banking sector is “showing signs of strain.” The stress tests had revealed that over 13% of China’s 4,379 lenders were designated “high risk” by the central bank’s report. With this amounting to over 570 banks, and thus multiplied by the three existing examples of bank bail-out funding, with the Chinese economy following the world into recession, the financial numbers and likelihood of any future series of bail-outs are truly biblical. If not, fiscally impossible.

Brett Redmayne-Titley, “China’s Growing Economic Miracle…Collapse?!” (January 17th 2020)

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Infrastructure. The problem goes beyond creaking subways and shaky dams. The country seems paralyzed. To anyone who has enjoyed China’s high-speed rail, or its payment system, or watched its domination of 5G, America looks like a country of the past. Fast trains are not just a clever gimmick. They are a major improvement in efficiency. For trips of at least 300 miles, and probably much more, China’s trains at 180 mph are comfortable, and go from downtown to downtown. Their maglev trains in development will cruise at 360 mph. But in America the automotive and airline lobbies oppose fast rail. They have lots of money. Fairly obviously, this is why…Congress does nothing.

Fred Reed, “ Who the Hell Is Mitch McConnell Anyway?” (August 2nd 2019).