What happens to towns when the main employer goes under?

dopester

Generali wrote: »

The casual racism in the cities is what I find amazing - calling football wogball and all that stuff.

:rolleyes:

Supposedly a lot of the distaste for Aboriginals comes from their nomadic ways: they didn't really have a concept of property in most (all???) tribes for example so the idea that 'squatting' was wrong was completely alien to them. Also, being a small number of people in a huge continent, clearing up after themselves wasn't important, something that clearly is important if you come from a place with back-to-back housing (as many early British migrants, both willing and unwilling, did).

Not exactly surprising. Conditions there didn't alter to the extent they did in other places, forcing changes upon us.

For tens of thousands of generations, there was no civilisation. There was no written language. There was no government, nor larger organisation of society at all. There appear to have been few settled communities, none larger that a village. Wandering bands of fifty or fewer lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering food in the wild. Population density was extremely low. For example, estimates of the Stone Age population of France go as low as sixteen hundred.

Our primeval ancestors travelled frequently, but usually without a settled home to return to. Their migratory habits helped them resolve disputes. When members of the band argued with one another, it was a relatively simple matter for one faction or the other to walk away if the argument could not be settled. Frequent movement also kept people healthy. Because they did not live in close contact with their own waste and barnyard animals, they were free of the infectious diseases of civilisation. Nonetheless, they faced the risk of early death due to hazards of wounds, and infections such as gangrene.

Little Work, No Savings

Anthropologists believe that our ancestors in the primeval economy "neither collected nor maintained" food surpluses. It seems certain that they did not work very hard, probably no more than two hours per day. Anthropologists observing remaining hunter-gatherer societies, such as Eskimos, Australian Aborigines, and Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert, find that they spend little time collecting food, even in their harsh habitats. When circumstances oblige them to work longer one day, they usually take off the next few days to talk and relax. They save nothing.

No Theft, No Government

Humans in the primeval phase of existence had little or nothing to steal. Other than a few personal ornaments and weapons for hunting, they had no private property. Ownership of other resources was held in common, or to be more precise, factors that we today consider resources - like land - were not resources, and therefore were not owned by anyone. Primeval society had no occupational specialisation, no structure or leadership, nor any formal hierarchy for settling disputes. Decision-making was democratic for fundamental megapolitical reasons. All men were trained as hunters to kill big animals, and those in good health were of practically equal in military power. Violence seems to have been rare, in part because the groups could dissolve and look for food somewhere else in a vast countryside almost empty of other humans. When crimes did occur, they were punished by ostracism, shunning, and blood feuds. When there was plenty of room to roam and essentially nothing to steal, neither crime nor government could have been paying propositions.

The first major change in the boundary conditions that govern the use of violence were climatic in origin. About thirteen thousand years ago, a global warming began that put an end to the last Ice Age. This change in climate appears to have had dramatic effects on the primeval economy. Over a period of about five thousand years, the warming of the earth made it impossible for humans in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere to support themselves by hunting large animals. As the warming proceeded, forests of evergreens and beech trees began to take over the grassy plains that had once supported the vast herds upon which humans had depended for food. With grazing lands vanished, animals like the woolly mammoth and the giant elk vanished with them, hunted to extinction by hungry humans. Our ancestors seem to have turned to gathering wild grasses, like barley and wheat, because it was the only way they could survive.

About four hundred generations ago (or about 6000 B.C.). they began planting seeds and became farmers. Farming was the most sweeping innovation in human existence. Farming spawned government, civilisation, history, war, writing and organised religion on a large scale, among other things. Farming required planning ahead. It made calendars and time-telling important. It was a revolution that spread through the whole of life.

The Megapolitics of Grain Farming

Grain farming made possible the accumulation of enough surplus food to support centralised authority in cities. The word "civilisation," like "civility" and "citizen," is derived from the Latin civitas, for city. Before grain farming there were no cities or civilisation. Farming allowed for a staggering increase in the size of human populations by making it possible to support many more people in the same area. Rice farming in China, for example, was able to feed fifty thousand times more mouths than a hunter-gatherer economy in the same area. As farming grew in importance, and farm populations expanded, they inevitably pushed hunter-gatherer groups aside. The commotion stirred up by farmers as they move into new regions depleted resources and scared away game.

