I’ve been spending a lot of time playing the game Geoguessr on the internet. It’s a great game where it shows you an image somewhere in the world and you have to figure out where on earth the image is from. I like it so much I’m paying for it, lol.
But one of the things that immediately becomes evident as soon as you spend any time exploring pictures of the world (streets mostly, admittedly, because it uses Google maps as its image source), is the IMMENSE amount of decay that has occurred in the world. And by decay at the outset I mean physical decay, meaning you can actually see it.
When American drive around all the small towns that were built by previous generations during the great centuries long expansion across first the east then the midwest then the west, as I have done multiple times and am about to do again next week, what they often say is how sad it is that many towns and even cities seem like shells of their former selves.
I am currently very struck by this in California, because I am visiting their more often because my daughter is in college. Suburban LA is in physical decay. The infrastructure that was built there in the 20th century now seems old and decrepit, often. And of course across the entire span of American geography you can see the same thing almost everywhere you go, as people have built and them moved on.
But I think it’s pretty important to differentiate between this “move on” effect and actual societal decay. That you have a ghost town is NOT a sign of societal failure, at all. It’s only a sign that whatever wealth and industry was once there has MOVED. I like to think of the “brain drain” as a kind of leading indicator on this. If you have the smartest people and the most industrious people moving to other locations, the physical decay is sure to follow.
Now all of this is common sense. People move on. Big deal right? But really the question becomes what happens next. If you play a Geoguessr game in Greece, the sheer amount of “moving on” that has occurred over the millenia makes it seem as if the entire country is living in the past if you “drive” around many of the greek isles or rural greece in the game.
But here’s the thing. Often, bigger, newer cities are absolutely thriving. Or older towns and cities have rebuilt themselves into something different and new, using those aspects of the former infrastructure where they can, but often just building right along aside it, or tearing it down and replacing it.
I’ve been struck by the sheer number of people during COVID who believe that the ghost town in flyover america is a sign of societal decay that is somehow different from what has occurred FOREVER in the past. I’m not sure. I think America has just now gotten old enough that we are leaving all our “moving on” detritus all over the place, and it seems like societal decay.
No doubt it is true that much of the industry and efficiency in the world, and much of the thought leadership, will now come from places like Indonesia, China, India, the Phillipines and Africa. Recently the amount of professors moving from America to China exceeded the number of professors moving from China to America for the first time. Is this a sign of societal decay? I guess so, in relative terms. But we shouldn’t confuse the physical remnants for societal decay.
It’s extremely hard to argue that societal decay is underway during such an long extended period of global economic growth and very broad increases in most basic human standards of living across the entire planet. Some places inevitably decline, but they are almost invariably replaced by other new centers.
