You wrote about immigration and recruiting internal migration as elite ploys to drive down wages, but those past actions are apparently fine now because there is multi-ethnic working class solidarity. The history you recount stops before the Hart-Celler Act which has propped the door open for 60 years now. Multiple things correlate with more than a half century of declining real wages for those without a college education, but Trump's two terms have given us a scientific ABAB longitudinal experiment showing that the supply of labor really does impact the price it can demand.
Aaron cut up my introduction so the thesis is unclear but it’s about an out of touch elite that has its heels dug into identity politics instead of solving economic issues then wondering why they keep losing voters. There are no specific policy conclusions or recommendations.
Great story. I would add that serving in the Army for 27 years with individuals from all over the country and all races the idea of forcing so called diversity is an anathema to the military ethos. Accomplishing the mission and surviving supersedes any of this woke nonsense. Then I get lectured by young, white, liberal college girls that I need to examine my systemic racism made me want to vomit.
That's because historically, the military is derived from a Culture of Honor, which predates both religion and government. It is now seen as 'primitive and backwards' by the elite. The military is fundamentally at its core, exclusive because there is horizontal honor (meritocracy of basic standards allows you to wear the uniform) and vertical honor (meritocracy of accolade acquisition like medals, purple hearts etc). A Culture of Victimhood is the exact inverse of this because of it's hyper focus on identity and inclusion.
I concur except that for the comment about the military predating religion. Worshipping God in many varieties came before the establishment of any military.
Read again: a Culture of Honor predates both religion and government. This is any gang of men around the world since the beginning of time. Protect, Provide & Procreate.
Well we’re going to have to disagree on this. As I take the account in Genesis as historical fact, Adam and Eve were not concerned about a culture of honor or protecting, providing or procreating, but became fearful when they disobeyed God. After the Fall, then the chaos began.
Adam and Eve have nothing to do with religion. I also find it illogical to base all of human culture on the first two people.
Go camping anywhere around the world at any time in history and you’ll find a gang of men operating by the same standards, well covered in the book ‘Manhood in the Making’. Those who didn’t were conquered and perished.
Like I said, we are going to have to disagree. Maybe we have a different definition of religion. Adam and Eve literally walked with God in the garden of Eden; in my mind that is religion. After they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they were exiled. They believed that they could decide good and evil apart from God and so began the chaos that leads to what you say.
DC has all the things you’re saying are wrong and they’re winning. East Gary has these wonderful things and it’s a failure.
The working class places are continually getting their hats handed to them by every essentially elite city. Why is that? You identify yourself off shoring and strike breaking with people of a different ethnicity, all done by elites.
Now you’re “unified” but you’re still getting your hats handed to you. The elite places are still pulling ahead every year. The gap isn’t only still there it’s widening.
I was a budget staffer in Congress so this is a softball. DC has a printing press in the basement. It creates a new government program via deficit spending which in turn creates an entire ecosystem of a built in constituency plus overpaid think tank writers, trade associations and multi-client lobbyist that don't just try to preserve but to grow said new program. Little actual productivity occurs in DC, merely money changing in the name of influence. Try to shave one dollar from the place and it goes into full protect mode (like right now) but when the steel industry went belly up, the Feds did not show up to save them. DC isn't winning based on merit or actual competitive advantage, it controls capital flows based on the laws it writes, which sent everything the Midwest built overseas. You can't take someone's boots then tell themselves to pick themselves up by their bootstraps...
Hey preaching to the choir, but the ball isn’t as soft as you think .
If we’re so unified and strong, why could they steal our boots? If they fooled us, why were we stupid enough to fall for it? Once or twice sure, but we’re going on a EDIT: half century losing streak. I don’t think proving we’re not racist for the thousandth time is going to work.
Also, it’s not just DC, like I said it’s elite cities. Rust Belt NYC lost five million industrial jobs and bounced back by replacing those jobs(proportionally more). Your Detroits and Garys, have not. Since 2000 the two places with the largest off shoring were furniture manufacturing in Iowa and computer equipment manufacturing in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley replaced those jobs Iowa didn’t. What’s going on?
This is also easy. Midwest never had capital, only labor. The four original industrial cities of Northwest Indiana: Whiting (Standard Oil now BP), East Chicago (Inland Steel like Cleveland Cliffs), Gary (US Steel now Nippon) and Hammond (George H Hammond Company) were all founded by outside money and took their profits as such, especially before organized labor came about. Both Gary and Detroit were one trick ponys so comparing them to Silicon Valley and NYC would be inappropriate given 1) They are global capitals in their own right and 2) their economies were long diversified, more specifically anchored in intellectual property and technology which the US has sought to protect unlike the manufacturing sector.
It seems you are using IP and technology to mean just about whatever you want. Having a room to trade egg futures is apparently not much harder to leverage growth off of than all the patents and engineering know-how of the century's most transformative industry, namely automobiles.
