Guy Gordon (00:00.536)
Hello, and welcome once again to the Hashtag Facts Matter Podcast brought to you by the Citizens Research Council of Michigan. I’m Guy Gordon. when we were up at Macina, Eric Lufer and I, the president of CRC, we heard a lot of discussion. It was almost like a fore-alarm discussion about the state of affairs in the state of Michigan in terms of educational attainment, real income, household income, family net worth, population growth, you name it.

We were in the bottom third or lower. Joining us today is Madou Anderson with her Path to Prosperity paper that looks at this and takes a very novel approach. Madhu, our senior research associate for local affairs, thanks for joining us.

madhu (00:44.053)
Nice to be here, guy.

Guy Gordon (00:46.326)
So I want to throw just throw some data points at you that came out of Mackinac. Population growth, Michigan’s 49th. Per capita income, 40th. Total job growth, 43rd. Annual unemployment rate were 46th. population with a college degree a bit better, we’re 33rd, but still in the bottom third. Have we reached an inflection point in the state of Michigan where maybe we’re no longer ignoring this?

madhu (01:16.162)
I hope so. I think that the the cry from all sorts of you know very knowledgeable people about where Michigan is is heading is taking taking root and now we can get to some solutions because it’s something that we need to work on or we’ll just other states will pass us by.

Guy Gordon (01:37.186)
Now, every time we get a new governor, we get a new strategy for prosperity. they put together their blue ribbon panels. we had the Twenty First Century Project with Governor Snyder. We had a kind of a a patchwork quilt of of proposals from the Grand Home administration, including cool cities and other things, and then Mich growing Michigan together from Governor Whitner, which was I think it was led by one of our our most conservative Republicans in the state, John Ricolta, and it was a very, very comprehensive.

and very diverse group of people. And we’ve seen virtually nothing undertaken by them. So all of these were kind of a top-down approach or at least having a statewide strategy. In your pathway to prosperity paper, you take a different approach, kind of lay that out because it’s more about that everything is local, as Tip O’Neill once said.

madhu (02:34.444)
Right. Right. Everything is local. I I think it’s wonderful to have an overall strategy. You have to have a direction. We do this in business, we do this in government. You have to have an overall strategy and goals of where you want to be. And so I think those exactly. This is where we want to go. We want higher educational attainment. We want a skilled workforce. We want people to move here. We want people to stay here. We want

Guy Gordon (02:49.909)
Right. A tack good tax environment, good business climate. Yeah.

madhu (03:04.48)
families to grow here and we want a communities to thrive. But to do that, that is really a local, those things are very local issues. And by by taking a broad brush and telling locals we’ll do this and this is what we’re going to we’re this is what we’re going to support doesn’t always work because every locality has a different personality, culture, population, in economic

climate. And so what’s really interesting is that if we help, we should look at this from let’s set our broad goals. Let’s help those local communities do what’s best for them so that they can grow. And what’s really wonderful is we have this this they call it a lab in at Harvard University that’s done some amazing work with data from the census

and from the IRS and they pulled it together in a way that’s manageable, that we as policymakers could use to analyze what the problems are.

Guy Gordon (04:13.101)
Well it isn’t it leverages some social media context too, doesn’t it? Which which y we haven’t seen that before, but that could be a really positive tool because people do offer a lot about their lives and what’s happening or what’s not happening in their lives on through social media.

madhu (04:16.993)
Yes.

madhu (04:32.458)
Right, right. It’s a little weird, I will say, using social media data in this way, but it is it shows that that social connections and your and the ability in your community to reach people that are doing things that you aspire to, like if you’re a child and you want to aspire to something else, that social attraction can really help.

build up and give you some incentive to do some things to grow and get resources around you. So if you do all those things together, it’s not just, it’s not just one thing. It’s it’s a it’s a package that will help a community grow.

