The Rust Belt's Future

"The collapse of America’s industrial heartland into the Rust Belt was part of the price... of the economic shift that turned America from an industrial economy that produced most of its own goods and services at home to a global power that imported most of its manufactured goods from overseas," reminds John Michael Greer — Betting on the Rust Belt. Now, "America is learning the hard way, as Britain did a century ago and Spain a century and a half before that," Mr. Greer writes, "that the sheer economic burden of maintaining a global military presence is quite capable of pushing even the richest nation into bankruptcy."

Given the above, he makes "a gamble, and a distinctly contrarian gamble at that:" "Among the likely beneficiaries of these changes are the towns that thrived best in an earlier, more regional economy -- those that are well served by rail and water transport, surrounded by farming regions that don’t depend on irrigation, not too far from major markets, and provided with ample and inexpensive real estate for the factories and warehouses of a downscaled and relocalizing industrial economy."

Mr. Greer's earlier thoughts on the subject were summarized in this earlier post of mine — A Rust Belt Renaissance?