Off the Rails: New York Times on the Acela Economy

[AndrAIaSprite]

Taking the train from Boston to Atlanta today, I picked up the New York Times in the Acela Lounge and saw that the Times Magazine's cover story (November 4, 2012, pp. 26-35) is "Off the Rails: For a true picture of the U.S. economy, ride the train from New York to Washington and take a good, hard look out the window," by Adam Davidson The magazine article distracted me from actually looking out the window. Here are some relevant excerpts:

"As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it's all tidy and digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay...."

"A few remarkable books by [business] professors ... argue that a primary source of profit for Wall Street over the past 15 or 20 years could be what I call the Acela Strategy: making money by exploiting regulation rather than by creating more effective ways to finance the rest of the econonmy...."

"But one more look out the Amtrak window reveals something else: the shiny new buildings that are actually filled with workers have nothing to do with manufacturing. They're in the broad service sector, in the anonymous office centers that bloomed out of nowherte -- near Metropark Station in New Jersey and in Claymont, Del., and Aberdeen, Md. -- to hold law firms and engineering companies and I.T. firms."

Respectfully submitted,
AndrAIa Sprite

[James Robinson]

I sounds like the author has never ridden a train before, and somehow
thinks the sight of urban/industrial decay from rail lines is something
new. It's been that way for over 50 years! I can recall riding into
places like Chicago from the south along the lakes, Baltimore,
Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, and so on. Lots of abandoned or out of
date factories to see, plus decayed housing as populations left the city
centers to minorities and migrated to the suburbs.

The idea of making money by stripping companies of assets is also nothing
new. Carl Ichan was big in the junk bond market in the '70s, which led
to the S&L crash, with Ichan getting away clean.

The most troubling thing about Wall Street is that they've shifted from
making money by bringing people with money to lend together with people
who what to develop businesses. They now make only about 20% of their
profits doin that, and now make most of their money by things like
gambling in futures, playing one customer off against another, and of
course the infamous credit default options. They are no longer building
the economy, but instead are simply lining their own pockets at everyone
else's expense. For shame.

[conklin]

"James Robinson" <NoE...@nowhere.net> wrote in message
news:XnsA101CFF...@94.75.214.39...

Buildings do wear out and it costs more to retrofit them than to build new
ones. Those along the rail lines are obsolete due to age. Of course, as
the article points out, factory work today does not emply as many people as
it did in the past. This by no means excuses Bain capital's excesses.

[Glen Labah]

In article <XnsA101CFF...@94.75.214.39>,
James Robinson <NoE...@nowhere.net> wrote:

> AndrAIaSprite <AndrAI...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like
> moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay...."
>

> I sounds like the author has never ridden a train before, and somehow
> thinks the sight of urban/industrial decay from rail lines is something
> new.

I wonder how often the author has actually driven anywhere, for that
matter? A rather substantial percentage of the old industrial areas
along highways are decayed quite a bit too.

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