The New Republic

Brookings’ MetroMonitor has been, we hope, a steady witness over the past three years, tracking the downs and ups and back-down-agains of economic recession and recovery across the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas each quarter.   The story hasn’t often been one of breakthroughs but it has been revealing about the nature of the nation’s sluggish recovery and the extensive variation among the nation’s diverse metro areas.  READ MORE >>

This week, the debate over the economy and environmental policy reached a new low. Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Calif.), and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform which he chairs, made Bureau of Labor Statistics officials go through a list of jobs and say whether or not they were counted as green in their “Green Goods and Services Survey” in order to ridicule it. READ MORE >>

In a recent post in Slate magazine, Matt Yglesias bemoans the Obama administration’s renewed focus on reinvigorating America’s manufacturing sector as a “foolish obsession.”  “[I]t should be obvious,” he writes, “that the path forward for America is to focus on our strengths in information technology and media, and not compete with the Chinese for manufacturing supremacy.” READ MORE >>

The G.O.P. primary struggle is finally beginning to wind down (though nobody seems to have told the candidates!) and predictably the commentariat is moving on toward big-picture macro predictions about the national election. READ MORE >>

For those who’ve been following the “green jobs” story the release late last week of the federal government’s first official green goods and services count was probably a little anticlimactic. Nearly two years in the making, the one-year “snapshot” of so-called “green jobs” from the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that 3.1 million people, amounting to 2.4 percent of full-time workers, are employed in the production of goods and services that benefit the environment. READ MORE >>

Two years ago the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings released a major report entitled “Export Nation” that insisted, in the depths of the Great Recession, that exporting held great promise for generating needed sales and jobs in a rebalanced American economy.    Because doubling export growth in real terms hadn’t been seen by the United States since the early post-war period, a number of economists naturally expressed skepticism. READ MORE >>

At last a more serious discussion of manufacturing has begun. In just the last month, strong voices have by turns questioned whether manufacturing merits special attention, contended that it does, and then begun to say which sort of manufacturing matters most. READ MORE >>

Washington is paralyzed by politics and debt, but states and regions are moving to renew the drifting U.S. economy themselves. READ MORE >>

It was good to hear strong shout-outs for clean and renewable energy sourcing as part of the balanced energy stance promoted in President Obama’s State of the Union speech this week.   We’ve long agreed that the “all of the above” energy approach Obama championed last night could be desirable so long as it is just that--oriented to the balanced development of all sources including American renewable and clean energy as well as fossil fuel resources. READ MORE >>

Here at the Metro Program we have long advocated a “bottom-up” approach to economic development.  READ MORE >>