Pittsburgh as a reinventor region

In our last post we reviewed the Centre for Cities report on what predicts economic success at the regional level in the United Kingdom. The report's characterization of successful regions as reinventors and lagging regions as replicators is quite insightful and…

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Michigan is a low wage state

Michigan was the birthplace of the 20th Century American mass middle class. Largely built on a foundation of high paid blue collar –– mainly unionized factory –– jobs. It is the main reason Michigan was one of the most prosperous…

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Michigan’s demographic challenge

We close our presentations with "either Michigan gets younger and better educated or we will get poorer". Both matter and for both the trends are not good. Many of these posts are about the necessity of getting better educated. Michigan…

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What we do

Don Grimes and I are just putting the finishing touches on our annual report on the Michigan economy. It will be out in mid September. The genesis of these reports is the publication in 2006 of Michigan Future's A New Agenda…

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Hanging on to the past: not smart!

Micheline Maynard wrote an insightful article for Atlantic Cities entitled The Midwest's Big Economic Miscalculation. She writes particularly about Michigan's continuing belief that the auto industry will once again be the engine of economic good times as it was for most…

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Getting Poorer Quick

In each of our annual progress reports Don Grimes and I have predicted that Michigan's per capita income would fall to the mid thirties because per capita income is increasingly correlated with a state's ranking in college attainment. Michigan is…

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