The Two Tomorrows

The report starts out with the good news, the "icing". Beneath the surface, the region is merely average. That's a far cry from Jon Pinney's Rust Belt shaming of Cleveland at the City Club. I figure the Fund must be politically polite. The report is not as frank as the introduction claims it is. That said, this is a damning statement: "We hope the greater Northeast Ohio community will undertake an honest reckoning, too. Together, we can do better than just icing." Ouch.

The summary of the headwinds the region faces is weak. I don't see much evidence of understanding how disparities, for example, are connected to economic restructuring. The main initiative is job creation, but in terms of quality employment. The goal isn't more jobs. Training and access follow from that. Hopefully the report addresses bifurcation. The executive summary does not. Job creation itself can be the cause of "systemic race-based inequities".

Off the bat, in the meat of the report, bifurcation is raised. The authors seem to lay this at the feet of the legacy economy. The only ding for the emerging industries is an over-reliance on one or two. The prescription for that is economic diversification. But what about bifurcation in regions that have chosen to be "extraordinary"? Perhaps that comes later with workforce development and access.

The brief section on digitization is promising. The emerging economy is connected with bifurcation of wages, much like Drucker does. The last paragraph is a giant nothing-burger:

"Northeast Ohio must prioritize driving innovation into existing industries, foster flexible and responsive job preparation activities that can keep up with new market demands and purposefully build in digital access for disconnected residents currently cut off by a growing digital divide."

Is everyone going to get a high tech job? I don't see how this would solve the bifurcation problem stemming from digitization. I would like to see some regional examples of what success looks like.

I'm not going to go into racial inclusion discussion unless I see it integrated into the other parts of the report. So far, it's just in there to be in there. I do appreciate the traded sector discussion. Dovetails nicely with our ironic demography lens. Lots common ground, common language here.

The interrogation of the job growth metric is also good. Pittsburgh is the tortoise. Charlotte is the hare. We all know who wins the race.

I gather the Fund is tapping the expertise at Brookings for this report. I won't make a normative judgment on that other than to point out that bifurcation will likely get worse with such prescriptions.

The job growth strategy is a grab-bag of the usual suspects. Nothing new there. Just stay the course and mind the conventional wisdom. More or less, the same could be said of the approaches to job preparation. The region just has to execute better? There aren't any new ideas here. Nor are there new lenses to understand the problem.

I'm wary of the job hubs approach. Exogenous shocks could render large transit infrastructure investments moot. I'm looking at you, Denver. I think the region would be better served by first understanding what is causing the spatial mismatch.

I like the call for better, more appropriate metrics of success. Brookings is providing the heft here. I would have looked at Fed stuff. This should be a regional conversation, not a canned product.

Lastly, after perusing the end notes, I can confirm the heavy hand of Brookings. This is their baby. One note that caught my eye: "Peer economies include Baltimore, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh MSAs. All GMP data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis." That looks like a cohort of demographic decline large metros. The goal appears to be better than the average peer.