Imagine that you are the mayor of Nowhere, USA. The town’s largest employer–a widget manufacturer–died ten years ago, the victim of foreign competition. Your town has been withering away ever since. The population is declining, all of your talented young people can’t wait to leave, and opioid use is skyrocketing. It’s a depressingly familiar scenario.
What can you do? Here’s some unsolicited advice:
- Don’t think for a minute that you can woo employers to Nowhere with low taxes and minimal regulations. You’re competing with a million other, similar places in the US, and a billion overseas. It will never work.
- The key is wise public investment. Put money in infrastructure and education. Have a plan for a striking-looking and interesting downtown. Provide public matching funds to repurpose and refurbish valuable old buildings. Invest in parks and other measures to improve the quality of life in your community.
- Above all, identify what makes your town unique, and market it aggressively.
Unfortunately, it is very possible that none of that will work; there will be no money available for investment, and there is nothing special about your town that you can market successfully. If so, the town is probably going to die. It is, alas, the “destruction” part of “creative destruction,” and it isn’t pretty, notwithstanding the hymns of praise from right-wing economists and philosophers.