This NYT article on the Detroit bankruptcy* is a perfect illustration of the pernicious effects of "localism" and "presentism" in political economy.** That is, here we see the unquestioning acceptance of a spatial scale focused on political boundaries (i.e., city limits) instead of the functional economic unit (i.e., the metro area), and a temporal scale focused on the short-term ("the crisis") rather than on the long-term (the processes allowing for the production of "the crisis"). Of course, the spatial and temporal scales are related; to understand the causes of the crisis you would have to understand post-war suburbanization and the concomitant ability of the surburbs to shift tax burdens while still benefitting from proximity to the city.
*This is an ongoing story of course: see here for a judge's ruling against the bankruptcy claim and here for targeting of the municipal art collection by the disaster capitalists.
**If you want to be fancy about it, you could say this is an example of the trouble you get into by focusing on the properties of a product while neglecting the production process. (See the "illusion" discussed at Difference and Repetition, 240E.)
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