« Fed's Lacker explains his dissenting vote | Main | Midwest economy still expanding, but is the rest of the country slipping into recession? »
August 31, 2006
Prosperity on the plains? Ya sure, you betcha!
[This started out being a single topic post, but it presented an opportunity to weave together a number of things that have come up in the news lately and have been on my mind. There is a common theme.]
Joel Kotkin looks toward my old stompin' grounds and likes what he sees. (Wall St. Journal)
Fargo-Moorhead, the pair of cities straddling the Red River (the boundary between North Dakota and Minnesota), is a thriving metropolis of slightly less than 200,000 that grew by over 20% between 1990 and 2000 and has added an additional 4,300 people over the past five years. One in five newcomers was an immigrant. Bismarck has seen a similar surge in population, growing by 3% over the past five years.
...
...According to the National Science Foundation, North Dakota ranks No. 2 in academic R&D dollars per $1,000 of gross state product, right behind Maryland and right ahead of Massachusetts. It ranks fourth in technology companies as a percentage of all business startups.
...
If the energy and technology booms bring more high-end workers to Bismarck, the broader labor shortages are driving up salaries, on average some 15% across the board between 2002 and 2005. This movement is even helping those workers who have historically had the lowest salaries. Bismark's McDonald's restaurants now start pay at upwards of $8 an hour, with some stores offering "signing bonuses" of between $100 and $150 to work under yellow arches.
Yes, opportunities abound, and the quality of life is good too. According to Bizjournals.com, the west and midwestern plains states are pretty good places to live and do business. In a survey of 577 "micropolitan" areas, the west and midwest were well represented. Bozeman, MT came in first. Minnesota has 7 in the top 50. Phil Miller will be pleased to know that Mankato came in 16th. David Tufte's home of Cedar City, UT was 48th. Here in Macomb, IL we made the top hundred (94th) which puts us in roughly the top 16%. Macomb narrowly misses the top 10 (11th) in percentage of residents with graduate degrees. Make no mistake--big university in a small town rockets a place to the top of a list like this. There is a lot to be said for living in a small town with a big (or medium sized) university. We have access to performing arts... a jazz festival that rivals those in much larger cities is coming up in a couple weeks. In October, the touring production of RENT comes to town. We have libraries, broadband access, and Division I athletics to entertain us. Not bad for a city of 20,000. By the way, micropolitan areas are defined as follows:
Micropolitan areas are smaller than metropolitan areas. Each micropolitan area consists of a county or cluster of counties that are economically dependent on a central city, town or village with 10,000 to 50,000 residents. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget has classified 577 micropolitan areas across America. Statistics in this study cover all portions of micropolitan areas, not just their central communities.
With such a good quality of life in places like Fargo, Iowa City, and Macomb a person can follow his or her vocatio and be very happy, very unlike the "Great Gatsby." As it happens, Robert Frank discusses happiness in today's NY Times,
Gatsby’s unhappiness may also be explained in part by the finding that those who focus most consciously and intensely on material success also tend to experience low levels of measured happiness. This is a singularly important finding for the many incoming freshmen whose only apparent goal is to become fabulously wealthy by age 25.
A far more promising strategy, according to the happiness literature, is to seek work you love. Those who find such a calling typically become deeply engaged in their professional lives. And engagement, in turn, leads to expertise, which in some fields, at least, leads to wealth. Finding work that you value for its own sake is thus not only a promising path to happiness, it may also increase your chances of becoming rich. But even if not, it will improve your odds of becoming an interesting person, someone who is attractive to both friends and potential mates alike.
One can follow that strategy anywhere if you really want to, even in places like Fargo, Iowa City, and Macomb. Furthermore, with the internet and modern supply chain management, we in the smaller metro areas (and micropolitan areas) can partake of the conveniences of modern life that make us wealthier just the same as folks from the coasts. That would not have been the case in the 1920s or even the 1960s. The fact that I can communicate these thoughts with you, my readers from New York to Australia, from the hamlet of Macomb, IL is itself an indication that we live in amazing times. It's difficult to measure it, but it makes me happy. And I count it as wealth.
Don't get me wrong. The picture is not entirely rosy. This is not a Panglossian "best of all possible worlds". But neither is the bottom falling out. When McDonalds is paying $8/hr (something that I last saw in Iowa City in about 1999 at the peak of the dot-com boom), that's something you can't ignore.
Posted by William Polley at August 31, 2006 12:54 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.williampolley.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/579