How can educators deal with racial microaggressions most effectively?
Click to access Is-it-Racist-Addressing-Racial-Microaggressions-in-Counselor-Training.pdf
How can educators deal with racial microaggressions most effectively?
Click to access Is-it-Racist-Addressing-Racial-Microaggressions-in-Counselor-Training.pdf
Unlike both the United States and Canada, Mexico (New Spain) represents the negative impacts of economic development over the last two centuries. While the macroeconomic patterns of absolute wealth growth are apparent, the concentration of this wealth in a single location (Mexico City) as well as the massive loss of natural resource capital (starting with the Baja peninsula and extending east and north, in addition to losses across central America, South America, and the Caribbean) reveals the extraordinarily deep problems with gross domestic product as a measure of economic development. In contrast, asset value analysis reveals the contradictions of capital accumulation clearly in the uneven processes of Mexican national industrialization.
While most of the advanced national economies around the world use the United States as a benchmark for commercial development, this commitment carries ideological baggage and methodological limitations that must be addressed. Asset value analysis reveals the social and geographic costs of macroeconomic theory, especially in the case of the United States. The contradictions of using enslaved Africans as both currency and infrastructure simultaneously is only one of the fundamental problems. Over time, this specific error was replicated during the process of industrialization in terms of immigrant labor populations as well as the manipulation of consumer networks over the last seventy years. An examination of the Canadian processes of commercialization reveals that there are other ways to approach market growth.
Canada (really the remainder of British North America) in 1800 covered the eastern Mississippi river valley, the Great Lakes region, with core settlements stretching north and east from Lake Erie to Nova Scotia. Over 95% of the physical infrastructure for the nation laid within two miles of a lake, river, or ocean. In 2010 dollars, the asset value of the country was just over $2 billion – barely 2 per cent of the United States at the same time. The core of early American commercial growth was Montreal (though a dozen smaller towns also contributed). In this pre-industrial setting, the importance of converting natural resources into physical infrastructure was everything. Canadian towns were little more than military installations to protect limited commercial activities in timber and furs. This pattern persisted through the nineteenth century, limiting any fundamental movement towards industrialization and minimizing larger-scale patterns of urbanization.
By 1900, Toronto had emerged to emulate its American neighbor to the south – New York City. Canada’s political independence gave it a nominal claim to the western territories and introduced the possibilities of expansion across the Pacific Ocean. Its national asset value exceeded $152 billion. While this measure shows evidence of growth, the market expansion is anemic compared to the major world powers of the time (United Kingdom, United States, Germany, Japan, and Russia). Canada remained a small, stagnant, rural economy on a national scale with little physical or financial infrastructure to reward industrial investment. Toronto grew largely as an extension of the Buffalo metropolitan area, creating a “twin cities” effect similar to Philadelphia and Camden (or San Francisco and Oakland) at the end of the nineteenth century. At $36 billion in asset value, Toronto surged past Montreal as the economic center for the country. It became the first densely urbanized center in Canadian history and became the model for its commercial growth over the next century.
The main story of Canadian market expansion comes in the second half of the twentieth century. The emergence of the United States as a global superpower during the Cold War against the Soviet Union required the consolidation and protection of North America. Canada reaped the benefits of increased American military and financial investments in projecting its political authority around the world. In the early twenty-first century, 90 per cent of all Canadians live within 100 miles of the United States border. Further, 70 per cent of Canadians live in major metropolitan areas. The process of rapid industrialization and digitalization of the Canadian economy is a direct result of $1.7 trillion of direct private investment from the United States since 1946. Toronto, and later Vancouver, were the most direct local beneficiaries of this investment in terms of asset value. By 2000, Toronto’s asset value reached more than $1 trillion, while the Canadian national economy became a leading global partner worth $7.27 trillion. The massive economic growth of the twentieth century may foreshadow the kind of commercial expansion that the United States experienced between 1880 and 1920. If Canada can create better transportation and communication networks while attracting increasing numbers of skilled immigrants, it will be the key to geopolitical stability in both Asia and Europe in the twenty-first century.
United States, 1800-2000
As demonstrated in “The American Economy” (2016), asset value analysis provides the tools to quantify the scope and scale of economic development in historical context. The initial world asset map revealed the concentrations of natural resources, physical infrastructure, and human capital around the world in 2012. The data sets demonstrating the evolution of global capital since 3500 BCE reveal the flaws in the neoliberal politics of late capitalism as well as the fundamental flaws in economic concepts like GDP. Using asset value provides an institutional investment praxis to create new forms of sustainable wealth creation that restore a global sense of common wealth that has been distorted for five centuries.
In this first snapshot, analysts can begin to understand the creation of the first (un)free markets in human history. The United States in 1800 stopped at the Mississippi River, and over 80% of the physical infrastructure for the nation laid within fifty miles of the Atlantic coast. In 2010 dollars, the asset value of the country was just over $119 billion. In comparison, Apple (as a corporation) is worth almost one trillion dollars alone in 2018. The core of early American commercial growth was Philadelphia (though Charleston was also very important). In this pre-industrial setting, the importance of converting natural resources into physical infrastructure is immediately apparent. The geographic features of the southeastern Pennsylvania region enabled the rapid creation of a thriving commercial center, surrounded by a variety of residential neighborhoods. The rigid geometry of the roadways reflected the idealism of a revolutionary generation in pursuit of a democratic society that rejected the privileges of imperial monarchy.
However, by 1900, a starkly different architecture shaped the booming, industrial metropolis of New York City. The consolidation of the continental United States, including the new acquired territories of Cuba and the Philippines, showed that the practices of free markets could incorporate the ambitions of industrial empire. The United States achieved an asset value exceeding $2 trillion by this point. That figure is roughly a quarter of the asset value of the United Kingdom at the same time, and approximately a third of the Australian economy in 2012. The emergence of massive national corporations, especially banks, railroads, and oil companies, caused the local asset value of New York City to reach $129 billion, dwarfing Philadelphia’s dominance a century earlier. The central control of assets through New York firms only trailed the power of London’s economic reach at its Victorian peak. Across the United States, Chicago, San Francisco, St. Louis, and Dallas followed the model that New York symbolized. The core of American asset value at the start of the twentieth century sustained small industrial centers like Newark, Trenton, Camden, Baltimore, Norfolk, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Detroit in addition to these larger cities. While Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx consolidated into the modern New York City, commercial and residential infrastructure remains concentrated along the East River. Long Island and the northern suburbs remained distant hinterlands in the countryside.
Over the next century, transportation and communications technologies would utterly transform the landscape and metropolitan design of the United States and the world. Foremost in this unprecedented revolution were the automobile and the television. They were the keys to the commercial emergence of the United States as a world superpower after the end of the Second World War. The United States was the unchallenged leader in the world economy by 2010 with over $123 trillion in asset value. New York remained the largest of the metropolitan economies within the country, worth almost $4 trillion in asset value. The second largest economy in the world was Japan ($20 trillion), and a dozen American cities were worth at least $1 trillion. Hundreds of American cities housed economies as large as Philadelphia has been 200 years earlier. In the specific case of New York, the emergent design of its economic system became known as the ‘megapolitan’. In lay terms, the region between Boston and Washington, D.C., became a massive city – the richest region in the world. Ten other megapolitans existed in the United States by 2010, and there were twelve more worldwide. Human capital became the distinguishing feature of megapolitan growth as service industries like medicine, finance, and software engineering became the dominant industries for growth in the twenty-first century.
Astonishingly, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, achieved a personal net worth of $139 billion in 2018. A single person today is richer than the wealthiest city in North America was a century earlier. This process is the accumulated power of (un)free market capitalism. By 2100, there will be a person worth a trillion dollars (or, perhaps, it will be measured in Bitcoin by that point). They will likely control the accumulation of personal data through social media, or, more likely, detailed genetic profiles of terrestrial life (human, animal, and plant) for both experimentation and marketing. There are even suggestions to repeat the colonial processes of the nineteenth century beneath the sea and across the solar system. Neoliberalism will commodify every cell and atom, every asteroid and planet, in the name of efficiency and productivity unless a revolutionary commitment to balance and dignity occurs.
