As an non-American, looking from the outside, I find Detroit's saga incredibly sad and a little strange.
When I was a kid, Detroit was a symbol of US industry and engineering. All those huge muscle cars. That kind of Mad Max Road Warrior attitude (yeah, I know that's Aussie, but that same attitude).
Now it's a symbol of US decline, I think. It's strange to me that the USA let this happen, or that it didn't have the power to stop it happening.
It would be like the UK allowing Oxford or Cambridge to become a slum, the universities moving away and the old buildings becoming derelict. Or the Sydney Opera House going vacant and letting squatters move in.
There's something very, very symbolic about Detroit, then and now.
Just my opinion. Apologies if it offends, that is not my intent.
I think Detroit is well past its “bottom”. I have visited there every year (briefly) for the past 14yrs and it has some really vibrant and cool aspects now.
My anecdotal evidence is backed up by Detroit Metro real estate outpacing the national average significantly over the past 10 years. The people and culture are great too.
Also if America is ever going to greatly increase manufacturing, Detroit (and the rust belt overall) will be a big player because the navigable waterways have not moved and it is still 10 times cheaper to move things by water than land.
Agreed. My family's from Detroit. Like so many others, they left in the mid-70s because Detroit had become unfathomably bad - the job market was shit, crime and corruption was out of control, and there was no hope for things turning around. In the mid-80s, there were countless jokes about Detroit, like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/iFxyAA0l0nU
In my opinion you are mostly right. I lived in a Detroit suburb when the city's population dipped below 1M, which was a big deal at the time. 1M was a federal funding floor or something like that so they were literally rounding up homeless people to try and make the cut... unfortunately it didn't work.
I think there is an untold story here about the part that the automobile played in the fall of Detroit. Detroit probably experienced more sprawl than other cities due to the influence of automobiles on the local economy. You only need to drive around Bloomfield Hills for 10 min to know that the metro has plenty of money, but the people who could afford 2 cars weren't staying in the city proper.
On the flip side it was a terribly exciting place to live at that time. Detroit still had excellent music, sports, and entertainment. Unlike the major metros on the coasts, I never knew anyone who had a problem making rent or had to work extra jobs to get by. A double edged sword I suppose.
Agreed, and I'm sure at one time the UK was seen as an industrial and mining powerhouse and people raised with that image would be sad at the change. But by the time Thatcher trashed the North that wasn't really true any more. I don't think the UK went from an industrial giant to a desolate wasteland in a single generation like Detroit did. I could be wrong, though.
> I don't think the UK went from an industrial giant to a desolate wasteland in a single generation like Detroit did. I could be wrong, though.
Glasgow went from a prosperous shipbuilding town to the heroin capital of Europe. Sheffield also collapsed fairly dramatically with the loss of the steel industry, though maybe it didn't quite fall so far.
Yeah that's fair point. The closest from that perspective would be the collapse of shipbuilding in places like Sunderland or Hull or maybe textile mills in burnley. But not as significant in terms of global cultural importance i guess
I don't think it would offend, Americans are the first to bemoan what happened to Detroit as far as I have seen. What will probably offend more is the fact that the USA is not really in decline, as much as that has long been the highbrow narrative.
It has lost ground in some industries, it has also invested and pioneered in high tech design and manufacturing, aerospace, computers, software, internet, etc. which has kept it strong. And I know GDP doesn't give you much picture, but it gives you something.
Australia is doing well too as a coal/LNG depot and iron ore mine for China, after giving up their manufacturing industry and any pretense at technology. The "Education" export sector has looked good on paper, but the penny is beginning to drop that universities have been allowed to be hollowed out and turned into degree mills chasing short-term profit like some wall street quarterly results whore, and when there is very little investment in science and technology in the country, "higher education" can never be at the forefront. I guess that's good, the world will "always" need iron ore, bauxite, uranium, and coal/gas (until it doesn't). But when it runs out or stops being bought, are we going to be any better off than the Saudi post-oil?
Australia has so little of its own capability that if something serious happened to our maritime trade (I'm not talking about the tiny blip in the Persian Gulf just now, but a serious conflict involving real players), they would all starve to death in the dark, surrounded by vast fields of food and energy.
