INTRODUCTION

Influencing the Islamic Republic of Iran has proven to be a perennial conundrum for American presidents. The complexity of Iranian politics and the intractability of the problems posed by Tehran’s revolutionary theocracy may explain why, over the course of three decades, each U.S. administration has been forced to revise its initial approach to Iran in hopes of achieving better outcomes. The overall result has been an American tendency to oscillate between engagement and pressure, with frustratingly limited results.

And so it goes for the Obama administration. After an initial, high-profile effort to draw Tehran into a serious dialogue both to resolve the nuclear issue as well as transcend it, Washington now finds itself pivoting away from diplomatic engagement to a more coercive policy centered around economic pressure. The shift comes amidst a dramatic new context within the Islamic Republic, characterized by historic turmoil on the streets and bitter divisions among the elites, and at a moment when the international urgency surrounding Tehran’s nuclear ambitions has never been greater. This context raises the stakes and heightens the sensitivities of getting U.S. policy on Iran right after so many years of failure.

The turn toward sanctions is a predictable one. Sanctions have proven to be an instrument of American policy toward Tehran for the past thirty years. American use of economic pressure as a means of dissuading Iranian malfeasance began with the freezing of Iranian assets after Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and culminated in the nearly comprehensive ban on trade and investment in Iran that has been in place since the Clinton administration. But, despite the appeal of sanctions, their protracted duration underlines their limitations—particularly when they are unilateral—as a mechanism for categorically revising Iranian policy. Still, many find sanctions attractive because the overall track record of Iranian decision-making demonstrates that Tehran often considers the costs and benefits of its policy options in determining its course. As Iran’s internal strife exacerbates the regime’s vulnerabilities, the prospects for international consensus around new economic restrictions appear more realistic than ever before.

To examine the options and implications for using sanctions to address the multi-faceted challenges of Iran, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution held a half-day symposium in late October 2009. The workshop featured off-the-record panel discussions led by experts on Iranian internal politics and the key actors shaping the diplomatic landscape. The conclusions from that session are presented below.

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Rumor has it that an economist started hitting the gym after finishing two milestone research papers, in expectation of a Nobel Prize, which is only rewarded to a living person. Almost no one denies that greater expectations translate into healthier behaviors, while the converse rarely enters the health policy discussion: expectations of a less-than-desirable future may lead to unhealthy behaviors, including smoking, excessive drinking, sedentary lifestyles, and drug abuse. The health issues of the deprived may have a deeper root in economics.

Professor Zhu Xi from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and I found evidence of this in our working paper “Affordable Care Encourages Healthy Living: Theory and Evidence from China's New Cooperative Medical Scheme”. Standard economic theory predicts that providing medical insurance encourages unhealthy behavior by mitigating economic consequences. We developed a novel theoretical framework in which the opposite is possible because insurance makes longevity more affordable and thus desirable.

We test the theory utilizing a unique experiment of China introducing the New Cooperative Medical Scheme, unique in its long-term credibility necessary for their proposed channel. This scheme reduces cigarette use by around 9% and bolsters subjective perception of the importance of physical exercise and healthy diet. These effects depend significantly on the number of children and the local culture of elderly care. We can rule out alternative explanations of these robust results. The empirical evidence affirms a causal link between concerns about negative bequest and unhealthy behavior, and how to break it.

Breaking the causal link would not be an easy task, because bringing a brighter future to the deprived would not be. But this does not revoke the necessity of considering this “expectation” mechanism in designing health policies. For example, it is trendy to study how smokers may substitute other tobacco products for cigarettes and the ensuing health consequences. According to our analytical framework, the substitution could be broader, that is, a person expecting a miserable future would consciously or unconsciously resort to other means of shortening life. Case and Deaton, in their sensational paper, pinned down drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis as the causes of the rising mortality in midlife among white Americans. The war against tobacco use may be complicated by this potential substitution.

In general, recognizing the source of a problem is the first step in solving it. The association between income and life expectancy in the United States is well identified by a Brookings study by Bosworth and Burke and a paper by Chetty et al. The hypothesis that poverty may rationally trigger unhealthy behaviors and thus shorter life expectancy is under-explored.

Our research suggests that constructing a social safety net – by subsidizing health or old-age insurance, for example – brightens the future and thus promotes healthy living. Libertarians who believe in “from each as they choose, to each as they are chosen” may frown upon the idea of expanding the government for the sake of saving people from their own poor choices. As usual, an argument could be made that the positive externality outweighs the cost. In this case, a better social safety net can make a person more forward-looking and thus more beneficial to the society.

Discovering hidden incentives and mechanisms is one of the primal tasks of economists. Our research suggests, surprisingly, that both the Center of Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of the Treasury are important players in promoting healthy living. Let them be.

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI, or “the Innovation Center”) recently announced an initiative called Comprehensive Primary Care Plus (CPC+). It evolved from the Comprehensive Primary Care (CPC) initiative, which began in 2012 and runs through the end of this year. Both initiatives are designed to promote and support primary care physicians in organizing their practices to deliver comprehensive primary care services. Comprehensive Primary Care Plus has some very promising components, but also misses some compelling opportunities to further advance payment for primary care services.

The earlier initiative, CPC, paid qualified primary care practices a monthly fee per Medicare beneficiary to support practices in making changes in the way they deliver care, centered on five comprehensive primary care functions: (1) access and continuity; (2) care management; (3) comprehensiveness and coordination; (4) patient and caregiver engagement; and, (5) planned care and population health. For all other care, regular fee-for-service (FFS) payment continued. The initiative was limited to seven regions where CMMI could reach agreements with key private insurers and the Medicaid program to pursue a parallel approach. The evaluation funded by CMMI found quality improvements and expenditure reductions, but savings did not cover the extra payments to practices.

Comprehensive Primary Care Plus uses the same strategy of conducting the experiment in regions where key payers are pursuing parallel efforts. In these regions, qualifying primary care practices can choose one of two tracks. Track 1 is very similar to CPC. The monthly care management fee per beneficiary remains the same, but an extra $2.50 is paid in advance, subject to refund to the government if a practice does not meet quality and utilization performance thresholds.

The Promise Of CPC+

Track 2, the more interesting part of the initiative, is for practices that are already capable of carrying out the primary care functions and are ready to increase their comprehensiveness. In addition to a higher monthly care management fee ($28), practices receive Comprehensive Primary Care Payments. These include a portion of the expected reimbursements for Evaluation and Management services, paid in advance, and reduced regular fee-for-service payments. Track 2 also includes larger rewards than does Track 1 for meeting performance thresholds.

The combination of larger per beneficiary monthly payments and lower payments for services is the most important part of the initiative. By blending capitation (monthly payments not tied to service volume) and FFS, this approach might achieve the best of both worlds.

Even when FFS payment rates are calibrated correctly (discussed below), the rates are pegged to the average costs across practices. But since a large part of practice cost is fixed, it means that the marginal cost of providing additional services is lower than the average cost, leading to incentives to increase volume under FFS. The lower payments reduce or eliminate these incentives. Fixed costs, which must also be covered, are addressed through the Comprehensive Primary Care Payments. By involving multiple payers, practices are put in a better position to pursue these changes.

An advantage of any program that increases payments to primary care practices is that it can partially compensate for a flaw in the relative value scale behind the Medicare physician fee schedule. This flaw leads to underpayment for primary care services. Although the initial relative value scale implemented in 1992 led to substantial redistribution in favor of evaluation and management services and to physicians who provide the bulk of them, a flawed update process has eroded these gains over the years to a substantial degree.

In response to legislation, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are working correct these problems, but progress is likely to come slowly. Higher payments for primary care practices through the CPC+ can help slow the degree to which physicians are leaving primary care until more fundamental fixes are made to the fee schedule. Indeed, years of interviews with private insurance executives have convinced us that concern about loss of the primary care physician workforce has been a key motivation for offering higher payment to primary care physicians in practices certified as patient centered medical homes.

Two Downsides

But there are two downsides to the CPC+.

One concerns the lack of incentives for primary care physicians to take steps to reduce costs for services beyond those delivered by their practices. These include referring their patients to efficient specialists and hospitals, as well as limiting hospital admissions. There are rewards in CPC+ for lower overall utilization by attributed beneficiaries and higher quality, but they are very small.

We had hoped that CMMI might have been inspired by the promising initiatives of CareFirst Blue Cross Blue Shield and the Arkansas Health Care Improvement initiative, which includes the Arkansas Medicaid program and Arkansas Blue Cross Blue Shield. Under those programs, primary care physicians are offered substantial bonuses for keeping spending for all services under trend for their panel of patients; there is no downside risk, which is understandable given the small percentage of spending accounted for by primary care. The private and public payers also support the primary care practices with care managers and with data on all of the services used by their patients and on the efficiency of providers they might refer to. These programs appear to be popular with physicians and have had promising early results.

The second downside concerns the inability of physicians participating in CPC+ to participate in accountable care organizations (ACOs). One of CMMI’s challenges in pursuing a wide variety of payment innovations is apportioning responsibility across the programs for beneficiaries who are attributed to multiple payment reforms. As an example, if a beneficiary attributed to an ACO has a knee replacement under one of Medicare’s a bundled payment initiatives, to avoid overpayment of shared savings, gains or losses are credited to the providers involved in the bundled payment and not to the ACO. As a result, ACOs are no longer rewarded for using certain tools to address overall spending, such as steering attributed beneficiaries to efficient providers for an episode of care or encouraging primary care physicians to increase the comprehensiveness of the care they deliver.

Keeping the physician participants in CPC+ out of ACOs altogether seems to be another step to undermine the potential of ACOs in favor of other payment approaches. This is not wise. The Innovation Center has appropriately not established a priority ranking for its various initiatives, but some of its actions have implicitly put ACOs at the bottom of the rankings. Recently, Mostashari, Kocher, and McClellan proposed addressing this issue by adding a CPC+ACO option to this initiative.

In an update to its FAQ published May 27, 2016 (after out blog was put into final form), CMMI eased its restriction somewhat by allowing up to 1,500 of the 5000 practices expected to participate in CPC+ to also participate in Medicare Shared Savings Program (MSSP) ACOs. But the prohibition continues to apply to Next Gen ACOs, the model that has created the most enthusiasm in the field. If demand for these positions in MSSP ACOs exceeds 1,500, a lottery will be held. This change is welcome but does not really address the issue of disadvantaging ACOs in situations where a beneficiary is attributed to two or more payment reform models. CMMI is sending a signal that CPC+, notwithstanding its lack of incentives concerning spending outside of primary care, is a powerful enough reform that diverting practices away from ACOs is not a problem. ACOs are completely dependent on primary care physician membership to function, meaning that any physician practices beyond 1,500 that enroll in CPC+ will reduce the size and the impact of the ACO program. CMMI has never published a priority ranking of reform models, but its actions keep indicating that ACOs are at the bottom.

The Innovation Center should be lauded for continuing to support improved payment models for primary care. Its blending of substantial monthly payments with lower payments per service is promising. But the highest potential rewards come from broadening primary care physicians’ incentives to include the cost and quality of services by other providers. CMMI should pursue this approach.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Health Affairs Blog.

It seems the Senate could have a really hot summer. Majority leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has reportedly threatened to “go nuclear” this July—meaning that Senate Democrats would move by majority vote to ban filibusters of executive and judicial branch nominees. According to these reports, if Senate Republicans block three key nominations (Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Thomas Perez at Labor, and Gina McCarthy at EPA), Reid will call on the Democrats to invoke the nuclear option as a means of eliminating filibusters over nominees.

Jon Bernstein offered a thoughtful reaction to Reid’s gambit, noting that Reid’s challenge is to “find a way to ratchet up the threat of reform in order to push Republicans as far away from that line as possible.” Jon’s emphasis on Reid’s threat is important (and is worth reading in full).  Still, I think it’s helpful to dig a little deeper on the role of both majority and minority party threats that arise over the nuclear option.

Before getting to Reid’s threat, two brief detours. First, a parliamentary detour to make plain two reasons why Reid’s procedural gambit is deemed “nuclear.” First, Democrats envision using a set of parliamentary moves that would allow the Senate to cut off debate on nominations by majority vote (rather than by sixty votes). Republicans (at least when they are in the minority) call this “changing the rules by breaking the rules,” because Senate rules formally require a 2/3rds vote to break a filibuster of a measure to change Senate rules. The nuclear option would avoid the formal process of securing a 2/3rds vote to cut off debate; instead, the Senate would set a new precedent by simple majority vote to exempt nominations from the reach of Rule 22. If Democrats circumvent formal rules, Republicans would deem the move nuclear. Second, Reid’s potential gambit would be considered nuclear because of the anticipated GOP reaction: As Sen. Schumer argued in 2005 when the GOP tried to go nuclear over judges, minority party senators would “blow up every bridge in sight.” The nuclear option is so-called on account of the minority’s anticipated parliamentary reaction (which would ramp up obstruction on everything else).

A second detour notes simply that the exact procedural steps that would have to be taken to set a new precedent to exempt nominations from Rule 22 have not yet been precisely spelled out.  Over the years, several scenarios have been floated that give us a general outline of how the Senate could reform its cloture rule by majority vote. But a CRS report written in the heat of the failed GOP effort to go nuclear in 2005 points to the complications and uncertainties entailed in using a reform-by-ruling strategy to empower simple majorities to cut off debate on nominations. My sense is that using a nuclear option to restrict the reach of Rule 22 might not be as straight forward as many assume.