Guy Gordon (05:16.565)
So you mentioned these new tools that we had, courtesy of Harvard University. One of them called the Opportunity Atlas, the other one called the Social Capital Atlas. What would what would they do and how could we leverage them?

madhu (05:32.075)
Yeah, this opportunity atlas I think is terrific. it took it looked at data over a long period of time of a generation. So it took and it put it in a geographical place. So for example, we could take areas such as Marquette versus Detroit and see how their graduation rates have changed over a generation, how their college graduation rates have changed.

How their household income has changed. So for they could follow an individual that grew up in Marquette and see how their household income changed over time. And all of this, of course, is anonymized data, so there’s no tracking individuals, but that helps us see in different income classes how they grow. And one of the fascinating things is that Grand Rapids in the country was one of the fifth

fifth in growing personal income for that that generation. And so Green Rapids is maybe doing something right. Wouldn’t it be great if we could share that with other communities to see what kind of strategies they’re doing to help other places? And that’s what I think we can do.

Guy Gordon (06:48.545)
Well there’s there’s also this presumption that locals know what their pro problems and their are better, and that may be true, but this gives you some data that maybe is more granular and more precise to understand your your your your issues better on a local basis.

madhu (07:01.792)
Yeah. Yeah.

Right, we can confirm by neighborhood, literally, what that neighborhood has been doing. And that’s what’s fascinating. I mean, we have this opportunity to use all this data, which is great at this time and age, to we have all this data to use it to do something that will help those communities grow and prosper, because we build, you know, if Grand Rapids prospers, if Detroit prospers, if Saginaw prospers, Marquette prospers, then the whole state prospers.

Guy Gordon (07:20.215)
Right.

Guy Gordon (07:35.565)
And we should note that these tools not only allow you to get a better snapshot of where you are in your moment, but they also can optimize historical data.

madhu (07:46.358)
Yes. Yeah.

Guy Gordon (07:48.598)
the one thing that came away f from from your paper i in the with the Grand Rapids showcase was that there’s kind of this idea that, well, you know, this is a big ship and it’s gonna be a hard to turn it around. Grand Rapids made progress fairly rapidly, no pun intended.

madhu (08:07.905)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I just got that fun. it the Yeah, it was within thirty-five years, I mean, just it’s amazing. They were able to take individuals and their personal income grew very quickly. So

Guy Gordon (08:15.369)
Most of mine work that way, Mado.

madhu (08:40.13)
What did the Grand Rapids do? And one of the one of the ideas may be looking at they have a neighborhoods of focus program where they are consciously involving the community members overall and helping other community members grow. it could be public finance expertise, it could be literacy, it could be just being around someone who’s

Guy Gordon (08:49.002)
Mm-hmm.

madhu (09:07.446)
built a business and you can get that kind of mentorship and things like that.

Guy Gordon (09:12.983)
So it I think that it was that’s a very a very hopeful narrative what what happened in Grand Rapids is that this can th this turnaround can be quite quite quick. We’ve got a problem though, and it may be cultural. It it it certainly is historic because we’ve been talking about it for the thirty years that I’ve been in the business, which is this idea that higher

Education investment yields better income outcomes for families and individuals. Seems so basic, and yet it’s not resonating with a majority of average Michigan citizens and Michigan residents. How do we break that? I mean, these tools are great, but if there’s this horse to water problem, how do we how how do how do we leverage those things?

madhu (10:06.166)
Yeah.

madhu (10:09.762)
I think you have to show them that it’s gonna work. So y whether it’s a four year college degree or an apprenticeship program or some sort of skill building program that will help someone raise their potential for income over the long term is really important. But you have to show them that it works because they’re making an investment as an individual in either in you know, in cost, in time.

To get that education. And it’s working in some places. I looked at Marquette and they have a high graduation rate. High, you know, high college graduation rate relative to others. So what is it in Marquette that’s encouraging people to stay in school? They obviously see something like that. And so that would be something to look at.

Guy Gordon (10:52.365)
Right.

