Ryan Avent has a smart post on the economic geography of the rust belt:
Economic geography tells us that market potential is important. If you want to be a rich place, it helps to be close to other rich places. This is one of the problems with the Rust Belt. Individually, Rust Belt cities are weaker than cities on the east coast — they have smaller economies and less human capital. This is complicated by the fact that they're fairly isolated. The rich cities of the northeast corridor are squeezed together, while Rust Belt cities are far apart — from each other and from the rich cities of the east coast. This means that they have less to work with, and they're less able to leverage that strength in a regional economy. For this reason, I've argued that it's important to invest in individual cities in the Rust Belt, but it's also important to improve connections between the cities. To effectively bring them closer together.[...]High-speed rail could cut travel time between Detroit and Washington from nine hours to three — just a smidge longer than the train ride from Washington to New York, from downtown to downtown. And you'd never have to take your shoes off, unless you wanted to. High-speed rail would also cut a five-hour drive from Detroit to Chicago to just over an hour. Detroit to Cleveland? Just under and hour. Detroit to Pittsburgh? About an hour and a half.
This wouldn't, of course, fix all the problems of the Rust Belt, and it might not even fix many of them. But it would make it somewhat easier for folks to open major businesses in the area. With better transit, the advantages of cheap real estate might begin to match the disadvantages of distance. Meanwhile, I'm in part quoting Ryan's post to see if my new tagging scheme works to normalize the blockquote display in Google Reader. If anyone could weigh in on that, I'd be much obliged.Update Rob Farley disagrees. I find his points convincing. I considered writing something in the original post about how it's not clear to me we should be trying to save these cities, rather than offering a robust social safety net so people can go seek out new opportunities, but that seemed both callous and politically unrealistic. Since we're presumably going to waste a lot of money making sure the middle of the country doesn't die off (at which point it either will or will not die off for reasons that are hard to predict or subsidize), I'd like to do it in a way where we end up with more trains. Meanwhile, I'm just glad my blockquotes now work.
