Not time for a celebration III
The Census Bureau released in September a report on poverty in American from 2000-2012. Not good news for the country. The poverty rate since 2000 has risen from 12.2 percent to 15.9 percent. The number of people living in poverty has increased from 33.3 to 48.8 million. The trends are worse in Michigan. The poverty […]
Not just STEM
I do a monthly post for the Grand Rapids Business Journal. Last month I wrote about the occupations and industries their latest 40 Under Forty worked in. Turns out these future leaders in West Michigan overwhelmingly don’t work for manufacturers or are in STEM based occupations. In fact, the nearly 150 nominees, at the undergraduate […]
College access
There is a growing––but certainly not universal––understanding that the economic well being of the country and state are now highly dependent on the proportion of adults in the workforce with a college––particularly four year––degree. That human capital is the asset that matters most and is in the shortest supply for economic growth and prosperity. And […]
Manufacturing in decline
Two terrific articles on the declining role of manufacturing in the American economy. One from Bloomberg Businssweek entitled Factory Jobs Are Gone. Get Over It. The other a Steve Rattner column for the New York Times entitled The Myth of Industrial Rebound. Both clearly present the overwhelming data that manufacturing employment has been and will continue to […]
Ballard on the Michigan economy
MSU economics professor Charles Ballard just gave a terrific presentation on the Michigan economy. Highly recommended! Ballard’s main themes are: Michigan’s population decline has followed its economic decline Michigan has moved from being a high to low prosperity state The main causes of the decline are both the decline in manufacturing employment and Michigan’s standing as a […]
Growing Ann Arbor
Had an opportunity to talk with the Ann Arbor City Council about the economic future of the city. (For an excellent summary of the session see this MLive article.) My remarks and the conversation was mainly about retaining and attracting college educated Millennials. But we also had a chance to discuss Ann Arbor being part […]
The safety net and employment
Conventional wisdom seems to be that a generous safety net reduces the number of people that work. The thinking goes if you pay people enough not to work, they won’t seek and find work. Acting on those beliefs, Michigan, particularly in the last three years, has slashed the state’s main safety net programs: cash benefits, […]
Mayor Heartwell
Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell’s latest State of the City Address is terrific. Worth reading. It lays out an agenda for making Grand Rapids a place where people from across the planet want to live and work. Its an agenda that other Michigan cities should want to adopt as their own. And the state too. […]
Machines destroying occupations updated
At the core of Michigan Future’s work has been the belief that globalization and technology are mega forces that are and will continue to transform the economy. And that both are more powerful by orders of magnitude than policy or politics. That means, as we explored previously, that more and more work that humans have […]
Repopulating Detroit as the priority
In an interview with the New York Times, new Detroit mayor Mike Duggan said: “Everything that we are doing, from the time we get up in the morning, we’re thinking about: How are we going to build the city where the population is growing again?” Mr. Duggan said. “And that’s ultimately what’s going to define this: […]