My latest column for the Minnesota Star Tribune, “Reforming broken economies in greater Minnesota,” is out today. Check it out.
Covering economic development in a politically-connected rural place like the Mesabi Iron Range is a little like following celebrities in the tabloids. Over time, names rise and fall. Every little twist and turn invites speculation, often wrong, and gossip, sometimes true. Some celebs/projects transcend into legends. Others toy with the paparazzi for years, then suddenly fall out of favor. You never know which way it’s going to go. The chatter is a business in itself.
This is one of the reasons why “economic diversification” — the thing I have harped on, lo, these many years — fails to rally much support. Why try to nurture something independent and new when the tabloids always report that the studmuffin Copp Nickel will drop a new mining album any day now. Just you wait until he gets out of rehab!
Economic diversification starts small, takes time, and requires local actors to do something rather than have something done. It’s the only way out of the long decline we detect so clearly but feel so powerless to change.
Today’s column explores some Iron Range projects you may have heard about — all operating or more developed than the copper-nickel mining projects that consume most of our political energy. They, on their own, won’t save the day, but they represent opportunities that regions like ours could expand upon. If we dedicated our energy toward the anticipated future rather than the imagined past, we might be surprised to learn the amazing things that are possible.
Read more in the column, published in the Monday, Dec. 16, Minnesota Star Tribune.
Two facts: 1) Mining is a one-time harvest — the world is littered with abandoned mining towns on dead end roads; 2) The boreal forest covers 6.6 million square miles with a total population of 3.7 million people (the Iron Range is located within the boreal forest).
The natural condition for the Range, given its location and climate, is to have far fewer residents than it now has. Inefficiencies in mining produced the initial large population, and as you’ve noted, efficiency improved and with it the number of workers required. Same situation out in North Dakota. It takes very few people to farm today. So, the natural condition for the rural Northland and for rural areas in general in America is population decline. North Dakota historian Elwyn Robinson called it the “Too Much Mistake,” too many people came, too much infrastructure was built that could not be supported.
When I was curling, I had a conversation with one of the Mayasich brothers from Eveleth. He said the curling rink was located on land that was their family garden. They would produce 100 gunny sacks full of potatoes every year, which they hauled home with a toy wagon. Their garden food production was essential for the family’s survival. Incomes were not high enough. It was only after WW II and unionization that mining produced a comfortable lifestyle.
I had a friend, Ed Tekautz, a retired mining engineer who lived in Chisholm. He said he told Rudy Perpich to quit looking for the one big thing that was going to solve the Range’s economic problems. He said put up 10 shop buildings a year, and give them out to people wanting to start a new business that would hire at least 10 people. If after 10 years, they’re still operating and providing good wages and benefits, they get to keep the building and the land. In ten years, you’ve produced 1,000 jobs. That was 30 years ago. There could have been 3,000 stable jobs created in that time.
Farm population dropped long before corporate farms arrived. The reason was poverty. The average farm family in 1950 had one-third the income of the average urban one. Most farms today are still family farms, but they’re much bigger. My wife Leah grew up on a 160 acre farm. Our land is rented to a family farm — father and son — with 3.000 acres. That is just enough to support two families. Leah’s mid-1960s high school classmates knew they would have to leave the farm. Only two stayed behind, married each other, and farmed, although with one off-farm teaching income.
It takes subsidies to start new technologies. China didn’t become the world’s largest producer of solar panels through free market capitalism. The government provided huge subsidies, which in turn rapidly drove down the price per kilowatt-hour. That requires political power. When the Northland voted Democratic, it had tremendous political power. When it switched to voting Republican because of cultural issues (and let’s throw away the argument that Democrats abandoned the working class — the reverse was the case), it lost its political power. Oberstar, Peterson, and Obey were giants. Their Republican replacements are back-benchers with scant accomplishments. The only northern legislator who really matters in St. Paul is Grant Hauschild, a Duluth area DFLer who represents a 13,000 square mile rural district.