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roachboy · 06-19-2008, 05:34 AM

the suburban model required considerable infrastructure (roads, highways) which were functions of decisions made at the state level concerning automobiles as the basis for the american transportation model. so it relied on automobile production, was a function of economies of scale...it also relied on the standardization of house construction. it also relied on the transformation of consumer credit right after world war 2, which enabled mortgages to be obtained by people whose socio-economic position would have prevented it before--the gi bill was a big part of this--so you have even at the most general level a combination of public and private, state and corporate actions---and if you push thinking about this into the 1950s, the other element which emerges is a kind of total advertising campaign to sell this model--which worked until it didn't.

from this only 2 points:

the suburban model as it developed after ww2 would not have happened without substantial policy choices entailing the directing of state resources to infrastructure development---it follows then that if the transportation model, and the housing model which is intertwined with it, are being challenged by the price of oil that nothing will necessarily come of it until there are policy-level decisions made to begin transforming infrastructures (like mass transit or rail)....in other words, these are not "market-driven"--that's backward. the other point is linked thereby: people want what they are told they want. we are nice like that. easily managed. so there'd also have to be a substantive marketing campaign, more or less on the order of much of 1950s pop culture, to sell the alternative "way of life"--which over time would become as inevitable and necessary as the current "ways of life" because we are pliable and nice like that as well. what's real is rational, hi de ho.

this is, btw, one of the reasons that the next presidential and congressional elections seem to me so important. whats a bit depressing is that i see obama as somewhat more likely to address these sorts of problems (a statement that makes me squirmy because it repeats this goofball ideology of All Logic Emanating from the Skull of the Leader), whereas mc-cain would in all likelihood try not to address them at all.

06-19-2008, 05:34 AM	#56 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	the suburban model required considerable infrastructure (roads, highways) which were functions of decisions made at the state level concerning automobiles as the basis for the american transportation model. so it relied on automobile production, was a function of economies of scale...it also relied on the standardization of house construction. it also relied on the transformation of consumer credit right after world war 2, which enabled mortgages to be obtained by people whose socio-economic position would have prevented it before--the gi bill was a big part of this--so you have even at the most general level a combination of public and private, state and corporate actions---and if you push thinking about this into the 1950s, the other element which emerges is a kind of total advertising campaign to sell this model--which worked until it didn't. from this only 2 points: the suburban model as it developed after ww2 would not have happened without substantial policy choices entailing the directing of state resources to infrastructure development---it follows then that if the transportation model, and the housing model which is intertwined with it, are being challenged by the price of oil that nothing will necessarily come of it until there are policy-level decisions made to begin transforming infrastructures (like mass transit or rail)....in other words, these are not "market-driven"--that's backward. the other point is linked thereby: people want what they are told they want. we are nice like that. easily managed. so there'd also have to be a substantive marketing campaign, more or less on the order of much of 1950s pop culture, to sell the alternative "way of life"--which over time would become as inevitable and necessary as the current "ways of life" because we are pliable and nice like that as well. what's real is rational, hi de ho. this is, btw, one of the reasons that the next presidential and congressional elections seem to me so important. whats a bit depressing is that i see obama as somewhat more likely to address these sorts of problems (a statement that makes me squirmy because it repeats this goofball ideology of All Logic Emanating from the Skull of the Leader), whereas mc-cain would in all likelihood try not to address them at all. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite