What Is To Be Done? Investing Where It Matters.
Something has started. Let's keep it going.
This photo from 1922 shows a worker at Bell Systems doing the advanced-tech manufacturing of that era, testing vacuum tubes while wearing protective dark glasses. Advanced-tech manufacturing is making a comeback in the US. (Colorized photo via Smith Collection/ Gado/Getty Images.)
Two weeks ago I mentioned that I plan to concentrate for a while on innovations, partnerships, experiments, and other steps that could be the basis of locally driven, bottom-up improvement in America’s economic, civic, and environmental welfare. In many ways this is a return to the ‘Our Towns’ work that Deb and I began more than a decade ago.
Today’s post is about three recent developments on this front. They all involve a through-line in American life that has re-emerged as the central axis of electoral politics here and elsewhere. That issue is improving the economic and social opportunities available to people (and places) that have been left-behind by the technological and business changes of the era. Or that have grown resentful from a feeling of being overlooked.
The trauma of “creative destructive” has of course been the story of economic change since the beginning. Back in the 1990s, after our family had been living in Japan during its miracle-boom years, I wrote a long story arguing that the US should embrace rather than deny its own long history of success with “industrial policies.” The real lesson of American economic growth, according to me, was that the US fared best when it tried to guide this path of development, rather than living with whatever chaotic outcome the market happened to serve up. After all, nearly every globally dominant US economic sector—from agriculture and aerospace, to biotech and higher ed, the energy business and many more—had been fostered through a combination of private enterprise and public support.
That’s more or less as Alexander Hamilton had foreseen it back in the 1790s, with his famed Report on Manufactures. And now, in the Biden era, industrial policy has come back into vogue. (As has been widely discussed—for example, here by William Janeway, and by me this spring.)
This brings us to the leads for today.
1) Case studies in ‘economic connectedness.’
Four years ago, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) released a report called Our Common Purpose. It has received ongoing attention for its specific, practical suggestions on repairing the broken machinery of American democracy. For instance, why the US House of Representatives should and could be expanded by at least 50 seats. (The House started out with 65 members in the 1780s. Over the next century-plus its size was steadily increased, Census by Census, until it hit 435 in the 1920s—and has stayed there ever since, even though the US population has nearly tripled.) Or how to shift from life tenure on the Supreme Court to fixed 18-year terms, without needing to amend the Constitution.
One year ago, the AAAS put out two more major studies with a similar practical-minded emphasis. One was on Accelerating Climate Action, offering specific how-to steps on reducing emissions and coping with climate effects.1
The other was from the Commission on Reimagining Our Economy, or CORE. This was a multi-year effort, of which I was part as a commission member. It was conceived in the wake of notable “economic discontent” election results of the past decade, including Brexit in the UK and the first ascent of Donald Trump. But its findings have become if anything more relevant given Trump’s return.
The CORE commission had many products: next-step recommendations, many for action at the state or local level; a new digital-dashboard tool for tracking community well-being; a photo project in the spirit of the famed Depression-era pictures by Dorothea Lange and others; and more.2 But I’d like to highlight one of its ongoing spin-offs, its project on “economic connectedness.”
The premise for this effort is that connections matter a lot in economic life, but typically are mentioned only a little in economic theory or models. Individual connections matter enormously for education, promotions, opportunity of any kind. (“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”) Civic connections can bind a society together despite differences: Think of the WWII guys-in-a-foxhole movies. When connections fray, societies can tear themselves apart. But because it’s hard to work these intangibles into a mathematical model, it’s easier for theorists to skip past them. You can read a more extended version of why connections matter, and how to improve them, at the project’s main site.
Why mention it now? Because of the expanding list of locally based case studies the project is presenting, as examples that other communities could learn from. Brief writeups of nine of them are available here. The projects vary widely in scale and location and ambition. One is designed to connect racially separated neighborhoods in Chicago. One operates in the public library of Waimea, Hawaii—plus another in the public library of Toledo, Ohio. Another involves housing policy in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Few have required big new financial investments. Mostly they involve investments of attention and time.
Last week I had the occasion to discuss some of these success stories, and other parts of the CORE report, with state legislators from both parties at the Council of State Governments annual conference, in New Orleans.3 Not one of the legislators brought up divisive national culture-war themes. Many of them said they’d like to see how similar approaches might work where they live.
2) Innovation across the country: The ‘Roadmap Summit.’
I mentioned last week that I was headed for a “potentially exciting” conference the following days in DC. This was the Roadmap Summit, jointly hosted by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration (EDA). It turned out to be even more worthwhile than I had anticipated.
The idea behind the meeting was to gather in one place many of the entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, investors, civic leaders, and others involved in starting new tech-based businesses with (Biden-era) federal support. Most of the projects were part of local business-civic-educational-governmental alliances. (Recall that most of today’s regional-tech powerhouses, from Silicon Valley to Boston, started out with similar alliances.) As the conference program said:
The U.S. has made historic investments in place-based innovation at a scale not seen since the height of the Cold War. NSF, EDA, and its partners intend to launch this annual convening to ensure these investments broadly represent a new and thriving frontier of American innovation
“Intend to launch.” Oooof. Given the bumper-car movements of national politics, whether this ends up as an “annual convening” no one can say. I hope it will.4
But even if turns out to be once-and-only, to me it was an eye-opening, even startling, introduction to how much advanced-tech startup activity is underway across the country, in how wide a variety of places, and on how broad a range of business and scientific frontiers:
From robotics to quantum computing, from water monitoring to biotech, from advanced manufacturing to the electric grid, and much more. Nearly all of it came as a surprise to me—and I thought I’d been following the local-entrepreneurship beat pretty closely. If Deb and I were still traveling the country for Our Towns reports, we’d have dozens of new stops lined up. The crowds were large, but I kept wishing even more people could see the displays and hear from the presenters.
And interactive map on the Roadmap conference site lets you click on any of the icons below and learn more about projects in that state. (What about Iowa and Wyoming? I forgot to ask why. And Delaware??)
Screenshot of the interactive map showing federally supported tech startups around the country. The live online version is here; you click on a state icon, and then get tabular info on projects within that state.
The projects shown on the map are from an array of federal agencies, programs, and funding programs. Some are part of the NSF’s “Regional Innovation Engines.” Some are EDA “Tech Hubs” Others are something else. But they have in common being “place-based” in two ways. One is on the international scale: Boosting made-in-USA research and production capacity, in what seem the technology-advancing, job-creating industries of the future.5 The other is within the nation: Deliberately steering investment toward communities that have felt “left behind.”
We’ve all heard and read that Biden-era infrastructure programs have gone disproportionately to “Red America.” (This Bloomberg calculation found that projects in Republican Congressional districts are getting four times as much clean-energy money as those in Democratic districts.) Again, I thought I’d been following this news, but talking with one project leader after another from “Red” areas made it newly vivid.
As the saying goes, 90% of life is showing up. For reporters, the figure’s closer to 98%. Please consider “showing up” online to check out the Innovation Engine or Tech Hub sites for a sense of things actually happening around the country, despite horrors at the national level. I know that meeting these people and hearing about their work helped my mood.