America’s Next Boom Towns: Regions to Watch in 2016

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Forbes

Which cities have the best chance to prosper in the coming decade? The question is a complex one, and as the economy changes, so, too, will the best-positioned cities.

To identify the cities most likely to boom over the next 10 years, we took the 53 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country (those with populations exceeding 1 million) and ranked them based on eight metrics indicative of past, present and future vitality. We factored in, equally, the percentage of children in the population, the birth rate, net domestic migration, the percentage of the population aged 25-44 with a bachelor’s degree, income growth, the unemployment rate, and population growth. Read more

The Cities Where Your Salary Will Stretch The Furthest 2015

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Forbes

Average pay varies widely among U.S. cities, but those chasing work opportunities would do well to keep an eye on costs as well. Salaries may be higher on the East and West coasts, but for the most part, equally high prices there mean that the fatter paychecks aren’t necessarily getting the locals ahead.

To determine which cities actually offer the highest real incomes, Mark Schill, research director at Praxis Strategy Group, conducted an analysis for Forbes of the 53 largest metropolitan statistical areas, adjusting annual earnings by a cost factor that combines median home values from the U.S. Census (20%) with a measure of regional price differences from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (80%). Read more

Are We Heading for An Economic Civil War?

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The Daily Beast

When we speak about the ever-expanding chasm that defines modern American politics, we usually focus on cultural issues such as gay marriage, race, or religion. But as often has been the case throughout our history, the biggest source of division may be largely economic.

Today we see a growing conflict between the economy that produces consumable, tangible goods and another economy, now ascendant, that deals largely in the intangible world of media, software, and entertainment. Like the old divide between the agrarian South and the industrial North before the Civil War, this threatens to become what President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Seward, defined as an “irrepressible conflict.” Read more

How Big Government and Big Business Stick It to Small U.S. Businesses

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The Daily Beast

From the inception of the Soviet Union, transformation was built, quite consciously, on eliminating those forces that could impede radical change. In many ways, the true enemy was not the large foreign capitalists (some of whom were welcomed from abroad to aid modernization) but the small firm, the independent property owner.

“Small scale commercial production is, every moment of every day, giving birth spontaneously to capitalism and the bourgeoisie … Wherever there is business and freedom of trade, capitalism appears,” noted the state’s founder Vladimir Lenin. He understood that while larger firms could be manipulated to serve the state, “capitalism begins in the village marketplace.” Read more

Oil Bust? Bah — North Dakota Is Still Poised To Thrive

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Forbes

Oil and gas companies have the worst public image of any industry in the United States, according to Gallup. But it’s well-loved in a swathe of the U.S. from the northern Plains to the Gulf Coast, where the boom in unconventional energy production has transformed economies Read more

The Comeback Of The Great Lakes States

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Forbes

For generations the broad swath of America along the Great Lakes has been regarded as something of a backwater. Educated workers and sophisticated industries have tended to gather in the Northeast and on the West Coast, bringing with them strong economic growth.

Yet increasingly these perceptions are outdated. The energy hotbeds of Texas, Oklahoma and North Dakota may have posted the strongest employment growth since 2007, and were among the first states to gain back all the jobs lost in the recession. But a group of less heralded places from Minnesota to western Pennsylvania have also enjoyed a considerable revival, as energy, manufacturing, logistics and other basic industries have rebounded. Read more

Economic Progress is More Effective Than Protests

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The Daily Beast

The election of Barack Obama promised to inaugurate the dawn of a post-racial America. Instead we seem to be stepping ever deeper into a racial quagmire. The past two month saw the violent commemoration of Read more

The Cities Leading A U.S. Manufacturing Revival

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Forbes

Manufacturing may no longer drive the U.S. economy, but industrial growth remains a powerful force in many regions of the country. Industrial employment has surged over the past five years, with the sector adding some 855,000 new jobs, a 7.5% expansion.

Several factors are driving this trend, including rising wages in China, the energy boom and a growing need to respond more quickly to local customer demand and the changing marketplace. Read more

The Cities Creating The Most White-Collar Jobs

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Forbes

In our modern economy, the biggest wellspring of new jobs isn’t the information sector, as hype might lead some to think, but the somewhat nebulous category of business services. Over the past decade, business services has emerged as easily the largest high-wage sector in the United States, employing 19.1 million people. These are the white-collar jobs that most people believe offer a ladder into the middle class. Dominated by administrative services and management jobs, the sector also includes critical skilled workers in legal services, design services, scientific research , and even a piece of the tech sector with computer systems and design. Since 2004, while the number of manufacturing and information jobs in the U.S. has fallen, the business services sector has grown 21%, adding 3.4 million positions. Read more

The Cities Winning The Battle For Information Jobs 2015

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Forbes

We are supposed to be moving rapidly into the “information era,” but the future, as science fiction author William Gibson suggested, is not “evenly distributed.” For most of the U.S., the boomlet in software, Internet publishing, search and other “disruptive” cyber companies has hardly been a windfall in terms of employment. As jobs in those areas have been created, employment has shriveled in old media like newspaper, magazine and book publishing (these industries lost a net 172,000 jobs from 2009 through 2014). In the 52 largest metropolitan areas that we studied, information employment declined for roughly half from 2009 through 2014. Read more