Re: Re: A Nation at War with its Capital City?

http://unison.ie/irish_independent/stories.php3?ca=9&si=1715919&issue_id=14831

Capital investment: a nation’s real wealth is built on its cities
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FOR years in Ireland, political and economic debate has focussed on relocating industry and financial opportunities from Dublin to the regions.

The rationale was that people and money accumulate in the city at the expense of rural Ireland and so, it is incumbent on the elected representatives from rural Ireland to make sure some of the goodies were divvied up more equally.

Dublin has been portrayed, unfairly, as a long shadow which blights and darkens the countryside. In fact, the opposite is the case. Dublin and big cities in all countries are the dynamos of the national economy. Without the heat generated from cities, there would be no such thing as a national economy.

Ironically, senior civil servants were to the fore in implementing this ‘forced regionalisation’, yet they themselves are about to suffer from the superannuated version of their own misguided policy which is decentralisation. And surprise, surprise they don’t like it one bit.

It would be unfair to revel in the difficulties of those that who once lauded wholesale economic decentralisation because that would miss the point. The crucial factor is that decentralisation is and has always been a profoundly silly idea. It is based not on common sense but on shady political imperatives which will have an overall negative impact on the public sector.

Why do cities generate wealth? Why do cities generate inventions and why is economic history not the history of countries but the history of cities?

Cities generate innovations. Most inventions, even those which ultimately increased the yields in agriculture, were made in cities. Since the Middle Ages, cities fostered an economic dynamic usually based on trying to make stuff in the city which had to be imported in the past.

Back then, for a city to grow economically strong, it had two achieve two things: first, it had to produce nails, hammers, tools of all sorts so that it could wean itself off imports and thus, dependency; and second, it had to excel at something so that it could export and generate currency to sustain itself.

By being an economic dynamo, traditional industrial cities created a demand for food that, in turn, sustained the countryside. So this history of modern Europe and the US from the Hanseatic League and the first Puritan settlers, right up to the end of the Cold War, is the history of cities.

Countries such as Switzerland and the regions of Northern Italy and Southern Germany achieved this diverse patchwork of trading cities and towns each with their own specialities and skills. Even today, these places are at the forefront of highly profitable businesses.

Japan in the second half of the 20th century operated the same type of economic model, based largely on family firms. Ireland never developed like this and instead we have sought to attract in foreign capital by giving tax breaks. This has worked spectacularly well and at the moment, Ireland is a significant cog in the global economy’s supply chain.

But herein lies our vulnerability. We are part of a global supply chain and as such are a supply region. As long as we can supply part of the manufacturing process at a competitive cost, we are fine, but what happens when, not if, that changes?

A country we are rarely compared to is Uruguay. However, if there is one place that Ireland in the early 21st century resembles it is Uruguay of the early 20th century. It may be hard to believe now, but Uruguay was the world’s fastest growing country for almost 20 years. It had among the world’s most comprehensive social welfare system, brilliant infrastructure and, like Ireland today, a rapidly rising population driven by immigration.

So advanced was this small Latin American country, that it was termed the ‘Switzerland of the Americas’. Uruguay was in truth nothing of the sort. Like Ireland today, it was a supply region.

In its case, it was a highly efficient part of the global trade in agriculture. Uruguay was one of the world’s most competitive suppliers of meat, wool and leather. Its farms were among the most productive in the world and with the huge revenues it gained from this, the government invested in a state of the art welfare system, great schools and a European-style transport infrastructure.

Because it was so brilliant at agriculture, Uruguay did not see fit to promote other industries or innovations. Montevideo was content to process agricultural products, add value and export them.

In the 1930s things began to change. Agricultural prices fell worldwide. Uruguay suffered its first recession.

Then, after the second world war, European countries – having flirted with famine in 1945-46 – began to crank up agricultural production. Australia and New Zealand emerged as significant players in the market and Uruguay’s period in the sun came to a crashing end. Since then, Uruguay’s story has been one economic disaster after another.

In the dry language of economics, Uruguay suffered from what is termed ‘a trade shift’. The international value of what they exported fell at the same time as the prices of their imports rose. And, they had all their eggs in one basket.

SWITZERLAND, on the other hand, has thrived. Its wealth was based not on being a link in the global supply change but rather on years and years of strong domestic innovation, based in its small cities. In the future, Ireland must learn from the Swiss and not from the Uruguayans.

Things are going well today, but the real wealth of nations is built in their cities, not the countryside. Creativity, networks and competition thrive in cities and they cities should not be penalised for this by trying to relocate to rural regions which haven’t got the capacity to maintain relocated industries.

Decentralisation should be scrapped because government will work better from the city-centre out.

David McWilliams presents ‘The Leviathan: Political Cabaret’ tomorrow night at 9pm in CrawDaddy, Harcourt Street, Dublin. More details from http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie