The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

For College Grads, It's a Cold World Out There

My wife arrived at our apartment building at the same time as a young man delivering groceries from a local supermarket. She held the door for him. He thanked her and smiled sourly, almost apologizing for his state in life. “Not much for a college degree, is it?” he said.

No indeed. But how typical was he? We hear so much about the parlous job situation for college grads these days. The papers are full of anecdotes of well-educated young Americans emerging with a degree, a lifetime of debt, and no job at all. Nor any place to live for their childhood bedrooms in their parents’ homes. Nor any real idea how to access the adulthood for which their four years on campus was supposed to prepare them.

But how bad is it really? Things clearly are tougher now than they were for their parents’ generation. But is this bad luck for a few, or an affliction that could burden an entire generation?

Putin and the Ukrainian Crisis Are Not Our Fault

There’s a theory, held by some American pundits, that Vladimir Putin’s menacing of Ukraine is all our fault.

Here’s the argument: In the 1990s, Moscow had just lost the Cold War. The Soviet Union had broken up. The Warsaw Pact was dead. Russia was down and all but out. Instead of being gracious winners, the West gloated. We brought Poland and most of Moscow’s other allies into NATO. We expanded the alliance eastward all the way to the former Soviet border. By rubbing it in, we guaranteed that, sooner or later, we’d get a future nationalistic Russian leader—Putin, for instance—bent on avenging this humiliation by hitting us where he could—Ukraine, for instance.

According to this theory, if we’d just treated Russia more like an equal and foregone NATO expansion, Putin would be running a proper parliamentary democracy and diplomatic harmony would rule from the Azores to Vladivostok.

Letter from Galena: How to Create a Region

The drive to reorganize the Midwest into economically sensible regions moves ahead slowly, but it does move. I was reminded of this recently when I spent time with people working to make it happen in northwestern Illinois, a beautiful backwater that is trying to figure out its future.

The core organization here is the Tri-County Economic Development Alliance (TCEDA), which embraces all or part of three counties just east of the Mississippi River. TCEDA held its first annual meeting on a bluff high above the river, and I came away with two thoughts:

Same-Sex Marriages and the Battle for Businesses

There’s more than tax breaks to attracting a business to a state. Such as whether that business may have gay employees—even executives—who don’t want to live in a state that treats them as third-class citizens.

That didn’t used to be a problem, when most gay business people were closeted and the same-sex marriage issue was barely on the to-do list of gay rights advocates.

That’s changing now, fast. Seventeen states, including three Midwestern states, recognize same-sex marriage, with more sure to come, possibly this week: a circuit court has stayed until Wednesday the ruling last week by a federal court in Michigan which struck down that state’s constitutional ban on same-sex marriages.

Putin's Big Mistake

We’ve been here before, we and the Russians. We’ve stood eyeball to eyeball, playing double-dare in international politics, mostly in Eastern Europe, plotting just how far we can push the other guy before he pushes back.

Back then we called it the Cold War. We didn’t think the possibility of another Cold War would loom quite so quickly, but it has.

By and large, we got the last one right. What do we do now?

A Report from a Vanished World

Forty years ago this month, Studs Terkel published his epic oral history, Working: People Talk About What They Do all Day and How they Feel About What They Do. Today, the book reads like dispatches from a lost world.

Chicagoans knew Terkel, who was 96 when he died in 2008, as a legendary broadcaster and master interviewer. Nationally, his reputation rested on his oral histories – books of edited interviews, mostly with unsung Americans, about their lives during the Depression, in World War II, or in old age. One of them, “The Good War,” won a Pulitzer Prize.

Working was probably Terkel’s best and best-known book. It includes interviews with 137 persons, from steelworkers to truckers to stewardesses (as they were called then) to jockeys to bosses. Recurring themes run through the book, and it is these themes that make it ancient history. There's no better way to gauge the changes in working life than to re-read how it seemed then.

A Big Win for Chicago

Chicagoans are justifiably ga-ga over the news that their city has been awarded a $320 million digital manufacturing institute with a mandate to invent the future.

At first glance, here’s what it means:  

It’s a big deal, all right. The Digital Manufacturing and Design Institute, backed by $70 million in federal money, is to be an idea factory for advanced manufacturing. It could make Chicago a global center for industrial research and restore the city’s status as a global center of manufacturing.

But this is not to say that Chicago is about to be, once again, the City of the Big Shoulders. Its days of powerhouse mass manufacturing are over. The institute should spin off new companies, create good jobs, bring in serious money and contribute to the city’s wealth through exports. But the jobs that were lost when the smokestack industries closed aren’t coming back.

The False Promise of Eds and Meds

Much of their manufacturing has disappeared, but many old industrial towns in the Midwest still have two things going for them. These are colleges and hospitals, or eds and meds, as they’re called. Most of these towns are counting on these industries to support them in the way that factories once did.

This always sounded a little desperate, even when both education and medicine were fast-growing parts of the economy. That’s stopping now, and towns that have staked their future on teaching young people and treating old people may be in for a disappointment.

Basically, both eds and meds depend heavily on government financing. In an era of tight government budgets at all levels, that financing just isn’t going to be there.

The Political/Economic Divide

You’ve heard the debate about the shortage of good jobs, the stagnation of wages, the collapse of the middle class – all the problems that ail the U.S. in general and the Midwest in particular. Actually, there’s not one debate but two, and that’s one reason why the problem isn’t getting solved.

Simply put, one debate is economic and the other is political. The real problem is both economic and political, but you’d never know it from listening to the two debates.

A College's Lesson for Midwestern Cities

All across the Midwest, virtually every town, city, county and state has its own economic development agency aimed at attracting investment, jobs and economic vitality. But most of these places aren’t getting the investment or jobs they need. The reason may be that their economic development agencies are dropping the ball.