NYC still surging

More than four years ago I wrote about the prosperity of Manhattan (and more broadly all of New York City) this way: Here the dominant narrative about the economy is that everything that makes Manhattan a powerful engine of economic growth is what has or will ruin the Michigan economy. How we can continue to […]

Urban amenities and talent attraction

Terrific CityLab article entitled The Real Source of American Urban Revival. It documents the trend we have been writing about for nearly a decade that young professionals far more than previous generations are concentrating in central cities not the suburbs. CityLab reports: From 2000 to 2010, more college-educated professionals aged 25 to 34 moved downtown […]

Renters and economic prosperity

A core finding of Michigan Future’s research has been that what made us prosperous in the past, won’t in the future. The big change is that prosperity is now aligned with knowledge-based rather than factory-based economies. Another big change is that renters are now an asset not a liability in a community’s economic well being. […]

The college grad multiplier

In a previous post on why retaining and attracting young professional was an economic development priority I wrote: The reason they are important to economic growth is both they are the most mobile and that knowledge workers––professionals and managers––are now, and will increasingly be, the core of the middle class. They will play the same […]

40th in employment

Michigan’s unemployment rate in January is the lowest it has been in fifteen years. But the state ranked 40th in 2015 in the proportion of adults who worked. How can that be? An unemployment rate at the national average while at the same time having a smaller proportion of those 16 and older working than […]

Definitively Michigan is not back

This blog––and the work of Michigan Future––has been about the economy primarily and to a lesser degree the policies needed to improve the standard of living of Michiganders, not politics. The results of the Michigan presidential primaries in both parties sent such a clear message about each that I want to get into politics even […]

States in recession and state economic policy

Most observers labeled Michigan’s economy from 2000-2007 as a single state recession. And interpreted it as caused primarily by state policy. In our reports Don Grimes and I labeled it a single industry recession. That the root cause of Michigan’s so-called lost decade was not policy, but the collapse of its dominant industry–motor vehicles. Michigan’s […]