Smith, Greg dot com

Excellent article on recent history (post WWII). Here's the premise:

In 1950, America produced 51% of the GNP for the entire world. Of that production, roughly 70% took place in the eight states surrounding the Great Lakes: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York.

The productive capability of this small area of earth staggers the imagination. Virtually everything that rebuilt the industrial bases of Europe and Japan came from those eight states. Cars, planes, electronics, machine tools, consumer goods, generators, concrete - any conceivable item manufactured by industrial humanity poured out this tiny region and enriched the world. The region shone with widespread prosperity. People migrated from the South and West to work in these Herculean engines of industry.

The wealth, power and economic dominance of the region at the time cannot be overstated. Nothing like it has existed in human history.

Yet, a mere 30 years later, by 1980, we called that area the “rustbelt” and it became synonymous with joblessness, collapsing cities, high crime, failing schools and general hopelessness.

What the hell happened?

Go read the whole thing.

Actually, I would quibble with one thing in linked article. In addition to the reasons it gives I would add that the infrastructure costs of these heavy industries made it difficult for them to change in response to the marketplace. A steel plant can't really shift its production to plastics or pharmaceuticals or microchips. Advances in manufacturing technologies make it technically easier today for a company to retool. Of course the political and economic cost of shifting industries can be just as hard as it was for Detroit. Add to that the simple refusal (based on arrogance?) of the Big Three car companies to innovate their product lines in response to competition from overseas and you had a recipe for the disaster that is Detroit.

But the basic argument in the argument stands: Detroit today is a petri dish experiment of every economic and social policy that Obama wants to implement. It isn't pretty.