John Howard, I reached out to you directly about the font issue. Email me if you don’t get my note.

Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” is a must read. I think human beings are frankly hardwired to see the world through a “paradigm”. Even Kant argued as much with his “a priori” knowledge. Perhaps the knowledge itself is somewhat socially constructed, but we seem to have a “world view” that is incredibly resistant to change and through which we process everything.

Greg Blankenship from the Illinois Review. 217-306-5226
Pete Speer from Illinois Review. peterdee99@hotmail.com He wrote a long challenge to IPI about high Speed rail.
Chris Robling from Illinois Review.
Carl Oberg is a Policy Associate for Americans for prosperity. http://americansforprosperity.com/111609-obama-administration-fighting-increase-your-debt. His contact info is not listed on AFP’s site, but I’m sure he can be contacted through channels.

The phenomenon you observe, that older cities seem to decline in productivity as the original industries decline, is encouraged by land regulation and the under taxation of land in urban centers. Landowners are have a positive incentive to withhold land from production, preventing new industries from forming and holding back urban progress. Cities with high taxes on land and low taxes on production and consumption experience a much higher rate of urban renewal.

The pages render extremely-ragged text that is quite difficult to read. IE, however, is clean and contrasty. It’s very readable with IE.

The ‘Meta*’ fonts are a very poor choice.

It’s quite an old phenomena. It’s inertia.

If cities continue to specialize in a key industry that has made them wealthy, it tends to focus on that emphasis until its momentum can no longer be sustained.

Detroit and Pittsburgh are the industrial equivalents of a supply region. So many jobs and business transactions depended on cars and steel that it was too late to shift into another economic sector by the time those industries had diminished.

The people working in those jobs had not gained appreciable skills they could port to create some other value function and business transactions had shifted elsewhere.

The world is also littered with boomtowns that arose to extract resources (mining towns, logging camps, old fishing villages, etc.) then deactivated when the resources had been exhausted.

Even telling was where the modern cities of their time developed. Very few feudal agricultural lands evolved to important cities. The earliest cities sprouted near bodies of water.

Feudal lords were loath to adopt to capitalism, as they saw their land and serfdom as the plentiful bounty that nourished their well-being and influence. Instead, these early cities were able to produce wealth through trade. Soon, one hectare of city land produced exponentially more wealth than a hectare of cropland.

In turn, it enabled a new category in the social order. The term used to be “middle class,” but today it has been simplified to mean an income cohort. The original middle class actually referred to a social function. The middle classes toiled, but they were not serfs. The middle classes possessed some property, but they were not nobility. They managed to create a social hierarchy and set up learning methods, but they were neither monarchy nor clergy. They were somewhere in between these other classes.

This is the precedent to the statement, “If you have a daring new idea, you don’t take it to someone who’s living fat off something which has worked for decades. You take it to someone who is hungry.”

That is how cities came to be.

He concluded that “business was excellent” for existing electronic firms in their old areas of expertise, and they weren’t “geared” for all the gov’t red tape, plus Chicago bankers were content with their current clients and were “indifferent, if not hostile, to small research-based enterprises”.

Sounds mighty similar to what is being described in your (Ryan’s) post, and Rubenstein’s study was in 1962, so at least some people have recognized this dynamic for decades. Does anyone ever learn from it?

At this point perhaps it’s just as well for Chicago to have largely missed out on the big defense aerospace/electronics biz, as the city is doing rather well now, and those industries have since picked up and moved from some of the places in which they centered back in that era (Los Angeles for instance).

Anyway, I like your blog and also many of your reader’s comments.