Tracy Alloway

Joe, do you ever discover little cultural blind spots that you had in your life?

Like things you missed?

So I discovered one recently and it kind of led to a minor epiphany for me, but I had heard the Billy Joel song, Allentown.

I had never watched the video.

And in preparation for this episode, I watched the video and suddenly a bunch of Simpsons references made sense to me.

And I don't mean to be I don't mean to be very grand millennial by making Simpsons references.

I know.

I know.

And here I am doing it on the podcast.

We can do it.

This is a safe space.

So the reason I bring it up, though, is for kind of a serious point, not just to talk about Billy Joel music.

Although now that I think about it, he has a lot of songs about like the political economy of America.

But it is because Allentown, Pennsylvania basically became a poster child for deindustrialization and the hollowing out of American manufacturing in the 1980s.

Right.

How do you actually go about implementing industrial policy on a local scale?

And I have to say, the other thing I found out in researching for this podcast, I had no idea, but Allentown, Pennsylvania was also the site of some of the first mass-produced transistors, which are like the precursor to semiconductors of today.

Yeah.

We should do a whole episode on Billy Joel songs at some point, including my favorite karaoke standard, which is Downeaster Alexa, all about the decline of the fishing industry.

But anyway, Allentown, Pennsylvania, let's focus.