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 this way: The evidence strongly…
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 than those with less education…
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 on competing in the rising…
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 3.5 percent. In Michigan it…
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 Wages, Bureau of Labor Statistics…