What Will The Next Generation of Meds and Eds Look Like?
Pittsburgh and St. Louis both provide examples of how to use federal meds and eds spending to leverage future prosperity. But will these new efforts generate enough jobs to sustain their host regions?
On Monday, I wrote about how the Trump Administration’s cuts to research and Medicaid could threaten the “meds and eds” economies of legacy cities like Philadelphia, which is dependent on meds and eds for a third of its economic activity.
There’s no question that this is a real problem for legacy cities, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, where meds and eds are often the only game left in town. But is there a way for legacy cities to get ahead of this game – to use the meds and eds base they already have to leverage the next generation of prosperity in a way that isn’t so dependent on federal spending? And, just as important, can these efforts create jobs at the same rate?
Cortex, the innovation center located near the meds and eds in Midtown St. Louis.
The answer to these two questions, as far as I can tell, is, respectively, yes and no.
To see what’s possible, let’s take a look at two legacy cities that appear to be doing pretty well compared to their peers: Pittsburgh and St. Louis. There are a lot of similarities here. Both are river towns in what can broadly be described as the Midwest. Both were important and powerful cities during the industrial era but have suffered from what would seem to be calamitous population loss. And both are leveraging their meds and eds pretty well – though in different ways that is important to understand.
Pittsburgh: The Robotics Revolution
Pittsburgh is often viewed as the poster child for an industrial city’s comeback. It was formerly the steel capital of the United States if not the world, but it fell on hard times early in the game when the nation’s industrial base began to decline. At 300,000, the central city’s population is half of what it once was and now represents only about 15% of the region’s population. (And the region’s population, at a little over 2 million, isn’t growing.)
Yet Pittsburgh has been unusually successful in reinventing itself for several reasons. The first is that regional cooperation came early, largely because of air pollution. The regional economic development entity, the Allegheny Conference, dates back to the 1940s when smoke was a huge problem in Pittsburgh. But the Allegheny Conference also focused on pulling together the region’s economic players to generate a new type of prosperity for the region.
And that prosperity is built on the back of meds and eds – especially Carnegie Mellon University, which was endowed by two of Pittsburgh’s most prominent and wealthy industrial-era families. (The University of Pittsburgh has also played an important role.) Early on, Carnegie Mellon went heavily to