What do we normally talk about in urbanist spaces? The most successful social media posts belong to people who find a brand and stick to it.
They become trusted sources in a specific niche; people keep them in mind paired with specific issues and they are sought after when their expertise is required.
In time, brands evolve and find more and better ways of explaining the world and reaching effective solutions to serve their clients.
In the small network I converse with on social media and in person, we talk about cities and urban issues: transportation, Placemaking, housing, small businesses, economic development and Main Street.
Most of the chatter circles around efforts to make transportation more efficient and less polluting, designing streets in a more humane way, including everyone in the conversation and giving a hand to pillars of the communities.
We delve into construction, regulations and Historic Preservation. Some coach small developers and others teach tourism and planning officials about marketing, branding and urban design.
However, we rarely talk about the economy. The economy is a space where the sum of individuals’ logical choices about their daily lives create trends and shape societies around institutions.
Institutions are trusted elements of society. Nonprofits, charitable organizations and religious congregations, and also laws, unwritten rules or customs are examples of institutions.
Our role as observers of the economy, focusing on downtown revitalization, urban development, housing and other issues, is to try and use “Praxeology” or the study of human action, to understand the logic behind the choices that people make and the institutions they produce.
Sometimes, those choices will emerge as a fight or flight reaction, when subject to a shock.
The graphics below show the shock as it occurred. In 1971, President Nixon made a decision that eliminated the gold backing of the US Dollar. This process started with Bretton Woods, the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and was cemented by the confiscation of gold bullion by FDR in 1930.
Fun fact. If you look at a $1 bill from before the war, you can read “Redeemable for $1 in Silver”, while new $1 bills conveniently omit that.
What this means is that political decisions, as opposed to the value of gold reserves, were to dictate 100% of monetary policy from then on.
Think of it as a credit card with no spending limit, that is not bounded by how much you can pay when dues come up. Let’s face it: both you and I would go to town, buying all sorts of things we don’t need.
We are putting up the wrong fight. We are strengthening a system that is designed to break up the wealth of the Middle Class and prevent upward mobility. Each new capital investment or program we pay for with debt is a nail in the coffin of our currency.
This is the reason why salaries haven’t increased since the 70s, and why housing, healthcare and education are more out of reach each year and why folks locked into student loans and other obligations are struggling to put food on the table.
And, importantly for us here in this space, it’s the reason why inequality, homelessness, displacement or crumbling infrastructure run rampant in our cities, aided and abetted by regulation that constantly, and hopefully unwittingly, erodes property rights.
So let’s talk about the economy and how, when we fix the money, we fix the built environment.