A Thought Experiment Regarding Detroit

People say economics ruined the city. The remaining Blacks (keep in mind that Detroit is 9 Others say like commenter Ishmael that Detroit has a Black problem. Many of Detroit’s problems flow directly from the fact that it is now a 9 Keep in mind that in the US, whenever any huge US city gets around 9 Let’s try a thought experiment: Suppose we had a Stalinist or Stalin-like dictator in the US dedicated to the common good and the greatest good for the greatest number. He would also be, like Stalin, utterly dedicated to the concept of what the right derisively calls “social engineering” on a mass scale. Detroit now is the same under this Stalin-type dictator. US Stalin has had it with Detroit as nothing seems to work. He decides to transform Detroit. Whereas now it’s 9 You still think it would be the same city? Would the 9 I do not think so.

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0 thoughts on “A Thought Experiment Regarding Detroit”

  1. White people at about the socioeconomic level of Detroit’s blacks are different. Not necessarily better, but different. If anything, they are more docile and aimless, except when they are moved to act impulsively. The predatory drive is not as prominent, so I am convinced a random stranger of any race would probably be safer in such a neighborhood. Poor white (think jugalos) are more pathetic than frightening. Physically, the neighborhoods would probably be about equally ramshackle, especially as the economy got inevitable worse.
    It is important to realize that black Detroit wasn’t Black Detroit until the auto industry crashed. It wasn’t paradise, but the people had jobs, and the sense that a better future was in sight.

    1. Ok but if you threw 900,000 White “settlers” in Detroit with its shit economy, would they simply flounder like the Blacks are doing? Or would they somehow create some sort of an economic structure for themselves on their own somehow by creating businesses, fixing stuff up, having money and stuff sent in from outside, etc.?

      1. Hi Robert:
        I appreciate somewhat your introspection which is completely speculative. My parents are both Air Force Veterans, My mother grew up in urban Chicago and my Father is a Dominican Republican native who didn’t get to the USA until he was 9 years old. This idea that more whites would make a city better is far-fetched, because it’s not dealing with the real issue here; and that is “mindset”, Not race. For instance, remember WWII and the Pearl Harbor attack? I have several other examples also for proof.
        Trailer parks in the suburbia areas I grew up near once my parents divorced where certainly 90% white resident- occupied. It wasn’t any cleaner or safer than ones in Texas, which were predominantly occupied by Latino residents. Listed sex offenders were able to rent a trailer as easily as a known sex offender in the trailer ‘barrio’.
        Long before any of that, there’s a little story about such an issue in the Bible. The people under Moses regime, were freed from slavery in Egypt, and yet dug a trench in a wilderness; never living in the land the Hebrew God promised them to inherit, because of their mindset. Moses dies and under the new regime a Hebrew leader named Joshua leads the ‘Descendants’ of those freed slaves into a land promised first to their parents. So, we see again, it’s not about race, but mindset.
        It’s the whole reason, one person works to build an empire and in the next generation,it crumbles entirely… but then a descendant of a parent just happy to make ends meet with a laundering ‘side hustle’ turns that idea into a well renown Laundry and Dry Cleaners “chain”.
        Finally, even Jesus makes a parable out of this concept, with Luke 19:12-27… to prove it’s not what you have been given, but how you use it. Furthermore, how you use it doesn’t depend so much on your race, but rather, what your mind esteems (estimate) the worth of what you have.
        If you’re uneducated about estimations and utilization, then you suffer loss. If you utilize and estimate well, then you get more to utilize.
        Please NOTE: I am by no means making an excuse for ignorance here. Ignorance doesn’t justify being uneducated, I’m just declaring what lack of education, experience, and practice will yield for an individual.
        We live in a society where (in my mind) if you know how to get YouTube, FaceBook, or MySpace to broadcast intimate details of your life, (despite how non-interesting/lewd they are) then you ought to know how navigate the internet and learn something: particularly, when there are parts of the world, where education, regardless of race, status, or gender are still prohibited, amid Americans who have libraries all over the place. Even if you don’t check a book out of the library, you can read it while you are there.
        In conclusion, all things, even errors of the past are useful to make better estimates in the future. So, if Black Detroit suffers that loss, a willingness to learn from it should inspire them and any other neighborhoods, regardless of which racial percentage is highest within it. Moral of the story? IF a majority of 90% of ANY people has a wrong mindset, their environment will be affected for the wrong and is ultimately destined for ruin in the long run. God Bless!

