Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

The free market didn’t kill Detroit: blame bad managers and worse unions

Protectionism at work. (Photograph: J.D. Pooley/Getty) 
issue 27 July 2013

One of the best articles I ever commissioned as an editor was an account by James Doran of a road trip from the steps of the New York Stock Exchange to the back streets of Detroit in October 2008, at the nadir of the financial crisis. At his destination, Doran found a shocking vista of empty, vandalised factories, all once ‘bit-part players in the now dying auto industry… The desolation was so complete that it hardly seemed real.’

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