What the heck happened to Detroit?

Detroit population by year.

Detroit was first settled by the French in the 1670s as a fur trading outpost. It was formally established in 1701 by Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who constructed a fort to assert French interests against the British (and became the namesake of a famous American luxury car).

Strategically located on a long narrow waterway connecting two of the Great Lakes, Huron and Erie, Detroit is named by the French word for strait, détroit. It is a cruel irony that Detroit is both named by a strait and is, economically, in dire straits. It was a long story, peaked by strength and glory, but ultimately ending in ignominy and bankruptcy.

Detroit became famous for manufacturing automobiles, and that required steel and labor. Both were readily available, with workers flocking to the city from all over the country. Situated within a golden triangle of easily accessible natural resources, Detroit was able to tap into iron ore in Minnesota, coal in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and limestone in Michigan. A network of canals, railroads, and lake shipping made all the components of steel cheap to find and transport.

Not one to depend on the vagaries of supply, Henry Ford built the huge Rouge River complex to manufacture steel and glass, produce electrical power, cast engine blocks, and otherwise keep his Detroit production lines humming. Detroit in the 1950s reached its apex with a population approaching two million and hundreds of thousands employed in the auto industry. The days of “Leave it to Beaver” and the new Ford Thunderbird were idyllic, prosperous, and exciting. But it would never be so good again.

On July 18, 2013, Detroit declared bankruptcy. The city suffered a spectacular failure, with debt estimated as much as $20 billion. From a peak of nearly two million, the New York Times portrayed the city as “home to 700,000 people, as well as to tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, vacant lots and unlit streets.” Crime was rampant. The disaster was immense.

PBS Newshour on December 13, 2013, presented an investigation into the causes of Detroit’s collapse. In a program titled “How Detroit Leaders Ignored Causes of Bankruptcy for 65 Years,” economist Dr. Lew Mandell delved into the precipitous decline.

One major factor was the slowness of the Big Three auto makers to respond to the demand for small, fuel efficient cars following the Arab oil embargo in 1973. This created a huge opportunity for upstarts Toyota, Honda, and Datsun (Nissan today). Ford, GM, and Chrysler offered a weak slate of small cars with poor options and not-so-good fuel economy. The die was cast.

But there was a more serious problem. The Big Three were supported by a raft of other small manufacturers. According to Mandell, they became very discontented.  “Manufacturers, other than the big-three, felt so poorly treated by state and local government in terms of high business taxes, oppressive worker’s compensation laws and hostility to business that many were ready to move elsewhere.” And indeed they did.

With the departure of businesses came an inevitable increase in unemployment. Mortgages were foreclosed, houses abandoned. Crime rates soared. Whites escaped to the suburbs. Middle class blacks did as well. Vast sections of Detroit became a wasteland as the tax base evaporated. Huge commitments to public union pensions, with little income to fund them, made bankruptcy inevitable.

A sad story with no redemption except, perhaps, in learning a lesson. Mandell reviewed studies of business climate and found that Detroit and Michigan made employers unwelcome. Onerous regulations and taxes burdened employers to the extent that they simply left. Atlanta and Charlotte and many other cities were the beneficiaries of Detroit’s burdensome policies. While the anti-capitalists among us may hate business, it is clear that Detroit fervently wished it had kept some.

Locally, there is another great example. According to a recent Forbes survey of business climate by state, Massachusetts ranks 13^th while Michigan is 47^th and Rhode Island 48^th.  It is no accident that Massachusetts has an unemployment rate of 6.5%, Michigan 7.7%, and Rhode Island 9.0%. It is fun to hate business, to castigate fat cats, but when they take the jobs away, we all suffer. It’s a lesson that Detroit has learned, and Rhode Island is wrestling with.

Remember that government produces nothing. It is said that taxing our way to prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket, trying to lift himself by the handle. It’s a tough lift.

Living with Bambi

US Route 20 originates in Kenmore Square, Boston, and proceeds westward over 2,300 miles to the east entrance of Yellowstone National Park. If you invest five days of driving, you can make the trip that took early explorers up to half a year.

The park, comprising nearly 3,500 square miles, is situated on the Yellowstone Caldera, the largest supervolcano in North America. As a result, it offers many geothermal features such as geysers (think Old Faithful), hot springs, fumaroles, and mudpots.