That gets us to the place of threats in reform-by-ruling strategies. The coverage of Reid’s intentions last week emphasized the importance of Reid’s threat to Republicans: Dare to cross the line by filibustering three particular executive branch nominees, and Democrats will go nuclear. But for Reid’s threat to be effective in convincing GOP senators to back down on these nominees, Republicans have to deem Reid’s threat credible. Republicans know that Reid refused by go nuclear last winter (and previously in January 2009), not least because a set of longer-serving Democrats opposed the strategy earlier this year. It would be reasonable for the GOP today to question whether Reid has 51 Democrats willing to ban judicial and executive branch nomination filibusters. If Republicans doubt Reid’s ability to detonate a nuclear device, then the threat won’t be much help in getting the GOP to back down. Of course, if Republicans don’t block all three nominees, observers will likely interpret the GOP’s behavior as a rational response to Reid’s threat. Eric Schickler and Greg Wawro in Filibuster suggest that the absence of reform on such occasions demonstrates that the nuclear option can “tame the minority.”  Reid’s threat would have done the trick.

As a potentially nuclear Senate summer approaches, I would keep handy an alternative interpretation.  Reid isn’t the only actor with a threat: given Republicans’ aggressive use of Rule 22, Republicans can credibly threaten to retaliate procedurally if the Democrats go nuclear.  And that might be a far more credible threat than Reid’s. We know from the report on Reid’s nuclear thinking that “senior Democratic Senators have privately expressed worry to the Majority Leader that revisiting the rules could imperil the immigration push, and have asked him to delay it until after immigration reform is done (or is killed).” That tidbit suggests that Democrats consider the GOP threat to retaliate as a near certainty. In other words, if Republicans decide not to block all three nominees and Democrats don’t go nuclear, we might reasonably conclude that the minority’s threat to retaliate was pivotal to the outcome. As Steve Smith, Tony Madonna and I argued some time ago, the nuclear option might be technically feasible but not necessarily politically feasible.

To be sure, it’s hard to arbitrate between these two competing mechanisms that might underlie Senate politics this summer.  In either scenario—the majority tames the minority or the minority scares the bejeezus out of the majority—the same outcome ensues: Nothing. Still, I think it’s important to keep these alternative interpretations at hand as Democrats call up these and other nominations this spring. The Senate is a tough nut to crack, not least when challenges to supermajority rule are in play.

Amy Liu’s recent paper, “Remaking Economic Development,” is disruptive in that it rightfully undercuts the shaky foundation of what draws many practitioners to the field: the idea that success is simply structuring transactions to attract new jobs and investment. These two metrics alone can’t diagnose the economic health or trajectory of a community. Instead, as the paper outlines, setting the right goals—measured by growth, prosperity, and inclusion—provides a much richer framework for a community’s trajectory, vibrancy, and opportunity.

Goal-setting clarifies how a community defines success and when it has been achieved, and promotes collaboration and increases buy-in from diverse stakeholders. If, as Liu argues, goals were designed to lead to growth, prosperity, and inclusion, metro areas would make dramatically different choices around policies, investments, and priorities, and people and communities would likely be in an overall stronger economic position.

However, these goals represent a longer-term proposition than conventional measures, and, perhaps naively, “Remaking Economic Development” fails to acknowledge the barriers that prevent most communities from setting the right goals:

1. Goals should focus on long-term interests, but election cycles prioritize clear near-term political wins. Meaty investments in infrastructure, workforce development, and fiscal policy reform needed to shift the competitive position of a community rarely yield easily defined and clearly increased short-term political capital.
2. Economies function as regions, but many municipal strategies are not aligned with regional goals. A metropolitan area is the logical unit to measure success, but civic leaders are elected from individual municipalities, or from a state that has a larger focus. Although it’s easier to market a region of 5 million people than a city of 650,000, in Detroit, intramural competition between cities and suburbs, suburbs and suburbs, and even neighborhoods within the city all undermine the cooperative effort to set goals regionally. The failure of mayors within a region to recognize their economic connectedness is a huge problem and fuels wasteful incentive battles over retail and other projects that are not economic drivers.
3. Goal-setting takes time, money, and requires data, but capacity is in short supply. Most economic developers and political leaders lack the framework, experience, and manpower to effectively lead a goal-setting process. And if the choice is between collectively setting goals or managing a flurry of “bird-in-hand” transactions, the transaction under consideration will always receive resources first. Leaders are primarily evaluated on near term jobs and investment figures; not having the time to lead a goal-setting process and, in many cases, lacking the approach and datasets to appropriately undertake this activity make goal-setting easy to eliminate.

Despite these obstacles, setting the right goals is critical to building healthy communities. To combat political challenges, strong collaboration between business and public sector leadership is crucial, as is the recognition of diverse sub-economies with different value propositions and opportunities. Leaders must ultimately acknowledge that near term wins mean little if they are leading down a path that will not fundamentally address the long-term investment climate and the region’s productive capacities, grow wages or address employment levels, and offer broad opportunities for diverse economic participation. The following steps can help:

1. Harness diverse, cross-sectoral perspectives. Fundamentally, businesses understand their industries better than anyone else; hence the public sector should identify ways to encourage growth, increased productivity, greater inclusion, and more competitiveness in targeted sectors by listening to businesses and jointly setting goals that marry private sector profit and public economic and social interests effectively. This approach may offset some of the other realities of short election cycles and limited capacity to participate in goal-setting or planning processes.
2. Identify unique roles for communities within a larger regional framework. Although competition between local cities may inhibit the most meaningful dialogue and alignment of interests, deeper analysis often produces greater clarity on the niche opportunities for different communities. For example, although Detroit has a strong manufacturing base, a major project requiring more than 40 acres will likely have better site options in the suburbs. In the same vein, companies seeking a vibrant urban campus with easy access to food, living, and other amenities are likely better suited to Detroit than one of the surrounding communities. That said, both companies are likely to draw employees from communities all over the region. Effective goal-setting includes analysis that should allow municipalities to uncover their niche opportunities within a larger regional framework.
3. Balance short-term and long-term priorities and successes. The truth is that near term investments are vital in creating momentum, providing stability, and creating jobs while long-term investments, policy decisions, and industry-focused asset development fundamentally position an economy to win over time. For example, incentives play an important role in offsetting competitive disadvantages in the short-term and should be used as a way to fill the gap while a community fixes the bigger economic challenges, ranging from exorbitant development costs to workforce development issues. The disconnect is that many communities are not focusing incentives on strategic, long-term priorities.

"Remaking Economic Development” elegantly exposes the shortsightedness toward aggressive deal-making that often prevents communities from thoughtfully building their long-term economic strength with an eye on growth, prosperity, and inclusion. Sadly, the economic development profession has historically focused on growth without much attention to prosperity and inclusion, which are arguably most important in building a sustainable economy. Goal-setting—painful as it may be—is the first step towards remaking the practice and establishing an honest foundation to build a better economy in the future.

Baltimore police officer Edward Nero, one of six being tried separately in relation to the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, has been acquitted on all counts. The outcome for officer Nero was widely expected, but officials are nonetheless aware of the level of frustration and anger that remains in the city. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings Blake said: "We once again ask the citizens to be patient and to allow the entire process to come to a conclusion."

Since Baltimore came to national attention, Brookings scholars have probed the city’s challenges and opportunities, as well addressing broader questions of place, race and opportunity.

