Thomas Friedman’s Optimistic Article

Here is something exciting or something to be hopeful. Here is an article from Thomas Friedman showing how one rural town in Minnesota is working to increase acceptance of diversity. He says there are three things necessary in order to be a rising town versus a declining town: a need to fill jobs, ready to fill jobs with people who are not white, and has a “critical mass of leadership without authority”.

I wish he would give a little more data to back up his assertion that Willmar is “rising” and its neighbor, St Cloud, is “falling”. I tried to find some data that Willmar is “rising” and St Cloud is “falling”. The economic data that I found did not really put St Cloud in a state of decline. All I got was there is something cyclical about St Cloud: every January unemployment jumps up above state and national levels and then it declines during the summer months below the state and national levels. Willmar is too small to have any accessible data; its population is around 21K per Thomas Friedman. St Cloud is around 68K at the city level and 194K at the Metro level. Wages in St Cloud appears to be below the state or national average but it is also higher than that found in Willmar.

I tried finding statistics on drugs since much of the reporting on the people’s angst include discussion on drug abuse, but what little reporting there are is mostly focused at the state level or broad areas such as the South, Midwest, West, Northeast. And the Midwest appears to not have a serious drug problem as the South. The South is really hurting.

I’m failing at finding anything.

Maybe the sense of rising or falling is really just people’s sentiment rather than actual situation. Maybe in Willmar, the people are more positive because about 50% of the population are immigrants and they are in a much better situation in the US rather than in their birthplace. St Cloud is predominantly white and thus doesn’t have a contrast of coming from a place of poverty; instead they have a memory of the Great Recession and it’s that lingering memory that pervades their pessimism.

In general, despite the lowest unemployment rate in decades, most Americans do not feel their life is on the upswing; instead, they feel their situation is precarious. Maybe a lot of them do not make as much before the Great Recession. There has been a lot of discussion that since 2000, there has been a flat or declining wage growth for most Americans, so after 2 decades of no growth, yeah, Americans would be disgruntled and apprehensive. And then there is the prospect of automation in the coming years.

It would be nice to know why he feels Willmar is one of the rising towns and St Cloud is in a state of decline, to give his article some context.

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Some data I pulled from the Internet – there is a graph showing the unemployment rate of national, state, and St Cloud as well as some wage information. You might have to download to be able to see the data that I pulled from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.