America has its problems, but it always has something on the go there. There's an energy in the air over there. Like China. People are determined to do something, reminds me of stories of the Australia that died before I was born. Australians aspire to work in a mine or in a worthless government bureaucrat jobs they can't get fired from, and accumulate rental properties. "But it's so 'laid back'", "but we don't have gun crime", "we have government healthcare" does not mean the road it is going down is not a dead end.
While I agree with your overall assessment of the Australia economy...
> But when it runs out or stops being bought, are we going to be any better off than the Saudi post-oil?
"It" is not going to run out in the foreseeable future. Australia is unimaginably huge and has deposits of pretty much everything somewhere. The state of Western Australia alone has 29% of the world's known iron ore, more than any other entire country (Brazil is #2 with 19%) and more than Russia and China combined.
It really isn't hard to "foresee" 50-100 years into the future, and that's when iron ore could run out. Could even be sooner if production increases significantly.
Yeah but when they automate all the mining jobs away and the existing policy of bribing our politicians to not tax them gets to its logical conclusion, what's the point? We're just throwing away irreplaceable natural resources.
> they would all starve to death in the dark, surrounded by vast fields of food and energy.
What does this mean? That Australia is self-sufficient in food and energy but exports all of it or does it mean Australia is incapable of processing the raw materials into finished goods?
Australia does not have the ability to manufacture enough fuel or fertilizer to feed or harvest or transport its crops and livestock or dig minerals and fossil fuels out of the ground. Is also incapable of making any of the machinery to do any of those things either. All of it has to come on boats.
Australia ships thermal and coking coal and iron ore and bauxite and uranium and lithium to China, Japan, Korea, and buys cars and steel and batteries and machinery back from them. It's not high-tech, smart, forward looking. It extremely extremely lucky (cursed by its luck, really) to have the natural non-renewable resources that it does, and it is hell-bent on squandering them all as fast as possible and having nothing to show for it by the end of it.
yeah, basically. We export iron ore and import cars. If the global trade system shut down we'd be sat on a huge pile of ore with absolutely no way of turning it into anything useful.
It's similar with food: our Wheatbelt produces vast amounts of wheat. Which is great but kinda useless without global trade; we can't turn all that wheat into actual food ourselves.
> It would be like the UK allowing Oxford or Cambridge to become a slum, the universities moving away and the old buildings becoming derelict. Or the Sydney Opera House going vacant and letting squatters move in.
Or the Roman Forum going from the centre of life in the world's most powerful empire to cattle field? [0]
In a way it’s nice. You let failing things fail and new things take their place. The problem starts when new things don’t take their place and I hope the current regressive political climate doesn’t get us there.
"Motor City" was basically the "Silicon Valley" of its day with entrepreneurs and companies. Then it got mired by a bunch of businesspeople rent seeking rather than innovating and collapsed.
> When I was a kid, Detroit was a symbol of US industry and engineering. All those huge muscle cars.
Which was precisely the problem at the time. Detroit was producing muscle cars (with terrible engineering other than gigantic engines) and huge land yachts "Because profit!" when gas was going nuts and got demolished when Japanese cars showed up. Sound familiar? Detroit is producing Brodozers "Because profit!" when gas is going nuts and is going to get demolished when BYD finally shows up.
> Now it's a symbol of US decline, I think. It's strange to me that the USA let this happen, or that it didn't have the power to stop it happening.
I can't think of any country that managed the transition away from a manufacturing labor dominated economy. All of them wound up with their large employment manufacturing centers completely hollowed out and left to rot.
The echoes of this neglect reflect into the anger of the electorate we see today.
However, these same people also refuse to embrace working in new fields like renewable energy. They have completely forgotten that even in the 1970s when the auto companies were extremely sclerotic their employees still had to retrain constantly (that was one of the duties of the unions).
When I was a kid, Detroit was a symbol of US industry and engineering. All those huge muscle cars. That kind of Mad Max Road Warrior attitude (yeah, I know that's Aussie, but that same attitude).
Now it's a symbol of US decline, I think. It's strange to me that the USA let this happen, or that it didn't have the power to stop it happening.
It would be like the UK allowing Oxford or Cambridge to become a slum, the universities moving away and the old buildings becoming derelict. Or the Sydney Opera House going vacant and letting squatters move in.
There's something very, very symbolic about Detroit, then and now.
Just my opinion. Apologies if it offends, that is not my intent.