• In this podcast, Jennifer Vey describes how, for parts of Baltimore, economic growth has been largely a spectator sport: "1/5 people in Baltimore lives in a neighborhood of extreme poverty, and yet these communities are located in a relatively affluent metro area, in a city with many vibrant and growing neighborhoods."
• Vey and her colleague Alan Berube, in this piece on the "Two Baltimores," reinforce the point about the distribution of economic opportunity and resources in the city:
  

  In 2013, 40,000 Baltimore households earned at least $100,000. Compare that to Milwaukee, a similar-sized city where only half as many households have such high incomes. As our analysis uncovered, jobs in Baltimore pay about $7,000 more on average than those nationally. The increasing presence of high-earning households and good jobs in Baltimore City helps explain why, as the piece itself notes, the city’s bond rating has improved and property values are rising at a healthy clip."

• Groundbreaking work by Raj Chetty, which we summarized here, shows that Baltimore City is the worst place for a boy to grow up in the U.S. in terms of their likely adult earnings:

• Here Amy Liu offered some advice to the new mayor of the city: "I commend the much-needed focus on equity but…the mayoral candidates should not lose sight of another critical piece of the equity equation: economic growth."
• Following an event focused on race, place and opportunity, in this piece I drew out "Six policies to improve social mobility," including better targeting of housing vouchers, more incentives to build affordable homes in better-off neighborhoods, and looser zoning restrictions.
• Frederick C. Harris assessed President Obama’s initiative to help young men of color, "My Brother’s Keeper," praising many policy shifts and calling for a renewed focus on social capital and educational access. But Harris also warned that rhetoric counts and that a priority for policymakers is to "challenge some misconceptions about the shortcomings of black men, which have become a part of the negative public discourse."
• Malcolm Sparrow has a Brookings book on policing reform, "Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform" (there is a selection here on Medium). Sparrow writes:
  

  Citizens of any mature democracy can expect and should demand police services that are responsive to their needs, tolerant of diversity, and skillful in unraveling and tackling crime and other community problems. They should expect and demand that police officers are decent, courteous, humane, sparing and skillful in the use of force, respectful of citizens’ rights, disciplined, and professional. These are ordinary, reasonable expectations."

Five more police officers await their verdicts. But the city of Baltimore should not have to wait much longer for stronger governance, and more inclusive growth.

Ranking U.S. metro areas, or counties, or even countries, by some fixed metric is a straightforward and often useful way to start a deeper dive into a larger body of research. For example, the top 10 counties by share of taxpayers claiming EITC, or the top 10 metro areas by change in prosperity. But what if the phenomenon being measured is more complex, has interacting characteristics that make a top 10 list less useful?

In new research, Brookings Senior Fellow Alan Berube, along with his colleagues at the Metropolitan Policy Program, and John Irons of the Rockefeller Foundation, ask “What makes an economy inclusive?” Inclusive economies, they say, “expand opportunities for more broadly shared prosperity, especially for those facing the greatest barriers to advancing their well-being.” A new Rockefeller Foundation framework identifies five characteristics of inclusive economies: equity, participation, stability, sustainability, and growth.

A typical ranking approach would list the top 10 inclusive economies (or the bottom 10) based on some score derived from data. It turns out, however, that understanding the “trends and relationships that might reveal the ‘big picture’ of what makes an economy inclusive” doesn’t lend itself to typical ranking techniques, and instead requires looking at relationships among the characteristics to ascertain that “big picture.”

Take, for example, equity, defined as: “More opportunities are available to enable upward mobility for more people.” For this analysis, Brookings researchers used 16 discrete indicators—such as the Gini coefficient, median income of less-educated workers as a share of overall median income, and transportation costs as a share of income—to come up with an equity score for each of the 100 largest U.S. metro areas. (Likewise, each of the other four inclusive economy indicators are composites of many discrete indicators, for a total of about 100 across the five.) Looking at equity alone, the top 10 metro areas are:

1. Allentown, PA-NJ
2. Harrisburg, PA
3. Ogden, UT
4. Scranton, PA
5. Des Moines, IA
6. Salt Lake City, UT
7. Wichita, KS
8. Grand Rapids, MI
9. Pittsburgh, PA
10. Worcester, MA-CT

Top 10 lists can also be fashioned for the other four dimensions in the inclusive economies research, each showing a different mix of U.S. metro areas. For example, the top three metro areas in the growth characteristic are San Jose, CA; Houston, TX; and Austin, TX. For participation: Madison, WI; Harrisburg, PA; and Des Moines. Stability: Madison; Minneapolis, MN-WI; and Provo, UT. And, sustainability: Seattle; Boston; and Portland, OR-WA. In fact, 30 different metropolitan areas are present in the combination of the five inclusive top 10 lists, spanning the country from Oxnard, to Omaha, to Raleigh. The individual top 10 lists for each inclusive economy characteristic look like this:

Because these rankings each impart useful and distinctive information about metro economies, Brookings researchers next combined the data into an overall ranking of the 100 metro areas “based on their average rankings on individual indicators for each of the five inclusive economy characteristics.” Instead of generating a ranking from 1 to 100, the analysis produces a grid-like chart that shows how metro areas fare not only in terms of inclusiveness (top to bottom), but also along a left-to-right spectrum that demonstrates the trade-offs between growth and equity. Here’s a sample from the chart (visit and study the chart here; note that wealth is depicted but by itself is not part of the inclusive economy score):

One thing that stands out when considering this colorful chart against the disaggregated top 10 lists is how unrelated they seem to be. San Jose sits at the upper right position of the chart, suggesting that it ranks as one of the most inclusive metro economies, and yet it ranks only 51st on equity. By contrast, Allentown, PA—on the left of the second row—ranked first in equity, but lower on other measures. However, taken as a whole, both Allentown and San Jose are in the top 20 metro areas overall for inclusiveness. Detroit sits along the bottom row of the inclusiveness chart. Among the five characteristics, it posts its highest rank in growth (37th overall), with much lower ranks in the other categories, even though it ranks 29th for wealth. Las Vegas, NV, is one of the least wealthy metro areas (91st), but ranks 19th in terms of equity.

Berube and Irons point to what they call “a few important insights” about the chart and these data:

• Judged across all five characteristics, the “most” and “least” inclusive metro economies are geographically and economically diverse.
• More equitable metropolitan economies also exhibit higher levels of participation and stability. 
• Growth and equity vary independently across metropolitan areas. 
• Metro areas with similar performance across the five characteristics may not possess the same capacity to improve their performance.

For more detailed discussion, and the complete inclusive economies chart, see “Measuring ‘inclusive economies’ in metropolitan America,’ by John Irons and Alan Berube.

See also “A metro map of inclusive economies,” showing metro areas that are similar to others in these outcomes.

Finally, download detailed information on the composition of the 100 indicators used to measure the five inclusive economies indicators.

INTRODUCTION

The Obama administration needs to focus on executing its existing financial rescue plans, keep the TARP focused on the banking sector, and create a contingency plan should the banking system destabilize again.

