In the Land of the Highest and Lowest, the Most and the Least.
The television stations, newspapers and other news sources, in their attempt to raise revenue, lead stories with some measurement telling us why this news is important for us to know. It jolts our senses and rivets our eyes to the screen when we hear “This is the deepest stock market drop in 12 years.” or “The unemployment is the highest since 1982.” And “Home prices are the worst in recent history.” All of these stories are designed to captivate your attention so you don’t change the channel, put down that magazine, or leave that web page. The underlying purpose, we tend to forget, is to raise advertising dollars by increasing viewership. The media is a business first. We are lulled into thinking the media’s purpose is to inform and entertain, but that is secondary to making a profit. The stories may indeed be true, some even hopeful (yes, even in these times), but they are carefully constructed out of many calculations.
Headlines deal with breaking news. What these reports lack is the long view. Look back at other times in history when the same indicators were dire, yet as a nation we survived and thrived. During all of the tragic times, recessions, wars, and terrorist attacks, the American people, overcoming the deep emotional component of these events, reinvented themselves as stronger, wiser, and more innovative than ever before. We certainly will again.
What is different this time is the global experience of this recession. So yes, it looks like it will take a bit longer than a US-contained recession, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a temporary situation. Growth is inherent in the human condition. We can only be down for so long before wise and creative individuals and companies ascend to lead us into the next phase of the now global economy. Small businesses in the US will meet this challenge too, in ingenious ways not yet even considered. A classic example of this is a problem that was getting steadily worse about a hundred years ago, so much so that it drove most observers to despair. This was the great horse manure crisis.
Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses. In addition, there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures could be produced for any great city of the time.*
The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. (See Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.
The problem did indeed seem intractable. The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.
–Stephen Davis, The Freeman, Sept.2004
We know of course that the automobile replaced horses. This is just one of many examples where doom-sayers did not take into account the creativity of their fellows.
As we hear the news, let’s keep this in mind.
~Invaluable input from our editor, Jana Dieter
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 10:53 am and is filed under Blog Posts.
