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Unsurprisingly then, many hope that an injection of innovation into the economy will cure the area’s malaise. Because competition within the American manufacturing industry was weak, the thinking goes, firms failed to innovate and rendered themselves unprepared to compete with foreign manufacturing firms later on when globalization began to accelerate. One particularly common theme among explanations is the lack of innovation. People have pointed fingers at everything from poor political leadership and shortsightedness to the inexorable march of globalization and automation in an effort to find someone or something to blame for the Rust Belt’s collapse. A global economic recession in the early 1970s kicked off a sustained economic decline from which the region has never recovered. However, the clock was ticking on America’s “Golden Age” of manufacturing. The region served as the central hub of the United State’s manufacturing industry, and by the 1950s it was home to almost half of all American jobs. Read about transforming rust belt towns into cities of the future.įor most of the 20th century, America’s “Rust Belt”-stretching across the Great Lakes region and areas in the Midwest-was an economic powerhouse.How can investors and philanthropists help drive progress in economic development in this way?
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The author notes that innovation needs to motivate individuals to participate in the economy, and then it will see growth and change.Lincoln Wilcox discusses how tailoring innovation toward job participation will help the Rust Belt’s economy thrive.