The labor but no capital argument doesn't hold water for a number of reasons. When the Federal Reserve banks were set up, their districts were drawn to correspond with relatively equal sections of the U.S. economy. New York state had its own district, but so did Ohio. Meanwhile, everywhere west of the Rockies was a single district.
You mentioned Standard Oil; Cleveland was where Rockefeller built his empire, and he was very quickly self-funding out of his own profits. The greatest industrial fortune in U.S. history was not raked off by investors and bankers from elsewhere.
Were all the profits of the automotive industry over more than 50 years siphoned off to other places? Somehow Ford Credit and General Motor Acceptance Corporation became some of the county's largest banks. They had capital.
We can see from the Federal Reserve bank districts that California started the 20th century with much less capital than the Great Lakes region. Why were outside investors rapacious with development in the Great Lakes but seem to have let the more needy California keep and compound a much greater share of their profits?
You said Detroit was a one-trick pony, but so was Silicon Valley. It was Microwave Valley,
then that went away and it became Silicon Valley. Now all the electronics are gone and it is Software Valley. Somehow the same set of people managed to string together one trick after another. It isn't a diversified economy; it is just one success being completely replaced by another.
Why does it seem the coasts made uniformly good decisions and just about every place between the coasts made uniformly bad decisions? You say San Francisco and New York City are capitals and were long diversified like it is an inevitable fact of nature.
Yes, many Midwest cities were little more than factory towns for corporations headquartered elsewhere. Not all of them were as monolithic as East Chicago, but that factor was present. But even where there was a more diversified economy and HQs, the cities often failed to do much with it. Detroit is a paradigmatic example. Compare what civic leaders in Chicago created with their wealth vs. Detroit. David Frum wrote a great essay on Detroit a couple decades ago (sadly no longer online I believe), where he said the message Detroit sends is, "This is a city built on brawn."
And I would say Chicago's "anchor" IP was developing the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, keeping them relevant (errr economic powerhouse) as the U.S. pivoted from an agrarian to an industrial society.
Also, a few other points. Silicon Valley was created by the federal government (see Aaron's interview on American Compass podcast) and last I checked, the feds bailed out our financial system (aka NYC) between Bush/Obama admins, creating a bit of moral hazard. Later on, they bailed out Silicon Valley Bank. What did they do for steel in 2000-02? Let them go BK so investors could snap them up for pennies while cutting pensions significantly.
You wrote about immigration and recruiting internal migration as elite ploys to drive down wages, but those past actions are apparently fine now because there is multi-ethnic working class solidarity. The history you recount stops before the Hart-Celler Act which has propped the door open for 60 years now. Multiple things correlate with more than a half century of declining real wages for those without a college education, but Trump's two terms have given us a scientific ABAB longitudinal experiment showing that the supply of labor really does impact the price it can demand.
Aaron cut up my introduction so the thesis is unclear but it’s about an out of touch elite that has its heels dug into identity politics instead of solving economic issues then wondering why they keep losing voters. There are no specific policy conclusions or recommendations.
What’s your point?
The point is you stopped the story at the point where it intersects with current policy. Why is that?
Great story. I would add that serving in the Army for 27 years with individuals from all over the country and all races the idea of forcing so called diversity is an anathema to the military ethos. Accomplishing the mission and surviving supersedes any of this woke nonsense. Then I get lectured by young, white, liberal college girls that I need to examine my systemic racism made me want to vomit.
That's because historically, the military is derived from a Culture of Honor, which predates both religion and government. It is now seen as 'primitive and backwards' by the elite. The military is fundamentally at its core, exclusive because there is horizontal honor (meritocracy of basic standards allows you to wear the uniform) and vertical honor (meritocracy of accolade acquisition like medals, purple hearts etc). A Culture of Victimhood is the exact inverse of this because of it's hyper focus on identity and inclusion.
I concur except that for the comment about the military predating religion. Worshipping God in many varieties came before the establishment of any military.
Read again: a Culture of Honor predates both religion and government. This is any gang of men around the world since the beginning of time. Protect, Provide & Procreate.
Well we’re going to have to disagree on this. As I take the account in Genesis as historical fact, Adam and Eve were not concerned about a culture of honor or protecting, providing or procreating, but became fearful when they disobeyed God. After the Fall, then the chaos began.
Adam and Eve have nothing to do with religion. I also find it illogical to base all of human culture on the first two people.
Go camping anywhere around the world at any time in history and you’ll find a gang of men operating by the same standards, well covered in the book ‘Manhood in the Making’. Those who didn’t were conquered and perished.
Like I said, we are going to have to disagree. Maybe we have a different definition of religion. Adam and Eve literally walked with God in the garden of Eden; in my mind that is religion. After they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil they were exiled. They believed that they could decide good and evil apart from God and so began the chaos that leads to what you say.
A stirring and convincing essay, thank you.
