Learning from Florida: 3rd grade reading mandates don’t work
This post reruns a 2017 post by our former colleague Pat Cooney entitled the Problem with 3rd grade reading mandates. In it Pat lays out the evidence that 3rd grade reading mandates don’t work and offers an alternative that does achieve the goal of all students gaining strong literacy skills and a love of reading, […]
Michigan needs a General Motors 2030 economic development strategy
In 1979 General Motors employed 468,000 American hourly workers. 76 percent of their U.S. workforce. In 2021 General Motors employed 45,000 American hourly workers. 46 percent of their U.S. workforce. Today 24,000 work at the General Motors Global Technical Center in Warren. Their average annual salary is $120,000. Around double what their highest paid hourly […]
Florida and Michigan academic test scores
For decades many business, political and media elites have told us that Florida is the model for improving student achievement. They constantly urge Michigan to replicate former Governor Jeb Bush’s 1999 A+ Plan. Today, once again, Florida is being trumpeted by many business, political and media elites for its policies of in-person schooling during the […]
Which state economy should Michigan want to be like?
In our last post we detailed that states with employment most concentrated in production––front-line factory––jobs are all structurally low-prosperity states, with per capita income substantially below the nation’s. Those states include Michigan and Tennessee, both with per capita income twelve percent below the nation’s Tennessee matters particularly because when it was chosen by Ford for […]
Factory jobs are not the path to Michigan prosperity
In 2004 Don Grimes and I wrote A New Path to Prosperity?. The report detailed that prosperous states were no longer manufacturing-based states, but were now those over concentrated in knowledge-based industries. In an accompanying Detroit News op ed, subtitled State should quit protecting factory employment and attract high-pay, high-education industries, we summarized our findings […]
The B.A. work earnings premium is growing
Increasingly our public conversation is dominated by claims that workers can do just as well without a four-year degree as with one. As we have explored frequently, pre pandemic––in both good and bad economic times––that simply was not accurate. Those with a four-year degree or more over a forty-year career worked more and earned more […]
Why Michigan doesn’t pivot to a high-prosperity economic strategy
The first post I wrote for this blog was 13 years ago. It was entitled the Need For a New Michigan and made the case that what made us prosperous in the past, won’t in the future. That if we wanted to recreate a high-prosperity Michigan, the state needed a new economic agenda––one that focused […]
Minnesota has the lowest state unemployment rate ever!
In June Minnesota recorded the lowest state unemployment rate ever. An astonishingly low 1.8 percent. In July Minnesota’s unemployment rate remained at a best in the nation, record low 1.8 percent. (Ever in the case of state’s unemployment rates means 1976, the farthest back published data is available.) The national unemployment rate in July was […]
Detailing the failure of Michigan’s motor vehicle factory strategy
As Rick Haglund chronicled for Crain’s Detroit Business, since General Motors in 1992 chose Arlington Texas over Willow Run for a motor vehicle assembly plant, Michigan’s economic development priority has been to compete for auto assembly and auto parts plants. That motor vehicle factory strategy has failed. Data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and […]
Detailing the failure of Michigan’s low-tax strategy
Michigan’s low-tax strategy has failed. Since 2000 Michigan has experienced––in good times and bad and no matter which party has been in control in Lansing––far worse than the nation employment and wage growth. In 2000 Michigan accounted for 3.6 percent of the nation’s employment. In 2021 it had fallen to 2.9 percent. If Michigan’s employment […]