Live-blogging again from “North Carolina: The Good Growth State,” in Raleigh, N.C. State’s Emerging Issues Forum. You can listen in here.
Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz is speaking now. He’s not nearly as wittily satirical as N.Y. Times pundit David Brooks, who opened this morning with a great disquisition on “go-go suburbia.” But it’s stern good medicine for all N.C. policy- and law-makers to hear:
“There is no such thing as the North Carolina economy or the American economy.”
Katz’s key points:
- Despite the economic trauma we’re living through, the economic fundamentals haven’t changed: The drivers of an economy are metro-region economies.
- We have no national economy. We have a network of metro economies.
- We don’t have a national or state governance that recognizes that reality.
- National and state policies reward wasteful forms of development and policies. (More later about his comments on roads spending.)
- North Carolina is a metro state. It doesn’t think of itself this way.
This is essential stuff for the state’s leaders to hear. N.C. culture – once you get outside Charlotte – thinks of itself as a place of farms and small towns. The legislature and state government attitudes all accept this as truth. It’s tradition, it’s nostalgia and it distorts the way state resources and policies are used.
“I’m talking about a different way of thinking,” Katz is saying, about economies and governance.