In my last post, I looked at the connection between the educational attainment of the working-age population of a region or state, and the prosperity of that region or state. The short story is that at both geographic levels, the…
Most discussions about economic development in Michigan are pretty narrowly focused. How many jobs did we “create?” What companies did we “attract”, or retain? Manufacturing jobs receive the lion’s share of attention, and it’s generally understood that in order to…
Every year, the US Census Bureau publishes estimates of the poverty rate in the U.S. There is the official poverty measure (OPM), which is what we use to determine eligibility for government assistance, and the supplemental poverty measure (SPM), which…
Michigan Future Inc., a Michigan-focused non-partisan, non-profit think tank, today announced the hiring of Patrick Cooney as Vice President. Cooney joins the Michigan Future Inc. team after having served as the assistant director of policy impact at Poverty Solutions, overseeing…
The appropriate size and scope of our social safety-net has long been a matter of disagreement between politicians, researchers, and advocates on the left and right. But one thing that seemingly everyone can agree on is that no matter how…
Success in today’s and tomorrow’s economy is largely dependent on having a set of skills that are critical in today’s workplace. At Michigan Future, we’ve been using a framework articulated by learning scientists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff for these…
Two threads came together for me recently. In talking with Colin Seale, the keynoter at our recent conversation on educational equity that we titled "Beyond Learning Loss" (video available here), I was reminded that of everything we've tried in education…
Today we're pleased to feature a guest post from Ned Staebler, the Vice President for Economic Development at Wayne State University and the President and CEO of TechTown, Detroit’s most established business incubator and accelerator. I’ve been an economic developer…
On October 21, Michigan Future co-hosted a convening in downtown Grand Rapids for 60 community leaders called Outsmarting the Robots: Redesigning education from the classroom to the halls of Lansing. The goals of this half-day event were: To help catalyze…
For years I have said that the city of Detroit needs more gentrification and congestion. As most of you would expect, the push-back is immediate and intense. Most folks think of the negative consequences of both and instinctively recoil at…