The lead paragraph from a smart piece in The New York Times Magazine that explains why the old jobs are never coming back, and why any politician who says they are is a liar:
As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it’s all tidy and digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay. There’s Newark and Trenton and the heroic wreckage in parts of Philadelphia, block after block of hulking edifices covered in graffiti, the boarded-up ghost neighborhoods of Baltimore made familiar by “The Wire” — all on the line that connects America’s financial center and its booming capital city.
More here.
Have the old jobs ever come back? Not to be a smart ass but what the hell exactly is an old job? And what does neglect of the inner cities have to do with old OR new jobs? Who wants to live right next to train tracks with trains flying by anyway? Some shit in our society should fall down. Other stuff should be torn down. If we stop mining for coal that when burned heats up and fouls our air then all of those old jobs will disappear too. To realize that most politicians are lying scum shouldn’t require a journalism degree from Yale either. Maybe the person who wrote this article for the NYTMagazine should join the ranks of the old jobs never coming back? His editor too.
The “old” jobs actually produced products and engaged humans. The new jobs produce scrip much of it worthless. The new economy is as hollowed out as the real estate bubble. Globalization is efficient only by manipulation of averages as the median declines across the board. We all remember the promises of ranging prosperity made in support of fast tracking NAFTA. It was a lie. The mess we are in is the inevitable result of parasitic trade agreements. Opt out of the whole lot of them and then reset the domestic economy.