“The possibility of a rapid repair of their disasters, mainly depends on whether the country has been depopulated. If its effective population have not been extirpated at the time, and are not starved afterwards; then, with the same skill and knowledge which they had before, with their land and its permanent improvements undestroyed, and the more durable buildings probably unimpaired, or only partially injured, they have nearly all the requisites for their former amount of production.”~ John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book I, chapter 5.  When depressed U.S. cities are talked about in the media, the explanation for their decrepitude is nearly always described through the prism of a departed industry, a natural disaster, or overseas competition. Pittsburgh is allegedly a shadow of its former self because the steel industry is no longer vibrant, Galveston, TX supposedly never recovered from a hurricane back in 1900, Flint, MI and Detroit are depopulated because the U.S. car industry has been eclipsed by more efficient global producers, and then Selma, Alabama’s limp economy was recently reported in the New York Times as a function of still-healing scars from the 1960s Civil Rights struggles.  The problem with the diagnoses offered up is that they don’t measure up to the most basic of logical and observable realities. Particularly the industry explanations for a city’s demise. Indeed, the departure or decline of already established forms of work would far more likely signal an economic renaissance whereby the economy of a city evolves with the times, with abundant wealth the result.  One of the best examples of this is the richest city in the world, New York City. What’s perhaps been forgotten is that as recently as the 1920s more manufacturing in total dollar value took place there than any other American city. Fast forward to the present, it’s safe to say that next to nothing consumed by New Yorkers is actually manufactured within the city’s limits. This bears repeating: Less than 100 years ago New York was the U.S.’s top manufacturing hub, whereas today manufacturing there is near non-existent.  Yet despite the above truth, New York remains the world’s richest city.  So what replaced all the manufacturing that disappeared? There are so many answers to this question, but the obvious one is that more advanced forms of commerce did. While Google is based in Mountain View, CA, since 2000 it’s come to amass over 3.5 million square feet of space in Manhattan; much of that office space in what is a former Nabisco factory.  Importantly, the Google story is the norm. Former glass factories are now populated by fancy restaurants meant to serve New York’s well-heeled residents, while sugar plants from the early 20th century have been turned into loft space for wealthy residents in the 21st. New Yorkers “import” food, clothing and glassware made around the world, and this gives them time to pursue higher-yielding work in the culinary arts, advertising, and most prominently there, finance.  Los Angeles is no different. As of 1927 it could claim the 4th most manufacturing output; the City of Angels having come in behind New York, Milwaukee and Flint, MI. More modernly Los Angeles is hardly known as a manufacturing hub, but far from a signal of its demise, the happy fact that much of what used to power the city’s economy is gone similarly signals its positive evolution with the economic times. Rather than make the prosaic that would come at great productivity costs for some of the greatest minds in the world, Los Angelenos “import” shoes, televisions and bananas from Italy, Japan and Guatemala, and they pay for those imports with their genius in film, finance, aerospace technology, etc.
Cities like New York thrive precisely because they don’t live in the past, while Detroit continues to implode precisely because it does.