Monday, October 31, 2011

Breakdown of the Old Order

An interesting set of posts in the past day or so about the ongoing breakdown of the old order.

Walter Russell Mead writes on his blog about the breakdown of the American political parties.  The rise of various populist movements and the availability of outside money has lessened the influence of party structures.  But he makes the larger point that,

"populism, plutocracy and dynasticism have traditionally been seen as signs that a republic is in trouble.  The rise of populism means that a gap has opened up between the leadership elite of a society and ordinary voters.  Alienated from a system that is no longer seen to be working, populist voters believe that the system and the establishment are the enemy.  Clearly, an establishment which allows such a climate to flourish is an establishment without the skills or the character to lead."

At the Volokh Conspiracy (a legal industry blog), Kenneth Anderson writes about the "Fragmenting of the New Class Elites."  The "New Class" refers to a society's Nomenklatura, the ruling political class, functionaries, and hangers on that view themselves as among the nation's elite.  (I've written about the American nomenklatura before.)

Anderson makes the useful point that our political elite is splitting into two tiers:

"The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites.  But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits—the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control."

His theory is that the two tiers are now at war with each other.  I love the close,

"The downward mobility is real, however, in both income and status.  The Cal graduate started out wanting to do “sustainable conservation.”  She is now engaged in something closer to subsistence farming."

Anderson is actually reacting to this post this post from Glenn Reynolds (the InstaPundit) back in 2003. 

For his part, Reynolds links to several contemporary (2011) takes on our current situation [1], [2], and [3].

I hate to get all dialectical on everyone, but a breakdown of the old order is probably a needed pre-condition to rebuilding from the bottom up.

Creative Class Fail

More evidence of the failure of the "Creative Class" economic development strategy in the Twin Cities Metro area, this time from the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

The article focuses on the suburban city of Eagan, which led the metro area in job creation during the past decade, but has had a run of bad luck with its large employers, of late.

More interesting to me, was an accompanying graphic on relative job growth during the past ten years.  It showed that the largest gainers in jobs were suburban communities, and the largest losers were the core cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, with the area's largest suburb, Bloomington, the third largest loser.

After spending billions of tax dollars on building attractions--like sports stadia and theaters--to lure employers and employees to the core cities, the result was job losses, not gains for these core communities.  Outlying communities were the gainers, flying the face of what we are constantly told, that suburbia is dying.

As I note in my essay "Creative Class Fail," Minneapolis-St. Paul--following the Creative Class economic development strategy--ranks a disappointing 46th out of 65 large cities in 2011 job growth.  What the Pioneer Press data show is that the strategy has failed further to attract jobs to the core cities.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Victor Davis Hanson on the System of Liberal Indulgences

And the coming Reformation.

Forget the “Creative Class,” Try Attracting Young Families, Instead

The main, above-the-fold headline on page one of Saturday’s Minneapolis Star Tribune is a self-congratulatory piece on the success of the Twin Cities area in attracting young professionals from elsewhere.  (“Young, educated flock to the Twin Cities”)

I have previously written about the misguided emphasis that Minneapolis puts on its status as a “cool city” and the attraction it holds for the “creative class” and “knowledge workers.”  But here I want to dig a little deeper on why that approach to economic development is ultimately self-defeating for a community.
 
In explaining why this focus on the “creative class” of twenty-something college grads represents a bad long-term economic development strategy, it will help to give you some of my personal biography.

Mr. Glahn Goes to Washington
In the late-1980’s I found myself as a newly-minted college graduate, lured from the hills of Virginia to the bright lights of the imperial capital across the river in Washington, DC.  I toiled as a minor functionary in one of the lesser Crown ministries for more than four years in my mid-twenties, exactly the sort of young, urban professional that local planners would kill to have move here in droves.

In enjoyed my sojourn on the banks of the Potomac, but I can’t say that I, on net, contributed to the social capital of the Washington-Baltimore Metroplex.  (More likely, I helped dissipate it.)  I did meet my future wife, though, and concluded that the fetid swampland of the Chesapeake Bay watershed region was no place to raise a family.  As it happened, neither I nor my roommate nor any of my friends stayed in the area for more than a few years.

So, Minneapolis got me anyway, not as a young professional, but closer to middle-aged and soon to be a husband and father.

