Indiana's Race to the Bottom

 See the title? That is how I interpret Hicks: Manufacturing matters, but not for creating jobs. Anyone who has read my posts under the topic of Indiana knows this is a recurring theme here: Indiana's leadership has dumbed down the populace for the leaders' profit.

Professor Hicks' thesis:

IA surprising number of American politicians make the claim that factory employment will rescue lagging regions. The implicit promise is that manufacturing jobs will revitalize cities that have lost factory jobs over the past half century. These claims are irresponsible. Worse still, they show a deep lack of respect for voters. Even worse, a policy focus on manufacturing jobs weakens the long-term economic prospects of Indiana. This manifests itself in three ways.

First, a monolithic focus on factory jobs has resulted in a policy focus away from higher education. The result has been so damaging that Mississippi now sends almost a third more of its high school grads to college than Indiana sends. Yet, job creation in manufacturing is heaviest among Hoosiers who haven’t graduated from high school. We are in the midst of the first ‘de-skilling’ of the Indiana workforce in history. It is all driven by a wistful desire for more factory jobs.

Second, our focus on manufacturing jobs as an implicit political metric has been disastrous in terms of the mix of actual factory jobs. There’s a lot highfalutin talk about advanced manufacturing, but data on job growth by educational attainment since January 2000 is just stunningly bad. We’ve lost 7,852 factory jobs held by college graduates and 39,651 who have an associate degree or some college under their belt. We’ve lost a whopping 86,263 jobs for high school graduates. But, we’ve actually gained 2,428 jobs for high school drop outs. 

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The third problem is that the focus on manufacturing is actually backfiring on efforts to boost the Hoosier economy. By tailoring our K-12 educational sector to the training needs of a declining sector, we fail to prepare for emerging jobs. At the same time, the huge tax incentives to factories appear to be accelerating the automation of jobs. Of course, economists would expect this. By abating business personal property taxes, the cost of new equipment declines. This accelerates automation and reduces the demand for labor. We teach this in our 100-level economics classes.

If you put down the need for an education think about what I have quoted. If you are not convinced, read the full article with all the stats. 

There is one important question: who benefits from an Indinaa where the workers lack an adequate eduction for the future?

sch 12/11