Contextual Healing
There are several interesting demographic articles this week looking at population dynamics.
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- Rob Tracinski at Real Clear Future has a piece lamenting the weakening of the middle class in cities and offering certain policy steps cities can take to reestablish middle class presence. His policy solutions largely involve decreasing regulation on housing, small businesses, and city services. He goes beyond a knee-jerk anti-regulatory stance and provides interesting historical context for how regulatory policy has exacerbated other economic pressures in cities.
- John Austin at Brookings looks at haves and have nots in the Rust Belt. He examines the economic success that the large cities like Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Minneapolis and Milwaukee are enjoying, not to mention the university and college towns like Madison, Ann Arbor and Bloomington. He demonstrates how the 2016 voting results in many of these swing states went along lines of prosperity and posits how the success in rust belt boom towns can spill into the old company towns. His focus is the Midwest but the analysis easily transfers to North Carolina.
- Stateline examines recent Census data and looks at small towns that are growing and tries to infer common characteristics.
- Using similar data, the Carolina Population Center looks at the dwindling population in North Carolina towns.
For Your Consideration
At E21, Charles Hughes analyzed some data related to the federal government workforce. President Trump has said that civil service reform is part of his agenda, and Hughes pulls data from different sources to look at how the federal workforce compares to the private workforce.
The findings are what one might expect: federal workers have more job security and less turnover than the private sector. Hughes suggests that may be problematic and connects it to insufficient feedback loops between federal employers and employees.
The Other 49
Governing reports on a distinctive plan in Philadelphia to scale water rates to income. Delinquent water bills create hardships for the struggling individuals and for the utility providers who often have limited revenue sources for cash flow. Especially with small to mid-size water providers, failures to pay can have a meaningful impact on a utility’s fiscal health.
Philadelphia will experiment with a system that connects water rates to customers income level and allows for a sliding rates. The hope is that the city will get a handle on the 40 percent of customers that are delinquent and make a dent in the $242 million in uncollected revenue.
What we're reading
New Transformers Produce Smart Grid
Researchers at N.C. State University have tapped into complex computational models to find smart solid-state transformers (SST) that could be used for a stable and reliable smart grid.... Read the rest-
Long session legislative recap
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At Duke, I realized how badly many South Carolina schools are failing students like me
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Need jobs? Get robots, and education right
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Confronting the Myths of Suburban Poverty
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A generational failure: As the U.S. fantasizes, the rest of the world builds a new transport system
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Can Sun Belt sibling cities learn from each other?
