This is how it happens:
1. Cities were built by pioneers who had some sense of how things work. I don't mean the first wave; it's usually the 2nd and 3rd waves of pioneers. But take Seattle. It was a city full of engineers (and doctors) until quite recently.
2. The political class, on the other hand, is made up of the Sally Clarks, Tina Podlodowskis, and Pat Thibodeauxs of the world. They have essentially zero knowledge of how anything works. Zero. None. Zip. They subscribe to the "Left wing version of where the shoes come from":
Once upon a time the people were sad, because their children did not have shoes for their feet, and had to walk barefoot to school. They became indignant and said "It is not right that only the children of the rich should have shoes. We will come together to solve this problem." So community leaders from every segment of society: gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, people of color, minorities, women, the poor, immigrants, people of different abilities, and people of different psychiatric profiles got together, and formed a committee to create a more equable and just distribution of shoes.
So now all children have shoes to wear.
There's also a right-wing version I'll post again some time.
Sally J. Clark's career includes both non-profit social services and government work aimed at both helping people to become their own best advocates and connecting people with government in ways that improve their lives and their communities. She has served on the Seattle City Council since 2006.
Sally started her career as a print journalist and soon put her skills to work as the Communications Manager for Chicken Soup Brigade, a non-profit agency that provided practical support to people living with AIDS in King County. In 1997 she left Chicken Soup Brigade to join the office staff of former Seattle City Councilmember Tina Podlodowksi.
3. The school system is run by people like
Terry Bergeson, who, while no longer in office, wraught such destruction on the school system that it will never recover. The "high water mark" for corruption and insane social engineering experiments is now so high, nobody dares to try to undo the gigantic mess people like her created.
As a result, we are running out of people who know how to do anything. "Engineers" and craftsmen in the wider sense of the words.
Instead, what we've got is a nation of people who have the politically-approved opinions about Abraham Lincoln and Frankin Delano Roosevelt, because they had to write 25 page papers on them in high school.
More generally, the whole paradigm of schooling, even the most traditional pre-Deweyan reading, writing, and arithmetic kind, was based on models basically designed for rich kids who don't need to know anything terribly specific.
One thing they did used to do, that they don't anymore, was that they taught classics of philosophy mixed with religion, statesmanship, and law. So while the ruling class had little idea how anything worked in the real world where you can't just legislate your problems away, they did have some sense of basing their ruling decisions on some sort of guidelines, even if they did cheat horribly. Nowadays it's all seat-of-the-pants.
4. So the cycle is something like in the beginning, engineers and skilled craftsmen are more valued because there is so little infrastructure. Once the infrastructure is built, the ruling class starts taking it absolutely for granted, and gets into the habit of problem-solving-through-legislation-and-taxation.
The system starts cannibalizing its own foundations.5. It's more noticeable in big cities, but I would not take for granted that small towns, aside from being more manageable due to smaller size and less complexity, don't have some of the same problems. For one thing, many of them are dependent on infrastructure, goods, services, and consulting flowing downstream from the big cities. Numerous small towns around Seattle, for instance, do not have their own electrical systems or water systems; they simply buy from Seattle. Many of them now probably have no choice, being locked in at this point.
One advantage of being "off the grid" is that systemic breakdown does not impact you as much. But you must be TRULY "OFF THE GRID", which is difficult due to the necessity of getting parts and sometimes non-durable supplies from upstream.
