The other day, over lunch with friends from Grand Rapids, our talk turned naturally enough to Michigan's great east-west divide.

For there is, whether we want to admit it or not, an enormously deep and intense cultural chasm between the "east" side of the state (running up I-75 from Toledo through Detroit, taking in the entire tri-county area and Flint, Bay City and Saginaw) and the "west" side (roughly everything else.) This divide is so great my friends worry whether we ever will be able to agree on a common agenda for our state's most important task - restructuring Michigan's economy.

Indeed, they think, with some justification, that the ingrained culture on the east side of Michigan is mostly to blame. Here's how they see the mentality: Confrontational rather than collaborative, dominated by self-serving interest groups, whether labor unions, automobile companies or racial minorities.

They think east side politics are often incoherent, and based on competing interests. Where they can understand what's going on politically, they see race getting in the way of common sense. They see a labor force that has a poor work ethic and yet insists on being paid too much.

Their critique was so intense, deeply held and distressing, it made me realize we need to try understand how this gap arose.

The answer starts with focusing on how long-standing economic factors shaped the culture of the east side.

First of all, we need to start with the observation that the east side of Michigan has been dominated by the automobile industry for nearly a century. That's hardly new information, of course.

But it is important is to understand how the economic structure of the industry helped determine the culture.

At its core, the traditional auto industry for decades was what the economists call an "oligopoly," that is, a basically closed market in which sellers are so few that together they share monopoly profits.

The Big Three auto companies, for example, could for decades pass on a monopolistic price to the American auto market simply because there was no other competitive choice. As a result, the Big Three prospered. And so, too, did the suppliers, because the industry's uncompetitive economic structure wasn't confined to the manufacturers. It included the entire supply chain. That's because while Ford, Chrysler and General Motors "competed," the market was largely free from international competition, and everyone could set prices unrealistically high. And so many years, auto suppliers also enjoyed a good living. In turn, once the plants were organized, this non-competitive structure extended to the labor movement, which sought to administer monopoly pricing for labor on the industry through industry-wide "pattern contract" bargaining.

In an ordinarily competitive industry, this would have been a recipe for mutual suicide. But in an industry that throughout was based on a three-way monopoly, high labor prices were just another cost factor that could be passed on to consumers.

So for decades, the money rolled in. The success of the industry and the high demand for labor eventually led to the mass migration of African-American families from the South to Detroit, starting with the labor shortages during World War II and continuing. Originally a nearly all-white town with mixed ethnicity, Detroit soon attracted droves of Black families that came to enjoy a full-blown middle-class life style, courtesy of the unions and the noncompetitive structure of the auto industry.

Now here's the point of all this historical musing. Over time, the economic underpinnings of the east side of the state had a profound impact on the culture of its communities. They developed an adversarial culture, because the essence of collective bargaining between management and labor is adversarial.

People have too often found it easy to be self-serving and non-collaborative, because whether you're a manufacturer or a supplier or a labor boss in a closed market system, you're jostling to get the biggest possible piece of the economic pie.

They got used to charging high prices, because if you can stick a non-competitive price for autos to the market (for the manufacturers) or parts (for the suppliers) or labor (for the United Auto Workers' union) you don't have to care about how high.

The work ethic suffered, because if the UAW local controls who gets hired and at what price, who needs to work hard to keep his job? The politics of race developed as a consequence of Detroit becoming in essence a segregated city surrounded by largely white suburbs.

Now, don't get me wrong. I think that the west side's critique of the east side is somewhat exaggerated, and sometimes just factually incorrect. The west side isn't perfect by any means, and could learn a few things about cultural and intellectual diversity from the eastern part of the state.

Most of the great technological and manufacturing innovations and advances in Michigan history haven't begun in west Michigan, and maybe those folks need to ask themselves why.

But the biggest problems we face are rooted in southeastern Michigan, and the rest of the state has an attitude about the east side that is deeply held and which we need to understand, if we are ever going to bring our state together to move forward. Eventually, I'd guess the current unraveling of the decades-old and now outdated model of the closed economy auto industry is going to result in a changed culture on the east side of the state.

But these changes will take a long time - perhaps decades - to have a real impact. And in the meantime, everyone on this state has a lot of work to do together to overcome the chasm that divides us.