Thursday, June 13, 2024

Invisible Wealth of a Nation

Back to a serious post after a day-long break.

This is mostly one BlueSky thread from film producer Michael Tae Sweeny, but with one rejoinder from a commenter:

...the per capita GDP of Canada is lower than every US state besides Mississippi. Europeans are mostly markedly poorer outside of like Switzerland and the batshit tiny microstates....

Americans have a lot of money! In some important ways: the most money! Our problems are mostly not caused by our people not having money!

America's destruction of its cities to replace them with car-mandatory suburbs have made housing and transportation a huge drag on quality of life. Suburban sprawl is ludicrously expensive to subsidize and maintain.

The response from Wrycke was:

The two most under-rated calamities of the 20th century:
- Robert Moses and the hellish blueprint he spread around the country;
- The Supreme Court decision allowing school segregation as long as the little white havens were given different city names.

Well, you can trace that second underrated calamity back more specifically to the North's failure to assert Reconstruction, which allowed the South to slowly win the Civil War. But sure, it took some particular forms in the 20th century. It's what Heather McGhee calls drained pool politics, and it affects a lot more than school segregation.


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