But Minneapolis is still in the business of attracting the young and rootless.  The Star Tribune tells us that “Minneapolis-St. Paul is holding its own in the race to attract young professionals,” and adds that this race is a “deadly serious national competition to attract the best and brightest.”

Flawed Theory of Economic Development
The idea seems to be that to succeed as a community, we need to prevail in attracting “creative-class young people” because, “We can't attract or help companies expand here in our region if we don't have workers.”

Surly this isn’t about merely collecting drones to populate the corporate/non-profit/public sector cube farms.

Don’t worry, the Star Tribune assures us that the stakes are much higher, “it's about maintaining youthfulness, period, at a time when the number of over-45 Americans is climbing 18 times faster than is the number of those under 45.”
By targeting the “Creative Class” the Star Tribune tells us that,

“Just one quirky nerd with a concept for a website can create multibillion-dollar firms these days, and one survey suggested that educated young people are twice as likely to choose a city for its quality of life than just go any old place as long as it has a job.  To that end, Minnesota has lavished billions on new and expanded stadiums, zoos, art museums, music venues, bike paths, rail transit and other amenities aimed in part at the affluent young.”

But has the Star Tribune and our civic leadership gotten the model right?  Is lavishing billions on “amenities” for the “affluent young” really the best bet for future growth?  Are the cities that we see ourselves in competition with actually succeeding in the “youthfulness game”?

Let’s be more specific.  Minnesota may have “lavished billions” on these amenities, but for the most part, these attractions have been built in the core cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.  It has been part of a big bet on the back-to-the-city-movement that young people will abandon the soulless suburbs and countryside for the excitement of the core city.  The examples cited in the Star Tribune piece are all of young people relocating to downtown or uptown Minneapolis.

The Star Tribune includes a table with the article comparing Minneapolis-St. Paul with the other Kiplinger.com’s “Ten Great Cities for Young Adults.”  Those other nine include Atlanta, Baton Rouge, Chicago, Cincinnati, Colorado Springs, Washington DC, Madison, New York, and Seattle.  The article itself also mentions the cities of San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles as “more happening” and Portland and Denver as “key competitors.”  How are these other 14 doing compared to Minneapolis-St. Paul in youthfulness?

The Baby Bust Takes a Toll
No one is more youthful than a newborn.  Demographers calculate that a fertility rate of 2.1 per woman is needed to sustain a given population level.  Across the U.S., the fertility rate is estimated to be just at that level, at 2.05.  While the fertility rate reflects the number of children that a woman would have over a lifetime, a number easier to obtain for a city is the birth rate, the number of births in a given year. 

Here are the birth rates (births per 1,000 people, pre-recession 2006 data) for the 15 metro areas mentioned in the article, including Minneapolis-St. Paul.  For selected cities, I include the (2004) number for the core county,

Atlanta, 16.2
Baton Rouge, 15.1
Boston, 12.5
Chicago, 14.9
Cincinnati, 14.3
Colorado Springs, 15.1
Denver, 15.8
Los Angeles, 15.5 (15.3)
Madison, 12.9
Minneapolis, 15.0 (Hennepin, 14.9)
New York, 14.2 (Manhattan, 13.0)
Portland, 14.0
San Francisco, 13.4 (11.5)
Seattle, 13.7 (King, 12.9)
Washington DC, 15.5 (DC, 14.3)

Compared to the usual suspects of “cool cities” (Boston, New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle), Minneapolis-St. Paul compares quite favorably on birth rates.  So it’s not clear why we would want to emulate a group of cities that struggles to form families and produce new residents.

Another Model:  Focus on Job Growth
For a different take, Forbes columnist Joel Kotkin produces an annual list of “The Best Cities for Job Growth.”  His 2011 Large Cities Rankings produces a very different set of rankings than those focused on “hip cities” or young adults.  His top 5 large cities include four Texas cities, plus New Orleans.  Washington, DC, is Kotkin’s highest-ranked city from the “cool” list.  But DC’s job growth is fueled by the extraordinary, and unsustainable, growth in federal spending.  New York ranks 9th, Boston 13th, Denver 24th, Seattle 32nd, San Francisco 33rd, Portland 35th, Chicago 41st, Minneapolis-St. Paul 46th, Cincinnati 49th, Atlanta 52nd, and Los Angeles stands 60th of the 65 ranked.

