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- We already covered the development of Europe and their rise up the
economic ladder of affluence. Now we will focus on America's input
concerning economic development. The first thing one should consider
about our economic system is the political system that protects it.
- “It has been said of America that it is a system designed by geniuses
so that it could be run by idiots.” The real source of America's
prosperity is the combination of free markets, political institutions,
and political consensus that protects property and innovation, ensures
fair play, encourages the most aggressive players to succeed and
provides "some minimum safety nets to catch the losers."
(quotes from Thomas Friedman, 2000)
- In the late 1960s and early 1970s, visionaries like Hewlett, Packard,
and Gates had a new economic sector to give to the world. The
"techies" created computers and programming language, which
made the Internet (created by Briton Tim Berners-Lee) possible. By doing
this they added to America's level of wealth and added another sector to
the economy. The only difference between the countries of the world is
how many workers they have employed in each sector. For the US, we see
the new quaternary sector has the most workers which brings a level of
wealth and prosperity heretofore unknown to the world.
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- The secondary sector is the manufacturing sector and transforms raw
materials into finished, marketable products (e.g. cotton to clothing,
bauxite to aluminum, raw metals into automobiles). Manufacturing employs
15% of the US workforce. This is the “blue collar” sector.
- The tertiary sector is the services sector (e.g. office jobs, finance,
education, retail clerks, doctors). Eighteen percent of the workforce is
employed in these activities. This is the “white collar” sector.
- The quaternary sector is today's dominant economic activity. This
sector deals with the collection, processing, and manipulation of
information. This is the high-tech sector. But don't think of this as
just computers. It is biotech. It is medicine. It is communication. It
is virtually anything in the quick-moving society and fast-paced world.
It is tomorrow. I like to call this the “gold collar” sector. See how
this has impacted our economy on the next slide.
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- Silicon Valley, the world’s first technopole, starts the information
technology (IT) revolution.
- Silicon Valley is so named because of the silicon in computer chips.
Tiny chips that contain millions of bits of data became the wave of the
future. Companies from around the globe located there because of the
close proximity of Stanford University and California Berkeley, where
the educated community of San Francisco was nearby, where there were
lots of activities to keep their workers happy, where the weather us
almost always nice, where the Santa Clara Valley has nice homes, and
where most everyone has a job and a high standard of living. The IT
expansion fueled hundreds of successful start-ups resulting in the late
’90s dot com boom.
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- To industrialize a nation it takes the greater amount of the populace
to live in the cities and work in specialized jobs. The USA is about 75%
urbanized. The urbanization patterns of a country occur at two levels of
spatial generalization: macro-scale and micro-scale urbanization. They
occurred simultaneously and are easily seen on the landscape. But it
took a geographer to see them first. Walter Christaller wrote ”Central
Place Theory" in 1933. His article stated that within the sphere of
influence of a particular city that no other city would compete for
primacy. This is because the prime location of the city dominates in the
production of goods and utilization and distribution of services across
the landscape.
- The urban areas of the United States and Canada developed at a time
when the automobile came into greater use by millions of people. The
cities formed accordingly. Families moved further and further away from
downtown, known as the Central Business District (CBD). As
suburbanization progressed the CBD began to decay. People no longer came
to the area to shop. In fact, jobs of all kinds left this area for the
rapidly developing ‘burbs. Thus, the CBD essentially died. The only
people left behind were those without the means to leave - the poor. The
ghetto is what happened to many of America's largest cities. However,
the geographic importance of the downtown area (i.e. the focal point of
the region) never changed. Therefore, investors returned to the inner
city to buy up cheap real estate (and evict the poor people of the
slums). This revitalization project is termed gentrification.
Gentrification is the upgrading of an older residential area through
private reinvestment, usually in the downtown area of a central city.
- So, even though the outlying areas around a city have high population
density and retail malls, the CBD is still as important as it ever was.
That's why you'll see places like the Spaghetti Warehouse in an old
warehouse in downtown Nashville, Titans Coliseum on the bank of the
Cumberland River where a barge company used to be, and law offices,
apartment flats, and delis in old buildings around Nashville. All the
tarnish isn't gone from this area, but the money keeps flowing into the
CBD making it more attractive for people living in the hinterland. Have
you seen the Frist Center, Gaylord Entertainment Center, or the
Nashville Public Library? They're all very nice and built on land that
once had dilapidated structures on it.
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- Central Place: A town or city that provides a common location for
obtaining goods and services.
- Central Place Hierarchy: The grouping of central places by population
size and types of goods and services.
- Market Area: The hinterland or surrounding area served by a central
place.
- Range: The distance a customer will travel for a specific good or
service.
- Threshold: The purchasing power of customers and consumers that supports
provision of a good or service.
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8
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- The Core Region/American Manufacturing Belt has two distinct parts. The
first section is Megalopolis, an area of great development. It is also
know as the BOSWASH, the Atlantic coastal zone stretching from Boston to
Washington. The conurbation (continuous urban areas) is so populated
that it is difficult to discern where one city or state ends and the
next begins. The major cities of this region are Boston, Hartford and
New Haven (CT), New York City, Trenton (NJ), Philadelphia, Baltimore,
and Washington, D.C.
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13
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Notes
