To the editors:
Actually, local growth started falling behind the nation’s job growth rate after 1929.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
One can but marvel at Markusen’s ability to write such a comprehensive essay on Chicago’s job decline without once citing a number of jobs gained or lost, or a single reference to previous work done on this topic. Better yet, she is able to complain that, in the middle 1980s, while Chicago’s economy “went through the floor,” it was “hard to find how bad things really were from the city’s newspapers,” and that the local economy is “enormously understudied.”
The Chicago Tribune’s hard-hitting series on Chicago: “City on the Brink” was reprinted in book form in 1983.
Markusen also complains that business writers “prefer to herald every tiny upswing in any indicator, while ignoring the more prevalent downers.” She fails to point out that her colleagues in City Hall were the major source of such upswing indicators at this time.
Markusen’s dispatch of the five myths leads, without warning or logic, into a prescription of industrial revitalization based on what she calls the “Tokyo model,” in which Chicago could reclaim its place as preeminent steelmaker to the nation.
In any case, job flight to the suburbs–not discussed by Markusen–is far and away more important than job flight to the two coasts as a cause of factory closings in the city.