Crystal balls are dangerous, especially when it comes to economic predictions, which is why it is important for the administration to chart a path forward. Public policy must remain focused on the very real possibility that the apparent easing in the economy’s decline may be followed by little or no growth for several quarters and there could possibly be another negative turn. One of the risks is that the United States is very connected to the rest of the world, most of which is in severe recession. The global economy could be a significant drag on U.S. growth.

Cautious optimism should be the order of the day. We fear that the recent reactions of the financial markets and of some analysts carry too much of the optimism without recognizing enough of the uncertainty. There remains a lot of uncertainty and policymakers should not rest on their laurels or turn to other policies, even if they look more exciting. It is vital to follow through on the current financial rescue plans and to have well-conceived contingency plans in case there is another dip down.

We propose three recommendations for the financial rescue plans:

• Focus on execution of existing programs. The Administration has created programs to deal with each of the key elements necessary to solve the financial crisis. All of them have significant steps remaining and some of them have not even started yet, such as the programs to deal with toxic assets. As has been demonstrated multiple times now since October 2008, these are complex programs that require a great deal of attention. It is time to execute rather than to create still more efforts.
• Resist the temptation to allocate money from the TARP to other uses—it is essential to maintain a reserve of Congressionally-authorized funds in case they are needed for the banks. It would be difficult to overemphasize the remaining uncertainties about bank solvency as they navigate what will remain a rough year or more. The banks could easily need another $300 billion of equity capital and might need still more. It is essential that the administration have the ammunition readily available.
• Third, make sure there is a contingency plan to deal with a major setback for the banking system. The plan needs broad support within the administration and among regulators and, ideally, from key congressional leaders. We probably won’t need it, but there is too high a chance that we will require it for us to remain without one. The country cannot afford even the appearance of the ad hoc and changing nature of the responses that were evident last fall.

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On Valentine’s Day, even a dismal scientist’s mind turns to love. It’s a powerful feeling, with a value that goes far beyond the millions of chocolate boxes and bouquets that will be delivered this Feb. 14.

Survey data from the Gallup Organization, where Justin works as a senior scientist, allow us to take a uniquely deep look at the state of love around the world. In 2006 and 2007, Gallup went to 136 countries and asked people, “Did you experience love for a lot of the day yesterday?” It’s the largest such dataset ever collected.

The good news: Ours is a loving world. On a typical day, about 70 percent of people worldwide reported a love-filled day. In the U.S., 81 percent felt love, as did 81 percent of Canadians and 79 percent of Italians. Germany and the U.K. were less loving, with slightly less than 3 in 4 people reporting feeling loved. Surprisingly, the same was true of the supposedly romantic French. And if you’re in Japan, please hug someone: Only 59 percent of Japanese said they had experienced love the previous day.

Across the world as a whole, the widowed and divorced are the least likely to experience love. Married folks feel more of it than singles. People who live together out of wedlock report getting even more love than married spouses -- an interesting factoid for conservatives worried about the effects of cohabitation. Women get more love than men, particularly in the U.S.

Young Love

If you’re young and not feeling all that loved this Valentine’s Day, don’t despair: You’re not alone. Young adults are among the least likely to experience love. It gets better with age, ultimately peaking in the mid-30s or mid-40s in most countries before fading again into the twilight years.

Money is related to love. Those with more household income are slightly more likely to experience the feeling. Roughly speaking, doubling your income is associated with being about 4 percentage points more likely to be loved. Perhaps having more money makes it easier to find time for love.

That said, the data aren’t necessarily telling us that money can buy you love. It’s possible that other factors correlated with income, such as height or appearance, are the real source of attraction. Or maybe being loved gives you a boost in the labor market.

What’s perhaps more striking is how little money matters on a global level. True, the populations of richer countries are, on average, slightly more likely to feel loved than those of poorer countries. But love is still abundant in the poorer countries: People in Rwanda and the Philippines enjoyed the highest love ratios, with more than 9 in 10 people providing positive responses. Armenia, Uzbekistan, Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan, with economic output per person in the middle of the range, all had love ratios of less than 4 in 10.

Fun facts aside, we think there is a deeper and more consequential purpose to the study of love. Think about what love means to you. To us, it means caring about others and being cared for. Love is valuable, even if it is absent from both our national accounts and our political discourse.

In the language of economics, love is a form of insurance. It involves bonds of reciprocity that provide support when we’re feeling down, when we’re sick and when times are tough.

More broadly, love has the power to mitigate the free-rider and moral hazard problems associated with social (and private) insurance. Bailing out a bank might encourage executives to take bigger risks in the future, but helping loved ones down on their luck has fewer incentive problems because our loved ones typically care for us in return. Such mutually beneficial relationships make us all more resilient in times of crisis. This is why the household remains one of the most powerful institutions for organizing not just families but also our economic lives.

If we can find more love for our fellow citizens, our society will function better. Hard as this may be to achieve in an era when trust in government, business and one another is low, it’s worth the effort. When you expand the boundaries of trust and reciprocity, you expand the boundaries of what is possible.

Note: This content was first published on Bloomberg View on February 13, 2013.

Justin Wolfers, professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, re-joins Brookings, Vice President and Economic Studies Co-Director Karen Dynan announced today.  Wolfers was a visiting fellow from 2010-2011.

A world-renowned empirical economist, Wolfers will continue in his role as co-editor, along with David Romer of the University of California, of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA), the flagship economic journal of the Institution.  He will continue his focus on labor economics, macroeconomics, political economy, economics of the family, social policy, law and economics, public economics, and behavioral economics. His appointment as senior fellow will last 13 months.

Wolfers is also a research associate with the National Bureau for Economic Research, a research affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, a research fellow of the German Institute for the Study of Labor, and a senior scientist for Gallup, among other affiliations. He is a contributor for Bloomberg View, NPR Marketplace, and the Freakonomics website and was named one of the 13 top young economists to watch by the New York Times.  Wolfers did his undergraduate work at the University of Sydney, Australia and received his Master’s and Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.  He is a dual Australian-U.S. national and was once an apprentice to a bookie which led to his interest in prediction markets. 

“We are pleased to re-welcome Justin back to Economic Studies,” said Dynan. “His work continues to challenge the conventional wisdom, and we look forward to collaborating with him once again.” 

“Justin is outstanding at communicating economic ideas to a wide audience, as evidenced by his regular writings for media as well as his large social media presence,” added Ted Gayer, co-director of Economic Studies.

“I have enormous affection for the Brookings Institution, which provides not only a home for deep scholarly research, but also an unmatched platform for engaging the policy debate,” said Wolfers.  “The Economic Studies program has a rich history of being the go-to place for policymakers, and I look forward to coming back and engaging in debate with my colleagues there.”

In a new essay, “The New Challenge to Market Democracies,” Senior Fellow William Galston argues that “the centrality of economic well-being in our politics reflects long-held assumptions about the purposes of our politics. If economic growth and well-being are in jeopardy, so are our political arrangements.”

