Marketplace of Ideas Blog

As an author, I’m properly grateful for the attention you gave to my book and to my ideas, laid out at the NEWNorth Summit. I’d be bored and disappointed if you did nothing but agree. It’s nice to have people nodding in agreement, but sometimes they’re just nodding. Much better to have a debate. Let me join in, by commenting on your comments. (As you said, that’s what journalists do.)

You say a regional Midwestern marketing and development strategy won’t work, because the only benefits go to the state or locality that actually gets the investment, not to the Midwest as a whole. Narrowly conceived, that’s true. But it assumes that individual states and localities can thrive in a rusting, dying region. Granted, economic lightning might strike a region like New North, while the rest of Wisconsin or the rest of the Midwest crumbles. But don’t bet on it. Regions do rise and fall together. Look at New England: boomtime in shoes, textiles and other industries, busttime when those industries went south, renewed boom (except for the far reaches, like Maine) when New England recovered on the basis of high tech. Or look at the South: a bad century, somewhat like the Cubs, from the Civil War to the 1960s, when air conditioning was invented and the Old South became the Sun Belt. Some places, like Atlanta, have done better than others, like the Delta. But overall, the South has drawn in industry, investment, people and money as a region. Or look at the Midwest: we’ve been living for the past century on the explosion of innovation and entrepreneurialism that burst from the region as a whole, with one good idea (the invention of the car, for instance) spawning tons of other ideas (ignitions, tires, ball bearings, etc.) and creating industries, like steel, across the Midwest to feed these entrepreneurial businesses. Steel mills in Chicago, in turn, created demand for iron and coal throughout the Midwest and, in time, spawned the farm equipment businesses in Wisconsin and elsewhere. In other words, the Midwest rose as a region, thrived as a region and, alas, is now declining as a region. My point: economic development seldom happens in isolation. So what if Minnesota gets that factory? Wisconsin will get the next one. Better for the two states to work together.

You’re right, though, that whenever a factory gets built somewhere in the Midwest, the governors and state governments of the neighboring states see this as a defeat. My point is that this idea is just dumb – and is a really good reason why we have to stop looking to state governments to lead the next generation of economic development. They haven’t learned yet, and probably never will learn. (Talk a bit to some ex-governors, and they’ll tell you that they know it’s dumb.) You quote a visitor to the Taste of Entrepreneurship to the effect that, if New North was a government venture, it would fail: instead, it succeeds as a collaboration between business, education and other players, with governments helping out but not leading. Absolutely right. This is the kind of collaboration we need not just within regions like New North but across the Midwest.

Bobby Kennedy moved to New York specifically to get elected to the Senate. He’d never lived there before he declared for the Senate. Obama’s been around Illinois, Chicago and the Midwest for more than 20 years, working in the nabes, practicing law, teaching at the U of Chicago, serving in the state legislature. He has indeed lived here only half his life – but that’s longer than he ever lived anywhere, and the Midwest is truly home to him and his family. So yes, I think the Midwest can push this administration’s Midwestern buttons, especially since the entire region voted for him. Granted, we’re as fickle as any voters, so you’re right that if he doesn’t come through, we’ll vote against him next time. But that’s life. That’s politics. Let’s hope he comes through.

You say I spent too much time in my native Iowa, not enough time in Wisconsin. There’s no such thing as too much time in Iowa. But you’re right. Mea culpa. I plead guilty to doing too little reporting and research in Wisconsin. You can’t go everywhere, but Wisconsin deserved better. But I’ve been spending a lot more time in Wisconsin since the book came out – surprisingly, given that I ignored too much of the state, I’ve had more demands for speaking and more good newspaper articles in Wisconsin than anywhere else. And everywhere I go, I’m told that I accurately described towns and cities that I never visited. I think this is the point – that the Midwest is truly a region and is suffering now as a region. The problems and potential of cities in Ohio or Iowa or Michigan are very much the same as those of cities like Appleton or Green Bay.

A note on Chicago as a global city, and whether it deserves the title. It does. If it’s not quite the global metropolis that New York or London is, it ranks right up there with Los Angeles and Shanghai and Toronto and Frankfurt and Singapore and all those other global cities. You point out that it has crime and political corruption (no argument on that point just now) and a lot of other bad things, like congestion and high taxes and problematic schools and stress. OK, that’s life in the global city. You say that other places have the same drawbacks but I wouldn’t rank them as “global cities.” Wrong, A city’s “globality” doesn’t have much to do with these attributes. Many great cities have corruption (the last governor to get in trouble was the New York one, Spitzer): some have autocratic governments (Singapore) and some have out-and-out dictatorships (Shanghai). All great cities are congested, because so many people want to be there. All great cities have high costs, for the same reason. All great cities are high-stress places, because they’re so busy. Many have lousy schools, to their shame: so many bright and creative young people want to come there to live and work that they don’t have to create their own home-grown pool of talent. Many, for all these reasons, are not particularly pleasant places to live (although they’re all exciting places to be.) No, global cities are the places where the world’s business gets done – the home of headquarters, global law and accounting firms, trading marts and global universities and huge influxes of immigrants. They are big economic centers and, because they draw in so much of the world’s money, they are often cultural and recreational centers, too. You’re right that there certainly are easier places to live. But they aren’t global cities.

But not everybody wants to be there. As you note, Wisconsin and the New North region have a lot of great people, including entrepreneurs, who have chosen to live there and are creating not only good lives but an economy. A lot of these people came to the New North summit, and I could see that they are thriving in the region. More power to them – literally. More power, and more money, and more investment. You, like Chicago and everywhere else, need all you can get. So are you getting enough? Is Wisconsin thriving? How’s Janesville? Or Racine? Or the towns in the center of the west of the state? Or Milwaukee, where no less than 70 percent of the town’s African-American males are unemployed? Or the towns in the far north, or the small farm towns too far from cities to be bedroom suburbs? Are all your best and brightest young people staying in their home towns, because these towns offer them the best chance to use their brains and talents? Or are they grabbing their diplomas and heading for the cities? Be sure, I’m not pointing any fingers at Wisconsin here. As Midwestern states go, Wisconsin is doing better than most. But my point is that the entire Midwest is lagging the rest of the nation, is falling behind in the global race, and Wisconsin is part of the Midwest and can’t escape this malaise. Everyone who lives in the New North is there because, as you say, they chose to be there. Anybody who spends any time in the Fox Valley can see what those reasons are. But will their kids make the same choice? My goal is to get the Midwest and Midwesterners working together again, to built a truly regional economy, to leverage their many strengths, to re-create lives of economic decency for everyone here.

Again, thanks for commenting on my thoughts, and I hope you’ll fire away at these comments on your comments.