The Chicago experience: Chicago vs NYC

[edsg25]

Originally Posted by emathias

There is a funding issue for infrastructure, and part of that problem is with employment costs outpacing funding costs. Unions have lose power in the private sector and perhaps this hard period will force govenments to re-evaluate their relationship with unions, too. Particularly with pension liabilities.

Public transit is in decay, though, because the U.S. population has chosen to embrace the automobile instead of pedestrian densities. I don't personally like that, and I think there have been short-sighted policies that have contributed to the speed with which that happened, but then again America isn't unique in that regard, just younger.

Of all cities that attained 2 million people by 1950, which city lost the most? Not Detroit or St. Louis or Baltimore, because they never reached 2 million people by 1950. Not Chicago, even though we did reach over 2 million before 1950. It was Paris. We think of inner city population loss as some American problem, but it's not - it's a middle-class choice, and it's been made across countries and borders and cultures. Even as China's and India's cities grow, so do their suburbs. You can have a single family home or townhome in suburban Shanghai, just like New York or Cleveland or Bangalore. People choose that lifestyle, and as long as most people do (and in the U.S., most people have), public transit will never have the critical mass of density required to run via fares and an affordable and tolerated subsidy.

We can end policies that make suburban development easier, but is it really democratic to swing the policies all the way to the other extreme (and I say this as a pretty hard-core urbanist)?



"Producing nothing"? We are "producing" efficiency for other countries. Where does that finance income come from? Our finance expertise and management expertise, our "knowledge workers," are producing efficiency and productivity for other countries. Just because what they sell isn't a physical good doesn't make what they're selling any less valuable, useful or real. As I pointed out in my previous post, our manufacturing jobs loss isn't so much through outsourcing as it is through gains in efficiency - part of what counts as finance's share of the economy is sharing that expertise in increasing efficiency with other manufacturing economies. We're selling our lessons, we just need to figure out a way to allow that profit to find its way to the displaced workers in a fair way that doesn't overly discourage free enterprise and self-motivation.



Not a generational thing, eh? You sure? Your last sentence there reads a little bit like "kids these days!"



We'll see. 2010 elections are but a year away, and a lot can happen in a year.

you know, I have absolutely no problem with how you see the future. None of us has a crystal ball. And each of us is going to use what data and signs we pick up along the way to make our assessments.

I am in complete disagreement with you on the course this nation is taking but that by no means suggests you are wrong. It merely means that I have come to a different conclusion.

and, for me, it has never been on trying to look at the details in a positive or negative way, but in trying, to the best of my ability, to assess them as fairly as I can.

For me, as noted, it has been a downward trejectory. And, to me, this has been a seminal week. Viewing the fiasco on the floor of the Senate and in the White House, I feel we have reached that moment when it has become clear that the two party system is broken, as well as the government it props up.

We are awash with problems, and yet cannot manage through our government or our other institutions to even try to address them, our heads buried in the sand. I can't imagine feeling optimistic when we won't even face what is one our table, let alone try to correct it.

I won't reiterate the littany of ills that face the US, arguably more so than any time in our history. Nor will I argue again how critical the time is for correction in a world and a nation which have never seen so many people nor had to deal with the so many problems that our very technologies create.

Yes, emathias, yours is a far more mainstream take on the US than is mine. I would lose any numbers game on it. But I will tell you this: there are millions of your fellow Americans who have charted the course and are worried sick what our nation has become and seriously believe the gig is up, though both our actions and our disinterest in correcting them.

I love my nation, but I have to admit where it is today. Sadly I do feel America is far more a drag on Chicago than Chicago would ever be on the nation. And frankly I would feel more confident about my city's future in some new possibly Great Lakes nation as our current one, Rome like, breaks into parts. It's too big, became too powerful, and can't and won't address the needs of its people. And it is owned by corporations and not them.