Galston, the Ezra K. Zilkha Chair in Governance Studies, makes the case that economic growth and well-being are indeed in jeopardy for a variety of reasons, including: wage growth that has just kept up with inflation; family and household incomes that remain below their pre-Great Recession peak; the share of national income going to wages and salaries is as low as it’s been in nearly 50 years; and a difficult jobs situation in which workers are getting paid less, the number of people working part-time who want full-time work remains high, and few new jobs offer middle range incomes. “These trends,” Galston writes, “bode ill for the future of the middle class; many parents now doubt that their children will enjoy the same opportunities that they did.”

Galston offers three broad policy prescriptions related to employment and tax reform:

1. “We should adopt full employment as a high-priority goal of economic policy and welcome the wage increases that it would generate.”
2. “We should use the tax code to restore the relationship between wage increases and productivity gains.”
3. “We should adopt a strong presumption against provisions of the tax code that treat some sources of income more favorably than wages and salaries,” which includes scrapping tax expenditures that “disproportionately benefit upper-income investors.”

Calling economic growth a “moral enterprise” as well as a material goal, Galston—acknowledging economist Benjamin Friedman—concludes that:

the central question the United States now faces is whether the next generation will again achieve broadly shared prosperity or rather experience the stagnation of living standards. Broad prosperity is both the oil that lubricates the machinery of government and the glue that binds our society together. Economic stagnation means a continuation of gridlocked, zero-sum politics and a turn away from the spirit of generosity that only a people confident of its future can sustain.

Read “The New Challenge to Market Democracies.”

Last month, a team from the Metropolitan Policy Program, along with a delegation from the city of Chicago, traveled to Mexico City as part of the Global Cities Economic Partnership (GCEP). Launched at a 2013 event sponsored by the Global Cities Initiative (GCI), this novel partnership aims to expand growth and job creation in both cities  by building on complementary economic assets and opportunities.

Together with representatives from World Business Chicago, the Illinois governor’s office, and members of Chicago’s tech startup scene (organized by TechBridge), the Brookings team arrived in Mexico City just as, after a 20 year debate, reforms to devolve greater autonomy and powers to the largest metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere were finalized.  Central to that reform is Mexico City’s enhanced ability to plan and implement its own economic development policy, underscoring the growing importance of city-regions assuming roles once solely the province of state and national governments: fostering trade, investment, and economic growth.

Chicago and Mexico City illustrate this trend through the GCEP. Emerging from a GCI analysis that identified unique economic, demographic and and social connections between the cities, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera established a novel city-to-city collaboration. Since signing the agreement, government, business, and civic leaders in both cities have been experimenting with new approaches to jointly grow their economies.  They have tried to foster more trade and investment within shared industry clusters; link economic development support services; and leverage similar strengths in research, innovation, and human capital.

This trip to Mexico City focused on one of GCEP’s early outcomes, a formal partnership between Chicago tech business incubator 1871 and Mexico City incubator Startup Mexico (SUM) that facilitates the early internationalization of firms in both cities. Both organizations advanced the creation of a residency program that will enable entrepreneurs from both incubators to have a presence in each other’s markets.

The GCEP approach of city-to-city global engagement has inspired other GCI participants to try their own models, forming economic alliances to ease global navigation and engagement. San Antonio, Phoenix, and Los Angeles also crafted agreements with Mexico City, each focused on different opportunities built off their distinctive economic assets and relationships. Portland and Bristol have investigated how to leverage their comparable “green city” reputations in the U.S. and U.K., connecting mid-size firms in their unique sustainability clusters for collaboration on research and joint ventures. Similarly, San Diego and London are testing how to promote synergies among companies, academic centers, investors, and workers in their shared life sciences subsectors such as cell and gene therapy.

Home to half of the world’s population, cities generate about three quarters of the world’s GDP, and now serve as the hubs for the growth in global flows of trade, capital, visitors, and information. The future prosperity and vitality of city-regions demands finding new approaches that take full advantage of these global connections.  

The Global Cities Economic Partnership emerged from work supported by the Global Cities Initiative: A Joint Project of Brookings and JPMorgan Chase. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors reflect this commitment and the analysis and recommendations are solely determined by the scholar

Image courtesy of Maura Gaughan

In a rare Kumbaya moment, the nation's leaders of both parties have decided that rebate checks and a flurry of other short-term measures are needed to help stave off an economic slowdown.

Unfortunately, but predictably, we're hearing far less from Capitol Hill and the campaign trail about the bigger picture and the long-term challenges facing the American economy.

Increasing competition from nations like China and India, the impending retirements of the baby boomers, and the highly unequal distribution of benefits from the recent expansion all signal the potential for slower U.S. economic growth in the future.

These challenges, and our responses, will resonate throughout the Puget Sound region.

Already, the region is one of America's economic juggernauts. According to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area is the fourth-most productive in the world. And the ports of Seattle and Tacoma together form the eighth-largest gateway for foreign goods nationwide.

In that strength — and the strength of other metropolitan areas around the country — are the seeds of solutions.

Like the call for "three T's" in the stimulus debate — measures that are timely, targeted and temporary — policies to improve our nation's long-run economic performance and address its overhanging challenges would instead do well to focus on the "three I's" — innovation, intellect and infrastructure.

Innovation has always served to propel economic growth. Here, Puget Sound companies lead the world in the fields of aerospace, software and retailing, developing new ideas and products that trump the labor-cost advantages of offshoring.

Yet as a nation, we have fallen behind European competitors in innovative new-growth fields like alternative energy, where none of the world's 10 largest solar-cell manufacturers, and only one of the world's 10 largest wind-turbine manufacturers, is a U.S. company.

Intellect — the knowledge and skills of our people — translates into economic growth by raising worker output and incomes and creating more of the first "I," innovation.

Yet, while the United States sends the highest share of its young people to college worldwide, our rank falls to 16th when you measure who actually graduates. And though the Puget Sound region boasts one of the most-educated adult populations in the nation, the feeder system (especially Seattle's public schools) loses too many young people along the pathway to higher education.

Infrastructure supports long-term economic growth in many ways. High-quality transportation infrastructure — roads, transit, rail and ports — speeds the movement of goods and people within and across markets.

Yet, the Seattle area succeeds economically despite the real hurdles it faces on this front. Even taking into account high performers like Sea-Tac Airport and King County Metro, rising congestion highlights the lack of cogent plans for key corridors like Highway 520 and the Alaskan Way Viaduct, as well as the need for a renewed commitment to rail transit.

To its credit, the Puget Sound region, like other metropolitan areas around the country, has tried to tackle some of these issues on its own.

But, because the route to resolving our long-term challenges runs through areas like Seattle, its issues demand national attention.

For instance, shouldn't the federal government — through direct investments in scientific research and favorable tax treatment for corporate investment in research and development — help put innovative regions like Puget Sound ahead of the curve in cutting-edge "green" industries?

To upgrade our nation's intellectual capacity, shouldn't the federal government partner with states, localities and the private sector to support the diffusion of successful, entrepreneurial urban education models for districts like Seattle?