In his Midsized Cities Rankings, three of the top four are found in Texas.  Madison ranks 15th, Baton Rouge 45th, and Colorado Springs 58th.

In reference to the stunning success of uncool Texas on the list, Kotkin writes,

Whatever they are drinking in Texas, other states may want to imbibe. California–which boasted zero regions in the top 150–is a prime example. Indeed, a group of California officials, led by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, recently trekked to the Lone Star State to learn possible lessons about what drives job creation.

How do these top job growth cities compare in birth rates?  Here are the figures for the top five from each of Kotkin’s Large and Mid-Sized cities lists,

Anchorage, 16.4
Austin, 16.6
Corpus Christi, 15.4
Dallas, 17.4
El Paso, 19.8
Fayetteville (AR), 17.4
Houston, 17.3
McAllen, 24.9
New Orleans, 13.5
San Antonio, 16.3

Minneapolis-St. Paul betters only New Orleans from this list of top job growth cities (you may recall that 2006 was not a good year for the Big Easy).

Just so we are clear that it’s not all about the oil, here are birth rates for a few other top job growth cities.

Nashville, No. 8 in job growth (and with lots of entertainment options), 15.1 births per 1,000 population in 2006
Raleigh, NC, No. 14 (and big with knowledge workers), 16.0
Salt Lake City, No. 20, 19.1

And it’s not just about the Sun Belt.  Here are some northern and mid-western cities that do well in both job growth and natural population growth,

Columbus, OH, No. 19, 15.5
Omaha, No. 21, 16.4
Lincoln, NE, N. 11 (Mid-Sized), 14.9

So there are models out there of communities that can produce both job growth and “youthfulness”, without relying on the constant importation of new, young adults from other states.

Needed:  Job Growth and Young Families
Merely having lots of smart, twenty-something adults around does not guarantee the future.  Joel Kotkin and his colleague, demographer Wendell Cox, recently studied top cities for growth in families.  Not surprisingly, their list correlates highly with Kotkin’s list of top job growth cities.  The Texas cities are on the list, as are the Sun Belt destinations of Raleigh and Charlotte, NC.  Minneapolis-St. Paul ranked 29th out of 51.

Digging deeper, though, Kotkin and Cox find that,

“Overall, the places with the absolute fewest kids ages 5 to 17 tend to be dense core cities.  Children constitute barely 1 in 10 residents in the city of Seattle.  The urban cores of San Francisco, Washington and Boston show similar low rates.”
Kotkin adds, regarding his rankings of family growth,
“Other areas losing youngsters included the nation’s three legitimate megacities—Los Angeles (No. 44), New York (No. 38) and Chicago (No. 35)—as well as areas long associated with the migration of the “young and restless,” including Boston (No. 37) and San Francisco (No. 36).  Unlike young adults who move to Austin and Raleigh, the “young and restless” in these “hip and cool” centers may not hang around long enough to have children.”
Here are how our 15 “Young Adult” competitor cities rank on family growth,
Atlanta, 6th
Boston, 37th
Chicago, 35th
Cincinnati, 34th
Denver, 14th
Los Angeles, 44th
Minneapolis, 29th
New York, 38th
Portland, 22nd
San Francisco, 36th
Seattle, 27th
Washington DC, 18th

(Baton Rouge, Colorado Springs, and Madison were not ranked on this list.)

If these 15 are the magnet cities for the young and educated, then the system seems to have broken down for translating young adults into young parents.  Again, it is not just about oil and sun, as Indianapolis ranked 13th and Columbus 17th.

If the young, educated professionals that we are attracting are not likely to hang around and form families, then “youthfulness” will not be served, in the long run.  Further still, if the young are not sticking around the core cities, but are moving to the suburbs and exurbs, than those expensive investments in downtown sports stadia, art palaces, and bike paths would have been for naught.

In fact, Kotkin and Cox have found evidence in the latest census data for just such a conclusion.  They found that young people are not opting for the big city as they get older,
“Cox looked at where 25- to 34-year-olds were living in 2000 and compared this to where they were living by 2010, now aged 35 to 44.  The results were surprising: In the past 10 years, this cohort’s presence grew 12% in suburban areas while dropping 22.7% in the core cities. Overall, this demographic expanded by roughly 1.8 million in the suburbs while losing 1.3 million in the core cities.”

