Globalization: Insights and Suggestions

By: Gary R. Baker
Senior Lecturer
English Composition
The University of Akron

Longworth, Richard C. Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of
Globalism. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008.

Florida, Richard. Who’s Your City?
How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important
Decision of Your Life. New York: Basic Books, 2008.

The key to Richard C. Longworth’s new book, Caught in the Middle, is to step back from a map of the United States and to look at the Midwest as the large region that it is –about the size of Germany. Considering the Midwest’s history, geography and economy, Longworth sees the Midwest as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, far eastern Nebraska, northeastern Kansas, the northern half of Missouri, and three states – Illinois, Indiana and Ohio – without their far southern counties. When he thinks about the effect of globalization on the Midwest, he does not let state boundaries get in the way. In Longworth’s mind, the smart way to figure out how to deal with globalization and how to live in a global economy is to consider the region – not the individual state. He thinks as a resident of the region, not a resident of a state. Then he can ask: What does the region need? What should we do as a region? How can we work together to help our fellow Midwesterners and ourselves in this global economy?

Longworth, an experienced and professional journalist, drove 11,000 miles around the Midwest to talk with people face-to-face and to look at the towns, cities and farms himself. Born in Boone, Iowa, and later a long time resident of Chicago, Longworth is a fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. For many years he was a foreign correspondent and senior writer at the Chicago Tribune. His book is a serious and challenging “… report from the front line of America’s new economy.” He is not easy on the Midwest. He does not make excuses. He does not make a case for propping up failing or failed industries. In the global economy, he knows some Midwestern communities, towns and cities are being left behind.

With Richard Florida’s book, Who’s Your City?, the reader needs to stand back from a satellite map of the world at night and note where the light clusters and over what areas it shines out in “spikes”. It’s easier to see the cities, metro areas and metro corridors which are morphing into mega-regions at particular places on the map. The reader can then see the new global economy in action and discover that the Midwest hosts the third largest mega-region in the world in economic output. It runs from Pittsburgh west to Cleveland through Detroit to Chicago and, finally, to Minneapolis. State and national boundaries are not relevant in this economic picture.

“We owe it to ourselves,” Florida writes, “to think about the relationship between place and our economic future, as well as our personal happiness, in a more systematic – if different – way.” In the global economy – where you live does make a difference - even if you have a laptop, iPod, blackberry and cell phone because opportunity is not spread out equally across the map. Having the technology does not make up for the face-to-face conversations, the personal contact that leads to inspiration, insight and innovation. The technology does not make up for where you are and the people you talk with each day in the hallway outside the office, on campus, at a restaurant, in a local pub, on the street downtown.

Florida, an economist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, is Professor of Business and Creativity at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. He grew up in Newark, New Jersey, graduated from Rutgers and Columbia and taught at Carnegie Mellon University. His wife, Rana, grew up in Troy, Michigan, near Detroit. They have lived together in a number of cities, including Washington, DC.

After many years of social science, statistical and survey research, Florida has decided to organize and lay out his findings so that the individual living in the global economy can make use of the results. Florida makes this argument: Where a person lives is directly connected to the individual’s happiness and creativity. The subtitle of the book is How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life.

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In Caught in the Middle, Richard Longworth writes, “A city is an organic thing. It is born usually for economic reasons.” But what if the economic base disappears? “Great cities reinvent themselves, over and over, finding new ways to support themselves and their citizens.” Scanning the Midwest, Longworth observes, “The Midwest has a handful of global cities and creative cities, and it desperately needs more.” He sees Chicago as the Midwest’s brightest example of the reinvented city, the global city and the creative city in the new economy.

In Longworth’s review of the global economy and the Midwest, he is especially worried about education and job training. He wonders: Do Midwesterners understand what education means to the region’s future in the global era? Longworth contends that most Midwestern states are “shortchanging education at the moment in history when it’s most important…More than any other part of America, the Midwest has lost the knack to compete in the new economy, and the schools have lost their ability to teach it.”

He feels that one reason the Midwest is being held back in the global economy is that the colleges and universities are duplicating each other. He praises the example of California’s system of big time research universities, four-year state schools that teach undergraduates, vocational and technical colleges and two-year community colleges that prepare students for the four-year colleges.

In the Midwest Longworth praises the community colleges because they are offering a wonderful flexibility in their programs. “Everywhere I went in the Midwest,” Longworth remembers, “I found community colleges emerging as the engine of local economies.”

Longworth endorses the Midwest Research Universities Network (MRUN), “a potential base of cooperation”, composed of twenty Midwestern universities and medical centers. The mission of MRUN, now based at the University of Wisconsin, is to bring joint proposals to venture capitalists and to leverage the institutions’ brainpower to create start-up companies.