John
Disillusioned
This is such a worthy book on a crucial subject; painful in many places. The author's main background as an education reporter brought him into the story and, to his credit, he realized the larger forces at work and operating nationally as the elites keep fleeing "the last great thing" for the "next great thing" -- except that trying to do that now (now that the overall economy has stopped expansion in real wealth and overall wealth has become ever more grotesquely unequal) means that it's a game of exploding musical chairs, where they keep building a few nice recliner chairs with massage features every round, but most of the chairs have rotted so badly that when someone sits down they end up losing wealth instead of repeating the historic post-war run, where the racial spoils system meant that all the white GIs returning got to get into the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme on the ground floor, while people of color are like people who have to try to run to catch a bus that left the stop ...
He interviewed Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns while writing the book, and Chuck had him on the Strong Towns podcast in early 2024 -- it was a prickly interview because Chuck kept wanting to say "It's not about race, and the Growth Ponzi Scheme victimizes poor people on a race neutral basis" . . . which is only half-right -- because the way we segregated the suburbs through legal means (see "The Color of Law" if you are unfamiliar with the way the racial segregation was anything but happenstance) meant that family wealth has never happened for most families of color, and now that the music keeps stopping more and more as the economy increasingly becomes nothing but casino speculation, it's overwhelmingly the case that the most frequent victims of the exploding chairs in the musical chairs game are the people of color who, had they been allowed to build wealth on an equal basis with whites after WWII, would be vastly ahead of where they are now.
Except for things funded by gas taxes, we've stopped lavishing wealth on the suburbs -- just as the folks who benefited the most from that practice now flee for the exurbs and privatized schools and services.
This is such a worthy book on a crucial subject; painful in many places. The author's main background as an education reporter brought him into the story and, to his credit, he realized the larger forces at work and operating nationally as the elites keep fleeing "the last great thing" for the "next great thing" -- except that trying to do that now (now that the overall economy has stopped expansion in real wealth and overall wealth has become ever more grotesquely unequal) means that it's a game of exploding musical chairs, where they keep building a few nice recliner chairs with massage features every round, but most of the chairs have rotted so badly that when someone sits down they end up losing wealth instead of repeating the historic post-war run, where the racial spoils system meant that all the white GIs returning got to get into the Suburban Growth Ponzi Scheme on the ground floor, while people of color are like people who have to try to run to catch a bus that left the stop ...
He interviewed Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns while writing the book, and Chuck had him on the Strong Towns podcast in early 2024 -- it was a prickly interview because Chuck kept wanting to say "It's not about race, and the Growth Ponzi Scheme victimizes poor people on a race neutral basis" . . . which is only half-right -- because the way we segregated the suburbs through legal means (see "The Color of Law" if you are unfamiliar with the way the racial segregation was anything but happenstance) meant that family wealth has never happened for most families of color, and now that the music keeps stopping more and more as the economy increasingly becomes nothing but casino speculation, it's overwhelmingly the case that the most frequent victims of the exploding chairs in the musical chairs game are the people of color who, had they been allowed to build wealth on an equal basis with whites after WWII, would be vastly ahead of where they are now.
Except for things funded by gas taxes, we've stopped lavishing wealth on the suburbs -- just as the folks who benefited the most from that practice now flee for the exurbs and privatized schools and services.