It is also home to 4,000 bison (American buffalo) and 20,000 elk, large herds which present huge pressure to the ecosystem. These ungulates (hooved animals) compete for grasses, bark, and leaves, and have actually changed the appearance of Yellowstone. This is largely due to the interventions of man as we, perhaps answering deep tribal fears, exterminated the only significant predator in the park – the grey wolf.

To hear the National Park Service tell it, “By the mid-1900s, wolves had been almost entirely eliminated from the 48 states.”

While farmers and ranchers and park game managers initially thought this a good thing, shockingly, we found that removing a natural predator cannot be done without effect.

As elk and bison stripped the river banks of shoots and leaves and grasses, the natural willow groves were decimated. Beaver populations plummeted and their dams disappeared. River banks collapsed during flood season and river courses straightened as the flow increased. Species of fish and songbirds declined as the biodiversity of the ecosystem became less robust. The ungulate herds became less healthy as starvation and disease ravaged their ranks.

Finally coming to their senses, park managers determined in the early 1990s to reintroduce the wolf population. Not without controversy (hunting outfitters and neighboring ranchers were staunchly opposed), a small number of Canadian wolves were captured and released into the park in 1994 and 1995. Initially numbering only 15-20 wolves, the several packs now total about 450.

In the nearly twenty years since this experiment commenced, what have we seen? First, the bison and elk herds have been trimmed and are, overall, much healthier. The wolves prey on the sick and the weak: only the strong survive. While this could be considered very tough love, the bison and elk are the better for it.

But more unexpectedly, the ecosystem itself has become healthier. The willow groves have rebounded and river banks solidified by trees and grasses and other plants. The rivers themselves have resumed their lazy, more curvaceous course. Beavers have returned with their dams creating pools, friendly conditions for fish and amphibians. Songbirds once again nest in the willows.

The park is, overall, much more balanced and healthy than it was twenty years ago. All due to the reintroduction of a feared predator.

What does this augur for our highly populated eastern regions? It is not likely that folks will be agitating for the return of wolves and cougars to Boston and Foxboro and the like. But we will pay the price.

Local homeowners are familiar with having their shrubbery stripped by deer during a hard winter. The deer herd itself suffers from malnutrition and disease. Anyone who has collided with a deer rues the damage to their car and mourns the poor animal they crippled or killed.

What’s the answer? Perhaps only to keep an open mind regarding human predation of the deer herd. Those few who choose to hunt are providing a service that we won’t allow wild predators to perform. We might consider the idea of harvesting deer and donating the venison to homeless shelters.

The lesson from Yellowstone is that predation, from wolves or otherwise, is necessary for a healthy ecosystem. Man’s intervention has been historically unwise. Let’s try to do better.

Knowledge is Power

Huge 3D printers will build houses.

In the 1961 film “The Errand Boy”, Jerry Lewis plays the part of a mailroom clerk serving a sprawling Hollywood studio. The movie depicts Lewis and his band of fellows as they deliver mail and scripts and revisions and memos between hundreds of offices. In typical Lewis fashion, there are lots of laughs as items are misdelivered and paper flies everywhere.

The mailroom was a classic entry opportunity into the business world. Mail clerks, if assiduous, could learn the business, gain knowledge, and begin to rise within the organization. The mailroom was a common feature of many businesses as disparate as banks, grocery chains, manufacturers, and hospitals. They all had in common the need to distribute information between knowledge workers in a variety of departments, a function the mailroom was designed to fulfill.

But the number of mailroom jobs is quickly dwindling and the culprit is obviously the rise of digital technologies. Email and text messages and a variety of other technologies have sharply reduced the need for human clerks to move physical representations of information from place to place. We now increasingly move information as bits over the internet, not physical pages made of atoms. Bits don’t require clerks as atoms do.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the fastest growing and most rapidly declining occupations over the next ten years.  Not really surprising, health care, computer, and construction jobs are ascendant. Equally not a shock is that apparel manufacturing, federal postal work, and sugar and confectionary production are on the decline.  A combination of dietary evangelism, technological shifts, and globalization has created winners and losers in the job market.

There is yet another technological revolution on the horizon which may wreak havoc with skilled machinists and a number of other occupations – 3D printing.

Everyone is familiar with the concept of metal working, where milling machine or lathes are used to manufacture precision parts. These parts are then combined with others, screwed, bolted or glued together to create a final product or component such as an airplane wing or an artificial limb.