Heightened Incentives for Violence

Farming altered the incentives to use violence, in part because it increased population dramatically. Higher population densities antiquated mobility as a solution to disputes. If two farmers quarrelled, it would be unlikely for one to simply abandon his field and wander somewhere else, as foragers in conflict could. After the ready supply of good land had been occupied in any region, the land itself became an economic resource as it never had been to foragers.

Farmers had to work much harder than foragers ever did - up to thirty-five hours a week to prepare the fields and harvest crops in the Northern Hemisphere. This required the development of private property in land. No one would work all year to raise a crop if someone else could wander by and freely harvest it. In order to grow food surpluses, someone had to have the right to exclude others from the produce of the field.

The Seeds of Taxation and Theft

The difficulty of securing property claims played a major role in raising the scale of human communities. Farming produced a food surplus upon which nonfarmers could survive. It therefore gave a tremendous added incentive to employ and organise the use of force. Farming made government possible, and, indeed, necessary as the scale of human society rose. It was no longer sufficient for human communities to divide into bands of fifty or fewer as had foragers in the primeval economy. An agreement among a handful of families to reserve the produce of a field for those who planted it was likely to mean nothing to outsiders who came around to plunder after the harvest.

For a stable farming community to survive, it had to be big enough to fend off attack by the largest expedition of bandits that could operate in the local area. This logic turned descendants of foragers into the citizens of empires.

Settled agricultural society made both taxes and crime paying propositions. Where there was accumulated wealth to take, there was always someone willing to take it.

A good way to understand how government originated is literally to image how a group of bandits would have behaved under the megapolitical conditions created by the Agricultural Revolution. The temptation to settle down among the conquered people and extract a regular tribute rather than returning sporadically to loot and pillage must have been obvious. It saved a lot of meandering. It avoided the possibility that another band of looters would pass through the vicinity and take a first swipe at the harvest.

The logic of pillage required that warrior bands who preyed on farming communities settle among their victims. Greed and fear drove them to expand the number of farmers subject to their plunder as well as suppress competition from other looters operating nearby. As the ancient maxim had it, "The Treasury is the root of kings."

Farming made slavery and its grey equivalent, serfdom, profitable for the first time. There was hard labour to be done in the fields. The output of that labour could be stored and consumed by someone other than the person who did the work.

Farming created other forms of occupational specialisation. Small numbers of artists, architects, builders and craftsmen, like jewellers and potters found markets for their wares.

Agriculture was also the seed from which written language germinated. To collect taxes on a broad scale, you must be able to keep records. Written language, which is a feature of only about 10 percent of all human tongues, appears to have originated as a way to solve problems of inventory-keeping in ancient agricultural societies. Hunting and gathering cultures never developed writing because they never developed taxation at a large scale, and never needed to keep track of four thousand sheep, or a thousand bushels of grain. For similar reasons, arithmetic became necessary to calculate inventories and compute calendars that helped guide farmers in planting.

The new possibilities introduced by farming dramatically altered life-styles, principally by raising the scale of human communities. But many of the advantages we associate with the emergence of civilisation, like written language, profound religions, and thriving cities, did not universally accompany agriculture. The equations by which the logic of violence raised groups from fifty or fewer to empires of millions were very delicate. Until relatively recently they did not depend so much upon weaponry as on other megapolitical factors such as climate and topography. The lay of the land, the flow of a river, a small shift in wind patterns could dramatically alter the incentives that drove groups together.

Generali

Thanks Dopester, that's very interesting.

lostinrates

Generali wrote: »

Thanks Dopester, that's very interesting.

Yes, it is. FWIW there seems to me increased interest in this among anthropoligist: there is a flurry of stuff being publicated now/recently.

Mary_Hartnell

So that is it then most of the world will get worse?
More regulations?
More taxes?
More inflation?
Time to emigrate but to where?

Generali

Mary_Hartnell wrote: »

So that is it then most of the world will get worse?
More regulations?
More taxes?
More inflation?
Time to emigrate but to where?

I went to Aus on the basis that if you're going to be poor then it might as well be by the beach.

Davesnave

Mary_Hartnell wrote: »

So that is it then most of the world will get worse?
More regulations?
More taxes?
More inflation?
Time to emigrate but to where?

For the less adventurous, there's Wales.

