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Caught in the Middle: America's Heartland in the Age of Globalism By Richard C. Longworth ( Bloomsbury USA )
Release Date: 2007-12-26
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Product Description
A sharp, brilliantly reported look at how globalization is changing America from the inside out. The Midwest has always been the heart of America—both its economic bellwether and the repository of its national identity. Now, in a new, globalized age, the Midwest is challenged as never before. With an influx of immigrant workers and an outpouring of manufacturing jobs, the region that defines the American self— the Lake Wobegon image of solid, hardworking farmers and factory hands—is changing at breakneck speed. As factory farms and global forces displace old ways of life, the United States is being transformed literally from the inside out.  In Caught in the Middle, longtime Chicago Tribune reporter Richard C. Longworth explores the new reality of life in today’s heartland and reveals what these changes mean for the region—and the country. Ranging from the manufacturing collapse that has crippled the Midwest to the biofuels revolution that may save it, and from the school districts struggling with new immigrants to the Iowa meatpacking town that can’t survive without them, Longworth addresses what’s right and what’s wrong in the region, and offers a prescription for how it must change—politically as well as economically—if it is to survive and prosper.
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 Great description of a sad piece of history ( bkellogg8 )
The Midwest - particularly the rural Midwest has provided a significant part of the historical underpinnings of the US and the US Economy. However, because local, regional and state governments can't get their acts together to cooperate, we sink into the morass of unemployment, unmet expectation and decline. Mr. Longworth makes a great case for working together, like other parts of the US. However, knowing the political leaders in this area, hope will only spring eternal and love will remain unrequited.
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Great Book . . . Troubling Book
"Caught in the Middle" is a fascinating look at what is happening to the Midwest's economy. It is both scary, and at the same time, hopeful. Richard Longworth offers a research based analysis of the attitudes and practices that are keeping the Midwest from becoming a leader in the global economy. The book is brutally honest in its assessment of what will happen to individuals and communities that do not become risktakers and acquire the education necessary for highly skilled professions. If midwestern states will cooperate and if the major research universities work together, there is hope.
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 Interesting - but not much meat ( jrmiller2283 )
This book does an excellent job of pin-pointing the issues that middle America faces, and does point out some bright spots - all be it in a mostly negative tone. It does not provide much in-site into what the author would do to address some of these dire problems. I can't say I "enjoyed" reading this, but it did help to clarify some of what I instintually felt was amiss in the Midwest. It did not give me much hope for the future - given the tendency of the area to be very State oriented. Until the states can come together and work as a region - we will continue to be know as the "fly-over" part of the Country but the Costal snobs.
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 Solid data and final chapter recommendations deliver!
I recommend Caught in the Middle because Longworth uses lots of data to make his points and get the reader to understand the history of the midwest and the challenges that lie ahead. There are several chapters in the middle of the book that kept me from giving a 5 star rating, they are simply not as compelling as the first few and the last. The last chapter offers insightful and practical solutions. In my case, I used the data in the book to create some excitement around a regional initiative we are trying to begin in Michigan, the one state where new initiatives and collaboration is needed as we face severe economic challenges.
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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.
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