3D printing turns this time honored approach on its head. The thing to be produced is first represented, in its entirely, as a  highly detailed computer file. This information is then processed by a machine which miraculously turns the description of the thing into the thing itself.

The machine, a three dimensional “printer,” is called such because the basic mechanism is reminiscent of the old dot matrix printer.  A dot matrix computer printer utilizes a print head which moves left and right across a page and deposits tiny dots of ink to create letters and numbers and graphics; patterns of dots which finally become your recipe for tomato soup or a letter to mom.

Now imagine a “print head” that can move in three dimensions – vertically as well as two horizontal directions – and instead of ink, exudes bits of material which harden on contact. Processing the detailed design file, the 3D printer patiently “paints” the thing itself, building up layers as it sweeps back and forth. It can take many hours, but an actual object, such as a coffee cup or piece of jewelry, finally emerges.

Long a curiosity of hobbyists, 3D printers were little more than expensive toys. But continued refinement has vastly improved their capabilities. For instance, Boeing now uses 3D printers to create certain airplane parts. Medical researchers are printing human body parts, such as kidneys and livers, and while this is still in the experimental stage, the prognosis is good.

A University of Southern California team is building a huge 3D printer designed to create buildings. Exuding concrete, this machine will be capable of creating houses or other structures, complete, from the ground up.

This technology is truly amazing and will revolutionize how we humans create objects in our world. But what does all this mean on the job front?

Like other disruptive technologies, it will destroy some occupations but create many others. It is difficult to precisely predict the job skills demanded in this new world. But for our children, a solid education including language and computers and mathematics seems a good bet. The successful worker of tomorrow will need to be literate in many ways.

As we were all taught, knowledge is, indeed, power.

Winter and fortitude

The 2014 Winter Olympic Games are over and the verdict is in: Norway placed second in gold and third in total medals behind the United States and Russia.

But stop and think a moment. Norway has a relatively tiny population of 5.1 million, some 1.5 million less than the state of Massachusetts. If Massachusetts were a country and garnered Olympic medals at the same rate as Norway, we would have walked away with the world’s top honors.

This puts into perspective the remarkable Norwegian achievement, whose winter athletes won medals on par with world superpowers. How can this be?

Obviously, Norway is geographically located in the far north. Its capital, Oslo, is farther north than Juneau, Alaska, and the country extends well past the Arctic Circle. Norwegians live winter ten months of the year.

But these simple facts don’t begin to tell the story of this tenacious people, their extreme mental and physical toughness. For that, we must turn to the historic exploits of Jan Baalsrud and the Norwegian villagers who saved him.

During World War II, Norway was occupied by the Nazis. It was a dark time, as Hitler’s forces turned the Scandinavian Peninsula into their northern fortress. The Germans launched Norwegian-based submarine raids against supply convoys destined for Russia. Air patrols projected control over the North Sea. Nazi troop concentrations convinced Sweden to maintain its uneasy neutrality.

Worse, Norway’s abundant hydroelectric power was at the heart of Hitler’s nuclear energy program. If successful, the war’s outcome would have been grim and quick, with Hitler as the new world ruler. This could not be allowed to stand.

Jan (“yahn”) Baalsrud was one of a patriotic band of Norwegian resistance fighters. Early in the war he escaped to Russia and eventually arrived in England, where he was recruited into an elite commando unit. After completing a grueling training program, he was assigned a dangerous mission to disrupt a Nazi airfield and recruit others into the resistance.

Departing from the Shetland Islands in late March, 1943, aboard the fishing cutter Brattholm with a crew of eight, Baalsrud and three other commandos were covertly landed on the Norwegian coast. Through a tragic mistake, they made contact with a Nazi sympathizer having the same name as their intended contact. Not knowing their cover was blown, they returned to the boat to prepare their weapons and explosives.

The next morning, the Brattholm was attacked by a Nazi patrol boat. To avoid the capture of sensitive codes and materiel, the crew sank her using a time delay fuse and eight tons of explosives. The crew and commandos set out in a small boat which was promptly sunk by cannon fire. Baalsrud and the others swam to shore, now teeming with troops, and attempted to evade capture. All were killed except Baalsrud, who, soaking wet and missing one boot, managed to kill a Gestapo officer and escape into the icy mountains towering 3,000 feet over the sea.

