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Gearcity lower production cost1/4/2024 Among other things, the typewriter helped bring women into offices. The importance of this invention is hard to underestimate. Smith, the typewriter “king,” gave the world the first generation of word processing. Smith and others of the city’s great entrepreneur/industrialists. It might be argued that Syracuse University would never have been much more than a college without Mr. Simply, Syracuse would not have been what it once was or even is without him. Smith was, or, if they can, why he was important. It is not for nothing that the nation’s first and most consequential school of public administration should have been founded at Syracuse University, the gift of a successful businessman and alumnus of the institution, George Maxwell.Īs an example of its economic amnesia, virtually no one in the city can tell you who Lyman C. So notable was Syracuse’s leadership that it was held out as an example of having set the nation’s public health standard, the subject of a 1934 book, A City Set on a Hill, by a Yale Professor, C.E.A. In health care for example, Syracuse’s private/public system produced one of the nation’s lowest rates of infant mortality. There was a Syracuse way those who guided the city’s growth obviously sought to build an enlightened municipal culture. Fewer of its residents know that Syracuse’s bygone wealth was used to make it an exemplar in civic affairs. No one seems to remember when Syracuse’s people, their innovations and their creative entrepreneurial skills, made it one of the most successful cities in the nation. Poverty is the city’s overwhelming social characteristic – over 50 percent of school students come from families that are officially “poor.” When a metropolis no longer generates the wealth to sustain itself it has no choice but to become a supplicant city whose future is guided by federal and state politicians and bureaucrats whose visions of what to do with places like Syracuse are likely not sensitive to its history or what its destiny might be. It has lost its ability to determine its own fate. It appears that its future is no longer dependent on the genius of its people but the largesse of higher order governments both state and federal. A recent report from the state found that average household income was $31,000 while the state average was $55,000. The 170th largest city (and only one of 15 in the top 200 that continues to lose population, thus making it one of the fastest shrinking cities), it ranks second in the ratio of property taxes to assessed value (3 times greater the national average), its schools produce students who are consistently in the lowest quartile of New York State students in every subject in every grade, and it is among the top 100 cities in terms of infant mortality! The obvious conclusion: the city’s economy no longer works. Today Syracuse’s civic distinctions are embarrassing. Not surprisingly, its school system was one of the best in the country. Family bank accounts were at times higher than those in Detroit and Philadelphia. Household income was well above the national average. Not surprisingly, given its economic importance, it was also one of the wealthiest cities. For another thirty it was among the 50 largest cities. For eight decades, right up to the Depression, Syracuse was one of the thirty largest cities in the country with one of the best-educated and healthiest populations. As a native of Syracuse, I was once introduced to an audience in Washington as being from “the beta site for winter.” Returning to teach after a career spent in other parts of America two things have struck me, and neither relates to the city’s reputation for snow.
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