And on infrastructure, shouldn't the federal government deploy its roughly $50 billion in annual transportation expenditures in smarter ways to help relieve congestion and promote sustainability in key trade corridors like the Seattle-Tacoma area?

Once we get past the stimulus frenzy, let's have a real debate about the blueprint for bolstering America's long-term economic growth.

Building on the strengths, and addressing the challenges, of the "three I's" in regions like Seattle ought to be another strategy leaders in our nation's capital can agree upon.

Alan Berube is research director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. David Jackson is a policy analyst with the program.

Summary: Why digital skills matter

As the influence of digital technologies in the global economy expands, metropolitan areas throughout the United States face the task of preparing residents for an increasingly technology-powered world. Most jobs now require basic computer literacy to operate email and other software, while jobs specific to information technology (IT) require advanced skills such as coding. At home, residents need access to the Internet and consumer technologies to do homework, shop at online retailers, communicate with one another, or check real-time traffic and transit conditions.

Digital technologies hold out the promise of more widely shared prosperity, but achieving that vision will require every person to have basic digital skills—the ability to use digital hardware and software to manage information, communicate, navigate the web, solve problems, and create content.¹

While some metro areas have made important advances on digital skills acquisition, the effects are not ubiquitous. The Census Bureau found that only 73 percent of U.S. households subscribed to in-home broadband service in 2013, leaving 31 million households without a high-speed in-home connection.² Pew Research Center finds that over one-third of U.S. adults doesn’t own a smartphone, while 7 percent of smartphone owners lack high-speed Internet access at home and have few ways to get online beyond their smartphone.³ Another survey finds that 29 percent of Americans have low levels of digital skills, and many of these persons tend to be older, less educated, and lower-income.⁴

In an advanced economy, all residents deserve an opportunity to obtain digital skills. It is up to leaders in each U.S. metropolitan area to determine how best to meet this need. As with any social challenge of this scale, meeting it will require pragmatic problem-solving and deep collaboration across the public, private, and civic sectors.

This brief summarizes the results of a workshop held in Seattle to explore these issues. While the findings from the workshop discussions are unique to the Seattle region—making its leaders and residents the primary audience for this brief—the workshop approach can be replicated in any metropolitan area interested in addressing digital skills shortfalls and developing solutions tailored to residents’ needs.

Introduction: Digital skills and the Seattle metropolitan economy

Metropolitan Seattle is well positioned to prosper in the information era. Advanced industries—including global leaders in aerospace and IT—power the regional economy and have created an impressive network of patent-producing firms that employ over 295,000 people.⁵ The region’s households actively participate in the digital economy as well, as evidenced by a broadband adoption rate of 82 percent.⁶ Collaborations bringing together firms, public utilities, and government institutions make Seattle a national leader in the use of data monitoring to reduce energy usage.

However, for the region to maintain its position in the years ahead, it will need to cultivate a more inclusive economy that gives every resident the opportunity to acquire the skills needed to succeed in the digital era.

Like most U.S. metro areas, metropolitan Seattle continues to struggle with digital inclusivity. Strong broadband adoption across the region masks lagging adoption rates in many low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.⁷ A skills mismatch between job openings requiring digital skills and the education and skills training of area residents contributes to income inequality.⁸ This inequality, though less marked than in other cities with similar high-tech economies, continues to increase, with the highest-earning households experiencing rising incomes while lower-income households’ earnings stay relatively flat.⁹ Meanwhile, more than 45 percent of jobs in the region are more than 10 miles from downtown Seattle and Bellevue, and over two-thirds of poor households now live in the suburbs.¹⁰ This kind of job sprawl and suburban poverty limit many residents’ physical access to economic opportunity.

But the Seattle area has the assets to address these challenges. The region has a legacy of direct private-sector support for professional skills development and a huge network of IT firms that can expand such efforts. Government agencies and civic institutions already manage programs to promote digital skills acquisition. In addition, there is a regional ethic of supporting equitable economic growth, seen most recently in Seattle’s landmark living wage policy and Sound Transit’s discounted fee system for lower-income riders.¹¹

In an effort to address Seattle’s digital skills gap, the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program convened a group of leaders from the public, private, and civic sectors to discuss how to continue building a regionally inclusive digital skills infrastructure. The workshop consisted of brief presentations from Brookings experts and local leaders, group discussions of current efforts and challenges, and break-out groups to identify specific barriers and discuss strategies and next steps to improve future outcomes.

The following is a distillation of the key themes and lessons from the workshop.

1. Commit to ongoing collaboration

There is a clear consensus among Seattle-area leaders that basic digital skills are essential for everyone. The tough part is ensuring that all residents in the region have the opportunity to acquire these skills.

This challenge implicates a wide range of stakeholders, from municipal and county government, public libraries, and universities to area businesses, education and training providers, philanthropies, and nonprofits.

Many of these actors already manage their own initiatives, to great effect. Programs like the Seattle Goodwill’s Digital Literacy Initiative are working to increase the number of people with 21st-century digital skills, particularly among traditionally underserved populations. The private sector is advancing a similar agenda with major initiatives, such as Microsoft IT Academy and Google’s Made With Code, that promote computational thinking through computer science. Meanwhile, nonprofit training programs like the Ada Developers Academy as well as for-profit training providers such as Code Fellows and General Assembly are getting more people on pathways into tech-intensive careers that pay well.

However, despite this demonstrated willingness to act, coordination of activities across the region remains a challenge. Most initiatives operate independently from one another, often resulting in duplicative efforts and missed opportunities for greater impact. Furthermore, current efforts often concentrate activities in either the central cities or specific portions of the three-county region, thereby excluding those who live in other parts of the metro area. For example, the city of Seattle’s excellent digital equity programs extend only to the city limits and are not available in South King County. Without more collaboration, the region will not be able to take full advantage of its creativity, resources, and capacity for pragmatic problem-solving.

By committing to ongoing collaborative action, leaders in the Seattle region will be well positioned to design, launch, and maintain smart solutions to the digital skills challenge today and in the future.

2. Identify a convener and organize for action

Once stakeholders commit to collaborative problem-solving, they must then determine how best to organize for action. Identifying a neutral convener organization can help expedite this process. Designating a convener ensures that there is a single organization tasked with driving the group’s agenda forward and fostering greater collaboration among stakeholders.

The role of convener involves a handful of specific tasks that help keep the group on track and in regular contact. Organizing regular group meetings, delegating critical tasks like research into best practices, and managing communication within the group are all critical functions for the convening organization. To take just one example, the Community Center for Education Results (CCER) fills the convener role for the many stakeholders involved in the Road Map Project, which is working to improve student outcomes in South Seattle and South King County.¹²

The Seattle area is fortunate to have a number of organizations that could act as convener. Potential candidates include the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County (WDC), the Seattle Public Library, the University of Washington, or one of the many large philanthropies in the region.

Regardless of which organization ultimately takes on this role, selecting a convener marks a crucial first step toward an actionable, collaboratively developed digital skills agenda for the Seattle region.

