Inland California Needs to Get in the Zone

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Appearing in:

Orange County Register

California’s dream is shrinking inexorably, and only radical steps can prevent the condition from becoming permanent. Compared with previous economic expansions, fewer state residents and communities are benefiting from this recovery, which has largely been restricted to the small coastal zone surrounding the Bay Area, as well as certain parts of western Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.

As the economy has strengthened, what is called a “boom” in the mainstream media is really a story of one region. Some 300,000 jobs have been created as the recovery has strengthened over the past 15 months,but three-quarters of them have been concentrated along the coast, mostly in the San Francisco-San Jose corridor. Read more

Shaking Off The Rust: Cleveland Workforce Gets Younger And Smarter

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Appearing in:

Forbes

In virtually every regional economic or demographic analysis that I conduct for Forbes, Rust Belt metro areas tend to do very poorly. But there’s a way that they could improve, based in large part on the soaring cost of living in the elite regions of California and the Northeast. And one of the rustiest of them appears to be capitalizing on the opportunity already: that perpetual media punching bag, Cleveland.

Between 2000 and 2012, the Cleveland metro area logged a net gain of about 60,000 people 25 and over with a college degree while losing a net 70,000 of those without a bachelor’s, according to a recent report from Cleveland State University. The number of newcomers aged 25 to 34 increased by 23 percent from 2006 to 2012, with an 11 percent increase from 2011 to 2012 alone. Read more

The Cities Winning The Battle For Information Jobs 2014

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Appearing in:

Forbes

In the town of Verona on the rural fringes of Madison, Wisc., there’s a Google – like campus that houses one of the country’s most rapidly growing tech companies, and one of the least well known. Founded in 1979, the medical software maker Epic has grown to employ 6,800 people, most of whom work at its 5.5 million-square-foot headquarters complex, which sprawls over 800 acres of what was farmland until the early 1990s.

Despite annual revenue estimated at $1.5 billion, the company is congenitally publicity shy, a characteristic associated with its founder and CEO, Judy Faulkner. Yet in its quiet, unassuming way, Epic is emblematic of the expansion of the information industry in the Madison area. Employment in the metropolitan area’s information sector is up 28% since 2008, among the fastest growth in the country over that period. Read more

Taking a Back Seat to Texas

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Appearing in:

Orange County Register

The most important news recently to hit Southern California did not involve the heinous Donald Sterling, but Toyota’s decision to pull its U.S. headquarters out of the Los Angeles region in favor of greater Dallas. This is part of an ongoing process of disinvestment in the L.A. region, particularly among industrially related companies, that could presage a further weakening of the state’s middle class economy.

The Toyota decision also reflects the continued erosion of California’s historic economic diversity, which provided both stability and a wide variety of jobs to the state’s workers. We have seen this in the collapse of our once-burgeoning fossil-fuel energy industry, capped this year by the announced departure from Los Angeles of the headquarters of Occidental Petroleum. Blessed with huge fossil fuel reserves, California once stood as one of the global centers of the energy industry. Read more

Reversing American Decline

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Appearing in:

New York Daily News

Across broad ideological lines, Americans now foresee a dismal, downwardly mobile future for the country’s middle and working classes. While previous generations generally did far better than their predecessors, those in the current one, outside the very rich, are locked in a struggle to carve out the economic opportunities and access to property that had become accepted norms here over the past century.

This deep-seated social change raises a profound dilemma for business: Either the private sector must find a way to boost economic opportunity, or political pressure seems likely to impose policies that will order redistribution from above. It is doubtful the majority of Americans will continue to support an economic system that seems to benefit only a relative few. Looking at our unequal landscape, one journalist recently asked: “Are the bread riots finally coming?” Read more

The Best Small And Midsize Cities For Jobs 2014

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Appearing in:

Forbes

In the classic television show “The Honeymooners,” many jokes were wrung out of bus driver Ralph Cramden’s membership in the International Brotherhood of Loyal Raccoons, headquartered in Bismarck, North Dakota. When Ralph mentioned in one episode to his wife, Alice, that among the privileges is that they could be buried at the “Raccoon National Cemetery” in Bismarck, Alice’s reply was that it made her not know “if I want to live or die.”

That’s worth a chuckle, but perhaps it’s time to reconsider Bismarck, which ranked first out of the 398 metro areas we considered for our annual roundup of The Best Cities For Jobs. Read more

Stop Favoring Investors, Speculators over Middle Class

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Appearing in:

Orange County Register

I, like most members of the middle class, particularly in California, just paid a tax bill that seemed less like my fair share than a shakedown by the Mafia. Increasingly, for people who run small businesses or earn a decent income, the tax bite is becoming ever more like in Europe, with total bills in high-tax states like ours reaching upward of 40 percent. It’s like paying the bill for a big dinner without eating the food – we get hammered like Swedes but without the free education, health care and other benefits of a more conventional welfare state.

Most galling is that, while the middle class has endured ever-higher taxes, those who have benefited most from the Bernanke-Obama “recovery” continue to get the biggest tax breaks. This is largely the investor class, who have been able to reap the benefits of the stock-market boom and, in some areas, including coastal California, the steep rise in real estate prices. Read more

The Best Cities For Jobs 2014

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Appearing in:

Forbes

As the recovery from the Great Recession stretches into its fifth year, the locus of economic momentum has shifted. In the early years of the recession, the cities that created the most jobs — sometimes the only ones — were either government- or military-dominated (Washington, D.C.;  Kileen-Temple-Fort Hood, Texas), or were powered by the energy boom in Texas, Oklahoma and the northern Great Plains.

Now the recovery has shifted to a new group of cities that have benefited from the boom on Wall Street and the parallel IPO surge in Silicon Valley — call them asset inflation cities. Last year the S&P 500 clocked its biggest rise since 1997, helped by aggressive monetary easing by the Federal Reserve and a return to the stock market by investors who had retreated to the sidelines after the financial crisis. Read more

Silicon Valley’s Giants Are Just Gilded Age Tycoons in Techno-Utopian Clothes

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Appearing in:

The Daily Beast

Silicon Valley’s biggest names—Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe—reached a settlement today in a contentious $3 billion anti-trust suit brought by workers who accused the tech giants of secretly colluding to not recruit each other’s employees. The workers won, but not much, receiving only a rumored $300 million, a small fraction of the billions the companies might have been forced to pay had they been found guilty in a trial verdict.

The criminality that the case exposed in the boardrooms the tech giants, including from revered figures like Steve Jobs who comes off as especially ruthless, should not be jarring to anyone familiar with Silicon Valley.  It may shock much of the media, who have generally genuflected towards these companies, and much of the public, that has been hoodwinked into thinking the Valley oligarchs represent a better kind of plutocrat—but the truth is they are a lot like the old robber barons. Read more

Good Jobs Often Not Matter of Degrees

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Appearing in:

Orange County Register

If there’s anything both political parties agree upon, it’s that our education system is a mess. It is particularly poor at serving the vast majority of young people who are unlikely either to go to an elite school or get an advanced degree in some promising field, particularly in the sciences and engineering.

Historically, education has been a key driver of upward mobility and progress in our society. But, increasingly, its impact on boosting incomes has slowed, or even reversed, and, for many, the attempt to get a four-year degree ends in debt and widespread unemployment or underemployment. Worse still, many don’t make it. Read more