Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Thought Experiment: Imposing Order on Detroit

Anyone care to take a gander at how much wealth would be created by imposing Order (in the reactionary or Moldbuggian sense) on Detroit?  I suspect that even were you to impose NYC policing norms (how the hell do they get away with that in NYC anyway), you'd be talking billions of dollars created virtually overnight, in a manner that'd make even Helicopter Ben envious.

How much wealth have we foregone in the US because we lack the will to impose Order?  How would the number of people you'd have to kill to impose Order compare to the ordinary toll of homicide and aggravated assault imposed by the lack of Order?

Could an Imperial Governor from the old school---perhaps @1900 or so---make Detroit the envy of America?

Achieving a state of Order really wouldn't be that hard insofar as a technical or military problem.  It is solely an issue of Will.  Presently we lack the Will even to ask the question in public.

3 comments:

Jack Black said...

Detroit produces nothing of value. Value producers long ago relocated elsewhere. Braining order to Detroit wouldn't result in value producers return because they couldn't take the chance that order might go away next week. Uncertainty is death to economic growth.

Also the people currently living in Detroit are quite marginal when it comes to productive work. Order or not your not going to get much out of them. Now if you exiled the population of Detroit to Liberia, then yes Detroit would produce a lot of value.

Jehu said...

Jack,
Just the increase in real estate values would be in the billions. Check out some of the prices in Detroit right now. When you're that far down, there is tons of low-hanging fruit, so to speak.

Aretae said...

I like this analysis approach, Jehu. Hits on my key metric, as you know.