The hip cities fared even worse,

“More intriguing, and perhaps counter-intuitive, “hip and cool” core cities like San Francisco, New York and Boston have also suffered double-digit percent losses among this generation.  New York City, for example, saw its 25 to 34 population of 2000 drop by over 15%—a net loss of over 200,000 people—a decade later.”

From looking at the data that Kotkin and Cox have assembled, Minneapolis and St. Paul have picked the wrong models.  Getting young, educated professionals to move to the region and settle in our downtowns will not ensure future growth for the region.  An emphasis on young families would better serve the region’s long-term interests.  Kotkin writes,

“These findings should inform the actions of those who run cities.  Cities may still appeal to the “young and restless,” but they can’t hold millennials [today’s 25 to 34 year olds] captive forever.  Even relatively successful cities have turned into giant college towns and “post-graduate” havens—temporary way stations before people migrate somewhere else. This process redefines cities from enduring places to temporary resorts.”
It’s not about the best restaurants, or nightclubs, but boring old social capital, which holds the key to future prosperity.  Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, for example, notes the importance of social capital, not just to economic growth, but to the health of a democracy. 

Let’s face it, 25-year-old law associates are not the ones coaching youth soccer or presiding at Rotary Club meetings.  We need to foster policies that promote family formation and encourage people to plant deep roots in the community.  A focus on the “creative class” and the “young affluent” will not get us there.



Friday, October 28, 2011

Updated: Follow the Money: Red Rock Commuter Rail

In today's Minneapolis Star Tribunewe are told that a new commuter rail project for the southeastern Twin Cities Metro area is "gaining ground." 

It has a name:  "Red Rock Corridor."  It would connect downtown St. Paul with the downriver town of Hastings, Minnesota, 30 miles away.  The project has its own website.

But what would it cost?  We are not told.  The only dollar figure given is a $69,350 number for a planning grant from the regional government Metropolitan Council.  The state's first commuter rail project, the Northstar line, cost $320 million to construct.  [See below for more cost information.]

What problem would it solve?  We are told that the project "is envisioned as the heart of Newport's redevelopment, with a blend of housing, retail and commercial building."  Newport is a commuter city of 3,850 people.

We are told that U.S. Highway 61 is "an increasingly congested north-south route."  How about fixing bottlenecks on Hwy 61?  No information is provided.

We are told that Hastings "has no transit links to downtown St. Paul or Minneapolis."  How about adding bus service to Hastings?

We are told that park-and-ride bus lots along the proposed route "are already filled to capacity."  How about expanding the parking capacity or add new bus lots?

Rest easy, this is a "both/and" solution.  "To build ridership, rapid bus service to the southeast metro will be expanded next year, park-and-ride lots will be built, and by 2020, commuter rail should be running."

We are also told that these "plans come as Minnesota communities look for ways to recover from dwindling state aid and an ailing economy."

Who gets the final word?  In the newspaper article, the improbably-named Sam Zimbabwe is quoted, saying,

"It is something that we've seen around the country taking hold as the real estate market demands a new type of development." 

Ignoring the question of "what development?", the more interesting question is "Who is Sam Zimbabwe?"  The paper lists him as the "director of the nonprofit Center for Transit-Oriented Development at Reconnecting America."  Reconnecting America is a Washington, DC,-based group partnering with Smart Growth America to improve your life through expanding public transportation.

Where does Reconnecting America get its funding to apply its tender mercies in Minnesota?  Ah, the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation, which has provided the group with $1.4 million since 2004 "to expand local knowledge, build capacity, and support leadership for equitable transit-oriented development in the Twin Cities region."
 Update I:  The story is accompanied by a timeline for the project, which I reproduce below,


2011: Station area and site study completed on building transit stations in St. Paul (Lower Afton Road), Newport, Cottage Grove and Hastings.
2012: Expanded express bus service to build ridership.
2012-13: Analysis of cost allocations and ridership projections.
2014-16: Final design and engineering for the commuter rail line.
2016-18: Commuter rail construction begins.
2019: Commuter service begins to St. Paul.
2022: Commuter service extends to Minneapolis.

Source:  Red Rock Corridor Commission, October 2011

Notice what's missing?  No determination of how much it will cost or who will pay for it.  In 2012-13, we'll figure out how to divvy up the cost, whatever that may turn out to be.

