Richard Longworth, an expert on the impact of globalization on the American Midwest, is making a case for even more stimulus funds for the Midwest on the order of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II.
The United States spent today’s equivalent of $200 billion rebuilding Europe from 1948-52. A similar stimulus just for the Midwest could go a long way toward making the eight-state region competitive again.
“But the cash itself is not the key,” Longworth writes. “It’s the way it is spent.”
His outlines five investments that could produce value…
1. CLEAN WATER TECHNOLOGY: “Twenty years from now, anyone who wants to live, work, or invest in a place with a reliable supply of fresh water will have to look at the Midwest.” A mega research institute with the combined force of the Midwest’s best universities could help assure sustainable fresh water. For too long, Longworth argues, universities and colleges have “competed for students, faculty, projects, and grants as fiercely as their football teams competed on Saturday, never thinking that this Midwestern brainpower, put together, could create an intellectual powerhouse that would draw the best and brightest — and richest — from around the world.”
2. BIOSCIENCE & BIOTECHNOLOGY: There’s much bio research in the Midwest lead by global agriculture and pharmaceutical firms. “Why are most of the bio jobs still on the two coasts?” Because that’s still where most of the venture capital is. “Each state has its own bioscience organization, competing with every other state in a discipline where, if the Midwest merged its expertise in plant and animal science, it would lead the world.”
3. NANOTECHNOLOGY.
4. GREEN INDUSTRY.
5. TRANSIT. “We should stop thinking about an auto industry per se, and start thinking about a transit industry geared to the twenty-first century needs of the nation and the Midwest.”
