Indiana, Remote Workers, The Future?

 Today's newsletter from The Muncie Star-Press brought Michael Hicks' For parts of Indiana, remote work, an economic calamity.

First, the headline seems a little strange after getting into the article:

I am in the midst of academic work on the topic, so I have read nearly all the new research on post-COVID migration. From what we now know, two issues are emerging as leading explanations for household relocation. One is great for Indiana as a whole; the other offers optimism for fewer than half of Indiana counties.

Where is the calamity? Not sure if I have found what the editor found.

Indiana has a number of natural amenities, but we don’t do especially well in the characteristics that most Americans appear to prefer. We rank poorly for January temperatures and hilliness. We rank much higher on water frontage and on state/local recreational areas. Our trail systems receive special focus in many places. We are getting better at what we can change, but our real competitive advantage will need to come from elsewhere. The good news is that these natural amenities were fairly modest predictors of quality of life.

Indiana has among the best environments for private sector amenities. Large, densely populated places always have more variety, but the role of state and local policy is primarily to remove barriers to commerce. Here in Indiana, it is very easy to start and operate a business. We have one of the easiest tax climates in the developed world, and plenty of opportunities to open gyms, restaurants, groceries or recreation-focused businesses. Indiana is strong in our ability to develop private amenities, but these mostly follow people. So, these amenities play an important role in population retention, but they play a pretty modest role in attracting them.

Far and away the biggest factors that predict quality of life are those associated with local government quality. The effects of school spending or school quality are bigger predictors of quality of life than all other factors combined. In second place is crime rate—places with high rates of crime do very poorly in quality of life. In third place are several different measures of public health. These are all issues of investment in people.

The good news is that Indiana has several communities that rank really well on all three of these measures. The bad news is that most of the state ranks poorly on all three. Being brutally honest about these facts is necessary to reverse course. Indiana’s overall crime rate is twice that of New York’s, and that is not just a big-city problem. The health of our citizens is among the worst in the nation, and educational attainment across our state is now in long-term decline. This legislative session began to address these issues in some meaningful ways. However, a prosperous future will require a lot more investment in human capital than we have seen in recent decades.

Well, we who live here know the limits on our quality of life. Yes, our factory towns seem to think still they exist only to house factory workers who do not need those amenities making up a quality of life others demand. 

I still do not see a calamity coming, only the same old calamity that hit Indiana around 40 years ago. Those who aspire nothing more from life than a population who think themselves no more than cogs in an economic machine has been a mark of our political life for decades. Perhaps that is the real calamity for Indiana.

When I was in New Jersey, I saw New York advertising why businesses should move there. What is Indiana doing along these lines. Or is it we do not want these new arrivals, who will demand more out of Indiana than the citizens left from our Great Industrial Meltdown?

While in prison, a friend from here sent me the local real estate listing magazine. I showed it to a fellow from New Jersey, he was of Italian descent, who went rather wild about the cost of Madison County real estate until I told him about the availability of good Italian restaurants and the lack of Italian bakeries. He lost all interest in Madison County real estate. The quality of life thing, you see?

sch 5/15