Marketplace Today Blog

The New North called its 2008 Summit “A Date to Collaborate.”

So it made sense to invite as its keynote speaker an author who claims that economic survival for the Midwest in the 21st century requires collaboration, even across state lines.

Richard Longworth, a former Chicago Tribune reporter and author of Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism, said that the financial crisis of today will end, but “when that does end … the problems of globalization will still be there. The short answer is: We’ve got problems.”

Longworth said the Midwest grew into prominence because of heavy industry and agriculture — “the Midwest was the Silicon Valley of the industrial era, and it made us rich” — but “Globalization is throwing them right up into the air. Globalization is putting the final nail in a lot of coffins.”

Yet, he said, “Globalization is not going to go away. Globalization is the present and the future. If you think the Industrial Age changed the way we live, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

Globalization is in part due to the liberalizing of the economies of China and the former Soviet bloc countries. The fact that three times as many workers are now competing for the same amount of economic dollars squeezes both wages and costs, Longworth said.

While Chicago is “almost unique” in its transition from its industrial past to “becoming a global city,” other Midwest cities, including Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis “look like they’re dying,” he said. “Cities are the focus of civilization, and some of these cities may have no future.” Globalization “concentrates its brains and business in major and global cities.”

Globalization additionally is speeding up the decline “of much of the rural Midwest,” said Longworth, with educated young people departing their hometowns, leaving poorer and less educated people behind.

“Across the Midwest, the only places that are growing and thriving these days are the places that draw in immigrants,” in “what was once the whitest and most homogeneous” part of the U.S., he said. Even with that, “small-town Americans are terribly conflicted about this.”

Longworth is optimistic about the new Barack Obama presidential administration because Obama is a Midwestern senator, and because the entire Midwest voted for Obama. He is, however, pessimistic about states’ abilities to deal with globalization issues; he called state government “totally inadequate” and “incompetent” for today’s globalization issues.

“Globalization couldn’t care less about lines drawn two centuries ago,” he said. “All Midwestern state governments are saddled by the legacy costs of the industrial era … that they don’t have the time or energy or resources” to deal with globalization issues.

As a result, he said, “The place to start is to start thinking regionally. We are a big region with real global assets.” Big cities need to “look at themselves as one big economic area and work accordingly.” Efforts need to be made to create new industries that are “just waiting to be tapped,” including bioscience, nanotechnology, and a “transit industry — rail and people-moving that makes 21st-century sense.”

Longworth said New North efforts are an effort to “abandon mindless competition.” He noted that Northeast Wisconsin is similar to western Michigan, and “in this age it should take more than a lake to divide us.” He said Midwestern universities have the resources and knowledge to work together to create “a true Midwestern intellectual powerhouse.”

Longworth’s organization, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, is starting the Global Midwest Project, a think tank and a forum to “find out what we have in common so we can face the future together, because the future is already here.

“The good news is that the era has already begun. The bad news is that too much of the Midwest is already behind.”