Product Description

The Midwest has always been the heart of America—both its economic bellwether and the repository of its national identity. Now, in a newly globalized age, the Midwest is challenged as never before. In Caught in the Middle, longtime Chicago Tribune reporter Richard Longworth explores the new reality of life in today’s heartland and reveals what these changes mean for the region—and the country.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #146008 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-04
• Released on: 2009-08-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781596915909
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Ex–Chicago Tribune correspondent Longworth (Global Squeeze) paints a bleak, evocative portrait of the Midwest's losing struggle with foreign competition and capitalist gigantism. It's a landscape of shuttered factories, desperate laid-off workers, family farms gobbled up by agribusiness, once great cities like Detroit and Cleveland now in ruins, small towns devolved into depopulated rural slums haunted by pensioners and meth-heads. But the harshest element of the book is Longworth's own pitiless ideology of globalism. In his telling, Midwesterners are sluggish, unskilled, risk-averse mediocrities, clinging to obsolete industrial-age dreams of job security, allergic to change, indifferent to education and totally unfit for the global age. They are doomed because global competition is unstoppable, says Longworth, who dismisses the idea of trade barriers as simplistic nonsense purveyed by conspiracy theorists. The silver linings Longworth floats—biotechnology, proposals for regional cooperation—are meager and iffy. The Midwest's real hope, he insists, lies in a massive influx of mostly low-wage immigrant workers and in enclaves of the rich and brainy, like Chicago and Ann Arbor, where the creative class sells nebulous information solutions to dropouts and Ph.D.s. It's not the Middle West that's under siege in Longworth's telling; it's the now apparently quaint notion of a middle class. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“Longworth’s book should be of interest even to those who have never come closer to America’s heartland than to change planes at O ’Hare. Almost any chapter of Caught in the Middle could generate a book’s worth of debate anywhere in this country.”—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

About the Author

---

Customer Reviews

Review of" Caught in the Middle"
This books tells more about what's going on in America today than anything I've ever read. Longworth's descriptions of the economic upheaval in the Mid-West
apply just as well to other areas such as New England
where I live. Most valuable are his analysyes of the
the communities and the companies that reside in them that have learned to thrive in the new global economy -
Chicago, Ann Arbor, Peoria, Columbus (Indiana), and
Madison (Wisconsin). His comments on education are right on target - the community colleges are providing the training needed by the new workforce. This is must
reading for anyone who is concerned about the country's
prosperity.

William Saunders
Whately, MA

Global is to Ghetto as Education is to Unemployment
I found this book interesting, because I was Senior Economist and Deputy Director of Economic Analysis for the Indiana Department of Commerce in the 1980's for the Administration of Governor Robert Orr. During those years I was also co-chair for the Economic Development Task Force of the Great Lakes Commission, an interstate compact with a charter from the U.S. Congress like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

One of Longworth's theses is that the Midwest manufacturing region must be treated as a whole region, and that the individual States cannot address the economic adjustment to globalization in isolation from one another. I can agree that States stealing employers from one another cannot make the needed economic adjustments imposed by globalization; this is merely a zero-sum game for the region, and is not a remedy. While with the Great Lakes Commission I found that the Economic Development Task Force benefited its participants to the extent that we shared our research findings. But the Commission could take no action on economic development.

Contrary to Longworth I found that effective action is possible with the State governments, and that the best instrument for the State government action is the fiscal budget's public investment sectors. The Indiana's budget is about nine percent of its gross state product, and about half of the total budget is public investments: i.e. higher education, primary and secondary education, highways, airports, and water ports. These public investments facilitate development of the State economy's tax base and thus yield increases in tax collections independently of tax rates.

In 1986 I made an econometric model which exhibited an employment-maximizing allocation of public expenditures for Indiana's budget, and found that the optimal allocation implied very large increases to Indiana's primary and secondary education. These findings supported Governor Orr's "A+" legislative agenda for a $300 million increase in primary and secondary spending, which was enacted.

Longworth advocates improved primary and secondary education in Chapter Ten of his book. And former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan also advocates improved education in Chapter Twenty One of his recent book The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.

Global is to ghetto as education is to unemployment, because education is the means for supplying the needed enhancements of human capital that turns globalization into opportunity instead of unemployment due to a ghetto economy.

On balance I thing that this book written by a journalist is well researched in many respects and is informative about Midwest economic history.

Depressing Scenario
While the book is depressing for someone like me (I live in the Mid-West), the author does connect with the vital realities of the area. He is right in assuming that the mid-west might change more than any other section of the country and that the point of it all is that we need to stop fighting the future (i.e. globalization, etc.) and begin accepting it along with everything that is frightening about it. I think that a lot of countries are far ahead of the U.S. in this aspect of living. The book os worth while for anyone who cares about tomorrow.