Cleaning up the town: Dodge City, Starnesville, and Detroit

[syrakusos]

To me, the city is civilization, by definition. ... come from under-reporting.

I am comfortable in rural areas and GOOD towns and cities. ... how much corruption has been tolerated for how long. ... Overall corruption of public officials is by far my biggest criminal concern. Sustained long term crime doesn't happen without it. Fix government official crime, keep people free, and most of the other problems go away. Dennis

We are pretty much on the same page, as we usually are. You and I just have "artistic differences." Fixing government corruption rests on citizens who care to do so. It takes community support for the institutions that are not corrupted. That might be the mayor or the counsel, a prosecutor, or a judge, but also, it will take media. If the newspaper is bought off then you need a TV or radio station. But it does take a concerted effort by people who are involved. Best of all is when corruption does not get so bad that it needs a "moral panic" to fix it.

But fixes, patches, and band-aids seldom work for long.

Take Detroit. Conservatives and liberals will identify the same factor - welfare. Conservatives claim "too much"; liberals say "not enough." That misses the underlying sociology. And it is complicated.

In 1900, Detroit was a fair to middling Midwest town of 250,000. They had a mix of peoples and a mix of businesses because they happened to be on a Great Lake facing a foreign country. It was an entrepot. Come the automotives and it was Brave New World. Mass production; industrialization - people were used where machines were not. Other trends continued Burroughs made adding machines and then computers there. Support businesses such as accounting and law, clothing and pharmacy, all of those were also part of the mix. But the automotives dominated. For three generations you could get "a good job for life" (measured in hourly wages, not quality of work life) without an education. The consequence was that Detroit soon became and remained a town of ignorant people with too much money. That has to include the management and engineering workers as well. Geting a degree and go to work for an automotive was the ticket to a good-paying job for life. One easy choice, a introduction from a relative, and you never have to worry again. Just show up every day, do as you are told, and stay out of trouble. It seemed like a formula for success. For many it was. But every day they all buried Detroit one inch deeper.

The most recent collapse of the automotives was only yet another in a sequence. Some people never learned from history. The automotives suffered shocks in every decade. After every shake-out, the new situation was accepted as "stability."

Through all of this, for three lifetimes, some people grew up, rose up, and moved out. They left behind the immobile and unmotivated, both those born into it and those who immigrated into it.

Contrast Detroit with Muncie, Indiana. In their classic studies of 1937, sociologists Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, called it "Middletown." Similar to Detroit, for instance, the Ball glass factory provided stories of industrialization, mechanization, and what we call today "de-skilling." And the young workers were all for it. They did not want to learn the craft of glass. They wanted to learn to operate machinery, because that was the future they saw. And they were right... as far as that went. Enter "corruption muncie indiana" into a search engine and read as much as you can stand.

I read a story, a narrative passage in a technology biography, about a group that met as graduate students. This was a couple of generations ago when graduate students were more closely bound to a single graduate school or college within the university. They were sitting in the cafeteria, and the biologists got up from the table, excusing themselves, "We have to go start some cultures." Two beats later, one of the sociologists turned to another and said, "I wonder how you could do that..."

[caroljane]

I would be interested in PDS's observations on your above post. Muncie does not have much of a hockey team.