How the Americna dream went horribly wrong in Detroit

[Mike_Yates]

This pretty much sums it up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hhJ_49leBw

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

You mean the Liberal Dream...

​

 

[NeverEndingMe]

the pension killed Detroit

 

[RobDownSouth]

You mean the Liberal Dream...

​

Is there ANYTHING the Chief cannot blame on teh Librulz?

 

[Mike_Yates]

Corrupt labor unions brought down the automotive companies, which were the only thing holding Detroit's economy together.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Corrupt labor unions brought down the automotive companies, which were the only thing holding Detroit's economy together.

Higher quality, energy efficient imports and domestic automakers refusal to adapt to a changing market is what brought down Detroit.

 

[nerfhearder]

Michigan is just a shit place to live. Beautiful but shit. Like Florida it's nice to visit but no way in Hell would I ever live there.

 

[doubleover]

Michigan is just a shit place to live. Beautiful but shit. Like Florida it's nice to visit but no way in Hell would I ever live there.

And in what shithole do you live?

 

[Hypoxia]

Michigan is just a shit place to live. Beautiful but shit. Like Florida it's nice to visit but no way in Hell would I ever live there.

My mom's family couldn't wait to get the fuck out of greater Detroit. That's why they moved to southern California, post-WWII. My partner's mom's family felt the same about North Dakota but they headed to the Bay Area instead. Smart. (Our dads' families had the sense to move West a couple of generations earlier.)

I recall comedienne Diane Ford's take on why so many Scandahoovians settled in the upper Midwest: "Because it was just as fucking miserable as the place they left." Yeah, cold comfort.

Higher quality, energy efficient imports and domestic automakers refusal to adapt to a changing market is what brought down Detroit.

Quite. Detroit's barons pushed Planned Obsolescence (make junk that falls apart in 3 years) and energy-hog rolling battleships, unsafe at any speed. Detroit business practices re: healthcare, financing, lobotomized mass-production, shitty quality control, etc helped too.

What killed Detroit? Arrogance.

 

[oggbashan]

Higher quality, energy efficient imports and domestic automakers refusal to adapt to a changing market is what brought down Detroit.

Exactly the same factors that wrecked the UK automobile (and motorcycle) manufacturers.

Detroit and the UK didn't build vehicles people wanted, didn't invest, didn't change and wondered why people bought Japanese and German.

The UK now builds more automobiles than it ever did - but for foreign companies supplying better quality products.

The UK's equivalent of Detroit was shipbuilding. We couldn't compete with modernised shipyards building better ships at competitive prices.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Exactly the same factors that wrecked the UK automobile (and motorcycle) manufacturers.

Detroit and the UK didn't build vehicles people wanted, didn't invest, didn't change and wondered why people bought Japanese and German.

The UK now builds more automobiles than it ever did - but for foreign companies supplying better quality products.

The UK's equivalent of Detroit was shipbuilding. We couldn't compete with modernised shipyards building better ships at competitive prices.

And here I thought the demise of British shipbuilding was due to the sinking of the "unsinkable" Titanic!

There was an excellent article about the decline and fall of the Intel corporation last week (they laid off 12,000 people). They got myopic like Detroit did, building ever-more powerful energy guzzling superchips, eschewing the low-margin but increasingly more common low-power cell phone cpu chips.

Directly analogous to Detroit's turning up its nose at 4 cylinder cars for years after the 1973 oil embargo. Not enough profit.

#Hubris