Update II:  I found this article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press, from early last year, which cites a 2007 study estimating the commuter rail portion of the Red Rock project at $550 million.  The article also contains some estimates on the bus service portions of the project.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

In Search of: The Island of Misfit Toys or How to Get Our Economy Moving Again

Although I was not able to attend, I read with great interest the various media accounts of the “Jobs Summit” hosted this week by Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton in St. Paul.  My takeaway is that a big opportunity was lost.  According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, Minnesota has more than 205,000 unemployed workers.  If ever we were in need of a “jobs summit,” now is the time.

Don’t misunderstand:  the Jobs Summit was a sellout event, with more than 800 people in attendance for the day-long program, including 12 speakers, 15 breakout sessions, and a small trade show.  All the usual ground was covered, clean energy, re-branding, the "Creative Class", infrastructure.  Technology and Innovation were given their due.    Calls to action were issued.  Buzzwords were bandied.  But in the end, I’m left with the nagging thought: every stone turned this week had already been turned by 2008 or even earlier.  It is as if the past three years of the Great Recession have taught us nothing new about economic development.

After reading the media coverage and studying the summit's agenda, I have come to the conclusion that the most important people were the ones who weren’t there.

No, I’m not talking about the jobless themselves.  I’m talking about the people with the ideas that no one has heard before.  I call it the search for the Island of Misfit Toys, after the characters in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the beloved, animated Christmas TV special from the 1960’s.  As you will recall from your childhood (or last year’s rebroadcast), the toys were the misfits that no one loved—the train with square wheels, the polka-dotted elephant, the bird who swims, etc.—that in the end save Christmas.  What we needed this week in St. Paul were not the “usual suspects” but some fresh ideas that can jolt us out of our economic doldrums.

Take, for example, the Summit’s keynote address.  Author Michael Mandelbaum discussed his book That Used To Be Us, the exercise in nostalgia co-written with New York Times columnist (and St. Louis Park’s) Thomas L. Friedman.  Rather than look back to the “top-down,” Hamiltonian approaches of an earlier age, or pine for a “green jobs” revolution that never came, perhaps some fresh thinking would have been the order of the day.

Media coverage of the Summit centered on the "skills gap," the mismatch between the job opportunities out there and the skill sets of the unemployed.  It is a useful topic, no doubt, and one worth addressing.  But the real fix for the skills gap probably goes back to pre-school and rebuilding our education system for the 21st century:   not an 18-month project.

Moreover, the skills gap is a perennial:  it exists during boom times and busts.  And I am old enough to recall the Reagan recession of the early 1980’s, when the observation was made regarding the pages of help wanted ads at a time of high unemployment.

Regardless of whether a few hundred high skills, high wage jobs have gone begging, with a fifth of a million unemployed people seeking work in Minnesota, more wholesale ideas need airing.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press had a different take on the event, emphasizing the practical ideas generated.  Here is my favorite idea,
For instance, Tina Smith, Dayton's chief of staff, said her panel on reducing government costs for businesses embraced the idea of an ‘unsession’ where state officials would identify the bureaucratic red tape, overlapping reporting requirements and other unnecessary hurdles and, in Smith's words, ‘stop doing them.’”
Again, a great idea.  Like the skills gap, something that should be addressed.  But, first, speaking as a former one, “state officials” are the last people who should be entrusted with the exercise.  Second, “state officials” are already required to do this by law.  Minnesota Statute § 14.05, subdivision 5 begins,

“By December 1 of each year, an agency must submit to the governor, the Legislative Coordinating Commission, the policy and funding committees and divisions with jurisdiction over the agency, and the revisor of statutes, a list of any rules or portions of rules that are obsolete, unnecessary, or duplicative of other state or federal statutes or rules.”

Presenting as new ideas something already enshrined in law reinforces the idea that we really needed to hear from those who weren’t there.  We need to hear from the entrepreneurs that don’t have job openings to fill, because they can’t justify the risk in hiring in Minnesota.  We need to hear from employers in other states who won’t locate to Minnesota because of our business climate.  We need to hear from Minnesota employers who are expanding elsewhere for the same reason.

