Lessons from Chicago

Harvard’s Edward Glaeser is becoming my new favorite columnist. He is a regular contributor to the Economix blog at the New York Times. He recently wrote about Mayor Daley’s legacy. As he writes Mayor Daley took over a declining Chicago. Chicago like most American cities had bad times in the 70s and 80s. Mayor Daley […]

Do Green Subsidies Work?

I read with interest a recent article from MLive.com on Evergreen Solar. It is closing a solar panel manufacturing plant in Massachusetts and moving the jobs to China. It was in MLive because the company got subsides from the state of Michigan to open a similar plant in Midland. This is another example of the […]

A budget to grow the Michigan economy

Governor Snyder will unveil his budget tomorrow. It will set the direction of state policy for years to come. The public conversation about his proposals will be about balancing the budget – eliminating a General Fund deficit of something like $1.8 billion. But that is the wrong metric. Just balancing the budget is not enough.  […]

Flat World Realities

Insightful article from Chrystia Freeland in the Atlantic entitled the Rise of the New Global Elite. As Freeland writes a major reason for the rise of the new super rich is globalization and technology. These two mega forces are what is flattening the economy and transforming the economy for everyone. Elites have benefited enormously, but […]

Worth reading

Always too much good stuff that I can’t find time or space to write about. Here are links to three reports/articles I found worth reading. The Harvard Graduate School of Education released an important study called Pathways to Prosperity which puts back on the table the question of whether the sole focus of k-12 education […]

Politics vs Economics III

In his analysis of the recent elections which I wrote about previously Richard Florida quotes the Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey. Who said Here, in the first decade of the 21st century, the rival ideologies of left and right are both pining for the ’50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while […]

Jobs but not enough workers again

I need to figure out how often to post this basic story. Because it is going to appear regularly in the press across the state, probably for years, mainly in our big metros. The reason to write about it a lot is that no one believes it. The dominant story is that there are no […]