DC has all the things you’re saying are wrong and they’re winning. East Gary has these wonderful things and it’s a failure.
The working class places are continually getting their hats handed to them by every essentially elite city. Why is that? You identify yourself off shoring and strike breaking with people of a different ethnicity, all done by elites.
Now you’re “unified” but you’re still getting your hats handed to you. The elite places are still pulling ahead every year. The gap isn’t only still there it’s widening.
I was a budget staffer in Congress so this is a softball. DC has a printing press in the basement. It creates a new government program via deficit spending which in turn creates an entire ecosystem of a built in constituency plus overpaid think tank writers, trade associations and multi-client lobbyist that don't just try to preserve but to grow said new program. Little actual productivity occurs in DC, merely money changing in the name of influence. Try to shave one dollar from the place and it goes into full protect mode (like right now) but when the steel industry went belly up, the Feds did not show up to save them. DC isn't winning based on merit or actual competitive advantage, it controls capital flows based on the laws it writes, which sent everything the Midwest built overseas. You can't take someone's boots then tell themselves to pick themselves up by their bootstraps...
Hey preaching to the choir, but the ball isn’t as soft as you think .
If we’re so unified and strong, why could they steal our boots? If they fooled us, why were we stupid enough to fall for it? Once or twice sure, but we’re going on a EDIT: half century losing streak. I don’t think proving we’re not racist for the thousandth time is going to work.
Also, it’s not just DC, like I said it’s elite cities. Rust Belt NYC lost five million industrial jobs and bounced back by replacing those jobs(proportionally more). Your Detroits and Garys, have not. Since 2000 the two places with the largest off shoring were furniture manufacturing in Iowa and computer equipment manufacturing in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley replaced those jobs Iowa didn’t. What’s going on?
This is also easy. Midwest never had capital, only labor. The four original industrial cities of Northwest Indiana: Whiting (Standard Oil now BP), East Chicago (Inland Steel like Cleveland Cliffs), Gary (US Steel now Nippon) and Hammond (George H Hammond Company) were all founded by outside money and took their profits as such, especially before organized labor came about. Both Gary and Detroit were one trick ponys so comparing them to Silicon Valley and NYC would be inappropriate given 1) They are global capitals in their own right and 2) their economies were long diversified, more specifically anchored in intellectual property and technology which the US has sought to protect unlike the manufacturing sector.
It seems you are using IP and technology to mean just about whatever you want. Having a room to trade egg futures is apparently not much harder to leverage growth off of than all the patents and engineering know-how of the century's most transformative industry, namely automobiles.
The labor but no capital argument doesn't hold water for a number of reasons. When the Federal Reserve banks were set up, their districts were drawn to correspond with relatively equal sections of the U.S. economy. New York state had its own district, but so did Ohio. Meanwhile, everywhere west of the Rockies was a single district.
You mentioned Standard Oil; Cleveland was where Rockefeller built his empire, and he was very quickly self-funding out of his own profits. The greatest industrial fortune in U.S. history was not raked off by investors and bankers from elsewhere.
Were all the profits of the automotive industry over more than 50 years siphoned off to other places? Somehow Ford Credit and General Motor Acceptance Corporation became some of the county's largest banks. They had capital.
We can see from the Federal Reserve bank districts that California started the 20th century with much less capital than the Great Lakes region. Why were outside investors rapacious with development in the Great Lakes but seem to have let the more needy California keep and compound a much greater share of their profits?
You said Detroit was a one-trick pony, but so was Silicon Valley. It was Microwave Valley,
then that went away and it became Silicon Valley. Now all the electronics are gone and it is Software Valley. Somehow the same set of people managed to string together one trick after another. It isn't a diversified economy; it is just one success being completely replaced by another.
Why does it seem the coasts made uniformly good decisions and just about every place between the coasts made uniformly bad decisions? You say San Francisco and New York City are capitals and were long diversified like it is an inevitable fact of nature.
Yes, many Midwest cities were little more than factory towns for corporations headquartered elsewhere. Not all of them were as monolithic as East Chicago, but that factor was present. But even where there was a more diversified economy and HQs, the cities often failed to do much with it. Detroit is a paradigmatic example. Compare what civic leaders in Chicago created with their wealth vs. Detroit. David Frum wrote a great essay on Detroit a couple decades ago (sadly no longer online I believe), where he said the message Detroit sends is, "This is a city built on brawn."
And I would say Chicago's "anchor" IP was developing the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, keeping them relevant (errr economic powerhouse) as the U.S. pivoted from an agrarian to an industrial society.
Also, a few other points. Silicon Valley was created by the federal government (see Aaron's interview on American Compass podcast) and last I checked, the feds bailed out our financial system (aka NYC) between Bush/Obama admins, creating a bit of moral hazard. Later on, they bailed out Silicon Valley Bank. What did they do for steel in 2000-02? Let them go BK so investors could snap them up for pennies while cutting pensions significantly.