Your geographic location has so much to do with your financial destiny. From the day you are born, it starts having an impact on your economic well-being. If you happen to be American-born or your mother is Swedish or Japanese – you have a leg up from the day you take your first breath. As an added bonus, you’ll probably earn a decade or two of additional longevity just because you entered the planet as a resident of a developed country.
But geographic destiny is not just determined by national borders. If you’re an American – the state or city you live in will very likely have a lasting effect on your economic fortunes. Rust belt cities didn’t rust overnight. Until the 1950’s, Detroit was a vibrant metropolis that beckoned ambitious southerners with offers of high paying union jobs in the automotive industry. At the turn of the last century, Buffalo was one of the highest per capita cities in the country on account of its location as a hub for the bountiful grain that made its way across the Great Lakes from the lush farms of the Mid-West to the East Coast and beyond.
If you look at a map of the most prosperous American cities in the 1940s and 1950s, you will see places like Philadelphia – which has since lost 40% of its population as a result of the demise of its ship building yards. The Japanese and Koreans sailed off with that industry. There are parts of Philadelphia and Detroit that look like ghost towns – some of them littered with long abandoned architectural gems. Of course, Philadelphia is now re-emerging as a city that has every prospect of regaining its past glory. No such luck for Detroit or Buffalo or dozens of other former vibrant municipalities that have fallen on hard times. So forget about WC Fields – I’d rather be in Philadelphia.
It breaks my heart when I visit Syracuse where I spent some of the happiest years of my life. It was in the early eighties but the writing was already scrawled on the wall with plant closures. The abandoned plants are still there – relics of the days when Solvay Steel, General Electric and Carrier rewarded their union workers with paychecks that made for one of the highest standards of living in the States. Until the late seventies, Syracuse was considered such an ideal community that many companies market tested their products there.
