Business following talent
Fascinating New York Times article on UBS entitled Regretting Move, Bank May Return to Manhattan. Its about UBS considering moving back to Manhattan because they can’t attract talent to their huge suburban Connecticut trading operations. As the Times writes: …UBS is having buyer’s remorse. It turns out that a suburban location has become a liability […]
Quality of place in the news
All of a sudden a lot of media reports on the importance of creating quality of place – particularly vibrant central cities – in growing the Michigan economy. Hopefully this media attention is a harbinger of policy maker attention. Because it sure isn’t on Lansing’s priority list at the moment. (If it ever has been!) […]
Hindering new knowledge creation
Back to our thought experiment on what others would offer if the University of Michigan decided it was willing to locate all or parts of its operations anyplace on the planet. In my previous post we established the dollar amount offered would be off the charts. And that most of what Lansing is focused on […]
Michigan’s Transition to a Knowledge-based Economy: Fourth Annual Progress Report
Michigan’s Transition to a Knowledge-based Economy: Fourth Annual Progress Report May 2012 This is Michigan Future’s annual report on Michigan’s transition to a knowledge-based economy. How well Michigan does in this transition will, in large part, determine whether we get more prosperous or poorer. As we detailed in our 2006 A New Agenda for a […]
Worth checking out
Some interesting items that are worth checking out: • CNN did a terrific report on high tech job growth in metro Detroit. Going so far as to ask whether Detroit is the new Silicon Valley. Yes dead and gone Detroit! Not to mention the state with the worse business tax in America that drives away […]
American workers as the priority II
Mohamed El-Erian is the CEO of PIMCO, the huge California based money management firm. He recently wrote a column for Project Syndicate entitled Sleepwalking through America’s Unemployment Crisis. Worth reading. El-Erian writes: The country now has an unemployment problem that is large in magnitude and increasingly structural in nature. … This is much more than a problem […]
American workers as the priority
An objective assessment would almost certainly reach the conclusion that American businesses are much better positioned to do well in a flattening world than American workers. Despite that at both the state and national level our policy focus is on helping companies compete. This despite record corporate profits both before and after the Great Recession. […]
The case for higher education as a priority
Great column in Dome Magazine by Glen Mroz, the terrific President of Michigan Tech. Mroz makes the case that cutting higher education funding is harmful to the Michigan economy. First the facts. State appropriations to higher education are down 35% over the last ten years. So much for the nonsense that the state went on […]
Cut and then what?
Insightful Rick Haglund column on AnnArbor.com. He makes the point that after the reset of Michigan state government this year the state faces a fundamental choice in where it goes from here. One path is to do more of what we did this year: less taxes, less spending. The other is to resume public investments […]
More education attainment data
The Bureau of Economic Analysis has released its preliminary estimates of per capita income for 2010. There will be all sorts of revisions before the final stats are in. But they are the first data in a decade that use actual state population (the denominator), rather than estimates. Because Michigan’s population in previous calculations was […]