For nearly a year now, I have tried to use this space to introduce audiences to those thinkers who have truly different approaches to our current dilemma.  Although, they may be offended by being compared to misfit toys, I’d like to (re-) introduce a few worthies of a more (dare I say it?) Jeffersonian, bottom-up view:

From the “leftish” end of the political spectrum:

From the other side:

  • Arthur Brooks, the think-tank leader who pushes the importance of “earned success”
  • Daniel Hannan, the British politician who emphasizes the importance of direct democracy and local control
  • Charter Cities, home of Paul Romer’s idea that, at some point, the best option is to start over with a new set of rules
Unfortunately, not one of those I mentioned lives in Minnesota.  What we need to do next, is to find our homegrown misfit toys, with the ideas that can lead us out of this wilderness.

[Updated and Bumped] After Climate Change, Then What?

In the last day or so, a couple of several national voices have proclaimed the end of the global warming industry.  Syndicated columnist Michael Barone weighs in with his take, "Cult of global warming is loving influence."

The Wall Street Journal editorial page contributes a lead editorial on Tuesday, "The Post-Global Warming World: Moving on from climate virtue" (subscription required).  The Journal concludes,

"The question today is whether it makes sense to combat a potential climate threat by imposing economically destructive regulations and sinking billions into failure-prone technologies that have their own environmental costs."

Update:   Columnist Victor Davis Hanson has added his take to the obituary of the global warming movement on the National Review homepage, "Global Warming--RIP?".

I hope that the Journal, and Barone, and Hanson are correct, that the world is "wearier and wiser" and the global warmists are losing influence.  But the climate change industry is so vast and the funding streams so generous the charade may must continue for years more.

I would remind everyone that California and Australia have, just this month, started "cap and trade" programs in their respective jurisdictions.

Never underestimate the perseverance of even the most useless ideas, when jobs and careers are at stake.  Just in Minnesota, we have a thriving global warming industry that supports hundreds of jobs in the non-profit, academic, utility, and government sectors.  Millions of dollars in foundation and government grants support a network of media outlets, conferences and publications, and political candidates.  Funders will continue to want results for their dollars.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Boomerang by Michael Lewis: Read It!

Just finished reading Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis (Liars Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short).

Highly recommend it.  Lewis travels to Iceland, Ireland, California and other places to show us the future that we can still avoid.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Follow the Money: Trading Oil for Votes

The Minneapolis Star Tribune piece on Alida Rockefeller Messinger last Sunday deserves even more attention than it has been getting.

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton's former wife and Rockefeller heiress "has quietly given at least $10 million to [DFL] candidates and causes over the past decade," according to the Star Tribune.  And now, "She is vowing to do all she can to help the DFL regain control of the Legislature and get President Obama re-elected."

John Hinderaker had an early reaction on the Power Line blog to the piece, making the point that the Star Tribune is fine with the liberal Messinger's use of her money to advance her political causes, but when it comes to conservatives, not so much.  Let Freedom Ring blog connects a few more dots on the story.

But I want to make two points that I have not seen elsewhere.

One.  As the great-granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, she is the heiress to a fortune built on oil refining.  According to the Star Tribune, someone spending millions of oil dollars on left wing politics is just "a woman passionate about issues."  The paper is rather less kind to the current bogeymen of the left, the Koch Brothers.  They too made a fortune in oil refining.  But back when the Wisconsin legislature was considering some public union reforms, the Star Tribune wrote that Messinger's ex-husband Gov. Mark Dayton, "would 'not let right wing billionaires" [the Koch Brothers--who reportedly have helped finance Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker campaign] "control the debate in Minnesota."  So, Gov. Dayton's ex-wife spends money on Minnesota politics and she is "passionate about issues" but the Koch's are trying to "control the debate."

Two.  It isn't just through direct political donations that Messinger influences policy.  As recently as 2006, she served on the board of the Rockefeller Family Fund, which gave grants to a host of policy-oriented environmental groups in that year.  Her son, Eric Dayton, continues to serve on the Fund's board.

The New York City-born Messinger presumes to tell the rest of us in Minnesota how to organize our society.  The Star Tribune quotes a former DLF official saying, "She has chosen, by virtue of her ability to support things, to have a very loud voice."

I, for one, choose not to listen.

Rebirth of Detroit?

That's the hopeful headline in today's post from Walter Russell Mead.  Some rebuilding from the bottom up is occurring.  Writes Mead,

"It is interesting to note, however, that in one of the bluest of blue-model cities, the government is responsible for so few of these changes.  Entrepreneurs and foundations seem to be stepping in where political institutions failed, just as charter schools and religious schools are filling the vacuum caused by a dysfunctional public education system."