One major interest of mine at one time was to visit some of the many ghost towns scattered about the West. These are the towns where the gold or silver simply ran out and, with nothing to support the towns in the way of production, people simply moved away.
Then there are now the ghost towns, or near ghost towns of the agricultural areas, where agribusiness took over, with the amalgamation of farm lands into larger entities and the small farmer no longer finding things viable, so they too simply move out and the towns they supported became ghost towns.
But now we have the economic ghost towns, like Flint Michigan and probably many others where the business went overseas to China or somewhere, (some moving to cheaper labor markets in the South) and now there are whole neighborhoods gutted by people simply moving out.
Then today I learned of another ghost town phenomena, the modern ghost town, some only years old, in which the only productivity was the retail trade, and when people no longer had the jobs, or felt like commuting the distance required to have jobs (high gasoline prices?), these consumer towns became ghost towns., or very close to it. Remarkable. Towns founded on consumerism? Where is the sense of that? Nonsense, I would say, and probably be right.
So here we have these planned communities with consumer empires based on retail outlets, car dealers, furniture dealers, with square miles of new homes, a new type of ghost town, isn't it?
These new ghost towns are easy to get to with modern roads and highways taking you right to the door step. Perhaps the farming ghost towns are the same way. The real ghost towns, the centers of mining in the Old West sometimes require a Ural or Jeep to get to, and when you get there you find just the bare remnants left. A foundation here, maybe a false front or chimney there, but with a sense of history emanating from the site. Real people trying hard to make a go of it in a real industry such as the mining one.
What will the next America look like, a few established cities surrounded by ghosts? Well, I suppose too that there are ghost nations scattered around the world, nations that just no longer were viable and the people simply moved out, died off, or the town sites became pasture lands.
I think the lesson should be that if a nation has no productive basis, whether it be farming or manufacture, it soon may become a ghost nation, just the same as a town which loses its productivity becomes a ghost town.