How the Crash Will Reshape America (from The Atlantic)

[lunatica]

How the Crash Will Reshape America


By what they destroy, what they leave standing, what responses they catalyze, and what space they clear for new growth, most big economic shocks ultimately leave the economic landscape transformed. Some of these transformations occur faster and more violently than others. The period after the Great Depression saw the slow but inexorable rise of the suburbs. The economic malaise of the 1970s, on the other hand, found its embodiment in the vertiginous fall of older industrial cities of the Rust Belt, followed by an explosion of growth in the Sun Belt.

The historian Scott Reynolds Nelson has noted that in some respects, today’s crisis most closely resembles the “Long Depression,” which stretched, by one definition, from 1873 to 1896. It began as a banking crisis brought on by insolvent mortgages and complex financial instruments, and quickly spread to the real economy, leading to mass unemployment that reached 25 percent in New York.

During that crisis, rising industries like railroads, petroleum, and steel were consolidated, old ones failed, and the way was paved for a period of remarkable innovation and industrial growth. In 1870, New England mill towns like Lowell, Lawrence, Manchester, and Springfield were among the country’s most productive industrial cities, and America’s population overwhelmingly lived in the countryside. By 1900, the economic geography had been transformed from a patchwork of farm plots and small mercantile towns to a landscape increasingly dominated by giant factory cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Buffalo.

How might various cities and regions fare as the crash of 2008 reverberates into 2009, 2010, and beyond? Which places will be spared the worst pain, and which left permanently scarred? Let’s consider how the crash and its aftermath might affect the economic landscape in the long run, from coast to coast—beginning with the epicenter of the crisis and the nation’s largest city, New York.

continued at the link

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200903/meltdown-geography

[BlooInBloo]

1. Oldie but a goodie.

[bluestateguy]

2. I think we entered the "Fourth Turning" sometime in 2008

For those of you who do not know what the Fourth Turning is, read the book by that title, and you'll figure it out.

[lunatica]

4. I know about the Fourth Turning and it does look like we're there

So in a few years we'll start all over again with the new creativity and growth that will shape the new culture, economic and otherwise

[Warpy]

3. We have been here before, many many times

and the same fucking people are behind it every time: rich men who aren't getting richer fast enough to suit them, politicians who are up for sale, and a population that was born after the preceding crash and doesn't realize they're being sold poison that will ultimately destroy them as the whole system collapses around their ears.

The best thing the New Deal did was levy a 90+% tax rate on the richest, thus keeping them from destroying the system quickly.

Kennedy was a damned fool for lowering the top marginal rate to 70%, but it still took the rich another 20 years to fuck up the system sufficiently through Reaganism to ensure today's collapse.

[a la izquierda]

6. This is why I'm not buying into the...

fearmongering going on around these parts lately.

I'm an historian. This shit happens. A lot. It gives me a bizarre perspective on things. I'm not trying to sound crass, as the economy has effected my family- but, I wish people read good history books more frequently...it might keep folks from completely losing their minds and worrying themselves sick.

[Double T]

5. History continually repeats itself and the GD humans don't learn anything.

History has taught US that it takes several decades to recover from economic depression disasters; expect the same with this little beauty courtesy of dick and idiot son.

[NOW tense]

7. I think we will be a better country and World partner

when we come out the other side.

[lunatica]

8. I hope we stop being a superpower and start being a partner n/t