The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Chicago: What's Changed? What Hasn't?

A few years ago, The Chicago Council published a book called Global Chicago, with two goals in mind. The first was a wake-up call to Chicagoans that their old industrial City of the Big Shoulders was gone, replaced by a global city with new strengths and challenges. The second was an attempt -- probably the first anywhere -- to study globalization's impact on cities by looking hard at one of those cities.

I was talking recently with the editor of the book, Charles Madigan, then a writer and editor at the Chicago Tribune (as was I), now Presidential Writer in Residence at Roosevelt University in Chicago. We were exploring what's changed in Chicago since the book came out, and what is unchanged -- or still undone.

Re-Shoring and Its Discontents

Manufacturing may be coming back to the Midwest. Whether that's good news or bad news depends on the reasons why.

A flurry of recent reports says that "re-shoring" has begun. This means that American manufacturing jobs that had been off-shored to Mexico, China, or other competing economies may be returning to the United States. At the least, according to these reports, the breakneck pace of off-shoring is ebbing.

According to University of Chicago political scientist Gary Herrigel, we're entering a new economic era -- "the post-off-shoring manufacturing America."