Inmost City

Big City is flourishing. It’s densely populated, full of bright and industrious citizens. It’s also loud, crowded, and expensive. If you look a couple miles to the west of Big City, however, you will find huge plots of vacant land. This land is so cheap, that for the same price you might pay for an average apartment in Big City, you could instead buy some land and build a big fancy house on it, complete with a backyard and a white picket fence. For most of Big City’s history, nobody has wanted to live on this land because it would simply take too long to walk to work every morning. It was way easier to live close to work and deal with the noise and cramped conditions of Big City. But then, Henry Ford invents the automobile! Suddenly, the commute doesn’t seem all that bad. A bunch of people buy cars and take out bank loans, moving their families west to build the house of their dreams on that cheap, vacant land. Out here, they are no longer officially within Big City limits. They decide to name their new enclave “Suburbville.” 

Continue reading “The Story of Suburbville and Big City”

 

In his book, Sapiens, author Yuval Noah Harari describes the post-agricultural history of human civilization as the history of empire.  The natural resources and means of production for most civilizations throughout our history have been owned and controlled by a tiny ruling class.  For whatever reason, this form of government has been a common configuration, arising spontaneously multiple times throughout human history.  Our current political and economic situation appears to be headed down the same path. Continue reading “Regressing to the mean”

Part I here

 

In Part I of this series I was trying to set the table for everything else.  In summary, I described how the post-WWII United States had emerged from two world wars and the Great Depression in a rare progressive mood.

Continue reading “St. Louis in the Big Picture (Part II): Monopoly and the Capital Markets”

The goal of this website has always been to dig a little deeper into issues affecting St. Louis City.  As I have continued to research and write these articles, it has become clear that the bulk of our problems don’t stem from local mismanagement, despite how good it feels to excoriate our elected officials.  Continue reading “St. Louis in the Big Picture (Part I): How did we get here and WTF happened?”

Unions have been around since colonial times. In the beginning, it was primarily a skilled workers movement. Shoemakers, carpenters, printers, or tailors banded together and utilized the strategy of striking to defend their trades against dilution and lowered wages. If they all simultaneously refused to work, the supply would dwindle and prices would skyrocket. United, they had the required leverage to demand shorter work hours and better wages.

Continue reading “Racing to the bottom with Right-to-Work”

The debate over privatization of Lambert International Airport, a public asset, is just beginning. This local debate will most likely foreshadow a forthcoming national debate over Donald Trump’s infrastructure plan; a topic which will likely play a role in the 2020 presidential campaign if not sooner in the midterm elections.

Continue reading “Privatizing public assets”

In February of 1954, voters in the St. Louis region, City and County, voted to establish a single, unified sewer district. This district would come to encompass the entire region and assume responsibility for the planning, construction, and management of the sewage infrastructure for every municipality in St. Louis. This was consolidation done right. Who would argue that we should go back to a system of fragmented sewer districts?

Continue reading “Effective consolidation”

2017 is drawing to a close, and the number of homicides has surpassed 200 for the first time since the mid-1990s. We all knew it was going to happen, we’ve been outpacing last year’s homicides since mid-summer, but now it’s official. Our New Year will be peppered with the obligatory pessimism that comes along with news like this.

But before we all go and defenestrate ourselves, let’s bring some perspective to these numbers. Here’s a few things to keep in mind:

Continue reading “St. Louis City just passed 200 murders in 2017. Should we panic?”

It’s no secret that the city has been a financial disaster for decades.  Plenty of scorn has been heaped onto us by Missouri Republicans as they gleefully ride the Trump train back to the 1950s.  Democrats are the preferred whipping boy of the moment (at least for now, the tide will turn in a few years and then it will again be the Republicans who are irrationally hated for a period of time.  Back and forth we go until the sovereign debt crisis wipes us all out.), and they have been heavily derided as the cause of every problem we face in St. Louis City, especially the financial problems.

Is this a fair assessment?

Continue reading “A review of St. Louis City’s financial situation”

A lot is said of St. Louis becoming a new tech hub.  In a city which can, at times, seem infested with feral humans completely devoid of respect for life, often the only way we can keep hope for the future is to point to those organizations which are pushing towards a better tomorrow.  Things might be bad now, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Continue reading “A snapshot of the St. Louis startup ecosystem”