• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1103 0

of the nation’s wealth. Forty-five years ago, New York was in fact the Empire State, its per capita income about 60 percent above the nation’s average. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Jersey ranged from 37 to 55 percent above the nation. No longer. A 1976 study for the New York State Economic Development Board disclosed that after adjusting for the region’s higher living costs, the “real” income of the average citizen of the Northeast was 1 percent below the national average. The region’s economic growth rate has lagged behind every other region in the country. Between 1975 and 1977, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, employment in the Northeast inched up 2.1 percent—three times slower than the next slowest growth region, the North Central.

Economic stagnation afflicts many older cities. Every time they construct a new building, Detroit and St. Louis, like New York, proclaim the resurgence of their downtown areas; but these downtowns cannot compete with Broadway (ever think of vacationing in Detroit or St. Louis?) nor do they hide the population and job loss mirrored in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Gary, Buffalo, New Orleans, Trenton, and other aging cities. A nationwide Gallup poll, taken in late 1977, found that 36 percent of all urban residents would vacate cities if they could, with overcrowded conditions and crime cited as the chief reasons. The unemployment rate among black Americans, who crowd older cities, is twice that of whites and higher than any time since World War II. The median income of blacks has gone up 105 percent in the last ten years; black poverty has decreased, as has the salary gap between whites and blacks. Still, ten years after the national Commission on Civil Disorders warned that America was moving toward “two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal,” the average median income of a black family ($9,252) is about 60 percent that of the average white family ($15,537). A more recent Rand Corporation study said it was 75 percent. Teenage black unemployment is almost three times greater than for whites—double the gap that existed in the mid-1950’s. Nationally, over 50 percent of all black births were illegitimate in 1976; one of every three black youths is supported by welfare. Public schools are more segregated, and the education levels achieved by blacks—central to competing for the growing number of white-collar jobs—is far behind that of white Americans. “A lot of black kids simply feel they don’t count, and they don’t,” says black psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint. “In terms of what makes this society run, they’re expendable.”

The nation’s economy is hardly robust. Inflation is growing faster than income. True, as I write this, the gross national product and consumer spending are expanding, and personal incomes and housing construction are advancing at a brisk pace; in February 1978, the jobless rate was 6.1 percent, the lowest level in three years. But, here again, we run into the water glass problem. At the end of 1977, 92 million Americans were working; nearly 7 million were not. Looking at those figures, the Commissioner of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, Jules Shiskin, told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, “We ought to be cheering.… In terms of unemployment and in terms of gross national product, we are doing better in the current expansion than in any previous expansion in history.” The glass was half full, as it was for Gerald Ford when he boasted of growing employment in 1976 (and opponent Jimmy Carter complained of growing unemployment).

To the Chairman of the Committee, Senator William Proxmire, the glass was half empty. “We have lost our sense of outrage, and complacency has set in,” he scolded Shiskin. “… the continuation of today’s high unemployment is a tragedy for nearly 7 million Americans and is costing the federal government some $54 to $60 billion annually.”

Some “facts” are hard to dispute. Decomposition, which attacks our older cities, also plagues America’s aging industries—often for the same reasons. The lagging productivity