A Short Film About Detroit – and a crazy idea for the recession.
Embedding disabled on this, however here is the link.
Why am I choosing to highlight this film? The US car industry is essentially bankrupt, and Detroit is already the equivalent of a failed state within a contracting economy. The median price of a house in Detroit is, staggeringly, less than $10,000. Surely, with a deep prolonged recession it is beyond hope?
The financial sector has been saved by the government, but too late to prevent significant in the ‘real economy’, there will, as a result, be a need for massive government spending to stave off the effects of unemployment. This either happens naturally through conflict or war, or via the preferable alternative of things like the New Deal.
So what should the New Deal Light, New New Deal, or Deal 2.0, or whatever look like? It will have to employ lots of people and will therefore be some kind of large scale industrial project, but it will also have to have a strategic benefit of the type that has the kind of long term return that only governments can consider. In America’s case this obviously will have to do with energy, and more specifically portable energy, and even more specifically portable energy that solves a fundamental problem with the way America uses energy. American planning inextricably revolves around cars more than any other nation on earth, this is a problem that the government can realistically help solve, and only now will it have the stomach to do so.
As Paul Kedrosky predicts, clean tech. “was just given a two-year window to gestate before the major economies worldwide turn higher and begin driving energy prices straight up.”
So my hypothetical proposal is this: nationalize GM and Ford and create a plan to subsidize switch the majority of all cars on the road to the most fuel efficient form possible, using a pragmatic combination of goal driven R&D and industrial scale production, in a realistic timeframe, using whatever means is necessary, and with the zeal of the Apollo Moon Shot.
Is this a crazy idea?