Ballard on the Michigan economy
MSU economics professor Charles Ballard just gave a terrific presentation on the Michigan economy. Highly recommended! Ballard’s main themes are: Michigan’s population decline has followed its economic decline Michigan has moved from being a high to low prosperity state The main causes of the decline are both the decline in manufacturing employment and Michigan’s standing as a […]
Growing Ann Arbor
Had an opportunity to talk with the Ann Arbor City Council about the economic future of the city. (For an excellent summary of the session see this MLive article.) My remarks and the conversation was mainly about retaining and attracting college educated Millennials. But we also had a chance to discuss Ann Arbor being part […]
The safety net and employment
Conventional wisdom seems to be that a generous safety net reduces the number of people that work. The thinking goes if you pay people enough not to work, they won’t seek and find work. Acting on those beliefs, Michigan, particularly in the last three years, has slashed the state’s main safety net programs: cash benefits, […]
Mayor Heartwell
Grand Rapids Mayor George Heartwell’s latest State of the City Address is terrific. Worth reading. It lays out an agenda for making Grand Rapids a place where people from across the planet want to live and work. Its an agenda that other Michigan cities should want to adopt as their own. And the state too. […]
Machines destroying occupations updated
At the core of Michigan Future’s work has been the belief that globalization and technology are mega forces that are and will continue to transform the economy. And that both are more powerful by orders of magnitude than policy or politics. That means, as we explored previously, that more and more work that humans have […]
Repopulating Detroit as the priority
In an interview with the New York Times, new Detroit mayor Mike Duggan said: “Everything that we are doing, from the time we get up in the morning, we’re thinking about: How are we going to build the city where the population is growing again?” Mr. Duggan said. “And that’s ultimately what’s going to define this: […]
We don’t need to be 49th for another decade
Ron French writes in his terrific Bridge article on projected Michigan job growth from 2013-2023: “Bridge Magazine economic projections paint a Scrooge-like portrait of the state economy over the coming decade. But that’s just one possible future. In the Charles Dickens story, Scrooge is scared enough to change his ways. Is Michigan prepared to change?” Exactly […]
Prosperous states are open and welcoming to talent of all types
Michigan Future’s basic premise is that the key to prosperity in today’s knowledge-based economy is preparing, attracting and retaining talent. The best measure of that in today’s world is college attainment. An important key to talent is being open and welcoming to all talent from all sources and taking major steps to increase the education […]
Not time for a celebration II
As we explored in our previous two posts, on every major measure of employment and income Michigan is today a national laggard. To make matters worse, the odds are great that we will continue to lag the nation for another decade. One of the main causes of Michigan’s poor economic standing today is low education attainment. […]