The Road through the Rust Belt: From Preeminence to Decline to Prosperity

by William M. Bowen (editor)

For many years, members of the faculty and research staff in the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University have paid keen attention to the problems and issues faced by midwestern industrial cities. As part of a university community, they joined with colleagues across campus to think about how to respond to disruptive change in the regional economies of twentieth century industrial cities and regions. There is no one, simple recipe for renewing prosperity in midwestern industrial cities. But virtually all of the partial answers that emerged from their investigations recognize in one way or another that the greatest hopes and assets in these cities reside in the talent and energy of the people who live and work within them. In times of difficulty, individuals and groups discover unsuspected strengths and reveal qualities and capabilities that had not previously been seen. How can the huge reserve of human possibilities within midwestern industrial cities be released? The chapters in this book do not contain a single, complete, and satisfying answer to the question of how to rekindle prosperity in these cities. They contain no silver bullets, but together they may be silver buckshot. They provide valuable ideas to generate prosperity.

404 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 2, 2014

Reviews

[Helen Cho · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always loved reading about economics and reading about what went wrong in my own neck of the woods, Ohio, is even more interesting as I have a close-up view of friends and acquaintances who have lost their livelihoods because of the upheavals that roiled through our area.

This book is a collection of articles written by professors and otherwise associated with Cleveland State University as they study why the Midwest, more specifically the Great Lakes region, fell apart during the late 1900's after a more than auspicious start in the early 1900's as the United States became the powerhouse of the world. Some of the reasons are global as the rest of the world caught
up, but the authors seem to focus more on the regional reasons why businesses were pulled away from the Midwest to the South and the West.

The authors, as a group, seem to agree that the answer going forward is to tap into the entrepreneurship spirit that embodied the Ohio of the late 1800's and early 1900's. In this vein, they define entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs, how our world and society has changed, how work has changed, and the steps that we as a region need to take to bring back prosperity into the lives of our residents.

I've changed my mind about what these steps need to be and now understand why we as a country took the steps we did in order to better the lives of our residents even though the results at this time seem to be bad ones. Interesting reading to be sure!