During my travels there, I met two people who'd had relatives living undetected for years in their outbuildings. I also saw a mobile home cunningly disguised as a barn if viewed from the air. Indeed, if one examines aerial photos of the remoter parts, there seem to be quite a number of mobile homes in strange places unrelated to the tourist industry.

Of course, if you go through the 'usual channels,' you get the same old @=*~%
http://www.lammas.org.uk/ecovillage/news.htm

On balance though, I think ther climate in Oz has more going for it, particularly if you are going 'off grid' in all its senses.

beaujolais-nouveau

Vinegartits wrote: »

I have been wondering what happens when the sole or major employer goes out of business and those in surronding towns and villages are dependent on that employer for income and others are dependent on the spending of that income etc.

If anyone was local and can remember when they closed the coal mines, can you tell me what happened to house prices, the local economy and how long it took to recover? Thanks

Think back to Consett,

[SIZE=-1]For decades the name Consett was synonymous with iron and steel. Consett was the town that made the steel for Blackpool Tower and Britain's most famous nuclear submarines. ...[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]The Consett steel works provided jobs for 6,000 workers at its peak in the 1960s. But there was intense competition In the 1970s from both local competitors on Teesside and from abroad.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]Moves to close Consett came in the 1970s, despite heated debates about the future of the plant.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]In 1980 the death knell sounded for the steel furnaces, and the Consett works closed with the loss of 3,700 jobs. It was a devastating blow to the town, not least because the unemployment rate in Consett was double the national average at 15%.[/SIZE]

[SIZE=-1]The town became one of the worst unemployment blackspots in Britain, and the demolition of the works led to a massive hole in the heart of the town.[/SIZE]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nationonfilm/topics/steel/background.shtml

I remember seeing tv documentaries about the effect on people of the closure of the Consett works - there was nothing, just nothing, else. People had to move away to find work, and communities broke up. Things may be better now but, if so, it has taken more than 20 years. (To read the Wikipedia entry, you'd think that there had never been a devastating ironworks closure in this Labour-controlled town - that's all dismissed in a sentence about, with the steel works gone, everyone could better appreciate the picturesque countryside.)

PasturesNew

Generali wrote: »

I went to Aus on the basis that if you're going to be poor then it might as well be by the beach.

I had that mindset once ... then I realised I was poor BECAUSE I was by the beach ... and everybody else was loaded. But that was in the UK, most people in AUS are by the beach, so it's not a limiter for employment as the geography doesn't change between city/beach in many places.

I was 100 miles away from the nearest motorway, 20 miles away from any 24 hour shop/petrol station ... and if I'd wanted to go to a wedding and wanted an outfit and a gift in one shopping trip guaranteed I'd have had to drive 165 miles.

PasturesNew

Davesnave wrote: »

For the less adventurous, there's Wales.

During my travels there, I met two people who'd had relatives living undetected for years in their outbuildings. I also saw a mobile home cunningly disguised as a barn if viewed from the air. Indeed, if one examines aerial photos of the remoter parts, there seem to be quite a number of mobile homes in strange places unrelated to the tourist industry.

Of course, if you go through the 'usual channels,' you get the same old @=*~%
http://www.lammas.org.uk/ecovillage/news.htm

On balance though, I think ther climate in Oz has more going for it, particularly if you are going 'off grid' in all its senses.

I've often wondered about getting a camper van and a garage ... only one hour ago I was looking at turtle trailers and pondering the maths:
http://www.teardroptrailerssouthwest.co.uk/page6.html

There's an ad on ebay where somebody's flogging them at £4k too.

MMLS

beaujolais-nouveau wrote: »

Think back to Consett,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nationonfilm/topics/steel/background.shtml

I remember seeing tv documentaries about the effect on people of the closure of the Consett works - there was nothing, just nothing, else. People had to move away to find work, and communities broke up. Things may be better now but, if so, it has taken more than 20 years. (To read the Wikipedia entry, you'd think that there had never been a devastating ironworks closure in this Labour-controlled town - that's all dismissed in a sentence about, with the steel works gone, everyone could better appreciate the picturesque countryside.)

My family lived in Corby around that time - another town devastated by the closure of the steel works. The only place that saw a massive growth in jobs was the local DHSS and UBO (as they were then called).