United States, Asset Value, 1800-2000
Among humanity’s inalienable rights, why does property enjoy more legal protection than life and liberty? This collection of essays and historical documents shows several aspects of this series of political choices.
https://www.amazon.com/American-Economy-GREASON-WALTER/dp/1524902675
Free, online resource to help explain the importance of scholars in public discussions.
The field of Planning History has helped scholars across disciplines illuminate how historical actors dreamed of futures yet to come. The social policies which these visionaries explore have organized the economic development the industrial world. In PLANNING FUTURE CITIES, this classic field of historical literature is made comprehensible to a general audience for the first time.
PLANNING FUTURE CITIES combines the insights of historians, urban planners, architects, and industrial leaders to help students of the metropolitan landscape grapple with the contradictions that characterize the long 20th century. Production in rural agriculture, urban industrialization, global finance, and institutional architecture would undergo structural reform to accommodate demands wrought by women’s suffrage, feminism, civil rights activism, and global governance between 1870 and 2010. Contemporary colleges and universities must produce informed citizens to confront myriad ways which private initiatives, public policy, and democratic engagement intersect to produce prosperous metropolitan regions in the global 21st century.
PLANNING FUTURE CITIES is the essential text for students seeking to comprehend the power of Planning History.”
W.E.B. DuBois built the world you live in today. Brick by brick, concept by concept, he tore down a world dedicated to colonialism, segregation, and exploitation. Who was he? Sadly, too many people will ask this question with flawless sincerity. The United States Congress essentially erased him from the public record because he stood for peace in an age of multiple wars. DuBois’s academic and intellectual accomplishments would fill this entire newspaper for years, if they received the coverage he earned. In brief, his career began before the Presidency of William McKinley and ended just before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. While the world celebrated Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford, DuBois refined Frederick Douglass’ concept of universal human equality and developed the global political agenda of democratic self-rule. His most recognized insight was the exploration of ‘double consciousness’ — the idea that within a single person there was a self-image and an awareness of how other people saw you. The distinction between the internal and external perceptions of a person could utterly destroy an individual, especially when the difference between the two visions involved the idea of race.
However, another keen insight came from his work, “The Freedom to Learn,” in 1949. DuBois asserted that the right to learn was the most difficult achievement humanity had won in 5000 years of struggle. Consider that. More than the Jeffersonian rights to life, liberty, and property, the right to learn was most valuable. In the long process of human beings exploring different form of civilization as we moved from religion to enlightenment to science in pursuit of greater freedom, learning was never a right. For DuBois, this achievement was a product of the American commitment to public education in the late nineteenth century. Education was no longer the exclusive domain of the wealthy or the devout. Everyone could learn. The content of the education could certainly be debated. Which lessons were most appropriate for which people? Still, the fundamental claim that everyone had a right to more information built the conceptual foundation for the schools, libraries, and colleges across the world. Indeed, it is the premise behind the widespread information sharing we do with websites like Wikipedia, Youtube, and Google.
Who carries the torch today for increased freedom, education, and a better world tomorrow? Salamishah Tillet and Aishah Simmons have led the way in giving greater voices to women around the world in their work “No! The Rape Documentary” and its related projects. Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, Marc Anthony Neal, Marc Lamont Hill, Dawn Elissa-Fisher, and Marcia Dawkins have all established the ways hip hop music transforms societies towards democracy. Mary Sies, Thomas Sugrue, Robin Bachin, John McCarthy, and Julian Chambliss have applied these lessons to understanding architecture, environmentalism, and metropolitan growth for more than twenty years. We are all inheritors of DuBois’ unparalleled intellectual legacy. From his work on The Philadelphia Negro to The Souls of Black Folk to The Crisis Magazine to Black Reconstruction (of Democracy) in America, DuBois was the voice that invented an America and a world that stood for justice and equality in ways inconceivable when his career began. If we want the best world in the twenty-first century, we must teach these lessons and engage this work in ways that have been too rare over the last forty years. DuBois is the touchstone for establishing the best human principles for the future. There are literally thousands of interpreters of his work throughout secondary and higher education. When all Americans rediscover and embrace these ideas, we will have taken another step towards achieving the beloved community.