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 34th in the proportion of adults with a four year degree. We first made the […]

Straight Talk on the State Budget

Gary Olson, who is retiring as the head of the Senate Fiscal Agency, has some sound ideas on how to balance the state budget. He laid them out last week as reported by AnnArbor.com. Worth reading. According to the article his recipe is primarily reducing public employee and retiree compensation and raising taxes mainly by […]

Short vs. Long Term

The new Snyder Administration is going to be under a lot of pressure to do what they can to deliver jobs now. The line will be folks needs jobs now, so that now is not the time to do long term structural change. Big mistake! One we have been making for decades. I don’t know […]

Talent Shortage: High Tech Start Up Leaves Ann Arbor

Important Nathan Bomey article on AnnArbor.com. It’s entitled “University of Michigan microcontroller startup leaving Michigan for Texas”. The reason: not enough talent here. That’s right, not enough talent in our supposedly high tech mecca Ann Arbor. As Bomey writes: The firm, Ambiq Micro, determined that the Austin region offered the best chance of landing the […]

Not Anti Manufacturing

What we get criticized for the most is being anti manufacturing. Specifically anti high paid factory work. The jobs that built middle class Michigan. Nothing could be further from the truth. Believe me if there were a way to recreate a factory based economy we would be in favor of it. We understand that lots of […]

Politics Vs. Economics

I urge you to read back to back two insightful recent columns on the elections. The first from the New York Times’ David Brooks is on the role blue collar households played in the Republican landslide, particularly in the Midwest. The second is from Rick Haglund for mlive.com on a new study from the Chicago […]

Not Factories, Farms and Tourism

The dominant vision of a successful future Michigan continues to be a recreation of our past success. Won’t happen! Can’t happen! Until we give up on the vision of an economy driven by factories, farms and tourism we are going to continue to have slower job and income growth than the country. As we wrote […]

Global Challenges

As I wrote in my previous posts about the upcoming elections, at the core of our work is the belief that globalization and technology are mega forces, far stronger than politics/policy, that are fundamentally changing our economy now and forever. There is no way to stop either of them. So that the change Michigan needs […]