And then began a two-month, desperate bid for survival, aided by villagers at great risk to themselves. They dared not allow Baalsrud to stay in their homes, as the Gestapo would shoot an entire family if discovered. But they provided him with skis and sent him into the mountains to a hidden hut. Snow blind, frostbitten, and near death, Baalsrud managed to survive between the very occasional deliveries of provisions by the villagers, who could not allow the Nazi’s to detect their mountain forays.

As a measure of his grim ordeal, Baalsrud was forced to amputate his own toes to prevent the spread of gangrene. This rough surgery was extraordinarily painful but ultimately successful.

Eventually, the villagers managed to convey Baalsrud into the high, frigid interior plateau where they met a group of native Lapps. The Lapps agreed to carry him to safety in Finland using reindeer-drawn sleighs. Baalsrud survived, spent seven months in a Swedish hospital, and returned to England. After learning to walk again without toes, he resumed his role as a commando, training others and eventually returning to Norway as a freedom fighter.

This short narrative gives only a slight hint of the physical and mental fortitude of the Norwegian people. The full story involves cross country skiing at high speed to escape vehicle-mounted Nazi patrols, and skiing uphill thousands of feet into frozen mountains and glaciers, all while blinded by wind-whipped snow.

No, it is small wonder that Norway won so many gold medals. In games, as in life, they are toughened by winter. Something to which New Englanders can certainly relate.

Of hungry ducks and private property

Diving duck (scaup)

Consider the scaup (diving duck). On an early February day at low tide, upper Narragansett Bay, the duck is diving for clams, oysters, and mussels. Each time spending fifteen seconds or more under water, swimming and foraging vigorously, he often comes up empty. Only to take a deep breath and go down again into the icy depths.

This is an application of search theory. Search theory is claimed by several fiefdoms of bright scientists. Economists think it has to do with buyers or sellers who can’t immediately engage a trading partner and are thereby obligated to search for one. Military strategists are certain that search theory pertains to locating enemy submarines or finding the black box from a downed aircraft. Biologists use it as a tool to describe foraging behavior in species as disparate as early humans, wolf packs, and herds of elephants.

They are all right. Search theory has to do with optimizing success while minimizing time and energy spent in the search. And searching for food is fundamental to all living organisms.

Diving ducks employ search theory to locate mollusks, their primary sustenance. Honed by millions of years of evolution, their search techniques are polished to maximize results while minimizing time and energy expenditures. The outcome is mortal. If they expend more energy in searching than they gain in prey, they will perish.

This particular scaup, on his fifth dive, is successful and surfaces with an oyster in his beak. And is immediately accosted by a marauding seagull who steals the oyster and flaps off to enjoy his purloined meal. The scaup, its energy expended and wasted, must initiate a new search. This could be deadly, as each unsuccessful search in the frigid water drains his vital life force.

Which underscores the importance of private property. In early human times, weaker tribes were plundered by stronger and had their livestock and stored grains stolen. The result was often a gruesome death by starvation, especially if this occurred in the depths of winter. 

In the Middle Ages, the hard life of peasant farmers was one of overwork and difficult survival as they were forced to give up most of their production to feudal lords. This was a long, dark era with much poverty and little to recommend it. It all began to change with the Magna Carta in 1215, when the rights of the king's subjects began to be recognized.

The evolution of individual rights brought stability and countered these lawless expropriations. Individuals and families and traders were able to benefit from their labor, storing the fruits thereof and building a strong community capable of withstanding severe winters and occasional droughts. Governments began to enshrine the concept that producers owned the product of their labor, motivating them to produce more.

As technology developed and surpluses increased, protected by private property laws, society was able to spin off musicians and artists and sculptors, as not every individual was required to produce food for everyday survival. Private property encouraged the production of surpluses, and protected them. But it also required that consumers must purchase foodstuffs from the producers.

A bad bargain? No, unless you’d prefer that each individual spend all their waking hours producing food for survival. That would be turning the clock back 10,000 years.

The next time you hear the concept of private property vilified, imagine competing with your neighbors to pick the local apple trees bare and hunt down every rabbit and deer in the nearby woods and fields. Bare knuckle brawls and all, as you struggled for your family’s survival.

The anarchist movement, such as  Occupy Wall Street who eschew private property, want to take you for a trip in the way-back machine. Might not be as delightful as you think. At least the scaup doesn’t think so. If only he could get a restraining order on that seagull.