The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Paying for the Global City

For any city aspiring to play in the global league, infrastructure is where it’s at. Such cities are out to court both the people and the businesses who can afford to live anywhere. These global citizens go to cities that not only have clean streets and good schools, but first-rate airports, good public transportation, space-age communications and green economies.

The question is how to pay for all this. Running a global city is expensive. Granted, the global citizens and corporations are willing to pay for what they get, so are seldom put off by higher rates and taxes or by user fees. But how do you woo these global high fliers with their deep pockets without pricing everybody else – the much-battered middle and working classes – out of the city?

This issue – urban financing – may be the number one civic issue of the future, an under-studied problem that is only now beginning to get the academic and political attention it deserves.

Saving Detroit

A Detroit business man with immensely deep pockets and an equally deep love for his town, has taken it upon himself to rebuild the blighted heart of that tragic city. Dan Gilbert is putting his money where his heart is, but his project, called Opportunity Detroit, raises both hope and questions.

Does a city without a vibrant center have a future? But is a vibrant center enough to revive a virtually moribund city? What is the relation between the business-dominated core of a city and the largely working class people outside it? More to the point, can even Dan Gilbert save Detroit?

An Overgrowth of Democracy

Spring is late coming to the Midwest this year, but democracy is blooming in Illinois. Most of the state is to hold township elections on April 9 to elect some of the most redundant and least useful public officials in American politics.

Personally, I could do with more tulips and fewer townships.

Saving Detroit

For years now, the question has been: What in the world do you do with Detroit? Or: Does Detroit have a future? Or put it another way: Should Detroit have a future, or should this poor, empty, echoing, poverty-stricken, job-bereft shell of a city simply be allowed to decay, to become one of history's cast-offs, of interest only to future archaeologists curious about the Midwestern industrial age and where it ended?

For Detroiters, this is no academic question, and so they've come up with an answer. It's called "Detroit Future City," a painstakingly compiled plan, 184 pages long, written by a planning team appointed by Mayor Dave Bing, laying out what Detroit should -- or must -- do if it's going to survive.

Now the fighting begins. The Detroit Works Long-Term Planning Team, which did the report, stresses that, so far, it's a set of recommendations, not diktats. It plans public programs and other fora aimed at persuading Detroiters -- both residents and politicians -- to buy into it. Given Detroit's dysfunctional politics, this is an uphill slog.

After The Vote

Some post-election thoughts:

The solid Midwest abides, mostly. Nobody expected Indiana to stay in the Democratic column, where it landed in the Obama landslide four years ago, or Missouri to swing Democratic. But the other six Upper Midwest states voted again Tuesday for Barack Obama and three of them -- the swing states of Ohio, Iowa and Wisconsin -- helped put the president over the top.

The four Great Plains states -- the two Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas -- remained solidly Republican, as expected.

The election provided a graphic demonstration of the basic split, economic and political, between the Great Plains and the Upper Midwest. Take a map and draw a vertical line from the Canadian border down through Minnesota and Iowa, passing somewhere to the west of the Twin Cities and Des Moines. Most of the region to the east is industrial, urban, more unionized and more likely to vote Democratic. Most of the region to the west is agricultural, rural, with a drier climate, more sparsely populated, more religious and more likely to vote Republican. 

In this split, we're seeing the decline of the west. The votes were close but Iowa and Minnesota, like most of the other Upper Midwest states, voted Democratic. Only Indiana, perhaps the least Midwestern of the Midwestern states, bucked the trend.

Managing Decline

(This is the last in a series of posts on globalization and social/economic decline in America.)

Great nations decline badly.

Through history, empires and mighty nations have declined messily from their peaks, often destroying themselves and their neighbors as they fall. China, once the world's most powerful nation, endured 300 years of poverty, war and humiliation, culminating in the madness of the Great Cultural Revolution, before entering its recent revival. The Arab world, which invented mathematics and much of medicine, remains sunk in centuries of ignorance and superstition. The European empires disappeared in two ruinous 20th century wars. Most recently, the Soviet empire has withered into a bitter, corrupt and still dangerous kernel.

Now it's America's turn.

Previous posts in this series have reported the decline in this nation's capacity to support its people economically and in its ability to project power abroad: this decline has been the subject of articles and books by other writers and is increasingly accepted as fact. But we went further in stating that this decline is irreversible, mostly because the global economy has enabled the great corporations and their leaders -- traditionally the drivers of America's economy -- to escape not only American law and regulations but any responsibility for the nation, its people and its future. Operating globally, they have stopped being American. The nation will carry on without them but it will be weakened, in decline.

Debunking St. Mitch

Mitch Daniels will soon be leaving the Indiana governor's office to become president of Purdue University. He'll leave Indianapolis with praise from budget-balancers in other states, the admiration of pundits and a wistful regard from the Republican Party, which hoped that he could have been their presidential nominee this year. (He refused, for personal reasons.)

It's an odd chorus of huzzahs for a governor who, if he hasn't impoverished his state, has helped impoverish its residents. All statistics, including those from Daniels' own government, show that per capita income in Indiana has steadily declined during his eight years as governor. When he took over, Indiana ranked 33rd among the 50 states in per capita income: the latest figures, from 2010, rank it 42nd, with no reason to think things have improved since then.

If Indiana is becoming the Mississippi of the Midwest, the Daniels years helped make this happen.

A Light Dawns on Economists

Academic economists, a tribe as devout and cloistered as the Trappists, may finally be accepting a truth divined years ago by Midwestern workers -- that globalization and the free-market theology from which it springs can do more harm than good.

This blog has harped on this heresy, mostly because its author spends time in old factory towns talking with workers whose jobs just decamped to China, who dutifully punched a time clock for twenty years, who worked hard and loyally and now wonder what they did wrong. My book also reported this, and a recent blog discussed the thinking of a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Michael Spence, who says it's trade and globalization -- not other factors, like automation -- that cause so much of the job loss and declining wages among American workers.

Spence seems to have lit a spark among mainstream economists. A recent online article in the New York Times reported that "many economists see globalization as a major cause of the income slowdown in this country." This article links to several academic reports, all worth reading for those who want to dive into the literature on the subject. But the bottom line is the same.

How Midwesterners Feel About Unions

Midwesterners generally favor unions, public and private, and overwhelmingly support the right of workers to organize for collective bargaining rights. So says a new poll that indicates that pro-union sentiment is still alive, if not necessarily thriving, across the Midwest.

Yet a union-led drive to recall Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker over just this issue failed, fairly solidly. This raises the question of whether these pro-union attitudes will translate into votes for the Democrats come November.

A Chinese Plan for the Global Economy

For the rest of the world, the most interesting question about China's rise is what that country will do with the world economy when it gets its hands on it. A dramatic speech in Chicago recently by a well-connected Chinese economist indicated that Beijing has been asking the same question and has some interesting answers.

Most China-watchers had assumed that once China takes its place as the world's richest nation, it will approach the existing global economic institutions -- the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the rest -- in one of two ways:

• It will use its economic power to shut them down, and set up new institutions answering to its needs. After all, the institutions were originally created by the U.S. and its Western allies, which had the economic power at that time, to answer their needs, so it's only logical that China would do the same.
• It will keep those institutions functioning as they do now. After all, China has risen to economic power within the existing Western-created system, has pretty much played by the existing rules and would see no reason to change a structure that has served it so well.

Wrong both times, according to Xu Hongcai, a Chinese economist, a veteran officer in both Chinese companies and government, and now with the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, which deals with China's position in the world economy. Xu came here recently to speak to a conference at Northwestern University pegged to summits, like the G8 and NATO summits in May, and their impact.