Crain's Chicago Business ran a major story assessing the Daley administration's track record in Chicago last week. The title, "Mayor Daley runs up big debts building his global city; what about the rest of Chicago?," implies a negative piece, but it has a lot of positive things to say too. The piece includes a quote from a previous major post of mine on the city, talking about how I want Chicago to be less of a generic world city, and find more of its own niche in the world. I want to expand on that notion today. Some of these thoughts are … [Read more...]
Archives for June 2010
Bruce Mau’s Massive Change
"Natural resources ... pollution ... world's food supply ... pressures of population growth ... Every trend in material human welfare has been improving - and promises to do so indefinitely." - Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource With those provocative words on the cover, economist Julian L. Simon launched his magnum opus, a paean to the ingenuity of man and a rebuke to the doomsayers who have been more or less continuing to predict man-made catastrophe for the world since the time of Malthus. Simon was an unapologetic free trader … [Read more...]
The Neighborhoods of Cincinnati
Cincinnati can be incredibly surprising to people who don't know much about it. Cincinnati was the Queen City of the Midwest when Chicago was a small village. And it has an incredible legacy from that day. Cincinnati simply has the greatest collection of assets of any city its size in America. It's an embarrassment of riches. Yet Cincinnati has not been a strong economic performer in some time. It's not doing poorly, but it isn't great either. I examined Cincinnati in one of my signature overview posts a couple years ago called "A Midwest … [Read more...]
The Talent Disconnect (or, Pittsburgh’s Talent Failure)
I'm not sure how I first came across Jim Russell's Burgh Diaspora site, but I was quickly hooked. Jim was writing about two big ideas: that Pittsburgh was on the cusp of a comeback, and “brain drain” was the wrong way to frame the talent issue. Pittsburgh was a place I'd never given much thought to, except in noting that it was one of the rare metros with population declines, which didn't augur well for it in my book. Jim took the view that the demographic problems were a hangover from the steel collapse and disguised the fact that … [Read more...]