3. Develop a shared vision for digital skills acquisition

Crafting a shared vision for digital skills acquisition will strengthen the group’s work by ensuring that all involved are on the same page. That vision can support the creation of a coordinated regional plan, which will help stakeholders take advantage of economies of scale and ensure the greatest return on resources invested. This plan should take particular care to address challenges faced by traditionally underrepresented groups, including women and people of color as well as those in lower-income communities.¹³ Ending the persistent lack of diversity in tech-oriented careers will require a concerted effort on the part of all stakeholders involved.¹⁴

To start, the convener’s first task should be organizing a time for stakeholders to sit down, develop a shared vision, and determine the next steps necessary to achieve that vision. Conducting an audit of existing programs in the region that support digital skills acquisition can be a good place to begin. This inventory will highlight any overlapping initiatives while also providing information on gaps in the digital skills infrastructure that will need to be addressed.

In addition, the group should work with the private sector to identify the digital skills needed in various industries and begin to map out pathways into tech-oriented careers. This information will ensure that the solutions developed are informed by current and projected industry demand.

The industry-sector panels convened by WDC offer one possible approach. Under this model, WDC serves as convener, bringing together key stakeholders from industry, education, workforce development, labor, nonprofits, and other relevant areas to identify shared challenges and engage in collaborative problem-solving. The outcomes and activities of the sector panel are determined by the group, with WDC facilitating the process throughout. WDC has a demonstrated record of success in organizing sector panels for the maritime and health care industries, and it could apply the same techniques to industries requiring digital skills.

Preliminary research will provide the data and analyses necessary for truly evidence-based solutions that respond directly to specific challenges in the region. Once this baseline research is completed, the group can begin problem-solving in earnest. To start, the group should identify a punch list of action items that can be easily accomplished in order to start building a record of successful collaborations.

As the group designs these solutions, it should also take care to establish performance management systems that track progress over time. Monitoring the performance of each solution implemented will also support efforts to refine and course-correct programming over time.

4. Adopt new roles to accomplish regional goals

With a new, shared vision of the community’s digital skills infrastructure in hand, stakeholders will need to align their individual initiatives to that goal and, in some cases, redefine their roles in order to support the broader vision.

These new roles should leverage each organization’s core strengths rather than require them to develop new ones. For example, metropolitan Seattle’s public libraries are already community-meeting spots that specialize in information exchange, offer free access to the Internet, and host a variety of classes for the public. This current work positions the libraries to serve as an information clearinghouse for digital skills programs offered in the region, ranging from job-skills training to classes on smartphone use. Likewise, academic experts at the University of Washington and other postsecondary institutions could help create a new curriculum for teaching applied digital skills to diverse populations.

At the same time, organizations should be open to adapting their core projects in order to fill gaps in the region’s digital skills infrastructure. For example, technology firms like Microsoft and Google could draw on their extensive civic philanthropic efforts and employee skills-training programs to provide basic, applied digital skills and computer science training that enhances the regional workforce. Such efforts could build on Microsoft’s IT Academy model and Google’s support for programs at the Boys and Girls Clubs, which could be repurposed to address adult needs rather than those of children and teens.

As individual organizations adopt new roles, they will need to ensure that services are available to residents across the entire metropolitan area. Anchored by its Department of Information Technology and its Digital Equity Initiative, the city of Seattle has an impressive record of boosting digital skills within the city proper. But the vast majority of area residents live outside Seattle. Furthermore, over 60 percent of the region’s poor households now live in the suburbs. As a result, regional actors like Puget Sound Regional Council, Sound Cities, and county governments face enormous pressure to serve residents across the three-county metro area.

To start, organizations should work together to conduct metrowide surveys of digital equity issues, perhaps following the model employed by Seattle’s Digital Equity Initiative. This quantitative and qualitative data will set the baseline for the entire region and will help organizations set achievable benchmark goals for the years ahead.

5. Create a regional digital skills brand and marketing strategy to galvanize action

In order to communicate the shared vision to area residents, stakeholders should develop and publicize a new regional brand that positions the Seattle region as a leader in digital skills adoption and more equitable economic outcomes.

The associated marketing campaign can counter misconceptions about digital skills and the tech industry, maximize awareness of individual stakeholders’ projects, and minimize costs for each organization. Working together, stakeholders can reach the broadest possible pool of local residents with a cohesive message that encourages digital skills and computer science skills acquisition. Furthermore, by directing residents to centralized

information centers like local public libraries, the campaign will connect individuals with experts who can help them find the best programs for their needs.

In crafting this branding effort, the Seattle area should look to similar campaigns for inspiration. One example is Portland, Ore.’s We Build Green Cities campaign, a trade-based effort to leverage Portland’s international reputation for environmental sustainability and design in order to increase the region’s exports. Baltimore’s Opportunity Collaborative offers a more equity-focused model that brings together local and state public agencies, nonprofit organizations, and universities to solve common workforce, housing, and transportation challenges. A digital skills marketing campaign patterned after existing efforts will allow the region to capitalize on proven models when positioning itself as a leader in digital skills adoption that supports more widely shared prosperity.

Conclusion

The Seattle region stands at a crossroads. It has the industrial assets for continued growth that fosters ongoing innovation and provides jobs that pay well. It also has a commitment to shared prosperity, best represented by the public, private, and civic actors that support better wages, affordable transportation options, and education and training focused on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) occupations. The region should build on these efforts by advancing a shared vision for digital skills and undertaking the sustained collaboration necessary to make that vision a reality.

Additional resources

The Boston Consulting Group, “Opportunity for All: Investing in Washington State’s STEM Education Pipeline” (2014).

The Boston Consulting Group and the Washington Roundtable, “Great Jobs Within Our Reach: Solving the Problem of Washington State’s Growing Job Skills Gap” (2013).

Capital One and Burning Glass, “Crunched by the Numbers: The Digital Skills Gap in the Workforce” (2015).

City of Austin, “Digital Inclusion Strategy 2014” (2014).

City of Seattle Department of Information Technology, Community Technology Program, “Information Technology Access and Adoption in Seattle: Progress Towards Digital Opportunity and Equity” (2014).

Communities Connect Network, “Defining Digital Inclusion for Broadband Deployment & Adoption” (2014).

Maureen Majury, “Building an IT Career-Ready Washington: 2015 and Beyond” (Seattle: Center of Excellence for Information & Computing Technology, 2014).

Seth McKinney, “Economic Development Planning in Seattle: A Review and Analysis of Current Plans and Strategies” (Seattle: University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy, 2013).

Seattle Goodwill, “Digital Literacy Initiative: Overview” (2014).

Seattle Goodwill, “Digital Literacy: Theoretical Framework” (2014).

Angela Siefer, “Trail-Blazing Digital Inclusion Communities” (OCLC and Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2013).

Tricia Vander Leest and Joe Sullivan, “ICT Training and the ABCs of Employability: YearUp’s Jobs Program for Urban Youth” (Seattle: University of Washington Center for Information & Society, 2008).

Authors

• Jessica A. Lee
• Adie Tomer