04-14-2022, 01:04 AM
(04-13-2022, 03:08 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:(04-07-2022, 02:55 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Millennials will be as much re-builders as builders. They are unlikely to show sentimentality even to GI constructions that have met or surpassed their expected service life -- even if they admire the GI's who built them. I'm tempted to believe that huge swaths of GI-built "starter" homes will give way to huge blocks of high-density housing if housing is to be affordable. I can only hope that such is more attractive than the Stalinist architecture that prevails when construction must be cheap and swift, with ugly blandness as a result. Housing built for a population of 150 million is inadequate for a population of 350 million. Even without the ideology, Stalinist architecture (think of the Pruitt-Igoe Towers) dehumanizes people.
I don't think most millennials outside of the historically minded really think much about the GIs, so that much isn't surprising (if anything, I think generational cycles repeat precisely because of this lost-to-history tendency of the most recent elder generation). Needless to say, we share the same hopes there.
Most people are less knowledgeable about history than is an amateur such as I. At most, people seem to learn how not do do certain things, Millennial adults will reject the political values associated heavily with late-wave practitioners of right-wing politics -- that is, neo-liberalism that has consistently served the elites of ownership at the expense of everyone else. People who don't know the past as intimately have less to protect about that past should they have very different problems to solve. For much that is just as well Recreating the post-WW II experience for a very different and much larger group of Americans will be futile.To simply build the GI world on a scale necessary for twice as many Americans in 2030 as in 2030 would require that the urban area centered on Midtown Manhattan meet the outer fringe of suburbs of Philadelphia while going halfway to Hartford.
As important as our infrastructure and housing stock are, we also have institutional pathologies to meet. Obviously our tax system gives no break to small business while taxes upon the easiest income (economic rents and executive compensation) on the assumption that the profiteers and the masters of bureaucratic intrigue are rewarded richly for already being rich, denying opportunity to others, and exacting the rich fruit of cartels and near-monopolies are the greatest "job creators". They make greater profits from going from manufacturing to importing their wares,thus destroying huge numbers of jobs. Note well that the assembly line was the most reliable escape from mass poverty. Maybe Boomers wanted work more 'meaningful than the mindless monotony of industrial labor. That's fine for those who read Dostoevsky and listen to Brahms -- but far more Americans would rather have a steady paycheck that allows them to patronize amusement parks and NASCAR; most just can't relate to Dostoevsky or Brahms.
Quote:We will need to disperse the American population, especially back to places that in recent times have faced economic ruin. Why not revive places like Detroit, Flint, Dayton, Youngstown, St. Louis, Peoria, Muncie, and South Bend? Detroit, when the center of the auto industry (arguably a good analogue to Silicon Valley in its time) attracted people from around the world when the auto industry was the High Tech of its time. Let's not forget that much of the high technology goes into vehicles these days.
I foresee some exciting infrastructure projects overseen by millennials. They may very well redeem themselves in my eyes if they can pull this off without the confiscatory taxes of the previous 4T and 1T.[/quote]
Overseas... could a bridge be built between Estonia and Finland, countries that share the same tune for their national anthems? Closer to home, the deserts from San Francisco (if recent years of drought are any indication, San Francisco could be known for cactus as it becomes as dry as Phoenix) to El Paso could need copious water from the Canadian Rockies. Such would necessitate huge water projects. We will need new transportation projects to connect people in the exurbs becoming suburbs.
Paradoxically America got away with the "confiscatory" taxes of the last 4T and 1T. Small business was the norm even in retailing, banking, and manufacturing. Personal opportunity did not require a move to hyper-expensive cities. What went wrong was that racist attitudes still permeated American life, whether Jim Crow practice still prevalent in "Kukluxistan", redlining intended to keep blacks away from 'white' neighborhoods, and highway routing that in urban areas ripped well-established black and Hispanic communities. The main effect of "confiscatory" taxes was to keep the middle class from investing in the stock market instead of salting money away in savings accounts.
Americans effectively invested in single-family housing that allowed millions of Americans, many of them assembly-line workers, to enjoy the material comforts of the fictional Ward and June Cleaver... and of course, Beaver. Such seemed a salubrious alternative to the boom-and-bust economy that brought bubbles and panics from the late 1860's to 1929.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
