Brookings Launches Blueprint for Prosperity – One Year before ‘08 Presidential Election

On Tuesday, exactly one year before the U.S. goes to the polls to choose its next president, the Brookings Institution launched a national competitiveness initiative titled Blueprint for American Prosperity: Unleashing the Potential of a Metropolitan Nation. The central premise of the Blueprint is that the “health, vitality, and prosperity” of the major cities and metropolitan areas in the U.S. will be the drivers of the country’s ability to compete globally and meet future economic, social, and environmental challenges. During the next 12 months, Brookings will release a series of reports geared towards the next presidential administration and Congress to address various competitive and economic issues.

 

At the official rollout, vice president and director of Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program Bruce Katz made the case as to why the nation’s metro areas are critically important to the nation’s well-being. During his presentation, Katz noted that although the top 100 metropolitan areas (gauged by number of people employed) comprise 12 percent of the country’s land mass and 65 percent of the U.S. population, these top metro areas also are responsible for:

• 75 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product;
• 75 percent of workers with a graduate degree;
• 78 percent of all patents;
• 82 percent of NIH and NSF research funding; and,
• 94 percent of venture capital funding.

And while the metropolitan areas in the country are such an engine of economic growth, educational attainment, and cultural creativity, Katz contended that the U.S. federal government is out of step with the rapid changes affecting the new spatial geography of the changing economy. The leadership in other countries – such as China, Germany and Spain – is utilizing their federal governments to make critical investments, strengthen connectivity and infrastructure, and promote emerging technologies, compared to a U.S. federal government often seen as “strangely adrift,” Katz argued.

 

To improve the partnership between the nation’s metropolitan areas and government, it is argued the U.S. federal government needs to lead where it can and must – in areas of national visioning and policies that, being aligned with the necessary scalable investments, can produce a tremendous impact. Priority issues for reform that will be addressed by the Blueprint in subsequent reports include boosting innovation and productivity, enacting urban school reform, attaining higher levels of educational attainment, improving transportation linkages between and within metro areas, increasing the supply of workforce housing, and improving the energy efficiency of the nation’s housing.

 

The website for Blueprint for American Prosperity, which includes videos of Tuesday’s release and the report Metro Nation: How U.S. Metropolitan Areas Fuel American Prosperity, can be accessed at: http://www.brookings.edu/projects/blueprint.aspx