The captivating cover photo of Manhattan’s Empire State and Chrysler spires, presiding over their suburban domain that extends far beyond the horizon (“The suburbs lose, the sun belt fades, New York wins, how the crash will reshape America,” by Richard Florida, The Atlantic, March 2009), suggests to me a high-maintenance administrative superstructure that governs, exploits, and manipulates transnational empires. This global financial nerve center exists because of its ability to exact fees on millions of transactions every day. At such an immense volume of commerce, even minute exactions yield astronomical revenues. In many respects, it appears that New York treats the rest of the nation, if not the world, as its very own cash cow.
I must imagine that the commercial captains presiding over these global empires probably lose sight of the effects that their machinations exert on individuals and small communities out in the hinterlands. If robber barons operating the brain of the economic organism fail to circulate sufficient currency “blood” back to the arms, legs, and other appendages of the economic corpus, the system breaks down. Just as a diversion of blood causes and aneurysm, a diversion of wealth causes atrophy or necrosis of the body economic as well as politic. I suspect that Richard Florida’s rosy scenario for New York City will not work out as predicted if the economic and creative nerve center neglects the body that supports it. The parts cannot survive independent of each other.
Economic recoveries since the 1870s enjoyed tremendous infusions of readily available fossil fuels (Yergin, Daniel, “The Prize,” 1990). As with agricultural production, American and foreign hinterlands provided mineral resources and the profits from their exploitation to the capitals of capital. Humanity’s prior successes have yielded a population load that stretches the planet’s carrying capacity to the breaking point. For this reason, past recoveries fail to guide us through this malaise. Today’s ecological crises and simultaneously the global energy emergency will impinge on this economic recession in ways not seen in the 1930s or 1870s. While Florida’s analysis works for the examples in retrospect, “all else” never remains the same. Whereas I agree with large portions of Mr. Florida’s hypothesis – i.e. a large number of well-educated people in close proximity can usually solve problems more creatively than a dispersed population of poorly educated people – the historic events Florida mentions did not involve generic people or generic places.
The energy transition from coal to petroleum occurring between the Crash of 1873 and the Great Depression of the 1930s injected unprecedented wealth and productivity into the American economy. When U.S. oil production peaked in 1971, we lost not only global price control but the ability to base economic hegemony on cheap oil. Unfortunately, most Americans did not get the memo. For 37 or so years after the oil peak, Detroit continued producing gas-guzzling cars and discouraging development of mass transit alternatives. Automobile and highway interests have kept us locked into a doomed anachronistic transportation system. The home building and mortgage industries aided and abetted petroleum-dependent suburban sprawl and have provided previews of coming attractions. The financial nerve centers in New York and elsewhere did nothing to redirect our path in a more sustainable direction. They seem to remain clueless to the “Long Emergency” that they have helped inaugurate.
Mr. Florida acknowledges that the casualties of a crisis tend to clear the decks and set the stage for the next economic epoch. That sounds optimistic in the broad sweep of history but elides the staggering personal catastrophes that we can expect in the interim, to say nothing of the revolutionary changes necessary to usher in the new era. Florida faults high home ownership for anchoring people to declining places in recent decades – as if to suggest that we should all become mercenary nomadic exiles in our own country and surrender to rapacious corporate landlords who constantly push rents upwards. Florida seems to wax nostalgic about the high-mobility in the 1960s, when gasoline and jet fuel cost very little, travel seemed exciting and fun, and communities came unraveled. Footloose youngsters in the go-go jet era still identified with home towns where their parents lived but failed to ensconce themselves similarly anywhere. The rich still travel but “relocalization” seems a buzzword that increasingly characterizes our attitudes and yearning for community security. The concept of a home town seems to carry a different emotional value for today’s “wired” generation.
Cheap energy enabled the “jet set” era. That has ended. New York will survive and thrive if it nurtures the enterprises that enable the nation to survive in an era characterized by expensive energy and renewable resources. The creative classes who make New York the economic nerve center must find ways to reconnect themselves to the hinterlands or risk the consequences of metastasizing alienation.
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