    2. Be wary of the “correlation is not causation” trap, and also there’s some confounding in your thought experiment. Let’s fix that.
      First we must travel back in time say 150 years, and strip this group of whites of all their money, plop them in a foreign country, make them work for free with no way to accumulate wealth or knowledge other than by oral tradition until death by natural cause, exhaustion, or subversive related beatings. Then we do this for another generation or two, all the while taking the offspring from parents as soon as they can work and geographically dispersing them and giving them the same life as their parents. Then after 150 years of this – poof – we tell them they are “free”. and spend another 20 years harassing them when they try to homestead, and force them to mass migrate to another part of this foreign country where there are low knowledge, learn on the job, factory jobs and a booming economy. Then we pull the plug on this utopian economy (with stable increasing living costs and good wages) within 30 years of the mass migration. All capital and job creation is removed for 300 miles with no other types of jobs of the locals trade or skill being available. The normal pressures on an ecosystem like property taxes, fresh food distribution, police/fire services, and yes even library/school costs all strain to the point of shutting down and scaling way back. Oh and the 6% of original people who built the city or capitalized it, the people with savings or great wealth exit the city and never look back.
      Now, we have a fair comparison.
      About the closest anecdotal evidence for success or failure (with similar conditions of the initial population) I can come up with is a mass migration of poverty stricken foreigners into NYC during early economic cycles. I’m pretty sure these waves resulted in lots of crime, illegal activities, gangs, prostitution, violence, etc. However, a big difference being that the firehose of capital never quite left NYC, it only increased – though much later on. This afforded NYC the ability rebuild and repopulate neighborhoods with taxpaying workers, many educated outside of NYC itself. So, observation today makes it look like a success, when there is confounding in this example too.

      1. So you agree that it is a slave culture problem. It takes time, but there are millions of very low income European and Asian immigrants that faced horrible discrimination as well. After a few generations and thanks to openness in society, most of these immigrants left their Chinatowns and Little Italys (some stay to maintain culture) to work with the broader populace. Ghetto blacks continue the slave mentality by having the White man pay for their living and not having the family/social values to gain an education or to become ambitious.
        I’m a socialist. But I’m a big believer in socialism working in societies that see everyone as their brother. I live in a middle class neighborhood. We have many barbeques and there are a good handful of black homeowners that join us and they are equally as smart as my white neighbors socially. I would trust them the key to my home.
        But when certain immigrant groups build barriers for themselves, isolate themselves, you get a LOW TRUST society outside of a certain ethnic group. It also explains why red states usually have a more visible and isolated ethnic minority, while racially homogenous states, like Vermont and Bernie Sanders, are able to elect socialists. It may explain gun laws and distaste for entitlement spending.
        I’m a big believer in a strong social/family structure, despite being atheist. I mentioned the cult worshipping Mormons and Utah before. I’ve been to Salt Lake City and Ogden.
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ogden_Utah_downtown.jpg
        Majority white, majority religion. It gives the people a standard set of social values, treats everyone like a brother, and puts the Church pretty much in charge of social programs in the state (Mormons donate 10% of their income to the church). Granted, most of that money will be stolen by the higher ups and the aid money will go mostly to poorer people of the same religion, but the sense of community is there. I believe a true socialist state should model their social/culture similar to a religion! I have a nice book full of soviet posters – promoting industrious work, fighting alcoholism (HET!) and promoting healthy families.

  2. Here is another thought experiment about Detroit. Say you are travelling from Chicago to Detroit on a Train at the speed of light. You go past Detroit in the first Nano second. Your problem does not even exist, even beeforee you can say “Detroit”

  3. Bobby Ji, I don’t get it. You declare yourself a socialist, even communist, and are in favor of government handouts year after year, generation after generation, lifetime after lifetime, yet you fail to see how that leads to Detroit?

    1. Welfare can’t work if people are not assimilated. Welfare works in Scandanavian countries because of similar culture and race. It won’t continue if hordes of Muslims come in, don’t assimilate, and continue to get their welfare.

  4. It would probably depend on the kind of white people. If those white people were educated yuppie types, Detroit would definitely be in a much better state. However, if it were poor or working class types, while it would be in better shape than black Detroit currently is, it would probably resemble West Virginia in many ways.

    1. Can’t equate redneck fishing/hunting/rural types with urban white workers. The ‘Mossy Oak’ culture of dear horns on their pickups and camo gear are dominated by overweight whites that wear suits and tuck their shirt in Charleston. Although there may be a slight culture difference – theyre still the same race and protestant, allowing for a somewhat more stable society. On the lower rungs in terms of progress, no doubt, but there won’t be ‘Rodney King’ like riots.

      1. Atlanta has a very large population of middle class to upper middle class black people. Like Chandni said, its mindset, not race. Educated African immigrants could move into Detroit and it would not look the same because they value family, education and work.

        1. Yeah and welfare disincentivizes two parent family formation, education and work. But Clinton made some welfare reforms in office, which were good.

        2. Work incentives were torn down by executive order from Obama recently. The welfare has changed. But welfare is not the root of the problem. It’s changing the crabs in a barrel ghetto mentality, which is a harder process.

        3. “Atlanta has a very large population of middle class to upper middle class black people”
          Seriously? Ever been here or just opening your pie hole? Atlanta is a highly racially divided city with middle class to affluent whites in the northern suburbs, a good mix of poor to middle class whites and blacks in town and extremely poor blacks on the Southside who are the majority. More are more “cities” are breaking away from this already small city and I give it 15 years before it becomes a collection of highly polarized hoods.
          The airport is awesome though. All operated by blacks.

      2. Gentrification was 10-15 yrs back. Nowadays it is the whites from up north directly moving into upper class neighborhoods in the northern suburbs. In Atlanta’s case, it is called urban sprawl.

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