Guy Gordon (11:03.329)
Because when you have snow up to your neck six months out of the year Medu, there’s not a lot of other things you can do. You might as well crack a book and study. the but you’re right. And and s some of these neighborhoods, some of these local communities have done a better job of addressing that to others. So how powerful are these tour tools to addressing specific needs and challenges?

madhu (11:08.674)
You might as well do it. It’s too cold out there.

madhu (11:29.75)
What these tools will do will help us identify where those challenges are and which specific challenges that are needed in that particular area. They won’t provide the solutions, but they are it’s a what I think would be great is to have have the state of Michigan provide a place where this analysis could occur and local governments could use that information to help their.

their own individual communities find programs. So it’s

Guy Gordon (12:01.111)
So how novel is this approach? And have we seen I mean we’ve seen Grand Rapids do what they do well, but have we seen it used in a broader s state context where the state has come in and said, Here’s what we really think we oughta do and we want your buy in for that.

madhu (12:08.033)
Yeah.

madhu (12:20.938)
I haven’t seen it personally, but I think that that’s something that would be worth trying. I mean, obviously what we’re doing is not working, so we might as well try something else. I i I I think that’s by making sure that our local governments and our local communities have access to analysis and information that can help them make the best decisions is really important. So

by giving them what they need to make those decisions, I think is the real the real goal.

Guy Gordon (12:53.943)
So who would be the best end users of this data? Would it be a s a school superintendent and the elected board? Would it be a county executive? Is it all of the above? But I mean who who would benefit the most at at at the local level from this?

madhu (13:11.126)
I think it would be a a school district, a superintendent, and you know, I would say it would be their broader organization or community organizations that might look at what is the best type of program that this area could offer. it’s

You will need to get community buy-in to do some of these programs. So it would have to be someone that some group or entity that would be able to to pull those groups together and like move something forward locally.

Guy Gordon (13:46.335)
Okay. Any last thoughts about this path?

madhu (13:48.149)
No, thank you. No, I th I I hope that we use this information. We’ve all been submitting it for, you know, decades, each one of us, but using this information and having this this tool available to us can really help us choose where to really f target our best efforts so that we can lift everyone up.

Guy Gordon (14:11.083)
And by I I I should ask you, are these tools free or would would the data collection have to be s in some way funded at the local level to do this? Is is this something that you would it it it’s and so it’s just accessing it? I mean, would Harvard provide a navigator to help local officials cull through this information?

madhu (14:22.774)
The data’s already there. It’s already collected. It’s yeah.

madhu (14:35.87)
I I I probably. I think that you can you can just access it on the web right now. You can’t you don’t need anyone, you can manipulate the information and choose which kinds of graphs and data you want for how long you want it. And it’s they’ve done it in they did it in conjunction with the Census Bureau. So the data is public data. It’s publicly available data, so you can use it.

Guy Gordon (15:03.703)
All right. And and and as you point out, there are it’s not only identifying your problems, but it could also identify other communities that are doing some things where you you’ve you’ve seen progress, maybe not you know that they they didn’t use these tools perhaps to reach that outcome, but they have been doing things organically the right way, and you can leverage that as as well as as as something that you can

madhu (15:28.843)
Right.

Guy Gordon (15:33.165)
h hijack for lack of a better word to use in your community.

madhu (15:34.432)
Yeah. Yeah. We can share. We can share best practices and strategies that work at the local level between local communities. And this is a way to do that.

Guy Gordon (15:44.929)
All right. And you can read Madoo Anderson’s Full Path to Prosperity paper. Say that after a few cups of coffee at CRCmish.org. Madou, thanks so much. All right, that’s the hashtag Facts Matter Podcast for this time around. Thanks for joining us. And as always, we invite you to check out our webpage, crcmish.org. There is an opportunity to donate there of this kind of information and this kind of fact-based analysis of ballot questions.

madhu (15:56.844)
Thank you.

Guy Gordon (16:14.647)
budgets and other elements of state and local government are helpful to you. Until next time, I’m Guy Gordon. Take care.

madhu (16:22.307)
Thanks.