#RUST BELT AMERICANA FREE#
Central Europe found itself in free fall in the 1990s when the Soviet Union abruptly ended. But another example, central Europe, is overlooked. The most common examples of similar challenges are the United Kingdom and Germany.
But if we were to attempt a bolder and more holistic approach to reviving these regions and helping some of their struggling factory towns-without relying solely on public finance-what would it look like? From Despair to Dynamo in Industrial SilesiaĪmerica is not the first country to find itself at this point on the industrial curve.
Ideological commitments of both the Right and the Left have prevented the implementation of the sort of development efforts necessary to revive distressed regions. The solution likely involves all of the above, but so far we have refused to embrace a sufficiently comprehensive strategy. Others have contemplated bringing back industry by using the region’s energy boom, skilled labor pool, and university backbone. Solutions such as casinos, convention centers, and water parks have been offered in an attempt to attract the creative class through urban renewal. Other cities such as Dayton, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana, struggle with economic devastation, population loss, and declining educational attainment. When those firms faltered, their locales were left with outmoded assets, environmental issues, and legacy pension liabilities, while the country’s economic dynamism refocused elsewhere.įar from being uniform, regional centers like Columbus, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh have always been more economically diversified with finance, retail, and thriving academic centers. Contributing to this trajectory were cities that grew up around single firms (like steel in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania), often shielding dominant producers from the need to remain competitive and innovative. The country never addressed these issues on a national level, instead allowing the rise of one region to offset the fall of another. The migration of manufacturing to the South or offshore, automation, and increased competition caused large declines in output and employment. The United States experienced great shifts that gave rise to the Rust Belt.
While solutions remain elusive, the region continues to miss out on the lion’s share of the country’s vast capital resources, with over 80 percent of venture capital funding going to California, Massachusetts, and New York, and most foreign direct investment concentrated on the coasts. Rust Belt serves as an instrument of blame in a divisive political climate. Today, the term Black Belt generally encompasses a stretch of counties from Virginia down through the Deep South and including parts of Texas and Arkansas.Large swaths of Pennsylvania, New York, and the Midwest have stagnated for decades, resulting in unrecovered job losses nearing 60 percent in some parts of the region since the 1950s.
Later, and especially since the war, the term seems to be used wholly in a political sense - that is, to designate the counties where the black people outnumber the white. The part of the country possessing this thick, dark, and naturally rich soil was, of course, the part of the South where the slaves were most profitable, and consequently they were taken there in the largest numbers. So far as I can learn, the term was first used to designate a part of the country which was distinguished by the colour of the soil. Washington described the evolution of the Black Belt: That stretch eventually became associated with the slaves who tended to the land, and the term expanded to include the greater region where slavery and cotton farming was widespread. The term originally referred to a specific stretch in central Alabama known for its dark, fertile soil. The Black Belt is a region of the Southern US with a history of slave plantation agriculture and a high African-American population.
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